SearchSystemsChannel.com: Your company, Focus Consulting, seems to provide a broad range of consulting services to vendors and channel professionals, from business strategy to product expertise. What's the most common request for help you get from the channel?
Barb Goldworm: The thing we see is that there is still a lot of confusion out there. This world has changed so much and so fast in the past five years; five years ago there were no blades and there essentially was no server virtualization software. There was virtualization software on mainframes, and there were blades in the networking world, but they were very different. Both technologies are fairly new and have changed dramatically. It has been very difficult for the channel and for users to stay current on either technology, let alone both, and to understand how they fit together. Mostly what I hear from the channel is that they need help educating users -- through webcasts, white papers, seminars, etc. Many folks within both channel organizations and IT shops may know one of the technologies, but not the other. Or they don't know about the interactions between the current versions and how to best implement them. We provide a lot of education to the channel and to their end users.
10 tips in 10 minutes from Barb Goldworm
Home: Introduction
1: Blade server and virtualization benefits
2: Ideal blade server candidates
3: How to sell blade servers
4: Blade server and virtualization misconceptions
5: Preparing to deploy blade servers and virtualization
6: Server virtualization channel impact
7: Future of blade servers and virtualization
8: Blade server and virtualization consulting
9: Server Blade Summit must-attend sessions
10: Blade server and virtualization resources
About Barb Goldworm: Barb Goldworm is founder, president and chief analyst of Focus Consulting and author of the book Blade Servers and Virtualization. She has spent over 30 years in systems and storage in various senior management, marketing, sales, technical and industry analyst positions with IBM, StorageTek, Novell, Enterprise Management Associates and several successful startup ventures. A frequent speaker at industry events, she also created and chaired Interop's Networked Storage Track. More recently, she was one of the top three ranked analyst/knowledge expert speakers at SNW and has been a regular expert speaker for TechTarget and Ziff-Davis E-seminars. She also chairs the Server Blade Summit on Blades and Virtualization.
