S3 (Solid State Solutions Ltd)
UK locations: Basingstoke, Leeds
Established: 1989
Storage product/vendor capability/expertise: HDS, NetApp, CommVault, Symantec, Data Domain, Nexsan, Isilon and bespoke solutions
Number of consultants: 15
Vertical sector expertise: Finance, Legal, Insurance, Scientific Research and Life Sciences
Support levels available: Tailored support including 24x7 service and support desk, 24x7 managed services, pre-sales, design and implementation services
Most organisations are likely to employ the services of a reseller at some stage. The majority of IT vendors deal directly only with the largest accounts, and even then may bring in partners with specialist skill sets if they do not have the necessary expertise in-house. As a result, resellers tend to be the outward face of the vendor. They act as the local contact for placing orders and providing technical consultancy and support. The value gained in selecting and working with the right partner cannot be underestimated. In addition, "sometimes resellers can get better discounts because they deal in higher volumes and you can leverage off the back of their economies of scale," says Greg Gawthorpe, technical operations team leader at CMC, an online financial trading house
CMC signed up Solid State Solutions (S3) when it decided to expand use of BakBone's NetVault: Backup product as part of a wider upgrade of its nearline storage for backup. The aim was not only to handle rising requirements for storage, but also to introduce full redundancy and instant failover between the company's new datacentre and a second disaster recovery site.
There are two main categories of resellers: storage specialists (such as S3) and generalist IT providers. Storage specialists usually work with mid-sized organisations and provide value-added services in areas such as virtualisation, disaster recovery and information management. Generalist IT providers tend to deal with smaller companies and often perceive storage simply as an extension of existing infrastructure. They are more likely to focus on providing value-added services in relation to servers and applications and their storage skills may be more basic.