Upcoming revelations @ 9th SP Summit 2014

Infrastructure Blocks

The conference will start on this topic and the need of small infrastructural blocks to build a healthy cloud ecosystem. These blocks will include servers, storage, printers, power solutions (UPS), structured cabling among others.The session will talk about the offering from different vendors and ultimately what are the gains for a SI. The idea is to show a converged business roadmap for the partners. Partners will know of power services, server and storages solutions including solutions around printing and cabling.

Datacenters

Are there businesses that are increasingly dependent on IT for mission critical applications, or, are trying to increase its IT efficiency? Or, considering the effect of glooming economy, are there companies trying to cut costs? Whatever may be the situation, system integrators and solution providers have a good business opportunity to seamlessly manage their IT environment, increase their efficiency and reduce downtime. But the important question is where to start with?
One of the important places is to look into data center end-to-end services.
The second phase of the conference will start on this topic. Whether it is a big, mid-sized or a small enterprise, or a government body; every sector is now dependent on IT to deliver the kind of output required in real time, on demand. Amidst all this, data center is one such important area where top level players are putting their capital for a smooth flow of data, in case of government bodies-smooth flow of services. This brings a good business opportunity for channels where they can earn good revenue by optimizing these data centers without compromising on services; essentially it means reducing costs.

To begin with, let's look into the overall Indian Data Centre market. As per the latest reports by Nasscom, India's Data Centre market was estimated at $2.2bn in 2012 and is expected to grow over 8% over the next 3-4 years. Such is the quantum of amount of money involved in the data center business. It clearly indicates the growing need for efficient data centers; may be due to upsurge of data (read big data) from social media, smartphones, e-commerce portals, etc, or with the Indian government's ambitious social inclusion projects or various e-government services to citizens.

There are several vendors/integrators who are building their own datacenters and offering third party hosting services through partners to enterprises. Even infrastructure builders are starting to offer datacenter solutions and services.

Cloud Services

After understanding some of the basics of resources required to build cloud, our next session will include the cloud vendors who offers Infrastructure as a service as well as platform as a service. Wikipedia explains it well, "Typically, the seller has actual energy-consuming servers which host products and services from a remote location, so end-users don't have to; they can simply log on to the network without installing anything. The major models of cloud computing service are known as software as a service, platform as a service and infrastructure as a service. These cloud services may be offered in public, private or hybrid network, Google Amazon, Salesforce, and Microsoft Azure."

Apart from this, there are virtualization vendors who are virtualizing all infrastructure components including servers, networking and desktops and the services like BYOD and other mobility solutions.

Applications on Cloud

Almost all enterprise software vendors are selling not just through on-premise licenses, but also on cloud platforms. For SPs familiar with on-premise licensed selling of software, there is a tremendous paradigm shift in terms of how selling needs to be done. These sessions will talk about what are the cloud application selling models for SPs, how they can ensure bottom lines and how do they offer their services over a long-term contract.

Security & Surveillance

The fear of any network being breached has kept many IT managers on toes. In cloud too, these managers ponder and are skeptical over their data security. Wikipedia explains it well, "Security can improve due to centralization of data, increased security-focused resources, etc., but concerns can persist about loss of control over certain sensitive data, and the lack of security for stored kernels. Security is often as good as or better than other traditional systems in part because providers are able to devote resources to solving security issues that many customers cannot afford to tackle.However, the complexity of security is greatly increased when data is distributed over a wider area or over a greater number of devices, as well as in multi-tenant systems shared by unrelated users. In addition, user access to security audit, logs may be difficult or impossible. Private cloud installations are in part motivated by users' desire to retain control over the infrastructure and avoid losing control of information security."

So every organization is building a security roadmap around hardware, software and security services. Even for organizations moving onto cloud, the biggest challenge revolves around security. The role of system integrator becomes critical in providing security for enterprises. As far as surveillance is concerned, more and more IT system integrators are moving into partnership with physical security and surveillance vendors. Overall, the whole idea for this session is to give our partner a sense of belief and conduct their business freely.