 Welcome back to SiliconANGLE TV. We're here at IBM EDGE 2012 and I am John McArthur, President of Walden Technology Partners. We're joined right now with Jim Torney from Essex Tech and Bill Bielczewski, who's VP of Technology Solutions and Services. Essex Tech was just awarded a receiving award from IBM as a channel partner. Jim, why don't you tell us a little bit about Essex Tech and what you did to win your award. Sure, give it back. Essex Tech is an infrastructure services provider doing cloud computing solutions also with IBM. We're headquartered in the Northeast so that is Delaware Valley, Central Pennsylvania, New York metro area and we were recognized for that award because of the storage solutions that we've implemented with IBM software and storage products for customers and our commitment to our own skills and how it benefits the customer. And you came down here with a lot of your own team. Yeah, a team of people to make sure we're current both technically and sales education wise on the latest from IBM storage solutions. And Bill, you spend most of your time customer facing helping them with their problems. Is that right? Customer facing, I manage the technology, our pre-sale solution architects and our billable implementation consultants. So I'd like to have a lot of customer face time to understand the solutions. I'm not sitting up in the ivory tower and so I have a better understanding what our solution architects are seeing at the customer base so we can tailor our training and education to meet our clients. How many solutions architects you have? I have six pre-sale solution architects and seven implementation systems consultants. What are some of the problems that they're trying to help the customers with? Customers right now high availability and disaster recovery is a key point and data migration. And the high availability is that specific to virtualized environments or just in general? Both. Why high availability? Why is that a hot button today? Customers are looking to consolidate their data centers, but they're also they have diverse locations and now they realize that we can bring in house our own high availability solution. So they use a remote location, a small area for their business where they can put replication systems. So if their business is affected or something happens at their primary location, they just replicate over and continue their business. Irene came whipping through your area recently, right? How did that affect sort of the thinking of the customers in terms of what they need to think about in terms of disaster recovery? It's surprising when those hurricanes and storms come through the phones start ringing. Yeah, I know we've been talking to you about this. I think we have to talk seriously now. So that's often the case is people becomes a high priority when it happens that then people also tend to have short memories. So what are the kinds of solutions that you've been able to implement some post Irene? Well we had well outside of Irene, but it worked into the high availability. We had a large county government. They had HP storage installed. It was starting age, but it wasn't off of lease yet. So they had a problem. What do we do? We want new storage. We want more robust storage, but we you know, we're stuck in this lease. So we went in and we developed a solution. We talked to him about a IBM v7000 and what that allowed us to do with the v7000 being that's based off the sand by and controllers as we say technology. We told them that we can bring in they can keep their HP storage put in the background as a lower tiered development storage and then introduce the v7000 and we can seamlessly non-destructively migrate the data from the HP storage onto the new IBM production storage. Okay. And then as part of that solution, we added v7000s at their remote locations for replication purposes for the high availability. What kind of distance are they looking for between their primary? This one was located within the same town with different buildings. They built a brand new data center for the production center and they used the old data center as their replication site. So they can survive a tornado but not a not a Katrina style flood. Right. And they were looking more at that area that they were in they had brownouts and power failures and that's why they knew to build. Are they in a new power grid then? New power grid, new building, new technology. So and we're going back and they continually asked us to upgrade the the scalability of v7000 is great for them. We're upgrading it. We're taking advantage of the smart storage with the easy tier, putting solid state drives in there and now they're starting to see the benefit with the HP storage now sitting in the background. Save them money on that end because they had the lease and they didn't have to cancel the lease and pay a penalty. Okay. And they'll take advantage of that. Do you also work with IBM Global Finance in sort of creating sort of financial solutions to those kinds of problems? Sure. Work with them on take equipment takeouts? Absolutely. Right. So I think also it's important today you got to have high availability for a customer. You've got to have a disaster recovery plan and now you're considering hosting or cloud computing. You can't just go one. If you've got a disaster recovery plan well that's fine. That's for recovery but you need high availability and redundancy for your ongoing business before any of those occurs. The storage solutions that are being proposed with you know easy tier auto optimization virtualization lend themselves perfectly into a private or public cloud environment because of those particular features right there. So we will work with clients on either managing what they have on site but we'll manage it for you or we'll put it in a hosting center or they'll implement cloud or we'll help you implement cloud. So those solutions are what we're seeing a lot of success in and whether it's the Irene that flows through or just today with the cost of computing coming down through managed services almost every customer now is considering that option whereas 10 years ago. Just considering managed service? Yes. Yes. So lower their cost and get better availability. How much of your business starting to come from managed services? Yeah. So when you go back it was maybe two percent. Today it's six or seven percent but I can see it being 25 percent in just a few years. So big investment area for you. Yes. Big growth