channel ICT
technology offers industry-leading speeds and bandwidth,” explains David, “and there’s great potential for wireless in the stadium market driven by bring your own device – where people want instant replays, to access betting and simply to share their experiences – with Meru particularly good at coping with these sudden peaks and high demand in traffi c.”
David continues: “The wireless business also provides a signifi cant wider opportunity for our conventional networking sales through upgrading existing infrastructure to facilitate the front end wireless network. There seems to be a lot of physical cabling and switches required to underpin the wireless network in these stadium contracts.”
Another vendor in the Zycko portfolio is perfectly placed to meet this ‘mixed’ demand (and a lot more besides!) – Huawei. Anyone who knows anything about the global IT market knows just how big Huawei already is in the Far East, and, similarly, just how big it could become in the rest of the world.
For now, however, Huawei remains fi rmly in the ‘sleeping giant’ category when it comes to EMEA. However, he recognises their determination and believes that Huawei should not be underestimated – indeed, he thinks that as and when they do fully recognise the value of the Channel, the company could just start making a signifi cant impact, with Zycko ready to help.
Another area of the portfolio that Zycko is witnessing great success in is unifi ed communications, more specifi cally video. “We saw a 40% growth in Lifesize sales last year and expect this accelerated growth to continue this year” says David. He believes that this is down to software-based solutions driving an increase in video adoption.
“Organisations are now looking to enable each individual employee with video, rather than just the offi ce boardroom. Lifesize are
ideally set to take the market here with their recent launch of
Lifesize Cloud. Lifesize are driving innovation which is why they are a perfect partner for Zycko” David adds.
Storage success story Storage continues to be one of Zycko’s core strengths, with the interest in Tintri’s technology leading to 115 per cent sales growth last year. Tintri’s vision is quite simple: ‘Application-aware storage that provides VM-level visibility, control, insight and agility, moving IT from reactive to strategic’. The storage virtualisation space is a busy one, but David believes that: “We’re now getting to the point where people understand the differences between the various virtualisation offerings.”
“Tintri’s founder, Dr Kieran Harty, came from VMware after seven years as their Executive Vice President of R&D, so has a better understanding than most of what’s required. The Tintri VMstore appliance integrates the hypervisor and Flash to provide high performing storage, covering all but the very highest two per cent or so of the market.” With Tintri recently introducing VMstore for Hyper-V, there’s a whole new market to go after. Yes, the SMB one might be the current sweet spot for Microsoft, but no one can be unaware that the industry giant is making a signifi cant play for the large enterprise space as well.
Getting the balance right No such problems exist for a recent Zycko signing – KEMP Technologies, which manufactures a range Server Load Balancer appliances. “Load balancing is an exciting place to be,” says David. “Initially, this market was controlled by F5, who are the enterprise gorilla and now there’s KEMP, whose technology is simple, inexpensive and targeted at SMBs. KEMP have established Global alliances with some key global organisations enabling them to offer plug and play products with Microsoft and Cisco integration.”
David continues: “I’m confi dent that KEMP has a good management team, I know they are being ‘patient’ with us, but they are trusting us to deliver training and professional services, and we’re making signifi cant inroads in a lot of regions. We’re their fi rst authorised training partner in the UK and their Northern European Distribution Partner of the Year. The load balancing market might be a niche one, but it’s growing and Kemp doesn’t pretend to do anything else. The
Tintri clears storage bottleneck in German school
A VOCATIONAL SCHOOL in Cloppenburg, Germany, is now using Tintri’s VMstore solution to power its entire Virtualisation Desktop Infrastructure (VDI).
Berufsbildende Schulen Technik (BBS), a school that provides training for a wide variety of jobs in different industries, needed a new system to support its 2,700 VDI users on campus. It called on Tintri, a leading producer of storage for virtualisation and cloud environments, to supply a smarter storage solution to improve the speed and reliability of its virtual desktops.
Previously BBS had been suffering from a storage bottleneck when its students were using its VDI, an infrastructure that was originally deployed in 2009 using VMware ESXi on an HP storage environment. However, with Tintri VMstore, the school is enjoying much shorter boot times for virtual desktops and signifi cantly lower latency on a single storage array.
Andreas Loosen, IT manager at BBS, commented that after the struggles of a previously slow and cumbersome system, the Tintri solution has reduced latency by 500 per cent. Furthermore, he said the high IOPS performance means BBS suffers no signifi cant performance impact even when starting 25 to 50 desktops simultaneously.
BBS has also praised the speed of the implementation, with Loosen saying: “Tintri promised we could set up the arrays in 30 minutes. In reality, we were up and running in under 10 minutes! The arrays were incredibly easy to install. By contrast, it took over two days to implement the EMC storage we tested, even though it was installed by a storage expert.”
Summer 2014 I
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