The virtual opportunity

Martin Gregory is director of server and tools for Microsoft Australia. “In essence, IT managers are managing just a part of the overall business where increasing the efficiency of servers and the reduction of costs are more often than not, the main business drivers.

“Virtualisation can address these issues and bearing in mind that experience in the area is still limited, resellers are sitting on
a big opportunity to promote themselves.”

Desktop virtualisation

As desktop virtualisation gains momentum and becomes increasingly viewed as the optimal operating environment, Gregory said that “management is the most important issue for customers rushing to maintain control of their desktop environments and virtualisation is nigh on impossible without good management”.

Mark Magill, product manager enterprise business group, Alcaltel-Lucent, said desktop virtualisation presents strong opportunity for the channel, following the vendor’s release of its virtual ‘Business Integrated Communications Solution’ (BiCS), which can be controlled and delivered to end-users in a more manageable way than ever before. “The new environment allows IT managers to integrate our real-time communications more easily and efficiently as required.

“Virtualisation has really allowed us to build the BiCs solution with more applications and allow our channel partners to add in and learn about new applications much quicker, thus really increasing their value-add proposition to more and larger customers.”

He adds: “If resellers are not looking at opportunities within virtualisation, then they can be sure that their customers are.”

Although there is a massive market for virtualisation, Gregory admits that it may not be suitable for everyone. In order to help its partners to decide whether a customer is a good candidate for the technologies, Gregory points to a range of Microsoft assessment tools including its Virtualisation ROI Toolkit, as a way for them to build skills and use the information as a starting point for customers.

IDC’s Bihammar states that with areas such as storage, security and management being most heavily impacted by virtualisation, the skills relating to these will continue to be key for resellers. However, he points out that they should consider ‘skilling up’ on several virtualisation offerings from the range of vendors, rather than just focusing on one.

One belief within the market which VMware is keen to dispel is that with the rise of virtualisation, resellers would find themselves disadvantaged with lower margins on hardware. “Many of our partners are now realising this is not true as they end up needing to purchase for example, larger amounts of storage hardware in order to accommodate the virtualisation technologies,” said Blackman. “And these margins are set to increase too, as we have typically found that for every $1 spent on virtualisation software, $6 is spent on hardware, services and storage software.”

Market growth

IDC said it has high expectations on the continued growth in the market, with future opportunities to be found not only in server and desktop virtualisation projects, but also in disaster recovery.

With virtualisation being seen to solve so many IT department issues, it is not surprising that it is commonly being viewed as an easy sell. Blackman goes as far as to say that it is a ‘no brainer’ as to why the channel should look at the opportunities. “I think that many customers are now realising that it is not just a question of whether they will virtualise their operations, but more a question of when they will virtualise.”

data centre opportunity the virtual