Dasher Technologies

The comprehensive portfolio available from HP Technology Services (HP TS) makes it easy to help customers achieve the levels of availability and performance that are right for them.

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Objective

Grow sales and revenue while remaining true to the Dasher guiding principle of designing and delivering solutions that are a perfect match for each customer’s business and the unique challenges they face.

Approach

Rely on the combination of HP products and services from HP TS to respond to the varying demands faced by different customers, as well as by different sections of a single customer’s environment. By always listening to customers and matching their realities and needs with the right solutions, Dasher consistently transforms opportunities into wins.

Benefits

Dasher customers are confident that they will be offered the best solution for their needs. This enhances customer satisfaction, positions Dasher as a trusted advisor, and increases the chances that the customer will continue to select Dasher for products, services, and solutions in the future. For Dasher, the depth and breadth of the HP TS portfolio means that they can confidently go into sales opportunities, knowing that they can develop and offer the customer the right solution for just about any need or situation. They also know that they can rely on HP TS to consistently help them boost sales and margin.

“Over the past year, Dasher has seen a heightened awareness of the importance of services from many of our clients. Much of this recent interest is due to the fact that HP and their competitors, such as EMC, NetApp, and Cisco are actively evangelizing their services as insurance policies. The value of services is reinforced many times which paves the way for channel partners like Dasher to have conversations about services and support. Thanks to the extensive portfolio of services available from HP Technology Services, Dasher is confident that we can offer the right service to each customer, regardless of where that conversation leads. We know support and service contracts are in the best interest of most clients, and thus enhance overall customer satisfaction.” Al Chien, VP, Sales and Marketing, Dasher Technologies

Historically, companies like Dasher Technologies thrive by investing considerable time in getting to know their customers. They then work closely with them to develop and deliver solutions that are crafted to respond to each customer’s realities, as well as to the unique characteristics and challenges of each project. This is about as far from a “one-size-fits-all” approach as you can get.

To help ensure that it can consistently implement the best in personalized solutions, Dasher has worked to build up its capabilities and expertise in key areas such as Cloud, High Performance Computing, Green IT, and Data Center. Dasher is also an engineering-forward company with a nearly 1:1 ratio of engineers to account managers. Their certified engineers have the expertise necessary to help solve complex business challenges.

To complement its own areas of expertise, it is only natural that a company like Dasher would seek out partners that continue to innovate and drive the future of technology. That’s why HP continues to be an important contributor to Dasher’s success.

“We rely extensively on HP to create our solutions,” said Chien. “I think that’s clear from the fact that we are the #1 provider of HP High Performance Computing solutions and HP Open Source/Linux solutions in the U.S. But services play an essential and vital role in the success of our personalized approach with clients. The HP Technology Services portfolio allows us to go into any customer situation with confidence, knowing that we will be able to craft a solution, including services, that is a perfect fit for what that customer needs. The fact that customer environments are unique with specific demands only emphasizes the need to partner with dependable vendors and resellers. It also applies to the varied needs of disparate departments and business unit needs within a single customer. And that can make the difference in helping ensure customer satisfaction, continuity and customer loyalty.”

Sometimes, it’s all and nothing.

The range of HP solutions recently played a key role with a major Dasher customer. This major high tech component manufacturer was in the process of constructing a new $6 billion production facility that would be up and running 24x7. The customer was looking for IT solutions facility wide that could make that happen.

“By providing a range of solutions that could meet the needs of different parts of the operation, we had the chance to capture all of that business,” said Chris Stewart, Director, Pacific Northwest and National Accounts for Dasher. “Obviously, the customer wanted to control acquisition costs as much as possible, so we knew we would have to justify our choices to win the business.”

Dasher proposed ISS servers for a number of the new facility’s areas. From their discussions with the customer, Dasher knew that the customer preferred to build several layers of hardware redundancy. This would provide sufficient failover capability. The high reliability of HP ISS servers combined with the affordable cost of purchasing additional systems for redundancy, made this approach cost effective. The company could take a similar approach with elements of the storage infrastructure. So Dasher proposed a redundant fabric of HP B Series SAN switches, plus an HP ESL tape library for backup as well as a HP virtual library system for disk to disk backup. The HP P9500 storage arrays were another matter. Their cost and the critical role they were designed to play made it much more sensible to take an approach that relied on services to ensure the required levels of availability.

The customer wanted to achieve three basic support goals:

• Identify and resolve potential issues before they impact the plant’s operations. The customer was aware of the need to address people and process issues, as well as technology issues. They were open to include a strong proactive component in the support plan.

• Create a support system that could quickly identify any problem/outage that occurred

• Relying on the type of support that would help ensure that any problem identified in #2, the event gets resolved quickly so that if a second problem occurs, this first one is fixed before the second one happens.

This fit in perfectly with the capabilities provided by the portfolio of HP Mission Critical Support services.

HP Critical Service: the perfect match

The five services available in the HP Mission Critical Services portfolio made it easy for Dasher to offer the customer the ideal match for their support requirements: HP Critical Service (CS). With its extensive proactive capabilities and fast reactive response, this service delivered exactly what the customer needed. CS also includes a highly personalized approach with an Account Support Manager (ASM), a mission‑critical response center advocate, and a mission-critical hardware specialist who all work as a team to provide integrated support. As many customers have found, these experts can make a major difference in achieving and maintaining the required levels of availability.

“The depth of the HP TS portfolio offered another benefit to our customer,” said Stewart. “Because it was equally important to have support during the initial implementation phase, we were able to suggest that the customer select Proactive24 coverage at first. They could then upgrade to CS as they got closer to production. This resulted in savings to the customer. It also reinforced the idea that we had their best interests in mind.”

That basic customer trust also helped Dasher sell additional HP services, including a full complement of HP installation and consulting services, plus education services for all the hardware.

The power of partners

As we have seen on a number of occasions, the optimum partnership is one that features trust between the partners with both parties fully understanding that each will work for the customer’s best interests. This was certainly the case in this massive project as several teams of HP consultants were onsite on a regular basis to install, deploy, configure, and implement the entire storage infrastructure.

The optimum partnership allows the partners to leverage their individual strengths to achieve a common goal. This was also the case with this project on a wide range of levels. For example, in terms of individual services, Dasher did most of the work with the servers in terms of deployment and configuration. HP did all the work for the storage systems. Dasher and HP also worked cooperatively throughout to create the IT infrastructure for the customer’s new manufacturing plant.

“HP knows and respects Dasher’s expertise,“ said Chien. “In turn, we rely on HP to provide us with the exact mix of products and services that will help us provide the best match for our customers’ requirements. It’s an approach that has worked very well for many years. It continues to deliver results, allowing us to capture this outstanding opportunity. Throughout, HP helps us reinforce to our customers our own commitment to provide them with the best possible solutions every time, all the time.”