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One of the largest healthcare conferences in the country is just a few short weeks away. The Health Information Management System Society Conference (HIMSS 2012) comes to life February 20-24 in Las Vegas. An estimated 50,000 attendees are expected at this annual event.

Founded 50 years ago, HIMSS is a cause-based, not-for-profit organization exclusively focused on providing global leadership for the optimal use of information technology (IT) and management systems for the betterment of healthcare.

Avnet TS will have a 20' x 50' space on the show floor (booth #1463) with eight partners showcasing solutions focused on VNA (vendor neutral archive), healthcare analytics, and ISV recruitment. Representing the following supplier brands with Avnet will be:

•HP – Vital and Logicalis (3PAR and ISV)
•IBM – DSS, Novastar, Nordisk (VNA with Teramedica and Acuo)
•Oracle – Analytics Partners, LCN, Enkitec (HIE and Enterprise Health Analytics)

While partners showcase healthcare solutions to event attendees, Avnet executives will be there too, meeting with partners and their customers, as well as industry analysts and reporters.

For more information, contact your Avnet account manager or Jim Bindon to learn about HIMSS and/or how to grow your healthcare practice with HealthPath®.

Look for information from the event by searching hash tag #HIMSS12 on Twitter.

Maureen O'Leary / Director Communications / 480-794-6152

Whether you need additional consultants on your staff, or your customers need an infusion of talent to their teams, Avnet Staff Augmentation Services can help by providing skilled personnel to work under the direction of you or your customer.

Avnet has the ability to provide personnel to help with technical implementation, software development, database management, software quality assurance and infrastructure and networking support. Our skilled technical professionals can help you and/or your end customers manage fluctuating skill needs, skill gaps and changing staffing requirements to meet aggressive project timelines. Avnet resources work with you onsite or remotely, and are certified in key technologies.

To learn more about Avnet Staff Augmentation Services click here, or email us at DataCenterLifecycleServices@avnet.com.

Kathy Schauer / Director, Solutions Marketing / (480) 794-6470

Last week, Avnet announced the new SolutionsPath® Engagement Service, a strategic consulting service built to bolster our partners’ ability to design, sell and deliver data center solutions into high-growth vertical markets. Based on Avnet's proven SolutionsPath methodology, this service provides a comprehensive end-to-end strategic growth plan for our partners.

Are you interested in finding out how you can specialize and grow faster than industry trends? Speak with your Avnet account rep or watch this on-demand presentation narrated by David Hutchinson, vice president, SolutionsPath Content & Delivery to learn more.

Kate Sneider / Solutions Marketing Manager / (480) 794-6656

Throughout the past year, we were introduced to a plethora of new or newly popular buzzwords that describe industry drivers, priorities, and directions. While we saw a bumper crop of such terms this time around, few were mentioned as often as “big data.” There is no doubt that data sets are getting larger, growing faster and are composed of a wider variety of formats and types, but that’s not the most important point. What is important is that organizations are striving to find new and more efficient ways to make sense of all of that data and put it to use. That use may be to better understand customer behavior, respond in real time to utility usage trends and patterns, diagnose illness, or even to predict national security threats. Hence, the true competitive advantage (or higher probability for survival) is based on understanding the needs of the customer and extracting the value inherent in the data. The capacity of our industry to help organizations achieve this is most certainly one of the greatest opportunities front and center at this time.

Data analytics is key to helping customers, and there is no shortage of software tools to facilitate this effort. Suppliers are rushing to acquire strategic pieces of the analytics puzzle. Recent data analysis-related acquisitions include HP’s purchase or Vertica (a real-time analytics platform) and Autonomy (a suite of tools for handling unstructured data).

IBM is answering the call with their InfoSphere BigInSights platform, as well as offerings from Netezza (data warehouse and analytics) and Cognos (business intelligence). EMC and Oracle are weighing in with the EMC Greenplum Computing Appliance and the Oracle Exadata Database Machines respectively. HDS is offering a multi-pronged approach involving infrastructure cloud (data management platform), content cloud (virtualization and data discovery) and the information cloud (feeder to business intelligence platforms)¹. NetApp is creating use-based solutions such as NetApp Full Motion Video Solution and NetApp Seismic Processing Solution. Additionally, virtually all of the suppliers are offering Hadoop-based solutions.

