Reseller Blueprint for Success

Featured Reseller: CiBan LLC (www.ciban.com) CEO and Founder Paul Banco

CiBan specializes in delivering customized technology solutions to professional firms, service groups, food services organizations, trucking companies and government accounts. Although this may appear a very broad selection, CiBan’s success is linked to segments within markets. As Paul Banco states, “Our success is to focus on technology segments needed by these industries. For example, CiBan designs VoIP backbones and fault tolerant architectures. We also work closely with other resellers such as Hytec Telephone, which is Inter-Tel’s [now Mitel (News - Alert)’s] largest New Jersey reseller”.

A few years back I visited one of CiBan’s accounts, Neutrik USA Inc. and I was very impressed with the infrastructure design. It was mission critical for Neutrik to ensure the continuous flow of orders via phone and fax. The design involved the replacement of their legacy phone system with VoIP technology, thus providing mobility and centralized communications. Since redundancy was critical, CiBan architected a fault tolerant, high-availability infrastructure utilizing Microsoft (News - Alert) Clustering for the mission critical servers and a fully redundant Layer 3 backbone. Critical servers supported were SQL and all electronic communication servers including the fax servers that process 90 percent of their orders.

Recently, I met with Paul and asked him how the Neutrik site had evolved to keep pace with the latest technologies. Paul stated, “Although our original architecture proved to be a very reliable solution to meet critical needs, their needs continued to grow as did the cost of maintaining such a redundant and high-availability solution, forcing the team to look at other alternatives.”

CiBan’s recommendation was to migrate Neutrik to VMware. This was based on a number of reasons including the consolidation of the server and desktop environments. Neutrik still utilizes clustering but from within VMware. VMware has a feature that enables the client to achieve both high availability and disaster recovery plus VMware allows them to be more flexible in the server deployment. In addition, the total cost of ownership was dramatically reduced.

CiBan is an excellent example of a successful selling organization that combines a high-degree of technical expertise plus protection of their customer base by focusing on:

1. The customer’s bottom line.
2. The critical need — fault tolerant communications.
3. Utilization of service providers such as MXSense for email archiving and eVAULT for offsite storage to enhance the customer experience.

Impressively, it’s a true win/win situation where the customer is better protected, has lowered their costs and CiBan has continued to sell additional products and services. IT

Max Schroeder (News - Alert) is the Sr. Vice President of FaxCore, Inc. (www.faxcore.com)

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