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Customer Service: Are You Neglecting Your Secret Weapon?    

April 2011

Greetings!

 

Customer service and support can be a secret weapon for firms committed to excelling in this often undervalued discipline. By the same token, it can also stall progress in start-ups as they struggle to balance pre-sales and post-sales responsibilities while relying on developers to provide L2 support.   

As an example, respondents to a recent ESG survey ranked customer service and support as the number one reason they chose their current scale-out storage vendor.     

Service and Support ranked highest 

At the end of the day, it's all about the customer experience and how that experience translates to competitive advantage. In a recent three-part interview series, I spoke with Leo Colborne, Former SVP of Customer Service and Support at EMC, about the ins and outs of a successful customer service infrastructure.

 

You can check out the videos here:

Leo is currently an Executive-in-Residence at ESG and is available to speak to our clients about how to transform customer service and support functions for competitive advantage. Feel free to reach out directly to ESG for a conversation with Leo.   

 

--Jeff Hine, Analyst

 

ESG's Ahead of the Curve: Advancing Server Virtualization Initiatives event takes place on Thursday, April 14.  Registration for IT Professionals is now closed.  If you'd like to take part in the proceedings from afar, you can join the LiveStream events for the following sessions: 

  • 8:15am - 9am ET - ESG's Server Virtualization Maturity Model with ESG senior analysts Mark Bowker and Jon Oltsik
  • 1:00pm - 1:45pm - Server Infrastructure with ESG senior analyst Mark Bowker and New England VMUG president Chris Harney 

To participate, become a fan of Enterprise Strategy Group on Facebook and go to the Ahead of the Curve tab for more information.

 

Below you will find links to recently published content on ESG's website. 


Research Reports

Available to premium subscription clients only.

Scale-out Storage Market Forecast 2010-2015 

by Terri McClure 

IT operations, scale-out storage 

Designed as a companion publication to ESG's recent research report on scale-out storage market trends, ESG has created a scale-out storage market forecast-defined as ESG's estimate of the total, worldwide annual capacity and revenue associated with scale-out storage in the commercial and government sectors-through the year 2015.

 

Market Reports


Augmenting Data Backup and Recovery with System-level Protection
by Lauren Whitehouse
backup, data protection
File-level recovery on its own, while an important mainstay in data protection best practices, is an incomplete strategy when it comes to meeting today's stringent recovery time objectives (RTOs) for complete system recovery. Whether it's a physical or virtual machine, the time necessary to "rebuild" the server stack and re-establish configuration settings can delay actual data recovery.

System-level recovery can enhance or even eliminate manual, operator-driven recovery and deliver significant benefits to IT organizations. This paper will investigate what's at risk, where system-level recovery fits relative to current data protection approaches, the impact system-level recovery can have on IT's ability to meet RTOs and RPOs, and the potential of system-level recovery to reduce costs.


Briefs 

 

Could DR Become the New Backup?  

by David Chapa

backup, disaster recovery

 

 

Crossbeam Systems' Pragmatic Security Architecture for Server Virtualization  

by Jon Oltsik

security, server virtualization

The server virtualization train has left the station-large and small organizations are virtualizing production workloads as quickly as they can. Regrettably, security has remained an afterthought. CISOs understand which security safeguards are needed for physical servers, but they lack the skills, best practices, and tools to apply the same control to virtual assets. As a result, they tend to do what they can with what they have. ESG appreciates the wisdom in sticking with what works, but the challenge here is scaling these best practices as the number of VMs in production skyrockets over the next few years. Crossbeam Systems offers a practical solution to this problem by relying on physical server-based trust zones, virtual network security services, and the networking and security scalability of its X-Series security platforms.

 

Oracle Storage: A Force to be Reckoned With?  

by Mark Peters

storage

Oracle is getting increasingly active in the storage business and it looks to have the desire, resources, and products to become more of a factor in the overall marketplace. Although a non-traditional player in this space, its Sun/StorageTek acquisition, combined with its traditional areas of strength, are creating an opportunity for it to be a disruptive (i.e., successful) element.

 

SunGardard's Secure2Disk: From SMB to Enterprise
by David Chapa
backup
Whether it is data loss, corruption, or even a simple lack of data access, an organization needs to be confident that it can recover within a pre-determined time to avoid lost business. Data loss is not an option for companies of any size and, given the pressures IT organizations face from year to year, recovery processes often need a makeover just to keep pace. SunGard's Secure2Disk portfolio addresses everything from SMBs to the enterprise; whether leveraging an existing data protection solution or implemented as a replacement, Secure2Disk offers solutions for companies of all sizes to address their data protection challenges.

ESG Research Brief: Common Customer Complaints with IT Outsourcers and PS Firms
by Jeff Hine
IT professional services and outsourcing
Retaining a professional services or outsourcing firm is one of the most gut-wrenching decisions an IT executive can make. Nevertheless, every day, they put their trust in both established and lesser-known IT services providers to complete work that their internal teams-whether due to lack of skills, resources, or time-cannot complete. From the perspective of the services provider, when these arrangements go wrong, knowing why your client is unhappy is the first step in continuous improvement.

