Anyone who has spent time in or around the technology industry knows one thing is certain: technology evolves. Not only does it evolve, it transforms rapidly and without ceasing. The incessant changes introduce several obstacles that are certain to appear. There are now more options for strategic company direction, platforms to utilize, relationships to nurture, and ultimately, a plethora of decisions to manage. Resources are certainly available to answer questions and point organizations in a strategic direction. However, there is a shortage of companies who will be unbiased and do what is truly best for customers.
What value can be added by working with one company to accomplish multiple organizational goals?
CONVENIENCE
Convenience is rarely mentioned when speaking with IT professionals, primarily because there are limited aspects of IT that offer true convenience. When forming a relationship with a solution-focused company, complexity is reduced for everyone involved.
For example:
- Vendor management becomes seamless and allows complete transactions without needing to approve a new vendor for every deal.
- A dedicated representative will begin to wholly understand business needs and build a stronger relationship with the team.
- When an issue occurs or questions arise, it’s efficient to contact one person instead of spending hours on hold and tracking down multiple vendors to find answers.
- Having a primary contact at a company who can provide multiple options for new solutions and the support for legacy hardware can reduce effort and time needed to shop the market.
- No need to interact with the pushy salesman that claims his or her one product is “by far the best.”
- When utilizing multiple offerings, solutions can be strategically placed based on the problems at hand.
TECHNOLOGY GUIDANCE
There is a multitude of value-added resellers (VARs) that can provide you with a technology refresh from your major household names like Dell EMC and HPE. A partner with expertise reducing maintenance costs, deploying disruptive solutions, migrating to the cloud, and recruiting IT talent can educate customers surrounding changes in technology and industry trends. This allows busy employees to learn and understand current strategies, as well as understand recommendations based on new directions.
Another benefit of utilizing a company with multiple solutions is access to programs built to bundle solutions and reduce overall costs. Many companies offer post-warranty support, hardware, new disruptive technologies, or cloud services, but there are few that can offer it all and even find compelling ways to combine multiple offerings.
We have programs at Relutech that coordinate between our infrastructure division and cloud division. For instance:
- Our cloud customers may be entitled to free maintenance for the servers they’re decommissioning for the migration.
- Conversely, some of our maintenance customers have received free cloud professional services as well.
- When the customer is truly ready to decommission hardware at the end of a maintenance contract, ReluTech can buy it back to provide additional value.
Yes, some of these programs are designed as an incentive for customers to work with another division of ReluTech for the first time, but our customers have found tremendous value in this because we already understand their business and goals. Not surprisingly, our most satisfied customers are those that work with more than one ReluTech business unit.
Ultimately, you need to decide if you want to work with someone who already has your next solution picked out (no matter what you’re trying to accomplish), or if you’d rather work with a true consultant with a comprehensive portfolio. As a company that represents a broad range of solutions such as hyper-converged infrastructure, scale-out storage, data protection, and even public and private cloud adoption, ReluTech helps position technologies that will ultimately transform businesses to stay in front of competitors.
