As I am waiting for my flight to Las Vegas to attend and present at the IBM PartnerWorld conference, I wanted to get a few thoughts down on paper, as it were, regarding my expectations for the event and IBM's approach to cloud and managed services.
As far as the event is concerned, IBM is using this conference as an opportunity to brief the press (both channel and non-technical) on the company's plans for 2013. You can expect a lot of discussion about big data over the next few days, which is the focus of attention for a lot of the enterprise customers IBM is talking to these days. Big data does play into the strengths of IBM and a lot of the products and solutions IBM has accumulated over the years.
Now, the panel I'm on relates to big data and managed service providers. What I am interested in seeing is if the big data message resonates with the members of the press, particularly those in the non technical press. While big data has been a major topic for enterprises, the concept of big data for managed services and cloud providers has not yet become what I would classify as a topic of major concern at managed services events. This is not to say that big data isn't an issue; it's jut not am issue most MSPs would classify a big data, especially when dealing with customers.
As is frequently case, enterprise terminology often makes its way to the MSPs only after a period of time has elapsed. Issues of major concern do not often appear within both the enterprise amd the channel at the same time. While MSPs have been addressing data storage, archiving, business continuity, amd similar issues for many years now, big data is one of those terms of art that will likely start to become vogue within the MSP and cloud community very soon. My suspicion is that MSPs will be playing vertical roles in the larger big data picture. In this context big data is of major concern to service providers, especially in the mid market, where they are one of many service providers attending to the customer.
I'll keep you updated, live from the conference.
