Philippe Fosse, Vice President EMEA Channels, EMC, foresees how the regional IT channel is set to evolve in 2016.
In 2015 the cloud had full impact on businesses. Enabled by the flexibility and power of cloud computing, companies have launched new digital business models that are transforming customer services. At the same time, wholly new businesses have gained currency, ones like Uber, which is reshaping entire industries and even cultures.
Against this backdrop, the channel is evolving. In order to better meet customer requirements for flexibility and scalability, the IT channel is becoming increasingly flexible and scalable itself. It is fair to say that the channel of today bares little or no resemblance to the channel from two or three years ago.
We think that 2016 will see this pace of change accelerate further as we continue to move towards a brand new age of powerful enterprise IT. This will be characterised in the following ways:
Co-opetition will become more widespread
The advent of cloud computing and virtualisation has made the IT infrastructure channel much more complex than it used to be. With a wide array of technologies and business models available to partners and customers alike, it is no longer possible for one partner to meet the needs of all its potential customers.
This evolution places the customer even more firmly at the centre of the process. All that matters in the new channel ecosystem is the customer’s need – the partner will look to deliver on this in any way possible, using whichever technology approach is best suited to each specific use case.
There will be a war for talent in the IT partner ecosystem
As the pace of hybrid cloud deployments accelerates, and cloud technologies continue to mature, it will become increasingly important for channel organisations to have the right sales talent in place.
The channel sales agent of 2016 will not only need to understand the customer’s application, but also the infrastructure that serves it. This knowledge will include understanding where best to run a workload – on-premise or in the public cloud – as well as of the key platform technologies essential for hybrid infrastructures: Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Infrastructures-as-a-Service (IaaS). It will also require agents to know how Cloud Native Applications (CNA) are built.
2016 will see high-growth in flash, software-defined, and hyper-converged infrastructures
In 2015 we saw hybrid cloud emerge as the preferred model for cloud deployments. In 2016 this trend will continue; driving growth in three key technology areas, flash arrays, software-defined infrastructures and hyper-converged infrastructures.
Distributors continue to evolve
Change has been rapid and widespread in the channel of late. Perhaps most of all, the distribution channel has been subject to transformation in the wake of the cloud revolution.
In 2016, we expect to see an increasing number of distributors aggregate and connect private cloud services, taking on the role from vendors. This will allow IT vendors to focus on product innovation while distributors can focus on delivering effective hybrid cloud environments to their customers.
2016 will be the first big year of the IoT
Gartner has predicted that 2016 will see the Internet of Things hit the big time, with a mesh of ‘smart’ machines and digital devices and services glued together by a data backbone. It is a vision whereby nearly everything is a device and everything is capable of generating the data that could lead to business-changing insight.
Eventually, as a result of the Internet of Things, all businesses will be Big Data businesses. In 2016, channel organisations can stake a claim in helping businesses migrate to this new data-driven world.
