There are a lot of changes taking place in IT, and one of the biggest challenges facing the channel is understanding these changes at the same rate.
That's the view of Tim Hearn, partners and alliances director for F5 Network in the UK, Ireland and sub-Saharan Africa. "The key thing is for our partners to understand the changing IT environment," he said in an interview with ITWeb.
F5 Networks says over the past few years, application delivery networking (ADN) has matured in the data centre and changed the way applications are managed and delivered to users.
Rather than building out an infrastructure of networking pipes for speeds and feeds, the ADN aims to intelligently push application services out of the data centre in an on-demand fashion and address how the application is being accessed and requested, the company says.
Due to tremendous increases in application traffic in virtually every part of every organisation, enterprise ADN deployments are growing throughout the enterprise and spanning multiple data centres even over international boundaries, it adds.
Hearn also revealed that the threat landscape is now evolving from mainly targeting the networking layer to the application layer within the data centre and the channel has to grapple with all these changes.
He pointed out that the software-defined networking world is getting important for F5 Networks and also for its partners like Cisco and VMware.
"Though most partners are getting to grips with these changes, they need to be more agile," said Hearn. "As a 100% channel-focused company, F5 Networks needs to focus on a small number of partners who need to grow with the company," he added.
He also revealed that the company sees big opportunities within the sub-Saharan market, especially in the financial services industry, which is moving to the hybrid data centre environment.
Thus, F5 Networks will soon be hiring a channel account manager in the region to support growth opportunities, Hearn revealed.
The company is also set to make some changes in its distribution model in sub-Saharan. "We expected our distributors to be value-added distributors not just in name but in nature," said Hearn.
"As the company moves in that direction, last week F5 Networks appointed Networks Unlimited as a distributor."
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