Robert Moniz, GlassHouse Systems, with Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman at IBM Edge 2014 @thecube #ibmedge For the second year in a row, IBM has chosen GlassHouse, an IBM reseller out of Toronto, Ontario, as one of their “Winning Edge” award recipients. The Winning Edge Awards for Systems Storage are granted, said Robert Moniz, GlassHouse VP and General Manager, to companies that show “continued performance in the marketplace for selling storage” and who couple performance with “technical competency.” Technical competency builds customer relationships #IBMEdgeTechnical competency, Moniz told Stu Miniman and Dave Vellante, is “an area of business we take very seriously.” GlassHouse uses a methodology that places a high value on technical skill. This “deep technical bench” is partially due to the employees that make up GlassHouse, many of whom are former systems engineers: “our SEs are former IBM Redbook contributors, a lot of our sales staff are former SEs, our entire management team is made up of former SEs.” Since their ranks are filled with SEs, Moniz says, GlassHouse has a different approach to reselling IBM products. Solutions built around client goals “Customers can expect a very consultative, methodical, patient approach to understanding their requirements,” Moniz explains. GlassHouse builds “architectures and solutions” around what their customers “lines of business are trying to achieve.” They also, Moniz says, try to execute a “soft change,” which means preserving as much as they can of what the client already has: Glasshouse tries “to integrate what [the client needs] to do with what they have and add on any auxiliary equipment or solutions that they need to acquire.” This consultative aspect of their business is partially the nature of the storage business, which, as Moniz says, “requires a lot of pre-sales technical support.” But there are some companies that GlassHouse works with that require additional consultation because “they’re a non-IBM infrastructure shop today. But they understand that we get that type of architecture and that we can help them minimize costs and increase performance or optimize or reduce square-footage or cooling — all of that.” As a reseller with a consulting edge, GlassHouse positions themselves as “your advocate, your trusted advisor,” to their clients. Even though they are an IBM-only vendor, GlassHouse still helps customers “optimize how those other vendor’s products will sit on [IBM] storage.” And if an IBM product isn’t necessarily the right fit for a customer, GlassHouse will let them know and suggest another reseller. Handling changing IBM offerings Responding to Vellante’s question around “getting pulled into specific application and workload areas of expertise,” Moniz said that SAP is changing “what they require their customers to do,” and therefore GlassHouse has needed to “work with our clients through some of those changes.” He added that they’d needed to perform similar support “on the server and the application side” with Oracle. Miniman asked Moniz to expand on his experience with “virtualized HANA,” now supported by SAP, wondering “Is that a conversation you’re having with your customers?” Moniz replied that they do have HANA-centered conversations with their customers: “if a customer is heavily invested in HANA we’ll continue to work with them to protect those investments. If a customer has not yet embraced HANA but wants to perform due diligence on “how do I run my analytics on my SAP databases?” we’ll sit down and take them through it.”