ST1707

INDUSTRY FOCUS: DISTRIBUTION FOCUS:
BIGGER ISN'T ALWAYS
BETTER
TONY HOWARD, ENTERPRISE STRATEGY AND OPERATIONS
MANAGER AT BETA DISTRIBUTION, ARGUES THAT SOMETIMES IT'S
BETTER IF THE CHANNEL COMMUNITY LOOKS OUTSIDE OF THE
USUAL BIG NAMES WHEN MAKING BUYING DECISIONS
Everyone is familiar with tier one
brands: household names, worldwide
organisations, thousands of
employees and constantly in the news. They
are the only credible server manufacturers,
or so they would have you believe. As the
old saying goes, 'Nobody was ever sacked
for buying IBM'.
But for those companies trying to earn a
living in the server market, the big brand
badge does have some significant
drawbacks, namely over-distribution and no
margin in the channel.
Any distribution business trying to become
a credible supplier to the resellers, VARs and
MSPs has a real challenge. Firstly, the tier
ones probably aren't going to be interested
in any more distribution outlets for their
products and secondly, convincing the
channel to take a perceived risk on a non
first tier brand, is a challenging prospect - as
per the IBM quote.
However, it's worth the channel looking a
little deeper, and if they do they could
discover that the adage 'It can be any
brand, as long as it's HP', doesn't have to
apply. Let me describe one company to you;
far from a household brand, but
outperforming many of its more famous
rivals, and by some distance: Inspur
Systems, located in Fremont, CA, is part of
Inspur Group, a leading Cloud Computing
and global IT Solutions Provider.
'Well I've not heard of them', I hear you say.
Read on. Founded in 1945, Inspur's four
business groups - Cloud Data Centre, Cloud
Service and Big Data, Software and
Integration, Enterprise Software - provide IT
products and services for over 108 countries
in the world. Inspur is ranked by Gartner as
the Top 5 largest server manufacturer in the
world and No.1 in China.
Still not impressed? Inspur provides data
centre servers and storage solutions which
are tier one quality and performance, energy
efficient, cost effective and built specific to
actual workloads and data centre
environments. Inspur is the majority server
vendor for Alibaba and Baidu worldwide
data centres. The Rack Scale server platform,
the Inspur Rack Scale Server SR 4.5, is the
best choice for hyperscale data centre and
cloud deployments. As a leading solutions
and services provider, Inspur is capable of
providing total solutions at IaaS, PaaS and
SaaS level with high-end servers, mass
storage systems, cloud operating system and
information security technology.
Oh, and they're quite big too: 26,000
employees worldwide, over US$10 Billion
revenue in fiscal 2016, as well as being the
number one brand in China for software,
server and cloud solutions.
The badge may not have the shine of some
of the leading brand names, but that's the
only potential negative. They use the same
high quality components as the tier one
brands; their products and solutions are
proven worldwide, and from a channel
perspective they're certainly not overdistributed,
so there's a chance for the
channel to make some margin.
In any 'lights out' environment the user is
looking for a best fit product, with the best
price/performance, and Inspur fits that
bill. It's perhaps not surprising then that
this is the only server vendor in the world
who is growing.
Inspur had no presence in the channel -
until now. They have appointed Beta
Distribution their first channel distribution
partner, exclusive in the UK. With offices
across the UK, Beta provides a
comprehensive range of services to support
the MSP and VAR. Focused entirely around
'disruptive technologies', Inspur is a prime
example of how Beta have approached
building their portfolio: identify the need
and then go and find an alternative
solution, one that is best in class but
without the drawbacks associated with
many of the tier ones.
Nobody probably ever did get sacked for
buying IBM, but neither did they for
providing their company a tier one quality
and performance, energy efficient solution,
built specific to actual workloads and data
centre environments, and all at a lower cost.
More info: www.betadistribution.com
^
12 STORAGE July/August 2017
@STMagAndAwards
www.storagemagazine.co.uk
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