Technology is constantly evolving. Cell phones that once looked like radios—too large for real portability—now fit in your pocket. Today, technology is all about speed and an endless array of functionality. For years, early adopters defined the market while the government traditionally lagged behind in adopting new technologies. Well, things are changing. New legislation is driving an atmosphere of ‘tech forward’ throughout the public sector.

Specialized knowledge is becoming one of the most requested services for channel partners to provide to end customers. Sergio Farache, senior vice president of global cloud solutions recently shared his thoughts on why technology channel partners and ISVs should establish specialized solution practices to understand and serve the unique complexities of their customers’ technology deployments.

Did you know the All-Flash Array (AFA) market is one of the fastest-growing sub-segments of the overall enterprise storage space, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21.4 percent through 2020?¹  What’s most intriguing is how AFAs help align organizations into the 3rd platform (cloud, mobile, big data and analytics), which IDC predicts will account for 95 percent of IT expenditure by 2020.¹

Technology is evolving at breakneck speed. This is pushing those in the channel to review their business strategy in order to stay on top and ahead of the changing technology landscape and the competition. It’s not enough to help your customers simply maintain IT infrastructure anymore—it’s about delivering innovative services, solutions and capabilities that solve customer’s toughest business challenges.

Whether it’s protecting privacy, ensuring security, tracking access, or following retention policies, todays data center must stay compliant, aligning IT capabilities with business needs.

You now have an opportunity to create broader IT solution conversations and open up new avenues for profitability with the integration of Tech Data’s Advanced Infrastructure Solutions (AIS) division and Avnet’s Technology Solutions group. Tech Data’s acquisition of Technology Solutions has paved the way for a drastic shift in the value business solutions available to Tech Data’s reseller partners.

Many industry experts consider the software-defined data center (SDDC) to be the data center of the future because it enables a service-centric approach to provisioning IT resources and managing applications. According to one recent report, the market will grow at a compound annual rate of 28.8% between 2015 and 2020, reaching nearly $80 billion by the end of that period.¹

For many customers, the Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) is more about the future than the present. But, as we know with technology, the future comes upon us very quickly and it's sometimes hard to predict if a technology movement will actually stick. So, is everyone really moving to the Software-Defined Data Center or is it just hype?