But partners need to realise that “the nature of the technology they are selling is changing”. For example, security or network workload will be sold as a virtual appliance “which is a very different way of making money”. Also, with a product like Citrix NetScaler capacity can be increased by a licence which is fulfilled by the VAR. “It depends on the nature of the product and the reseller,” Saunders says, “but when you have a network where a lot of the capacity is in software and the licence key and not so much the physical distribution of the hardware, it’s easier in some respects but the challenge is in the pace of the business.”
He believes that resellers who want to do this really well will have to “get this in a hurry”. Most VARs make their money in professional services but with a software defined data centre (SDDC) a variety of security and software services will be consolidated. It won’t be like the old world where everything (compute, storage, networking) was in a separate silo. VARs “will need to become a bit of a jack of all trades, they’ll need a slightly broader range of skills”.
In the past, there was a very clear distinction between a security VAR and an application VAR, “now you can’t afford to be that specific. You can’t afford to maintain a specialism, you need to have a broader portfolio that extends beyond the security and networking topology to application delivery and virtualisation”.
“…network operators and users need to take steps to plan, trial and migrate to SDN architectures” – Mervyn Kelly, Ciena
Kelly at Ciena says the channel can support SDN in a variety of ways as it becomes more mainstream. It can show enterprises the benefits in upgrading their network infrastructure, such as cost savings through operational efficiencies, increased customer satisfaction and potential new revenue streams. The channel will also “need to also show their capabilities in helping enterprises transition to the new infrastructure with minimal business disruption. One potential way to achieve this could be to help train the enterprise operation teams on the new infrastructure, or act in a system integrator capability to offload the full complexity of the upgrade and manage the end-to-end migration activities”. Channel partners could also act as consultants to enterprises to “guide them in transforming their business processes”.
Saunders believes that SDN is “at a pivotal moment in time. There’s been a lot of discussion and people are beginning to deploy this stuff in anger. SDN is a broad brush and it’s a multilayered challenge”. He warns that while some vendors talk about SDN “as if it’s the only way, a lot of customers don’t see it that way. They have very large investments in traditional physical networks and security, so I think there will be a hybrid model. Everyone tends to forget that organisations’ find solutions to technical challenges quicker than the market they are selling to is willing to adopt them.”
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