Other IDC projections for the year ahead include strong partner moves into the digital transformation market, an emphasis on Customer Success programs, and changes to vendor Partner Success models.
FlashBlade has been in Directed Availability since last July, but it is now broadly available to all customers through the Pure Storage partner channel.
Business intelligence vendor Looker is looking to build out a channel to help take its data platform to market, and has launched a formal channel program to this end.
The program has been reworked from the one CloudJumper brought when it spun out from nGenx, but the real highlight is the capabilities of the new portal.
IBM also makes new z Systems announcements, and unveils several new and expanded partnerships at their Edge event.
Caringo has developed a patent-pending process that eliminates the need for a gateway by connecting the NFS server directly to the Object Storage. This significantly cuts costs and improves efficiency, opening up new use cases that Caringo believes will mainstream object storage.
The Memory1 hardware was announced last year, but now, as it hits production release, it is accompanied by Diablo Memory Expansion (DMX) software.
Personalized training is at the heart of the new Sinequa partner program, which has been significantly revised from its original form, which was more like an alliance program.
The HC V240, HDS’ first hyper-converged appliance, is based on the VMware stack, but the hyper-converged road map is likely to broaden out beyond that.
In what is likely the most exciting of the announcements so far at HPE Discover, HPE announces two converged EdgeLine devices, as well as the ability to use their Vertica Big Data solution and functionality from their Aruba secure wi-fi system in IoT devices. New IoT partnerships and IoT Innovation Labs were also announced.
Hitachi Data Systems has greatly deepened its strategic relationship with SAP around HANA in the last several years, and its new announcements, which cover from the low end of the market to the high, broaden that portfolio.
CEO Bill McDermott didn’t exactly promise a kinder, gentler SAP, but he did pledge a company that will be more empathetic to customers, have a more complete vision, and be more focused on simplicity. He also offered a forecast of some trends he thinks SAP will be well positioned to leverage.
The VM-aware storage vendor also announced new predictive analytics capabilities, nine new all-flash model options, and two new cloud offerings.
Alex Ryals of Avnet Technology Solutions offers some sage advice on how solution providers can get ready for the opportunity around Internet of Things (IoT).
CloudJumper thinks its option of a concurrent user licensing model will be particularly popular in larger enterprise accounts, because rather than a license for each named user, it requires only licenses for the maximum number using the offering at the same time.
New, preconfigured NetApp bundles for enterprise Splunk deployments will now also be available through Arrow, which is expected to significantly increase the amount of EF-series all-flash arrays sold in particular, as well as E-series arrays.
In addition to the FlashBlade, which becomes Pure’s new high end offering, the company also introduced the FlashArray//m10, a new entry level extension, to its FlashArray//m family, as well as several new FlashStack converged infrastructure solutions.
Caringo sees its enhanced search capabilities as enabling Swarm’s ability to handle additional tasks, including facilitating Big Data analytics.
Microsoft Dynamics AX went into the cloud in its last release, but the newest one is completely native to Azure, designed to fully leverage the hyperscale cloud for the first time.
The Hitachi Hyper Scale-Out Platform, a new, next-generation technology, leverages technology acquired with Pentaho last year to provide an appliance that is aimed at Big Data, Data Lake and Internet of Things use cases now, and at broader use cases once an all-flash version is available later this year.
