Partner SucceSS

consonus technologies Inc. One Partner, two Decades of Data center experience

Consonus (www.consonus.com) provides IT consulting and data center services to 850 customers throughout the United States. It uses Symantec™ solutions for data protection and disaster recovery, and offers cloud-based Enterprise Vault™ under the name Secure Archiving For The Enterprise, or SAFE™. Consonus is part of many Symantec partner programs including TSPP and STEP.

When Consonus uses the tagline “Get IT virtually anywhere” in its marketing, it’s not just a play on words. It’s a statement of Consonus’ dedication to flexible delivery of technology and services—a dedication the company has developed over two decades in business. For most of those two de-cades, technologies from Symantec have been key to Consonus’ success.

experience Pays

Consonus, headquartered in Cary, North Carolina, provides data centers, IT consulting and infra-structure, and managed services to more than 850 customers throughout the United States. Those customers range in size from startups to Fortune 100 companies, but they all have two things in common, according to Consonus director of marketing Jonna Murnick. “IT is a competitive dif-ferentiator for them,” Murnick says, “and IT supports their business needs, such as servicing customers, growing revenues, managing costs, and mitigating risk.”

Consonus customers typically are in industries such as financial services, insurance, manufactur-ing, technology, communications, healthcare, and the public sector that have large, complicated data requirements. About 80 percent of Consonus’ revenue comes from private-sector accounts.

Several factors differentiate Consonus from its competitors. Experience is one: the company’s nearly 40 engineers average 10 years of experience, and the company itself has been in the data center services business for two decades. In fact, it owns and operates its own high-availability, SAS70 Type I and Type II–compliant data centers. “That type of experience is not easy to duplicate,” Murnick says. “It creates an understanding that is very valuable as we help customers move into the future.”

The company’s three interrelated business units—IT infrastructure and consulting, managed ser-vices, and hosting—provide another differentiator. “We can combine those three business units to craft a solution that best fits and serves our customers’ unique needs,” Murnick explains. “That flexible delivery model becomes more important as you consider cloud computing and other alter-native delivery models.”

Partner PrOFILe

Website: www.consonus.com

Headquarters: Cary, North Carolina

Geographic area Served: Nationwide

Serves company Size: Mid-market, Enterprise, and Public Sector

Status: National, Platinum, Symantec Consulting Partner (SCP), and Symantec Technology Enabled Program (STEP) Partner

Symantec Solution Focus: Data Protection, Archiving, Disaster Recovery, Endpoint Security, IT Compliance, High Availability, Storage Management

“So much of what

Symantec does

integrates well with

the solutions that we

deliver to address the

data center needs

of our customer.”

Jonna Murnick

Director of Marketing

Consonus

Partner SucceSS cOnSOnuS tecHnOLOGIeS Inc.

Consonus’ three business units provide solu-tions in four primary areas: data protection, disaster recovery, virtualization, and data center efficiency. “Two of those areas, data protection and disaster recovery, map to Symantec products and to our customers’ pain points,” Murnick says. “The needs that we address, and the solution sets we provide, run in parallel with a lot of what Symantec does.”

Varied challenges, Solid Solutions

“File storage, file archiving, and file retrieval are very important parts of any company’s storage management process,” Murnick says, driven by compliance, e-discovery, and other factors. Consonus uses Symantec Enterprise Vault to address customers’ archiving needs, and delivers the software in two ways: a con-ventional on-premises Enterprise Vault de-ployment, of which Consonus has done more than 70; and through a software-as-service offering it calls Secure Archiving For The Enterprise, or SAFE™.

SAFE—which is in essence Enterprise Vault in the cloud—appeals in particular to smaller customers, Murnick says, because it allows them to minimize the up-front capital invest-ment while getting email and file system ar-chiving on a pay-as-you-go basis. “We saw an opportunity to serve a market that was a little bit smaller,” she explains when describing why Consonus developed SAFE. It’s been a smashing success: one Consonus customer expects a 280% return on investment within three years as a result of reclaimed storage, eliminated storage outsourcing costs, and reduced administrative burden.

Companies today also are wrestling ineffec-tive backup environments, Murnick says. Backup success rates are low, recovery capa-bilities are poor, and they’re struggling to find backup strategies and technologies that work well in virtual environments. “Symantec NetBackup™ is top of the line for helping to solve those issues,” she says.

cOnSOnuS SucceSS SuMMary

Specializations

Small and Medium Business

Key Industries

Financial

Insurance

Real Estate

Manufacturing

Public Administration

Retail Trade

Services

Transport

Public Utilities

Wholesale Trade

Other

Services Provided

Management Consulting

Business Process Management

IT Consulting

IT Implementation

Operations Management

Outsourcing

License Management

technical accreditations

STS Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery 6.5

STS Symantec Enterprise Vault 2007

STS Symantec Enterprise Vault 8.0 for Exchange

STS Veritas Cluster Server 5 for UNIX

STS Veritas Cluster Server 5 for Windows

STS Veritas NetBackup 7 for Unix

STS Veritas NetBackup 7 for Windows

STS Veritas NetBackup PureDisk 6.5

STS Veritas Storage Foundation 5 for UNIX

STS Veritas Storage Foundation 5.1 for Windows

authorizations

Authorized Product Partner - UNIX Specialty

Enterprise Vault Authorized Partner

Academic Authorized Partner

Government Authorized Partner

Technical Support Partner Program (TSPP),

Symantec Technology Enabled Program (STEP)

