Greg It was once thought that the whole world would only ever need a handful of computers.
And then you had people saying, I think it was in France that once computers came along, everyone would only have to work thirty hours a week. But the reality is that we all now work twice as hard.
We’re all competitive and interested in how much productivity we can squeeze out of every area of an organisation. That’s what it’s all about and that’s why it’s so exciting being in technology, because it’s not a staid thing and there will always be opportunity.
Marcus You can’t produce a big stick and go ‘that solves the whole computer problem’ with data centres, because you’ve got different types of industry, different types of applications, different types of user environments, depending on where you are. You need to bring that level of granularity one level below, which is understanding who your customer is, what’s the vertical, what is their propensity for change and what’s their growth.
So you’re now taking that consultant led approach which is understanding where they are today, doing that discovery phase and, as Trevor said, you need to understand what the profile of your customer’s use is today and need to understand what their propensity for change is, and what their risk appetite is. Someone might sit there and say ‘I’m happy to take a risk that my business is going to grow two or threefold, but my computer resources make it four or fivefold, because I’m actually going to move from a personal transaction base to automation, which has always been the computer driver, and everyone goes ‘that will never happen’.
A client I’m working with at the moment is in the logistics business. They are moving from manual handling of goods, to being completely automated with cranes going around. So the level of computer resource is twenty-fold moving materials from location A to location B. If you can understand that and predict that and also now the mission criticality of that business, you are going to say what was just an email server, and if it was a three or four second delay for your email coming, no-one would even notice.
Most people don’t even notice when it’s two minutes late. But if you are now actually say driving a forklift truck or a crane around, you put a two or three second delay on that, it’s either going to drive off the edge of the train track or the wharf, or it’s going to kill someone. So you’re now talking of moving from seconds to milliseconds. If you’re now talking bank and finance, you’re now actually talking microseconds, and they actually build capacity advantage say in the high frequency trading arena, they’re now talking about the length of fibre back to the actual matching of the exchange being a capacity advantage. They want the shortest length of fibre.
In fact in a couple of stock exchanges, they are actually asking vendors to guarantee that all the fibres be the same length. Project Speedway that was called.
So it’s understanding and bringing that level of knowledge, and if you actually take a strategic approach to being a reseller or data centre provider or even a vendor, you start at the bottom end which is your temporary technical advantage, right.
Whether it’s Microsoft or Apple, APC or Siemens, at the end of the day you’re talking temporary technical advantage as you release a product. You don’t talk about projects, and typically people try to sell to meet a project. What they’re missing is the layers above that.
If you can go into someone and say ‘I can save you save you 20 percent of your power bill and 30 percent on your computer bill by introducing BYOD or virtual desktop, and then back that up with real analytics, then you’re actually now driving an outcome. What you want to tie that to is your customer’s goals and objectives. He wants to be in a building that’s a NABERS (national Australian built environment rating system) rating of 5 stars, he wants to have a situation where he can say ‘my cost per SIM card is x’.
Most people might not be worried about that, but if you say ‘my cost per credit card transaction is actually reduced by 20 percent’ then instead of charging my retailer a 1.5 percent transaction fee, I can now charge him 1.2 percent, so Amex has an advantage, or Visa has an advantage over Mastercard, or Amex over Diner’s Club. Right?
The last bit though is the political agenda. If at the end of the day the CIO is sitting around wanting to become the next CEO and I’ve only seen one actually in my time, right, well you might have a situation with an IT manager who wants to take on the facility’s role, because more and more devices and more and more buildings are IP enabled.
I actually went into a facility the other day, even the clocks, which the face of it is actually an analogue clock, it actually has an IP interface in the back to keep the clock on time. It’s actually a hospital environment but it wants to have that old world analogue interface. But what you’re getting now are things that you’d never imagine now able to run over IP.
Greg I think there will be more CIOs making the leap to CEOs in the future.
It’s already happening; you can see the old guard of people who run government and major organisations things like that, they are actually getting in many instances, younger and more technically savvy, and so I think it’s good advice.
Marcus To me if you look across the life cycle of the data centre environment from preparation, planning, design to implementation – is that people forget about optimisation – current environments, you don’t have to replace it per se.
An example of that is that people never capture the output temperatures from the bloody devices. For true optimisation, you need knowledge, you need information.
But there’s a resources problem. I’m not talking about coal, gas, diamonds etc, but technically qualified, competent consultant-level resources in your organisation. If you haven’t got them, admit it, and go and find some subject matter expertise, and if you’ve got subject matter expertise, sell it into people who haven’t got it. Most people try and sell a product rather than actually selling expertise.
Also, you need a unified approach to the architecture from pouring the concrete slab, to providing compute and storage resources. This still has to evolve.
They’re still treated as separate components, and if you haven’t planned that this is going to work as one entity, and your power, your cooling, your network cabling, your fibre, your pathways, your compute resource your storage, if you haven’t planned that as one unified product, guess what it’s being sold as one product….. ‘oh don’t worry about the hardware and software, we’re putting it in the cloud’ and that’s great, but the people who are providing that cloud service, and even if it’s internally virtualised, all that stuff has got to work together.
So from your building management system if you need to have a shutdown because there’s a fire, does the building management system when there’s fire tell the servers to shut down? Not today. So unified architecture across infrastructures is probably the way to go.
Paul We live in exciting times. IT is a massive and key differentiator for businesses. Companies out there are struggling with legacy data centre design to be able to house the exiting innovations that they can really use to drive the business forward. So to me there’s great opportunities for resellers, integrators who want to raise their game, want to act as a consultant and really move into the services space.
Greg We’ve all talked about the baseline if you make any business decision. You don’t do it without a financial report and financial plans. So the baseline of any organisation is important, and what we say is if you can’t measure it you can’t manage it. So baseline is important. The next area where there is opportunity is around agility. There is obviously a competitive advantage if you can achieve it.
When I look at modern data centres being built today, they’re not fitting the purpose. They’re shining examples of 1980s data centre architecture. So how will they be to fit the purpose in 15 or 20 years is a big question. The smart operators will adopt a holistic approach.
You have to have that skills base which understands the business outcome and then how that all fits together with the big pillars of compute which are storage, servers, networking and your data centre. The data centre is actually now with electricity prices, the most costly of those. So therefore that person should be more important than they’ve traditionally been and if resellers want to look at the opportunities, just look at the industries that have had the poorest productivity and focus on those.
Look at the mining industry and the public sector. That’s where they are very, very inefficient, and that’s where computing and the whole adage of doing more or less will come to the fore, because all of those areas are under pressure to squeeze out a bit more productivity from those industries.
Trevor There’s a common theme of discovery. Make your customer aware of exactly what they’ve got. You can’t make a decision if you don’t know what your current costs are. If you’re unsure about how to use energy as a weapon to aid your sales endeavour, then reach out to the subject matter experts for help.
You will find that once you’ve got that, you’ve got IP that’s transferable to other customers to keep competitive advantage for yourself, and the person who wins is definitely yourself, but your customers will win as well, because hopefully you’re talking to a CIO that thinks like a CEO and arming him with some financial measures that will enable him to run his business. So you’re doing some skills transfer as well.
Greg The key message from all of this is don’t give your consulting away for free. Charge for it. Don’t sit there and say ‘guys here’s my advice on how you can do power’. Instead say ‘we are going to do a discovery phase, the outputs in this will help you make a business decision’.
The number of resellers who give consulting away for free is a concern. Then suddenly they’ve got no buy-in for the customer.
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