As virtualisation continues its conquest of the enterprise IT industry throughout 2015, the trend towards complexity within the IT channel space is going to gather momentum.
So says Claude Schuck, channel sales lead at EMC Southern Africa, who notes channel organisations have already had to adapt to wide-scale change over the past decade, driven by the rapid evolution of technology.
In a recent report, market analyst firm Frost & Sullivan says virtualised servers have approached ubiquity in the enterprise data centre. But in 2015, there will be a significant increase in the adoption of other virtualised infrastructure components ? including storage, network, load balancers, WAN optimisation controllers, firewalls, and desktops.
Fundamental to cloud computing, EMC says, virtualisation enables organisations to pool and share resources across multiple users and deploy quickly without over-provisioning. More efficient resource utilisation results in lower equipment, space, and power and cooling costs, the company says. Adding virtualisation also helps reduce complexity and management overhead, increase application availability, disaster recovery, and increase IT security.
Schuck believes in a virtualised world, resellers can no longer rely on selling storage capacity to meet their customers' new application requirements.
"Instead, they will need to be able to draw on new skills to advise customers on where application workloads should sit within a wider hybrid cloud infrastructure - either on premise or off - and be able to explain their reasoning for this to the customer," he notes.
David Odayar, Comstor Southern Africa's newly appointed data centre architecture lead, says the cloud will disrupt every vertical market and business process, and that means agility is critical to the survival of business in the current channel.
"It doesn't matter whether you are a distributor, vendor, reseller or end-user, the shape and form of your business has to modernise to keep up."
Odayar believes cloud computing will be the driving force behind virtualisation this year. "However, it is most certainly not something that businesses need fear. Cloud can help enterprises create growth, deliver operational results, reduce enterprise costs and attract, as well as foster, relationships with new customers."
He points out the benefits of cloud are still hinged on a "seeing is believing" scenario in the local channel, "so the sooner businesses start implementing cloud, the quicker they will see results and the more business we will be able to unlock for the channel".
According to Odayar, virtualisation is a concept that companies and customers are comfortable with because it has been around for a while. He points out that few Southern African enterprises still need to virtualise, adding: "The real challenge here is the cloud as many businesses know they need it but either don't know how to implement it, or are afraid to because they don't trust it."
He believes it is cloud computing that will present challenges to the channel should companies in the channel value chain not be able to add cloud services and solutions to their business offerings.
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