|
 |
|
General Information
|
Add To My Personal Library |
May 8, 2009
• Vol.31 Issue 14
Page(s) 1 in print issue
|
Seamless Continuity
Partnership Is The Foundation Of SteelEye’s Business Continuity Success
|
 As enterprises of all sizes and in all sectors continue to weather the economic storm, business continuity planning, or BCP, becomes increasingly critical. To SteelEye Technology, a leading provider of business continuity solutions, the potential impact to the bottom line can’t be underestimated.
“I don’t think it’s rocket science,” says Greg Ewald, vice president of marketing at SteelEye (www.steeleye.com). “If you’re part of any company that counts on access to data or in-house applications as being the foundational element for your core business, you can equate very easily the loss in money and customers if that access is lost and if your systems are down for any amount of time.”
 Real-Time Business Demands Real-Time Solutions
Although many companies have traditionally relied on relatively inexpensive tape-based solutions to preserve data and facilitate recovery efforts in the event of an outage, today’s 24/7/365 business landscape has exposed tape’s limitations.
“While tape-based solutions may preserve the data, when you get into recovery, it can take time,” says Ewald. “And while that recovery effort is taking place, it’s very difficult to maintain continuity of the business without access to the information.”
He continues, “It may be seen as more cost-effective from an operational standpoint to just do tapes. But quite honestly, if a system fails, the time it takes to recover from tape backup will probably not be looked upon by executives in that organization as a positive. From an overall total cost of ownership (TCO) perspective, real-time data replication and disaster recovery solutions come out ahead of the traditional tape backup type of model.”
It’s All About The Relationship
Simply selling a technology to a customer isn’t enough, though. Quality and long-standing relationships and partnerships separate top-performing vendors from the rest. The ability to leverage a broad and diverse reseller network to add value to every customer experience sets SteelEye apart, says Ewald. The company works with a diverse range of resellers to ensure thorough marketing and service support for its full range of Windows- and Linux-based solutions. Its offerings support most industry-standard platforms, including Microsoft, Red Hat, and Novell, and close reseller partnerships allow SteelEye to deliver custom solutions on a scale and capability that wouldn’t otherwise be possible.
“We get very involved and engaged with our customers as they develop their requirements for implementing high-availability data replication and disaster recovery solutions,” he says. “We work very closely with them and our resellers to ensure everything we bring to the table adds value.”
That means letting customer needs—not SteelEye’s specific technology offerings—drive the process. It also means giving the resellers free reign to manage things as they see fit.
“We have resellers who have been with us for eight or nine years, and their primary business is selling SteelEye solutions,” says Ewald. “This isn’t only a testament to our products. Rather, as the market continues to evolve and we continue to add more features to the product that better address the things that keep CIOs awake at night, it says quite strongly that our resellers are there for them anytime, day or night, to ensure our solutions provide them the absolute best data protection available.”
Big Solutions For Smaller Companies
SteelEye was formed in 1999 to take Unix-based technology and make it available to a larger market. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of SIOS Technology, a publicly traded Japan-based hardware and software vendor. By specializing in solutions for Windows and Linux network environments, SteelEye delivered data protection, data replication, and disaster recovery capabilities that were formerly reserved for larger enterprise customers to the small to midsized enterprise market.
In doing so, SteelEye opened up the market to cash- and expertise-strapped SMEs that had typically stuck to less expensive and less capable tape-based solutions. Today, the landscape continues to shift rapidly, thanks to the spread of virtualization technologies in data centers.
“The cost of hardware resources necessary to support a disaster recovery site is much lower now because you don’t have to have as many physical servers,” says Ewald. “You can use a virtualized platform to support multiple virtual servers on one physical machine. Many companies that had previously seen this as cost-prohibitive will now find a platform much more amenable to their needs from a cost perspective.”
Cloud-based computing is also having an influence, one that Ewald says offers SMEs a more cost-effective method for enabling instant or near-instant recovery capabilities. Although SteelEye isn’t currently marketing a solution specifically targeted at the cloud computing market, its core competencies position its customers and partners to leverage this emerging capability.
“The technology we have today lends itself to that model,” says Ewald. “We play very nicely here to protect both cloud computing data centers [and] the companies that rely on them. Everybody’s looking at the budget today, and everybody’s looking to get more value for fewer dollars. These methods go hand in hand.”
This model resonates strongly with resellers, too, as they are always looking for new opportunities to add value and develop sustainable business models.
“Resellers have owned the relationships with a lot of these customers and have the know-how to adapt the technology from larger to smaller organizations,” says Ewald. “This can open up the market for them and represents a really strong opportunity for them to expand their customer base and have something more friendly to [offer] the SME community.”
Unique Employee Makeup
The partnership model has allowed SteelEye’s influence to far exceed its actual size of between 40 and 50 employees, a large percentage of whom are long-term staff.
“What really resonates with me is the lack of turnover inside our organization,” says Ewald. “We have a very dedicated group of people devoted specifically to making sure our customers get the best service that they possibly can.
“It permeates down through our organization and into our reseller community, as well,” adds Ewald. “Any of our partners can call anybody in this company and get answers to any question they have.”
Ewald says it’s allowed SteelEye to build a deep level of trust that’s driven consistently high customer retention rates. “You can only survive today’s economy by having a degree of trust that’s above the competition,” he says. “If you want to continue to grow your business, you have to have people who trust you and believe in what you do.” 
by Carmi Levy
Company Information
 Company Name: SteelEye Technology
Location: Menlo Park, Calif.
URL: www.steeleye.com
Date Company Founded: 1999
Interesting Fact: Low turnover and long tenure of current staff—atypical in the industry—makes SteelEye more like a family than a company. Vice President of Marketing Greg Ewald says because everybody’s known everybody else for years, the entire staff is empowered to solve internal and customer-related issues more quickly than would otherwise be the case. |
|
|
