FEATURE TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE
Dennis Frank, Vice President, EMEA Strategic Partners & Alliances, Hitachi Vantara:
Realistically, yes, but the channel needs to be honest with itself about what that requires.
What we’ re seeing right now is that a lot of partners helped customers build Generative AI pilots over the last couple of years. Some good work happened, but pilots are not production. When organisations try to move from an isolated proof-of-concept to something that runs across their whole IT infrastructure, that’ s where the cracks appear. Legacy storage architectures can’ t provide the throughput AI workloads demand. On-premise arrays hit performance ceilings. The infrastructure that was fine for everything else simply isn’ t built for this.
The bigger issue, and this is something the industry hasn’ t been honest enough about, is the data layer. Around 80 % of the challenge sits there, not in the tooling. You can procure excellent GPU clusters, but if your data is unstructured, unclassified and effectively unreachable, the output will reflect that. A significant amount of enterprise data sits in exactly that state. Without the right data architecture underneath, AI tooling is just an expensive addition to foundations that can’ t support it. For channel partners specifically, the commercial model is also a problem. Most
Channel needs to be honest with itself about what that requires.
partner programmes still incentivise on transaction volume and capex cycles. AI infrastructure doesn’ t work like that. Customers need consumption-based, flexible models that reflect how AI actually gets adopted. That gap hasn’ t been addressed yet, and it needs to be.
The partners who keep pace will be the ones who move beyond hardware into genuine infrastructure capability. AI readiness is infrastructure readiness. That’ s the conversation the channel needs to be having. •
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