#SMALL FILESAFE PC#
Many customers, who tend to have between five and 25 PCs, are transitioning to a centralized file server from non-networked PCs, and their file storage system consists of saving documents locally on the PC or on a thumb drive. That’s especially true of Server Partners’ SMB customers, many of whom simply expect technology to work, Brand said. The service agreement part of the deal is a bit of a tricky wicket, Brand acknowledged, as many businesses are allergic to long-term contracts these days. Essentially, instead of selling a small business server, Server Partners would sell small business IT services for file sharing. That’s when Brand hit on the idea of the cell phone model, under which the customer gets a steep discount on the small business computing hardware on the front end with a two-year service agreement. With creditors unwilling to extend credit, many companies were unable to lease Server Partners’ SMB server and business dried up.įrom Small Business Technology to Small Business IT Services “The challenge began when the economy turned south and what were formerly good customers with pretty good credit weren’t getting approved,” Brand said. At the time, the company offered the product as a three-year lease that came to about $8 per day. But in 2008, as the recession hit, Server Partners’ small business server hit a snag. It was rated CRN’s networking hardware product of the year in 2006. It’s a domain controller that allows businesses to control who has access to which files in that centralized storage. The SMB server provides file sharing for businesses with five or more PCs that want to centralize the storage of Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, AutoCAD files, QuickBooks and other accounting databases, etc. Server Partners’ FileSafe small business server (formerly called FileEngine) was a bit of a sensation when it first debuted. The company sells FileSafe both directly and through value-added resellers (VARs). The “cell phone model” allows Server Partners to sell its small business server, valued at $4,000, for only $995 (plus tax), bundled with a two-year service agreement (starting at $199) –though the company does not penalize customers for early cancellation the way many wireless companies do. In this economy people don’t want to pay very much, they don’t want to be obligated and they want maximum flexibility.” This new cell phone model is really the invention. “We sell technology but nobody really wants that. “By doing some scrambling and thinking about what customers really wanted, we came up with what we call the cell phone model,” Brand told Small Business Computing. Kim Brand, inventor of Server Partner’s FileSafe small business server, thinks the new sales model for the company’s SMB server may be a more important innovation than the product he invented.
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