Ten resellers reveal what cutting-edge tech they are backing for 2019
Top execs from 10 VARs, including Softcat, ANS and GCI, name the new tech they are placing their bets on this year
Resellers and MSPs are notoriously risk-averse when it comes to new technology. Making the wrong bets can lead to hefty losses and angry customers.
On the other hand, technologies that have not yet hit the mainstream command the highest margins and growth potential, and picking the right ones can help tech suppliers cement their status as trusted advisors.
Here we quiz bosses at ten resellers and MSPs on which emerging technologies they are throwing their weight behind in 2019.
Andy Barrow, CTO, ANS
Cutting-edge tech: Digital twin
What is digital twin technology and why are you backing it?
Digital twin is connected to the Internet of Things (IoT). It is where you build out a virtual representation of a physical asset, such as a hospital or city, and use the data generated to model certain scenarios.
The cloud vendors - Amazon, Microsoft and Google - have started to talk a lot about it and some have released early services of cloud computing technology that allows organisations to build digital twins.
It gives you a faster time to market, and adds much more value to the customer and, in some ways, will accelerate the adoption of IoT due to the simplicity and value it can get out of an IoT solution.
Have customers moved beyond the trial phase yet?
It's a big push for us this year. We are currently working on a couple of customer pilots involving a real-estate business and a university.
Microsoft have just released a brand new service, which is in preview at the moment, and we are using that state-of-the-art tech and building out our customers' solutions using digital twin technology.
Do you foresee it being a large revenue contributor to ANS?
Over the coming years, definitely. It allows the market to get some traction, brings down the cost, makes it simpler to deploy and makes the data easier to analyse.
I am expecting that in the next two to three years it will be a contributor to our revenue.
How close is it to mainstream adoption?
You could argue that it is mainstream now because as soon as a cloud provider launches it, it is mainstream; then it's just about adoption. For that adoption you need the services, the ecosystem and the prices to come down. IoT has matured a hell of a lot over the last three years, and I would say it is mainstream now, but it's not mass adopted. Digital twin will massively mature over the next 24 to 36 months and you will start to see it become mainstream around that time frame.
Ten resellers reveal what cutting-edge tech they are backing for 2019
Top execs from 10 VARs, including Softcat, ANS and GCI, name the new tech they are placing their bets on this year
Paul Timms, group managing director, MCSA
Cutting-edge tech: SD-WAN
Why are you backing SD-WAN?
We are getting curiosity around it. From a technical point of view, SD-WAN is probably the one we are being asked about more than other things. We've heard a lot about it in the last 12 to18 months, but I think companies are now getting to grips with what it can deliver as a benefit.
Generally, large-scale adoption doesn't take place until there have been good case studies, and I think some of our partners are starting to see some good results. Twelve months is quite a long time in IT, so I think this time next year it will become like virtualisation - the questions of 'will it work or won't it work' will disappear - and it will become part of the background.
How prominent will this be in your offering?
I think cutting-edge stuff is more of an add-on. In my eyes there is no cutting-edge silver bullet that suddenly turns up and is prominent in your IT armoury. Talking about good outcomes and services and balancing the right technologies for customers is still a better conversation, along with understanding how your customers want to transform, rather than just focusing on one aspect of your offering.
What vendors are dominating in this space?
We work with Virtual1 and Convergence Group in this space, and they are our route into the likes of BT and Virgin.
It gives customers much more flexibility in how they set up their IT and is less financially restrictive than traditional WAN and the way that the big telcos control the market.
But the space is not at all controlled by legacy vendors. I imagine they are quite wary because SD-WAN can be delivered by smaller-scale connectivity partners, which may be where some of the innovation is being driven.
Ten resellers reveal what cutting-edge tech they are backing for 2019
Top execs from 10 VARs, including Softcat, ANS and GCI, name the new tech they are placing their bets on this year
Cliff Fox, COO, Pure Technology Group
Cutting-edge tech: VR
Why are you backing VR?
