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.

Fortunately for solution providers in the channel, things are getting more complex by the moment. Virtualization has introduced a whole new layer of software that frequently makes the underlying physical infrastructure invisible to the applications that run on it. Application performance anomalies are increasing as the number of systems that each application touches increases exponentially. And with the rise of cloud computing, there are all kinds of potential performance issues as applications increasingly span multiple wide area networks. Finally, the whole process of rolling out and then managing an application across virtual infrastructure is about to become significantly more complex as virtual machines and the application workloads that ride on top of them start to dynamically move across the enterprise.

The good news is that there is now a raft of new offerings that together take on the challenges associated with application management. Those new offerings include:

*BlueStripe Software provides a set of tools that correlates events across both virtual and physical infrastructure to create a holistic view of the entire environment.

*dynaTrace offers a new approach to application management that continuously monitors application events so no one has to waste time trying to recreate anomalies.

*Apparent Networks has a tool that identifies the weakest network connections to any given cloud computing service.

*rPath has an application delivery management system tuned specifically for virtual server environments.

There are probably at least another dozen or so modern application and systems management tools out there that collectively can give solution providers in the channel both a strategic and tactical edge. After all, most IT organizations today are encumbered by legacy toolkits that are anywhere from three to 10 years old. The opportunity for solution providers is to show up with the latest toolkits that allows them o easily convince customers that their applications are going to be in much better hands with the solution provider than anything they could do themselves.

First off, password security should be priority in any network. Educating your users to secure and memorize their password (that means no yellow post its lying around with that info) should be the top concern for any sysadmin. Allowing a person to post their credentials in the footer of his email signature is horrifying, as one of the brainy scientist had done. Hmm, maybe that’s how the hacker got into your system in the first place? Just maybe so.

Second, if you write about deleting information that you’re afraid of being obtained through a freedom of information request, then don’t store that same information on an unsecure server. That’s just counterproductive now! You never know when a hacker will download all that info and, oh who knows, publish it for the world to see. It’s rare, but I hear it happens.

Finally, let your users know that everything they write, or say (voice mail) and do (teleconference, security videos) at work which is recorded is the property of the company, and may just find it’s way unto the front page of the NY Times. Do you really want that remark about your assistant advertised on the frontpage? Think twice about what you say and think thrice about what you document into written record.

What do you think about the fiasco of the Climatologist emails and the fallout that they are experiencing due to their bad security? ISC2 is going to have a field day in with this!

Data Security Tools: As the focus on security has shifted from the perimeter, solution providers are finding success with a wide range of security tools focused on securing data rather than access to the network.

Data Storage: No matter the state of the economy, demand for more storage space keeps growing. And until storage virtualization goes mainstream, there is still plenty of opportunity to sell storage arrays.

Business Intelligence: There are a lot of tools in this category, but the reason companies buy them is the same. After years of investing in packaged applications, customers are anxious to show value for those investments by presenting users with actionable information.

Smartphones: There’s not much money to be made on the sale of the smartphone itself. But a new generation of mobile applications is creating opportunity for the channel.

Cloud Computing: It’s still early days as far as the channel is concerned. But the convergence of cloud computing and managed services does create a lower cost model for delivering IT services.

802.11n Wireless Networks: Increased bandwidth, lower costs and fewer headaches are a combination that most customers can’t ignore no matter how bad the economy is.

Appliance Consolidation: All those devices at the edge of the network are now ripe for consolidation as customers have become concerned about the total cost of managing them all.

Virtualization Sprawl: In the back half of the year, customers have discovered that not only do they need virtual machine management tools, but that left to their own devices virtual machines will suck up all the memory they can find unless properly managed.

Application Acceleration: Short of a full network upgrade, the best thing for a slow network is a set of application acceleration appliances that offload high bandwidth or low latency applications.

Desktop Virtualization: Starting with a conversation about Windows 7 and aging hardware, solution providers are starting to discover that customers are rethinking their entire approach to managing the desktop.

Even in the worst of times, there is always opportunity in the channel if you just know where to look.

Arguably, Citrix is the incumbent because of its long history with terminal services. But VMware has been coming on strong in its attempt to leverage its leadership on virtual servers to unseat Citrix. To that end, VMware has partnered with Teradici to come up with a PC-over-Internet (PCoIP) protocol that it argues is much more robust than the existing Citrix ICA protocol. To its credit, Citrix has responded with a new HDX protocol in XenDesktop 4 that it claims can do everything that PCoIP can do within a much simpler framework that spans a multitude of types of desktop virtualization, including the traditional terminal services approach. VMware argues that with VMware View 4.0, they can also do everything that Citrix can do only better.

Only testing, time and the robustness of the network will really tell the difference, but it’s interesting to note that Citrix seems to be able to count on its sometime ally Microsoft in this fight. Over the years the relationship between Citrix and Microsoft has waxed and waned, but now that they have a common enemy in the form of VMware the two seem to be joined at the hip, at least on the desktop. Given half a chance, Citrix would just as soon overthrow Hyper-V Microsoft or VMware on the server in favor of its own Xen virtual machine software.

For solution providers all this vendor infighting is nothing short of perhaps the greatest opportunity on the desktop to come their way in years. Bigger than Windows 7 even. The reason for this is that desktop virtualization is a major paradigm shift that, while it can dramatically reduce the cost of PC ownership, requires new servers, storage and networking infrastructure to make work. This is why we see every major server company, including Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco and IBM, sniffing around the opportunity.

It’s too hard to say who will ultimately win this fight just yet. Clearly, VMware has the momentum give its strength on the server. But Microsoft, which is still a little conflicted about the whole desktop virtualization concept, has yet to fully throw its full might into this fight. And once it does, the odds are good that combined with the weight of Citrix, we’re going to witness a battle for the hearts, minds and wallets of solution providers that will play out for years.

