Tag: APC

AWS, VMware, Microsoft and Symantec are pants vendors

hqdefaultAWS, APC, Citrix, Huawei, McAfee, Microsoft, Symantec, Veritas and VMware are lowest-scoring vendors in a channel management survey according to research outfit Canalys.

The Canalys Leadership Matrix was based on more than 2,700 responses from EMEA channel partners who were asked to rate their vendor partners across ten areas of channel management.

Canalys divided the results into four: “Champions”, “Growers”, “Contenders” and “Stragglers”, the survey also judges vendors on how their standing in the Leadership Matrix has changed.

Nine companies were placed in Canalys’ “Stragglers” quadrant, reserved for vendors that “have shown significant weakness in areas of channel management” or “have seen a deterioration in partner relationships, either by choice or mistake”.

AWS, APC, Citrix, Huawei, McAfee, Microsoft, Symantec, Veritas and VMware were all named as channel Stragglers in the survey.

Vole and VMware, two firms which have “highly successful businesses built on sales via partners,” were named and shamed in the report with Canalys saying that there was “a growing wave of channel dissatisfaction with both brands”.

Dell EMC’s appointment as an “official distributor” of VMware licences last year dealt a blow to its resellers and distributors and likely prompted a fall from grace among partners.

Canalys claimed that Microsoft, meanwhile, has been “accused of squeezing channel margins” through its Cloud Solution Provider partner programme.

The top-scoring vendors in the survey included Fujitsu, Cisco, Lenovo, Palo Alto Networks and Veeam. Canalys said that  Cisco’s quality of technical support for partners remains unparalleled when compared with its competitors, while Lenovo’s “Channel 2.0” initiative, which sought to simplify partner incentives, was well received by the channel.

Apple’s  overall rating was still relatively low compared with its peers, and its resellers still suffer from “low margin potential” and “rigid terms and conditions” from the vendor.

 

How to shrink your datacentre

datacenterBy 2018 each person will transmit one gigabyte of data every day, said Jason Dodier, director of sales at APC Schneider Electric. By 2018 there will be 8.6 zettabytes of data. There are two billion internet users, 21 billion network devices, 1.3 million video views per minute.

The data network worldwide use the industrial internet of things, the internet of things itself and social and internet data sources.

Speaking at the Canalys Channel Forum, in Barcelona, the company set out its pitch to the resellers and distributors in the audience. So, APC has something it calls a micro data centre but he said many customers wanted less latency than 100ms, so his company is using edge, which provides less than 10ms latency.

Edge technology is required for medical applications, machine to machine, smart cities, artificial intelligence, 3D printing and speech/image recognition.

Edge computing architectures include gateway, 1 to 10 racks or micro data centres, and regional data centres.

He said localised data centres will be an important part of the market – it;s fast to deploy and provides low latency and high bandwidth.

Schneider APC customers include banks, automotive, oil and gas, government and military and colocation banks.

Micro data centres include storage, processing and networking, ships in a single enclosure and includes power, cooling, security and management tools.

A micro datacentre costs $5/watt for a one rack system compared to $10.8/watt for a 1MW tier one data centre.

Schneider APC sells through a large partner network. Customers can self install, or use system integrator install.