Time to gamble on emerging technology?

Michael Costigan, marketing director Avnet Technology Solutions, said his company invests in high-growth, high-return markets to enable business partners to accelerate success.

“We have various people driving regional prospects and they look at what are the high growth rates. They then determine the market and feed back to the country management team. In this way we are prepared for some big players and this is how we establish presence in the market,” Costigan explained.

“What we do at Avnet with the changing IT landscape is to help our resellers put the science such as virtualistion, security, storage and software as a service (SaaS).”

Resellers looking to take advantage of Avnet’s solution distribution strategy can rest on the groundwork already done by the company.

Asked what skills resellers need to sell solution, Costigan said first and foremost they need to offer maturity and good commercial acumen to position IT solutions.

“We are then able to go out and offer our value-added services for them and run joint marketing programs as well,” he said.

“Our resellers can take advantage of Avnet’s global reach whereby in Australia they can form a relationship with Avnet and our solutions distributed around the world.

“We are a global distributor and for instance our business in North America allows for local resellers to have a presence and we can marry them up with various systems integrators.”

Costigan explained that business partners can determine the best solution for customers through Avnet’s business innovation office.

“This is our upmarket distribution service where we look at the numbers and what drivers are fuelling growth, for instance is the solution storage or appliance or compliance?”

“The distributor organisation needs to know the customer and what he needs and then to make recommendations on a more collaborative approach.”

Costigan said the main technologies driving the market are in and around security and virtualisation.

“There has been a lot of growth in the marketplace and in end-user organisations, not only about security but also compliance,” he said.

“This is driving IT in Australia and among major banks bringing together disparate systems together and moving towards a greater standards approach.

“Virtualisation is also a big area where from a business perspective they use less hardware and can almost double output, while still being more Green and using less power and disk space.”

Hewlett-Packard said it is continuing to invest in new technologies and making sure that they are incorporated into roadmaps and product line development to keep up with what is a constantly changing marketplace.

Vendors must keep the cutting edge razor sharp and focused on what it means for the customer including how it meets the customer requirements and the significant benefits of providing a better product rather than just technology for technology sake.

Raymond Maisano, marketing manager for Hewlett-Packard’s blade servers division, said a lot of the emerging technology now centres on blades and storage.

“Emerging technology is going down two paths,” he said. “One with a focus on consolidation of servers and the other is for Cloud Computing.”

Maisano explained that HP Virtual Connect is a new approach to connecting and adapting server, local area network (LAN) and storage area network (SAN) domains across the data centre.

“For the first time, server administrators can automatically manage resources independent of server connections to network and storage resources in an HP BladeSystem, saving days or even weeks of administrative ‘wait time,’” he said. “There are also upcoming servers that are built just for virtualisation.

Maisano added that channel partners need to be aware that the market shift to virtualisation means users are demanding more bang for their buck.

“The important thing for us about virtualisation is it is not just about visualising an application on the server,” he said. “Virtualisation is being able to consolidate and virtualise a variety of aspects such as power cables.

“Virtualisation allows for the connection of virtualised servers, operating servers and SANs which until today were connected with fibre channel.

“The move to cable virtualisation allows for a fully virtualised server and IP and integrates communications connections to seamlessly merge.

“Managing that can now be conducted in for instance, peak times with different demands at different times.

“If you virtualise end to end, customers are able to use the system when and where they want it.”

Maisano said the important aspect for channels in the virtualisation space is that they need to recognise that they have to provide solutions across the whole enterprise.

“They need to look at the whole business, because we can now cross the boundary of server and storage,” he said.

“We can pull together a seamless environment and the footprint of servers now have greater density and there is consolidation of cables and power.”

Maisano said the next big thing for HP is Cloud Computing. The company is so convinced of its importance as an emerging technology and benefits that it has created a whole new division in the US to cater for it.

“What occurs to me about Cloud Computing as an emerging technology is that the amounts of storage capacity required to store data online is only going to increase and adjunct to that is the exponential growth in storage needed to support these moves,”
he explained.

Gartner has reported that Cloud Computing is on a par with the development of email as a must-have technology.

Gartner defines Cloud Computing as a style of computing where massively scalable IT-related capabilities are provided “as a service” using Internet technologies to multiple external customers. The types of IT services that can be provided through a cloud are wide reaching.

Computer facilities will provide computational services so that users can use central processing unit (CPU) cycles without buying computers.