Crn21 1200 300.jpeg

Special report: Head above the clouds

New-style managed and converged infrastructures mean an expansion of partnering to provide a seamless customer experience

Teenagers today reportedly communicate only via specific platforms. Emails sent will quite likely go unanswered, and they do not often make many voice calls or answer telephone messages - even though for many individuals or organisations using that wider range of media may remain beneficial.

"In a small, personal way, it's becoming about communicating on shared platforms, and although they have email addresses, they won't check them," explains Bob Dalton, chief executive at managed services specialist Intact IS.

"My 17-year old is at a specialised sixth form college and he uses an online platform, an intranet, to do his work - a kind of content management system with wiki functionality. That's at college. And when he talks to other teenagers, it's [via] Facebook on the mobile."

Businesses no less than individuals are selecting preferred methods of communication and collaboration, with little standardisation seeming likely. This can only be expected to increase as new generations enter the workforce, even though collaboration remains key to organisational efficiency, says Dalton (pictured, right).

With a multiplicity of media platforms, and an "anywhere, any time" expectation of service delivery, support itself must become distributed, and storage is no longer peripheral to the network.

This can be a complex situation for the reseller or services provider, requiring expanded skill sets and more diverse expertise than ever before, which must itself work together well, and avoid retreating into new silos.

Best-of-breed offerings

Darren Briscoe, technical director at Comms-care, says the storage market is moving faster than it has for many years as it adapts to a world of virtualisation and cloud computing. "To ensure they are not left in the slow lane, resellers, distributors and vendors need to safeguard their future by embracing these changes, forming partnerships with specialised technology providers," argues Briscoe.

He also maintains that many, if not all, of the major vendors are now working to lower their historic defences to embrace each other's best-of-breed offerings. This has resulted in the introduction of more bundled, converged infrastructure packages into the market.

Briscoe points to products such as vBlock, where Cisco, VMware and EMC have joined forces to create an off-the-shelf IT infrastructure offering, and FlexPod, where NetApp provides the storage element instead of EMC. He is also seeing resellers building their own variations of these new pre-built bundles so they too can provide tailored propositions to their clients.

"Historically, storage was peripheral to the core network but that is now changing, as it becomes the centrepiece on which converged productised infrastructures are built," Briscoe explains. "One of the main drivers for this change is the increased adoption of mobile working and the need for a virtualised consolidated infrastructure."

Briscoe says that while clients are always looking to optimise their IT systems, the trend now is to do so by hosting their data, applications and operating systems across all the storage devices they have, making server space available for rapid processing of the data that travels across the network.

"Very few end users we speak to do not have some type or degree of virtualisation in their environment," he adds.

The end result should be - if the managed services are done correctly - that the customer's IT infrastructure becomes more resilient, responsive and readily scalable, on a consolidated platform where storage becomes an intelligent central hub, he says.

And because the manufacturers themselves are now collaborating in these technology areas, resellers too must reshape their businesses to take advantage of resulting opportunities. In Briscoe's view, this means by engaging with partners that have specialist skills to fill any gaps in their own portfolio.

Of course, this is where Comms-care and its support services hope to come in, says Briscoe (pictured, left)

Seamless, streamlined and integrated

"By partnering with best-of-breed organisations, resellers can start to add real value to their propositions by incorporating wraparound services such as site surveys, installation, integration and ongoing maintenance," Briscoe maintains.

"Any reseller can purchase the technology that makes up these productised converged infrastructures but very few have the expertise, accreditations and know-how to deliver and support these bundled solutions."

According to Briscoe, Comms-care is already seeing high demand for its services in this area - from resellers, vendors and distributors. And it is true that all three communities recognise that market differentiation increasingly requires provision of the right services: the ones that deliver across customer IT pain points.

"People are very interested now in ‘burstability' - for example, if they take on another 25 customers, they can ‘burst' up their capacity," he says. "That also means your [customer] relationships can be a little bit longer-lasting."

The right services, notes Briscoe, will be seamless, streamlined, and integrated from the customer's point of view - no matter how many different organisations must collaborate to provide them. Then, he says, there will be real momentum in the adoption of the collaborative, managed IT infrastructures that are increasingly seen as the best answer to a range of modern-day organisational difficulties.

Gavin Jackson, director of vCloud and service providers at VMware, notes that the trend for managing converged infrastructures for end users, while not new, has certainly been gathering speed through the past year or so.

"Customers do not really want to manage anything at all. They want all that to go away. And individual clients want that single experience, and preferably a fully automated infrastructure. They want to use those resources in an automated way," he says.

This often means consolidating more of their operations on to the datacentre, as well as progressing the virtualisation programme where possible, scaling up at the same time as they devolve management for aspects of their legacy infrastructure.

