AHEAD vs. CDW

They are easily our go to company for anything revolving around VMware suite, whether that is infrastructure related, automation related, or monitoring related. It's a no brainier to get their assistance with a lot of tasks as they can competently implement complex designs. Also on the storage architecture side they are great. I'm sure there is much more but for my team we mainly leverage them in these areas.

Incentivized

CDW is a good place to go for a large selection of competitively-priced goods to purchase directly from their web store, but customer service is still lacking, even after all these years; look at various review sites online. Management appears to still be out of touch, or possibly as high as the executive level?

If CDW doesn't value our business (and we're an SMB, so not a big juicy account that they're sure to court but we do conduct tens of thousands of $ per year range), there are several alternatives. I need to be convinced otherwise as most account reps themselves are great, but that's the end of the line on customer service for u.

• The provided pre-req documentation was thorough and well thought out, making it easy to jump into the project.
• The design session to gather our requirements was very helpful, Sovereign's familiarity with the vRealize product line along with diagramming our desired layout confirmed our decision to bring in assistance with the project.
• When we ran into some issues with Sovereign's custom code their development team was on top of it and solved the issue in a matter of a few days.

Incentivized

• Website is very convenient and easily navigated.
• Quotes are always competitive.
• The range of products and services that they provide is outstanding.

Incentivized

• Coordination of product orders with the vendor although I think the vendor is the bigger issue. Insuring delivery time frames are met is of great importance with these kinds of projects.
• Communication between scheduled project meetings. There could be more contact between meetings.
• Provide a customer portal for project tracking.

Incentivized

• High staff turnover.
• Small organizations are treated as second-class citizens.
• Seems to have an agenda based on what their vendors are offering them for incentives.

Incentivized

I would not call it training, rather would call it knowledge transfer.

Incentivized

Having extensive pre-implementaton dialogue really made the process much smoother. We had most of our bases covered and were ready for the equipment installation/implementation, except for the previously mentioned network configuration issues that arose.

Incentivized

CDW is able to offer a 'one-stop shop', for all your needs in your IT organization. This makes it very simple to pick up the phone and call just one person, to get something ordered or a request to meet a vendor initiated. It also makes it very simple to call one person, when something goes wrong and get assistance.

Incentivized