When he left Computer Associates after a record quarter at the end of last year, his peers were left wondering. Now Lawrence Hedges has kick-started his own storage consultancy business and has come out swinging at what he sees is a lack of storage skills in the channel.
Hedges is no stranger to storage. Having spent the past five years with CA, most recently as storage manager, he's seen first-hand what storage skills exist in the channel. Besides a handful of pure-play storage integrators, Hedges claims the majority of the channel is inexperienced and uneducated in aligning a customer's storage infrastructure with its business demands.
Together with a business partner and a number of engineers in Sydney and Melbourne, Hedges has launched Casewood. The company is billing itself as a specialist consultancy designed to help customers extract more value from their existing investment, and not necessarily through the purchase of additional technology.
"I've been thinking about [starting Casewood] for about 18 months, and what really propelled me to do it was talking to other vendors," said Hedges. "A lot of vendors have no faith in resellers' skills."
Hedges argues general resellers don't focus enough on specialist storage training and as such recommend customers purchase technology above and beyond their requirements.
As well as providing services to its own customers, Casewood intends to partner with other channel companies that can resell Casewood's services.