“How to Increase Your Business ROI With Diskeeper 2009”

Complete Transcript of
Michael Materie – Diskeeper Interview
on Let’s Talk Computers
Host Alan Ashendorf
June 27 2009

Alan:  When a consumer is thinking about buying a product, there re a lot of concerns that must be addressed: “Is this product going to do exactly as what I want it to do? How difficult is it to install this product on my computer system? Will this product work with all the other products that I have on my computer system?” However, the main concern most consumers have is, “How much will this product cost?”

But, when a business or corporation is thinking about purchasing a product, all of these concerns are very important, but the main one that any business or corporation is looking at is, “What is the ROI or Return on Investment for this product?” Our guest today is Michael Materie, Director of Product Management for Diskeeper Corporation. Welcome back to Let’s Talk, Michael.

Michael:  Thanks, Alan. Thanks for having us back, again.

Alan:  Workstation performance, ease of use, how easy it is to maintain the program. They are all important factors, but for a company, and especially a corporation to decide whether to buy a product or not, the bottom line is always ROI, isn’t it?

Michael:  The key word there is a three-letter acronym, ROI, or return on investment. That’s something that anybody in the hardware or software business or really in business in general, when they are selling to another business is going to have to prove with their solution. There’s a whole lot of ways you get ROI.

You get ROI just from the fact that a user is opening a document in 10 seconds rather than in waiting around for 60 seconds. You get ROI in not having to answer a help desk call that is a complaint from that user. You it from the power savings of a backup that didn’t take two extra hours of extra energy. You get it from the fact that you don’t have to replace your systems every three years. It can last four years. You don’t have to replace those hard drives because they are not wearing out.

There is a whole list of places where ROI is going to come from, from this product. So, it is the product that will, literally pay for itself within weeks.

Alan:  All businesses are different sizes. You have to have a software solution to actually fit the size of the business. What type of products do you have and what is the difference between them?

Michael:  We have separated our product line into a couple of products that are targeted toward the desktop, laptop or even now, the netbook systems that are out there. Also, we have Diskeeper products that are targeted toward the server.

To break it down a little with a little more details, these are the products are geared toward workstation systems are the Diskeeper Professional products and the Diskeeper Pro Premier products.

The Professional would probably be the products that would be, “I’ve got 10,000 systems in an organization,” that an IT guy that might be looking at. That would be really the key product that we would probably deploy on mass to the majority of the systems.

The Pro Premier Version would be something they may look to target towards some very high-powered PCs that might be doing say, CAD/CAM or design work or hosting terabytes of information locally.

On the server side of things you’ve got two editions: One is what we call Diskeeper Server Product and it’s, again, targeted to the overwhelming majority of Windows Server Operating Systems.

And then we have what we call the Diskeeper Enterprise Server Product, which has that Titan Defrag Engine. It’s really going to be targeted toward the super high-end servers that are storing many, many terabytes of data - something that is increasingly more common in the storage area networks where they are centralizing a lot of their data into common repositories. The Titan Defrag Engine in that Enterprise Product would be a good fit for that subset of their servers.

Alan:  We were talking about the importance of making sure that each workstation is defragged, but on a server environment having a defragging solution is almost an absolute must, because if you don’t have it, everybody is going to suffer, aren’t they?

Michael:  With a workstation certainly the 10 seconds, the 60 second Word document or web browsing is really only going to affect that user, but it’s really hard for him or her to be productive.

But on a server, it is probably 50 or 100 or maybe more people that are all affected by fragmentation. It can become a much, much bigger issue for the company once a server is affected.

Alan:  One of the things that management really demands is the most efficient employee and in order to get the get the most efficient employees, they have to have the best tools. If they have a workstation that is slowing down or has slowed down to the point where they are actually looking at it and going, “Whee, I see an hour glass, now let me count 1-2-3 and now it’s gone away!” That’s not being efficient. Time is money, isn’t it?

