Infinidat Technical Advisors: The “Keystone” to our Industry Acclaimed White Glove Support!

Reputations and relationships are built on trust. This is a core value Infinidat has based our business on and we embrace this philosophy in everything that we do. From the start of a business relationship, our goal is to instill trust with our potential customers, and something that we continue to deliver throughout the lifecycle of our relationship with our customers.

One of the most important parts of our business is that ongoing support, service, and trust that we constantly provide. This isn’t a one-person job − it takes a village, as some like to say, but this blog is going to focus on what is the keystone to making all this strong trusted relationship between Infinidat and our enterprise customers happen. That is the Infinidat Technical Advisor (TA).

We don’t just believe having a designated technical resource assigned to your enterprise account is the best way to invest in your success − we include it in your support service at no additional cost. Yes, you heard me right. We do not require enhanced or add-on support programs or packages, as most of our competitors require, and yet, again, an extra cost for a TA. It is just part of what we do. We have always made Infinidat easy and cost-effective to do business with and the award-winning support and service should not be any different. That is how we ensure you get the absolute best support and service in the storage industry, as several storage analyst firms have noted, throughout the lifecycle of any solution from Infinidat — from installation to decommission.

Your TA is your trusted advisor. You are assigned an advisor and that is who you talk to on a continuous basis, not a random team member that may have to re-learn your environment. The TA is there to make sure your Infinidat solutions are delivering powerful technical and business value for your enterprise, considering all aspects of your IT infrastructure and business needs, from performance to workload to data security and more. To deliver that, a TA has to wear many hats and be experienced in many things.

The TA’s breadth of knowledge is across a wide range of operating systems, protocols, and applications that enable them to support a multitude of use cases. The trusted advisor role is critically important as they provide risk-averse account management that includes historical support trends across the environment and sound recommendations for firmware and software targets, including an upgrade strategy. The many hats that our TAs wear cover a vast set of important areas:

• Technical Account Manager (TAM): A dedicated professional, the TA knows your business inside out. They recommend upgrades and product enhancements tailored to your specific requirements
• Service Account Manager (SAM): The TA monitors open cases, opens necessary tickets, and assures that nothing slips through the cracks. They act as a vigilant guardian of your technical landscape
• Customer Service Representative (CSR): Beyond technical aspects, the TA creates and reviews status reports regularly. They maintain a close cadence with customers and sales teams, tracking metrics relevant to individual customer interests
• Project Manager (PM): The TA ensures a seamless experience by coordinating delivery, installation, and post-installation reviews of each system. They also facilitate system re-locations and decommission activities with precision
• Escalation Manager: In critical situations, your TA takes charge from start to root cause analysis. Their swift and decisive actions ensure a prompt resolution
• Sales Engineer (SE): The TA contributes to knowledge transfer sessions and demos, ensuring that customers have a comprehensive understanding of Infinidat's offerings.

It’s really all about what our customers think. Here is an example of an Infinidat large enterprise customer in the insurance/financial services industry:

As you would imagine, a very large enterprise infrastructure consists of multiple vendors in any end-to-end solution that varies by uses and applications. Recently, at one of Infinidat’s largest enterprise customer implementations at a very large Fortune 500 company, there arose a need to problem manage a unique and intermittent failure during a complex fail-over operation and test cycle. The inclusion of the assigned TA with a solid understanding of this specific environment took on the role of a project manager, not just of Infinidat personnel but including the customer’s team as well, and in this capacity removed a huge burden from the customer’s IT team. They coordinated the collaboration with all the vendors, consolidated data collections, and provided real-time oversight and the scheduling of the technical follow-up calls. A massive amount of logistics for any project, person, or company! Having this level of support led to a speedy and successful conclusion that, by far, exceeded the customer’s expectations. It allowed them to quickly remove older legacy systems from previous vendors to a highly optimized set of InfiniBox® and InfiniBox™ SSA, consolidating to a significantly smaller footprint, and saving a huge amount of data center space and associated power, cooling, storage management, and capital costs.

Our customers speak even louder than our own words. We are proud to be recognized by our enterprise customers for the sixth time as a Gartner Peer Insight Customers’ Choice for Primary Storage Arrays. We obviously are doing things right, providing robust storage solutions that are backed by guarantees around performance, 100% availability, and cyber resilience. We top that off by making sure we provide our customers with the best white glove customer experience in the industry!