Selling deduplicating virtual tape libraries (VTLs)

Jerome Wendt, Contributor
Taken from TechTarget article published 8/28/07:

The upside of customers becoming more educated about their backup options is that VARs can become more proactive with their client accounts. Jim Reichardt, vice president of professional services for Middleboro, Mass.-based More Group Inc., finds that as network bandwidth costs drop, coupled with the data reduction benefits delivered by deduplication, it leads to deeper discussions with customers about disaster recovery options. Colocation opportunities and customers who build their own disaster recovery facility are just two of the ideas that More Group is exploring with its customers to add a new dimension to client relationships. "You can really roll up your sleeves and start thinking ahead," Reichardt said. Storage resellers who excel at explaining the value proposition of deduplication to their clients -- and some of the new ways that users can exploit data backed up to disk -- sometimes discover another side benefit: increased capital budgets. Steve Whitner, Quantum Corp.'s product marketing manager, finds that users want to get more data on disk and make backups simpler to manage. Though customers start out looking at one solution, new ideas occur to them that "result in customers going back and asking for increases in their capital budget," Whitner said.

Read the full article here.