"I think VDI [virtual desktop infrastructure] is driving a lot of demand for instantly available converged infrastructures. Things such as unified communications are another end-use case," he says.

VMware's vBlock targets a range of partners, including SIs, outsourcers, and services providers and aims to assist with both on- and off-premise collaboration for end users. It can help reduce the cost-to-serve for SMBs as well, along with service provider tools such as vCloud Integration Manager. Many customers are in transition between hybrid, public and private cloud infrastructures, so any simplification of management tends to be very welcome, Jackson (pictured, left) suggests.

Complex operation

Gary Collins, co-founder and director of London-based "datacentre-to-desktop" service provider Intercept IT, agrees there is growing demand for services offerings around virtualised and converged infrastructures at both ends of the market.

"As a business, we offer it in two different areas - public or private cloud for medium to large customers that have their own staff, and we provide consultancy services around the desktop, server, storage and on-premise evaluations," he says.

"Then we have our online services, and through that we do desktop as a service, as a public cloud solution to SMBs - those that do not have the internal capability."

Often customers are in mid-transition to the cloud or to and from the latest versions of applications such as Microsoft Exchange, and hybrid cloud offerings are widely deployed. It is a complex situation for many businesses, Collins agrees, and this makes the partner's role in obtaining operational efficiencies for them even more important and valuable.

Constantly and consistently reinventing what you do as the market changes is critical, he says.

"Even when customers have their own teams or resources, they often need a particular team to address a particular pain point," he says. "And we are certainly seeing, among our peers, increased business in on-premise consultancy. Things were a struggle for our first nine years but now people are starting to understand about cloud computing."

Intercept IT has about 52 staff at the moment, with 12 more roles expected to open up this year. Collins confirms also that finding the right staff with skills to help with growth in this area is difficult - and agrees that partnering with other services providers may work, although many other companies are similarly struggling to find the right skill sets for this opportunity and there remains a risk that you either lose or simply do not develop the skills in-house.

"We are quite picky as well, because it is all about delivering a high-quality service," he adds. "But I am pretty optimistic about the future."

Being vendor-agnostic, and skilling up for Windows 8, which has a high focus on mobile apps, are important at the moment, he adds, with Windows 8 potentially shaking things up for VARs "quite a bit" in the near future.

"And there will be less of a requirement for SAN infrastructure in highly virtualised environments," notes Collins.

Intact IS's Bob Dalton says the Ascot-based company helps firms both build infrastructure that they can use to provide their own cloud-based services, and provides its own cloud-based services. Both areas of focus are seeing increasing success, and are expected to grow over the coming months and years.

As a Cisco partner, Intact IS supplies only via its own channel partners but it is seeing success globally as well as in the UK.

One throat to choke

"I guess we are appearing to be a bit of a bellwether for this," says Dalton. "We have started to see a lot of work over the past six months, so it is quite recent really that we have seen a bit of an uptick. There is a lot of consolidation going on as well, and [also] we are getting quite a lot of work dismantling historic platforms."

The push for collaborative, converged IT infrastructure with managed services has been a long time coming, he agrees, especially if you remember Cisco was talking about it 10 years ago, but organisations are now warming to the idea - especially as the global economic situation makes it ever more important to meet customer needs in the most efficient, yet adaptable and flexible, way.

"It is [collaboration] around email platforms, and around integration; business management platforms whether it is SAP or whatever, and people saying ‘this is not our main thing'." Dalton suggests.

Technology providers must work together more to deliver the "one throat to choke" that customers are seeking, he agrees. SLAs must be arranged to guarantee that to the customer, especially with the advance of cloud - which people intuitively seem to trust less - even though vendors, integrators and telcos may all be working together on the one solution.

"People are always looking for a higher level of service from a cloud-based provider than they were used to before [with a non-cloud, on-premise offering]. The level of excellence and consistency that is sought is very high, especially where you are talking to people who delivered the service to date," Dalton says. "That sets a challenge for the provider."

Specialist providers will be required more than ever, to fill in some of the gaps and provide that additional consistency of service, even where vendors collaborate on an offering that fits the customer's needs. And today there is growing acceptance of technology providers' need to collaborate - whereas in the past a managed services provider would say, ‘sure, give me the keys, we'll do everything', he says.

"From an end-user perspective, it is potentially all good," says Dalton. "And for vendors to do [what the channel can do] is still a massive competitive issue, and I think that [for vendors] it will continue to be a massive challenge."

In future, though, telecommunications providers that successfully migrate into areas such as integration could prove to be the major players in providing managed, converged, virtualised IT. After all, they were the first to use a "virtual cloud" type of model, way back in the days of the early landlines, with pay-as-you-go billing and the customer owning little or no infrastructure. "This is almost like an extension of that," notes Dalton.

Download the special report in PDF