Intelligent Tech Channels Issue 15 | Page 19

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) 19