It's a multitasking tool. One operation of it is around field service and maintenance. For example, field engineers can touch the glass and dial back to base and have somebody look through the glasses at what they are doing and guide them in performing a function.
We are in dialogue with maintenance facilities management businesses for whom this will make a real difference to their operation.
It's not a result of people banging on our door demanding it, we just can see how some of these apps can make a big difference to organisations. It almost feels like cloud did 10 years ago.
How much of a revenue driver do you foresee it being?
It echoes back to cloud. When I was first involved in a cloud launch in 2009, a lot of people weren't that familiar with cloud and it was a slow burn getting people attuned to it, and I think this may be similar. I think it is the right thing to lead rather than follow when it comes to doing leading edge.
We're investing in this right now. If you're going to do something, you need to be able to take it apart, see how it works, develop it and bring it to market so it's robust and gains some interest and that requires investment.
How close is it to mainstream adoption?
I would think some of the VR apps will become mainstream in the next two years. If you look at Microsoft and its Hololens, it is no surprise that it is getting into the VR market and spending a lot of money doing so. It's an exciting space right now.
Ten resellers reveal what cutting-edge tech they are backing for 2019
Top execs from 10 VARs, including Softcat, ANS and GCI, name the new tech they are placing their bets on this year
Mike Constantine, CTO, GCI
Cutting-edge tech: Natural language speech recognition
Why are you backing this tech?
We are looking at how we can leverage this for our customer base. We have specific sectors in which we have a lot of customer penetration, such as local authorities and housing associations. They all have fairly large-scale contact centres dealing with inbound requests and this tech is perfect for them.
It's experimental at the moment. It is a cutting-edge area so we are working with our vendor partners in that space to develop services that we can bring as proof of concepts to our customer base.
What are the benefits to your customers?
A lot of our customers are looking at this as a way to deliver better service in a lower-cost contact centre environment and ensure that their skilled resources are used in the right areas. The way it works is that rather than talking to a human agent in a contact centre, you would be talking to a machine and it would respond to you in a natural manner.
The customer can record all those conversations, which means they can analyse that data and detect patterns in their contact centre, for example what causes customers to get angry, or whether people are satisfied with their products. It can be turned into a revenue-generating opportunity while also reducing cost space.
Do you foresee this being a large contributor to revenue?
This technology is still quite expensive, so assuming we recover our costs, yes, absolutely. I doubt it is going to make our business double or triple in size. But our business is quite diverse in terms of the services that we offer. This is a slice of one of our pillars. It will generate significant revenue, but on the broader GCI scale, it is a part of our strategy rather than a core of it.
Ten resellers reveal what cutting-edge tech they are backing for 2019
Top execs from 10 VARs, including Softcat, ANS and GCI, name the new tech they are placing their bets on this year
Des Lekerman, CEO, TIG
Cutting-edge tech: Cloud-based phone branch exchange (PBX)
Why are you backing cloud PBX?
This has piqued our interest, and we are looking into it around its functionality in Microsoft Teams. We are selling a lot of Office 365 and putting a lot of solutions around it and more of our customers are using Teams in its fullest capability. The natural progression for this is to use the voice features in Teams.
What are the benefits to customers?
There are other cloud PBX services out there, but they are just pure voice and do nothing else. Because this is integrated into Office 365, it makes it an easy extension from email and invoice.
Also, when you are dealing with other people outside the organisation, it's a good way to collaborate with partners and suppliers. Having a button to click gets you the conference calling in Teams and that functionality is a natural step.
Has there been increasing customer demand?
The conversations are growing around it. Implementation starts with what it is and how it can replace their traditional voice system. Skype for Business has been around for a long time, and this is the next generation of it, but it is integrated into a collaboration platform.
It won't be a revenue driver for us, it will just be an add-on to what we are doing, and we will be implementing it in the next 12 months.
