Rhipe’s growing cloud channel
The cloud distributor is on the partner hunt. Northern region territory sales manager Matt Dewsnap spoke to partners in Sydney about the opportunities that the company is bringing to the market.
Matt Dewsnap: Cloud now is commonplace: public, hybrid, private. We’re already seeing it as the fourth industrial revolution, of which IoT is a fundamental component. There’s been talk of self-driving cars for as long as I can remember. There are already self-driving trucks operating in high-risk environments right here in Australia. In the winemaking industry, where traditionally it would take 15 people one hour to sort two tonnes of grapes, that same volume can be sorted in 12 minutes using a special conveyor belt and a camera that automates the sorting out of unsuitable fruit.
In energy, here in New South Wales there’s an Australian company, Smart Lighting, saving companies 90-plus percent on their lighting electricity costs.
If we’re thinking about next generation opportunities, then clearly we need to start thinking as a next-generation partner. What Rhipe has been able to do is boil this down to four key areas.
Firstly, R&D has accepted the world is changing. We know that, but how can we expect to be on the front foot if we’re not investing in the future? That’s both from a business model, practices and technology perspective.
Platform. I remember the days when people would build their own service – that’s all but dead. You need to adopt a platform; it’s not about building boxes anymore.
A key point is ‘value out’. It’s about business outcomes, not technology. With the increasing ability to capture IP and turn this into reusable assets, it’s more important than ever.
Business continuity, security and compliance. End users want a seamless experience. Expectations are forever rising. Offerings have to be business-outcome based.
Whatever size or shape your cloud is, be it public, private or hybrid, we are in a really unique position and able to help. Should you have your own data centre and you need to license that, we have SPLA, Veeam, VMware or Acronis, we’re in a position to help.
Should you not want to invest in data centres, we partner with IBM Softlayer. You can get bare-metal-as-a-service on a monthly consumption basis. Again, if you want a public cloud offering, we have Azure; any mix is possible.
HPE’s hybrid IT opportunity
Taking to Pipeline to discuss their innovations across data centre, server, hyperconverged infrastructure, and enterprise networking was HPE’s Brendon Sit and Brad Morrison.
Steven Kiernan: HPE, through its acquisition of Simplivity, has become a competitor in the hyperconvergence space, facing off against the likes of Nutanix and Dell EMC, what would you say differentiates what you’ve got versus the other companies?
Brendan Sit: I think the mainstays, as to the difference between ourselves and the likes of Nutanix, would be that they’re software-defined, while we’re software-defined and hardware accelerated. We have the software-defined component, creating the hyperconvergence. We’ve also got a physical card, which offsets the digital compression. So, we have all of those on digital compression, built-in backup, and we’ve basically taken an entire stack of equipment that it takes to run a datacentre and condensed it down into a DL380, or flush server.
While they’re looking at servers and storage, we’re taking the entire stack and using that as a single building block for our business.
Steven Kiernan: You’ve got a classic three-tier architecture and solutions for some of the existing HPE range and you’ve got a hyperconvergence stack. How does it all fit together within HPE, and how do you identify which is the right customer for your partners?
Brad Morrison: There are some businesses that we’ve gone into wanting to speak about hyperconverged, before realising at the end of the day that hyperconverged may not be the best solution at hand, and that a traditional 3T might be the actual solution they need instead.
Sometimes our customers just want to go as a moth to the light, right? Because, hyperconverged is the latest buzzword. So it’s good that Hewlett Packard Enterprise can have a more fulfilling conversation, and qualify what the customer really needs.
Steven Kiernan: Whether a partner is a reseller, an MSP or an integrator, where do you see more business opportunity and where do you see more success for partners? Sticking with classic sell-to, or building out their own private cloud where they effectively become your customer.
Brendan Sit: I’ve actually seen both. There’s a lot of partners out there today who have an MSP practice and the resell business. That’s just because they can attack two parts of the market and not close themselves off to other opportunities. We’ve had success with SimpliVity and other solutions down both paths, because SimpliVity has proven a good building block for MSPs to resell platform as a service infrastructure, as a service to their customers.
That helps them go for maybe those smaller customers that don’t need their own infrastructure because they’re quite small, and they’re able to resell off that platform very well.
Brad Morrison: There’s an example of a managed services provider in Tasmania that’s selling into the mid-market space. They’ll sell, for instance, two Simplivity nodes to their customer. That customer might not have a remote data centre or a place to recover from, so then the partner becomes that, and they’ll package it up as a service and include things like backup as a service and disaster recovery testing as a service.
Brendan Sit: At the higher end of town we’ve realised that a service provider in the channel is something that HPE should be working with. We shouldn’t be scared of them taking away that business. So, we’ve realigned our compensation model internally to make sure that our sales reps work with service providers.
Aruba and the intelligent edge
Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company’s ANZ director Tony Smith spoke to Steven Kiernan and provided an update on the state of enterprise networking and where the opportunity sits for the channel.
Steven Kiernan: A couple of the sectors where we see a lot of wireless networking business going on is education and retail. Why would you say we are seeing so much activity in that space?
Tony Smith: Aruba Education is probably the largest business activity we look across. Schools, by and large, have a fixed number of people. Let’s say a thousand come in one year and a thousand go out the same year. It is a very big load on IT to deal with that level of on-boarding and off-boarding. One of the advantages we bring to schools and other organisations with user turnover is automation of on-boarding and self-provisioned on-boarding onto networks. It takes the burden off IT so they can get on with the work.
The next part of that is around the capacity of the networks. In schools now, there’s the learning they do, but video is driving big capacity across the networks.
They’re watching lots of video, so they need high capacity networks, and high capacity in little spots for short periods of time.
They want capacity to be able to deal with surge through video and simple network use and that’s what we’re providing: high density, high capacity networks in hot spot areas and in low-density networks across the rest of their campuses.
As for retail, it’s another really interesting place, because retail is wondering how to best use wi-fi. For analytics — to watch what people are doing, where they’re going in order to monetise it — there’s a lot of that in shopping centres. You’ll see as you jump onto your favourite shopping centre wi-fi network, it’s actually a big marketing tool. Then they’ll use it to monetise the most valuable property in the shopping centre.
Steven Kiernan: What work has been done on the Aruba side to compensate service providers in the same way you might have historically compensated transactional sales of gear and networking infrastructure?
Tony Smith: Service providers are the customer for all intents and purposes, but they’re a little more special than that in that there’s a marketing and rebates program that sits behind supporting a business activity.
So that’s one mode of business: the resale business supported by channel reseller programs and so on.
We’ve also expanded quite a lot across the world and are seeing success with our OEM program, where organisations take our intellectual property and wrap it inside their intellectual property, and that’s a part of the business that’s expanding quite nicely. These are non-traditional players as well.
One area we’re working on is putting wi-fi and satellite technology into commercial aircraft to offer wi-fi on the aircraft. We’ve also now got furniture manufactures embedding our technology into furniture to smart-enable furniture so you can find it, track it as a managed furniture provider and support smart office spaces.
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