Hyper-converged infrastructure systems (HCIS) are gaining a lot of attention as more and more companies are looking to streamline their existing data center set-up and also find replacements to expensive storage. In fact, experts believe hyper-converged architecture is injecting new life into traditional IT infrastructure market and opening sales opportunities for channel partners.
According to Gartner analysts, HCIS is becoming the fastest-growing segment of the overall market for integrated systems, reaching almost $5 billion in 2019 from $2 billion in 2016. Although the overall integrated systems market is growing, other segments of the market will face cannibalization from hyper converged systems, the research firm said.
Partners interested in hyper-converged systems need to evaluate different sales approaches, technology options, potential use cases and related services. Here are some key elements channel partners can learn and expect from hyper-converged systems.
The speed matters
HCI sales cycles are 4x faster than classic storage. With Hyper converged infrastructure users, can start in a small scale and then upgrade as per the requirement. Whereas tradition storage system resisted changes. This caused several bottlenecks. HCI will makes things simple for the partners as they find a customer base who will readily adopt this technology. Customers will be likely to experiment even if they may not be sure of the benefits of HCI as it can be set-up in a small scale with comparatively less investment.
Partners have choice to offer
Since HCL offerings are available from several vendors, partners have the flexibility to offer a bouquet of choice to the customers without introducing new user interfaces. HCI introduces value-added data protection services.
Long term relationship and ROI
As the client’s usage grow, the channel partner upgrade the system. This entails for larger performance. In this way customers’ will adhere to the partner for their renewed requirement, which will in turn build a long term relation ensuring long term return on investment. There will also be value addition to the service data backup, archiving and recovery. Unlike standalone servers, which offer restricted service and support revenue.
Easier for the Partners and Customers to Comprehend
HCI has also simplified storage to a large extent. With that, HCI also combines partner training time since management of servers and scale-out storage is based on widely used server- and virtualization-management tools. This also provides a consumer-inspired user experience. This makes things easy for partners as customers also understands easily its implications.