Symantec Products

Altiris™ Server Management Suite

Symantec Backup Exec™ for Windows® Servers

Symantec Backup Exec® System Recovery

Symantec Brightmail™ Gateway

Symantec™ Control Compliance Suite

Symantec™ Critical Systems Protection

Symantec™ Data Loss Prevention

Symantec™ Database Security

Symantec™ Endpoint Protection

Symantec™ Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition

Symantec™ Protection Suite Enterprise Edition

Symantec™ Protection Suite Small Business Edition

Symantec™ Endpoint Virtualization Suite

Symantec™ Enterprise Security Manager

Symantec Enterprise Vault™

Symantec Ghost™ Solution Suite

Symantec IM™ Manager

Symantec Information Foundation™

Symantec™ Mail Security for Domino®

Symantec™ Mail Security for Microsoft® Exchange

Symantec NetBackup™

Symantec™ Network Access Control

Symantec™ Security Information Manager

Symantec™ ServiceDesk 7.0

Symantec pcAnywhere™

Veritas™ Backup Reporter

Veritas™ Cluster Server from Symantec

Veritas CommandCentral™ Storage from Symantec

Veritas NetBackup PureDisk™

Veritas Storage Foundation™

For more information on Consonus Technologies and other success stories, please go to www.symantec.com/customersuccess.

Consonus uses an “improve while you move” philosophy when deploying NetBackup. “This allows us to evaluate how we can improve the customer’s data protection capabilities as they do the migration,” she explains. “We take the opportunity to evaluate their data protection strategy and make recommenda-tions for improving it.”

Lately, Consonus has seen great interest in NetBackup 7 from its customers. “It’s a com-prehensive data protection solution focused on the issues that our customers see in the backup landscape,” Murnick says. These is-sues include backup of virtualized environ-ments, and deduplication at the client, at the media server, and in the PureDisk pool. She also sees NetBackup 7’s simplified deploy-ment, flexible restore options, overall effi-ciency, and ability to meet backup storage capacity requirements as plusses for custom-ers. “As a company we are very excited about NetBackup 7,” she says, noting “phenomenal attendance” at customer information events Consonus has held.

Consonus also expects its customers to react enthusiastically to Symantec Data Loss Pre-vention (DLP) as the company ramps up its offerings related to this product. “We expect a lot of traction with it,” Murnick says. “It goes back to organizations’ need to secure, store, recover, and manage their data. DLP further completes that picture for our cus-tomers—and for us, in what we deliver.”

Versatile Partner

Consonus’ dedication to its customers’ needs—and its use of Symantec solutions to address those needs—make the company stand out in the Symantec Partner Program. Consonus is a Symantec Platinum Partner, a National partner, a member of the Symantec Partner Advisory Council, a member of the Technical Support Partner Program (TSPP), a Symantec Consulting Partner, and a member of the Symantec Technology Enabled Pro-gram (STEP). Consider just those last three designations.

Consonus helped to establish the TSPP when it was a Veritas partner fifteen years ago, and it has expanded its support expertise to other Symantec technologies. “TSPP is some-thing we take a lot of pride in at Consonus,” Murnick says. “Our people are trained and certified at the highest level with Symantec, and we have annually some of the lowest escalation rates among all of the TSPP part-ners. We consider this a critical part of how we service our customers.”

As a Symantec Consulting Partner, Consonus benefits from standardized statement-of-work templates and interaction with Symantec Consulting Services to improve the solutions it provides to its customers. “That helps our company grow, and it enables a better customer experience,” Murnick says.

And as part of STEP, Consonus is one of a select group who establish interoperability between their offerings and Symantec prod-ucts and solutions. “Being a STEP partner enables us to work better, and sell better, with Symantec,” Murnick says. “It’s another example of Symantec’s investment back into the partner community.”

customers First

There’s a good reason that Consonus par-ticipates in so many Symantec partner pro-grams. “Symantec gets it right in working with channel partners,” Murnick says, “from partner management and interaction, to marketing, to field sales team engage-ment.”

But the success of the relationship starts with the products. “Symantec’s offerings hit the sweet spot for our customers,” she says, both today and in the long term. “There’s a visionary aspect to Symantec in the way it looks ahead, and looks at technology issues from the customer’s perspective. It’s not ‘Here’s what products we have to sell,’ but ‘What are the problems that customers are trying to solve?’ That’s the way we, as a solu-tion provider, have to think about it.”

Consonus enjoys a “very cooperative working partnership” with Symantec, Murnick says. “It’s not a competitive situation where we’re fighting with Symantec’s field sales team try-ing to take deals direct, or arguing over ac-counts,” she explains. “That just doesn’t happen.”

Perhaps the most important aspect of the partnership, Murnick says, is that Consonus and Symantec benefit each other. “Symantec continues to challenge us and give us ideas on ways we can evolve our business,” she elaborates. “The technologies and offerings develop and evolve, and the relationship continues to grow in a way that’s positive for both companies.”

“Symantec has always been the model of how a channel program should work,” Murnick concludes. “I’m a big fan.”

Partner SucceSS cOnSOnuS tecHnOLOGIeS Inc.

Copyright © 2010 Symantec Corporation. All rights reserved. Symantec, the Symantec logo, Veritas, Enterprise Vault, NetBackup, Backup Exec, and MessageLabs are all trademarks or registered trademarks of Symantec Corporation or its affiliates in the United States and other countries. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Symantec document #21017701

“Symantec has always been the

model of how a channel program

should work. I’m a big fan.”

Jonna Murnick

Director of Marketing

Consonus

“As a company we are very

excited about NetBackup 7.”

Jonna Murnick

Director of Marketing

Consonus