VDI gets a bad rap because of cost and complexity but its utility in a mobility driven market segment cannot be underestimated. Although Techaisle's most recent SMB VDI adoption survey is still in the field, as per our last survey conducted in January 2014, the US SMB VDI adoption continues to increase. Techaisle's quantitative VDI/DaaS research shows that the SMB objectives in adopting either on-premise or hosted VDI/DaaS solutions revolved around mobility, application availability from anywhere and on any device, disaster recovery, centralized management and administration of end-point devices at the same time reducing costs. SMBs are recognizing the need to adopt virtualization within their businesses, however, Techaisle survey also shows that 56 percent of SMBs consider the technology complex to understand and implement.
Techaisle Blog
Dell
The year 2014 belonged to Dell with its end-to-end solution portfolio, post-privatization enthusiasm and channel momentum. In 2015 Dell will have to accelerate its market penetration with converged infrastructure, cloud client computing, security and new IT services offerings.
• Key question: Can Dell align its "breadth" capabilities with the "depth" required to position, deploy and support an increasingly-complex portfolio – and can it do so at scale?
IBM
IBM began to regain its lost glory in 2014 with rapid-fire Cloud announcements – SoftLayer, Cloudant, Bluemix, Watson analytics, Verse and Cloud Marketplace. IBM is in the best position to cement its place at the CIO table with its Cloud offerings. In 2015, IBM's biggest challenges will be to make all offerings work together instead of "ticking all boxes". Its GBS (Global Business Services) group has to announce bite-sized packaged services solutions, analytical services and performance-based pricing to disrupt the market.
Trends in the channel are felt throughout the IT ecosystem: they affect the pace at which new products gain market acceptance, play a role in determining which vendors rise and fall in market share, and have an enormous effect on the ability of small and even midmarket businesses to absorb new technologies and apply them successfully to business challenges. The epicenter of the trend impact is, of course, channel businesses themselves as they act as a key connection point in the IT product lifecycle.
What will we see in the channel in 2015?
1. Hybrid arrives – not as a strategy but as the result of many discrete decisions. Sources ranging from Consumption Economics to (many) vendors would have us believe that businesses decide on a cloud strategy first, and then layer new workloads on top of whichever platform they select. The reality is very much different – Techaisle research shows that businesses make platform decisions on a workload-by-workload basis, and that over time this results in companies supporting a mix of public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, and on-premise products. The result is that public, private and on-premise are all part of the mix...and that an ability to manage hybrid infrastructure will become a key corporate IT requirement in 2015.
