1. Customer Business Needs Assessment - Determine the set of customer's needs
- Identify the customer's business direction including future growth plans (i.e, new applications, new locations, new employees, etc.)
- Identify the customer's business challenges as they relate to storage and the IBM on demand strategy, and describe how IBM System Storage solutions help customers achieve an on demand environment
- Identify customer pain points
- Understand customer environment (i.e, resource, budget, risk-exposure, organizational issues, ease of use, etc.)
- Obtain strategic enterprise I/T plan and storage requirements (for example, identify links between customer's future growth plan, I/T plans, and storage plans to insure a match) and work with the customer to develop a storage plan
- Determine the customer's hardware, software, and service requirements
2. Sales Process, Tools, and Resources - Identify target markets and opportunities for IBM storage solutions
- Qualify opportunity (identify decision-makers, identify competition, etc.)
- Position the enterprise storage solution to meet the customer's storage needs
- Prepare sales proposals and presentations tailored to the customer's business requirements
- Coordinate appropriate presentation resources (e.g., specialists)
- Prepare business justification (TCO/ROI)
- Understand the value and leverage System Storage Executive Briefing Center, System Storage Interoperability +Center or System Storage Solution Center or Business Partner Innovation Center (BPIC)
- Identify key extended IBM team resources to help design solution
- Identify appropriate contacts and resources for information regarding IBM's Information Infrastructure strategy, including the three core technology innovations (Virtualization, Archive and Retention, and Security)
- Locate and use appropriate sales tools and resources to create and design storage solutions that meet customer Information Infrastructure needs
3. Total Storage Portfolio - Describe the IBM Information Infrastructure storage strategy and build a storage strategy with the customer.
- Describe the storage hierarchy as it relates to price, performance, and business requirements and as it supports life cycle management and storage orchestration
- Describe the benefits and differentiating features of IBM disk solutions (e.g., DS family, N series, Network Attached Storage, iSCSI, SATA, EXP Plus)
- Describe the benefits and differentiating features of IBM Tape Solutions (e.g., Enterprise Tape Drives and Libraries, Virtual Tape Server, LTO, WORM Tape and Encryption)
- Describe the benefits and differentiating features of the IBM Virtualization Family (e.g., SAN Volume Controller, Virtual Tape)
- Describe the benefits and differentiating features of IBM Storage Management Software (IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center, DFSMS)
- Describe the benefits and differentiating features of IBM's Archive and Retention Solution
- Describe benefits and differentiating features of IBM Storage Networking Components (e.g., gateways, switches, hubs, routers, directors)
- Describe benefits and differentiating features of IBM Managed Storage Services (migration, installation planning, assessment)
- Describe the business benefits and how network topologies affect the storage environment (e.g. switched fabric, ATM)
- Understand the differences in interface technology (e.g., SCSI, Fibre Channel (FC), SATA, ESCON, FICON, FCIP, iFCP, iSCSI, SAS)
- Understand the implications of different IBM and non-IBM host hardware and operating system platforms for storage solutions
- Describe how RAID levels, dynamic sparing, and cache affect performance and availability
- Understand the concept of storage virtualization
- Understand how tape automation reduces management total costs of ownership (e.g. multiple platform connectivity, high availability, scalability)
- Understand the concept of virtual tape
4. Solution, Design, and Implementation - Identify how IBM System Storage solutions meet the following storage-related business need: Disaster Recovery - Risk Assessment
+Identify how IBM System Storage solutions meet the following storage-related business need: Disaster Recovery - Business Continuity- Identify how IBM System Storage solutions meet the following storage-related business need: Disaster Recovery tiers
- Identify how IBM System Storage solutions meet the following storage-related business need: Disaster Recovery + High availability - geographically dispersed systems
- Identify how IBM System Storage solutions meet the following storage-related business need: On demand solutions, including Archive and Retention
- Identify how IBM System Storage solutions meet the following storage-related business need: Data sharing
- Identify how IBM System Storage solutions meet the following storage-related business need: Performance
- Identify how IBM System Storage solutions meet the following storage-related business need: Enterprise Storage Resource Management - Capacity planning
- Identify how IBM System Storage solutions meet the following storage-related business need: Energy Efficiency
5. Competition - Identify current primary competitors of the IBM System Storage portfolio
- Determine the competitive features and benefits of: Tape -- HP, Quantum and Sun
- Determine the competitive features and benefits of: Archive and Data Retention -- EMC
- Determine the competitive features and benefits of: Disk -- EMC, HDS, Sun, HP
- Determine the competitive features and benefits of: Storage Management Software -- EMC, HP, Symantec / Veritas, CommVault
- Determine the competitive features and benefits of: Network Attached Storage -- EMC, HP, Sun
- Determine the competitive features and benefits of: Storage Virtualization -- EMC, HPS
- Determine the competitor's value proposition, pricing, selling strategies and solution strengths/weaknesses
- Identify key corporate strengths and weaknesses of the competition
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