DCS: What are the company’s particular strengths/areas of expertise?

CM: a) We provide an extraordinary level of business-enablement support to resellers for IT and data centre deployments. Key to this is Magirus taking time to understand a reseller’s strategy, then offering a combination of technical, market, and business development knowledge to assist them to execute on that strategy.

b) Within the data centre space, we offer our resellers the technology they need today and migration paths to cloud computing. We are helping resellers to evolve from capital-intensive, premise-based data centres to hybrid models involving a combination of physical, virtualised, and private cloud computing. In the longer term we expect many of them to evolve to external cloud solutions where computing becomes a utility. Integral to this is Magirus’ strengths in converging virtualisation, storage and converged server technologies for the data centre.

c) With our professional services portfolio and knowledge of the IT sector, we are able to support business partners and their end-customers in the design, planning and implementation of data centre projects. Magirus is not your typical distributor. Our services span: business planning with partners; demand generation; pre- and post-sales support; consultancy; training; certification; implementation; professional services; as well as first- and second-tier support from our pan-European, multi-lingual Technology Logistics Centre in Strasbourg, France.

d) This ability to offer complete solutions with wrap-around support has allowed us to expand our vendor base while enabling partners to forge deeper, more profitable relationships with their customers. Today, Magirus is the largest pan-European distributor (by revenue) for both EMC and VMware – as well as a leading partner of vendors such as: Brocade; CommVault; DataCore; Juniper; and now Cisco.

DCS: Why is the recently announced tie-up with Cisco so significant for Magirus?

CM: Magirus is Cisco’s first specialty data centre distributor in Europe giving us a unique position in the market. The partnership sets us apart from the competition. It gives Magirus a comprehensive, end-to-end data centre portfolio, helping resellers to exploit the advantages of a ‘unified data centre’, converging server, virtualisation, network, storage and security technologies. Our portfolio now includes the much-heralded Cisco Nexus range of switches and Unified Computing System (UCS) range of blade and rack-mounted servers that are optimised for virtual environments in the data centre.

Also, our strengths in virtualisation and storage, combined with Cisco’s data centre products, makes the VCE strategy a reality for resellers – all through a single, pan-European distributor. VCE brings together a vision of the ‘virtualise compute environment’ that saw Cisco, EMC and VMware come together in 2009 to form a ‘path to the unified compute cloud’.

Magirus was a natural choice of distributor for Cisco because of its position as the largest VMware and EMC pan-European distributor with a major focus on data centres. Also, Magirus has a European Technology Logistics Centre in Strasbourg to provide a tailored design, configuration and assembly service. Under one roof, technologies from the three data centre giants of Cisco, EMC and VMware can be configured and staged as a single cohesive solution for resellers and their customers.

DCS: And what does it allow Magirus to offer its customers that it could not previously?

CM: Aside from the technology, our European Technology Logistics Centre in Strasbourg enables us to stock key data centre products, meaning that we can offer resellers fast delivery times. By pre-staging the technologies, we substantially de-risk the solution which gives our resellers and their customers greater confidence. Furthermore, we provide facility and training services – making us the most comprehensive “one stop shop” for unified data centre solutions.

DCS: Do you see the data centre market overtaking storage networking as the major focus for IT amongst your customers?

CM: We envisage customers looking at the data centre in a more holistic way in contrast to siloed components, bringing together network and storage fabrics into a unified platform.

We are excited about the opportunity for resellers and customers to create an intelligent, dynamic data solution. This is where Cisco has integrated the networking, storage and server configuration into a single management interface. In practice, it means utilising the fabric as the ‘intelligence’ which links every data centre component. This gives significant benefits by reducing management overhead by up to 60-70% when re-purposing servers for new business processes.

DCS: Is Magirus now “Cisco only”?

CM: No. With this newly-structured portfolio Magirus offers resellers greater choice, maximum flexibility and best of breed solutions of data centre technologies and migration paths. This allows resellers to come up with all kinds of solutions to meet customer demands and requirements. They can choose from a wide range of products from vendors such as: Juniper; Brocade; Riverbed; RSA; Vizioncore; Veeam and many more. These will form the basis of future data centre and private cloud deployments. Looking ahead to the future, we are constantly reviewing the market to ensure that we are able to take on the best new vendors and technologies to help our resellers and their customers to differentiate themselves.

DCS: How can Magirus help customers address the following customer pain points/buzz topics:

Virtualisation
By creating a virtual server, you can dynamically alter and most importantly, reduce the amount of computing power available to suit your needs, saving power and reducing the overall amount of IT resources needed to do the same job. While virtualisation is more commonplace, it still represents a significant opportunity for resellers to help customers deploy the technology and free up resources. Magirus can help resellers and their customers benefit from the next wave of virtualisation. For example, we can help them to utilise tools to better manage virtual environments as well as deploy desktop virtualisation – all of which increases IT and data centre efficiency.

