Technology Reseller - v17 2019

01732 759725 36 PREDICTIONS The race to adopt and provide new technologies will become critical In 2019, we’ll see many resellers struggle financially due to an unwillingness, or inability, to adopt new technologies on time. Quite simply, channel businesses become stuck in a comfortable business pattern that becomes harder and harder to break out of – from commission structures to customer and vendor relationships. Yet, if resellers can identify and begin offering the next big thing when it is still becoming popular, they will have much greater revenue opportunities – not only from higher margins from a yet-to-be- commoditised product, but also from being one of the main providers of exciting and disruptive new technology. Resellers that stay in their fixed way of working, offering the same products and services to the same customers and relying on updates and upgrades to generate enough additional revenue, will miss the opportunity to change and New role for the channel As organisations embrace digital transformation, the process of migrating to the cloud has never been under more scrutiny – from business leaders looking to minimise downtime and gain positive impact on the bottom line to hackers looking to breach systems and wreak havoc. For this reason, 2019 will see the rise of a new role for the channel – the Cloud Migration Security Specialist. As companies move across, there is an assumption that they’re automatically protected as they transition workloads to the cloud. The channel has a role to play in educating companies that this isn’t necessarily so and that they’ll need help protecting themselves from threats. It’s these new roles that will ensure the channel continues to thrive. Gary Marsden, Cloud Security Solutions, Data Protection at Gemalto MSPs must harness the power of SMB customers In 2019, SMBs will continue to drive big technology growth and MSPs that don’t have an SMB-centric strategy in place will lose out. SMBs consume technology in a less expensive yet more efficient way than their larger counterparts and vendors and MSPs must offer products that are easy to consume and easy to do business with. Machine learning will also have a substantial impact on SME-facing adopt new client offerings. 2019 will be the year we see these resellers start to get punished by their customers as new emerging technologies, such as Microservices and a revised approach to cloud, steal the limelight and ultimately business spending. Containers will enter the mainstream – but only after mis-steps 2019 will see a lot of excitement around Microservices and Containers – together with a lot of potentially empty hype. As a result, there will be a significant number of mis-steps from organisations that don’t get implementation right first time. Ever increasing demands on IT teams to be more agile and to deliver services faster will drive leaders to adopt technologies like OpenShift, Docker and Kubernetes before they have a clearly defined strategy or appropriate underlying visibility and security. Resellers that can position themselves to help customers through this From 5G to vaporworms: what to expect in 2019 Opportunities for early adopters Profiting from SMEs By Sean Fane, Managing Director, Spectrami UK By Mike Puglia, Chief Strategy Officer at Kaseya period of change – offering the support, management and the right technology needed to avoid making costly mistakes – will see the most benefit from this new approach and avoid missing out on significant revenue opportunities. Resellers and businesses alike will migrate towards open-source Resellers will increasingly start to build open source software into their portfolio as the low cost and increased flexibility on offer tempt more organisations to use it to deliver their services. IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat shows that open source is becoming a significant financial opportunity. While resellers might initially see open source as a threat, as their customers purchase lower cost products and adapt them more themselves, there are opportunities too. For example, management and support services will open up significant revenue streams, as will partnering with vendors that offer their own modifications and support models on top of an open-source base. As uptake picks up, open source will become a significant revenue stream. companies, allowing them to operate at such a level of efficiency that they are able to offer their managed services at a lower price. We predict that these will be the most successful MSPs in 2019. Continued growth for Microsoft in the MSP market Over the last three years, Azure growth among MSPs has skyrocketed from 47% to 67% and is set to grow by even more next year thanks to two major factors: relationships and product familiarity. In terms of relationships, some MSPs have been working with Microsoft for 15 years and even have their sales rep on speed dial. Product familiarity means that starting over with AWS or Google Cloud Platform can be a daunting endeavour. Microsoft is making it easy to move on-premises applications to Azure. It is not just building the infrastructure for MSPs to use, but also building the apps and services on top of that, making the transition to the cloud that much easier. In short, Microsoft owns the MSP market and its growth will continue in 2019. Sean Fane Mike Puglia