From left: Roy Pater Accucom | Claudio Antoniolo SystemCraft | Adam Nixon PC Nation | Jon McBride Dell | Paul Beale Purruna | Jamie Warner eNerds | Amir Antonir Spectrumtech | Mark Gluckman Regal Information Technology | Steve Gross VMware | Jean-Marc Annonier IDC | Nadia Cameron ARN | Jay Turner Dell | Robert Brown ...
Roy Pater, Accucom (RP): Certainly, with the S in SMB, it’s more about being able to move systems around easily, whereas for mid-sized businesses, it’s where you have that shortage of technical skill. In the mid-sized market, we have seen higher uptake and about 60 per cent virtualising, whereas it’s about 20 per cent of smaller clients.
NC: Is more education required in the smaller end of town?
RP: Those S-sized customers don’t really care what it is and I don’t know that education would help.
RB: They’re interested in dollars at the end of the day.
Steve Gross, VMware (SG): Really, they’re looking for the most cost-effective solution not only in the long-term, but also upfront. If they are cutting their server fleet from three or one, or three to two, virtualisation provides them with cost savings. But from a VMware point of view, what we find is that the customers then start asking, or resellers start recommending, that they can get services that weren’t available in the physical world. We touched on hosting as the next wave, but we’re also seeing peer-to-peer hosting between resellers and the customer for DR scenarios, and replication of information centrally.
RB: Once you’re in virtualisation land, it’s easy to say ‘you want a BlackBerry server? Well you can just buy the $1000 software licence and through virtualisation have that BlackBerry server’. Whereas in a physical sense, buying a new $2000 server to host that isn’t as cheap for a small business with three staff. Virtualisation does open up upselling opportunities. For sub-25 organisations, they just want to set it and forget it, and focus on being an accountant or a mechanic.
JMA: I think in the S market, education should be around the notion of security and recovery. I have seen so many small businesses with the server next to the water cooler, under the stairs.
JW: I agree virtualisation take-up is slower depending on size. The smaller-sized businesses that have an IT manager but aren’t enterprise or corporate level struggle to keep up with technology. We have one client with an IT manager that realised the business owners have been experiencing pain points because of a slow network. They have five sites and use Citrix, and the server architecture is at least five years old and all out of warranty. As managers with no idea about IT, they’re wondering why they’re paying their IT manager X dollars to manage it when they don’t get any proactive consulting about it because the knowledge isn’t there. They are all operating on a break/fix model and until something goes wrong, nothing happens. If it is left to internal IT managers, who potentially aren’t keeping up their skills, adoption [of virtualisation] is much slower. I agree managed services providers are driving a lot of take-up of new technologies.
RB: Sometimes it’s hard getting into those organisations because you speak to the owner, and he tells you to speak to the IT guy, but the IT guy is just keeping the lights on and isn’t interested in that stuff. His job is on the line potentially, especially if I come in and start talking about refresh and virtualisation.
CA: Or the problem could be another external one-man band advising them but who hasn’t kept up.
Jon McBride, Dell (JMc): What’s the tipping point when an organisation gets to a certain size or infrastructure, or where we’re introducing virtualisation to them on a larger scale? We spoke about giving them a free product for some flexibility, but there comes a point where you’re starting to introduce a capability that’s more enterprise, which, if they don’t have it, means you have to start introducing things like networked storage. We are asking a bit more of the infrastructure in place, but what comes with that is more flexibility and capability.
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RB: With a lot of our clients, we go to a DAS model first and put on a free or [vSphere] Essentials version, because it’s cheap. Then after a year, when they have another server to refresh, we put in the Dell or EMC SAN, giving them a two- or three-year step. It’s putting your toe in the water, and it’s a bit of a gamble they don’t understand. You give them some benefit of flexibility, then step it up over time. It comes down to being that trusted advisor and having a lifecycle conversation, not a fly-by night conversation.
CA: There’s no real tipping point.
AN: We have just come off a campaign where we targeted 300 prospects with the idea of tackling virtualisation. At an SMB level, you had two areas: Those with an internal guy; and the business owners. We found it a great success because we were ultimately trying to get one-on-one appointments to talk about virtualisation for their organisation. From a consulting point of view, we were then able to give them an understanding of how it applies to their business and what the potential benefits would be. The interesting thing was that at a certain level – around 20 seats – there was a clear case for managed services.
