"Why infrastructure? Well, it ages rapidly, far faster than business logic," notes Ross Brown, vice president of worldwide sales, services and channel operations at Citrix. Even though there's a commonly held notion that customers are literally sitting on tons of unused processing, storage and networking power, the fact of the matter is they will need even more capacity as they move their IT models and architectures to more of a services model where applications are provisioned over a network instead of being stored locally on each and every machine.
Then there's a financial reason. Spending on infrastructure typically comes out of an end-user customer's capital budget, whereas projects such as the rewriting of applications typically put a drain on operating expenses. Because customers can amortize capital spending over time, they are more inclined to free up dollars for that type of IT spending.
No wonder solution providers say they expect to sell more products from Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel and Microsoft in 2004. In our recent 2004 State of the Market survey, VARs rated several infrastructure companies at the top of their lists of vendors they plan on selling more of in 2004. Interestingly, though, struggling infrastructure companies, including Nortel, Novell and 3Com, did not fare well in our ranking of vendor expectations.
VAR Takeaway
What all this means for solution providers is simple: Prepare to make a full assessment of your customers' IT architectures before moving forward with specific application-deployment plans. That's especially true of channel organizations that have distinguished themselves as specialists in certain fields. As more solution providers have come to learn, specialization has its limits, especially if it means you cannot positively impact a customer's IT infrastructure.
"It's why we maintain strong practices in both our IT infrastructure-solutions business and our applications business," says Andy Vabulas, CEO of I.B.I.S., which offers both Microsoft Business Software solutions as well as traditional Windows and Office offerings.
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