Hello 2020! Time for Improvement
2020 is here. I don’t know whether to cry or celebrate because the older I get, it appears the years go by faster and faster.
2019 was a complete blur. If that’s an indicator for 2020, it certainly will feel like the endless ‘dirt nap’ is somewhere on the horizon. Life is short, and we must embrace it as it happens. We need to continuously try to improve our quality of life.
Customer First
I try to take that philosophy and apply it to our IT Solutions’ Team. We implement a Customer FIRST mentality which is:
F: Flexible
I: Invested
R: Responsive
S: Strategic
T: Trusted
Zunesis’ Wins
While those are all very respectable words, I wanted to highlight some of our wins towards a Customer FIRST approach:
Daily summaries on work completed for a client – When we work with our clients, we want to assure them we are in the process or have completed the work we have done for them. At the end of the day, we will provide a complete write-up of the work performed on that day. This allows our clients to trust in our capabilities and be current where the project stands.
Constant communication with client – Similar to the above, sometimes it’s important to gently ‘nudge’ the client. We may need an important piece of information from them for us to complete our milestone(s) or the overall objective. It also shows we’re organized and invested in exceeding client expectations.
Quick turnaround when clients send an email – Being responsive goes a long way. This is especially true if there’s an escalation. Problem resolution for an Infrastructure is extremely important. It can either save an organization or if not responded to in a timely manner, can cost an organization thousands to even millions of dollars.
Dedication to Detail – Do it right the first time. Budget the work accordingly (based on what has been learned with similar historical projects). Spell it out on a Kickoff Call with the client. Assign & schedule the correct resources. Document (and document some more for reference purposes). Continuously keep the client updated. This type of process will reduce the amount of rework, recognize scope and scope ‘creep’. It allows for additional opportunities with a client based on our reputation for being so thorough.
Internal brainstorming – Sometimes it’s possible to get stumped on one or more of the project’s process, attributes, resources, etc. Therefore, it’s so important that an engineering team meeting occurs. A uniformed type of cadence will be developed to discuss project status and introduce opportunities for solutions. We use these internal brainstorming sessions to think outside the box. There’s more than one way to par/birdie a hole on the golf course!
Opportunities
Now, some areas of opportunities for continuous wins:
Continue to implement our approach listed above – Each action item becomes more and more efficient and beneficial to the client as the practices above increase with repetition.
Keep internal stakeholders current – Your Project Manager can be the glue to the entire project. This is usually done without a hitch. It can be embarrassing to contact the client about an issue that’s already been resolved because the necessary stakeholders weren’t on all the applicable correspondences.
Identify areas of opportunity for your client to succeed – While knee-deep in a client’s infrastructure, there’s a distinct possibility our engineers may uncover a proverbial ticking time bomb. This could delay production or operations for your client far sooner than that Storage upgrade.
Infrastructure Assessments – This is almost in tangent with client success. Equipment may be running out of support from the manufacturer. This is why it’s so important for an organization to have a firm grip on their overall environment. This is just one example of a continued trusted partnership with a client.
Life is short. Implementing these type attributes and actions will allow your organization to spend less time in a datacenter. It will allow you to spend more time with the people and activities you enjoy the most.
Zunesis Solution Services Team
As Gene Hackman says in Hoosiers, “This is your Team!”
James Hughes – Vice President of Engineering and Services / Engineer
Michael Gosselin – Chief Technology Officer / Engineer
Garrett Law – Networking / Engineer
Adam Gosselin – Network Administrator / Engineer
Joe Tressler – Microsoft / Engineer
James Burke – Networking, Compute / Engineer
Pete Knoblock – Project Management
Contact Zunesis to see how we can help improve your organization’s IT Solutions for 2020.
“Endgame”:
- (in chess)- the final stage of a game, usually following the exchange of queens and the serious reduction of forces.
- the late or final stages of any activity.
Superfan Alert
This Friday, Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame premiers in theaters (technically tonight if you were lucky enough to get tickets to the Thursday night screenings). It is shaping up to be the most anticipated film in human history.
Since I am a Marvel superfan, you could take this statement as hyperbole. But with presales ticket figures at over $130 million and one crazy fan even paying $15,000 on eBay for a pair of tickets…I stand by my claim!
It seemed only fitting to write about this massive cinematic event in my blog this week. Besides the fact that it is one of the most prominent topics of discussion as we inch closer and closer to the big premier. “Endgame” also happens to be the “main event” at the IT presentation that Zunesis is hosting in conjunction with Aruba and HPE tomorrow (again…if you were lucky enough to get tickets to our SOLD OUT event)!
If you remember, (which I’m sure you do if you have even the slightest inkling of what these movies are about) when we last saw the remainder of our heroes, they were left sitting helplessly after just witnessing half of the known universe be completely obliterated from existence! How’s that for a bad day?
Like in chess, the leftover Avengers are in the “endgame” with little resources and only the faintest hope of gathering their remaining forces and rallying one last offensive against the enemies of the universe. As exciting as this is and as eager as many of us are to see the conclusion of this epic saga…the whole concept really got me thinking about the other world I live in; the world of IT.
