Increasingly Virtual in NZ

As the tech world goes virtual, Heather Wright polls some experts about their views on where resellers stand to gain the most.

Darryl Grauman is bubbling with enthusiasm as he talks virtualisation.

Westcon's national manager of innovation and services proclaims virtualisation 'ground breaking' – and a big potential opportunity for New Zealand resellers, with data center virtualisation and desktop virtualisation 'taking off' and resellers already across those areas 'streaking ahead in monetising it'.

"Those who aren't adopting virtualisation technologies are fighting World War II with World War I weapons," he declares.

Michael Warrilow, Gartner's Infrastructure Software Team research director, has the figures to back claims New Zealand is a world leader in virtualisation. He says while server virtualisation worldwide is around 65%, the figure is 'easily 85% or higher'.

While Warrilow says the market for server virtualisation is reducing in New Zealand, thanks to it approaching saturation, it's not completely off the boil.

In fact, Duncan Bennet, VMware vice president and managing director, ANZ, says VMware sees a new wave of server virtualisation, with customers looking to virtualise Unix servers and the likes.

He's also bullish about the potential for 100% x86 appliance virtualisation, saying 'that's the objective'. "Most New Zealand customers have a 'virtualise first' policy where you virtualise – unless you can show why not to.

"As an extension of that, especially in New Zealand, we're seeing a lot of customers migrate their Unix servers to x86 standard servers and virtualising. The virtualisation market, in itself, is still growing.

The company's Q3 2013 results, announced last month, certainly indicate a buoyant market, with year-on-year revenue growth of 14% to US$1.3 biliion and a net income of US$261 million.

"We're a $5 billion business, growing at nearly 20% [with a 19% revenue growth excluding GoPivotal and divestures in 2013]. That shows that there's still plenty of opportunity out there," Bennet says.

According to Warrilow, VMware and Microsoft lead the server virtualisation pack. Citrix and VMware claim 90% of the desktop virtualisation market.

Hotting up...

For its part VMware has recently been doing some 'incremental hiring' in New Zealand, with two new roles created in areas the company believes are 'hotting up'. Those two areas? End user computing/mobility and network virtualisation.

Neither are a huge surprise coming from VMware. The company recently purchased Desktone, a desktop-as-a-service company. "Desktop virtualisation is taking off now," Grauman says. "But a virtual desktop alone does not make a solution.

He says it's crucial for resellers to also wrap the voice component into the solution. "The desktop can be available anytime, anyplace, but voice needs to follow.

Warrilow is more circumspect about desktop virtualisation. In an October report, he noted that the 'year of desktop virtualisation' has been predicted numerous times over the past decade.

"Unfortunately, such predictions have concealed the underlying reality that desktop virtualisation contains multiple, conflicting drivers and challenges – just as is often the case generally for client computing.

"When positioning desktop virtualisation, sales and marketing teams need to ensure that broad, all-encompassing messaging is curtailed in favour of practical guidance that clearly positions desktop virtualisation offerings. There will never be a particular 'year of desktop virtualisation' — rather, there will be increased adoption based on enterprise use and business case.

Warrilow notes that worldwide desktop virtualisation is put at around 3%-4%. "I think in New Zealand you might see around 4.5%, but it's in niches – call centres and industries like education and government.

That doesn't deflate Grauman. "If you take the entire desktop fleet across New Zealand, 4.5% is nothing to be sneezed at!

Both, however, agree that one hampering factor for desktop virtualisation is a Microsoft licensing issue. Users need to have a second license to allow virtual desktop access. It's a license, opponents say, that has a hefty price tag.

"One of the biggest contstraints to further desktop virtualisation has been Microsoft's licensing terms," Warrilow says.

Adds Grauman: "It has made virtualising desktops unaffordable by licensing, not because of the technology.

He notes that Microsoft has recently allowed all government departments to be viewed as a single customer 'so you can multitenant all of the government departments on one piece of tin', but adds that that is an exception to the rule.

As the tech world goes virtual, Heather Wright polls some experts about their views on where resellers stand to gain the most.

Westcon's national manager of innovation and services Darryl Grauman, Duncan Bennet, VMware vice president and managing director and Michael Warrilow, Gartner's Infrastructure Software Team research director, offer some industry insight...

Beyond the desktop

Grauman says he's seeing two key growth areas beyond desktop virtualisation: copy data management, which he believes is the next growth area, and virtualised networks.

Copy data is the data created by all the business systems making a copy of everything in production – backup, snapshots, disaster recovery, business continuity, test and development, analytics...

Storage software and hardware company Actifio claims that can result in 'an average of 13-120 excess duplicate copies of data', 'with a massive increase in your required storage footprint, bandwidth requirements, backup windows, labour intensity and just plain complexity'.

Actifio's offering 'essentially virtualises your disparate protection and availability in storage applications into a single data management appliance that lets you recover anything instantly...

Grauman, says Actifio's offering has already been adopted locally by companies including MetService and IAG.

"It's a really, really big area, alongside VDI," he says, with the top 300 New Zealand companies key targets.

"Imagine what this will do to the market. It's going to cannibalise a significant amount of the storage market. Think what will happen. The cost savings are phenomenal. If I'm competing with another reseller in outsourcing and my cost is one-third the cost of theirs...

He says Westcon is working with several New Zealand resellers keen to offer an 'as a service' model.

Networking time

The virtual network space is also an area Grauman says resellers should be getting excited about. Offering the opportunity to put the smarts in the switch layer into software and leave the switch purely as a transport layer,

Grauman claims it's an area which 'is going to shake up the industry second to none'.

"I can't wait for the launch of VMware's NSX," he adds. VMware announced general availability of its NSX network virtualisation software last month.

Grauman says the distributor is already seeing customers putting $1 million network upgrades on hold pending trials and testing of NSX. Japan's NTT has deployed a pre- cursor to the product, and Grauman says he's keeping a close eye on how it works there.

While he's unsure what sort of savings virtualisation of network infrastructure could bring companies, he says it's likely to be very similar to the way virtualisation impacted servers and where 'companies are now spending one tenth on a virtual server'.

"But it's taken 10 years to get server virtualisation [to this point]. It will take us two, three, four years to fully understand network virtualisation.

Warrilow agrees that virtualised networks are increasingly coming to the fore, but that it's a longer term game. "It's probably more of a conversation for next year" he says.

Instead, in the immediate future, he sees demand for virtual storage.

"If your customer is sick of spending money on storage vendor x or y, there's an opportunity for classic education and pre-sales for where software-based storage may come in," Warrilow says.

He adds that there is still plenty of scope for proof of concept, and more design and configuration work for resellers focusing on software defined storage, balancing out some of the loss of hardware sales.

Meanwhile, Bennet's hit list for where channel can most capitalise on virtualisation is topped by the aforementioned virtual servers as companies move off Unix, management and automation of virtual environments, end-user virtualisation, and virtualisation of the network and storage.

"In all of these areas there are not just technology resale opportunities, but significant services opportunity for resellers as well," Bennet says.

"Not all partners specialise in all areas. Not all server partners will specialise in end user and not all partners will set up cloud offerings. You need to look at what part of the solution you want to specialise in.

Grauman adds resellers need to think carefully about their business and 'do some forward training'.

"Right now people need to become experts. You can't be a jack of all trades and master of none," he concludes.

"Become an expert in virtual desktops, data center virtualisation, server virtualisation, copy data management. Take one and become a deep expert in it.

"Because the worst thing you can do is walk in as a generalist and be competing against an expert."