Evidence of this convergence abounds. Security software vendors are lined up to port their wares to network infrastructure platforms from companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Juniper Networks and F5 Networks. The latest example is the coupling of the Firemon firewall and network management platform with BIG-IP switches from F5 Networks.

As IT organizations ponder their options for the next generation of networking, many of them are insisting that security functions come baked in with the gear. This creates disruption and, in some cases opportunities for solution providers such as M&S Technologies in Dallas that is leveraging its relationship with both Secure Passage and F5 Networks to expand its potential base of customers for both offerings, said Mark Miller, a company partner.

There will always be the need for security services as practice, but how security technologies get delivered to the enterprise is undergoing a major transformation that will challenge solution providers to adopt to some new market realties in the days and months ahead.

A good example of how Web 2.0 platforms can be used in the channel comes in the form of a Web service from BrainShark. Dubbed the Brainshark Channel Solution, this multimedia platform makes it relatively simple for a vendor to extend “widgets” and other modules from the Brainshark service and right on to the Web site of the solution provider.

As platforms like these continue to gain traction, it’s easy to see how solution provider could mix and match modules of product information from different vendors to create solution sets on their own Web sites without having to reinvent that content. Better yet, the same piece of content can be used multiple times across various solution sets.

Brainshark isn’t the only channel marketing platform out there, but it does illustrate how solution providers need to evolve their marketing in the age of the Web. Of course, before that happens, the vendors have to evolve their capabilities as well. And the best way for that to happen is for solution providers to start asking vendors why can’t they do what platforms such as Brainshark already provide?

In the meantime, solution providers need to up their marketing game in the age of the Web, and aligning themselves with vendors that actually help them do that is one intangible criteria that should be seriously considered when deciding to ally with one vendor or another.

Normally, the assimilation of one product category into another is cause for dismay in the channel. But as we go forward, Adam Famularo, CA , senior vice president and general manager for CA’s Recovery Management & Data Modeling business unit, points out that what we’re actually witnessing is the transformation of backup and recovery into an ongoing service that creates opportunities for recurring revenue streams for channel partners.

Famularo adds that this general movement towards backup and recovery in the cloud is also creating some even bigger opportunities for solution provider in the realm of data management. Customers no longer want to treat all data equally. They want to be able to prioritize the recovery process based on relative importance of the data. That creates an opportunity for solution providers to deliver information lifecycle management (ILM) services to the customers are that are enabled by data deduplication and replication services tied back to cloud computing services.

Famularo says channel partners should keep an eye out for how CA not only intends to tightly integrate backup and recovery with cloud computing services, but also how the entire portfolio of CA products will be unified around a data management strategy.

In the meantime, Famularo says he wants partners to know that CA is serious about backup and recovery because it’s now part of a larger corporate strategy that will ultimately create more opportunities for partners.

But at the same time, interest in increasing the productivity of the existing workforce through the better use of IT is on the rise. The question is how can solution providers best leverage unified communications to meet the needs of customers while simultaneously advancing their own business goals? The answer to that question is to start thinking more like a carrier that is delivering set of services that have been customized for a specific customer.

We all know that every major carrier is looking to expand their footprint in unified communications. But the issue these big carriers will have over time is their inability to customize these services. As unified communications evolve in the enterprise, customers are going to want to see these services delivered inside the applications they use every day. That creates an opportunity for solution providers to provide custom unified communication services as a managed service to the customer.

To pull that off, however, solution providers are going to need to deploy a suite of products based in industry standards such as the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) that by definition creates an open architecture. For example, it’s the maturity of SIP that enabled Siemens to replace Tandberg with Polycom as its preferred partner for the video conferencing component of the OpenScape unified communications platform. That same approach has also allowed Siemens to make a case for layering its software in on top of existing Nortel infrastructure rather than just assuming those customers will become customers of Avaya in the wake of the latter company buying the enteprise assets of Nortel, said Michael Garland, head of the North America channel for Siemens Enterprise Networks.

As time goes on, SIP will be extended to integrate with a host of service-oriented architecture (SOA) services, as promised this week separately by Avaya and IBM, that will allow unified communications to be delivered seamlessly across public and private cloud computing implementations.

In the meantime, unified communications represents one of the best opportunities for solution providers to inset themselves inside the business processes of their customers. And as we’ve said before, whoever controls the business process controls the customer.

Of course, IT vendors never saw an emerging technology trend that didn’t look like an opportunity to increase their attach rates. So what is happening under the heading of data center convergence is an attempt by Cisco to expand its networking base into the server realm. This naturally led to a response from Oracle in terms of acquiring Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard’s move to acquire 3Com.

Even before these deals, all three companies have been pushing partners to increase their attach rates and as we move into 2010 there will be more pressure than ever. But the question that solution providers should be asking themselves is whether data center convergence will actually come at a cost of their vendor independence. The fact of the matter is that there are several perfectly good software-only approaches to data center convergence that accomplish much the same goal that Cisco and HP are trying to achieve. Furthermore, we’ll see some evolution of various virtualization technology standards that will make it easier to deliver heterogeneous solutions for data center convergence.

What will change, however, is how customers think about acquiring IT infrastructure. Instead of buying servers, storage and switches, customers will evolve their thinking into buying something akin to “data center processing units” where solution providers are asked to deliver sets of discrete pre-integrated components to power a given set of applications. That may require a little more technical savvy on the part of the solution provider. But what it won’t require is the solution provider to sacrifice their vendor independence unless they deem that backing one horse in the data center races is a good idea.

