The COMPUTERLINKS Virtualisation Stack

A few months ago, COMPUTERLINKS announced that we were re-structuring our business slightly, to try and take advantage of other growth areas of IT. Many in the market regarded us (and possibly still do) as a niche distributor in the IT security space - although thankfully most also think we are very specialised and deliver considerable value in this area. We want to replicate this good reputation outside of the specialist security market; we've always had several non-security vendors in our portfolio but the accusation could perhaps be levelled at us that we haven't shouted loudly enough about them.

Enter Virtualisation, Cloud Computing and Professional Services. All of them considerable markets already, but with tremendous growth and potential. A colleague and myself were tasked with putting together a selection of vendors, products and technologies that make up an end to end deliverable and taking this to market with the help of several sales specialists and business development staff.

My area of expertise, thanks to 5 years as Citrix Product Manager, was obviously the virtualisation piece and the first steps on this journey are now complete. We announced our suite of "co-brandable" (everything we do is delivered through the channel) virtualisation services a while ago now and we have been selling the Virtual Machine Company dedicated virtualisation appliances for some time too. Throw in the market leader in desktop virtualisation, Citrix, some serious heavy-hitters in the virtualisation security arena and F5's storage management and app delivery capabilities and you could argue we had the basis of a great line-up already.

However, alongside all this is now a round-up of new vendors that really complete the COMPUTERLINKS Virtualisation Stack nicely. The products that will fall under my responsibility are as follows:

Akorri provides virtual infrastructure management software that assures performance and optimises utilisation and operations of server and storage infrastructure.

NetEx is a software-only, virtualisation-ready WAN optimisation solution, ideal for moving large data sets across WANs securely, swiftly and seamlessly.

SteelEye provides business continuity, high availability and disaster recovery solutions for Windows, Linux and virtual platforms.

Virtual Machine Company manufacture dedicated, purpose-built virtualisation hardware appliances, designed specifically for the demanding requirements of virtualised data-centres.

It's a great challenge and I look forward to helping shape the future of COMPUTERLINKS. As always, feedback very welcome.
Click here for the COMPUTERLINKS Virtualisation Stack

All change

Those of you who are subscribed to this blog on RSS would have had pretty continuous radio silence for quite some time. I do apologise but the title of the blog is virtualisation tribulations after all – it would be far too easy if everything ran smoothly, wouldn’t it?

I won’t go into the reasons I suddenly stopped writing in any detail, suffice to say it was decided that there was an inherent conflict of interest. My position as a Product Manager at COMPUTERLINKS often permitted me access to information about products and companies that was not in the public domain. This, on occasion, presented a challenge when writing something that I was trying to make an interesting and thought-provoking (perhaps even controversial…?) read. For these reasons, I decided to stop writing.

However, things have now changed. I am no longer doing the role I was previously, I have now taken on the exciting task, as Virtualisation Product Manager at COMPUTERLINKS, of setting up a virtualisation practice. With that, I wanted to re-start my blog and tackle some of the issues faced by IT administrators and resellers in the virtual world. A lot has happened in the last few months.