Smart VARs always have one eye on the bottom line and the other on the future. While the future often looks complex, a number of industry experts agree that upcoming technologies are almost exclusively designed to make customers’ lives easier.
With that in mind, we’ve come up with five emerging technology trends that readers should watch closely. We picked them because they all offer resellers new opportunties to sell products, or new ways to help customers simplify their lives through value-added services.
“A lot of technology is really designed around technology for technology’s sake. And I think there is an increasing dissatisfaction with (that),” said Tom Wujec, author, fellow and principal consultant with Alias Systems Corp. in Toronto.
With the continuation of Moore’s Law and Metcalfe’s Law, and corporate information also doubling about every 11 months, one common theme out there for most new technologies is finding new ways to simplify the processing of all this information, he said.
“If you look at the brain’s ability to process change, it (only) doubles in performance every 160,000 years. So we’ve reached our limit to be able to handle this change — it’s becoming more and more noisy. So a lot of people are looking for a tonic to this change. I think there’s two tonics. One is simplicity and the other is visualization.”
Visualization
Countless studies have shown that people are able to retain and understand information better when they can picture it in images rather than words, he said.
“We are seeing, in larger organizations, the introduction of visualization studios, which are places where people can see their work, as if on IMAX,” Wujec said. Companies can use specially designed software and a high-end projector to map everything from corporate strategies to market trends to product designs.
“This is an emerging trend, to be able to cut through the information overload and to be able to see what’s important to a business — whether it’s a car manufacturer or games developer or even a financial institution. It will represent different information according to their business.”
The hardware necessary for this task is no longer only available to high-end graphics companies, he said. These days, many projectors on the market can do the trick, and the toughest thing might be finding an empty boardroom within a corporation in order to set up the “studio”.
VARs can take advantage of this new space in different ways, he said. Hardware resellers who sell products like projectors can tap into a potentially broader market. Software and services, however, will probably be the biggest opportunity for VARs and integrators. And because the types of businesses that can benefit from this type of functionality are so diverse, there is a huge untapped market for various specific applications.
“You can add more value to your customers by providing richer solutions. And increasingly, we are seeing resellers providing much more value through services.”
Virtualization
Solutions that allow for server virtualization is another emerging space that has a lot of reseller opportunity, said Jonathan Eunice, president and IT advisor with Illuminata Inc. in Nashua, N.H.
“Products that slice and dice systems and let you do server or system consolidation have a real, clear economic impact on IT customers. And it applies to many of the small and medium-sized customers that the channel tends to deal with,” he said.
Eunice calls this space a “kind of green field,” because some processes that used to only be able to run on big, expensive servers are “now available to mom and pop shops” because of this technology. “And that is a powerful, new function,” he said.
“We are just starting to see the adoption of this technology in a big way. And it is very much a reseller opportunity.”
According to Andrew Bartels, vice-president and research analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Long Island, N.Y., there are two sides to how this will play out for VARs.
“On one hand, many large companies may find they can economize on hardware, because the servers are able to handle much more volume,” he said, meaning that there may actually be less opportunity for hardware sales.
“On the other hand, small businesses are going to need some tools to make their tasks simpler. Service providers who offer tools, processes or services will have a lot of opportunities in this space,” he said.
Bartels added that we will probably start to see more boxed server virtualization solutions available for companies who want to manage the servers themselves, in addition to a new trend to have service providers manage these “virtual servers” outside a company’s walls.
Business process management
The most significant emerging trend in software is in the area of service-oriented architecture, where applications are turned into components to carry out specific tasks, and can be reused and reapplied in other areas of the business, said Bartels.
“These applications could be things like user authentications, or customer site administration tasks,” he said. “We are only very early into this space.”
Jackie Fenn, vice-president and Gartner Fellow for emerging trends and technologies with Boston-based Gartner Inc., agrees, and sees potential for VARs in this area as well.
“We are seeing the original long-term goal of Web services . . . to represent the elements of business processes in a more modular way.
“So you can either replace those elements, update them, outsource them, give them to the customer — whatever it is you want to do, you have that much more flexibility, instead of having those big, monolithic hard-code processes.”
Back door applications
In the recent past, most companies set up policies to keep an end-user’s personal software off corporate PCs. However, a new trend is to take these consumer products that have entered an organization “through the back door” and find new uses for them in a corporate way, said Fenn.
“A definite theme we found (in research) was around the grassroots, personal productivity applications that are coming in (to organizations), not necessarily from IT, but from the end-users themselves — because they are using them at home,” she said.
“There are quite a few technologies like Wikis, desktop searches, blogging, podcasting and instant messaging — companies are now trying to take advantage of the install base that has kind of snuck its way in,” she said. “It’s kind of a new way of adopting these emerging technologies.”
For example, many companies are looking into ways making practical use of podcasting, such as making teleconferences available to employees, especially for those in distributed environments.
Savvy resellers will be able to sell these traditionally consumer applications to corporate customers, as well as find opportunities to develop service packages to manage applications that are already installed through the back door, so they can be used in new ways within an organization.
PC telephony applications
PC telephony capabilities have been around for a while, but only in the last few months have they been used in a big way in corporate settings.
What’s more, the entrance of VoIP into the corporate space has opened the door for new value-added applications that are just starting to be developed, said Carmi Levy, senior research analyst with Londo