Monday Morning Impact – November 2

CompTIA: Industry Business Confidence on the Rebound

The CompTIA IT Industry Business Confidence Index rebounded in Q4 with an increase of 2.2 percentage points, reversing two consecutive quarters of decline.

The index – published quarterly by CompTIA, an IT industry association – now stands at 62.8 on a 100-point scale, and is based on IT executives’ opinions of the U.S. economy, the IT industry and their own company. All three components of the index recorded gains in Q4, with the rating of the overall economy achieving the largest increase.

“Overall, I’m hearing positive reports from colleagues, business partners and clients,” said MJ Shoer, president and virtual chief technology officer, Jenaly Technology Group, Inc., Portsmouth, N.H., and chair of the CompTIA Board of Directors. “We’re seeing more and larger opportunities coming to the table as some businesses, who’ve historically tried to manage IT internally, realize they can accelerate their adoptions and efficiencies through outsourcing. We’re also seeing a strong uptick in cloud migrations.”

Heading into the final months of 2015, 65 percent of IT executives surveyed say their companies are on track to meet their sales goals for the year.

“Though down slightly from earlier this year, a healthy percentage of companies expect to meet or exceed revenue goals for 2015, indicating the broad based strength in the IT sector,” said Tim Herbert, senior vice president, research and market intelligence at CompTIA.

Despite the uptick, there continues to be concern over customer willingness or ability to invest in IT products and services.

“Six in 10 firms report seeing some degree of customers’ postponing certain purchases,” Herbert noted. “About one in three companies say their clients have substituted for less expensive or opted for smaller IT purchases.”

The CompTIA IT Industry Business Confidence Index is based on a September 2015 online survey of executives at 335 U.S. IT companies.

Channel Impact
These findings are good news for channel partners, as well as for the rest of the IT ecosystem.

Brocade Joins Next Generation Mobile Networks Alliance

Brocade has announced its membership in the Next Generation Mobile Networks (NGMN) Alliance, an open forum founded by global network operators dedicated to ensuring that the standards for next-generation mobile broadband infrastructure satisfy end-user demands and expectations.

As a member of the NGMN Alliance, Brocade will help to define and standardize next-generation mobile broadband technologies. In particular, Brocade will participate in the software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) spaces as the alliance further evolves its work on the standardization and availability of 5G for 2020 and beyond. As mobile operators begin to transform their networks to support 5G, they need a New IP architecture that can support the scale, automation and services enabled by software and an open ecosystem. Alliances such as NGMN are intended to help develop new partnership and business models supported by technologies that increase performance and scalability for mobile broadband networks.

“Brocade believes that New IP networking solutions are intricately linked to delivering the performance and scale necessary to support billions more users and devices,” said Kevin Shatzkamer, chief technology officer of mobile networking at Brocade. “We are excited to share our strong domain expertise in SDN and NFV to support the development of 5G requirements and design principles.”

The NGMN Alliance membership now comprises 28 global mobile network operators, 35 major telecom vendors and 28 universities and international research institutions.

Channel Impact
It’s always good to see a variety of vendors participating in such endeavors.

Data Dynamics Launches New Partner Program

Data Dynamics, Inc., a New Jersey-based storage management vendor, has rolled out a new partner program designed to augment sales of the company’s StorageX platform. The Data Dynamics Advantage Partner Program features three partner tiers with scaling benefits and discounts offered to each level.

“Data Dynamics continues to see strong growth via our channel to deliver a software-defined data migration and management solution for next generation hardware environments,” said Sean McCarry, vice president of worldwide sales. “Exponential data growth necessitates frequent capacity expansion – and relies heavily on manual migration efforts which are labor intensive and very costly. Automated, policy-based mobility solutions solve the migration problem allowing enterprises to move quickly to next-generation hardware platforms.”

The platform also offers simplified movement and management of data with deep API integration to leading NetApp and EMC file storage platforms. Reporting features can also be used to validate configurations and confirm moves, as well as health checks of namespaces and systems in the management module.

Channel Impact
Smaller vendors typically engage the channel following proof-of-concept, and a clear view that sales are ready to scale upwards in the near future.