"Symantec " Technically the leader !!

Customer Problem
The customer, a small financial institution in INDIA, was implementing a new Data Center in city of Mumbai for which he was procuring new servers and storage. He had called us to negotiate for purchasing Microsoft OS licenses for his Desktop’s. During our initial engagement’s we learned that he has finalized on almost all aspects of hardware procurement and is in advanced stage of negotiation with hardware Vendor(HP) to provide him with Backup Software for his server’s. For compliance he however needed to get comparative quotes from two different vendors and asked us to provide the same for NetBackup. Beware, he warned us, HP will provide me with unlimited license to backup any new server’s I may add in near future in my DR Data Center.

Challanges

The first challenge set for us was the short time we had in hand considering that the customer needed to finalize on the backup software within 15 Days. The second challenge for us was to un-do all the learning’s he had got from his hardware vendor (HP in this case). The third challenge was to unroot the “dirt cheap price” tag that HP had associated with HP Data Protector. Fourth challenge, was to separate the “Backup software” quote that HP had bundled along with its own hardware.

Our Way of Attacking

Avoid PoC: We knew that if we are to win this customer within the stipulated time, we will need to avoid doing any PoC at customer premise. We started the initial seeding by providing him with name drop of customer in his industry (peer’s). We also did a 2 Hour demo for him in our small lab (we could demonstrate Oracle and Exchange backup). Customer was satisfied with the demo and settled for not doing a PoC.

Go Granular:

Customer was provided the consolidated BOM for his hardware. This BOM included line items for each server hardware and the HP-DP components needed to backup the respective server. The way HP projected this to the customer, it looked as if each server comes bundled with HP-DP agents and option’s. So effectively customer was provided one price tag for the whole bundle - server hardware plus OS plus backup agents/options. We asked customer to ask HP to give him a separate BOM only depicting Backup component’s, to separate hardware and backup software BOM.

Undo the learning:

Being in financial sector, customer needed to comply with PCI. We educated the customer on best practice for BFSI segment. Specially the need for encryption and reporting. We also educated customer on some facts which HP typically forgets to inform the customer, Some of this facts included :
1) HP-DP unlimited license does not cover open file backup. It still needs a separate open file license.
2) HP-DP is not truly heterogeneous. We pointed out the limited support it has for AIX.
3) Customer was awed by HP’s off-host backup strength. We countered that it was limited to HP’s own hardware. It can not offer similar functionality for other vendor’s disk array’s / OS. We pointed out that NBU is vendor agnostic and its off-host capabilities are far superior to that of HP-DP.
4) HP-DP sell’s only with HP hardware. It does not have any story in a multi vendor environment.
5) We had different meetings with customer to educate him on various aspects other than price that he need’s to consider when selecting backup software vendor

Pay for your Lunch:
We did a one on one licensing comparison exercise with customer, comparing HP-DP and Netbackup (NBU). We wanted to demonstrate to customer that HP-DP is only cheap for entry level non critical backup’s. But HP-DP cost grows exponentially as the environment grows complex.

Some license requirement’s which we could point out from HP’s published document were:
1) Backing up data onto Disk needed separate license.
2) Doing a synthetic backup needed a separate license.
3) Encryption needed a separate license.
4) More than 60 slots in a Tape library will need additional license.
5) All Clustered nodes need license’s (regardless of being Active-Passive).
6) Partitioned System needed license for each partition,

Finish Off:
Customer was baffled by our finding’s on HP licensing policies. He was particularly worried about the licensing needs for clustered and partitioned system’s. He planned to have VMware play a major role in his data center. And DR data center was also in the next pipe line. He wanted us to go deeper into such cost implications he might get into considering his future plans to have a remote backup’s and virtualized environment. We highlighted the following implications he has with HP-DP

1) HP-DP has almost no support for Data DeDuplication. We pointed out the road map for NBU and tight integration pure Disk will have with Netbackup.
2) HP-DP also had no mechanism for Continuous Protection. Customer though did have initial reservations about CPS appliance, but was more worried that HP-DP had no such clear road map for such a technology.
3) We articulated single pass backup of VMWare possible with NBU. HP-DP can not offer such capability. We articulated the storage and backup window implication of this approach.
4) We pointed out that HP-DP does not have robust encryption key management that will be needed for large data centers. We explained about MSEO and pointed out that HP-DP does not support media server based encryption at all.
5) Major point we scored was when we proudly stated that we charge per frame and per OS type for our client and database agent’s.
6) We highlighted that HP-DP offers a “Pay for each bolt” licensing approach as compared to NBU licensing policy which is pretty straight forward and does not hide any sub component’s.

Learning’s:
Take time to educate your customer. Fight HP-DP head-on at pricing. Don’t forget to ask HP to also quote for encryption, disk staging, synthetic backup’s, etc (make it a equal comparison). Believe it or not, in our comparison study with all whistles and horn’s, HP-DP was costlier than NBU (with list pricing listed on HP web site)

Kill HP on reference’s, Ask HP to quote on sites having implemented HP-DP with non HP hardware. Ask HP to quote largest implementation site.

Wherever possible showcase the roadmap (we could not showcase the whole road map with this customer as customer would not agree to have a NDA).

Data DeDupe and CPS are the golden bullet’s. HP has no answer to this.

Did we win? Yes we did win this account. And we won despite being late entrants, despite customer having pre notion about HP-DP being cheap.

We believe that one of the major reason we won was that instead of fighting on pure technical features we could make the customer see the light that HP-DP licensing policy make’s it a costlier proposition up front. We actually managed to prepare a Bill Of Material for HP-DP using tools made available online by HP. Once we accomplished this, it was obvious that HP-DP was costlier. Post this exercise customer was more receptive to future benefits of DeDupe and CPS.