In a SPIN over VIRTUALISATION

How does this tie into a managed services offering?
It would enable resellers to do managed services in a much less complex way. If you go back 5-10 years, you had to know a lot to do managed services. Now if you have the tight container concepts around what the customer needs from you, you can successfully enter the managed services space and host the applications, provide software-as-a-service and optimise it all to run well. Traditionally, you had a server dedicated to each customer. Now I can have one big server with other customers on it and run that business efficiently.

DR is one of the areas we see a big resurgence in a managed services context. This will allow some companies to get rid of in-house IT altogether - it will be like buying electricity or a phone service.

What is PlateSpin doing to help resellers put together a datacentre strategy?
The standard programs we have include sales training and incentives, but it's an education curve. Resellers interested in building long-term relationships with customers can start with consolidation, then DR, followed by provisioning. Three or four years later, they can still be helping customers modernise their datacentre infrastructure. We're trying to engage partners as much as we can to help them realise the lifetime value they can offer all of their customers.

When our products were originally built, they were designed to accommodate integrator-style usage. For example, both PowerConvert and PowerRecon can be licensed on a per-use basis as well. So if you're an integrator, you can rent the software for the project. That allows the cost to scale. If you have a larger business, you can buy what we call systems integrator licenses to divide among projects.

How do you see datacenter management evolving over the next couple of years?
It's going to get bigger. In many respects, we've been on a course to provide workload, or lifecycle management software, in the datacentre. One of the important issues is how you protect the datacentre through your lifecycle, another one is how you optimise it, provision it, and relocate it on a project basis. The aim ultimately is to operate in the middle of the stack between the hardware and the business services management layer and help customers run dynamic datacentres.

If you look 18-24 months ahead, people will be buying software that can be used to make practical changes to the datacentre for projects, but also software that can improve datacentre operations by reducing wastage and risk. We're trying to provide the flexibility so the goal and actual states can follow each other over time, and users can make adjustments to the datacentre to keep them closer together. We can do a lot of that today, but it's not as automated as the lights-out model customers will be ready for in the next 1-2 years.

How much of a driver is green computing?
It is the topic of the day, but it also has practical benefits. One of the things I find when you sell software based on an ROI model is that it helps if it really does save users money. Software sold on people time-saving never fulfils itself, but with server consolidation, you literally have 500 servers to start with and 100 when you're done. So you can prove the business case for reducing infrastructure and the impact it will have on an organisation's electricity usage.

In the US, the utility companies are subsidising companies to do consolidation because it's cheaper for them to pay you to take servers out than it is to build a new power plant. Our impression is this thinking is starting to spread. We won a green product of the year award in Europe and we're hoping to spread that message here. As part of the profiling tools built into PowerRecon, we can capture information about how much power each server uses, so that when you model the virtualisation solution, it will give you the before and after measures. This helps users see what kind of power savings are tied to what consolidation approach.

How are you helping resellers to capture and use this information?
What resellers can do as part of that pre-sales engagement is offer to run our tools for a couple of weeks and gather the information they need to speak intelligently about a customer's environment. This makes the reseller more accurate in their business proposals. Resellers could then use the same model to capture the actual benefits of a consolidation project afterwards. You can also use it to have point-in-time graphs of power usage or problematic areas.

We've also recently added predictive datacentre forecasting to our software. Again, one of the goals is to avoid getting locked in to today's view of the datacentre. You want to model it based on how the software thinks it's going to look six months or a year from now, so you create a more stable base for your business plan. If you're a hosting provider, you could use these tools to do a 90-day trial to get your service level agreements accurate. It's about being more proactive.

With the number of acquisitions and investments going on around virtualisation, it must a tumultuous time to be a software vendor.
There are lots of start-ups, but at the high end a lot of [software management] players have gone away, definitely. Going back to 2003, we still had EMC and Marimba, Veritas and Altiris as separate companies, and HP hadn't bought BladeLogic. The top 20 list is down to 12 or 13. What it does say is there's less need for so many different ways to do the same thing. As virtualization falls into the background, it's going to experience the same level of consolidation.

One of our advantages as a third-party vendor is we can maintain the neutrality between OEMs that are offering this to specific verticals.

Where will PlateSpin be in five years time?
We would anticipate PlateSpin will be part of that consolidation and someone will buy us. In the meantime, we've got our heads down and are building the business as big as we can.

What are the biggest opportunities for the channel in the datacentre today?

Over the next 12 months, the biggest opportunity from a partner perspective is disaster recovery. We think customers who have started to tackle a bit of server consolidation reserve the rest of their budget money improving the survival of the business if disaster strikes. Partners who are investing in virtualisation can leverage it as a way to help with DR. They can sell services, software and hardware as a tag on, and build a tight relationship with the customer. It's going to be harder to compete on the server consolidation side, as all of the bigger players, like Dell, are gearing up and getting into the game. But on the DR side it's more about solution selling and the hardware vendors aren't as good as that. You need someone to come in and help the customer every day without the ulterior motive of selling boxes. I think there's some good balance there for partners to get involved.