Round Table

The tougher economic climate and the need for better costs management is just one of many factors driving managed services take-up. ARN recently pulled together a group of managed services providers and their vendors to talk about why this proactive sales approach is so successful.

ARN recently held a roundtable with a selection of key industry vendors and partners to discuss the managed services phenomenon. Here are some of the highlight comments made during the roundtable event.

ARN recently pulled together a group of security industry representatives to talk about the challenges of securing content, as well as best practices and the channel partner's role.

Successfully securing and controlling information is an increasingly complicated issue for corporates to deal with. ARN recently pulled together a group of security industry experts to talk about the challenges of securing content, as well as best practices and the channel partner’s role. The roundtable was held in conjunction with Marshal8e6.

ARN recently invited a selection of key industry representatives to discuss desktop virtualisation and the impact of the economic downturn on take-up and sales strategies.

Mobility and cloud computing are just some of the latest IT trends impacting the perception of desktop virtualisation. ARN recently brought together a group of industry thought-leaders to discuss the benefits and challenges of delivering desktop virtualisation, as well as how the economic climate is affecting take-up.

Virtualisation was without doubt, the most widely discussed technology last year, and one of the most successfully deployed. And as customers look to rein in costs, and mitigate risk to avoid succumbing to the economic downturn, virtualisation is also proving one of the best opportunities for the channel this year.

Although heavy-handed messaging has led to a great deal of scepticism in the market, there’s no doubting that environmental concerns are creating serious market opportunities. ARN recently brought together a group of IT industry thought-leaders to talk about myths and margins.

Virtual desktops are being touted as a way of delivering applications to any user via any device. So does this brave new mobile world mean curtains for the humble PC? ARN recently brought together a panel of industry professionals to hear their views.

ARN recently brought together a panel of industry experts to discuss a range of datacentre issues.

While there are no silver bullets for current power and cooling issues, Cisco’s datacentre general manager, Dylan Morrison, said partners could help their customers make the best of current environments by looking to consolidate, virtualise and automate wherever possible.

While power and cooling issues in the datacentre are among the biggest in the IT industry today, EMC’s A/NZ president, David Webster, said there’s a view out there among some vendors that the concept of the datacentre will be irrelevant in the future.

One issue put to the panel at ARN’s recent datacentre roundtable was whether the economy was headed into recession and, if so, what impact this could have on IT spending.

Brian Corrigan, ARN (BC): Datacentre power densities are increasing, due to the increased uptake of blade servers and SAN systems, while electricity costs are quickly growing. Is the industry headed for a crisis and, if so, what can be done about it?

The ARN round table was held in conjunction with Firewall Systems and its vendor partners, AirMagnet, Blue Coat, Check Point, Network Box, TippingPoint and WatchGuard.

The virtualisation market continues to grow and is sure to be one of the hottest technology topics again in 2008. ARN recently hosted an industry lunch to find out what developments we can expect to see in the year ahead. What follows is an edited transcript of the discussion.

The world's two largest server vendors have pronounced blades as the future and will continue to plough ever-increasing resources into making them the mainstay of distributed computing. ARN, in conjunction with HP and Avnet, recently hosted an industry lunch to discuss what progress is being made locally.

Selling the environment