Channel Post MEA speaks to Salil Dighe, the Managing Director of Meta Byte Technologies, to find out the VDI opportunities present for regional channel community.
How has the VDI market in the Middle East and Africa region grown over the past few years?
The VDI space is an interesting space and lots of organizations are thinking about it. The main drivers for VDI are obviously the centralised management of company data and environment, so it reduces the admin overheads and provide more security as all data is in your company.
What sort of benefits does VDI bring along and how can the channel community use those to market the products and solutions better?
For businesses, VDI technology can bring in a lot of benefits viz. Secured environment, cost savings in the long run, licensing costs become much easier and simpler, Easier budget planning, to Space savings (Hot desk concept), etc. For I.T. it reduces a lot of admin overhead as it is now much easier to manage and monitor the end-user environment running out centrally also not to forget the patch management requirements which is a major challenge.
The channel in this region, instead of focusing on customers technology requirements and tenders alone should also look at creating projects and understanding the business challenges in order to come up with a ROI based solutions selling. In most cases the regional channel is dependent on the principle vendors to do the ground work.
What sort of challenges do you think companies face with VDI? How can these challenges be compared with traditional desktop computing environments?
The challenges are mainly business justifications as you need to have a new infrastructure for hosting the virtualization platform and then software costs. There are also a lot of operational challenges and virtualisation needs to be driven via a strategy and a phased plan. At the beginning VDI sounds redundant but has tremendous benefits in operational efficiency and the overall proficiency of the enterprise.
VDI cannot be a replacement of desktops. VDI is an organizational strategy to minimise cost and to be fluid in terms of response to risks associated with Desktop battlegrounds like downtime due to malwares or viruses. From its capability to restore and backup being extremely easy to allowing an enterprise asset to operate in a virtual and secured environment to distributing software’s and patches with much ease are some of the benefits. However not all can be virtualized hence there are semantics that need to be gathered and considered thus strategizing the initiative. So comparing a VDI to a desktop may just not be fair.
How can the regional channel community market VDI to the best possible scenario?
As said in my earlier point not all organizations can virtualize, as sales, a sense of responsibility towards your customers need, business drivers and other parameters need to be looked at. The best way however to start with is from a securing and centralising aspect. There is a lot of consolidation these days and one of the areas the customers can definitely look at is VDI. I am sure there are many more creative sales than myself who can come up with more reasons that I can write here.
How are VDI solution vendors aiding their channel community to market VDI solutions in a better way?
Vendors have some excellent case studies. Unfortunately regionally I haven’t seen much of case studies. The vendors should invest in this region and its partners to promote them and their partners. Some of the very big ICT firms do that but haven’t seen many.
Regionally there is some excellent technical caliber, vendors must take up this market seriously and invest in trainings and workshops more frequently. Virtualization brings its own challenges. The adoption is definitely there but slow compared to other regions.
The industry needs to look at making VDI’s affordable and lighter in footprint. Organizations need to look at greener technologies to enable high performing infrastructure. Yes the impact is high CAPEX but lower OPEX and profits in the long run.
Do you offer VDI solutions in the regional markets?
We do not have a VDI solution, our solutions make VDI happen for enterprises in smaller, greener and extremely high performing footprint. Whilst we do this we also consolidate our customers infrastructure. We have partnered with FusionIO which is a NAND Flash based storage and caching solution. It’s like you will run 10x more capacity and performance on standard Tier1 servers. We haven’t seen any other technology adoption grow so fast in such a short span. Many large US firms are already using this for not just VDI but also for datacenter consolidation.
