We’re at an inflection point when it comes to IT infrastructure hardware, and it’s making life more difficult for network engineers who have to make decisions on which vendors support different network building blocks.

On the one hand, data centers are reaching the physical limits of what their legacy IT hardware can support. On the other, advanced technologies such as 5G, virtualization, automation and hybrid cloud continue to increase bandwidth demand. The global optical network equipment market is projected to exceed $28 billion by 2024, driven by the ever-rising numbers of mobile smartphones, laptops and PCs that are allowing users to shop, chat, game and conduct business online.

Network architects now have to weave together different networking building blocks to create viable solutions instead of just building out a single-vendor environment. They’re challenged with meeting complex business challenges while not adding cost or operational complexity — not an easy mandate. Most end customers don’t understand – or care – that balancing legacy and emerging technologies can be tricky, involving multiple networking vendors and complex integrations. They just know they want to be able to collect, process, store and manage immense amounts of data at high speeds with no interruption.

In the as-a-service age, there’s much less talk about hardware than there was a decade ago. Thanks to the cloud, the channel is far more services-oriented than hardware-oriented these days, which has caused an enormous shift in how partners operate, says Brian McConnell, CEO of optical networking hardware provider InterOptic. In fact, InterOptic’s very existence is emblematic of that new channel paradigm, where the market isn’t dominated by one or two big networking hardware OEMs.

Today, partners have to sift through far more networking solutions coming from hardware providers, service providers and third-party sources. That increased competition has tightened margins for partners, causing them to look for alternatives to traditional OEM solutions in order to gain back some of that lost margin, says McConnell.

But the ecosystem, as crowded as it is and as many different products and services it encompasses, is crowded and confusing to many MSPs and SIs who now have sift through dozens of vendors to find the right one for their customers. According to InterOptic, there are 10 things channel partners should keep top of mind when choosing a hardware partner.

Most importantly, like with any OEM offering, partners have to makes sure the hardware they’re buying is coming from a reliable and secure source, so it isn’t going to fail in three months. It isn’t all about cost, either. Below a certain price point, quality and support drops off and customers’ network uptime will ultimately take a hit.