Tech Data Touts Consumption, Budgeting Tools For Microsoft Azure

Tech Data has debuted an analytics dashboard on its StreamOne cloud platform that displays Microsoft Azure consumption and sends notifications when usage exceed set thresholds.

The Clearwater, Florida company said it is the first distributor to offer this tool, which address partner concerns around a lack of control or insight into Microsoft Azure usage, according to Stacy Nethercoat, vice president of Tech Data Cloud.

"This provides our partners with real-time visibility into the consumption data with Azure," Nethercoat told CRN at the TechSelect 2016 Fall Partner Conference. "Partners who are watching us are seeing that the pace of our investments is picking up."

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Partners previously struggled with tracking how much Microsoft Azure their end users were consuming, Nethercoat said, particularly if the customer also has their own internal IT staff responsible for managing the environment. The situation is less of a challenge for solution providers that fully manage their end user's IT ecosystem since they enjoy a greater level of control, she said.

The new analytics dashboard will also allow solution providers to set up budgets for their end users, Nethercoat said, with the distributor sending out a notification when usage reached 75 percent of the allotted amount. This ensures that partners have a conversation with customers around their credit situation before they spin up thousands of servers, Nethercoat said.

The analytics tab will automatically appear for Azure partners once they log into StreamOne, Nethercoat said, and will provide solution providers with both an aggregate view of all the Microsoft Azure consumption that's under their management, as well as the level of usage for each particular end user.

Tech Data's dashboard will also allow partners to dig up details around how much of a particular service or workload within Azure - such as virtual machines or a pre-configured backup solution - is being consumed by a specific customer, Nethercoat said. The dashboard will also provide usage predictions as well as overall budget and credit limits.

The analytics dashboard is Tech Data's second Azure-specific enhancement in three months as the distributor looks to build a toolset that supports partners in helping their customers move to cloud or a hybrid environment, Nethercoat said. Tech Data's team is working closely with Microsoft on their roadmap to ensure the distributor can prepare and quickly bring enhancements to the market, she said.

Tech Data is focused on investing in Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings such as Azure, Amazon Web Services and IBM SoftLayer as adoption rates accelerate, Nethercoat said. Tech Data is looking to provide similar tools across its entire IaaS line if vendors are willing and able to provide access to data through an API to that the distributor can provide a real-time presentation, she said.

"We see a real opportunity in infrastructure," Nethercoat said. "I only expect adoption to accelerate."

The analytics dashboard is available today to Tech Data partners in the United States and Europe, and is expected to roll out to the distributor's Canadian partners in November, Nethercoat said.

Murray, Utah-based Wasatch IT said it would like Tech Data's assistance around business intelligence and analytics, and believes Microsoft Azure partners will benefit from making more usage data visible, according to Rett Roberts, director of sales and marketing for Wasatch IT, a Tech Data partner.

However, AWS has some advantages in that it is very popular and already provides some built-in analytics. Roberts said Wasatch has focused more on AWS in the IaaS space since it's seeing a greater level of end user interest there. He added that it's fairly simple to understand what end users are consuming on AWS.