Flood Of New Data Means Opportunities For MSPs, Says Synnex Exec

Peter Larocque, Synnex’s president, technology solutions, North America, told the crowd at Varnex that as new Internet of Things devices come online and legacy systems are plugged into the cloud, the amount of data created is expected to increase ten-fold in the next two years. This, he said, will deliver more sophisticated demands upon MSPs, but also bring them new opportunities.

“There are billions of new devices connected each year. And they are sending tons of unstructured data to your data center, to the cloud, to your customer’s data center,” he said. “Less than 1 percent of that data today is being used. So there are opportunities for us all to help our customers manage that data, analyze it, and put it to good use.”

In the past two years, the amount of data produced by the total of all these connections “exceeds the amount of data produced by mankind before that,” Larocque said. Over the next 10 years, the amount of data stored will be 10 times that, he added.

“In the day not so long ago, we as humans created how that data went into the network and was stored, but today you have billions of machines creating data, and some of these machines are not connected and when they are connected it will expand,” he said. “Networks are overwhelmed with all this data being transported.”

Larocque was one of the keynote speakers Monday at the 2019 Varnex Spring Conference taking place this week in Greenville, S.C. The event brings the more than 500 members of the distributor’s member community together for training sessions and networking.

Larocque also touched on 5G, saying that as it becomes available it will lead to more data coming from manufacturing.

“We have an opportunity to help our customers modernize their networks and manage their data so they can continue to use these things as well,” he said.

Steve Ricketts, director of technical services at Roeing, a Lafayette, Ind., MSP, said the demands for more analytics in the data created on a customer’s network started in education and has spilled over to industrial customers.

“Our company is diverse in the fact that we’ve got many different verticals we work in, and they’re all asking for the same thing, they’re all asking for data-driven decision-making,” he said. “Whether I’m building widgets in the back or I have 100 patients coming in the door, how are my decisions from an IT standpoint going to get the most bang for the buck?”

Cecilia Corcoran, president of Roeing , said once customers understand the capabilities of analyzing that data they just want more.

“They are just jamming stuff into systems that no one is ever taking it out, sorting it, filtering it, really making sense of it,” she said. “So we invested maybe five years ago in just the skill, training people up to be able to take data—and it’s a lot of unstructured data, so it’s data from everywhere—and connect it and draw meaning from it. It’s a journey for us, and I don’t think our customers are there yet. For the large enterprise organizations like the state, we had to serve it to them in little baby unsophisticated components. Once they absorbed that, they want to keep drilling and drilling.”