What prominent trends can we expect in the Australian IT channel for 2008?

As the end of the year approaches, it is time to look ahead at what will sculpt the Australian IT channel in 2008. Gartner has already outlined the top 10 strategic technologies for 2008 as: green IT, Unified Communications, business process modelling, metadata management, virtualisation 2.0, mashup and composite apps, web platform and Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA), computing fabric, real world web, and social software.

“Companies should factor these technologies into their strategic planning process by asking key questions and making deliberate decisions about them during the next two years,” said David Cearley, vice president and
analyst, Gartner.

“Sometimes the decision will be to do nothing with a particular technology. In other cases it will be to continue investing in the technology at the current rate. In still other cases, the decision may be to test/pilot or more aggressively adopt/deploy the technology. The important thing is to ask the question and proactively plan.”

The recent announcements that leading vendors have been making is another safe indication of the year ahead. Microsoft has been actively pushing its focus in the Unified Communications (UC) market. This year Microsoft released Office Communicator 2007 (its voice-data-video communications client), Office Communications Server 2007, and a 360-degree video conferencing system called Roundtable. Bill Gates has already predicted a change in the way people work “as profound as the shift from typewriters to word processing”.

Avaya and Nortel have also highlighted their dedication to the UC landscape. Louis D’Ambrosio, president and chief executive officer of Avaya has said: “This technology is at such an important state that it is transforming businesses and now transforming markets.”

Cisco has been busy in the WiMax space and promoting integrated communications, too. IBM has been keen to talk up its green focus alongside its expansion in the SMB space.

“Just as IBM helped organisations grapple with new innovations around the Internet and Linux, we will again assist clients in navigating this new era of energy-efficient computing,” said Bill Zeitler, senior vice president, IBM Systems and Technology Group.

Again if this year is anything to go by, Apple will be at the forefront of innovation and it will be interesting to see how the iPhone goes on our shores.

HP will be looking to continue its strong growth in software revenue as seen in its most recent results, alongside its core storage, servers and notebook sales.

“We have been aggressively expanding our software portfolio in the last two years to broaden and deepen our capabilities to help customers improve their top and bottom lines,” said Tom Hogan, senior vice president of software at HP.

VMware will also be optimistic about its future after growing at a relentless pace in recent years.

2008 will also be the year that sees Dell expand its channel coverage. It will be interesting to see how the channel reacts and whether the vendor can get its indirect model right. There is also the emergence of niche vendors and technology to consider, but either way you can guarantee the IT channel will throw up its fair share of surprises at a fast developing rate.

As the end of year approaches it is time to look ahead at what will sculpt the Australian IT channel in 2008.

Ben Bowley
Director, Business Systems Group at Panasonic:
Panasonic expects the convergence between AV and IT to be a continuing trend in 2008. Nowhere is this more keenly demonstrated than in the emerging digital signage market. Large-scale commercial plasma displays now require both the traditional specialised AV installation skill set, as well as access to IT skills that realise the solution’s full potential as a real-time distribution network for high-definition images and content. Digital signage is a dynamic medium that is appearing in shopping centres and other high-traffic industries around Australia. It allows advertisers and retailers the ability to instantly update information and broadcast it to a large audience. Tourist destination Phillip Island uses digital signage to communicate timings and rules of watching the penguins, with flexibility to tailor messaging depending on the location and the time of day. In the pubs and clubs and tourism market, organisations modernising their premises are installing digital signage, to keep their audiences both entertained and informed of the latest events and promotions. These solutions provide fast, flexible and cost-effective communications. There is an expanding role for channel partners who now have the opportunity to provide their customers with a high-value networked solution, and the need to invest in the skill set of themselves and their staff to meet this challenge. The benefits of becoming a ‘consultant’ in the market – rather than simply delivering hardware – not only include upselling to large-scale solutions, but also the opportunity to provide after-sales service and technical support.

Peter Masters
Director of marketing at Express Data:
Express Data sees ‘quality’ and ‘execution’ as the keys to 2008. We believe the trends will be around simplicity of selling, transacting, billing and managing solutions integration – things such as the simplification of selling product upgrades and renewing maintenance, bolting on products with one click, and B2B systems sharing. his will eliminate a lot of unnecessary replication. Software as a Service (SaaS) will also become a reality in 2008. Alternative sales models will be more mainstream too, meaning commissions paid to resellers for selling contracts for services will take product fulfilment to new level. These trends are going to bring partners closer as they will be sharing more information than ever. Tighter relationships will mean there will be casualties for those who haven’t built up years of trust with partners. Newer businesses also haven’t the experience to have built robust and secure systems for partners to rely on, so in 2008 I expect to see more consolidation and an increasing trend for vendors to work exclusively with quality distributors. The other side of this is the push into SMB, which will only fuel the need for quality execution, because the channel will need a simple, efficient way to service this huge market profitably. Vendors are bending over backwards to unlock the SMB market. This will continue to be felt throughout the channel. SMBs, like resellers, want known and consistent solutions that require minimal administration and they want to know they have the backing of vendors, so this is vital to Express Data, too.

Steve Nola
Chief executive officer at Dimension Data:
The ability for organisations to train their own people will be critical for competitive advantage in the current climate of acute skills shortage. For service providers, this will be a critical competency as it will become essential to ensure skills and knowledge transfer is something they can offer. The ALP is now in power, so we can expect developments and policies to take a more definitive federal position on climate change and environmental sustainability through legislation, policy and targets. All of these forces will place pressure on the CIO to play a role in the management and measurement of environmental sustainability programs within the business. Home computing and social networking activities are forces which are impacting on corporates and a social force which organisations will increasingly have less control over. This will place increased security risks on organisations’ data and network infrastructure. Virtualisation is all about optimising your IT infrastructure. For example, how do I get the most out of a network, a storage farm or a server cluster? Virtualisation helps you extract more value from your infrastructure investments such as servers and desktop PCs. Virtualisation is also a huge part of green IT – it reduces devices, which reduces power consumption. Unified Communications encapsulates the way businesses and users want to work today. Productivity is the key driver behind UC adoption. Australia’s economy is in a growth cycle and productivity increases are highly sought. Unified Communications will enable that productivity.

Alex Lopez
Principal at Quantify Corporation:
Once the domain of the heavy duty IT managers and their corporations, virtualisation is now ready for SMBs to use legacy systems with new and diverse technologies for current and future IT solutions. Virtualisation will become readily available to the desktop. This will revolutionise the market, broadening the base of technology functionality across platforms. There is also a green benefit to virtualisation – by consolidating hardware there is less power use and heat dissipation. Major vendors are working on Network Admission Control (NAC) or Unified Access Control (UAC) to control networks to effectively handle unmanaged devices and guest users attempting network access. Expect users to gain access by presenting specific credentials, such as smart credit cards and biometrics before being granted access to the network. Managed services have been around for a long time but only the “big end of town” has been able to afford it. There are a number of smaller players working with resellers in this growth market and showing some great ROIs for SMBs who can’t afford to have an IT specialist onboard. The need to stay competitive and relevant will keep this at the forefront of SMB IT solutions. Online advertising continues to grow and when you throw in social networking sites such MySpace and Facebook, you will have smart technology solutions in strong demand to leverage advertising and promotional interaction between all players. Business consolidation will also continue as margins keep falling in a market with minor growth.