Unified communications has been “a bit disappointing”, Owens reveals. “I thought we’d see more Lync action but we haven’t seen so much in the mid-market as we thought we would.”
Asked to explain why this is the case, he suggests that while there are lots of features in UC that are useful, it’s possible people don’t consider them to be “have to have, core offerings”. Besides, he thinks it’s still quite an expensive system to put into the mid-market: “It only really makes sense for 100 users or a couple of hundred users.”
Security
Which brings us to security. There has been “some good growth”, Owens reports. SonicWall is going well with much more enterprise business since it was acquired by Dell. There has also been good growth in Barracuda Networks which provides mid-price boxes “that really suit the Irish market”.
He says there is a big move to virtual appliances taking place although not on the firewall/UTM side because most of those appliances run on custom silicon. There is a lot more intelligence in security than there was even five years ago, he adds, but then the threats are more complex as well. Commtech has seen good success in single sign-on, authentication solutions and expects to see a lot more of that.
Unsurprisingly, security and unified communications are not expected to grow at the same rate as storage with both pencilled in to contribute around 12% growth in 2014. Owens expects the channel to remain to fairly stable. The top 10 to 20 customers will remain the same. “The same top customers are there year in year out,” he says, “we have all the usual suspects.”
Commtech deals with around 350 resellers. While people bandy numbers like 1,200 around, Owens says: “I don’t know who they are. There are maybe a couple of hundred that do any business, tops, and 50 that do the vast majority of business in Ireland. The trick’s to sell the top 100 customers more product because there aren’t another 100 customers out there for us to get.”
For Commtech, 2014 is a case of “keep on keeping on”, he comments. “There is positivity out there at the moment. Enterprise business has been good for the last couple of years and we’re going to see more growth in the mid-market this year and more indigenous business from companies with 100 employees. There’s a lot of kit that needs to be refreshed and we’re seeing a lot more converged infrastructure this year. Generally, we will have a good year, I don’t see any storm clouds on the horizon.”
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