IT Endgame
What if you, as a customer, got put into a situation where you had greatly reduced resources? What if your data center experienced catastrophic failure and you and your colleagues found yourself in the “IT-endgame”? Wouldn’t you avoid this if you could? Wouldn’t it be nice to have Dr. Strange in your ear telling you where your environment is at, where it has been, and where it will be? Well now you can, with our help!
It’s called Recurring Data Center Advisory Service or RDCAS (I’m pushing for “RDSAS”, Recurring Doctor Strange Advisory Service, but nobody will listen to me). It’s the newest professional service that Zunesis offers to our HPE-centric customers. I know that our CEO just wrote his own blog on this topic a few weeks back, but it is a great new offering that we have in our professional services catalog and I really want people to see the value that it brings! And what better way than using the biggest movie on the planet as an analogy?
RDCAS is an advisory service wherein Zunesis will continually review your HPE infrastructure (the frequency of which is based on your company’s personal preference) and give you a documented summarization of our findings after each run-through. We will create an effective maintenance plan for you that details when your required or recommended updates are, processes involved for said updates, and can even download and provide update packages for you. We will monitor your support contracts and even escalate your service tickets with a sense of urgency.
Imagine being able to sit-down with Dr. Strange every quarter and review the entirety of your HPE infrastructure (or as much as you wish to review). You will have an accurate representation of your environment’s performance, OS versions, updates, patches. Wouldn’t it be nice to have an ongoing cadence that improves your uptime and overall infrastructure health. Or would you rather wait and find yourself in the “datacenter-endgame” like those poor Avengers? If you answered “yes” to this question, then Recurring Data Center Advisory Service is the right-fit for you!
I have barely scratched the surface of what the RDCAS can provide. While maintenance and support costs are on the rise (especially in the case of a massive failure), I want all our customers to know that this great service is available. It’s like G.I. Joe said, “knowing is half the battle”.
If you want to learn more about RDCAS or how Zunesis can help you with your IT environment, please reach out to a Zunesis or visit our website! Until then, I wish you all a super-heroic Thursday and a MARVELous weekend! “Avengersssss Assemble!’
Credit and Leasing
In today’s world, you rarely, if ever find someone who does not have a payment schedule for something they couldn’t or didn’t want to buy outright. Between phones, cars, houses, and credit cards, most of us have something that we put on credit. The concept of credit is not new, and it has had many different faces and reputations over the years.
In fact, I find it somewhat assuming that as a society we depend on credit. Yet in general our concept of credit is one of disdain. Or we use it just because we have to, not because we want to.
Leasing options in the IT industry have been met with similar attitudes. In fact, there are some companies and agencies that will make a hard and fast rule that you CAN’T lease.
But what if things were different?
What if there was a way to purchase the technology you need, pay for it on a yearly basis as your budget becomes available and still not sign a lease?
Subscriptions or subscription agreements have been around as long as credit/leasing have. With the rise of software and cloud computing, subscriptions have become more and more prevalent in our IT world.
So the brain trust here at Zunesis thought this through, and we said to ourselves:
“What if we could provide a subscription agreement for on premises hardware and remove the stigma of a lease from our customers minds?”
What would this look like?
Customer Challenges
First, we wanted to come up with a list of challenges our customers are facing. Here is what we found:
- Traditional storage infrastructures have hard limits on capacity and data growth is unpredictable.
- Traditional infrastructure refresh cycles are typically every 2.5 – 5 years, and these refresh cycles require extensive planning and time-consuming data migrations.
- The rate of data growth today is unprecedented. This growth is being driven by analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, video, and edge-based Internet of Things (IoT) applications.
- Capital costs continue to rise on enterprise storage because of demands for faster I/O, greater redundancy, and enhanced security. Finding cost-effective ways to provision storage is a major challenge for most organizations today.
So after some careful thought, we realized that we would need a procurement model that allowed our customer to purchase all the infrastructure necessary for a complete data center refresh. It needed to be sufficient enough to support current operations and five-years of planned growth.
Subscription Agreement
To make that happen, Zunesis teamed up with Hewlett Packard Financial Services to create a SLED/Nevada compliant agreement that would allow our customer to make cost-effective annual payments for managed infrastructure.
We would set this up as a subscription agreement, providing the following benefits:
- An annual cost that is consistent year over year. No surprises.
- Proactive support from vendors is included, off-loading administrative overhead of updates, migrations, and end-of-life transitions.
- The Subscription Agreement allows for rapid and unpredictable storage / infrastructure growth.
- The Agreement enables costly and risky data migration to happen only once (in 5-year life cycle).
- The Agreement enables consistent and predictable budgetary planning.
This agreement would be created to allow organizations to buy best in class infrastructure at sufficient scale to allow the organization to be supported today and into the future. This would be beneficial to our customers by eliminating the need to incrementally improve their infrastructure and remove all of this risks of frequent migrations with this incremental upgrades.
Now in theory and on paper we thought this would be a great benefit and something our customers would really gravitate toward, but as my mother used to say, “the proof is in the pudding.”
Would customers ever sign an subscription agreement like this? Well, I am happy to announce that we signed our first customer subscription agreement in March of this year. We have several other customers that are working to be next on the list for this option.
If this sounds like something you may be interested in looking in to, we would welcome you to contact us to see if this will fit your needs!!