If there is one question I hear almost weekly, it’s “What is Hadoop?” Hadoop.Apache.org² states that “Apache Hadoop software library is a framework that allows for the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers using a simple programming model. It is designed to scale up from single servers to thousands of machines, each offering local computation and storage ...delivering a highly-available service on top of a cluster of computers…” It uses MapReduce to split the data crunching into smaller manageable pieces. MapReduce is a programming framework popularized by Google and used to simplify data processing across massive data sets.³ If you want to learn more about Hadoop and the opportunity that it provides, Information Week wrote a great article “Why all the Hadoopla?” in November which you can read here.

We’ve been helping our customers collect, store, protect, archive, transfer, and analyze their data for a long time, but for the most part, it’s been based on traditional data sets using traditional databases and tools. With BIG data analytics, you need to take a new look. Your customers are!

If you’d like to discuss this opportunity further, please contact Kim Hofmann.

¹ http://www.datanami.com/datanami/2011-10-31/hds_makes_big_data_triple_play.html
²www.hadoop.apache.org, “What is Hadoop?”
³www.mapreduce.org, “What is MapReduce?”

Kim Hofmann / Director, Storage Solutions Practice / (303) 544-6487

Retail sales are booming! All channels—online, brick and mortar, catalog, mobile—are experiencing hefty gains over 2010 sales figures according to the National Retail Federation and numerous industry resources. These retail sales are helping to drive the US economic recovery, as well as the IT market. Retail IT is no longer just a disconnected cash register at the front of the store. Today’s successful retailers rely on a complex set of interworking software applications built on a solid foundation of data center solutions.

Feeding the BI System
There is an axiom in the retail industry that “retail is detail.” Today’s successful retailers utilize the power of IT to give them the ability to pay attention to the details and to reap the rewards. More retailers than ever are leveraging the data through advanced business information (BI) systems. These BI solutions are focused on areas such as improving the precision of product selection, allocation, replenishment, pricing and promotion. The common thread through all of these activities is the ability of highly advanced BI systems to bring order to giant volumes of data. Volumes of data (massive numbers of transactions) have been a challenge for retailers since computers were first widely adopted in their businesses.

So What’s the BIG Problem?
Let’s look at one big-box retailer to get a sense of the data volumes and associated IT storage demands. According to the company’s 2010 annual report, it served over 200 million shoppers per week. With over $405 billion (USD) in sales in 2010, that works out to roughly $39 per customer transaction. That volume, alone, would add up to billions of transactional records to be stored. And that’s only the beginning for many retailers. Each customer transaction creates a series of additional transactions as they ripple through the labyrinth of business-related applications. So, what starts as a simple purchase at the retail counter of a local store, becomes a series of transactions as they touch the other retail systems including inventory, payments, ordering, labor scheduling, finance, etc. Each of these transactions needs to be stored because of business, legal, customer, and analytic requirements. In fact, each of these transactions may at this point grow exponentially. That’s because the retailer stores the original transaction (let’s say a single purchase) in a transaction database that may then be replicated to serve a unique BI, CRM, or other specialty application that needs to manipulate the data. This data is then stored again. This means that large retailers are storing billions of transactions per day in more than one place.

What’s the Solution?
If not for the efficient, highly scalable storage solutions available on the market today, many retailers would not have the ability to handle their endless rivers of data. While these solutions are handling the storage needs of retailers today, even greater storage will be required in the future as more retailers adopt even more complex solutions in the areas of pricing, customer behavior, and loss prevention patterns, just to name a few. Avnet partners have access to some of the most advanced storage solutions available, combined with retail-focused experts to help our partners to create and present the best solutions to their customers. For more information on how our RetailPath™ consultant team can assist you, contact practice leader, Joe Delgado.

