As IT solutions evolve to meet the needs of a greater variety of businesses, distributors like SHI work to find the best products to fit their customer’s needs. On theCUBE at EMC World 2014, SHI’s Director of Strategic Partners, Brandon Farrell, discussed his clients’ present needs and his predictions about the technology they will ask for in the future.

Helping customers overcome business pressures

More than ever, Farrell explained, companies are under pressure to “do more with less.” Farrell also mentioned a new focus on the application as part of that trend, and stressed that his focus is one SHI has had for quite some time: “Where everyone else is going, we’ve already been there.”

“As a distributor that’s “married,” Farrell says, “to what the customer is trying to accomplish,” SHI values their longstanding relationships with both EMC and Microsoft. Farrell expressed that SHI is excited about the current and future product offerings that help customers become more efficient.

• Why SHI is excited about SQL 2014

Customers that were previously still evaluating whether SQL would be the right solution for their businesses, Farrell says, have come around to SQL 2014 because of the speeds and savings it offers, especially in combination with VNX:

“Straight out of the box, the VNX is three X faster than the next competitor when it comes to hybrid solution. And SQL 2014 itself, ten X plus, on the transaction side, so that’s huge improvements in performance. Then on the storage side and reducing the amount of disks that you need, you’re talking 45 percent there, so it’s fantastic for our customers.”

Farrell also mentioned that the Microsoft-EMC relationship is so compelling because two companies that “have controlled things in their area” are starting to cooperate going forward. SHI, Farrell says, finds that partnership “very interesting.”

Even though SQL 2014 is new enough that Ferrell couldn’t give any “specifics about what’s going to the a best practice,” he mentioned that the “fact that it’s in line memory, that really puts customers in a position to do things with Hadoop with Microsoft.” This combination, Farrell mentioned, is something he never would have considered — “almost yin and yang.”

Microsoft and EMC from a distributor standpoint

Microsoft’s innovations in combination with EMC have Farrell impressed: “It’s been tremendous,” he said, “that Microsoft is really pushing the envelop.” He expressed his view that while Microsoft is a giant in the tech world, the products that have come out of their relationship with EMC are evidence that the company can still come up with novel ideas that wow the tech world.

EMC is a company full of novel ideas, but it’s one that, Farrell says, sometimes need mediation when presented to a customer: “There are so many different tools out there from EMC that putting all those in front of a customer is not the right thing.”

Such an array of choices can overwhelm a customer, and so Farrell says that SHI concentrates on helping customers accomplish something specific, like “development around application performance” by capitalizing on technologies like a “FAST back-end data base,” Flash, or DSSD.

• Tech solutions must be based on customer-specific business outcomes

This customer-specific approach is one that Farrell stressed when responding to Steve Kenniston’s question about how SHI helps their customers prioritize their tech needs in reference to mega trends. “Everybody has a different use-case,” Farrell said, “as to what they’re trying to accomplish — we focus on business outcomes, not the megatrend itself.”

• DSSD and Hybrid cloud: innovations for a range of business sizes

While Farrell explained that SHI is focus on customer needs instead of megatrends, there were some trends that he thinks will have the most impact on many SHI customers in the coming years, specifically Flash storage and the hybrid cloud.

For large businesses, Farrell said he was most excited about the EMC DSSD acquisition. Particularly, he cited how DSSD could impact VDI, potentially opening up Flash storage to customers with a five to ten thousand seat VDI deployment. He added, “Some of our larger customers have high transactions in financials, they’re [going to be] so excited, I’m sure, once they learn a little more about what the possibilities are.”

While Farrell was excited about the potential of DSSD for enterprise-seize businesses, he has high hopes for hybrid cloud for a different set of reasons: “Hybrid cloud,” Farrell, predicted, “is going to be the standard.” Farrell thinks that both EMC and Microsoft are key when it comes to hybrid cloud: “EMC is bringing to bear solutions around making [going to the cloud] easy,” and because of Azure and SQL 2014, Microsoft is “well positioned for a hybrid cloud solution.”