Accelerating Business Opportunities on the Way to the Cloud

The road to enterprise cloud computing is paved with opportunity for enterprising solution providers who are properly positioned and equipped. As organizations continue to add virtual infrastructure to their physical resources and begin experimenting with internal clouds, they’ll need new technical capabilities, operating processes, policies and management tools that are non-trivial to acquire, integrate and master. Most will find themselves stuck at some point in the journey, struggling to achieve the promised gains in efficiency and cost savings. They may feel like the economic benefits and operational agility can’t be realized until the journey is nearly complete.

A solution provider that can quickly assess a customer’s current state of maturity, identify the technical and operational gaps that impede their progress, then orchestrate and expedite their move to the next level can build a significant new practice as an expert cloud migration guide.

The stakes certainly aren’t trivial. Gartner predicts 28 percent annual growth in the virtualization market through 2013, with sales reaching $6.2 billion. Only 16 percent of workloads are virtualized today, but that’s forecast to reach 50 percent by the end of 2012. Sales of server virtualization management solutions are projected to grow at 38 percent a year through 2012, reaching an annual value of $4.6 billion.

Four Stages to Virtualization Maturity

All this investment will take place along a migration path described by Forrester Research as a four-stage progression from exploratory deployment of virtual servers to policy-based automation of large, dynamic virtual environments—private clouds. There will be obstacles aplenty along the way, and capable solution providers will find profitable opportunities at every stage.

In the Forrester model, stage one is initial acclimation, where companies build virtualization experience in non-critical applications, moving carefully into production with minimal use of virtualization tools. Business opportunities here will include virtualization strategy and planning engagements.

Stage two is strategic consolidation. In this stage, production deployments become widespread, thanks to the use of virtual server management tools. Customers will need experienced guidance in server consolidation and virtualized disaster recovery solutions. You can also prime future cloud success by introducing automation into the virtualization project.

Stage three is marked by process improvements and virtual lifecycle management solutions to address business-critical deployments and virtual server sprawl. Companies at this level require expert assistance in managing physical and virtual infrastructure lifecycles, and a partner with ITIL expertise in service management.

In stage four, organizations make the transition to a private cloud. Combining resource pooling and policy-based automation with self-service deployment helps to greatly reduce the burden on IT staff. In addition, chargeback tracking must attach real costs to those services consumed by business units. And since these services are often business-critical, there must be a strong focus on service level agreements and quality of service compliance. Capable channel partners will find opportunities in management tool integration, chargeback/SOA implementation and cloud infrastructure design.

Needed: Versatile, Affordable Assessment Tools

One thing you’ll need to access and capitalize on these types of opportunities is a powerful workload planning and analysis tool, something that takes the guesswork out of capacity management and consolidation planning by tracking and profiling actual CPU, disk, memory, and network utilization over time, on both physical and virtual hosts, across operating systems and hypervisors. Something like PlateSpin Recon. And in the best of all worlds that tool would be available essentially for free.

Which is precisely the point of PlateSpin Recon for Assessment, a Novell program that makes free licenses available to Novell partners in good standing, for use in 30-day customer assessments. The program includes marketing and planning support, technical training, joint sales calls and assessment support. Interested Novell partners can find program details here.

Dan Dufault is global director of partner marketing at Novell. Guest blogs such as this one are part of The VAR Guy’s annual sponsorship program. Read all of Dufault’s guest blogs here.