Your essential guide to make the most from storage

Sliding up the stack

As integrated appliances remove the need for profitable integration services, resellers will need to look up the stack for other services which they can sell. These tend to be around the applications layer and vendors claim they are already helping resellers in this adjustment.

HP’s Nielsen says there are two booming areas for resellers to move into. Many HP resellers are already consulting in VMware, the dominant leader in virtualisation software, as the swing towards server virtualisation continues.

“There are a lot of dollars to be made by our resellers around virtualisation consultancy services.”

Another strong market is in Exchange migration and consulting. Nielsen says 74 percent of the installed base of Microsoft Exchange is on Exchange 2003, for which Microsoft plans to discontinue services at the end of the year. “And by 2012 all those customers will need to move to [Exchange] 2010. Resellers can really help customers with doing that migration,” Nielsen says.

Oracle’s channel strategy with Exadata, Exalogic and the forthcoming supercluster was to provide building blocks for resellers on which they could sell higher services, MacDonald says.

“We would rather ship an engineered solution where the hack work is done in the factory rather than the partners spending their time doing that. We’d rather the partners add their own unique value to users.

“I have done a number of CIO breakfasts and lunches with partners that are looking at adding the value above the hardware stack. Hardware expertise is being de- accented to an extent and the focus is on the deployment up the stack where the focus is on the customer.”

EMC offers a range of specialties for partners to differentiate themselves as they move up the stack such as backup and disaster recovery. “I don’t think [the integrated approach is] eroding their services options. It’s making it simpler for them as a systems integrator to stand-up solutions and do proofs of concept a lot quicker and be able to deploy and migrate in a more efficient way,” Oakey says.