| The First Step Is Asking for Help. And Trusting Who You Ask. |
| A Santa Clara, California based chip designer had recently purchased a backup solution from one of its technology vendors. Integrated Silicon Solutions Inc. (ISSI) had the product in place for only about three
months when it began malfunctioning. The application wouldn’t backup the integrated circuit designer’s
Lotus Notes server. Nor would it backup their Oracle server. |
| “ISSI couldn’t get it to work,” said Cedric Higgins, Groupware Technology’s Professional Services Manager.
“They didn’t know why it stopped working. It just broke.” Even when it appeared important business data
was properly preserved, the files were often inaccessible. The new backup solution, intended to solve a
problem, was actually creating problems and costing ISSI time and peace of mind. |
| ISSI repeatedly sought help from the backup product’s vendor, but the manufacturer’s representatives
offered little in the way of assistance. “The response was always, `You need to upgrade to the latest version,’” said Higgins. “They’d been dealing with it for three months, |
| working with the vendor trying to get it fixed, but to no avail.” |
| The exasperated IT management team shared their frustrations when
Higgins and other Groupware representatives were “just over visiting ISSI
and talking technology,” recalled Higgins. Grateful for their expertise, ISSI,
a long-time Groupware customer, agreed to have Groupware conduct a
backup assessment. |
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| In any storage assessment, Groupware consultants take ample time to learn
the customer’s policies, methods and pain points, in addition to evaluating the technologies in use. “We try
to fully understand the customer’s backup processes, determine what is and isn’t working and determine if
the tools that are being used are the right fi t for their business needs,” said Higgins. |
| Checking Under the Hood Some Good News. And Some Better News. |
| During the Groupware assessment, storage experts conducted in-depth investigations of ISSI’s backup situation.
Completing the ISSI assessment took a full two weeks. When the Groupware team finished, it informed ISSI that
its existing backup solution was not beyond repair. Groupware’s experts knew how to get it working, but they didn’t think doing so would be the best idea. |
| “We could have spent the time to fix their problems using their current
backup technology.” said Higgins. “But when we looked at their backup
systems as a whole, and at their business objectives and projected growth,
we had to ask, `Is this the best solution for the customer going forward?’” |
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| One way of solving the problem while keeping the existing software would
have been to start from scratch. “It would have been very labor intensive just
to return them to the status quo,” said Higgins, “and we wanted more for the customer.” Groupware suggested a
better plan would be to move to a more robust backup technology, one that better fit the company’s applications
and hardware and could meet their longer term backup requirements. This made sense to ISSI’s executives who
eventually acknowledged that the solution recommended by Groupware should have been used from the start. |
| Groupware Gets it Right. From the Start. |
| “In talking to the customer, we realized the vendor came in and sold them a solution, but didn’t ask the types of
questions we make a practice of asking,” said Scott Sutter, Groupware VP of Sales. “They didn’t look at the longevity
of the company. It was the wrong solution, and the customer trusted them.” |
| Following the backup assessment, ISSI accepted Groupware’s recommendation and moved to a new system that
entailed backing up first to disk, to allow easy information retrieval, and later to tape for long-term storage. The new
arrangement enabled the use of a disk array ISSI had purchased previously, but couldn’t use with the old backup
application. It also met the company’s requirement to be able to quickly recover data from the prior 60 days. |
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