Moving Up Requires Tech Savvy

When it comes to climbing your way up the VARBusiness 500, we all know it takes savvy sales know-how, customer care and a fair bit of schmoozing. But all the relationship-building in the world won't help if you haven't nailed the fundamentals.

To paraphrase political strategist James Carville, "It's the technology, stupid."

From top to bottom, the one thing VARBusiness 500 solution providers understand is the opportunity nestled in the enterprise's desire to leverage technology to lower costs, grow business and access growing amounts of data in shorter amounts of time. Technologies such as server and storage virtualization, VoIP, service-oriented architectures (SOAs), security and mobility--as well as applications (business intelligence, CRM and ERP)--are all driving sales and revenue.

Here is a look at some of the leading technologies and product sets that are racing off the shelves at VARBusiness 500 companies.

The Virtual Data Center

Virtualization is becoming a universal theme for successful VARs. While the technology has different definitions, simply put, virtualization lets storage devices and servers share capacity without interrupting production. Long the subject of unrealized hype, many enterprises are finally beginning to virtualize storage (notably SANs and NAS) and servers.

VMware has quickly become a key enabler of virtualization. Meanwhile, Microsoft is touting its own Virtual Server product set to be built into the Windows server and client (Vista) operating systems.

Jeff Wacker, futurist and a fellow at Electronic Data Systems (VARBusiness 500 No. 2), points out that, until recently, companies would engineer their server loads anywhere from one-and-a-half to two times their peak transactions. Now for many, it's at 10 times and rising, Wacker says.

"They know they can't continue to scale the servers beyond this 10x flex factor," he says.

This isn't the case in all organizations, but many that are transaction-oriented, such as retail and financial services, are feeling the pinch. The largest enterprises are looking at utility computing where they can acquire capacity on the fly and pay for it as needed. That is typically being done via a hybrid of in-house systems and hosted capacity.

Outside the mainframe world, virtualization remains in its early stages. Truly virtualized data centers at the industry-standard level, however, will be those that can predict changes in business conditions, as well as system capacity, and automatically react to those changes. Many vendors that have delivered pieces of this call it self-healing technology, or autonomic computing.

"A lot of the underlying technologies exist to add capacity in a virtualized environment," says Kris Domrich, a principal consultant at Dimension Data (No. 34). "What you are doing is choosing metrics to monitor and make decisions based on whether or not capacity should be added. But also, when things have slowed down to the point where capacity can be removed, it can be put back in the shared pool. It needs to work both ways."

NEXT: The rise of SOAs, plus open source's continued upward trend.