Joe Delgado / Director, RetailPath / (480) 818-5633

Over the last ten years, the federal government has grown the number of its primary data centers by nearly 4x. Data center growth is not unique to the government space. The relatively low cost of x86 servers, previous one-server, one-application designs, and an insatiable appetite for storage have all contributed to the dramatic increase in the demand for real estate to support IT infrastructure requirements.

Virtualization brought attention to the orders of magnitude of inefficiency under which many, if not most data centers operate. The benefits virtualization has provided are universal in terms of increasing data center efficiencies, lowering operating costs and helping businesses avoid some of the up-front costs of acquiring and deploying IT assets to support growth. The trouble is, just like children (as parents we know it doesn’t cost all that much to start a family; the real cost is “maintenance” over time!) servers and other IT assets can be expensive to house and maintain. Long-term costs are major drivers for the adoption of cloud technology, particularly with the ability to provide required IT services through a third party using a variable cost model supported by on-demand IT services.

In my opinion, these factors are the primary reasons for recent government initiatives on use of cloud technology to significantly increase cloud adoption across the multitude of government agencies. President Obama initiated a “cloud first” policy recently, which mandates a reduction in the number of federal government-run data centers. Specifically, 800 data centers will need to be eliminated from the government inventory by 2015, 373 of these by the end of 2012. Each of the 31 federal agency CIOs have specific requirements on identifying three "must-move" services, and to create a project plan for migrating each to the cloud. Most importantly, the mandates seek to eliminate the current infrastructure. At least one of the services must migrate to the cloud within 12 months, and the balance within 18 months. Cloud solutions must meet security, reliability, cost and other requirements.*

Like the federal government, many organizations are moving to a cloud first stance on IT spend and—just like federal agency CIOs—many CIOs will need to assess their organization’s level of readiness for cloud and prioritize the services that should move first (or not at all). These are great opportunities for partners to align with key customer requirements and potentially engage at a different level than they may be today. Along with developing and/or broadening capabilities in delivering cloud solutions, understanding which data centers are slated to be closed and when should be major factors in targeting opportunity in the government space. Avnet’s government, cloud and data center teams can help partners accelerate business growth in the rapidly changing markets the cloud is creating.

If you'd like to learn more about this topic, contact Michael Mattal.

*Source: TechAmerica Foundation Cloud Buyers Guide

Mike Mattal / Director, Virtualization Solutions Practice / (480) 794-6505

A primary initiative in the government market is data center consolidation. Elizabeth Montalbano of Information Week recently reported that the Federal government has an initiative underway to decrease the number of data centers by 800—by the year 2015. The White House has developed a "Cloud First" policy which requires that federal agencies consider cloud computing when evaluating their future IT needs. Many State and Local governments are following suit in their consolidation efforts and are also looking at cloud computing as a viable alternative for certain applications as a way to reduce their data center costs. How does this federal, state and local push towards cloud computing effect the data center network?

Networking for cloud computing infrastructures is a fast-growing market. Cloud computing creates new traffic flows and adds to the demands of the network, including an increase in network intelligence functionally. Users require a more resilient, intelligent, scalable and adaptive data center network to support their cloud computing environment. Three areas of networking technology which benefit the most from the adoption of a cloud computing architecture are Ethernet switches, application acceleration and network management.

• A strong, data center network is imperative for a successful implementation of cloud computing. Ethernet switches, the backbone of the data center network, remain the largest portion of the networking opportunity with overall growth coming primarily from 1GbE to 10GbE upgrades.

• The demand for application acceleration (delivery and WAN optimization), which provides users with a LAN-like performance, also benefit from the migration to cloud computing. The development of an effective cloud computing architecture is nearly impossible without application acceleration technologies.

• Cloud computing also drives the need to build intelligence into the network to control traffic flows and handle the complexity caused by the variety of users and applications supported in the cloud environment.

These three networking technologies will continue to improve as cloud computing continues to drive higher bandwidth, drive improved network intelligence and drive enhanced delivery of applications and data, all while reducing the complexity across the network.

