By: Sherifa Hady, Vice President Channel, Europe Middle East & Africa at Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company
The pandemic’s massive alterations acted as a stimulus for a faster rate of digital transformation in every industry area. Businesses must now transition from surviving to thriving.
Businesses have been made fully aware of how critical digital transformation is to their long-term success, and they are eager to invest in IT services, support, and solutions that align with their new requirements – distributed workforces, agile IT, and everything cloud. Channel partners who can recognise these trends and provide information, services, and solutions will thrive in this fast changing IT environment.
Here’s our pick of the top three trends driving market demand in 2022:
IT systems and infrastructure have become more sophisticated as a result of distributed workforces and hybrid working. At the same time, businesses have shifted to fulfil new customer expectations within stores, such as touchless encounters, by distributing applications and workloads across data centres and the cloud. Businesses are at risk of jeopardising the fundamental benefits of emerging IoT and cloud technologies due to a combination of scattered networks and inflexible demands.
IT teams will need to concentrate on network simplicity in 2022, and channel partners may get ahead of the game by providing a single network operating system. IT teams will be able to successfully manage disparate network environments while also offering a high-quality user experience inside a single architecture if they employ a unified infrastructure that is centrally managed via a single point of management.
Because many businesses’ budgets have been slashed as a result of the pandemic, network simplification is even more critical. IT teams must be able to manage remote settings without disrupting larger operations. Channel partners may give customers with new levels of operational simplicity by establishing a single infrastructure, allowing IT teams to transfer resources to more business-critical areas.
There’s no denying that the year 2022 is going to be cloudy. According to recent Aruba study, 83 percent of IT decision makers plan to expand their cloud-based networking spending in the next 12 months, and Canalys data shows that the channel will help fuel a 33 percent rise in cloud spend in 2020.
Upgrading to the cloud is a complex path, and channel partners have an opportunity to step in with new product offerings. It’s also vital to recognise that consumers have a strong desire for trusted advisors to assist them with this shift. The process can be intimidating, especially if clients lack the expertise to comprehend the benefits of the cloud or whether it is more cost-effective for them to deploy a hybrid cloud model.
To capitalise on the rising interest in cloud, channel partners must stand out by leading customers through the process and assisting them in maximising the cloud’s benefits, potentially through a support package. This entails devising a thorough cloud-based plan to guarantee they have the most up-to-date tools and management software to assist consumers.
The fast adoption of cloud technologies has forced a general rethinking of IT consumption models, and we have now transitioned from a hardware-driven industry to a software-first market, or a SaaS-based economy. We may predict a surge in demand for flexible subscription arrangements in 2022.
Customers are increasingly more open to investigating flexible consumption patterns, according to new data from Aruba. In light of the pandemic, only 8% of IT decision-makers stated they would continue with primarily Capex spending, versus to 55% who said they would look at SaaS options. These models free up IT professionals to focus on more complicated, value-added business duties by including several core functions such as deployment and decommissioning in subscription offers. It’s critical for channel partners to expand their products to meet this new demand.