Further on down the road, solution providers can also look forward to the business opportunities afforded by the eventual need customers will have in terms of integrating diverse units of data center processing. In the meantime, solution providers would be well-advised to not panic in the face of the massive amount of sound and fury around data center convergence that will be one of the hallmarks of 2010.

The good news, as evidenced by the plethora of systems launched at the Consumer Electronics Show, is that there is more variety of types of PCs than in recent memory. Starting with smartbooks and notebooks all the way up to workstation-class systems based on the Intel Core i7 processor. And just to make matters more interesting, there are a new class of “slate PCs” coming that feature touch-screen displays.

The bad news is that margins on all of these systems are very tight. For a solution provider to make any real money on these systems, they have to provide consulting services and ongoing support to really make it worth their while.

The opportunity for solution providers is to present themselves as mobile computing specialists. Customers inherently know they can increase their productivity using these devices, but the number of choices available to them is so vast that many of them will opt to do nothing without a little coaxing.

The companies that make these devices, including smartphones, will be inundating customers with messaging over the next several months. The confusion that all this messaging will generate should ultimately make the customer a little more receptive to the concept of developing a real mobile computing strategy for their business. And that’s where the opportunity for solution providers will ultimately lie.

But while the Nexus One smartphone essentially adds another supplier of phones made by HTC, the Google smartphone is still tethered to wireless networks from T-Mobile and, shortly thereafter, Verizon. Oddly enough, the Nexus One smartphone doesn’t work on 3G networks from AT&T, which just happen to be the preferred wireless network for the Apple iPhone.

From a channel perspective, the ideal situation would be to have open carrier networks that could work with any smartphone. But it would literally take an Act of Congress to make that happen. So while the Google Nexus One is a step in the right direction because it at least provides an open source platform for building mobile applications, it’s hardly represents a revolution.

Perhaps one day, Google will build out its own wireless network and then open that network to any and all device makers. That would roughly result in a smartphone market that would be roughly akin to the open approach that created the PC marketplace.

But until that happens, solution providers and their customers are going to be held hostage by carriers. And the price of that closed-minded approach is not only higher costs for consumers, but a lack of innovation that limits to the mobile application space to penny-ante developers of 99 cent applications that most people get bored with an about an hour.

In the meantime, the development of business-class applications for smartphones suffers because the carriers that control the network are just too difficult to do business with, which largely stems from a bunker mentality dedicated to protecting a franchise rather than thinking about how to better exploit it.

For example, a lot of existing applications are not designed to run as a service in the cloud. And yet customers will typically have 20 years of business logic tied up in that application, so rewriting that application just so it can be delivered as a service via the cloud may not make a whole lot of sense. In addition, there are certain core applications that differentiate the business from business, so running those applications on premise can represent a strategic advantage. And finally, there a host of scenarios where putting data in place outside the four walls of the company may create some legal potential legal issues that are best avoided.

And yet, cloud computing still offers a lot of immediate benefit when it comes to tactical applications. For example, there are a whole range of security and backup and recovery applications that make a whole lot of sense being delivered as a service via the cloud.

This, of course, is where the sweet spot for solution providers is in terms of cloud computing. Longer term, there may be plenty of opportunity to run all kinds of applications in the cloud on behalf of your customers. But right now, most customers want help with the tactical stuff that consumes a lot of their time, but adds no real value to their business.

There will even come a day in the not too distant future where the distinctions between cloud computing, software-as-a-service and on-premise software will become irrelevant. But in the meantime, solution providers in the channel would do well to focus on clear and present opportunities, while waiting for the next generation of enterprise computing to evolve to the point where the discussion about where the application is running is generally moot and all that really actually matters is how well are the various application components integrated.

For solution providers, that usually means sending engineers out to the customer site in the hopes that by setting up a proof of concept demonstration, they can close the deal. The trouble is that all takes time and money.

That’s why the solution providers should be paying close attention to CloudShare, a new cloud computing service that leverages virtualization to greatly simplify the setting up of a proof-of-concept deployment. The solution provider works with CloudShare to create a single implementation of the application they are selling that can be tailored for each customer’s environment. This way nobody has to lug IT equipment to a particular customer site, and the amount of time it take to get the customer to ultimately sign off on a project is greatly reduced.

The other side benefit of CloudShare is that it can also be used for deal registration. Effectively, a vendor could partner with CloudShare to set up a system where no solution provider was allowed to register a deal unless a working proof-of-concept deployment was in place.
In this age of cloud computing and virtualization, the way solution providers in the channel sell products is changing rapidly and, fortunately, it’s mostly for the better.

Now comes along a more modular approach in the form of a Tandberg T3 Custom Edition, which gives solution providers in the channel access to the core components that make up a Tandberg telepresence system without having to commit to using the same displays and furniture that Tandberg uses in its standard product line.

In recent months, Tandberg, Polycom and Mitel have all been making a concerted effort to battle Cisco for dominance of this emerging market. Of course, Cisco is making a play to acquire Tandberg, so it remains to be seen what will ultimately happen to Tandberg.

But as the spectrum of high definition video offerings continues to reach all the way from the desktop to fully-immersive room experiences, the opportunity for the channel continues to grow. Right now, the economy is clearly holding back major IT investments in telepresence, but even now you can see more of these system being used in a variety of conference room settings. That means it’s only a matter of time before these system go mainstream, especially on the desktop where integration with existing systems management tools is the next barrier about to be overcome.