area. Right. So I want to go back to this use case with the county government. All deals are competitive these days. Who are you up against on this? Well HP we're up against and then EMC took a shot at it. But one of the keys to our solution development is you know we're pure IBM. We sell IBM power servers, IBM x86 servers. So when we work with our customers and we develop that solution and we include the IBM storage in there we can go in there with confidence to say it's going to work. Because of the thorough testing that IBM does you know we've had so many situations where customers say well I got this EMC or I got this HP storage you know attach it for now and there's compatibility problems or issues and then the fingerprint starts. So being a you know selling a total IBM solution works to our advantage. And you don't find that problem with the HP storage behind the SVC. That's the great thing about the SVC when that was first announced and as IBM increased the competitive storage that you can place behind it. Because customers you know they still might keep that storage as I said earlier for development purposes or for backup or lower tiered storage. Right. It's that non-disruptive migration that's the key to the sell. I think SVC has been around for about nine years. Something like that. So have you been selling it all along? We've been selling the SVC front end unit in front of the IBM storage. Now with the V7000 it's basically SVC with storage under the covers. Right. And what we've been very successful with is what the IBM calls their RAS bundle. Rapid application systems or the RAB, the rapid application backup. So we inclusively software supported that solution. How do you view the Pure Systems announcement and how does that impact your business with the integrated servers? It's interesting because SXTEC as a company we were developing our own quasi Pure Systems. We called it our... You were doing all your own... ...mean pillar. Yeah we called it our V-pillar where we would integrate all the IBM components the System X processes or chassis with power blades, the IBM V7000 storage and build it together and integrated internally in our house and then sent out to a customer. So now that Pure System came out that's going to work well for us especially for a customer environment because we have a wide range of power system customers and X86 customers. And with the integrated storage that this has to that total solution coming under one serial number, one part number. So it's going to be a lot easier down the road for the customer when they call for support. That's the other key. When you sell a single solution from one vendor that the old adage, one throat to choke, still works. Now customers are looking as they cut back on their IT staffs that they know they have one number to call and they're going to get the support they need. What are you seeing in terms of... So in order for a customer to say I'm ready to move forward in this, what kind of cost savings do you have to show them? What kind of impact do you have to have on there? How are they evaluating ROI return? Well we do an ROI analysis. Some customers ask for it but we can talk to them. We talk to them about the tiering of the storage. We can cut back SSD, high-valued storage. It's got to go on the high-value data. So now they see the value they can cost justify the acquisition of the solution based on the unified storage of having file data, block data, slow fat spinning disk in SSD drives. Any other case studies, recent case studies, wins that you can talk about that were sort of interesting? Well we had a large pension fund in New York. They were looking to consolidate their data center. So we got very creative on that one. They had multiple data centers and they wanted to get down to one? Well they were on the consolidate to space in the data center. The real estate in New York is expensive. So they were getting back on space even in this economy. So we got very creative with them. We actually took power blades in a blade center chassis, run in a Linux operating system, and then we attached that to v7000 storage. So they had power with eye running internal storage but we moved them to a sand environment. Now with this consolidation this will allow them to take their x86 blades and x86 servers and integrate it into that sand environment attached to those v7000s result. I think IBM's always been known as a as a total solutions provider. So you talk about integrated servers, storage, everything works together. It's one sort to choke and that's great. And you know the alternative of that is sort of best of breed solutions. When you go to, when you come to IBM the reason IBM's doing this is and it seems to me is to raise the visibility specifically on their storage capabilities. Right? Right. Specifically to storage. How important in your business is that total solution and how important is it for you to have IBM delivering best of breed solutions? Do they have to do both? It's better together, more important than. Right. Now it works well, you know the total solution works and IBM very strong in storage over the years and vented tape. Then it got away from it a little bit and they were OEM in equipment from NetApp and other LSI. Yeah, LSI. Right. Then they came out the SVC. Then they came out with the v7000 and the DS8000. So they're back to their roots. They're back to developing high. Or acquiring. Right. Well, XIV was acquired. But they're putting their you know they're putting their spin on it. And the v7000. Right. But I think they also answered your question. It's that you know some customers want to build their own and they have their own business reasons for doing that. Right. And therefore you'd want best of breed in that situation. Right. But when you come down to toward the middle market and you talk to the CFO the CFO wants to optimize costs and would trade off to get everything integrated. Right. But also on the integration side with pure systems you're getting better response time the auto optimization and those things make a huge difference. So while it is customer dependent I would say that the benefit of integrated is 70 percent of the market would We've certainly learned that there's not one type of customer having one. Yeah. Right. So well I appreciate you coming on with us today. Jim Torney, president of SXTEC and Bill Bill Bieljewski, VP of solutions and services at SXTEC. Thank you for joining us today here on theCUBE. We're going to take a short break.