Taking the Discombobulation out of Services with "Design, Build and Manage"
Streamlining organizational data management, access and protection from a configuration, implementation and support perspective has been a key focus of CommVault over the past year. This topic was obviously on the forefront of the mind of Robert Brower, CommVault's VP of Services and Technical Support, when he and I met last fall and discussed in a series of blogs how CommVault was evolving to address this common issue in customer environments. That conversation foreshadows the growing integration in CommVault® Services between its Professional Services, Support and Training divisions and how this integration could become the new template for what customers expect all vendors to deliver going forward.
Backup redesign is top of mind in many Fortune 1000 organizations with 33% of these companies listing it as their #1 storage priority in 2009 according to TheInfoPro's 2008 Wave 11 results. But the issue that these organizations run into as they start to look to redesign their backup infrastructures is how to best engage vendors who can help them in this initiative.
From my own personal experience, I know that vendors have inadequate processes in place to collectively manage the installation, training and support of their backup software in customer environments. Rather, each of these aforementioned divisions stands on their own with inadequate cooperation between them. When I asked Brower as to why this is so counterproductive, he used the example of an organization that calls upon a vendor to help it better protect the information in 10,000 of its email mail boxes.
Vendors tend to respond to these customer requests according to which of their three services organization receives the customer engagement. For instance, if the Professional Services (PS) organization is awarded the job, it may see it as a cut-and-dry 20-day services engagement. The PS staff will go to the customer site, archive all data over 30 - 90 days and then reconfigure the backup software to protect the remaining production data. However, they may not train the local IT staff on how to properly manage the email archive or backup software so once the PS staff is no longer on site, problems can and do resurface.
On the other end of the spectrum, if the Training organization handles the customer engagement, they train the customer on how to use the software. So the customer obtains training for managing the backup and email archive software but, after a week of training, only knows enough to be dangerous when it comes time to do the initial archive of the 10,000 mail boxes. It is when they start to archive all of this data, all sorts of things go wrong from slow performance on the email server to an improperly configured archive.
What then can occur in these scenarios is that the customer in desperation calls the vendor's Support organization. Support is then stuck with trying to fix the situation even as they privately wonder how this particular customer engagement got so screwed up in the first place. Meanwhile the customer is left feeling frustrated and left wondering what went wrong with their engagement with the vendor.
It is this discombobulated situation that Brower both sought to address and help differentiate CommVault from its competitors. His initiative has resulted in CommVault combining its Professional Services, Support and Training under simply "CommVault Services" and adopting the philosophy of "Design, Build and Manage" to tackle this longstanding issue.
Brower explains that with this new all-in-one Services organization, CommVault takes a "cradle-to-grave" approach with its clients. Now when customers or resellers come to CommVault with a project, all of the Services organization, whether that is Professional Services, Support, Training or some combination of all three, works together to deliver what the customer needs. In the earlier example of 10,000 email mail boxes, Brower said CommVault Services would now cooperate to recommend something like a week of training, 5-6 days of Professional Services to configure the migration and making a Support engineer available or even putting the engineer onsite while the migration occurs. "Everyone is now aware of where the project is at and the tasks that were completed so there are no more gaps in support," he says.
The "Design Build and Manage" philosophy extends this agile approach to services by enabling customers to engage their preferred services provider at each point from the design stage to deployment to the operation's life cycle. With this new methodology CommVault can work directly with the customer or with the customer's preferred services partner. This agility ensures that the Services solution is not only technically sound and requirements 'right-sized' to meet customer objectives but also includes participation with all of the customer's trusted advisors.
CommVault's decision to bring its Professional Services, Support and Training divisions under one umbrella makes sense from both a tactical and strategic perspective. Immediately, companies should find it helpful to not have to navigate CommVault in order to receive the help they need. Rather when they reach out to CommVault to discuss a new or existing project, the individual they contact should have the information at his or her fingertips to help them answer their question. Strategically, this change further helps CommVault Services become more agile and, should this change work as well as Brower promises, gives both CommVault's customers and resellers greater confidence to proceed in any project that they engage with CommVault.
Backup redesign is top of mind in many Fortune 1000 organizations with 33% of these companies listing it as their #1 storage priority in 2009 according to TheInfoPro's 2008 Wave 11 results. But the issue that these organizations run into as they start to look to redesign their backup infrastructures is how to best engage vendors who can help them in this initiative.
From my own personal experience, I know that vendors have inadequate processes in place to collectively manage the installation, training and support of their backup software in customer environments. Rather, each of these aforementioned divisions stands on their own with inadequate cooperation between them. When I asked Brower as to why this is so counterproductive, he used the example of an organization that calls upon a vendor to help it better protect the information in 10,000 of its email mail boxes.
Vendors tend to respond to these customer requests according to which of their three services organization receives the customer engagement. For instance, if the Professional Services (PS) organization is awarded the job, it may see it as a cut-and-dry 20-day services engagement. The PS staff will go to the customer site, archive all data over 30 - 90 days and then reconfigure the backup software to protect the remaining production data. However, they may not train the local IT staff on how to properly manage the email archive or backup software so once the PS staff is no longer on site, problems can and do resurface.
On the other end of the spectrum, if the Training organization handles the customer engagement, they train the customer on how to use the software. So the customer obtains training for managing the backup and email archive software but, after a week of training, only knows enough to be dangerous when it comes time to do the initial archive of the 10,000 mail boxes. It is when they start to archive all of this data, all sorts of things go wrong from slow performance on the email server to an improperly configured archive.
What then can occur in these scenarios is that the customer in desperation calls the vendor's Support organization. Support is then stuck with trying to fix the situation even as they privately wonder how this particular customer engagement got so screwed up in the first place. Meanwhile the customer is left feeling frustrated and left wondering what went wrong with their engagement with the vendor.
It is this discombobulated situation that Brower both sought to address and help differentiate CommVault from its competitors. His initiative has resulted in CommVault combining its Professional Services, Support and Training under simply "CommVault Services" and adopting the philosophy of "Design, Build and Manage" to tackle this longstanding issue.
Brower explains that with this new all-in-one Services organization, CommVault takes a "cradle-to-grave" approach with its clients. Now when customers or resellers come to CommVault with a project, all of the Services organization, whether that is Professional Services, Support, Training or some combination of all three, works together to deliver what the customer needs. In the earlier example of 10,000 email mail boxes, Brower said CommVault Services would now cooperate to recommend something like a week of training, 5-6 days of Professional Services to configure the migration and making a Support engineer available or even putting the engineer onsite while the migration occurs. "Everyone is now aware of where the project is at and the tasks that were completed so there are no more gaps in support," he says.
The "Design Build and Manage" philosophy extends this agile approach to services by enabling customers to engage their preferred services provider at each point from the design stage to deployment to the operation's life cycle. With this new methodology CommVault can work directly with the customer or with the customer's preferred services partner. This agility ensures that the Services solution is not only technically sound and requirements 'right-sized' to meet customer objectives but also includes participation with all of the customer's trusted advisors.
CommVault's decision to bring its Professional Services, Support and Training divisions under one umbrella makes sense from both a tactical and strategic perspective. Immediately, companies should find it helpful to not have to navigate CommVault in order to receive the help they need. Rather when they reach out to CommVault to discuss a new or existing project, the individual they contact should have the information at his or her fingertips to help them answer their question. Strategically, this change further helps CommVault Services become more agile and, should this change work as well as Brower promises, gives both CommVault's customers and resellers greater confidence to proceed in any project that they engage with CommVault.
Leave a comment