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Talk about pressure.
Typical midmarket CIOs stare down myriad challenges on a daily basis: Hackers are getting craftier, work forces are becoming more dispersed, globalization is becoming a reality, and economic and environmental trends are forcing businesses of every ilk to think green.
In short, they face the same struggles as their counterparts at large enterprises, and they're looking for creative IT solutions to help tackle them.
So with Everything Channel's Midsize Enterprise Summit taking place this week in Dallas, CRN set out to identify the 12 must-have technologies that solution providers should be putting in front of their midmarket customers as well as some of the key vendors that will help them get there.
VIRTUALIZATION
Five Key Vendors: Citrix Systems, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Symantec, VMware |
| Server virtualization has become one of the fastest-growing practice areas for solution providers as their midmarket customers look to cut servers and get more out of the ones they have left.
Less than 10 percent of all servers have already been virtualized, making this a wide-open opportunity for solution providers serving the midmarket.
And the best part is that a virtualized server infrastructure is only the start. While midmarket customers initially adopt server virtualization to consolidate physical servers and cut the resources required to run them, it poises midmarket customers to take advantage of broader solutions.
Low-cost virtual servers can usher in long-distance disaster recovery, eliminate the need for application-specific server appliances and ease first-time SAN deployment for customers who have not networked storage previously. |
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BLADE SERVERS
Five Key Vendors: Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Sun Microsystems |
| With virtualization coming on strong in the midmarket, blade server solutions have never been more attractive. But blades are a funny beast, according to Tom Beckman, director of technology at Tampa, Fla.-based Infinity Business Systems. When you need a blade solution, you really need it. When you don't, you really don't.
Some technologies are general-purpose, with applicability to a wide array of solution packages. Blade server solutions, on the other hand, are appropriate to specific midmarket customer needs, Beckman said.
"Where it's come in handy for us is when we're doing a virtualization project and where the client had a fairly limited amount of space for servers," he said.
Heat and airflow can become significant issues with blade installations, Beckman said. But the upside is well worth the effort. |
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UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS
Five Key Vendors: Avaya, Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Mitel Networks, ShoreTel |
| VoIP has gotten a lot of attention in recent years, but savvy midmarket solution providers are already taking the next step: moving their customers to unified communications. The idea is to take the promise of VoIP—integrated voice and data networks—and build on it by bringing IP voice traffic together with other modes of communication. For midmarket customers, the ability to access e-mail, video, instant messaging, voicemail and the like via a single user interface means that employees are more accessible and better able to collaborate, making for a more nimble, proactive organization.
"The technology is a little ahead of the adoption of the users, but when you show folks that you can do continuous presence, the ability to communicate in myriad forms with any of your co-workers, your clients, suppliers and so on, that's what really seems to trip their trigger," said Dave Casey, president of Dallas-based VAR Westron Communications Inc. |
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Next: Videoconferencing
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