CRN head to head

VENDOR: HP StorageWorks

Mark Nielsen, marketing manager

There is industry recognition for the need of virtualisation to help companies stop the massive sprawl of multiple servers and storage devices in their IT environment. Increasing infrastructure complexity provides less flexibility and creates difficulties in terms of management. Customers need to consider virtualisation from an integrated and consolidated point of view to ensure resources are being utilised efficiently.

Customers are looking for a virtualisation solution that encompasses server and storage devices and integrates them both successfully. HP provides integrated solutions from both a server and storage perspective that work together and are managed centrally via HP’s Unified Infrastructure Management (UIM) software suite.

By providing an integrated virtualisation solution that is easy to manage, resellers now have the opportunity to engage in a high level conversation about their overall infrastructure. By engaging with the customer in this advisory role, resellers can increase their customer satisfaction and drive greater customer loyalty.

DISTRIBUTOR: Avnet Technology Solutions

Michael Costigan, marketing director

The priorities of the end-user are changing, and much more than that, they are changing in a way that we have not seen before. It would appear that the infrastructure bubble has well and truly burst.

It is now time for the channel to capitalise on the growth areas, and one of these is the virtual environment. Companies today are looking for savings: savings in energy, savings in floor space, and an overall reduction in
the complexity and expense of managing IT infrastructures.

It is becoming apparent that customers are looking towards their business partners for you to help them in realising the maximum value from their technology investments. This neverending quest for leaner IT infrastructures has led to explosive growth in virtualisation. Subsequently, revenue opportunities abound for business partners that have the ability to intercept the needs of their customers.

The virtualisation opportunity is not limited to any one particular industry vertical – get skilled up, enlist the help of a valued-added distributor and you should be able to reap the awards.

RESELLER: Oriel Technologies

Rodney Haywood, virtualisation practice manager

There are a number of advantages to selling virtualisation alongside our other offerings. As virtualisation is arguably the hottest topic in IT at the moment, it is a great conversation starter and can open up new opportunities within an account where we might not already have a presence. The benefits and the savings to the customer are clear and significant, and it will absolutely delight the customer when done right. Virtualisation is a “solution sell” which results in the pull through of services and additional systems infrastructure. It utilises the existing skill sets and competencies that our staff already have in adjacent technologies.

The keys to selling virtualisation and ensuring successful implementations lies predominantly in the positioning and planning of the solutions. Customers need to see the benefits of virtualisation in the context of their own environment. This means that part of the sales process inevitably involves a high degree of planning and design of how it will work for them. Resellers must understand what the customers’ real requirements and drivers are.

Vendors must continue to work with resellers to provide education on virtualisation technologies and provide reference implementation guidelines, especially ones which are realistic and sized to the Australian marketplace. Vendors must also have simple and clear licensing models which are affordable and suitable for the virtualised world.

ANALYST: IBRS

Dr Kevin McIsaac, advisor

The key opportunity today is server virtualisation. This has been the hottest infrastructure trend for the past couple of years and will continue to be the hottest trend for the next few years. While the obvious revenue comes from selling the software licences, resellers should not ignore the significant consulting opportunities in using implementing server virtualisation and establish consulting services around this.

Rather than treat virtualisation as a set of technologies, resellers should view it as a set of capability maturity levels that clients want to attain and vendors can help them achieve.

Resellers should start by consolidating their client’s non-production servers. Generally these systems have lower resource demands than production systems, are only used occasionally and are not business critical. This makes them a lower risk and it is easier to convince the client to try something different. A virtualised test and QA infrastructure enables these testing environments to be rapidly deployed and decommissioned. It also has the benefit of enabling standard testing environments to be quickly configured and deployed. Once sufficient experience has been gained, resellers should use it to consolidate smaller applications onto a virtualised server infrastructure.

Finally, once there is a critical mass of virtualised servers, resellers should treat this as an enabling infrastructure for creating application load balancing, high availability and disaster recovery.