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Tech Data Rolls Out Microsoft, Intel-Backed Analytics and IoT Catalog
The catalog aims to help partners get a jump-start on transforming their businesses and their customers' businesses.
Lynn Haber
July 10, 2019
2 Min Read
The fifth generation of wireless communications technology – 5G – will be the backbone of IoT. 5G is all about faster speeds and low-latency networks. What does this mean for businesses? According to AT&T, it’s about speed, low latency and more — it’s the ability to support the connection of many more devices, and an increase in energy efficiency of the network elements.
When talking about IoT, talking about 5G alone doesn’t go far enough — you also have to talk about low-power, narrow-band networks, also referred to as (LPWAN).
This year a number of carriers announced they’ll be launching their own LPWANs.
In June, AT&T, for example, said that next year it will launch NarrowBand Internet of Things (NB-IoT) to meet the growing needs of business customers for a wide range of IoT solutions. NB-IoT technology complements the carrier’s existing LTE-M network in the U.S. and Mexico.
AT&T’s investment in NB-IoT and LTE-M will be future-ready and is expected to become part of the industry’s massive IoT standards. Verizon also announced plans for a NB-IoT network while T-Mobile this year launched its US NB-IoT network. There are at least one-dozen carriers worldwide that also have NB-IoT on their agenda.
“There’s a part of this transformation [from currently LTE to future 5G] that’s not just about speed, but having these low power wide-area networks that are slower in speed,” said Mobeen Khan, AVP, IoT products, marketing and management, AT&T. “It’s because of the way they’re built, which allows devices that connect to the network to be able to last a long time on the battery charge, be able to communicate in harsher settings, be able to have a smaller device footprint, and be able to be lower cost than LTE devices.”
This opens the potential for a slew of use cases.Shutterstock
Tech Data on Wednesday launched the Analytics and IoT Solutions Catalog, containing more than 30 market-ready, vetted solutions that partners can use to speed up getting their customers up and running with new emerging tech solutions.
The new Analytics and IoT Solutions Catalog targets vertical markets such as health care, industrial, retail, transportation and logistics, and smart cities with what Tech Data says are proven, applicable use cases. The distributor also announced a new enablement program that will offer a structured and accelerated path for partners interested in transforming their businesses with a specialization in analytics and IoT.
The program, sponsored by Intel and Microsoft, is open to approximately 200 selected partners in North America and Europe. It includes a readiness assessment, strategy development workshop, and a build period of 90 days, to help partners take their analytics and IoT solutions to market.
Tech Data’s Patrick Zammit
“Some of the main challenges in executing analytics and IoT solutions are that they are both highly customized to solve a specific customer business problem and are complex in nature. The ability to scale is very important in realizing revenue from these solutions,” said Patrick Zammit, president, Europe, and global analytics and IoT solutions at Tech Data. “With Tech Data’s Solution Catalog and our series of strategy development workshops, we are facilitating repeatable solutions and outcomes for partners to help them quickly enter the analytics and IoT market and generate repeatable sales as they become their clients’ go-to resource for state-of-the-art, industry-specific solutions.”
Examples of industry-targeted use cases in the new catalog are: a telehealth solution for real-time monitoring to improve patient health and lower readmission rates; for retail, an omnichannel operations solution for improving efficiency and loss prevention with smarter inventory management and connected logistics; and, for smart cities, a solution for public safety and surveillance for impacting situational awareness, response time and security.
For the second year in a row, IoT grabbed the top spot on CompTIA’s list of the Top 10 Emerging Technologies — those most likely to generate immediate IoT pportunities for partners.
This latest announcement from Tech Data follows a trail of other aggressive moves designed to help put partners on the forefront of transforming their customers’ businesses, as well as their own. Earlier this year, Tech Data launched the Cloud Solutions Factory, a global portfolio of end-to-end cloud, validated and pre-integrated solutions to speed up cloud deployments while eliminating risk. Just three months ago, Tech Data took a page from the Cloud Solutions Factory initiative to launch the Analytics and IoT Solutions Factory.
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