McData unveils remote office consolidation strategy

McData has launched a new strategy aimed at turning the company into a services-led organisation- remote office consolidation (ROC).

The ROC strategy combines services and products from McData, Falconstor and Riverbed to help customers consolidate, centrally manage and secure remote office applications and data assets.

Specifically, the suite combines SpectraNet WAN Data Services Accelerator –OEMed from Riverbed, SpectraNet Replicator for Exchange – OEMed from FalconStor, and McData's Intrepid and Sphereon switching products, Eclipse and UltraNet extension products, bandwidth services, and support and professional services.

The new offering is not yet commercially available, but according to APAC/Japan VP sales and services, Paul Rath, a recent proof of concept for a Chinese media company yielded a 74 times increase in data response times between its data centre and remote offices.

With 50 to 75 percent of an organisation’s data located outside the controls of the data center, according to the Enterprise Strategy Group, Rath said remote back-up, security and sharing data were major issues for many organisations.

“Sharing data across locations, for example, has been an issue because telco and bandwidth costs are high,” he said. “With our OEMed Riverbed high-speed data accelerator you can get increased data speeds of up to 100 times.”

Currently McData is hiring a services team to be based in either Australia or Japan to offer a range of professional services, Rath said.

“We are changing our model to be a more services lead company and ROC is central to how we go to market,” he said.

The new ROC strategy would also give the company at least six months lead time on competitors Brocade and Cisco, Rath claimed, and would help the vendor kick its image as a solely fiber-channel SAN outfit.

“The acquisition of CNT in January 2005 really broadened our go to market strategy and offering,” he said. “Now we have ROC. It isn’t a vision or pie in the sky stuff - it’s real life business improvement.”

The market could also expect to see a virtualisation strategy, which would work in conjunction with ROC, in the second half of the year. Rath would not comment on which vendors the company would partner with for the offering.

A/NZ country manager Ken Cooper, said McData had not yet decided how resellers would fit into the new services offering. However, the company was looking at appointing additional distributors which could offer a services component to customers and resellers. IDS-G is the company’s sole Australian distributor.

Brocade A/NZ country manager Graham Schultz claimed McDATA were only offering a piece of the branch office consolidation puzzle and that its own tale on ROC - wide area file services (WAFS) - had been available for nine months in the local market.

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