The majority of WebCentral’s resellers provide technology services to SMEs who prefer pay by the month, says WebCentral products general manager Gene Suna. “The most successful of WebCentral’s 450 SaaS resellers have leveraged our products to help expand their business beyond providing commoditised ‘break/fix’ services and these resellers are now building more strategic relationships as technology advisers to their SME customers,” says Suna.
“We have found the best investment our resellers can make is in training their staff to understand the business problems that SaaS products can solve for their customers and prospects.”
While Gigabit Ethernet will have a more important role to play at the core of corporate networks in 2007, running Gigabit speeds all the way to the desktop is a waste of money for most organisations, warns Gartner’s Munch.
“We are saying outright that we believe the enterprise market globally, from now until 2008, will waste something like $US10 billion on buying Gigabit Ethernet to the desktop. We do not believe that the majority of the enterprise market needs Gigabit to the desktop,” says Munch.
“On the data centre side of the equation there is a need for Gigabit and even 10Gigabit Ethernet, but at the desktop there is hardly any reason to expect the bandwidth needs of a normal, average user to exceed 100Mb/s. If you are an honest integrator, you should go out and tell your clients that instead of spending the money on buying bigger pipes in the LAN they should actually spend their money on deploying features that would make applications work better, such as traffic management and application acceleration. They would have a lot more effect on application performance levels rather than just adding bandwidth,” says Munch.
Every serious network solution sold by Matrix CNI incorporates the ability to migrate to a 10Gb core in the future, says integrator Matrix CNI’s Saupin.
“More often than not the customers who are serious about protecting their current/initial investment will pick this path, budget permitting.
“It is important that resellers and integrators who predominantly sell systems do not see networking as an add-on service to selling hardware, because more than ever there is a need to have the right technical resources in place to help customers enjoy the promise of convergence,” Saupin says.
“Just as it is important to have the right technical skill sets to provide secure network solutions to customers, it is important to have the right skills in 10Gigabit technology to design workable solutions that incorporate data, voice, audio and video whilst maintaining the security and reliability of the network.
“Then marry that with good, focused customer account management to ensure a full understanding of client’s requirements, scoping the appropriate technologies and services, and setting the right expectations to the client in terms of the deliverables,” Saupin says.
“This means having senior engineers on-board with pertinent training, certifications and experience to help customers during the design and planning stage.”
WiMAX may be hot property in 2007, but Australia will have to a wait a little while before it gains traction locally, predicts Ovum Asia Pacific analyst Nathan Burley.
“Fixed WiMAX provides a good wireless substitute for fixed-line broadband services; however, the WiMAX technology of real interest, which has a much larger potential market but has not yet arrived, is the mobile version,” Burley says.
“Unwired and Austar are expected to be the mobile WiMAX leaders in city and rural regions of Australia respectively due to their spectrum ownership. However, they will potentially only upgrade their proprietary ‘pre-WiMAX’ networks and commercially launch mobile WiMAX late in the year. This means 2007 will see more WiMAX announcements, clarification on strategies, interest and developments, but the real year for WiMAX in Australia will be 2008.
It is in 2008 when Ovum expects end user devices and embedded laptops to become available in any volume. “Next year the wireless broadband and wireless data growth will be dominated by mobile operators’ HSPA solutions.
“The performance achievable by this technology has developed rapidly – partly due to the threat of WiMAX. HSPA solutions will have good coverage and offer end user services that are likely to gain a large majority of early wireless broadband adopters. For wireless broadband in Australia, 2007 is more likely to be the year of HSPA than WiMAX. For mobile WiMAX’s year, we will need to wait until 2008,” says Burley.
Tech to drive your profits next year
By
Adam Turner
on Jan 10, 2007 11:25AM
Page 4 of 4 | Single page
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