United Machine Assemblage Sailing Smooth Through Rough Aqua

'Protecting Data for the SMB' could be the title of a book written by Jim Kandrac, president of UnitedComputer Group. The Brecksville, Ohio, corporation is doing quite well. According to Kandrac, its revenue for the first quarter of 2008 was up 198 percent compared to the same quarter in 2007. That's appealing explosive stuff. When most companies are happy with status quo or small gains, where do numbers like 198 percent growth come from? The key to this, Kandrac says, was the launch of Vault400 in September of 2006. Vault400 is an online backup and disaster recovery managed service. It can hire the place of tape backup, handles encryption, and provide off site storage for archiving and disaster recovery. 'We're somewhat of a poor man's disaster recovery, ' Kandrac says. 'Those who are doing tape backups and may require some degree of high availability. .. we fill that gap. Where can a small shop go for DR and spend between $2
00 and $2, 000 a month and get data protected and stored and get a DR Quick Ship program? ' Quick Ship is a advantage that ships--within 48 hours--a System i machine that customers can handle to recover their data and applications. The success of United Personal computer Party is not all about Vault400, nevertheless Kandrac admits it is the most meaningful of three reasons for his company's prosperity. 'Vault400 opens doors to our existing customer base and takes us nationwide to gain original customers, ' he says. However he also emphasizes the importance of a partnership with VAI, and the development of the IBM reseller business that his firm has been involved in for 22 years. UCG did not release actual financial results (it is a private company), on the contrary instead announced the rate of convert of its revenues. VAI has an installed base of approximately 750 companies running its ERP solution. That partnership has worked elsewhere well. Surprisi
ngly, the reseller side of the business has been doing well, too. As a business partner in the Great Lakes region, UCG is permitted to market its services to about 1, 500 companies that employ the System i. Away of that base, it claims about 550 clients. The region is hurting, Kandrac says. Not surprising, thanks to it is heavily oriented toward manufacturing and the global economy has not been kind to manufacturing. (Google China and manufacturing for all the proof you need.) So how does this relate to terrific revenue gains for UCG? 'Our growth is somewhat attributable to other IBM business partners being bought out, merged, sold, or gone absent of business, ' Kandrac says. 'We are gaining market share in a stable or shrinking marketplace owing to we are in the System i, immediately Influence Systems business.' What's that, some sort of reverse logic? 'We're gaining market share due to our persistence and the loss of some of
our competitors, ' Kandrac says. 'We are doing turn-key implementations of 515s and 525s, since some of the larger reseller firms are not interested in doing deals below a quarter of a million dollars. We are doing all that business and some bigger deals, too, on the other hand [the bigger deals are] probably about 10 percent of our business.' Full text: http://computerandtechnologies.com/computers-and-technology/news_2008-05-20-18-30-06-895.html