Seeing the big picture

Trade

In the fourth of a regular series of articles seeking to identify growth areas for channel partners in 2013, Irish Computer asked a number of resellers, distributors and vendors for their views on the opportunities presented by storage and audio-visual.

AUDIO-VISUAL

Liam Sheehan, AV sales, Osmosis Ireland
Digital signage is the big growth area this year according to Sheehan. "There are a lot of opportunities for resellers in this area and there are many markets to focus on," he says.

Digital signage is becoming commonplace in the corporate world as a way to communicate to internal and external staff, visitors and customers. Staff-facing screens can be used to provide call statistics in a call centre, sales targets in a business or relevant news information on the trading floor of a bank.

In government, digital signage opportunities span a diverse array of applications from healthcare to housing authorities, with a requirement for easily accessed solutions for non technical customers. "The immediacy of digital signage can be coupled with the need to deliver different information to different audiences," he comments. It can be used in education, from primary schools through to higher education establishments. Screens in reception areas, staff rooms and canteens are already proven as a good way to communicate to pupils, students, staff and guests.

In hotels, restaurants and conference centres, digital signage "is an invaluable tool for communicating to visitors and customers, via screens that are instructive and interactive". And then there’s the area where most people encounter digital signage, the retail environment. Content can vary from being informational, for example listing features of the latest mobile phone, to aspirational, like, pictures of a car rally at a car dealership.

Conor McGrogan, managing director, Steljes Ireland
McGrogan believes the main opportunities will be in the corporate market where the potential is said to be 40 times bigger than in the education market. "While we are continuing to support our resellers in the education market," he says, "we are also helping them to diversify into the corporate market to provide them with a continued platform for growth."

In the current challenging economic conditions, companies are examining how they can streamline operations, work more productively and reduce costs. Until now, collaborative technology has been a ‘nice to have’, even a luxury, but it is fast becoming a must have for boardrooms, meetings rooms and training rooms everywhere. "At Steljes we offer technologies that can help companies reduce their costs and increase productivity – from digital signage to interactive whiteboards to video conferencing and everything in-between," he adds.

McGrogan stresses that Steljes does not "expect the market to come to us, nor do we expect users to identify new technologies and their benefits". The company’s more than 25 years experience working in the AV industry means it understands commercial success doesn’t just happen, no matter how innovative a technology might be. "This is why our marketing department markets to resellers and users," he claims. "And the results are paying off. We are gaining traction in this market through generating awareness of the technology with user advertising and working on joint marketing activities with our resellers to stimulate demand."

He adds that Steljes "is determined to make 2013 the year of opportunity for its resellers". With organisations having to work even harder to win business in a recession, Steljes is committed to helping resellers develop their businesses’ profitably despite the challenging economic times. It has developed "a number of new initiatives to help resellers extend their reach in existing markets and expand into new and emerging ones".

These include a minimum credit limit of EUR*5,000 (subject to terms and conditions) and the Steljes Commscentre marketing resource, which includes customisable templates for resellers to add their own messages and contact details to vendor approved co-branded marketing materials. Steljes also has a technology roadshow which brings together all its leading vendors in the same place.

Simon Fagan, managing director, TDMaverick
Fagan says there are a lot of good opportunities around interactivity and collaboration, with some good attach-selling opportunities and cross-over potential between AV and networking.

He highlights interactive solutions like Barco’s ClickShare, which are easily demonstrated and enjoy a high conversion rate from demonstration to sale due to the clear benefit it offers. With ClickShare, multiple users can contribute in a discussion and share content from up to four devices simultaneously. "Of course, it is also much more effective if the group of people sharing their displays have a decent large-format screen at their disposal, so selling ClickShare can help you sell LFDs and projectors," he adds.

Like Sheehan, Fagan sees digital signage "as a strong driver for large-format displays and projectors, and there is a real need for resellers to have skills both in AV and networking technologies here. We see this as a key growth area for resellers and are growing our collaborative solutions team to allow us to support this growth".

Garnett Stewart, general manager, SquareOne Distribution
"We’re expecting growth in a number of sectors," Stewart reveals, listing LED/laser- based technology in projection and display, HDBaseT signal architecture, video walls/digital signage and video conferencing.

Any business deciding on investing in IT will look at a number of different factors and audio visual purchases are no different. "Energy costs, ease of install, control, cost of ownership and suitability to ensure a decent return on the investment are all key," he argues. "The technology has improved to a degree that a strong business case can be made for the introduction of AV into any organisation."

He believes there is a significant Green benefit in moving to LED to save energy costs. Digital signage can be used as a marketing tool to increase business or as a communication method in a large building, while video conferencing has obvious savings in reducing travel time and costs.

To take advantage of these opportunities, resellers have to be up to speed on all the technologies. "It’s our job as a distributor (working closely with our manufacturer partners) to make sure that not only is the technical side of things understood, but also that the user business benefits are clear," Stewart says. "We try and do this through regular training sessions, seminars, site visits and pre-sales consultancy using our solution specialists."

