Right Place, Right Time

As much as everyone talks about business strategy, in the real world, luck and the alignment of the planets can combine with skill and good relationships to allow solution providers to solve their customers' problems.

Such was the case with Calculated Research & Technology, a solution provider in Orem, Utah, that had been helping Tai Pan Trading, a home décor retailer, keep its systems up and running. One day, Tai Pan came to its regular update meeting with the solution provider with a new dilemma: Management feared that outdated storage and backup technology had the potential to bring down Tai Pan's cash registers and stymie sales. During the busiest days at its single storefront, up to 2,000 customers were making purchases. The company's POS (point-of-sale) system was integrated with a single server—potentially a single point of failure that could cause outages that would hurt sales by sending customers elsewhere for their purchases.

Does product still matter?

The retailer realized it needed to augment the tape backup system it was using to manage its data with a disk-based storage solution.

"Our biggest concern was ensuring that our retail POS system never went down," said Danny Capener, chief financial officer and CIO at Tai Pan, in Sandy, Utah. "On a really good day, an hour or two of downtime might mean losing $10,000 to $20,000 in sales."

CR&T thought it would be a relatively simple fix, said Timothy Aguilar, owner and CEO of the solution provider. That is, until the solution provider realized its preferred backup storage solution was not available because of vendor-product constraints. So, CR&T went looking for an alternative.

Need New Storage

Initially, tai pan had begun to look for solutions on its own, but soon realized it needed help, so the retailer resolved to call on CR&T. "Depending on how busy we get, we outsource a lot of our IT activities, like making sure the backups are set up correctly or giving us help troubleshooting PCs," Capener said.

In fact, CR&T has provided annual IT maintenance services to Tai Pan, said Aguilar. As part of its annual maintenance contract, CR&T meets regularly with Tai Pan to assess its needs and review performance statistics of Tai Pan's computing environment.

"We meet with Tai Pan once a month to talk about stats and reports of equipment and check to see if there are any concerns, and then we make changes and augment their technology as necessary," Aguilar said. "Last year, we found that they had a very critical time where they were down. The opportunities for storing on tape backup weren't sufficient, and the timeline necessary for recovery, monitoring and management were insufficient."

The company's huge growth, as well as a shift in focus to retail from wholesale, pushed reliability and uptime to the top of Tai Pan's list of must-haves. "We've worked with them in their growth, and they've grown considerably," Aguilar said. "Their requirements and needs have evolved. Fault tolerance is especially important, since they may have as many as 20 registers up at once, and none of them can go down for even a second."

Building on the Past

For nearly three decades, tai pan made its mark in the retail environment by acting as a middleman, supplying mass--market retailers with home décor products to stock their shelves. But two years ago, during the holiday season, the company began selling direct to customers in a Utah storefront.

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