The VAR Guy

The VAR Guy had a conversation with Michael Nielsen, HP’s director of Network Solutions Marketing, about HP’s latest FlexFabric Networking technology. Nielsen said the lines between enterprise and SMB are being blurred, which could change the future of managed services. Read on for some interesting perspective …

Nielsen, who also spent time at Juniper Networks and Cisco Systems, has seen pretty much all the various approaches taken to big IT networking. He said far too often there’s an “overzealous adherence to standards-based implementations,” which can be unhelpful to customers and partners alike. The solution, he said? HP’s adherence to open-based protocols.

The VAR Guy wanted to know just how big IT networking technology can work in the SMB space. Nielsen said the labels “enterprise” and “SMB” actually do both groups a disservice.

“Partners don’t like ‘SMB’ vs. ‘enterprise.’ They don’t like to be classified. We’ve helped them get away from arbitrary classification [and] Flex has a good play there [since] ‘SMB’ and ‘enterprise’ companies are starting to see the same performance challenges,” he said. For example, a managed service provider may have only a handful of seats in house, but it provides a large amount of or complex services that require the need of HP’s high-end products. That robust buildup of Flex networking also bubbles up into a cloud, he noted.

“It’s an exciting time, because we’re just about to turn a corner. We’re starting to see traction on cloud services,” Nielsen said, because HP’s FlexFabric Networking technology allows partners and customers to shift into a “… hybridized compute and networking model — the industry doesn’t know what that looks like yet [but] creative stuff around managed services [is happening].”

Lastly, Nielsen noted it’s now within reach for managed network and managed services providers to compete directly with similar services offered by telcos, and stressed that HP’s FlexFabric would allow providers to work with a customer’s existing technology (or repurpose it). “It’s pure recapitalization,” he said.

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