AN INVESTMENT IN PEACE OF MIND

"The Zenith system offers everything I wanted. Its on-site NAS device automatically performs tapeless backups as often as every 15 minutes, and the optional off-site storage keeps my clients protected even if a natural disaster or fire were to damage their office."

GCS is a proud partner of Zenith Infotech Ltd

Resellers have all kinds of motivations for becoming a managed services provider. What I most wanted was peace of mind.

My company deals mostly with small businesses, and companies that size typically have only one server. If something happened to it, they might as well close up shop, because getting work done would be impossible. Ask the owners of businesses like that how they protect their data and they’ll usually tell you they have everything backed up on tape, or that they use an online storage service. In reality, though, those tapes are probably days if not weeks out of date, and no one’s monitoring the online service to confirm that it’s doing its job.

We had lots of clients like that, and through plenty of hard work I managed to keep their data safe anyway. But sooner or later, I knew, someone was going to suffer a serious data loss, and when they did their first step would be to fire me. Their second, I worried, might be to sue me. By 2005, I recognized that if I wanted to sleep well at night I had to find a simple, drop-dead reliable way to back up our customers’ data, one that would be affordable for them yet profitable for us.

Good News

As it happens, my search for such a solution took longer than I expected. The first product I tried turned out to be so expensive that customers couldn’t afford the rates I had to charge in order to earn any margin. My sales efforts went nowhere. Then we tested a second solution for a few months, only to conclude that it wasn’t dependable. So we gave a third system a try, but just like the first one, it proved to be way too pricey.

Then I heard about Zenith Infotech’s Backup and Disaster Recovery solution, and decided to test it out. Zenith sent over a demo unit, and within three days of its arrival I was hooked. The system offers everything I wanted. Its on-site NAS device automatically performs tapeless backups as often as every 15 minutes, and the optional off-site storage keeps my clients protected even if a natural disaster or fire were to damage their office. That means fewer sleepless nights for me. No more worrying about my customers’ data!

And here’s more good news: Zenith offers pay-as-yougo pricing, so adding their solution to my service offerings didn’t require big up-front investments. Plus, Zenith’s price points are much more reasonable than some of the other solutions we looked at, so I could set my rates more affordably. That makes selling the solution a whole lot easier. Yet there’s still plenty of room for margin. In fact, I’m collecting about $7,000 a month in additional profit now, and I expect to be clearing $20,000 a month once I hit my sales target.

Meanwhile, we’ve been getting more project work thanks to the BDR solution. Fully protecting my clients from data loss usually involves some infrastructure upgrades, so almost every time we close a BDR deal we end up getting a service engagement out of it too. Beyond that, clients appreciate that I’m shielding them from a significant danger, which leads to greater loyalty and more business.

Lower Overhead

To top it all off, Zenith has proven to be a great company to partner with. Unlike some vendors I could name, they’ve really done an excellent job of refining their products and streamlining their processes. Everything works the way they say it will, and interacting with them is always a pleasure.

Not surprisingly, then, when we decided to start offering proactive server management to our customers, we chose Zenith again. In the past, we were constantly dispatching technicians to fix issues that could easily have been avoided with a little preventive maintenance. In fact, we had to keep a small team of people on call all the time, waiting for the next crisis to arise. That added a lot of wasted overhead to my balance sheet. Now that I’ve got Zenith’s crack NOC team watching over my clients’ servers, however, my people are free to spend their time more productively.

In the near future, I plan to start providing managed desktop services with Zenith’s help, and I’m also going to take a close look at their new SmartStyle Computing solution. It looks like a great way to get into cloud computing, and if it’s anything like the Zenith solutions I already use, it will offer a hassle-free way to serve my customers while growing my business.

For more details, please check How BDR Data Backup and Recovery solution works