STORAGE

Michael Callaghan, Ireland managing director, CMS Distribution
Network attached storage (NAS) is buoyant at the moment, Callaghan reveals, and CMS has seen continuous growth over the last number of quarters. CMS is the largest supplier of sub-$10,000 NAS solutions in Ireland and the UK, with the broadest range, he boasts. It has a good perspective on the market through its relationships with about a dozen NAS vendors including Synology, WD, QNAP and Drobo.

Flash is another important area of opportunity, spread across three areas: PCIe Flash in servers, hybrid arrays which employ traditional hard disk drives with Flash-based acceleration ("we’re even seeing tiered storage with Flash-based acceleration in entry level solutions," he discloses) and all-Flash arrays.

Despite "premature rumblings of its demise", tape continues to be "very strong and is growing", possibly on the back of Linear Tape File System (LTFS). NAS tape is another exciting development, providing a NAS front-end to the capabilities of LTFS "for cost-effective long-term data stores".

Deduplication "is pervasive and continues to grow". It’s available "pretty much across the board in software and appliances, primary storage, archive stores and backup. CMS is also seeing growth in appliances, "typically with a NAS front end and focused on backup".

Nigel Dunn, director, TDAzlan UK & Ireland
The big topics of conversation at the moment are big data, the challenge of managing the explosion of data and extracting value out of it, Dunn says. These are issues larger enterprises in particular are getting exercised about. They present major opportunities for solutions like HP’s 3PAR StoreServ 7000 arrays, he claims, and the infrastructure to support the fast movement of data to and from storage devices.

The HP 3PAR StoreServ 7000 has broken new ground, Dunn argues, by bringing fibre channel technology and tier 1 features within the reach of SMB customers for the first time. "It’s the first storage solution to offer enterprise-class capabilities to mid-sized organisations," he believes. The product has already attracted a lot of attention "and we expect it to be a really popular choice among organisations looking for totally ‘bullet-proof’, but affordable, advanced storage solutions.

The HP 3PAR StoreServ 7000 is "just giving customers what they want from storage, enabling users to spend less time managing storage, doubling virtual machine density and, with hardware-assisted thin storage, guaranteeing a 50% reduction in capacity requirements. It scales easily, so upgrades are going to be painless and affordable".

As well as delivering better long-term ROI and investment protection, it enables businesses "to cope with the rising volume of data they are accumulating".

Declan Hogan, head of enterprise servers, storage & networking (ESSN), HP Ireland & Karl Jordan, sales manager, HO storage division
Jordan believes the HP 3PAR StoreServ 7000 will provide channel partners with their best opportunities this year. It’s extending 3PAR technology to partners that may not have had carried it previously and to a much wider customer base. "It’s an exceptionally easy system to implement, set up and manage on an ongoing basis," Jordan claims, "and it’s very specifically suited to SMB and mid-sized corporates that otherwise wouldn’t be considering [the technology]."

HP is forecasting to have between 15,000 and 20,000 systems installed globally and is looking at unit sales growth rates of between 200 and 300%. The StoreServ 7000 is aimed at an area where 3PAR hadn’t played before and Jordan says the feedback from partners is that "it’s the most exciting thing they’ve seen for a long time".

He claims it is proving so successful that HP is suffering lead time issues in terms of being able to source and provide the product.

The StoreServ 7000 is being positioned as the natural successor to HP’s traditional mid-range array product, EVA. The vendor has a "very very large installed base of EVA" and it has introduced a migration tool to allow customers to move from EVA to 3PAR.

There are over 100,000 EVAs installed and there is likely to be a significant turnaround of those products over the next two to three years. "There’s a big focus on EVA customers," Hogan says, "and all our channel partners are aware of that." For EVA customers looking at migration in 2013, "the natural migration is to 3PAR", he adds.

Justin Owens, managing director, Commtech
IT managers in 2013 are going to be grappling with the triangle of performance, capacity and cost when it comes to storage, Owens says. As they try to deal with it, they will also have to look at the implications of what is happening in areas like Big Data, data reduction in primary storage (DRIP) and storage resource management.

Big data is an unknown at the moment. There seems to have been a slow take up of big data technologies. "Is this more to do with the size of the Irish market?" Owens asks. He remains "inquisitive to see what is going to be adoption of Big Data strategies and technologies within various organisations this year".

DRIP, which builds on previous generations of storage tiering, is a process of reducing the cost of managing critical and high performance requirement data and less critical archive low performance data.

One of the technologies leading the charge in storage at the moment is solid state storage. Prices used to be prohibitive but they’re now much more realistic and continuing to get even more competitive. The performance for heavy transactional usage is "jaw dropping".

But there won’t be a sudden switch over from hard disk drives to solid state technology. Instead, the market will adopt a hybrid approach. There’s already an acceptance of hybrid arrays made up of solid state drives and hard disk drives. But for many there is still work to be done in trying to amalgamate solid state into a storage array which was there to manage all the storage.

Businesses coming to it from opposite ends of the storage spectrum will have different requirements. For example, a financial trading house will need very high performance in processing while, at the other end, a research organisation could be storing data that no one will need to look at for 20 years.

Resellers that understand the latest storage trends will be able to provide the best solution to their customers but this will take continuous professional development and upskilling with the help of distributors like Commtech.

Read More: Audio Visual channel