Support

Dan Crain, CEO: One of the things that’s really important to us at WHIPTAIL is customer service. There’s a lot of ways made in the industry of selling and people absorbing new technology. Many of us here are customers, former enterprise customers. To us a customer means you’ve already owned the equipment versus we’re trying to get you to own it. One of the things that we really focus on here is what does it mean to be a WHIPTAIL customer in terms of service and support and how we take care of our equipment that people purchase from us. We’re really the only company in the business, in our small segment that actually has 24 by 7 global four hour response time for all of our customers regardless of where you are in the world. The guy who runs this for us is a really unique person as well, his name is Joe Cutuli.

Joe is really one of the best known data center operations guys. He’s been both on the vendor side and the user side like me, but he’s really one of the … in New York metropolitan area, at least which is a fairly demanding group of people in general for IT, one of the biggest IT markets in the world. He’s known as one of the best operations guys out there. He runs global operations for us, but he also has taken sort of service and post-sales support under his wing because he wants to make sure that everybody gets treated the way he or myself, as an example, would like to be treated.

Joe Cutuli, VP of Global Customer Support: Most of my career has been on the customer side. I was responsible for supporting and managing large institutions, financial institutions in the storage arena. It included support, it included installation, it included also procurement. With that respect, I’m very familiar with support and what I would expect from … or what I did expect from the support vendors. 24 by 7, four hour support from the vendors that I was working would meant that they would be onsite within four hours and they get to diagnose the problem.

At that point if it was a hardware problem, they had to go and procure the failing component. That would be either from a local depot or from FedEx and that would take time for them to get the component. Whereas the difference with WHIPTAIL is that we provide a customer spare kit. When that field engineer gets onsite, and diagnoses the problem, a lot of times it’s already been pre-diagnosed, that part is onsite, he’s replaced the component, and the failing component is sent back to WHIPTAIL and a fresh component is sent back to the customer. We can fix the problem in four hours or less versus being onsite within four hours.

Our support, we are proactive. It just doesn’t call home when there’s a failing component that also responds every 24 hours to give an update health check. “Hey, I’m doing fine, everything is looking good, this is where I’m at,” and it also does trending. It can forecast let’s say based on what I’m doing right now, this is how well I’m going to be operating.

I use the analogy of looking at your gauges within your car. Do I want to know when my car overheated, with an idiot light going on after the fact, or would I rather see a temperature gauge and watch the temperature rising? At that point, I may be able to remedy the problem before I have to pull over because the car overheated and then failed and I cannot use it.

Once again being proactive versus reactive. I know how critical support is, in my past, a lot of my buying decisions were based on the support not just how well the product performs, but how well the support organization performed if and when it failed. That’s what I’m striving to be the best at, and I believe we are the best.