ESG Research Brief: Integrated Computing Trends
by Bill Lundell, John McKnight, Rolando Yamashita
server, storage, networking
Comprised of server, storage, networking, and management components, integrated computing platforms offer an appealing alternative to traditional technology infrastructure deployments. Touting benefits such as simplified management and faster provisioning, these platforms have garnered significant levels of interest, especially among organizations with increasingly large and complex IT environments. And while adoption of integrated computing technology has been relatively tempered to date, ESG research reveals that 2011 will likely see an uptick in the number of organizations committing IT budget to the purchase of these solutions.

ESG Research Brief: Application Virtualization Challenges
by Bill Lundell, John McKnight, Julie Lockner, Mark Bowker
server virtualization
Nearly two-thirds (61%) of large midmarket (i.e., 500 to 999 employees) and enterprise (i.e., 1,000 or more employees) IT organizations have deployed server virtualization technology on systems running in production environments. However, due to integration complexities, performance concerns, and vendor support issues, virtualizing applications and their underlying databases has been a challenge for many organizations.

vCenter Operations: Enabling Administrators to Morph into Managers by Leveraging Real-time Analytics and Automation

by Bob Laliberte, Mark Bowker
IT operations, virtualization 

Traditional approaches to infrastructure operations management are incapable of keeping up with highly dynamic virtual environments. VMware announced an extension of its management solutions aimed at simplifying and helping to mold a new operations model of virtual and cloud environments called vCenter Operations.

 

NetApp Optimizes SharePoint Implementations  

by Brian Babineau 

information and risk management, storage

A few years ago, NetApp introduced its first integrated storage and data management solutions for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server to facilitate storage management and data protection functions for Microsoft's rapidly growing collaboration and content management platform. NetApp's current storage solutions for SharePoint, including NetApp SnapManager 6.0 for SharePoint, do more than just "support" the now widely-used and rapidly growing Microsoft offering-they optimize implementations to reduce capital and operating costs while improving scalability and data  availability.

 

Lab Reports

 

DataCore SANsymphony-V: Compelling Storage Virtualization Software  

by Tony Palmer

storage, virtualization

Decades of growth of applications, storage, and complexity have delivered unprecedented economic, operational, and flexibility challenges to the world of IT. To meet these demands today's IT is turning to virtualization, not just of systems and applications, but in every facet of IT. When broadly and carefully deployed, virtualization has the ability to ensure that management focus is where it should be: on applications and organizational results rather than on hardware choices. This ESG Lab Validation documents the results of hands on testing of DataCore SANsymphony-V R8 Storage Virtualization Software. ESG Lab evaluated SANsymphony-V with an eye on assessing the value of infrastructure-wide storage virtualization including centralized management, ease of use, capacity efficiency, data mobility, and performance. The enhanced high availability and disaster recovery capabilities of synchronous mirroring within campuses or metropolitan areas and long distance asynchronous remote replication are also presented.

 

IBM Storwize V7000 Disk System: Enterprise-class Function in a Midrange Storage Package  

by Tony Palmer, Vinni Choinski

storage, virtualization

This report documents the results of ESG Lab hands-on testing of the IBM Storwize V7000 Midrange Disk System with a focus on the powerful enterprise-class features and functionality offered by the platform, including heterogeneous storage virtualization, thin provisioning, data mobility, and capacity-efficient point-in-time snapshots. Testing was designed to confirm IBM's claims that theV7000 has built-in efficiency with exceptional ease of use and performance.

  

NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup: Advanced Data Protection and Disaster Recovery

by Brian Garrett, Ginny Roth

IT infrastructure, data protection

Syncsort's data protection software has been teamed successfully with NetApp's SnapMirror and SnapVault technology for some time, creating an integrated disk-based solution for data protection and disaster recovery of mission-critical digital assets. Within minutes of an outage or disaster, applications, databases, and users can be accessing data and resuming business. This ESG Lab report focuses on the technologies that make this possible, including transparent integration with NetApp snapshot technology and valuable Syncsort services such as near-instant virtualization, almost continuous disk-based data protection, near-instant data recovery and bare metal recovery of physical and virtual servers.

 

ESG Lab Review: Coraid's EtherDrive is ESG Lab Proven and Well-suited to Emerging IT Needs  

by Mark Peters, Tony Palmer

storage

This ESG Lab Review summarizes the highlights from hands-on testing of Coraid's EtherDrive in August, 2010 and outlines new 2011 product enhancements and capabilities. The net value proposition of Coraid is then examined-and found to be very positive-in light of the rapidly emerging needs for storage to remain cost-effective, efficient, and easy-to-deploy in increasingly virtualized IT environments.

 

Panasas ActiveStor 12: High Performance HPC Storage for the Enterprise  

by Ginny Roth, Tony Palmer

storage

This report documents the results of ESG Lab hands-on testing of the performance scalability of the Panasas ActiveStor 12 (PAS 12) High Performance Computing (HPC) Storage System. The PAS 12 is a plug-and-play, high-performance, scale-out NAS solution designed with enterprise manageability in mind. ESG Lab evaluated the PAS 12 solution with an eye on validating the claims of appliance-like simplicity in support of large scale storage environments with demanding HPC performance requirements.

 aware storage management plug-ins.

 

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Sincerely,

The ESG Team


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