Compaq Rules RAID Products
by: hlpinout
December 07, 1998, Issue: 820
Section: Inside Spending
Compaq Rules RAID Products
Joseph F. Kovar
Compaq Computer Corp.'s acquisition this past January of Digital Equipment Corp. propelled the Houston-based vendor to the lead of the RAID products category in the latest CRN Inside Spending brand-preference survey.
With help from Digital's StorageWorks Division, Compaq was the clear winner across the board in the survey, which polled MIS managers at large, midsize and small businesses.
Among large companies, Compaq- or Digital-branded RAID products were
installed at 40 percent of firms, followed by 13 percent for Hewlett-Packard Co., Palo Alto, Calif., and 12 percent for IBM Corp., Armonk, N.Y.
In the midsize-business environment, Compaq and Digital RAID products were found in one of every four companies, compared with 17 percent for HP and 12 percent for IBM.
The small-business race was the tightest. Compaq and Digital still led, with RAID products installed in 13 percent of all companies surveyed. IBM followed with 5 percent, while HP had 3 percent.
Compaq's success, according to Rick Nagengast, storage manager for the
North America region, is due to the company's product architecture and a "go to market" strategy.
In terms of product, the company offers what Nagengast called a "Lego
architecture." That architecture, he said, allows storage sub-systems to scale from the desktop to the data center across multiple platforms, with prices ranging from $2,500 to $10 million, all using the same interchangeable parts.
According to Nagengast, the Lego approach allows VARs to sell the same data storage products to small, midsize and large businesses, and even to different sizes of departments and business units within the same organization.
"A VAR can go into a workgroup using Novell and install a $15,000
sub-system," he said. "Then he can walk up the hall, find a department using an HP application, and sell a $75,000 system. Then he can go further up the hall,see a Sun system, and sell an enterprise sub-system valued from $250,000 to $5 million . . . with the same product family."
In the past, if VARs wanted to sell storage for three different platforms, they would need to sell three different products and get training from three different vendors, he said.
Now, Compaq's storage products can be sold as workgroup, department and enterprise solutions. The vendor employs a "go to market" strategy that includes specialized programs for VARs and other channel partners, Nagengast said.
Compaq's channel storage managers focus on industrial distributors, commercial distributors or corporate resellers, he said. They use tools such as rebates to create demand on the channel side.
At the next level are marketing development managers, whom Nagengast also called "VAR rampers." They look for storage VARs, and use tools such as rebates, incentives and demos to "lunch them, train them and get them to work with us."
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