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.

We tested the appliance on a small network in February 2010.

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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.

Version 1.5.1
Price: $19,500 for appliance model

http://www.mcafee.com/us/local_content/datasheets/ds_fw_profiler.pdf

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.

In the meantime, we’ve seen some advances in the raw processing capabilities of switches that now allow many of the functions previously handled by a dedicated appliance be shifted back to the switch. Just about all the major switching vendors now have efforts under way to replace dedicated appliances and legacy switches with new faster switches that ultimately serve to lower the cost of managing the network.

But there is one difference between how Hewlett-Packard is approach this opportunity compared to others. Instead of moving to replace the existing appliance vendors with its own version of their software running on a switch, HP has invited appliance vendors to simply move their code from their appliances to the HP switch. At Interop this week, HP announced an update to the ProCurve Open Network Ecosystem (ProCurve ONE) that has now expanded to include 30 vendor partners, including Aastra, AeroScout, Avaya, F5 Networks, Fortinet, McAfee, Microsoft, SonicWall, Sourcefire, StillSecure and .vantronix. Existing members of the program include AirMagnet, AirTight Networks, AirWave, DVTel, Ekahau, InMon, Mitel, Riverbed and VBrick.

Obviously this could just as easily be called the “Anybody But Cisco” (ABC) alliance. But from the perspective of solution providers in the channel, the HP approach provides a relatively transparent way of moving customers that have invested in existing appliances to a new more efficient architecture.

It’s too early to say if the day of the network appliance has come to an end. There are a lot of emerging traffic patterns that suggest that while we may see a lull in the need for appliances as the performance of switches and routers increases, the sheer volume of traffic on the network will ultimately require another generation of new appliances to be deployed alongside a new generation of routers and switches.

Either way, the current convergence of appliances on the network, followed by a rapid expansion of network traffic, creates two-phased opportunity for solution providers that they would be foolish to ignore.

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.

At Oracle OpenWorld, Oracle announced application support for the integrated BladeSystem Matrix from HP. For those not familiar with this system, the BladeSystem Matrix is an integrated server that combines server, storage and switch components with virtualization under a unified management framework. With this system, HP is looking to head off competition from companies such as Cisco, which has launched a Unified Computing System (UCS) and Intelicloud, which is a startup company that has launched its own namesake version of an integrated server.

The only question solution providers have at the moment, however, is how much real demand there is for these types of system in this economic climate. The challenge with selling these systems is that they essentially require a forklift upgrade of the server environment. So even though they can lead to a very real drop in the total cost of computing in the data center, they require a lot of cash up front investment.

As an alternative approach to lowering the cost of computing, Dell, IBM and Sun have been promoting software alternatives to integrating servers, switches and storage, while companies such as Liquid Computing have been promoting a completely platform independent approach to accomplish the same thing. HP, meanwhile, has placed bets on both approaches in the form of its BladeSystem Matrix and its Insight software for holistically managing data center components.

Odds are good that vendor posturing aside, system vendors are going to follow the HP approach in terms of giving customers both a pre-packaged hardware solution and the option to deploy the software that integrates these components themselves. In either approach, solution providers will need to tread carefully when it comes to the managing the sensibilities of the internal IT department, because convergence in the data center can ultimately threaten the jobs of many IT specialists.

But data center convergence is inevitable as the people that pay for data centers continue to demand a real reduction in the cost of operating them. And if the real cost of running the data center is actually reduced, that should free up more money for additional applications and services from solution providers as the single largest cost of running the data center, namely headcount, is sharply reduced.

The addition of virtual machine support means that solution providers in the channel that rely on NetScout management software can use the same tools to track network traffic regardless of whether the application resides on a physical or virtual server.

This capability is going to especially important as virtual machine environments become more dynamic. Application workloads running on virtual machines can move across multiple physical servers, with each move changing the flow of traffic on the network with little to no warning. The addition of an nGenius virtual agent makes it easier to keep track of such moves and changes, while also giving network managers the tools they need to apprise their colleagues of the impact these changes are having on the performance of the applications running on top of those virtual machines.

The nGenius virtual agent software is free, but it consumes a port license on the nGenius platform, which costs $1,000. The software also requires 2GB of memory and a dedicated core processor to run.