When Does a Systems Integrator Make Business Sense?

It’s natural for businesses to try to save money by taking on their own system integration (SI). However, when companies try to do it all themselves, on-site, they’re often overwhelmed at how much infrastructure shows up at the datacenter—a lot of packaging, a lot of components, a lot of widgets to track down and integrate. Even if you’re only building 20 racks, there could still be hundreds of boxes.

Then you try to locate, organize, and put all the pieces together. And there's always the potential failure of manufacturer components—typically about a 4 percent failure rate. 

It may look like you’re saving a lot of money going in, but it’s often more expensive, simply because most organizations don't have the facilities or experience to integrate hardware in an ideal fashion. 

A network administrator or software administrator doesn’t likely have the expertise to configure and validate the hardware. And that network admin—who's configuring all the switches and setting security permissions—has many other required and duties more critical than racking, stacking, and integrating hardware.

Where a system integrator can help

On the other hand, an experienced SI partner can manage the complete project, from start to finish. 

A good SI partner can both help you determine what hardware is needed and execute the full breadth of the integration: project management, testing and validation, and delivering ready-to-go infrastructure to your facility. The result is better organization, efficiency, and faster time to new infrastructure.

A systems integrator should be involved as soon as a company realizes they need new infrastructure. From the beginning, the two parties should work together to identify business strategy and requirements, select the best-of-breed of hardware for the organization, and develop the plan for integration. Constant communication ensures that teams are fully aligned and that everything stays on track.

How Redapt approaches SI

At Redapt, our end-to-end SI solution includes teams receiving the hardware, checking the inventory, and allocating the correct hardware to each project. We have teams to assemble and integrate, test to specifications, install the correct firmware, load the software, complete validation, and then package and ship to the destination.

We are unique as a full-scale, full-service solution provider because of our knowledge and experience. We've been doing implementations for well over 20 years and are always on the cutting-edge of the latest and best-suited technologies. With this kind of experience, we can help large organizations scale quickly.

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