Michael:  Absolutely. I think another thing that this can often lead to is complaints from users or IT going into it with, “It’s been three years; we need to swap out these computers. We need faster computers.” As you can imagine, if you’ve got a few hundred computers you that have to swap out every three years, it’s a lot of money, especially in this given year with a down turn where a lot of companies are tightening up budgets and they are going, “We don’t want to buy 300 new PCs for all our users this year. What can we do to make them last through the end of, say 2009 and then we will buy new computers in the next year?”

Looking at an automatic software solution like Diskeeper is a way to get that extra 6 months or 12 months or whatever it may be out of those computers and get a good useful life out them and save a lot on the IT side of things.

Alan:  For a home user, having a simple software solution where they don’t have to think about what they do next is very important. But on a server, looking at the training time for IT professionals to get software like this up and running, what do I have to do to install a Diskeeper solution on my enterprise?

Michael:  That’s one of the key things we looked at with Diskeeper and really, anybody that would be potentially a customer of ours, whether it’s a soccer mom who just bought her fist PC yesterday and decided they wanted to defrag, to the enterprise IT administrator that’s responsible for a server that 10,000 users in the users in the customers are accessing.

The design of the product really is such that we have spent time in the engineering effort; we have innovated the new technologies’ patents with respect to, “Hey, we are going to figure everything out; we’re going to figure out to defrag your computer and return the best performance possible, but defrag without overdoing it (in other words, not do defrag or free space consolidation that’s not going to improve performance).”

We’re going to do it all with the technology that makes sure that this whole process is completely invisible; that we never bump into any other programs or applications. The user – all they have to do is install it and they are done. That’s the same, really on “Susie Soccer Mom’s” home laptop or an enterprise server. It was really built in such a way so that the customer is able to get the benefit out of the product, without having to spend inordinate amounts of time reading a massive manual and figuring out which button in the product to push and which ones not to push. It all falls really under our product’s long-term slogan of “Set it and forget it.”

Alan:  If you are an IT professional and you are looking at multiple computers across multiple states you want a very easy to look at screen where you can see everything that’s going on and you can just kind of zoom in. Ease of navigation is very important is very important, isn’t it?

Michael:  The thing that we look at and we talk a lot to everyday – I, myself, personally will visit and chat with a lot of IT administrators – really what they are looking for is a hands-free solution that they can install it and be done with it and know that it’s going to work.

And of course, on the reporting aspect, they are going to have their reports so that anything that does ever happen they want to be able to know about it and be able to address it. And of course, they want to be able to provide those reports to the management that says, “Hey, this product’s working great; it’s solving this problem for us and we spent our money wisely on this solution.”

Alan:  Yes, because a product like this has to be very fast. It has to be ultra-reliable and it also has to be hidden from the users because when a user sees a piece of software running in the background they seem to tinker with it, don’t they?

Michael:  The phenomenon is that somebody sees something running on their computer and their concern is “Is it sucking up my system, then if it’s using resources.” That’s certainly been a valid perception that many people have had, based on past experience.

The InvisiTasking Technology is something that the users – and I think we’ve got somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 or 6 million in an install-base right now of customers who are running InvisiTasking who have realized, “Hey, wait a minute, there is a way to run a process on a computer without it having to bump into everything else and be worried about and be concerned that it’s running on the system.”

You know, it’s really a revolutionary technology that this InvisiTasking processing is. It’s also something is sinking in, certainly over time just by the fact that people try it and it works for them.

Alan:  And I know that your customers heavily drive the Diskeeper solution. The reason I know that is that when I put in suggestions all the time about, “Well, I’d like to see in the next version,” and lo and behold, the next version comes out and there it is! So, I know if you listen to me, you listen to a lot of your enterprise customers, too, don’t you?

Michael:  In fact the story about how the product was created was the founder of our company was going out businesses and knocking on doors and talking to the IT professionals and going, “And what problem do you really have that drives you nuts and eats up your time and just kills you?”