Ten resellers reveal what cutting-edge tech they are backing for 2019
Top execs from 10 VARs, including Softcat, ANS and GCI, name the new tech they are placing their bets on this year
Howard Hall, managing director of DTP
Cutting-edge technology: Intelligent edge
Why are you backing intelligent edge to take off?
Intelligent edge is a sweeping brush for lots of areas, whether that's smart campus, the manufacturing or petrochemicals plant of the future, or innovative retailing. An app is probably at the centre of it. It's B2B technology, but the benefits are not just for the people who are adopting and using the technology; they're actually for the end consumers as well.
Have customers moved beyond the trial phase yet?
We're doing a lot of pilot work. We've got one in duty free at an airport. The great thing about duty free is that the tills are all in the corner, away from the footfall, and we can map using [Aruba] Beacons what's on the duty-free sales floor.
We've got to get you on our map which we do through the free WiFi, and then as you're walking around - I'll use me as an example - I'll go into duty free, find where the Tom Ford is, and then I'll have a wander. But the tills are in the corner and I've gone nowhere near them. So they've seen me go in, seen me stop, look at something for 15 seconds and gone ‘OK, there's an interest there'. And we can hone that down to half a square metre, so we know I'm looking at Tom Ford. Then I can ping myself a voucher to say within 15 or 30 yards ‘Tom Ford: 25 per cent off for next 20 mins'. For me, that actually might make me consider my normal pattern of spray and go, and actually buy it.
There are certain clients that airports are more interested in than others. People on the flight to Moscow are typically the largest spenders in that duty-free area, so if their flight is delayed, you could be pushing out notifications for an incentive to get 10 per cent off duty free for an hour.
Ten resellers reveal what cutting-edge tech they are backing for 2019
Top execs from 10 VARs, including Softcat, ANS and GCI, name the new tech they are placing their bets on this year
Matt Franklin, CEO of Roc Technologies
Cutting-edge technology: Robotic process automation (RPA)
Why are you backing RPA to take off?
We are really well positioned to help customers with that automation journey because of our process capability. We've worked with lots of enterprise customers to map and optimise their processes. And it's critical you understand how your business works, and have a good appreciation of the processes, before you automate it, otherwise you just make bad processes faster.
Have customers moved beyond the trial phase yet?
We've had deals in what we would call swivel-chair processes - so driving out the low-level human steps in processes. We have worked with customers to identify where the various steps in the processes are and that makes it very easy to automate at that point so we've done that discovery piece of work, and are seeing that in public sector, retail and legal.
Can you give us a flavour of what processes clients are typically using RPA to improve?
Embedding it in the delivery of projects for project change requests. So if there's a step process that needs to be worked through, we can take out a number of steps in that process to deliver automated budget change requests. And also between functions - so the whole customer journey.
We apply it to our own business, as you'd expect, so rather than multiple data entry points, single data entry points for the whole customer, and automating some of those swivel chairs between sales and accounts, and accounts and operations, in things such as matching skills sets to available resources in booking resources. Previously we'd have had someone scheduling that - looking at skills sets, location, availability and cost profile. We now automate that.
Paul Hart recently joined our board from Microsoft and he is leading the application of some of these technologies internally so we can really drive efficiencies as we scale. We can drive out human error and also make them much more cost effective, as well as improving the customer experience, whether that's an internal customer or an external one.
Ten resellers reveal what cutting-edge tech they are backing for 2019
Top execs from 10 VARs, including Softcat, ANS and GCI, name the new tech they are placing their bets on this year
Rob Bardwell, CEO, Pinacl Holdings
Cutting-edge tech: Internet of Things (IoT) (smart lighting)
Why are you investing in IoT?
Because it is going to be big. IoT is no longer people-to-people communications, but sensors to machines and therefore there are trillions of devices that will be connected.
