Wednesday, February 18, 2009

The Lumenate Storage Practice Blog – off we go!

Lumenate has been working with customers to solve data management and storage challenges since the company was founded but we did not implement a formal storage practice until a year ago. The reason we created the storage practice was so that we could be more strategic in our approach to storage solutions and thereby be of better service to our customers.

Here are some of the things we do:

Talk directly with customers about their storage and data management challenges. Everyone claims to sell solutions but what they generally mean is they sell bundles, you put some hardware together with some software, add in services and voila you have a solution. This is not our approach, while we offer products and services, our engagement starts with understanding what you are trying to accomplish and ends with a solution designed specifically to meet your needs.

We research the latest industry thoughts, trends and technologies. We want to understand not just where we are today but where we are going tomorrow.

We evaluate technologies and develop our position on them. Companies looking to sign up Lumenate as a reseller are often surprised with the depth to which we go before we give a new technology the green light. Having a great market and stack of leads is fine but we want to ensure that we understand the technology at an intimate level and are comfortable positioning it in our accounts.

We take all of this research and data points and educate our technical team, members our sales team and our customers.

Typically this information is shared in the form of white papers, positioning docs or presentations but there are a number of challenges with this approach.

1. This type of communication is one way, we push it out but getting feedback directly from customers and prospects is difficult.

2. Timeliness, creating white papers and presentation materials takes time and of course it needs to be scrubbed and polished before it is made generally available to the public. In some cases this delays getting the information to our customers that could really use it.

3. Finally, some of the most interesting and useful things we uncover come about through conversations the technical team has internally - when we are trying to solve a problem or develop a solution. We wanted a way to capture this information and share it.

All of these challenges have led us to the idea of creating a blog. We’re not sure just yet what will come of it, or just how interested people will be but our
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