Tarsus puts blades in customers' hands

15 July 2008

Mobile demo centre for resellers is so successful that Tarsus is building a second, identical demo centre.

With the growing interest in server consolidation, workload clustering and the integration of power efficient technologies into datacentres, the local enterprise market has gone 'blade crazy'.

Greg Pothitos, HP server and storage product manager at Tarsus Technologies says, however, that before resellers can capitalise on the upbeat nature of the market, they will have to concentrate on educating customers about what blade technologies have to offer.

"Traditionally, that would have meant delivering information to their inbox and setting up face-to-face meetings aimed at explaining the concepts behind blade technology. As it turns out though, blades are too complex a topic for this approach," he says.

"Customers need to experiment, investigate and discover what blades have to offer first-hand," he says, "and if possible, do a dry run on a blade migration. While some simply need assurance that their proposed solution will work, others need to get to the root of what blades have to offer." Pothitos says it would be ideal if resellers could provide customers with a fully configured blade system and then let them figure out the applicability of the technology for themselves.

Few resellers have the kind of financial backing or disposable income to build a demo centre for their customers. This is why Tarsus has a fully mobile HP BladeSystem C3000 (or Shorty) available to resellers, complete with every possible hardware option.

"It's a demo centre in a box," Pothitos says, "and it has created a stir in the market."

In the three months that the mobile demo centre has been available, Pothitos says it has been at Tarsus for just two days and the rest of the time, it has been at customers' premises, being used for benchmarking, trial and general compatibility testing.

While that fact should speak volumes about the solution's success, Pothitos says that the mobile demo centre's real value has been demonstrated through the fact that all of the customers that have tried out the unit (barring one), have purchased a C3000 of some sort.

"The customer that didn't buy a C3000 needed a more powerful solution, which we were only too happy to provide him with," he says.

The mobile demo centre has been so successful that Pothitos says Tarsus is building a second, identical demo centre.

"Clearly this mobile demo facility makes sense for both the customer and the reseller and since it has already paid for itself ten times over, I see no reason why we wouldn't have a fleet of these, comprising different kinds of solutions available to resellers before the end of the year," he concludes.