SNW Europe channel round-up
As a counter indicator to the pessimistic economic mood, SNW Europe has been a success on many levels. The two-day gathering in Frankfurt last week included more than 130 sessions and was supported by 70 sponsors, 25 of which were new for 2011. A record 1,300 delegates attended and the expo area and breakout session were busy across most of the event.
The show was dominated by product announcement and refreshes, with channel news somewhat scarce.
Enterprise data protection firm Bocada articulated its vision of putting people on the ground in the UK to grow its own channel after an initial “outsourced model” didn’t receive the required results. CEO Nancy Hurley’s vision of engaging with Veeam and Quest partners with the offer of 30 percent margin and an opportunity to break into consulting was appealing.
Emulex, the number two company behind Intel in the storage networking infrastructure adaptor market, inked a new distribution deal with Stordis. The firm was showcasing its technology that allows channel partners to soft upgrade its adapters to support more protocol via software. The firm was bullish over the market, especially as cloud prompts firms to close the connectivity gap that hampers cloud adoption.
Innovative start-ups in big data like Amplidata talked tech on new multi petabyte systems using Eurasure codes as well as low-powered servers to potentially make Petabyte-sized storage pools at the lowest possible costs. This briefing dovetailed neatly with HP announcing its first ARM based servers on the first day of the show.
Similarly, rivals like Scality, an object storage technology start-up, talked about potential OEM and service provider deals. The firm has lured undisclosed big service providers with pricing that it calculates at “pennies per GB per month” for cloud service providers. Both are still early in the cycle but have tantalising technologies that may well, obliquely, impact on the channel in the next five years. Assuming they don’t get bought in the next wave scale-out / big data acquisitions.
NetApp previewed its new Ontap 8 architecture that has spread down to its new entry level. Headline grabbing performance numbers from the firm require much more careful study for voracity but it was the vendor’s new “shallow margin” scheme was more interesting for us channel watchers.
Acronis meanwhile shared data from a survey of its 1200 partners from across Europe. In all the cloud hype, virtualization, physical backup and data protection are still the money makers. Although cloud is on the horizon, almost half (49 percent) of Acronis partners have transitioned to service providers – a trend which is clearly on the increase and evident across SNW.
As always, rumours flowed. These included the as possibility of Oracle buying into big data storage soon (unlikely), Intel looking at getting more low powered processors into the datacentre through an OEM partnership (likely), Huawei is about to takeover its joint-venture with Symantec (highly probable) and that Acer’s Gateway brand was on the way out (absolutely true).
With the economic outlook subdued for Europe as a whole, the event reinforced the notion that data growth is certainly not slowing down. The channel is critical in delivering new technologies and SNW was the place to be last week to see the potential.