We have been investing for two years in IoT and now have solutions for intelligent lighting, housing and for road temperature. We have just received our first major order of £3.5m for intelligent street lighting from Aberdeen council over the next couple of years.
How much do you predict this tech will drive revenue?
We've invested about half a million pounds in the last two years in time and real money. In next year's budget, which starts in April, about 20 per cent of our business will come out of IoT or IoT-related projects. Like everything else, it depends on how fast it commodifies, but there's a good chance that within three years it could make up 50 per cent of our business or more.
What vendors are dominant in this market?
It's a mixture of legacy and start-ups. The bigger companies are looking for dominance in terms of revenue and customer profiles. One of our sensors is sourced from a start-up company in New Zealand, so it's still very much two ends of the market.
Ultimately, the bigger manufacturers will buy out the smaller guys. But at the moment, we are still in a place where the start-ups are gaining equal momentum.
Ten resellers reveal what cutting-edge tech they are backing for 2019
Top execs from 10 VARs, including Softcat, ANS and GCI, name the new tech they are placing their bets on this year
Craig Lozinski, chief technologist of emerging technologies, Softcat
Cutting-edge tech: Custom chips
Why are you backing custom chips?
Some of the custom chips we are seeing come out for specific use cases are completely blowing away the orthodoxy that we are used to.
They can take problems that are mathematically very difficult and do them in a matter of seconds, which is something that would take years' worth of compute time on traditional infrastructure. Custom chips will become more significant in 2019; there's a lot of movement in the market that way.
How much is Softcat investing in this technology?
We tend to keep a lot of the emerging tech on a standby scenario, so we don't actively go and build solutions to take to market, because it changes so quickly that once we've trained people and built the processes, the market has completely changed.
We try to stay on top of things and make sure we have the ability to work on it. When we find the right scenario within our customers we'll absolutely turn the tap on and scale it out quickly and we have a great partner ecosystem that can help us with that.
How close is it to mainstream adoption?
Big organisations with big budgets will start to use this technology in anger this year, but it will initially be a small portion. I think we will then see a wider subset of the overall market take it on once it is available to purchase on the big cloud providers, for example Microsoft has its quantum development kit, offering the ability to take quantum computing as-a-service to Azure.
Unless you have a big business case it will remain niche until we see a democratising effect come into the cloud, and then we will see mainstream adoption increasing further down the line.
A lot of it still depends on where organisations already are on their cycle - using a custom-designed ASICS chip to do bleeding-edge artificial intelligence training at light speed is probably a bridge too far if you are still running Windows 7!
Ten resellers reveal what cutting-edge tech they are backing for 2019
Top execs from 10 VARs, including Softcat, ANS and GCI, name the new tech they are placing their bets on this year
David Lannin, CTO, Sapphire
Cutting-edge tech: Transaction stack security
Why are you backing transaction stack security?
It offers a merchant's end users complete protection when they are conducting payments to their website. It protects the customer, transaction and the merchant. All those components can be subject to attack in different ways. This tech wraps instructions in a secure environment so that hackers can't inject code to extrapolate that information. It's up to the seller to decide to implement it, it offers enhanced security and it doesn't cost the end user anything.
How far along are you in the development phase?
We've put it into our portfolio and rolled it out to our own website. Our site is fairly static, and we don't tend to do a lot of payments on it - we just have a couple of payments for our residential conferences. Even so, we've still gone ahead and implemented it on our own site. We are actively talking to customers about it and it is happening on that one.
We're getting interest from banks and utilities companies that are keen to understand how this enhances their overall end-user security.
What vendors are dominating in this space?
It is predominantly start-ups. At the moment, we are not seeing the larger traditional vendors, such as Checkpoint, F5 or Palo Alto dealing with this tech. I guess that is because there is a lot of innovation in this technology, and finding out how that would fold into their portfolios would maybe be a bit of a challenge. Trusted Knight would probably be the main vendor in this space.