Case Studies

Marketing Research – Needed An Unbiased Vendor

Problem: A customer that was standardized on Dell was acquired by a company who was standardized on HP. The customer was required to use the new parent company’s established vendors, and they were concerned their primary HP vendors would be unable to support their Dell infrastructure.

Eliminated Budget Constraints

Problem: A major university was looking at pushing back a massive IT project for several months due to budget cuts. Cisco was unable to provide as deep of a discount on new equipment as they had gotten in the past. As a result, the customer was unable to get within their budget.

Custom Configurations and Quick Service

Problem: The customer is a hospital located in a rural area, and as a result, IBM was unable to meet Service Level Agreements (SLA's). The customer also uses a proprietary software that requires the hardware configuration to be built to exact configurations. They have been unable to get the custom configuration they require from IBM, resulting in delays and extra work.

Getting New Technology While Realizing ROI on Existing Equipment

Problem: The customer wanted to realize their Return On Investment (ROI) for their existing HP C-Class Blade Infrastructure instead of having to purchase an expensive new Cisco USC infratructure. They also wanted to utilize Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) technology in their existing HP BladeSystem c7000 infrastructure.

Flexible Options - Uncertainty in Hardware Amount

Problem: A long-time customer of Great Lakes Computer underwent an Epic software migration, and experienced a lot of growth in their Citrix environment. As a result, they were unsure about how much hardware they would need to purchase in order to accommodate the growing number of users.

Refurbished Equipment vs New Equipment

Problem: A technical college based in the Midwest had a set budget for a large IT project that included setting up classrooms and testing facilities for students. When they received quotes from other resellers for new Cisco switches and routers, they realized that the cost of the equipment was going to far exceed their allotted budget.

Eliminating Long Delivery Times

Problem: The customer's biggest problem with their normal vendor, Dell, was that they had long delivery times, sometimes up to 2-3 months. In addition, the company was looking for ways to reduce their hardware costs to increase their profits.

Alternative Option – Discontinued Equipment vs New Equipment

Problem: A Fortune 500 company was going through a reorganization due to competitive industry pressures. They needed to make a large IT purchase for an equipment upgrade in order to make the reorganization viable. In order to free up th necessary cpial for the project, they faced having to lay-off employees in order to do so.

Education Industry - Lower Costs and Technical Support

Problem: Although the customer had purchased from Great Lakes Computer for years, they were unaware that GLC was a Dell Premier partner. The customer had previously been working directly with Dell for all of their product needs. By purchasing directly from the manufacturer, the customer experienced higher costs and a great deal of confusion when ordering products.

Banking Industry - Lower Cost Alternative

Problem: The customer was looking to add Cisco 2960 48-port 10/100 switches to their existing network for desktop connectivity. The overall IT budget was struggling with the repeated cost of buying these switches new.

Technical Support and Refurbished Equipment

Problem: Technical Support, Consultation and Refurbished Equipment

Support for Legacy Systems

Problem: The customer had been a long term user of AlphaServers running Open VMS. As their standard server models were discontinued by the manufacturer, they continually encountered several challenges in dealing directly with HP.

Spare Parts and Lower Maintenance Cost

Problem: The customer initially purchased from Great Lakes Computer to save money on maintenance costs by buying spare parts to self-maintain their hardware.

Refurbished and End of Life Product

Problem: Business partners buy their products from the manufacturer’s distribution channels and often run into issues when products go end-of-life or distributors are out of stock. The choice for the business partner is to either offer their customer an upgrade, or find the product in the market. Some customers will choose the option to upgrade, but many elect to stay with their current systems for a variety of business reasons.

Next Day SAN Delivery

Problem: The customer’s Medical Application provider had several engineers flying in the next day for a major software and hardware implementation. Due to personnel turnover, the hospital IT staff assumed the application provider was going to supply the necessary hardware. When the hospital IT staff became aware of the oversight, they had less than 24 hours to have the hardware delivered. With no one else able to deliver on time, they contacted Great Lakes Computer.

Refurbished Product and Trade In

Problem: The customer had legacy systems that went end-of-life several years ago. In addition, the model the customer owned was having repeated memory issues. These systems were housed in a remote disaster recovery site in Chicago. The IT staff was located on the West Coast, with no expertise in Chicago to trouble shoot and repair ongoing issues.

Asset Exchange and Month-to-Month Rental

Problem: The customer was in the middle of a data center consolidation project, needing to duplicate their systems and applications exactly in their new data center. This created several problems for the manufacturer.

Non Profit, Emergency Situation

Problem: In this situation, one of their critical servers had gone down on a Thursday and they had to be able to replace it during the weekend so that the system could be back up and running on Monday.