SMB Virtualisation: Taking the virtualisation journey

It’s almost a given that the enterprise customer has either adopted a virtualisation strategy, or is aware enough of the technology to have its own reasons for responding ‘not now’. In the SMB space, however, things are not as certain. While virtualisation has been around for eight years, it’s only recently started to push into the SMB space, and many customers are still either unaware of the technology, or don’t have the capabilities to rollout a virtualisation solution. That’s where partners can come in. But before the SMB can be a lucrative market for the systems integrator, they need to properly understand what virtualisation is to the SMB, and what they hope to achieve by investing in the technology.

The real reason for virtualisation

No SMB is looking at virtualisation for the sake of doing virtualisation. It’s a simple truth which also applies to the entire industry – enterprises are unlikely to be caught by a buzzword without a tangible benefit at the end of the rollout tunnel themselves – but it’s a truth that is often forgotten at the lower end of town. Enterprises have large-scale infrastructure concerns, so they’ll look for virtualisation solutions that aid in consolidating assets. SMBs just want to get the job done. That might sound flippant, but the typical SMB simply hasn’t got the resources or inclination to chase after intimidating-sounding technology, nor do they have the direct touch with a vendor to properly investigate the opportunities.

A partner with the ability to break down those barriers and demonstrate the value of a virtualised solution to the SMB market is therefore in a great position.

“In the SMB space, they’re not aware of the solutions they’re looking for,” Regal IT managing director, Mark Gluckman, said. “They may have heard about it, but they don’t have direct access to the vendors that the medium enterprise customers would have, and they wouldn’t be on any sort of invitation list.”

Some SMBs are quite technologically savvy, while others exist within a community in which friends or competitors have virtualised. But without proper exposure, even those SMBs have a high reliance on their network or systems integrator for advice on what should be done.

According the Gluckman, a number of roles for partners exist beyond the advisory role. For those SMBs with internalised IT resources, the partner can move to third-level support, putting an environment onto a managed service contract with regular health checks and maintenance.

At the other end of the spectrum, SMBs might want to completely outsource the environment – the customer won’t care what’s going on in the back-end as long as the systems and applications are being looked after and the SLAs are being met.

Regardless of the level of engagement, however, virtualisation is a technology that Regal IT encourages SMBs of all levels to look at – for disaster recovery purposes if nothing else.

“Even it it’s a single application on a single server, you can still virtualise it because it still gives you the ability to move that application to another physical server should a failure occur,” Gluckman said. “They might not have that second server onsite, and might not be able to afford a second, but we can still copy the virtual server to a disc, move it somewhere else and have the customer up and going in a short amount of time.”

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Crunching numbers

Virtualisation, according to Dell, is a strong proposition in the SMB space – which in turn is a large potential audience for the vendor and its channel network.

“If you look at the SMB market in Australia, there are around 1.2 million SMBs, of which about 800,000 have some sort of IT requirement,” Dell channel director A/NZ, Jay Turner, said. “If you look from a medium-business perspective, there are probably only 40,000-50,000 really medium-businesses in size.”

In the SMB space, organisations are interested in how to save money, and continue saving money over a three- to four-year purchase cycle. This drive may well cause virtualisation to be the first stage, or entrée, into entering a fully virtual relationship in the future. That SMBs are also looking to outsource their IT infrastructure lends further credence to this trend.

“SMBs shouldn’t really have to be able to even spell virtualisation to be honest,” Turner said. “It should be part of the overall deliverable that their IT support organisation provides them with. That’s where I think the successful channel partners in the future are.”

Dell has also observed an interesting trend develop when interacting with SMB customers and partners through various events over the past 24 months. A large number of SMBs have, in their heads, done some virtualisation, but in reality, what those customers have virtualised amounts to less than 10 per cent of the environment – a very tentative step into the virtual world.

Beyond the initial investment to put virtualisation into the IT environment, SMB customers are leaving the deployments with the low-risk parts of their environment alone, and not gone near the critical applications. Because of this, partners can find opportunities in revisiting those organisations and demonstrating that virtualisation technology has continued to progress and mature and is now more robust and capable.

