Through nearly two hours of debate and reflection, CRN's editorial advisory panel of resellers, distributors and vendors discussed the technologies, market strategies and business tactics that smart resellers need to understand to survive and thrive in the year ahead.
What follows is an edited transcript that no reseller who wants to stay in business into 2010 can afford to miss.
CRN: What technologies are selling well right now? Wireless seems to be doing well, but is that the case across the board?
Wayne Small: The work we do is in the smaller end of the small business space. To me that's up to about 1000 users, and 80 percent of our customers are 100 users or less. With that framework we are not seeing a lot of take up in wireless. The two areas we are seeing take up is VoIP phone systems and virtualisation.
Virtualisation to me is the biggest hot button that can assist businesses in saving quite a bit of money as they go through deploying infrastructure and so forth. They can build up in preparation for when things start to return without investing heavily in that infrastructure.
Gerard Florian: From our point of view, we are going through phase two, phase three on the wireless side. We are getting some "verticalisation" so things like education - putting in wireless across the campus - healthcare. Wireless for data is one thing. Wireless for voice means a whole different level of coverage and quality of service. Black spots around the lift may be OK for data coverage but if I'm doing voice and I want to walk from one floor to another I need to have that saturation coverage. It's taking it to the next level.
Ross Cochrane: Generally it's about collaboration. It amazes me there are so many people with notebooks still. If you are selling security and collaboration why would you have people with notebooks? Because they are not backed up there are loss-prevention issues and you are not working towards collaboration because everyone's got their own data. We are seeing a lot of focus on how every business needs to lift the level of communication.
If you used to have to tell your team how you were going once a quarter, now you have to tell them every month. You have got to be nimble, agile, change your strategy.
We are seeing people really start to look at conferencing using Webex, OCS or whatever the technology they choose. Rather than setting up just a physical meeting the meeting will be both physical and as however many can attend remotely. You want flexibility in your staff, and you want them to work four days [but] you still want them to be able to collaborate.
There is no more saving anything on the C drive. It has to go on the network and be available in a team environment. We are seeing a lot of drivers for network infrastructure being driven by UC and video conferencing. Voice is just another application. It meets certain attributes to the network. We are seeing a lot of network infrastructure being deployed because people see the benefits and productivity.
Paul Voges: Customers have more remote workers, casual staff, trying to cut costs at the moment. The things customers will save money on is UC, collaboration, mobile online access to information they never had before. Business intelligence, be it for a mobile device or notebook.
Dealing with security issues for casual staff. For example, if you had a casual workforce with laptops and say you were a construction company, and people are being hired for a project for an amount of time, the data security that comes with that.
If you look at the investments that customers make, virtualisation then features into that. As you get more flexible with your workforce and your business operation you start thinking about where does data need to reside, where do you access applications from?
And with that you start looking at cloud computing or software plus services and saying what applications have to be hosted within the company, and which applications can be hosted on the internet?
That's why you might be hearing about wireless because it's a broader symptom of a more flexible work environment. I don't see it as a wireless play as much as customers needing to be agile and flexible.
CRN: The network itself seems to be stepping forward. Network optimisation, performance optimisation is a really interesting area because it is not something the customer will necessarily go out and ask for.
Wendy O'Keeffe: You'd think that that technology would be screaming, and that's my prediction. But in some cases it is and in some cases it's not. When we are putting in [honey] pots we have probably got an 85 percent stick rate in those situations and so it's a typical puppy dog sale which works very well [customers who try before they buy end up buying the product]. Most of us around the table were here in 2000-01 when there were some issues with the economy and the market, and those optimisation technologies were phenomenal.
And my expectation would be that that would happen again. But some of the vendors that we represent are finding it really tough.
CRN: Is there any reason why some network optimisation vendors do better than others?
Wendy O'Keeffe: I think it's a highly contested market and there is a lot of different models to market.
Maree Lowe: I think Ross's comment about collaboration, it's actually driving the customer again while all these infrastructure changes are happening. We either look for products as a distributor or as an integrator. They're different roles but you can see education as a customer nationally is driving very much towards collaboration and what they call connected learner communities - local, state and global communities. Within that you now have the technology changes with the netbooks, development of software portals, the building infrastructure that's going to happen in all the schools, which will bring a lot of other infrastructure behind it. Or again hearing the strategy of the customer. Collaboration in schools is more the concept of the community. How do we access information everywhere. It's a different take on the sort of technology going in.
CRN: What impact will the NBN have on your businesses?
David Henderson: There are 6000 resellers out there who have got to start thinking about that. Whether or not they become an aggregator . . . but they better do something about it because it is going to change. The environment is going to change, virtualisation is absolutely fantastic because of the RoI for the customer - it's not a debate, it's an obvious economic driver for any business.
Anywhere up to 60 percent of our business is being driven by virtualisation.
CRN: Looking at issues that derive from the proposed $43 billion National Broadband Network, Microsoft chose not to go with Telstra's T-Suite for its Office product.
The NBN makes cloud computing more feasible, so where does a vendor such as Microsoft see cloud computing headed and how can resellers get on board?
Paul Voges: From Microsoft's strategy we see three models coming out for cloud computing - there'll be Microsoft online, which will be with Telstra, but there will be partner-hosted solutions as well. We see a very strong model with our partner channel.
And if I look at our hosted solutions, whether it's Exchange or Sharepoint or (Dynamic) customer relationship management with our existing partner base, [it] is one of our fastest growing portfolios and we see that continuing.
And then the third model is on-premise. Any network infrastructure that allows people to transport data across networks quicker makes our technology play easier because our investments are around collaboration and delivering more services over the web across a range of devices so I don't see it having a negative impact.
Ross Cochrane: With regard to the NBN, anything that's pumping $43 billion into building a network won't be built so we can do email faster. We're going to do different things.
This is the massive opportunity for our industry is to say, OK, what are those things that we're going to do with that high-speed network? It's an opportunity not just for our industry but the whole country. It's a great endorsement for technology to say it is a major component of our society and we need to take advantage as IT leaders to say, OK, this investment is going to be made so how do we make the most out of it?
And everyone's got a role to play: vendors provide a lot of great technologies but a lot of resellers, regional [or otherwise], have to find ways to take that network to say how do I use that investment to make a better environment whether it's in education or health or local community or whatever.
Paul Voges: I see it as an enabler; not a change of strategy it just makes things that we've been talking about for years possible. If you look at the size of data shared around the country today versus 10 years ago you think what may be possible in two to five years' time. It will be a very positive thing for all of us.
Gerard Florian: Until you take time to understand what someone in a hospital or an education environment goes through [you can't capitalise on the] vertical [markets]. From a partner point of view, the ability to understand what some of the smaller players in the channel come together to solve [niche applications]. The challenge here is to understand the opportunities and build a slightly different market.
John Walters: I've talked to quite a few regional resellers over the past couple of weeks since the announcement and it will be interesting to see what regional resellers do compared to what they do now. Regional resellers tend to do more things to more people than getting down to specifics.
You look at what Mathew Dickerson does in Dubbo because you can't be too specific in Dubbo but at the end of the day what do they do with their model to capture the opportunity? Do they stay a supplier of product and put some services around?
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