Your government customers are implementing cloud computing into their IT strategy. You will be ahead of the game by understanding their strategy and needs. Initiate the conversation regarding the impact their cloud implementation will have on their network. Avnet’s team of government, networking and cloud experts can assist in this effort and help to accelerate your success.

For more information about this topic, contact Domenic Gianfrancesco.

Dom Gianfrancesco / Director Solution Practice - Networking / (303) 545-1251

In this segment, I’m going to continue our talk about new data with a discussion of "Big Data." As I mentioned earlier, some data sets become so large that they become difficult to manage using conventional tools. Difficulties include capture and storage, search, analytics and visualizing. This is especially true in fields of science such as molecular biology, meteorology, energy or security that depend on frequent data collection from a variety of sources. Modern data collection devices such as software logs, digital [smart] meters and other sensing devices as well as video recorders create huge demand for storage. The fact that this data is unstructured and multi-formed adds a great deal of complexity in its management. This, in turn, drives up costs as well as risks. That said, we will continue to create this type of data at an ever-increasing rate.

According to Gartner, the problems with data storage can be boiled down the 3 Vs: volume, variety and velocity. Volume refers to transactional data, as well as new types of data like digital metering data. Variety includes tabular data (databases), hierarchical data, documents, email, metering data, video, still images, audio, stock ticker data, financial transactions and more. Velocity refers not only to how fast data is created but also how fast it must be processed. ¹

The 3 Vs are especially visible in the scientific, healthcare, and financial communities—where analysis and visualization of complex objects is the norm. Examples are financial models, 3-D molecular models, CT Scans and simulations. Additionally, with remote data monitoring becoming ubiquitous, data sets will become enormous simply due to the volume of devices and the frequency of collection.

If it’s so complex and expensive, why are we moving in this direction? Why does “big data” have so much value? Simply put, it’s the key ingredient in business intelligence. The McKinsey Global institute² boils it down to 5 categories.

1. Analytics can make big data much more available and organize it into a useful format; hence it will be used much more frequently.

2. As more transactional data is collected, organizations can make much better operational decisions.

3. Data will allow fine-tuned market segmentation.

4. Sophisticated decision support via predictive analysis will be available.

5. Big data can aid in the development of new and related products such as maintenance related services.

So, what is the answer to this increasing mass of data? Most major storage suppliers are moving to offer solutions. The solutions include specialized file-based or hybrid file/block storage solutions, as well as sophisticated analytical and archiving tools. HP’s recent purchase of Autonomy, EMC’s purchase of Isilon and Greenplum, IBM’s Cognos and their use of open source Apache Hadoop are all moves by major storage suppliers to address the opportunity presented by big data analytics. Just last week, Oracle announced its “Big Data Appliance” that integrates Apache Hadoop, Oracle NoSQL Database, and the R statistical analysis software.

This is a complex issue but one that will offer challenges and opportunities for our community for the next several years. I hope that I’ve given you reason to take note of this phenomenon. Please, take some time to understand unstructured data and big data analytics.

Want to learn more? Call your Avnet representative or email Kim Hofmann. Happy Selling!

Did you miss the first segment of this article? If you did, click here to read it.

¹Gartner Says Solving 'Big Data' Challenge Involves More Than Just Managing Volumes of Data - 6/11
²Big Data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity; McKinsey Global Institute – 5/11

Kim Hofmann / Director, Storage Solutions Practice / (303) 544-6487

Plenty has been said about the cloud, including how big the markets are and how fast they're growing. Though many of the nuances can be debated, it’s likely we would all agree that the cloud is upon us.

Referencing the cloud this way might imply something ominous, and for many companies this holds true. And it remains true regardless of what type of organization you may reference: partner, ISV or end user. The cloud is an equal-opportunity business disruptor, and whether it's “good” or “bad” for the company is largely dependent on how cloud technology is viewed and what actions are taken (or not) to embrace the technology.

