The Changing Face Of Today's VAR

Five essential elements of the trusted solution partner for tomorrow’s CIO.

By Ashby Lincoln, president and CEO, VeriStor 

Today’s IT enterprise is facing change like never before. New demands for initiatives including workforce mobility, BYOD, and converged infrastructure complicated by heightened needs for improved security, disaster recovery, and compliance can make the management of IT infrastructure both complex and costly.

To face these new and evolving demands, the visionary CIO needs to rely on a next-generation solution partner. So much more than the traditional value-added reseller (VAR), an advanced solution partner will help guide tomorrow’s CIOs into the future with a distinct combination of experience and expertise. As a result, new initiatives and organizational demands can be met swiftly and securely, without added complexity, cost or resource drain.

During this evolutionary time for the channel, following are five essential elements visionary CIOs need from their next-generation solution provider:

1. A Focus On Solutions, Not Just Products
   The traditional VAR focuses on selling products. But business challenges aren’t solved by adding products, they’re resolved though the implementation of comprehensive solutions custom designed to meet the needs and demands of the business. Simply throwing more software and hardware at a problem, without first assessing the goals and demands of the business, will only add more complexity and cost. The solution provider of tomorrow carefully and masterfully works to understand the goals and needs of the business, today and into the future, before proposing a technology solution. Then it architects, integrates, and deploys a comprehensive solution that will take the customers’ environment to new levels of performance and efficiency.

2. Technology That’s Tried, Lab-Tested, And Field Proven
   Unlike legacy resellers that sell set brands and only push the products they represent, innovative solution providers partner with dozens of next-generation storage, virtualization, networking, security, and cloud vendors so they can precisely match the needs of the business with the ideal combination of technology. By being a true thought leader in vendor technology and partnerships the best solution providers carefully select vendor partners based on technology innovation and efficiency and rigorously test and certify the solutions they offer. As a result, every solution is field proven, even lab-tested, to deliver the real-world results that meet changing business demands.

3. Agility Powered By Cloud Innovation
   To address increasing cost pressures, many organizations are turning to the cloud. Yet, with something as transformational as the cloud, new challenges occur. Driven by the cloud’s promise to lower costs and reduce day-to-day operations, organizations are moving data and workloads off premise, only to discover the complexity of multi-cloud, multi-hypervisor environments can threaten the efficiency they sought to achieve. Compounding these challenges are ever-mounting security threats and compliance pressures. Close attention is needed in the critical areas of unstructured data governance, network monitoring, threat detection, and cost effective disaster recovery to achieve the true business continuity and compliance that mark a secure and reliable enterprise.
   To optimize the agility of cloud infrastructure, next-generation solution providers need to be at the cutting edge of the cloud and converged infrastructure movement delivering a full range of public, private, and hybrid cloud services. Select one that was one of the early designers of private and hybrid clouds and remains at the innovation brink of cloud-enabled environments that deliver new levels of agility and resource optimization.

4. Business Productivity Accelerated Through Devops, Automation, And Transformation
   Advanced IT environments have achieved superior business alignment with the automation that will reduce costs, improve service, and increase business agility. This enterprise holy grail can be achieved through employing orchestration & automation and DevOps strategies. Advanced solution providers know best practices to centralize and simplify even the most complex enterprise management tasks so the IT team can focus on innovation. From monitoring and provisioning to capacity planning and chargebacks, these services can dramatically improve service levels and eliminate the risk of human error. They can also instantly enable new capacity on-demand, engage self-service access or ensure governance and policy management compliance all while freeing up valuable IT resources for the proactive IT organization that drives business growth.
   Taking automation a step further is IT transformation through the collaboration and systems integration enabled via DevOps services. Here, DevOps expertise helps organizations accelerate software development product delivery from inception to production by streamlining the transition from development to IT operations. Using Agile Methodologies and Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery processes, advanced solution partners can enable the DevOps transformation with a series of services that address both the cultural and technology changes necessary for successful DevOps adoption. As a result companies can achieve faster time to market, increased product quality and lower overall costs.

5. Architecting Tomorrow’s Enterprise Through Passion And Expertise
   At the core of the advanced solution partner are people. Here, it’s important for the advanced solution partner to be second to none. Teams need to have collectively seen and managed every IT enterprise challenge and know exactly how to solve it with ease. From assessment and requirements analysis to design, installation, migration and management, it’s the solution provider’s innovative team of experts that can help CIOs become the thought leaders in the IT enterprise of tomorrow, today.
   The era of the traditional VAR is over. Today, the next-generation solution partner is taking its place. And, these solution partners are the industry thought leaders that will enable tomorrow’s CIO to achieve more simplicity, agility, automation and productivity than ever. With the right solution partner by their side, tomorrow’s enterprises both small and large, will be ready to take on any new business demand with effortless confidence.

Ashby Lincoln is the president and CEO of VeriStor. VeriStor is a next-generation, end-to-end solutions provider specializing in enterprise data storage, virtual infrastructure, public, private and hybrid cloud services, migration, DevOps and technology financing.