The Great Grid Partner Grab

Fork In the Road
Indeed, it's becoming increasingly evident that grid computing is reaching a fork in the road. For VARs looking to capitalize on that growth, the big opportunity may come as grid moves beyond the large enterprises served by direct-sales organizations toward midsize organizations that haven't yet cottoned on to grid.

"The midmarket is now just starting to say, "Maybe we ought to have a look at this,'" says John Crocker, co-founder and managing partner of Enterprise Iron, a financial-services integrator in Iselin, N.J. He says that, at large customers, it's easy to walk in the door and start talking grid. For most other enterprises, however, grid is more in the way of another widget in the software tool box.

"In the middle market, where we have found the most appetite for grid is among companies already looking at upgrading their network infrastructure," Crocker adds. "It's at the point where, even if they're not looking at grid, you can introduce it. They figure as long as they're redoing their network anyway, the incremental cost might not be that great."

Not quite so sanguine is veteran VAR Ann Fried, chairman of Microway, a systems builder in Plymouth, Mass. "A year from now, I think [grid] is a solution you can pitch," she says. "Right now, for the medium- to large-size VARs that are not Tier 1 players, I think it's not as productive as it will be in the future."

"There's a lot of interest and a lot of optimism, but the smaller customers are very cautious," adds Fried, who knows a thing or two about the subject as a partner of grid ISV Platform and a seller of large clusters to university and government customers.

As with all issues that elicit the full gamut of opinions, the reality of where grid is today probably lies between the two extremes. "Resellers will help facilitate grid," Sun's Papadopoulos affirms. "Resellers [will] became very important in how these systems will come together to serve companies. Grid is another tool in their toolbox. We're going to make it progressively easier to use, and that's going to make it more accessible to the channel and the midsize market."

"Until six or nine months ago, grid was the latest fad," Crocker adds. "That led to a good deal of hype, and hurt sales. Now, the fad has moderated. What's going on is a deeper understanding of what grid can do and the benefits that can be derived from it. People are now calmly assessing grid."

With a growing consensus that grid is, at the very least, poised to make a move, the final action item for resellers is, how do they get ready to sell this stuff? Whether it's a VAR or an ISV, the most common advice is to partner. For its part, IBM recognizes the key role resellers will play, particularly in vertical markets. "We're trying to create a whole ecosystem, because it all works together," Gordon says. Accordingly, Big Blue is rounding up application providers who can deliver grid software or custom solutions, and resellers with customer bases in different verticals.

"This isn't just for the big guys," Gordon adds. "VARs could focus in on infrastructure solutions. Or, for the more integration-focused resellers, on services, because there's a tremendous services opportunity for people to cobble together the grid solutions."

Caught between the strategies of smaller VARs like Insbridge, which are aligning themselves with big vendors like IBM and Sun, and the big vendors themselves, which are corralling resellers to target industry verticals, are the grid ISVs themselves. They're forced to play both angles, hooking up with the big guys so that their solutions get mindshare in the big accounts, and making nice with VARs of their own in a bid to target customers—such as SMB accounts—that don't tend to get direct sales calls.

For example, as the newest of the major grid ISVs, United Devices uses a direct sales force domestically but has a healthy reseller network in Japan, where it lacks local market expertise. But it's not averse to expanding its partner base stateside. "We're open to working with anybody that has customers interested in grid," United Devices' Hubbard says. "We can help the VAR build their own expertise, we can go in with them and service a customer jointly, or we can handle all the services ourselves if the VAR doesn't want to become an expert in grid."

Still, specialized selling will remain the rule for this technology, and at least one member of the pitching team will have to have heavy-duty expertise. "We say grids are built, not bought," opines Sara Murphy, HP's grid-marketing manager. "Each deployment is going to be different."

Maybe grid will start to surge forward once its advocates refine their marketing message. That goes against the grain of Ascential's Beckerle, who thinks many of the folks pushing grid are going about it the wrong way. "A lot of the argument for grid computing is a cost-down argument," he says. "We're constantly trying to tell people that's wrong...It's really a value-up argument—you can now do stuff with these computers that you could never have imagined doing before because they're so effective at processing data."

For those who have hooked up with the right grid dance partners, the industry's financial tea leaves seem to bode well for the future. "The one interesting thing I've seen over the past 12 months is the first emergence of customers that have grid budgets," Hubbard says. "A couple of years ago, there was no one that had a budget with grid computing on it. Most of the global 2000 will have to dip their toes in the grid waters at some point."