January 22, 2001, Issue: 929
Section: Cover Story
COMPAQ'S 'MASTER' PLAN
Craig Zarley & Joseph F. Kovar
Compaq last week anointed the solution provider channel as the master of its
ambitious growth plans for its SAN business.
With 2000 external storage sales up 83 percent over 1999 sales, 3,300
SANs implemented in the fourth quarter as well as plans to grow its external
storage business by more than 50 percent this year, Compaq is moving to
make the channel its key ally in selling and servicing SANs.
As a first step, Compaq unveiled its Master Advanced Systems Engineer
SAN Architect program to solution providers attending the vendor's
ENSA@work Storage Conference in New Orleans. By midyear, the new
certification will create an elite subset of 50 to 100 of Compaq's current 450
enterprise storage solution providers, says Peter Delle Donne, Compaq's vice
president, North America, for storage.
Several solution providers welcomed the news. Carl Wolfston, director of
Pleasanton, Calif.-based Headlands Associates, says he has been trying to get
Compaq to offer such a program for three years. "Compaq just doesn't have
the manpower to do it all themselves," Wolfston says.
The new certification will boost the training requirements for solution providers
to 17 days from the current five, Delle Donne says. In addition, training costs
per certified engineer will run $15,000 to $18,000. But once the training is
complete, the solution provider organization will be certified as design and
deployment architects of Compaq SANs and open SANs.
"I have no plans to grow my direct business beyond natural growth," Delle
Donne says, adding that 70 percent of Compaq's storage business went
through the channel last year. "When we go from 1,000 to 2,000 SANs a
quarter, I can't deliver the right amount of services alone to support that
structure."
Besides offering the new certification, Compaq early next month plans to roll
out 11 SAN implementation services that will be required to be sold with each
Compaq SAN. The services, which sell for about $24,000, can be offered as
CarePaqs by all of Compaq's enterprise storage solution providers, with the
services to be performed by Compaq or its subcontractors. Solution
providers will get 18 points of margin-or about $4,500-on pacts sold directly
to customers, while Compaq's nine storage distributors will receive 28 points.
Delle Donne says the distributor will keep about 10 points, with the remaining
18 points to be passed on to solution providers selling SANs directly to end
users.
What's more, the 50 to 100 enterprise storage solution providers that move
up to the Master SAN Architect status will become Compaq service
subcontractors qualified to perform the 11 mandated SAN services.
"If we're able to deliver Compaq-branded services, the matrix works better
for the Compaq salespeople," says Larry Holzenthaler, executive vice
president of sales and marketing at Total Tec Systems, an Edison, N.J.,
solution provider. "We try to be the preferred partner brought in by the
Compaq sales guy. Compaq is going in the right place with a partner-friendly
strategy."
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Product Intros Heat Up Storage Market
EMC
IP4700 CHAMELEON -- NAS system aimed at midrange market.
Hitachi Data Systems
THUNDER 9200 -- Midrange storage system that scales up to 7.2 terabytes
in a single rack. Replaces the 5800.
Dell
POWERVAULT 660F -- Dell's first indigenously developed midrange
subsystem. Allows up to 70 terabytes to be managed on a Fibre Channel
SAN.
Compaq
CSS2105 STORAGE SERVER & TASK-SMART N-SERIES CLUSTER
-- The CSS2105 "Red Shark" is a Compaq-branded version of IBM's Shark
Enterprise Storage Server. The TaskSmart is a high-availability NAS system
with failover protection.
Hewlett-Packard
NETSERVER LP 1000r/2000r, SURESTORE DISK SYSTEM 2100 &
SURESTORE ULTRIUM 215 >> Series of rack-dense servers,
network-attached storage and tape backup units.
IBM
SHARK STORAGE SERVER UPGRADE -- IBM updated the Shark with
peer-to-peer remote copy and flash copy features for open storage systems,
plus native Fibre Channel support for non-IBM platforms.
Sun
T3 ARRAY UPGRADE -- Sun has enhanced its T3 arrays with support for
NT, HP-UX, AIX and Linux platforms. |
