By Praveen Sahai, Vice President – Channels, EMC India & SAARC
New Delhi, Jan 21: It’s been an interesting year for technology domain. The new recipe of social, mobile, analytics and cloud (SMAC) changed the IT landscape significantly. The disruptive trends are not only redefining the applications and technology we use, but also creating a structural change in many industries, including the technology industry, and creating a new wave of winners and losers.
The new wave of winners is comprised of organizations that have harnessed the megatrends of social, cloud, mobile and big data to build new applications that harness new sources of data to redefine their strategy and drive structural change to their advantage.
In such a scenario, partners need options, support and resources to continue to succeed in the current marketplace while also adapting to and thriving in this next generation of IT.
Some of the trends that partners must look out for in the upcoming year are:
• Re-define the channel ecosystem: 2015 will be a Re-defining year for the channel, with an increasing need for automation, and products and services that support integrated verticals. Niche technology and service providers will become binding agents for building a modern IT infrastructure. Market expertise, interoperability and integration will be paramount in evaluating these providers.
Vendors will need to be transparent with their partners and create dynamic go-to-market strategies for all partner types: how the ecosystem of large partners can collaborate and where niche partners will fit in. Newer consumption models, like the cloud and mobile, may dictate how customers will want to purchase technology.
Partners who have been selling products in the traditional way for a long time may be in for a change. This new digital business environment will profoundly change business processes along with the employment demographics and the need for higher competencies both for the consumer and the providers across all industries. Partners should embrace the new way customers buy technology.
Next year, it will be very important for partners to evaluate how they’ll fit into this new world, ensure they’re ready for this type of integration and potentially adopt new selling strategies. This will also be the year when there will be greater emphasis on the training and development of the manpower by channel partners to enable meaningful and intelligent conversations with customers to address their needs. When vendors maintain an open dialogue with their partners and partners can diversify to new ways to engagement, it will truly Re-define the ecosystem.
• New business opportunities with Hybrid Cloud – Hybrid Cloud is a reality in India and set to grow to become a huge revenue opportunity for partners. Hybrid cloud solutions offer true integration possibilities that aren’t yet being fully realized.
EMC Survey shows 31% of Indian IT decision makers have created hybrid cloud. Hybrid Cloud adaption is the best way of optimizing costs, bringing the efficiencies in the IT organization through self-service & automation and delivering service with the highest elasticity and last but not the least, offering the economical transparency for its end users. It brings the best of private and public clouds together, minus the disadvantages.
The technology is therefore relevant and useful across sectors and market segments. We’re already seeing companies approaching us for guidance on choosing the right solutions basis their existing systems. Partners with the right skillsets are needed to take on custom, on-premise consulting-based initiatives and deploy hybrid cloud solutions.
While these types of engagements can be more complicated, they’re generally more lucrative. VARs and resellers will be able to distinguish themselves with their knowledge of this market, and how to integrate these technologies and systems together. We’re bound to see big opportunities here in 2015.
• The Flash story – Flash is rapidly and violently disrupting the disk status quo. IDC estimates the all-flash array market will grow to $1.2 billion in revenue by 2015 and is being embraced by Indian companies across sectors.
Earlier the early integration of SSDs into a storage strategy was all about accelerating specific workloads, followed by getting a better overall balance of price/performance in external storage arrays. However, as flash is becoming more pervasive, optimized, and affordable, new applications and new storage software stacks are also emerging that are built “ground-up” for solid-state.
Thus today, flash storage has value in a number of implementations within and across the storage infrastructure—be that in storage systems themselves, in servers, or in the network. Even the small percentage of flash in almost any location in the storage hierarchy, and using it in combination with some intelligent management software (optimization code in an AFA, and caching or tiering in hybrid arrays) will almost always yield both performance and financial improvements. This should be a definite on the channel’s priority list for 2015
• Hyper-Converged Infrastructure- Converged infrastructure will account for nearly 20% of total IT spend by 2020 and will definitely see a stronger play in India and around the world in this year.
Deploying hyper-converged infrastructure offers the fastest time to deploy a Hybrid Cloud or Data Lake platform with the lowest risk to the business. Hyper-Converged infrastructure enables simplified delivery and consumption in the form of a Hybrid Cloud, Data Lake or datacenter services platform where the channel partners become the assembling unit for the solution alongwith deploying the same. We expect more partners to ride on this opportunity for better profitability in 2015.
• Software-defined enterprises– This is a continuing trend from 2014 and in this year, we will see this move from a ‘good to have’ to a ‘must have’ on the channel priorities. Software-defined storage (SDS) , Software Defined networking (SDN) and software-defined data center (SDDC) are gaining traction with increasing inquiries coming in from customers focusing on scalable data centers and mobility. Indian market is enthusiastic about the technology and this trend cannot be missed by Indian enterprise channel partners.