ENTERPRISE TECHNOLOGY
Certain markets within the region are
saturated with regards to the number of
players but, at the same time, there are
also geographic challenges that make it
difficult for a channel partner to reach
customers. To stand out in a crowd,
a channel player has to continually
distinguish himself by evolving from
a seller to a trusted adviser who
understands requirements and is able to
address them. An effective and relatively
inexpensive way to stand out is to
maintain a social media presence.
As it is right now, a lot of channel
partners are still focused on phone, e-mail
and face-to-face transactions, whereas
there are millions of people who look for
and purchase via the web or ask for help
on deciding what to buy on social media
platforms. Even without a website, if a
social presence is maintained and an
opportunity presents itself, a channel
partner can tie up with a logistics company
to address remote customer needs.
Today, majority of e-commerce sites
are market places where even smaller
resellers can open their brand stores, make
their presence online and reach out to a
large target audience.
“We are increasingly witnessing the
growing trend of e-commerce and a
lot of retailers are trying to adopt and
reflect success they have had offline
to now online. Not only are retailers
trying to adopt online stores, but also
new e-commerce platforms and brands
are emerging every day. While physical
stores help communicate the product
assortment directly to customers, online
offers higher reach to channel partners,”
explains Khwaja Saifuddin, Senior Sales
Director, Western Digital, India, Middle
East and Africa.
“At Western Digital Corporation, we
realise that our success is dependent on
those we partner with. We ensure that all
policies and practices are geared towards
ensuring their success, especially in such a
highly competitive market. The company has
instituted a strong programme to support its
channel partners, with the inclusion of and
Western Digital Corporation firmly believes
in supporting them.
Reducing the sprawl of
compute and storage
I
nfrastructure and operations decision
makers are recommended to follow
five steps to achieve optimal outcomes
with IT infrastructure modernisation:
Step 1: Reassign your inventory
of servers to address random
server proliferation
Organisations at this stage have a highly
inefficient infrastructure marked by
random server proliferation, where
systems have been added in a siloed
way to meet the ad hoc needs of
business units or particular workloads.
Infrastructure and operations decision
makers should begin addressing this
by taking a detailed inventory of assets.
Once complete, they have the necessary
information to start a process of
consolidation and rationalisation.
Consolidation is a reduction in
the number of physical servers, while
rationalisation is the reduction of the
variety of different server types. Both
are important aspects of simplifying
IT infrastructure, yet rationalisation
is often overlooked even though
most complex IT systems include
underutilised or inappropriate
systems. Consolidating without
rationalising simply perpetuates
unnecessary functions in a less
complex infrastructure,
Step 2: Develop common management
tools and processes
When unnecessary assets have been
removed, it is a good time to implement
a common management of the entire
IT infrastructure, including the
software-defined network, compute
infrastructure, and storage. This should
be straightforward and can enable
the measurement of success of all
subsequent steps.
Step 3: Reduce the number of common
locations across an infrastructure
At this point, opportunities to reduce
the number of physical locations in the
IT infrastructure will emerge, which
should reduce real-estate costs, as
well as further simplify management
and sourcing. Often this will involve
datacentre relocation or re-examining
provisions for lights out operations and
remote office branch office.
Step 4: Renovate infrastructure
through workload consolidation
and automation
This step can be complex and the overall
goal is to further reduce physical assets
by increasing the workload density
and efficiency of each server. Typically,
virtualisation is used to fit more
workloads onto each physical asset and
reduce the total cost of ownership of the
IT infrastructure. This is also a great
time to identify workloads and processes
that are good candidates for automation
and further increase efficiency.
Step 5: Rationalise the variety and
type of items within your infrastructure
Now the number of physical assets
has been reduced, the next step is to
rationalise the number and type of logical
assets present within the infrastructure.
Initially this step is concerned
mainly with infrastructure
standardisation toward commercial
off-the-shelf infrastructure, typically
achieved with software-defined
implementations and virtualisation.
This is an ongoing process as new
business demands are placed on IT
infrastructure and old processes, and
workloads become redundant.
(Source: Gartner)
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