Round Table

The cloud 'security strategy' involves adopting security solutions that seamlessly span physical, virtual and private/hybrid/public cloud environments while simplifying operational and management complexities. Roundtable attendees got down to business, discussion the 'practical steps' and issues and opportunities involved in securing the cloud environment. Jennifer O'Brien reports.

Industry executives across the channel gathered at Otto Ristorante in Sydney to discuss the journey towards the cloud. ARN in conjunction with itX, Trend Micro and VMware hosted the exclusive discussion on the securing the journey to the cloud, in what was a broad-based and detailed conversation of this major topic.

Industry executives across the channel gathered at Otto Ristorante in Sydney to discuss the journey towards the cloud. ARN in concert with Microsoft hosted the exclusive discussion on Harnessing the power of the Cloud, highlighting some of top challenges and benefits in transitioning to the new business model.

The changing face of distribution was discussed by a host of distributors and resellers at a Distributor Forum roundtable at Bilson’s in Sydney.

The datacentre of the future is shaped by a number of forces including commoditisation, virtualisation, integration and innovation. A group of industry experts sat down to discuss the key factors shaping the evolution of the datacentre of the future and its impact on the channel.

How to retain profitability within the channel is an issue vendors, distributors and resellers have to constantly stay focused on

Microsoft’s Gianpaolo Carraro challenged the fact that everything should be paid for by usage.

A critical question posed by Microsoft’s Gianpaolo Carraro was whether the channel was innovating from a business model perspective to meet new demand for more accountability, ROI and solutions success.

Selling technology for technology’s sake simply doesn’t cut it anymore. ARN recently brought together a panel of industry representatives to look at why selling business productivity, ROI and innovation are critical to the channel’s success and how these elements will be the force behind cloud computing take-up.

The way the IT industry positions and sells technology to business has undergone significant change over the years. There are two overarching reasons: Offerings have matured, gained complexity and infiltrated the corporate environment, delivering new opportunities and business cases for different types of customers.

The transformation of IT through new delivery models like cloud computing raises questions about the role CIOs and IT managers will play in a more business-oriented, on-demand world.

One of the questions raised by Dell’s Jon McBride was how resellers were taking virtualisation in their customer base to the next level. While many clients claim to have deployed virtualisation extensively, a bit of digging shows many only have about 10 per cent of their environment on virtual technology.

ARN recently held a roundtable on selling virtualisation to SMBs. Attached are highlights from the recent event.

One highly-debated topic raised during the roundtable was whether resellers were investing in building managed and cloud services to meet increased customer demand.

While the case for server virtualisation in the SMB market is intensifying, many partners around the table were less convinced about short-term take-up of desktop virtualisation.

Growing popularity of hosting, cloud and the managed services model are raising questions around whether telcos will again threaten the traditional systems integration channel in the SMB space.

Virtualisation is dominant in the enterprise market today, but how is it faring in the SMB space? ARN brought together a collection of channel players and vendors to discuss the opportunities and challenges for virtualisation technology in the smaller end of town.

Vendors, the channel and the media have spent plenty of time dwelling on the acceptance and deployment of virtualisation in the enterprise sector, but just how far has this technology come at the smaller end of town?

Cloud computing is being touted as a completely new way of delivering technology, yet many of the solutions on offer sound surprisingly similar to traditional outsourcing. So what is the difference between the two?

The term “cloud computing” has only graced the pages of technology publications and corporate IT agendas over the last 18 months. But already, it has become one of the most dominating technology trends influencing the IT industry.