Next-gen technologies are taking aim at the data center — think about edge computing, internet of things (IoT) and blockchain. These technologies will ultimately shape up as business opportunities for partners for years to come. Are you up to speed in the data center and the impact these emerging technologies will have on the market and, potentially, your business?

Dany Bouchedid, CEO of Colotraq, will lead a panel discussion – Data Center 2020: 3 Trends Changing the Game for Partners – at the upcoming Channel Partners Evolution in Washington, D.C. It’s happening on the Channel Futures stage in the expo hall, Sept. 11, at 2 p.m. Bouchedid will be joined by Nancy Ridge, executive vice president, Technology Source; Lisa Marks-Canty, CEO of ChainNinja Blockchain Solutions, and Jake Sherrill, founder and chairman at Tier4 Advisors, each of whom will bring their unique insight on these three key technologies, the competitive landscape, and why you don’t want to be caught flat-footed.

Colotraq/Aluf’s Dany Bouchedid

Channel Partners: The data center has been around forever. Why is it important for partners to hear more about it and these game changing trends?

Dany Bouchedid: The thing with this industry, no matter what the emerging technologies are, no matter what the killer app du jour is, or whatever last mile technology everyone is working on – SDN, SD-WAN or all this other telecom stuff – at the end of the day it needs connectivity, all the bits and bytes; everything has to reside on servers, routers and switches that are housed in the data center. So really, it’s at the heart of all IT architecture and IT infrastructure — anything over IP that’s happening, voice over IP or streaming media, you need the data center infrastructure.

It’s a part of the channel that, I think, is overlooked by agents. So we’re trying to open their eyes to this space and promote a channel for the data center industry.

Jake Sherrill: What’s interesting historically with data centers is that you have markets that are leader markets — so you have 10 million square feet of data center space in Northern Virginia, 6 million square feet of data center space in Atlanta and you have some anchor legacy data centers, meaning massive buildings that have dedicated compute within them, but you’re going to have edge computing data centers becoming more important. Edge data centers might not resemble the legacy anchor data centers and look more like the cabinet you might see at a stoplight or a tier 3 or tier 4 data center.

Tier 4 Advisors’ Jake Sherrill

So, as channel partners, we need to think differently and be ready to help our clients with different needs that they have for these edge compute facilities, for example.

CP: How real are these data center trends in terms of being able to make money?

DB: There are many trends; however, I do think that these three trends are the most pressing right now and will have the most impact over the next 18 months to two years — they’re here now and they’re happening now.

CP: So, address the session takeaways.

Nancy Ridge: Sessions like this one help partners become educated and catch the vision for where these technologies apply in the enterprise and small and medium-size business markets (SMB). We’ve seen cycles and trends happen before — if you look back, we were talking about …

… VoIP and hosted VoIP long before we had products or a selection of partners to choose from or platforms. Now, that’s arguably one of the fastest growing segments of business for many attendees at the show, but it took years to happen.

Technology Source’s Nancy Ridge

If you flash back to the last Channel Partners Evolution D.C., [two years ago], we were talking about SD-WAN. And it’s only been the last 12-24 months that you’ve seen wholesale adoption in the marketplace.

Partners educate the clients. They’re behind us so we have to stay ahead; we’re the trusted advisers.

JS: We’re going to talk about topics that many attendees have no clue what we’re talking about. Many partners, agents in particular, have been in the business for 20 years and can help you with an internet connectivity project at 100 locations but they don’t know much about data centers. That’s just the reality. The people on this panel are data center experts; I’ve toured 500 data centers around the world.

By attending this session, partners can learn something about data centers for their business or maybe they’ll decide it’s important to partner with other companies with data-center expertise on projects.

In fact, I believe there will be a lot of partnering because there’s so much money to be made. Instead of making 100% of nothing, these folks can make 5% of something.