AI explosion creating storage and data management opportunities

Channel storage specialists should be looking to tap into increasing user demand once they get back from their holidays and crank things up going into the fourth quarter.

The fourth quarter is traditionally the busiest time for the channel, with product launches and year targets on the line, meaning there are always suggestions for where efforts should be concentrated to target the best growth opportunities.

Aside from security solutions, one of the other areas at the top of that list is artificial intelligence (AI) – and Andrew Palmer, UK channel lead for enterprise data and cloud solutions at Seagate Technology, is keen to remind partners about the role storage plays in that sales pitch.

“Continuous breakthroughs in AI are sparking a technological and societal revolution, unlocking new markets and economic value. However, the surge in AI adoption has led to an exponential increase in data demand. As AI models become more sophisticated, they require vast amounts of training data. Simultaneously, AI has become a source of content creation. When it scales, unprecedented data volumes are needed. The value of data has never been higher,” he said.

The channel also has an opportunity to sell more than just capacity, with users looking for more intelligent tools to help store and unlock insights from their data.

“Over the next six months, channel partners will face the challenge of helping their customers to manage this data explosion. The sheer volume of data necessitates robust storage solutions. The cloud has been the epicentre of AI progress; however, the rise of real-time and hyper-personalised use cases is also pulling AI applications and services to edge and on-premise storage locations,” said Palmer.

There is plenty of activity in the storage market to make sure that the channel is armed with the right technologies.

On 13 August, Dell indicated that it was deepening its collaboration with Nutanix, announcing options that provide more flexible storage and management choices in a hybrid cloud environment.

Dell Technologies’ senior vice-president of product management Travis Vigil, along with Nutanix’s senior vice-president of product management Thomas Cornely, penned a joint blog post to outline the update and its rationale.

“There are – at a minimum – two constants in IT: growth and change. With 90% of organisations reporting increased complexity in the past two years, the continued, explosive growth of applications and data has made it more critical to manage applications and workloads efficiently. Furthermore, predictability and stability of infrastructure costs regularly surface as prominent concerns,” they wrote.

With a focus on data management, elsewhere in the channel, Synology signed up Exertis Enterprise to expand its channel reach, with Jason Daly, business development manager at Exertis Enterprise, commenting that partners needed to have data management tools in their arsenal.

Jeremie Francois, sales director at Synology, said that this was a good time to expand its distribution network, and Exertis would be able to put its technology in front of more partners.

“Their extensive network and proven track record make them the ideal partner to help us expand our reach within the enterprise market. This collaboration will enable us to better serve modern business customers and meet the growing demand for high-performance and secure storage data management solutions,” he said.