Mobility, utility computing to drive next year's channel

Despite signs Australia's IT market is back on track, resellers agree that if business is to pick up next year a tighter focus on selling to actual business objectives is required.

Eleven key players convened at Sydney's ANA Harbour Grand Hotel on 19 June to discuss possible themes for the year ahead in what many believe would remain a tight market.

Ross Cochrane, managing director at distributor Express Data, says the channel would need to focus on aligning the marketing of products and services to the outcomes businesspeople says they wanted. Products were still being sold on the strength of technical statistics such as up-time, yet customers wanted to see a clearer focus on actual business benefits.

Stuart Hendry, managing director at system integrator Logical, agreed that selling to business outcomes rather than focusing on technology for technology's sake would be increasingly important. 'People are not interested in IP telephony as such [for example], but security people have to do it in order to assure themselves of business security,' he says.

Salespeople needed to refocus on business outcomes if growth was to be achieved in what was still a relatively stagnant market. Hendry recommended companies adopt a hybrid model, encouraging salespeople to use both traditional selling techniques and a more consultancy-based approach. Money could still be made from application development and infrastructure provision, he says, so one key to channel success could be a comprehensive understanding of applications available.

Jamie Pride, technical services partner manager at storage software vendor Veritas Software, suggested C-level executives would likely increasingly favour utility computing models in next year's economic climate. In the recent past, many had invested in infrastructure that was hardly used. 'People don't want to buy stuff and have it sit there in a glass display case,' he says.

Even if the purse strings were slackened again next year, the legacy of recent years was expected to keep budgets focused tightly on ROI and lower TCO for some time to come. Instead, IT strategies seeking a services delivery model such as IBM's on-demand computing initiative were likely to take off in a bigger way, Pride says. Cochrane also favoured a utility computing approach, where larger businesses at least could even set up their own strategy, on a smaller scale, mirroring initiatives like that of IBM.

Yet whether mobile and wireless, touted as offering improved worker ROI, efficiency and flexibility, is the great white hope of the channel, remains in dispute.

Michael Bosnar, managing director at prominent HP distributor Exeed, says PDAs and other mobile products were earmarked as likely growth markets for the coming financial year. But although few products had lived up to expectations he felt this could soon change.

'I've used handhelds for five years but I still don't feel mobile because you have to go into your office and dick around trying to get things to work,' he says. '[But now] convergence is really starting to happen.' Several executives felt that security and management of applications would be key themes both in mobility and in utility computing.

Phil Cameron, PCD channel manager at broad-based vendor IBM, pointed out that the workforce had changed in regards to mobility such that more people were working from home. Consumers and employees were buying technology they were not buying previously, such as mobility computing, and channel players needed to recognise that and respond accordingly, he says.

Further, home users would shift technologies over into the business space by sheer dint of expectation. Consumers used to accessing new technologies at home would begin to request them in the enterprise.

Ian McLean, managing director at wireless specialist Netgear, says wireless was already so commoditised that it could be sold the same way as cables. 'It's got to that stage already,' he says.

But McLean cautioned other players that wireless security issues would continue to hold back adoption of wireless, and thus mobility, on a large scale, despite the take-up of broadband by Australian consumers - 'although at CeBIT we found, between switch and wireless products, the greatest interest in wireless,' he says.

McLean says, however, that businesses should be looking at wireless more as an overlay of existing systems. In his view, genuine - albeit indirect - benefits could be gained by implementing wireless in conjunction with standard business IT infrastructure. 'It can be like putting in an Internet connection,' McLean says.

Pride says that even though the market was picking up, there was an increased focus on deploying assets effectively across an organisation. For that reason, he says, true convergence and effective utilisation of mobility could likely be application-based.

Cochrane says wireless did not necessarily improve productivity, which was something many companies had come to realise. 'You've got to have the right infrastructure and the right applications and I'm sure business will look at it then,' he says.

Cochrane also says that Express Data had already deployed wireless everywhere across its own network but it was hardly used. 'It's [still] too slow, it's inconsistent, and I know notebook sales are going up but I would suggest that in years to come they are going to tail off again,' he says.

Business people were more worried about how to manage and secure mobile computing and, as a result, a lot of people were moving back towards the desktop. 'I can walk into any office and any computer and have any application I want, and get all my applications via a browser by using a desktop at conferences,' he says.

Chris Hale, general manager at distributor Alstom IT, agreed with Cochrane. 'Notebooks sit on somebody's desk 80 percent of the time. They don't take it home, it's a 'just in case' thing or to make them feel good,' he says. Frank Colli, managing director at distributor Leading Solutions, says behaviours needed to change before new technologies could be effectively implemented. People could buy the products, but if at the end of the day their work processes were the same, few benefits were likely to follow.

'We need to find out how people are going to get the gains from these things,' Colli says. 'We have received 80 percent of the gains from Windows and so forth but what about the next 20 percent?'

Several executives suggested it was up to the channel to lead the way in adoption of new technologies. Only the channel, they says, was perfectly placed to understand both vendor and customer perspectives and mitigate between them.

Hale says the educational aspect was particularly important in an environment where potential customers were still smarting from the effects of furphies told in the dotcom bubble years and around Y2K, and who felt they had been led by the nose in the past by technical staff and CIOs towards technologies that provided no long-term business gains. 'The IT managers wanted to have played with Sun and so on, so they could put it on their resumes and it helped them net their next job,' Hale says.

Pride says it was all about trying to bring value in a heterogeneous environment already over-supplied with infrastructure. 'That comes back to leadership,' Hale says.