CBR: What’s the temperature of the UK market?
Neil Eke – Director of Enterprise Systems Sales, Computacenter (pictured above, left with EMC’s Adrian McDonald):
From an overall UK market perspective at an enterprise level the uptake continued in certain key markets. The software enabled part of the business is continuing to grow at a faster rate than the server and storage space.
From a software perspective, and we’re aligning more to that market through a better aligned go-to -market sales engine and integration of solutions in enterprise management and core software with partners like VMware’s Vcloud suite, Oracle and IBM enterprise. This is driving market share gains for us.
CBR: What’s happening in cloud?
NE, CC: Cloud is definitely having an impact. It is difficult to measure the full impact on the customer base.
SAAS and IAAS ready is what they [customers] want to be able to become. They want to become more cloud ready, internally and also be ready to use external cloud providers.
We have a number of customers driving that way quite quickly and this is a service opportunity for integration and retiring of some equipment.
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The concept of two speed IT is gaining traction with the customer.
There is also the legacy issue. Where the application or workload won’t suit a virtualised or scale out environment they are being optimised while the building out of new highly scalable, automated and cloud ready environments is finalised.
CBR: What’s happening at the enterprise high end in hardware?
NE, CC: For IBM we are their largest mainframe partner in the UK and that is a good supply business for us. The platform is far more modular and spans entry level and enterprise level. They’ve done a good job of making it more appealing to a boarder market. There’s a consultancy and advisory play in there for us.
CBR: What’s happening in the converged systems world?
NE, CC: The infrastructure players such HP and VCE are supplying high performance workload for partner workloads. With Netapp, HP or VCE, customers can see significant value in moving forward with a converged approach because of the design, time to delivery, and some of the softer benefits such as TCO and resources.
The slightly new part of the market is the hyper-converged building block. We are partnering with Nutanix and will look at Simplivity.
Our job as a partner is to look at requirements and we’re seeing new players in the hyper-converged market so that helps.
CBR: How is the enterprise software market evolving?
NE, CC: Cloud is about to move to a into a software defined era. Customers are now looking at how to leverage these technologies. Now they need cloud ready automation and orchestration . Customers are now getting to grips with building IT cloud flexible infrastructure. As we see that shift – there is a lot of opportunity – e.g. how quickly they can move from Windows 2003 – which is driving more project work. And they are continuing with the adoption of VMware Vcloud suite which is a hybrid play and drives integration opportunities.
At Computacenter we are talking about the requirement to aggregate and be a broker of service to big public cloud platforms through our managed service proposition using Vcloud air. This would mean offering a choice of having a workload running in a VMware data centre or it could be a back up service where the customer is not typically running infrastructure on a cloud provider.
CBR: How has Computacenter evolved?
We are a service provider and a reseller. Reselling is still very important and not something we shy away from.
What’s important is how we evolve from a core infrastructure provider to an advisory service, in what is becoming a complex world of IT where the pace of change is phenomenal. That creates challenge and choice which is great. We’re investing in people who can advise on what direction to go. To deliver value you have to be great at the edge and great at the core.
