Distribution Central's SAN Systems goes virtual with Xsigo

On a recent visit to Sydney, Fred Smith, director International Sales for Xsigo [pronounced see-go] told CRN the vendor was founded by notable players in the IT space.

“Our Board of Directors is a host of who’s who in technology. We have Ray Layne, former president of Oracle and Mark Lesley, co-founder Veritas just to name a few,” he said.

According to Smith, the Xsigo virtualisation model is the “missing link” within the data centre. He explained that it offers customers agility by connecting data and storage networks to a central server to streamline user management.

“We’ve heard a lot about storage and server virtualisation but the last remaining static piece within a data centre has been the IL, which are your connections and data patterns,” he said. “Infrastructure is like a fine-tuned car that allows you to drive your service, and Xsigote allows you to control and direct both data and storage networks as needed.”

Nick Verykios, marketing director, SAN Systems said the Xsigote solution provides virtualisation at the infrastructure level across the entire data centre, which is a unique proposition resellers can take to customers.

“None of this is Open Source, it's bringing in an artificial Open Source layer to tie everything together and manage your infrastructure,” he said. “The fact is you can’t differentiate across virtualisation because everyone’s selling it, but you can take this offering and provide virtualisation at the infrastructure level.”

Verykios went on to say the distributor is rolling out accreditation and sales training to ensure local resellers are knowledgable in the technology and equipped with the necessary tools when approaching enterprise.

“At SAN systems we have to be realistic and with this kind of solution resellers need to get skilled up, they have to do some certification to understand it,” he said. “Resellers will focus on the mid to high enterprise, it’s not a small business play in this country.”

Commenting on the Australian market, Smith noted that the local IT industry is mature in relation to others in the region and therefore condusive to embracing this type of offering.

“Australia often gets lumped into APAC, often unfairly. It’s a mature market and we’re finding Australia is on parallel with the US when your talking about IT direction,” said Smith.

The Xsigote solution offers several benefits to resellers, claimed Smith, one of the most significant being ease-of-integration into existing networks. He explained that new technology is often met with apprehension as it may be disruptive at the implementation stage.

“We’re not changing protocol, we seamlessly go into an existing network,” he stated. “The margins on hardware are decreasing and therefore here’s a product that resellers can add value to their customers and also cap a margin. There are also professional services they can offer.”

Verykios added that SAN Systems is creating awareness in the local channel of a go-to-market strategy it refers to as ‘customer leadership’.

“Differentiation in the market has been overly used and overly abused. The thing about Xsigote and a few other products we’re going to launch in the next six months is providing resellers with an opportunity to provide customer leadership. We’re trying to find a way to politely say to the reseller ‘your customer wants this’. The end user is a lot more aware of their needs and someone’s not listening,” he explained.