Virtual Environments Make Business Opportunities A Reality For VARs

By Ramesh Menon, director of global channel marketing, Eaton Corp.

Virtual environments have never been more important to business customers, but it would be a mistake to think that information in the cloud needs less protection than data stored on-premise.

With so much information being uploaded and downloaded each second, it’s critical to ensure that a momentary power glitch doesn’t bring down the house. If you are a managed services provider (MSP) or an IT solutions provider, virtual environments create an opportunity to grow your business by offering cloud complementary solutions, especially power protection for comprehensive IT infrastructures.

Offering power protection allows resellers to design an entire, comprehensive solutions package from A to Z — providing customers with an advanced IT infrastructure and the assurance that it will perform as it should. Taking that one step further, combining the move to virtual environments with the ability to hold on to the same level of protection is an important differentiator and one that may allow your business to take off. The following are key opportunities to increase revenue:

• Make sure you’re bundling uninterruptible power system (UPS) protection with the sale or at least looking at the support infrastructure to determine if upgrades should be recommended.
• There are UPSs available that monitor energy consumption and run at 99% efficiency, making the bottom line attractive for your customers.

Sell The Benefits Of Intelligent Power Management
Chances are good that more than half of your customers are candidates for software upgrades that can manage power consumption and protect virtual environments. Eaton’s Intelligent Power Software Suite offers both as it integrates with VMware’s vCenter Server and Microsoft’s SCVMM (System Center Virtual Machine Manager) and triggers vCenter’s vMotion and Microsoft’s Live Migration applications.

UPS Leads To Additional Revenue Streams
When a customer has moved to a virtualized environment, oftentimes the power demand has outgrown the UPS. An audit of the existing infrastructure by you or a vendor-partner will allow you, as the solutions provider, to make this critical judgment and offer a meaningful recommendation.

The traditional relationship between the reseller and the end user is evolving. By delivering comprehensive and on-trend solutions, your customers will keep coming back to you. When it comes to growing your business, ask yourself:

• Are you doing all you can to protect your customers’ IT investments, applications, and data?
• Are you leveraging the full potential of powerrelated sales, including monitoring and services?
• Are your customers’ power infrastructures optimized for today’s realities, such as virtualization and blade servers?
• Have you exploited high-efficiency UPSs to improve efficiency and reduce heat in the data center?
• Have you discussed with your customers how they can reduce energy usage and gain insight to IT energy consumption?

One of the most important metrics in business is satisfaction with the solutions and services you provide. There are countless resellers interested in conducting business, but to be successful in the IT community there are three things you need to provide: product reliability, technical support, and unmatched value to the end user.