Training for your future in storage

SMB market provides opportunity

Much of the current storage opportunity for resellers lies within the small and medium-sized business (SMB) space.

“Whilst the complex storage market is generally manageable for large enterprise customers with full-time dedicated staff, this can often lead to a maze of confusion for the smaller entities with overstretched IT resources and staff,” said Simon Piff, IDC program director Asia Pacific. “The opportunity for resellers is in addressing the storage needs of the SMB space.”

Piff said that having a thorough understanding of the technologies – both established and emerging – is central to resellers seeking action in the storage market. “They need to understand the advantages and limitations of a number of architectures, such as three-tier storage, thin provisioning, virtualisation and off-site storage. These being the current trends within enterprise businesses, they will eventually start to have more than a passing relevance to the average SMB. Architectural challenges of data integrity, back-up and restore must also not be forgot about in the rush to the new technologies.”

Armed with an understanding of these requirements, and the relevance to the customer, resellers will, according to Piff, be more able to secure longer-term relationships. “This is important as storage requirements are continually growing and any customer with any IT infrastructure will need ongoing, long-term support in this area.”

With the growing storage demands of end users, resellers will need to keep pace with their customers and business needs, according to Michael Costigan, marketing director for Avnet, an IT distributor which offers resellers specialised educational sessions covering storage and virtual solutions.

“Training is not just regarding the technologies themselves, it also concerns the business skills and sales techniques involved in selling these technologies.

“We always conduct a market analysis with our reseller partners to see where they are headed with which vendor solutions, and apart from the obvious technical skills that are required in understanding these technologies, we try to also make them aware of the business drivers that are currently influencing things.”

Costigan highlighted compliance as one of the biggest issues currently influencing storage and how it is sold. “Many of our resellers’ businesses are in the mid-market (with a relatively small customer base) and often are confused as to the legal requirements of what they should be archiving.

“What with so many regulatory pressures out there in the market now, as opposed to say just five years ago, it is really important that resellers are trained up on compliance matters. Many of our resellers look to us to help them understand these complexities.”

IDC’s Simon Piff agrees on the importance of the legal side. “Understanding the legal and compliance issues concerning data management and retrieval should be the underlying foundation upon which all storage considerations begin. Until resellers know the specifics of retrieval for their local market, the layers of storage cannot be meaningfully applied.

“For example, in a multi-tier storage environment, when archiving data to tape storage - does this provide a company with sufficient legal time to retrieve the tape, reproduce the documentation, and comply with the law?

“Admittedly, in most cases the answer would be ‘yes’. But how would the company respond if a court order were issued? This is where there’s an opportunity for the reseller to become an integral part of their customer’s storage strategy.”

Matching up resellers for training needs

In addition to encouraging resellers to partner with the company for its training needs, Costigan highlighted the ‘Value Net’ program which Avnet has been operating for its reseller channel for the past three years.

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