CRN roundtable discussion: Commoditisation of IT

CRN: Dominic, you mentioned earlier that D-Link is looking at expanding its business channel – to what extent is the commoditisation of IT driving that do you think?

Dominic: What we think is the infrastructure services where the whole market is actually heading. If you look at the Australian marketplace, it’s predominantly SMB. You’ve talked a lot today about the fact that smaller organisations don’t have MIS managers, they don’t have anyone to look after their networks, so it’s an opportunity to be able to deliver services, or infrastructure as a service to these organisations. These organisations particularly wouldn’t have access to the technology that the big boys have, so the PRV systems, even email for that matter – so the ability to be able to deliver infrastructure as a service is I think one of the big things that we as a company would see an improvement in, purely because we really are predominantly an SMB company.

Norman: Do you see that there’s room for the small infrastructure as service providers, because obviously Telstra and the big boys are getting into this very heavily. Every data centre provider that I talk to is also launching infrastructure as a service, and I talk to all the telcos are launching it, and a number of my customers are saying ‘well actually we’ve downsized our business, but we’ve still got this big IT infrastructure, would you be interested in using our IT centre, and we could provide you hosting services’ and everyone seems to have it on their agenda. Is there room for all those players?

Dominic: Definitely I think so. I mean what we’ve been calling for cloud has been around for donkey’s years. What have we been waiting for? We’ve been waiting for technology or broadband to pass, we’ve been waiting for 3G, waiting for 4G, to be able to give us that mobility around the place, and you can actually access these clouds and be there.

Chris: Another thing that’s driving quite a bit of change is that the cost of storage is just decreasing all the time – so where the cost of actually processing information into the base service would almost be prohibitive in the past, because of the cost of storage and processing infrastructure, today’s storage and processing infrastructure is relatively cheap and enables you to do that with data centres, there’s so much processing power and storage to be able to host all this information and applications.

CRN: Interesting you make the point of faster network speeds, to what extent do we feel that faster broadband speeds, and in particular faster wireless broadband speeds with 4G LTE are driving these trends, and obviously people are able to access more information on their devices and downloading the richer files.

Norman: I think it’s still seen as an inhibitor. I don’t think that we’re there yet. I think that the lack of broadband, I think once 4G and higher wireless speeds get rolled out, I think you’ll see a burgeoning of applications. At the moment the applications are there, the access is there, but it’s very frustrating to use, because the download speeds, the response speeds when you’re interfacing to your back end RP applications are that slow, and the cost. And data platforms can be expensive as well.

Chris: That’s largely specific to Australia, elsewhere in the world in the same way as we’ve got the capture of ADSL, you’ve got the same sort of thing with your mobile plans.

Dominic: Yes, we hear the telcos quite often here in Australia about their speeds and feeds and how much we pay for their callback. It’s actually not that bad. You are paying for a service that you actually can’t get in some countries.

Having travelled around the world, I look at Europe alone, the broadband network there, the 3G networks there are terrible. You can’t get on the network, they’re so bad that they have to actually force you to get off the 3G network to access the data network through a wireless network that might be in a coffee shop for argument’s sake, so there’s a lot of that going on. Taiwan is the same and parts of Asia are the same, and so I’m not so sure about the speeds themselves being too slow.

I think we’ve got the speed, I think it’s more of a contention issue the number of people that are actually trying to access those services, and one of the things we talked a lot about security and we talked a lot about cloud itself, and what you can use the cloud for and so on, and not enough thought is actually being put into the actual infrastructure that might be running the network within your own office, within even the partners delivering you the cloud service. So it’s important if you want to become a cloud provider, or provide cloud infrastructure as a service, it’s important that as a reseller or an integrator that directly selecting the appropriate products to run your computer product, because there’s no point just having storage there that nobody can get onto and access.

Norman: The other thing just sitting behind the wings, behind the cloud applications, are waiting there to consume every piece of network that we can get, is VOIP, and the VOIP hasn’t seen the massive rollout yet, simply because and I think it’s your point it’s a contention issue, that the panel just isn’t there, not corporate grade at the moment, because we put VOIP in but at 3.30 every afternoon the calls would die, because Tom and Sally come home from school and get on the internet, and all of a sudden the local ADSL gets overloaded, but once we start rolling out high quality 4G wireless etc, and NBN, I think VOIP is going to go through the roof, as soon as the network can support corporate grade VOIP.