Business View Magazine | October 2019

141 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE OCTOBER 2019 cost savings and no risk. That really has been our philosophy this past year, as we’ve gone out into the market, and it’s resonated very well with the customers and the prospects.” “We are the counterpoint to the OEMs and OEM controlled channels to market,” says Toby Kruse, Worldwide Services’ new Vice President of Sales. “Rather than a products and services matrix like many companies have, we offer strategies and execution. We enable strategies for network, servers, and storage. We advise on, and execute, the full lifecycle of infrastructure: Design, buy/build, and run/maintain. “It all starts with good architecture and design – good design choices up front allow far superior options in the build and run phases. We coordinate a full discovery session with our customers and prospects to discuss all the technical details and business initiatives to really understand their framework – what they have today and where they are going, divestitures, acquisitions, refresh cycles, maintenance policies, etc. That allows us to start to make decisions on what to buy, how to install it, what tools to use, and how to maintain and run it, going forward. Where the real value happens is when we filter all these decisions by the lens of truth. We break that into three separate categories: OEM Truth (& Lies), Market Truth, and then Worldwide Services Exclusive Truth. “OEM Truth (& Lies): If you look in the back of a manual of any router or switch, there’s an MTBF – Mean Time Between Failure. It’s usually in hours, and when you convert that to years, it’s something like 25-40 years. So, the OEM is telling its customer base, statistically, this should work from 25 to 40 years, depending on the device. Then, the OEM rep will tell the customer base: ‘And please refresh it every three to five years.’ So, those are two data points coming from the same organization and they’re clearly in conflict. So, the question is, as an engineer in an organization, how do you handle that data in such a way to optimize your own company’s budget? “Then there are all these nuances in the world of software – perpetual licensing, annual licensing – WORLDWIDE SERV I CES