Rather than looking at cloud as a business disruptor, let’s look at it for a moment as a business enabler. Aside from the typical data center drivers most associated with cloud—increasing IT agility, reducing IT overall costs and improving efficiencies, etc.—how does cloud technology support industry specific initiatives? There are many use cases we could discuss but lets look at the healthcare market and one of its top initiatives, the Healthcare Information Exchange (HIE).

Per wiki definition, HIE is the mobilization of healthcare information electronically across organizations within a region, community or hospital system. HIE provides the capability to electronically move clinical information among disparate healthcare information systems, while maintaining the meaning of the information being exchanged. The goal of HIE is to facilitate access to and retrieval of clinical data to provide safer, more timely, efficient, effective, equitable, patient-centered care. HIE is also useful to public health authorities to assist in analyses of the health of the population.

According to a recent study by Sushoo Health Information Exchange, a single clinician practice spends $17,160 per year with the current method of exchanging patients’ health information. For clinicians and multi-practice facilities these costs can measure in the millions and may involve complicated technology and process requirements.

Implementing cloud solutions may be one way organizations accelerate the implementation of HIE by focusing on placing patient data in locations which multiple healthcare systems can access, versus finding ways for various healthcare systems to communicate with each other. Similar to vendor-neutral archiving technology, deploying cloud-based storage in concert with software delivered as a service may create lower cost and more efficient ways to serve up patient data to organizations who can use this data to create better patient outcomes—one of the primary goals for healthcare organizations.

Challenges do exist in implementing cloud solutions, and they vary by industry. Where systems and data exist, how they are accessed and protected are real concerns. Through advanced encryption and other security means, many of these fears may prove to be unfounded, but it will likely take successful use cases and time to prove out. For each organization considering cloud there exists a counterbalance between the associated risks and often political challenges of adopting cloud and the advantages cloud presents in cost savings and ultimately in providing frameworks for developing new ways of delivering IT—and potentially new ways to creating a competitive advantage.

To learn more about the opportunity in the cloud and how you can implement cloud solutions into your business, contact Michael Mattal, Director of Virtualization and Cloud Solutions.

Mike Mattal / Director, Virtualization Solutions Practice / (480) 794-6505

Avnet’s new and improved SolutionsPath® University program is now open for registration.

We’ve revamped our class structure to accommodate partner feedback and align with your business goals. The result is a schedule of industry-focused trainings sponsored by several suppliers, and a new data center training designed to accelerate your solutions growth by increasing specialization and expansion into adjacent market spaces.

Sept. 20-21: Healthcare University (click to register) (Chicago)
Dec. 6-7: Financial University (Location TBD)
Jan. 24-25: Government University (Washington D.C.)
Feb. 22-23: Retail University (Location TBD)
March 13-14: Data Center University (Location TBD)
April 11-12: Healthcare University (Location TBD)
June 5-6: Energy University (Location TBD)
July 24-25: Government University (Location TBD)

We’ve released a full 12-month calendar so you can plan ahead to attend the training that best fits your training needs and schedule. Be sure to check the Know-How Center’s Training and Enablement page regularly for training schedule updates and registration links.

Questions? Email SolutionsPathTraining@avnet.com.

Jessica Truman / Marketing Project Leader / (210) 247-1313

Do you want to learn more about a specific dedicated vertical or technology market practice? Avnet has now finalized its portfolio of market videos, each featuring one of our practice leaders addressing key topics within their areas of expertise. We've added new videos for Avnet HealthPath, NetworkPath and SecurePath.

The best way to view these videos, and our entire library, is to stop by "Watch" section of the Avnet Know-How Center. The Know-How Center features many on-demand educational and training resources that can help you gain valuable insight into industry trends and profitable market opportunities. Just use your Channel Connection username and password to log on.

You can also check out the videos on Avnet OnDemand through the links listed below:

Vertical Markets:
EnergyPath
FinancialPath
GovPath
HealthPath
RetailPath

Technologies:
MobilityPath
NetworkPath
SecurePath
StoragePath
VirtualPath

Interested in learning more? For more information about our vertical practices, contact Michael Houghton and for our technology practices, contact Tim FitzGerald.

Kate Sneider / Solutions Marketing Manager / (480) 794-6656