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The STORM^sb Opportunity

Storage for the Medium-Small Business

Small to medium-sized businesses in Canada have storage requirements that are continuously growing. Typically, these companies have very little tolerance for downtime and are becoming increasingly concerned with the need for regulatory compliance. With at least three to five servers, one or two IT staff members and a Windows or Linux environment, this type of business generally employs direct attached or server based storage, adding disk drives or even servers when they run out of storage space. Here's your opportunity to boost your business by developing a consultative selling relationship providing much-needed storage solutions to Canadian small to medium businesses. These customers also want their solutions to deliver continuous availability, ease of management, scalability and resource-sharing capabilities. By working with Bell Microproducts Canada to deliver customer-specific solutions, you can fulfill these needs - gaining income, expertise and repeat business in the process.

Provide Real Value

A storage solution is an investment, so your customers need consideration given to their existing infrastructure as well as their existing and upcoming challenges, and they will expect your company to serve in a collaborative role and become a partner who truly understands their business. For this, you must begin the sale early in the purchasing cycle and get an understanding of the operating system, network topology and more. The company's business and goals may be vital to the purchase decision also - an environmental agency will be looking for the best performance-per-watt while a firm of accountants will consider security to be their primary objective. The real value you can provide is the ability to address a customer's unique storage problems. A solutions focus has you adding value, not just earning margin. Boost your business. Becoming a STORM partner and creating solutions for SMBs will enable you to rev up your sales and profits, differentiate your business from competitors, and provide the opportunity to deliver both basic and professional services on an on-going basis.

New to storage? Here's what it can do for you . . .

Adding storage solutions to your product mix makes so much sense.

Here are just some of the ways selling storage will help your business grow:

• One constant in the computer industry is an exponentially growing demand for storage. You really can't go wrong with the ability to satisfy such a huge requirement.
• Selling complete solutions that include storage creates an excellent opportunity to play a greater role in assisting your customers, making your organization a more valuable resource.
• The ability to sell more products to every customer will heighten your gross profit.
• The goal of becoming an expert storage resource presents an increased incentive to upgrade the skills of you and your employees.
• It costs up to five times more to attract a new customer than it does to keep an existing one. Your addition of storage products will motivate your customers to come back to you - a trusted advisor - to purchase the ideal storage solutions for the systems you've already provided them with.
• Adding storage products will give you an excellent reason to contact clients - keeping you top-of-mind and easing the ordering process.

The time is right

With a wide range of NAS, SAN, ISCSI/IPSAN and other storage products now available, along with a vendor focus on providing solutions with ever-greater scalability and ever-larger capacities, now is an ideal time to sell storage. And now that storage solutions are more familiar to end users, respond directly to growing needs and have Microsoft hooks and support, they are an easy sell. Your small to medium business customers will enjoy the rich features of new storage and disaster recovery solutions that are easier to install and easier to manage than ever before, at price points that are lower than ever to accommodate shrinking IT budgets.

Server Agnosticism

At Bell Microproducts Canada, we take a platform independent and server "agnostic" approach to storage in order to enable you to provide truly independent, best-of-breed solutions. This unique approach allows for solutions catering to the end customers' true needs, rather than the "shoe-horning" of the OEM server vendors' products. Pricing and promotions that help you grow. At Bell Microproducts Canada, we constantly offer incentives to help your business succeed. Taking advantage of bundle pricing and other promotions will let you pass these deals along - encouraging purchases from existing clients as well as attracting new ones.

The Bell Microproducts Canada Opportunity Desk

The Bell Microproducts Canada Opportunity Desk is available to provide solution architecture, configurations, quotations and pre-sales technical support within 24 hours or less for all of our STORM^sb vendors.

Opportunity Desk personnel are product-certified experts within their assigned vendor lines.

Opportunities are vendor-registered where applicable, assessed for eligibility for discounted pricing and logged for your protection.

As well, on request, opportunity tracking and reporting can be provided on a quarterly basis for your review.

Access the Bell Microproducts Canada Opportunity Desk at opportunity@bellmicro.com

We make storage easy!

Bell Microproducts Canada has a unique ability to make it easy for you to solve your customers' storage needs. Our extensive knowledge in the desktop, server and storage fields is complemented by a huge array of products - giving you the ability to provide an enormous range of solution types. As well, we offer education and many other types of support and assistance, taking the mystery out of choosing the right products and configurations, giving you the expertise to compete in any environment. Storage: no longer an add-on. Just as businesses have strategies for applications and servers, they should also have a storage strategy. Bell Microproducts Canada can provide the expertise to help you work with your customer to develop the best strategy for their particular goals and challenges.

STORM^sb Partners