Distribution has a role to play in a hyperscaler world
Support, application aggregation and skills are just a few of the benefits that disties can bring to bear for hyperscalers looking to work with the channel
Distribution will continue to play a role in helping aggregate the fruits of the ISV community and in helping to ease cloud skill shortages.
The latest Global Technology Distribution Council (GTDC) podcast shared a panel debate at the organisation’s recent EMEA conference, and it was clear that despite the growth in public cloud hyperscalers, there is a continued role for disties.
Eric Buck, director global distribution & commercial partner sales at Google, said its channel had been reacting to lines of business looking for help in solving problems and that was happening at a greater speed. The result was a bigger shift to the cloud as users decided to make life easier by putting more data and applications into the hosted environment.
“The true value I see through distributors and for partners is couplefold – the dynamics of the ISV market, how do you find the best solutions?” he said. “Someone has to aggregate all of those together and help you understand what they are and have to create enablement around those solutions, and those people developing those solutions don’t even understand how to connect with the channel.
“The other piece is that we are seeing a significant gap in services. Cloud migration is on the rise and it’s going to continue and we see this market growing exponentially overt the next five years and we already see a shortage of people out there and where distributors can really help.”
Buck said distributors played a role in supporting managed service providers (MSPs) because it was not just a case of making a sale and moving on – there was a longer lifecycle servicing customers.
From the distribution point of view, that tier of the channel has already moved to evolve the business to support cloud, and Patrick Zammit, president of EU and APAC at TD Synnex, said the channel was well placed to support further cloud adoption.
TD Synnex works with all of the top three hyperscalers and it was helping partners to build cloud practices and there was value that the firm could add for both cloud players and partners, he said.
“This evolution to the cloud is a move to a multicloud environment and a hybrid cloud,” Zammit added. “The workloads going forward are going to be on-premise, off-premise and on many clouds and probably those workloads will move over time. If we want to bring value here, we must continue to support that.”
The Beyond distribution podcast kicked off back in April, with GTDC CEO Frank Vitagliano in the chair talking to a range of leaders across the distribution and associated industries, with the aim of promoting the work and value of its members.
