At your service
After picking up a "One to Watch" award last year, ZaveIT won the "Innovator of the Year" category at this year's Storage Awards. Storage Magazine Editor David Tyler spoke to the company's CEO, Lars Olav Habberstad, to catch up on a busy year.
David Tyler: We last spoke around a year ago when you had just won your first Storage Award - for anyone who wasn't reading the magazine then, can you recap some of your own history and background for us and how ZaveIT came to be?
Lars Olav Habberstad: I come from the storage and backup industry, where i spent many years working with everything from mainframes to Unix systems and even supercomputers - It was a very steep learning curve! I´d been coding since I was 13 so I loved all that. At one point I developed some software for moving data from disk to tape - back then it wasn´t normal to backup disk because it was super-expensive. One of our biggest client was Credit Suisse, who even back in the early 2000s were backing up a petabyte of data.
I then went on to start Purity in 2008, which was one of the first organisations seriously promoting the concept of “green IT”. We were going into data centers, looking at the storage and compute systems and making suggestions on how they could be making savings and improve efficiency.
After 5 or 6 years having some huge successes with Purity, we decided to take it a step further and move over to cloud services. We’d seen a few backup vendors who had successfully offered backup-as-a-service to the SMB market and we saw the opportunity to do the same for enterprise customers, because that was who we were used to working with. We found some great software from Commvault and built a service on top of it, and then did the same with Zerto. We were also among the first in Europe to use Cloudian. Then we were able to build storage-as-a-service, backup-as-a-service and disaster recovery-as-a-service, and had great success with that: Purity actually went from zero cloud service offering to around 60% cloud within just a few years.
DT: So what was the next step, from Purity to ZaveIT?
LOH: We actually sold Purity in 2017, and I took some time off to consider my future plans. We had been a reseller and MSP ourselves, of course, so I was very aware of many of the issues that resellers faced. In order to “downscale” these enterprise products so as to sell them to SMBs, here was definitely a need for automation. In addition there might be six or seven different systems we had to work around to deal with customers, from CRM to ticketing and accounting in the background - It´s a lot of work, and highly error-prone!
This was when i started to think about a platform specifically tailored for MSPs, IT resellers /VARs. Around that time everyone was talking about their APIs, but frankly most of them at that time were effectively useless. Coming into 2020, most systems were starting to offer decent APIs, and that´s when we began to think “yes, this is possible, we can build this”.
“I think even today many VARs almost don´t dare to try to sell services because often they don´t properly understand what it is they´re supposed to be selling: they´re used to just buying and selling “stuff”. Service sales is a very different approach than selling products: it can be far more complex. Our platform actually helps them get past this by integrating with distributors, helping them pick products or even build their own products, turn it in to a service, give it a nice look-and-feel, and put it into their own marketplace, or even offer it as a customer portal”
DT: And what was the benefit to the resellers of a platform like yours? Did you have to do a bit of an education job at first to explain the proposition?
LOH: I think even today many VARs almost don´t dare to try to sell services because often they don´t properly understand what it is they´re supposed to be selling: they´re used to just buying and selling “stuff”. Services sales is a very different approach than selling products: it can be far more complex.
Our platform actually helps them get past this by integrating with distributors, helping them pick products or even build their own products, turn it in to a service, give it a nice look-and-feel, and put it into their own marketplace, or even offer it as a customer portal”
DT: Explain why the customer portal is so attractive for your users.
LOH: It´s interesting: I actually believe that for the “first contact” with customers, it is still best to do it the old-fashioned way: you have to call them, and win them over as your customer - but once you´ve got past that point, after that, the customers simply wants to be able to buy from you easily. Neither side wants to be calling each other every week. Younger users, in particular, can be very resistant to the idea of “being sold to”.
This is a key advantage of a customer portal: Let´s say you sell some cloud services to a customer, and that customer also has requirements for things like wifi. hardware, keyboards, or whatever - previously, the chances are they will buy those items from someone else - often one of the global selling sites. But with the portal, it´s a really easy option to add all those peripheral products in there as well, and grow revenues a lot in that way.
DT: And what about the offering to MSPs?
LOH: In essence, we offer MSPs exactly the same thing, with exactly the same benefits, but of course, we focus more on deployments: MSPs, of course, have “bigger” needs. A good example is how we work with NODE4 now, who have a channel with around 200 of what they call sub-resellers. We automate their entire process: a customer clicks buy, and the entire chain is automated from buyer through sub-reseller back to Node4. That saves a lot of money, and increases customer satisfaction - one of the main customer complaints has always been about the time it take from placing an order to completion.
So overall what we are offering is efficiency gains and time/cost savings, obviously, but also a chance for our users to easily offer a large range of products and services. And it´s important to remember that ZaveIT is not just about services, it´s the total approach: you can do orders and ticketing etc. all within the platform, without having to go to lots of different webpages or whatever.
As SaaS has helped to establish confidence in the idea of the whole as-a-service approach, that has encouraged VARs to recognise that they pretty much have to look at offering services in order to remain competitive - the market is moving towards a point of offering one place to build, sell and manage those services, and that´s were ZaveIT comes in.
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