Projecting your relationships

Julian Fielden notes some keys to developing strong customer relationships that encourage bespoke project success

Customers need to know that the main players in a project - the integrator and the primary hardware vendor – have a good relationship that ensures projects are run as efficiently as possible.

That might seem obvious, but it is even more important when you’re working on the leading edge. In building bespoke solutions that may be the first, fastest, largest or most unique things can and do go wrong.

We follow five steps that we believe ensure partnership success for our customers.
Long-term commitment is one key.

We partner with just one primary hardware vendor and do not maintain a policy of playing one vendor off against the other. As a result, our primary hardware vendor is happy to share plans, business goals and build its business alongside ours.

In the supercomputer market, solutions are also often sold to customers alongside some commitment to future product direction. This highly sensitive roadmap information is only made available to us because we can demonstrate commitment to our vendor.

As an integrator, we win business because customers have confidence in the strength of our partnership and can see the benefits that this brings to them.

Interlinking partnerships are another factor. For complementary technology – supercomputing interconnects, switching or cluster management software - often our primary hardware vendor will not supply this technology. After all, no one company can supply everything.

We look to build partnerships with complimentary technology vendors that also share partnerships with our primary hardware vendor. These interconnected partnerships help build and develop an overall relationship between our business and primary hardware vendor.

Staying in the loop through regular interaction is also important. We have regular interaction with our primary hardware vendor and interact at multiple levels within each others’ organisations.

Vendors provide us with a dedicated account manager that has a focus on our business and our customers. This human interaction helps to ensure the cogs mesh rather than grind between our organisations.

Working together to create new solutions can also prove critical. Both OCF and our primary hardware vendor share a commitment to jointly developing and researching new supercomputer, high performance visualisation and storage solutions.

We have people constantly engaged in researching our own new and interesting supercomputer solutions and we also further investigate the research of our vendor.
Above all, good partners work as a single team. For example, if installing new technology for the first time, we aim to have both an OCF representative and hardware vendor on site throughout installation. This happens until the vendor’s knowledge around a new product is communicated sufficiently to our team.

Julian Fielden is managing director at OCF