He discovered in the process of knocking on doors and just listening to people that people were backing up their computers on the weekends and then reformatting their disks and restoring the data to solve fragmentation. These poor guys were spending their weekends in the office doing this with, at that time, OpenVMS systems, and said, “Well, I need to create a product and a solution that’s going to save these guys their weekends.” That’s how Diskeeper was born, was really by listening to the customer.

Alan: You say, “Seeing is believing,” and you have a free software package on your system called Depan that administrators can download and put on their system and actually see what the performance is going to be.

Michael:  “DPAN” is an acronym that stands for disk performance analyzer for networks, which is a tool that an IT person could load on their XP, their Vista desktop, or any other system they chose and have it go out there and scan their workstations or their servers and get back reports and saying, “Here are your servers and here are the fragmentation levels on them; here’s the performance on them; here’s some of the problems that you would want to look at addressing to assure that those systems are running at peak.”

Alan: When you download DPAN, you are actually getting a full version of the Diskeeper Server software to run and evaluate.

Michael:  It comes with full Trial Versions of both the workstation Diskeeper products and the server products. Those are 30-day Trials of the full product. Everything is in there and it works exactly as what you would pay for. Assuming it all works out for you and you get the performance benefit that you expect to see – we are basically offering you the full benefit of Diskeeper for 30 days.

Alan: What are we looking as far as the price to get started with Diskeeper 2009 for Servers and the Enterprise?

Michael:  The server side of things the manufacturer’s suggest retail price for one license is $349.95 and the Enterprise Server retails at $999.95. Of course, we offer a volume-license discounts. I certainly would suggest price shopping at your favorite resellers.

On the desktop of things the two editions of Diskeeper is the Diskeeper Professional with an MSRP of $59.95 for a single license and the Pro Premier MSRP is $99.95.

Alan: If you had to pick one feature that separates Diskeeper for the Enterprise from all the other products that are out there, what would it be and why?

Michael:  I can answer that in two parts: From a technology standpoint, the absolute key to the value of this product really lies within the InvisiTasking Technology which eliminates all of the other claims of cost that the program would normally incur for IT or for productivity. That kind of eliminates any other overhead or consideration.

From the technology standpoint that’s huge. From a features benefit, I’m a big fan of the iFAST feature, because what it allows a server or a desktop to do is Diskeeper will put the files to the fastest parts of the storage system you have. It knows, irregardless of SAN or RAID or whatever it may be, it knows what’s fast and what files to put into those fast areas so that they come back as absolutely as fast as possible.

Server people already know is they tend to not fill up disks because they know as they fill up the disks the file access gets slower and slower and that’s mixing unused data and used data together so intentionally they need to add more drives to make sure the performance is optimum.

What we’re giving with iFAST is the ability to not have to worry about that so you leverage all the storage you have without having to buy extra and still get the best performance from those files that are really needed, the files that you actually use. And then keep the unused data out of the way so that those key files do stay at peak performance.

Alan: You when are talking about an Enterprise System or a large business everybody wants to do their research before they go out and they buy a solution. I know you have tons of information on your Website. Where can they go find out more information about fragmentation and Diskeeper 2009?

Michael:  We have a Website. That’s http://www.diskeeper.com. One other thing I would really suggest if you are an IT professional and you are looking at this, we have really, a really technical sales force. These guys know the ins and outs of Windows and of the Diskeeper product and they are a real help. So, I would really suggest calling into our sales information line at 800-829-6468 and just ask for the account manager for the right territory for which you are located and they can certainly provide you all the information and really make the process of looking at this solution much, much easier and much, much faster.

Alan: Well, Michael, it’s been our pleasure to have you as our guest here on Let’s Talk Computer talking about how we can keep our businesses working at maximum efficiency. We look forward to having you back on the air again, real soon.

Michael:  Thanks, Alan. I appreciate it. It’s been a great time.