Easy is good, which is one reason why cloud services are growing in popularity. It also is why converged systems and related products that fit together is a growing trend among business customers.
This can be seen in the growing use of dedicated appliances that businesses can leverage to perform specific computing tasks. Need spam filtering? Get a spam filtering appliance. Need speech analytics? Get a speech analytics appliance. Need an SQL server? Get an SQL server appliance. Companies such as Unicom are helping developers make application deployment easier by helping them offer their products in easy-to-deploy appliance form.
The trend also can be seen in workload-optimized system services.
Hewlett-Packard (News - Alert) has called this the “the new style of IT,” and is encouraging its partners to venture more fully into such workload-optimized system services.
What HP means when it talks about workload-optimized systems is systems designed to run key apps such as Microsoft (News - Alert) Exchange or SQL server and make it, in HP’s terminology, “simple and easy, cheap and cheerful.”
HP’s service offerings, and its Technical Services (TS) division in particular, is a big growth opportunity for its partners, according to HP. Its ServiceOne program makes it easier for partners to both resell and deliver HP-branded close-to-the-box services, mostly offered under the Care Packs brand.
“That’s fueled this huge wave of services growth through the channel, to the point where TS is looking at the channel as their primary growth engine,” noted Sue Barsamian, senior vice president of worldwide indirect sales for HP’s Enterprise Group.
Barsamian said small businesses are particularly keen on these simple systems.
“SMB is one of the strongest growth opportunities we have,” she said. “Of 100 partners I talk to, 100 want to expand their software and services mix,” she said. “We’re incredibly focused on that. We’ve come a long way and it’s pretty compelling today, but we’re not done. It’s a journey.”
The next step for HP is to start more tightly aligning its converged infrastructure products with its software holdings, she said.
While HP partners should take note, so should software developers and anyone peddling software solutions. Easy is in, whether that be the cloud, a dedicated appliance, or close-system solutions. There’s already enough complexity, and businesses are looking for solutions that keep complexity to a minimum.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson