Bootstrapping A 130 Million VAR In The Midwest: Ahead CEO Dan Adamany (Part 6)

Sramana: I find the area of cloud computing to be a key strategic area for companies right now. How does that landscape look from your point of view?

Dan Adamany: The industry is evolving very quickly with cloud computing. Traditional resellers have aligned themselves within IT to verticals such as backup, storage, and servers. Today we have a converged infrastructure with cross-stack solutions. We are nimble and small and we have cross-trained all of our people on all of these technologies. Fortunately, the industry started introducing products that are truly cross-stack products. We were positioned to come in with any of our technical individuals and have an entire stack discussion. Customers appreciate our knowledge based on a solution, not a product. Manufacturers are now looking to partners like us because we can have front to back conversations that others cannot.

Sramana: Essentially you have identified two discontinuities. One concerns what is happening in virtualization and the second is in the cloud movement. There was a lot of discussion of change going on in these accounts, so you could go in and become a partner to your customers.

Dan Adamany: Yes. One of the main things that helped us to be credible for that role was the people that we had as well as the large investment that we had in our lab. We give our people hands-on experience so they can articulate what is sales spin and what is reality. We just signed a deal yesterday where customers are coming to us to help develop their future IT and cloud strategy. “Cloud” is an overused term, but our customers are trying to figure out what their data center strategy is going to be for the next three to five years.

Sramana: That illustrates the value of your consulting arm. You are going in very early in the sales cycle and are helping to shape that change. You can then supply the equipment accordingly. What has that done to the margin structure of your business when you move to higher value consulting?

Dan Adamany: It is very interesting. Running a services business or a consulting business is very different from running a retail business. It was a big adjustment for me to understand how we need to think on the consulting side versus buying and selling a product. To be transparent, we are still figuring it out. On the consulting side we are manufacturing a product which is people, and those people have an overhead and everything else. One the product side we have highly leveraged sales reps and technical people. They usually do not make money unless they sell something. Our exposure is much less so we don’t carry as much overhead.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Bootstrapping A 130 Million VAR In The Midwest: Ahead CEO Dan Adamany
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