Today, average consumers routinely tote hundreds of gigabytes of data with them everywhere they go, and businesses are expected to store absolutely everything they do — from emails to the corporate videos — and make it all easily accessible to users. In fact, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that, we are living in the age of ‘information overload’, says Satyen Vyas, director, medium business, CSMB, Dell India.
Companies are relying heavily on enterprise planning systems like ERP, SCM and CRM to automate and manage their resources. The structured and unstructured information is required to be stored and retained within these systems for various strategic, business and regulatory requirements. The exponential growth in data and the most effective ways of managing that data are being seen as biggest challenges by companies today. Given issues such as data archiving, data security, disaster recovery and storing and managing the information continuously streaming in, companies recognize that this is no longer just a backroom IT issue but really among the key CXO concerns.
Information by itself is considered a resource and enterprises need to plan effectively and put the right combination of strategy, software and hardware tools in place to avoid a data tsunami.
Apart from the new data that is generated every day, the strict data retention policies and legal regulations to retain transactional data over long periods is fuelling data growth. This is where the increasingly popular concept of intelligent data management (IDM) comes into picture. IDM helps companies strategize on how to manage data through its lifecycle—from the time the data is generated/ captured to the time it is deleted from the systems.
While there are some technologies like Data de-duplication and iSCSI consolidation that businesses increasingly find exciting, some of these technologies are still in their early stages of evolution as customers seek to understand the associated ROI. Not just large enterprises but small and medium business have also stopped dumping data and have started using storage solutions for business continuity purposes.
In fact the small and medium business (SMB) segment in India has consistently defied industry growth and is delivering marvelous results as of today. They are steadily realizing the power of technology in boosting their enterprise. It thus becomes a must for every business to capitalize on the shining segment and channel is going to play a big role in reaching out to them.
Just like vendors, channel partners need to understand that most of these businesses do not have an IT person, let alone an IT department and therefore look at complete end-to-end solutions as opposed to individual hardware products.
According to Gartner, Asia – Pacific mid-sized business are slower to adopt to server virtualization technologies compared to their European and North American counterparts, and it cites training and skills as the reason. The role of the vendor has got a lot bigger as they need to fill in the role of a trusted IT partner. On the channel front, vendors need to align themselves seamlessly with channel partners to offer simple, easy to set up, easy to run, solutions that would have shorter delivery cycles and a robust support and services.
This vendor-channel partner integration can take place with the help of tools that can felicitate better learning about the products/ solutions, constant feedback and so on. Once this task is accomplished we could see storage technologies like Data de-duplication and iSCSI consolidation being adopted at an increasing rate more as more businesses will start to understand the associated ROI.