Mid-range Servers

• Back to the future: New opportunities in the mid-range server market
• Addressing the skills shortage
• In search of the Holy Grail: Partnering with software developers
• The more things change, the more they stay the same
• Turning competition into cooperation

Addressing the skills shortage

Finding and retaining skilled staff is one of the big industry topics of the moment. But does the trend of Wintel servers nibbling away at their traditional space make this problem particularly acute in the mid-range server market? Frontline Systems' Steve Murphy thought not.

"I think it's just general because the market is so buoyant," he said. "Universities are not spitting out enough trainees, internships are not happening at the top end of town anymore, and too many people are going overseas."

But Computer Merchants' Matt Dargie said a shortage of mid-range server skills has become a real customer concern. As an example, he highlighted a company in Perth that is currently considering a platform migration away from the iSeries because it has been looking for somebody with relevant skills for six months. Although it has now found somebody, he said the company was still leaning towards moving platforms.

Service Elements' Mark Johnston agreed end-users were concerned about a lack of skills but suggested this was a great opportunity for skilled resellers to fill the void. This point was developed by Avnet's Michael Costigan.

"It's more of an opportunity than a problem. We are seeing a new breed of business partner emerge that are able to go out there and offer solutions," he said. "Our role as a value-added distributor is to enable those business partners. It's a 'train the trainer' mentality and a lot of our guys have increasingly been out there doing that with business partners."

In an attempt to tackle the skills shortage around its System i platform, IBM has announced bridging courses that it claims can transition the skills of a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer to its environment in just three days.

Sundata's Kon Kakanis said mid-range servers were a better solution in a skills-constrained environment. He pointed to analyst findings that it takes 25 per cent of the manpower to run an iSeries than to run the same workload through Windows.