Once a business case for a greater range of applications – including the critical ones –to be placed in virtualised environments, partners have a great opportunity for double-dipping with those SMBs that had previously been so tentative in adoption.

Picking the right attack strategy

Early this fiscal year, VMware released a product called VMware Go – a virtualisation solution specifically targeted at the SMB market. VMware Go comes with a Web-based interface and a wizard to guide the SMB through installation and set-up – an attempt to mitigate any lack of technical skill an SMB’s (possibly non-existent) IT department or manager might have. From there, users can easily create virtual machines and exercise basic management tasks on those machines and ESXi servers.

VMware clearly wants to penetrate into the SMB space. The vendor also recently created a director of commercial sales position to focus on the lower end of the market.

But it’s not that easy. The product, while within the abilities of the SMB to deploy and administer, is not really what that market is looking for. As explained earlier, SMBs aren’t looking for mere product sets, they’re looking for an overall solution and in that regard, they’ll still need a channel partner to complete the rollout for them.

“The role of the trusted advisor is very important here, and also they need to hide all the complexity – they’re going to tell their clients that it’s easy and they don’t have to worry about it, but at the same time they can flip a switch and get it working – that’s what SMBs want,” IDC program manager for IT spending, Jean Marc Annonier, said.

“The initial conversation to be had with a customer is ‘why would you want to do that?’ It’s not to be challenging, but rather, to be inquisitive.”

For example, is the issue about reducing the footprint of infrastructure equipment the customer is buying? Is it about trying to make the infrastructure they’re buying more flexible and dynamic in terms of being able to deploy new software, new servers and new applications quickly?

“At the server level, the driver is not virtualisation, it’s about consolidation, or the ability to build a dynamic environment,” Microsoft director of server business group, Philip Goldie, said.

“What we are trying to do, especially through our partners, is enable the discussion around some of the other benefits of virtualisation and effectively a virtualised infrastructure. That could be anything from the ability to save money on hardware, to the ability to manage that infrastructure properly.

“The discussion I’m interested in having is what’s the difference between me building that infrastructure, and me buying the infrastructure through a cloud service, and how would that look in the future?”

Moving forward

There’s little doubt virtualisation can aid SMBs. As with organisations of any other size, SMBs are feeling pressure to consolidate costs and make the most from IT purchases.

The challenge for vendors and their partners is that those same potential customers don’t necessarily understand virtualisation, and then don’t necessarily care about specific technologies.

The upside to this is a wealth of opportunities to act in an advisory and support role. Properly understanding the needs and capabilities of the SMB customer is the key to turning a massive potential customer base into a lucrative venture.

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SMB virtualisation trends

According to a survey run by IDC in late 2009, around 25 per cent of SMB servers in Australia are virtualised, excluding businesses with fewer than 10 employees.

In terms of technology, most are running on rack servers, although blade servers are quite prominent when it comes to medium-sized businesses – one-quarter of virtualised platforms are based on blade servers. For those servers in the last 12 months residing in the SMB segment, three in four servers being purchased at present are virtualised.

IDC program manager, IT spending, Jean-Marc Annonier, said while that was a huge number, it wasn’t a surprise to him.

“It is following the pattern of the refresh cycle,” he said. “Those systems integrators, when they go and deploy new platforms for their clients, typically now it’s going to be a virtualised platform.” On top of that, many of the new servers being deployed are quite beefy, even in the SMB level.

“A lot of quad-core servers are being deployed with multiple processors. More than 80 per cent have more than eight gigabytes of ram – those kinds of servers are good for virtualisation,” Annonier said.

According to IDC, there is little objection to virtualisation in the SMB space. “There are not that many difficulties, apart from trying to understand what virtualisation is – SMBs just want to make sure the applications will run the same way as they did before,” he said.

“Where there is resistance, it’s around moving business-critical applications to a virtual platform, because they have no guarantee that it will work the same way.”