Sherifa Hady, EMEA Channel Sales Director at Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, explains how Edge Computing has impacted the channel.
Aruba recently published a new e-book, ‘Opportunity at the Edge’, in collaboration with Fast Future, calling for companies to start embracing Edge technologies immediately in order to take advantage of the vast commercial potential they present.
It was clear from the global CIOs and future thinkers we spoke to as part of our research that moving processes and applications to the edge of the network will be imperative to enable the on-going Digital Transformation of companies.
But while this is good news for any businesses that are looking to gain a competitive advantage and keep up with increasing customer expectations, the research showed that unlocking the opportunity at the edge is no mean feat. Indeed, interviewees spoke about the sheer scale of the task facing IT teams in delivering these new technology ecosystems, with changes anticipated on both a structural level (adapting the network infrastructure, adopting new innovations, enhancing security provisioning) and on a strategic one (driving a shift in mindsets, growing leadership awareness).
One thing was highly clear. The opportunities for channel partners to support companies on their edge journey are huge, but to take advantage they will need to be competitive, fast and ready to adapt what and how they sell.
So, to give them a head start, here are three key pieces of advice I think our partners need to know as we try make this future a reality.
- Understand which sectors have the greatest immediate opportunities
While the channel will always have one eye on what’s coming over the horizon, it is important not to miss out on the opportunities of today. Though we see Edge networking creating future waves across the entire economy, we identified a number of specific industries that will be able to take advantage of the opportunities more quickly than others, and that are crying out for help developing and supporting the necessary underlying infrastructure or over the top services:
Education: A range of new revenue opportunities are opening up that could make a major contribution to the finances of education institutions if harnessed correctly.
Healthcare: With Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning offering far greater analysis of patient data than ever before, healthcare organisations have a real opportunity to better understand the efficacy of treatments and medications, allowing better targeting and less waste.
Large public venues: From overlaying Augmented Reality content on games to sharing multisensory virtual reality versions of what the players are experiencing, there are immense new possibilities emerging in sports and live entertainment.
2.Position yourselves as a strategic and trusted partner
For many IT decision makers, the challenge of the edge will be ensuring the IT function can lead the pursuit of edge-based strategies and deliver the right level of support with a proactive, enabling stance. With a long list of critical success factors, this should offer numerous open doors for channel partners.
3. Focus on securing the network
One of the key findings in our research was that securing Edge networks is an incredibly high priority for businesses – in fact addressing the security challenges of distributed processing was the number one critical success factor.