How NetApp customers gain a competitive edge and accelerate innovation: SAM

When I joined NetApp over a decade ago, I knew how important our customers are. And I knew what was imperative to ensure that their NetApp^® environments are operating optimally—helping avoid any issues, and keeping them at a minimum if they do arise. I quickly recognized the key role that NetApp Support Account Managers (SAMs) played in our customers’ experience and wanted to further enable our NetApp SAMs to advance our customers’ desired business outcomes. My focus is on making sure our NetApp SAMs are able to provide the critical and essential technical account management to make the difference for our customers and allow them to focus on higher-value work.

For our customers to maintain a competitive edge and accelerate innovation, it’s not enough to have the latest and greatest technology in their environment. Ensuring maximum efficiency while minimizing risk and reducing downtime requires support partnerships that you can rely on. Simply put, you need a personal support advocate, and that is our SAM service.

A NetApp SAM can help protect your business-critical operations while providing deep technical expertise that reduces operational risk and maximizes return on infrastructure investments. This is where our SAMs make the difference for you. The SAM becomes an extension of your team, working with you to achieve your unique business goals while aligning to proven best practices.

Here are just a few examples of what the NetApp SAM service includes to make this all possible for you:

• Account management: Facilitates active lifecycle management with reviews, reports, and documentation.
• Proactive support: Reduces risk, decreases operational cost, and reduces business disruptions by identifying and remediating potential issues before they cause problems.
• Upgrade advice: Provides you with the latest features and capabilities to optimize your NetApp environment.
• Education: Helps your team navigate available resources while improving efficiency.
• Reactive support: Acts as your single point of contact to oversee support cases and expedite issue resolution.

The value of a NetApp SAM speaks for itself. On average, our customers with a SAM report a 57% reduction in business disruptions with 33% shorter resolution times for P1 cases.

Even if your internal IT team is well-equipped to manage potential risks and expedite issue resolution, a SAM can give your IT team valuable support and resources so that they can focus on higher-value work to drive business success instead of tactical problem solving. Using powerful reporting and assessment tools, a SAM can give your organization the insight you need to preempt issues and enhance storage resilience. No matter how deep your IT bench is, every organization is a good candidate for our SAM services—even a company as savvy as DreamWorks Animation.

Here's what the NetApp SAM for DreamWorks says about the value of the SAM services to DreamWorks:

“Our relationship with DreamWorks from a SAM perspective is bidirectional. We work hand in hand to review potential risks and align on nondisruptive mitigation as well as code standardization to ensure any necessary changes are implemented as smoothly as possible.”

Skottie Miller, Technology Fellow and VP of Systems Architecture at DreamWorks Animation, says this about our ongoing partnership and the company’s relationship with their SAM:

“Our personal SAM is really a part of our team. He is constantly looking at our environment and making recommendations about configuration tuning. If there’s an incident, we get hands-on incident management. We’re also part of the early access program to test new versions of ONTAP, and he makes sure that we have the right applications, the right licenses, and the right systems to do our testing. It’s an extension of our team.”

To hear more details, watch the complete interview with Skottie Miller from DreamWorks.

And to learn more how the NetApp SAM service can help you, please view our SAM Knowledge Base, read about the SAM service on NetApp.com, talk to your NetApp representative, or send a question to ng-sam-salesdesk@netapp.com.

To learn more how SAM services help the bottom line for NetApp customers, read our other blogs:

• NetApp helps address customers’ top 3 storage challenges for success
• NetApp SAM customers report up to 57% less disruption time
• Title How NetApp SAMs help customers: Three real-world scenarios