The Great Grid Partner Grab

VAR Entree
For VARs looking to grab such customers, partnering is the quickest path to a payoff. The good news is that all the major grid vendors and ISVs are actively engaged in partner recruitment. But, given the complexities of grid technology, not all resellers are considered qualified to hook up with the most attractive vendors.

"We have to look at recruiting the right reseller—somebody who understands data-center practices, complex pools of servers and services in the data center," says Steve Campbell, Sun's grid guru. "This would not be a white-box reseller; it would be more of a systems integrator. It's not somebody that just buys and sells boxes."

From the perspective of the smaller VAR, there is indeed a lot on the line, and they're dipping their toes into the grid waters cautiously. That's the story at Insbridge, a newly minted grid partner of IBM.

"The grid marketplace is still in its infancy from our standpoint," says Tom Mant, vice president of sales at Insbridge, a Plano, Texas-based VAR that sells software and solutions to the insurance industry. The company has been working to get its software certified on IBM hardware and to craft a marketing and sales message through which it can approach its client base.

To mitigate its risk, Insbridge's market approach involves heavy hand-holding from Big Blue. "In the sales cycle, we'll be working in conjunction with the IBM sales force," Mant says. "So if an insurance company is looking to adopt a grid-computing infrastructure, during our sales cycle we can say that we support grid and that we're an application IBM has certified in that space."

Effectively, Insbridge is off-loading its risk onto IBM. Big Blue handles most of the heavy technology lifting, whereas Insbridge provides the entree into the insurance customer base. That's a win-win strategy for attacking grid that many Tier 1 vendors mimic as they scout about for reseller partners servicing profitable customer niches. From the VAR's perspective, the link with IBM is a pain-free way to enter the grid arena.

"Because of the low cost for us to get started, we saw it as a real opportunity to move forward with a significant upside and little downside," Mant sums up. "We see this as something that's going to have real business attached to it."

Tech Tie-Ins
Another route toward promulgating the technology is the one taken by RLX Technologies, a blade-server systems builder based in The Woodlands, Texas. RLX is offering grid capability as an add-on option to its blades. That's seen as an attractive sell, as blades are being adopted in droves by customers rushing to consolidate their servers.

"Blades are a natural building block," says Bob VanSteenberg, CTO and vice president of platform development at RLX Technologies. "Once you've mastered the ability to scale out among multiple machines in a single center, then it's the logical next step to scale out across multiple centers and do grid computing."

VanSteenberg does not believe that grid is yet all that easy a sell outside of the high-performance computing arena where his customer base lies and technical applications rule. "By definition, these big corporate enterprises are conservative," he notes. Still, he sees grid as a coming thing and believes it'll take off as ISVs demonstrate they can effectively manage the distribution of workloads across multiple sites.

Any VAR looking to migrate their customers to grid would do well to remember that one way to whet buyer interest is to tie the technology into something that has already caught fire in the enterprise. Think business-process integration as one possibility. That's a tack pursued by Ascential Software, a Westborough, Mass.-based ISV.

"Say someone has a business initiative which may be deploying CRM, sales-force automation or other mission-critical applications," says Mike Beckerle, chief scientist at Ascential. "They have to work out what kind of business processes are going to change and then figure out the implications for the information they have in the enterprise. Depending on the size of the problem, they'd either deploy a multiple-CPU symmetric multiprocessing system or bring in a grid-type solution."

Beckerle notes that most of the solutions Ascential has sold have been in larger enterprises with thousands of CPUs. He thinks that's poised to change—that grid will begin to move downstream as its advantages begin to permeate the consciousness of the business world in general. "Our software is basically the same, whether it's running on four CPUs or 4,000 CPUs," he says.