Managing the IT infrastructure for the largest membership-based consumer buying club in North America that provides members with access to more than a million products from hundreds of name brand companies is no small task. Downtime can be very costly, not just in terms of the cost of restoring services, but in lost sales and fewer new member recruiting opportunities. In addition, security must be bulletproof and PCI compliance must be ensured at all times. The online member and merchant interfaces must be clean and intuitive. The back end must function flawlessly to ensure end-to-end e-commerce transactions. And all of this must be accomplished with a commitment to cost-effectiveness and budgetary realities.
As CIO of DirectBuy, Inc., I led the transformation of our organization and our IT infrastructure towards meeting these higher-level objectives as well as consolidating our data centers and migrating them into a cloud environment. After an internal review revealed that our systems were a bit outdated and operational practices were no longer cost-effective, we engaged several cloud solution providers to assist in the transition.
Developing the RFP was more than a matter of due diligence. It was a process that helped us to more fully define our technology needs and ascertain what we really valued in terms of costs, performance and support, as well as those less tangible qualities that often separate successful solution provider firms from the rest.
One particular channel partner was an immediate standout. Their level of pre-sales work was clearly a differentiator. They engaged with my operations team and inventoried the infrastructure of our existing data centers; how many servers, where they were located, what their maintenance cycles were, and which ones were still under warranty. We came to realize that our SAN and storage infrastructure was obsolete and that we needed to make major strides on the virtualization front. After they completed the assessment, a clear vision for the migration began to emerge.
We had extensive dialogue on how far I was prepared to go into the cloud. I could see the benefits increase the more we leveraged the cloud, but I also wanted to make sure that it was the right direction for us to begin with. After all, we still maintained several key home-grown legacy applications that did not immediately lend themselves to being migrated to a virtual environment.
We ended up with a plan to fully move all of our infrastructure and our applications portfolio to the cloud. This was clearly the boldest, but also the correct strategy. We consolidated multiple data centers, replaced an outdated ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system, rolled out a corporate-wide business intelligence platform and deployed a new Point-of-Sales (POS) system. Now all of our applications and services are consolidated in a secure private cloud.
Make it a Complete Process
The partner's pre-sales efforts and active engagement with my team to develop the cloud migration strategy and plan solidified their position with us, and gave us a lot of extra confidence when signing the contract. The whole experience engendered a great deal of loyalty on both sides and I now consider them part of my extended team. Of course, I realize that pre-sales work is expensive to partners, but that added investment is a strong indicator of the value of service that resellers can provide.
The transition was not all that easy and it did take some time to iron out the “kinks.” It took a while to get all of our applications fully integrated, and it would've been very easy for our partner to pump up their margins by leaving us to figure out the application problems for ourselves. After all, they were mainly on the hook for providing the infrastructure. But they took more of a relationship approach, wanting our business over the long haul. So they resolved all issues methodically and effectively—even those outside the specific contractual terms.
There's nothing more refreshing than an IT firm that lets your interests (the customer) drive their agenda. A solid partner will often go beyond the contractual agreement because they know there are pitfalls and twists and turns that you can't anticipate.
Not all IT firms have an equal commitment to customer service. Some even tried to sell me a solution for a problem I didn't have. They had no idea what the issues were, or even what we do as a business! Others offered some canned solution but they didn’t really engage us as a partner. These people are wasting everybody's time, including their own.
Consultative selling is key. Learn the client’s business and provide solutions to real business problems. That will get me intrigued about your solutions and start to engage with you towards building an effective end-to-end solution. Approach me in that context and you will get my attention. I wouldn't do the deal any other way.
Armin Roeseler is the CIO of DirectBuy, Inc. and a Fulbright Scholar with a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Illinois Institute of Technology. He is also a U.S. Patent holder, writer and member of the CompTIA End User Commission.