The Cloud
The Cloud means different things to different people. Magirus helps resellers define what cloud computing means to their business and their customers. Consequently, we equip resellers to determine which cloud model best suits a given customer’s needs. We help them provide what is needed, whether it is: a premise-based data centre; a hybrid model that involves a combination of physical, virtualised and or private cloud computing; or a fully-fledged, external cloud solution.

Convergence/Unified Comms
Our focus is the data centre. Magirus works with resellers to assist customers in understanding which sections of the network need to be converged. Also, Magirus helps them adapt the relevant part of the data centre network refresh plan. This in turn creates greater efficiency for their data centre and business.

Consolidation
Magirus is committed to understanding the business plans and strategies of our resellers and their customers ahead of consolidation. Then using an IT building block approach we break down that vision into manageable pieces so each section can be consolidated and measured to show the return on investment. This gives the customer the control and choice to become comfortable with each phase before moving on. Magirus believes that this approach drives higher customer satisfaction and therefore a closer relationship with the reseller.

Energy efficiency
Virtualised, cloud computing and hosted environments, with their associated economies of scale are helping organisations to reduce their carbon footprints. Magirus can help prepare resellers and customers for this gradual migration to public cloud implementations. Furthermore, technologies from our virtualisation vendors are helping resellers to massively reduce energy consumption in their data centres as they consolidate their server farms.

DCS: Any other buzz areas right now?

CM: The market for unified storage and data deduplication will be key. This is set to grow by 15% in the next 12 months. Also, the increasing demand for dynamic data centres and multi tenancy in virtualised environments will drive specific data centre security requirements.

DCS: How do you see Magirus’ position in the Channel when compared to your competitors?

CM: Magirus is thriving in a very competitive market for two reasons:
1) We have a very clear strategy for consultative distribution with consistent pan-European reach, specialising in helping resellers to exploit emerging technologies

2) Magirus is unique in its 100% focus on the data centre and helping resellers to evolve to cloud-enabled solutions. We equip resellers with high-quality services from data centre integration capabilities to training, and help them de-risk entry into new markets.

DCS: And how does the Channel need to evolve to address the sophistication of the data centre market?

CM: The huge change in how customers’ access and delivery of IT is driving the dynamic data centre. So it is imperative for resellers to understand this shift and be the trusted cloud adviser to help customers adapt the network, the data centre and its delivery accordingly. For example, resellers need to understand where they want to operate and whether they want to partner with other specialist resellers in a certain area or with an application service provider.

DCS: How would you like to see Magirus developing over the next 12-18 months?

CM: We see Magirus staying at the forefront of the development of the dynamic data centre. This means being able to provide the best solutions for our partners with the delivery model their customers are requesting (i.e. traditional delivery, as a service or in a cloud)

DCS: Any data centre technologies/issues not currently on the radar that you believe will become important in the next year or so?

There are two areas:
1) Standards-based provisioning systems. They allow organisations to access public and private clouds in a standardised way, delivering time and cost savings. This contrasts with the bespoke provisioning solutions available today.

2) Data centre performance management and monitoring tools. These are vital for planning and managing future data centres. Also, the tools ensure that SLAs are met and that data centre managers have meaningful ROI information at their fingertips. The latter is critical in planning and operating cloud-based solutions.

DCS: If you had to offer just one or two pieces of key advice to customers wrestling with data centre optimisation – what would these be?

CM: Adapt or die i.e. resellers and customers need to adapt to the whole market shift to virtualisation and cloud computing solutions. Currently, 70% of production servers remain physical as opposed to virtualised. This means that a lot of cost and productivity benefits are being lost. So resellers and customers need to first, migrate to virtualisation and then evolve to a cloud solution. The implications of not doing so are that resellers will find it harder and harder to find customers – while the customers’ cost of IT and therefore, the cost of doing business will rise. Magirus has the IT solutions expertise along with a broad portfolio of the latest data centre technologies such as the VCE vendors that are pioneering the dynamic data centre.

We believe that resellers need to become trusted cloud advisors for their customers. By doing this, both resellers and their customers will have the knowledge to choose the appropriate data centre and cloud solution that will not only fit their organisation but deliver significant benefits that are there for the taking. 

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Tags: The Cloud, Virtualization, Applications, Design & Facilities Management, Green Tech, Hosting & Colocation, Networks & Telco , Servers, Power & Cooling, Security, Storage Networking

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