The pillar of success

Unified Communications will continue to be a focus of Express Data said Cochrane, as it addresses so many challenges the resellers’ customers face as they contend with increasingly sophisticated environments and a larger mobile workforce.

“Virtualisation is another key technology that will evolve in the future with more players, such as Microsoft, coming into play. These kind of technologies that help customers make better use of their data centre resources, roll out more stable business continuance and enhance data security, will succeed,” added Cochrane.

Jim Christie, vice-president for global sales at WAN optimisation vendor Exinda Networks, said there is a need for more applications that can run better.

“There are a whole load of applications which are time-sensitive and this has driven people to consolidate servers and move towards thin client applications. Users know if something is not working and if they are processing orders and it takes time, they are not going to be happy.”

Christie also supported the notion that a lot of resellers have been migrating from doing infrastructure to security, onto WAN acceleration.

“The infrastructure is in place and security has largely been fixed, but the WAN acceleration side is still a problem and means an opportunity for resellers. There will be a continued transition away from fat clients to an environment that is robust and competent,” said Christie.

Mark Geddes, ANZ country manager for Exinda Networks, added: “If you have been a predominantly VoIP player you need to understand what is in that pipe. Security players need to have visibility of what is going on in the network and so do the resellers that manage networks.”

Ed Havlik, ANZ country manager at infrastructure management vendor Avocent, said: “A major trend in networking is the ability to have the technology in place when the network goes down. The biggest cost in networking is the administrator costs.

“There are the tier-one players who are offering best business practices and there are other players focusing in vertical areas. You are seeing more vertical focus from networking resellers across the board.”

Speaking locally, Havlik added that Australia, compared with the whole of APAC, is very much an early adopter market.

More than ever the networking landscape contains one of the most diverse and broad sets of players in the IT market. Vendors are repositioning themselves for the next wave of network-based technology and resellers need to be doing the same. If resellers can obtain a base of customer through their networking skills, they will be well positioned to supply this glut of network and IP-based technology.

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