Just this past week we saw Cisco line up with VMware and EMC to create pre-packaged sets of offerings for the data center called Vblock Infrastructure Packages. A day later, HP outlined a Converged Infrastructure strategy built largely around its own offerings, and then Intel partnered with Liquid Computing to create the equivalent of a virtual data center in a box.

Meanwhile, Dell has partnered with eGenera to gain the same type of capabilities, Sun has the foundation for a similar strategy in place based on a unified fabric strategy for the data center, and IBM has been talking about the need for a new integrated approach to the data center for awhile. There are also relative newcomers such as Intelicloud that compete head to head with the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) in terms of having a similar architecture.

In short, what is happening here is that all the major vendors are now battling for the hearts and minds of solution providers as they gear up to take on the next major evolution of enterprise computing. Those set of advances are based on a concept called data center convergence that leverages advanced virtualization technologies to better integrate server, storage and networking resources, while simultaneously providing the ability for application workloads to dynamically migrate across multiple data centers.

The basic idea here is that we can lower the real cost of enterprise computing by automating more IT management functions in a way that improves the productivity of the IT staff, and reduces the number of people it takes to actually operate the data center. At the same time, these new system architectures are designed to introduce much higher levels of flexibility into the enterprise by making it easier to provision systems quickly, but at the same time they also introduce more complexity and volatility in terms of managing virtual machines that can now move at a moment’s notice.

From the customer’s perspective, there are a lot of benefits to these approaches. But many of them simply don’t have the IT maturity required to take advantage of these systems. And many IT specialists within the IT organization may resist these types of server architectures for fear that they put their jobs at risk.

From an economic perspective, some of these approaches are also financially difficult to get behind no matter how much the long terms savings might be. The Cisco UCS approach, for example, amounts to a fork-lift upgrade of the data center that can cost well over $2 million.

The good news for solution providers in the channel is that we’re at the beginning stages of a major transformation of the data center that creates major opportunities. He difficult part is going to be holding your customer’s hand for the next several years as they go through the pain and agony of a difficult process that will change not only their technology infrastructure, but the culture of the IT department and the way the business interacts with IT.

As long as IT organizations view virtualization as a complex technology that required special skills to manage, these two groups could live in relative peace. But as economic pressure continues to mount of the cost of IT, so too does the pressure to rationalize management in the data center. What that means is where there were once two groups there ultimately can only be one.

Already, we’re seeing the resurgence of the people who run the physical infrastructure, who ultimately have the laws of economics on their side. To that end, they have been driving traditional systems management vendors such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard and CA to better integrate their IT management platforms with the virtual machine management software not only provided by VMware, Citrix and Microsoft , but a host of third party companies as well. In fact, we’re already seeing the incumbent systems management players circling virtual management startups in the hopes of picking of some new technologies at a cost that is comparatively cheap when compared to developing the same capability themselves.

All this hue and cry for management integration naturally creates some major opportunities for solution providers in the channel. But solution providers should also pay attention to where they place their bets in terms of training. In the not too distant future, IT organizations may figure out that not only is having a single pane of glass to manage both physical and virtual servers a whole lot less expensive, it’s ultimately a lot less expensive when you start eliminating licensing fees because you only need one common management framework.

Of course, the virtual machine vendors today can still argue that the complexity and volatility of virtualization will require dedicated professionals and highly tailored management software. But that won’t always be the case forever.

CA is rolling out an umbrella offering called Cross Application Performance Management (CrossAPM) that integrates new versions of the company’s SYSVIEW mainframe management software with the Wily management software that CA markets for distributed computing environments.

According to CA, customers are increasing asking to integrate their mainframe and distributed computing environments under a common management framework in order to lower the cost managing these environments. Via this integration, they hope to reduce the total cost of enterprise computing environments where two-thirds of the IT budget is typically consumed by ongoing maintenance.

CrossAPM is an element of CA’s larger Lean IT initiative that seeks to reduce the cost of enterprise computing by bringing higher levels of IT automation into the IT organization.

IT organizations looking to embrace cloud computing require tools that allow them to monitor the ongoing performance of a cloud computing service. To fulfill that need, Nimsoft has expanded the capabilities of its monitoring software to include cloud computing services.

This gives solution providers an opportunity to deliver a service to their customers that encompasses not only their on-premise systems, but can now also be extended to include cloud computing services, including Salesforce.com. Amazon EC2, Rackspace and Google Apps.

The Nimsoft Monitoring Solution is also complemented by a Web site called unifiedmonitoring.com run by Nimosoft that provides a baseline of statistical information concerning the performance of various cloud computing services.

The good news is not everything is going to move into the cloud. The world will probably split to the point where there are just as many applications run on premise as there are in the cloud. That should create an opportunity for solution providers because customers will be looking to integrate IT services delivered via the cloud with their on-premise applications. A good example of the opportunity this creates for solution providers is a new set of tools from Nimsoft that give IT organizations visibility into cloud computing services.

As time goes on, customers will also want to federate various cloud computing services, which will create another opportunity for solution providers as customers increasingly look to somebody to manage their cloud computing ecosystems. And finally, many customers will try to replicate the IT infrastructure used to deliver cloud computing services internally. That creates all kinds of opportunities around virtualization and infrastructure upgrades for the channel.

Like every major technology shift that has gone before, solution providers in the channel are threatened if they fail to recognize the change and then actually act on it. For some, that may mean becoming providers of cloud computing services. For all, it means more focus on consulting services. Whatever path a solution provider chooses, one way or another they will be pulled into the cloud computing vortex. The only thing that is unknown is what will their company look like once it comes out the other side of that vortex?