Avalon Technologies’ Newly Hired President Talks VMware Costs, Dell Storage And Leaning Into Channel

'The market obviously is shifting faster and faster to the channel. I wanted to go somewhere where I felt like there was growth potential, but still had the feeling of a family-owned business,' Avalon Technologies President Todd Johnson, an 18-year Dell Technologies veteran, tells CRN.

Michigan-based solution provider Avalon Technologies has hired Todd Johnson to take on the role of president to help guide the firm’s work with channel vendors and customers.

“The market obviously is shifting faster and faster to the channel. I wanted to go somewhere where I felt like there was growth potential, but still had the feeling of a family-owned business,” Johnson told CRN shortly after the news was announced last week. “That's how customers feel about it too. So that's really what got my attention moving over to Avalon.”

With decades of experience in the IT solution provider space, Bloomfield Hills, Mich.-based Avalon Technologies is preparing to take on its customers’ most complex technology questions around storage, virtualization and data center by recruiting top infrastructure talent like Johnson, CEO Brian Flynn told CRN.

“Avalon has a strict focus on customer service. Our team consists of highly professional, certified IT engineers who deeply care about our customers,” Flynn said in email to CRN. “Now our collaboration with Todd will extend Avalon’s reach and build on our already strong and stable foundation. We are thrilled to have him on our team!”

Johnson said there are big moves that Avalon can make in the market to help customers with their largest infrastructure challenges. He said Avalon’s deep expertise across a range of virtualization environments is paying dividends as customers search for the best hypervisor for their data.

“Maybe five years ago we would have had a preferred partner for virtualization. At this point in time it’s extremely variable, based on where the customer is and it comes back to that TCO,” he told CRN. “Where is the maturity of that customer? How many applications do they have tied in? … We’re capable of leveraging all of the hypervisors that are out there for our customers. So what’s the cost to move? What’s the reason to move. And is there a value to moving in the first place?”

Johnson spent 18 years at Round Rock, Texas-based technology giant Dell selling into large enterprise accounts, which should help his transition to mid-market infrastructure.

“As a former Dell leader here in Michigan I am very familiar with Brian and his team. This company is already very strong with a great reputation and solid team. I am excited for the opportunity to help lead and grow this company,” he said.

Avalon was founded in 2002. It works with customers in health care, manufacturing, entertainment, financial services, education, and public sectors. Avalon employes industry professionals with deep experience, and a focus on consulting and advising clients with the right technology.

Flynn said Johnson has been a friend and a colleague working with Avalon during his time at Dell.

“His ability to create a supportive and collaborative culture focused on teamwork is something that is very important here at Avalon,” Flynn said. “Todd’s expertise, relationships and stellar reputation as a customer advocate will have an immediate impact at Avalon.”

Below is an interview with Johnson edited for space and clarity.

What made you jump into this space? You know, it's a high touch space. You have all these customers and, you know, kind of competing needs. What is it that's attracting you to this job right now?

Avalon takes a unique position as a channel partner. It’s kind of the smaller organization feel, so local resources on site. If you need something in the middle of the night, give them a call and they’ll get it done.

When I was with Dell, I saw a lot of value in that our customers did too. So the market obviously is shifting faster and faster to the channel, I wanted to go somewhere where I felt like there was growth potential, but still had the feeling of a family-owned business.

That's how customers feel about it too. So that's really what got my attention. Moving over to Avalon.

I grew up around the data center and the solution space, so being able to focus on the data center. The challenges customers see right now is there was urgency with the industry saying get to the cloud, get to the cloud.

Well, working with these customers now, the challenge is, OK, we've gone to the cloud. Our operating expenses are out of control. How do we start moving these workloads back?

How do we figure out what workloads we need to move back? How do we structure it? Does it go to colo? Do we start moving workloads back to that data center? And you really need a team that has that expertise, so you should see the total cost of ownership based on where you put that information, and that's where I think channel partners are going to add a lot of value here in the future.

I think channel partners are going to add a lot of value here in the future is, is deciphering what makes sense for it to sit in the cloud, what makes sense for it to maybe be in a colo what makes sense for it to be on the premises

And the other piece of that is data is currency these days.

Data is currency. What do you mean by that?

It's been currency for a long time. But how far away does that currency need to sit?

Do you need it in a safe at your home? Meaning right on the edge, especially if you're starting to get into the AI, it's critical to have access to that information as quick as possible as it's created.

Or is it more of a long-term play? Can we put it in the bank vault? Let's sit there and just go get it when we need it.

And again, customers, your mid-market customers, they may not have an answer. And having someone come in as a third party, review your operations, understand what the actual cost of running workloads where I think it's a huge value to customers, and that's what gets me really excited about being part of Avalon.

You also come in with these best practices from leading enterprise, right? I mean, is that part of the value proposition as well? Is that a big differentiator for Avalon?

There’s certainly a lot of value that’s come from that. I carve that up into two buckets. You have those larger enterprises that have been created over let’s say the last 10 years and have been a little more agile and quick to adopt to cloud.

But then you see it from another perspective of the blue-chip companies that have been around for a long time, and have a lot of legacy applications, and how they slowly move or made mistakes early on and moved those workloads back.

So seeing how that's worked over the years has been extremely valuable for me, from my perspective, and then being able to take some of those best practices and leverage them with our mid-market customers, that's a big value for our customers, for sure.

When it comes to splitting that difference for the customer in terms of what needs to be on-prem versus what needs to be in the cloud, are you looking at constraints around capacity with data center or cost with cloud?

Well it comes back to the data, the importance and about understanding the criteria of what you are looking at.

How close does it need to be to the compute and how quick does it need access?

And then, from a security perspective, where are they most comfortable with their data? So even these massive data centers are challenged when it comes to power constraints. And as we continue to put GPUs and stack more and more GPUs, it becomes more and more of a problem.

So to answer your questions, when we go in and look at what the power requirements are for a customer based on either what they're doing or where they want to go in three to five years, that's a major variable we consider when putting together that three to five-year plan.

How they're going to do it, what's the cost of getting additional power into the data center versus running that workload in the cloud or in a colo?

And I think that's where the colos going to become even more valuable to customers in the future.

It is your SLA. Maybe your partner is working on those. If you need to be agile. If you need to move quick that’s where leveraging a colo is valuable. You still have full control of what you want to do and when you want to do it.

Do you have a preferred partner for virtualization?

Maybe five years ago we would have had a preferred partner for virtualization. At this point in time it’s extremely variable, based on where the customer is and it comes back to that TCO.

Where is the maturity of that customer? How many applications they have tied in, how many plug-ins they have tied into the virtualization strategy they’re using right now. Then what’s the ROI by actually switching hypervisors?

We’re capable of leveraging all of the hypervisors that are out there for our customers. So what’s the cost to move? What’s the reason to move. And is there a value to moving in the first place?

That's where it's really important to take the emotions away from it. Because there were a lot of emotions in the market based on what Broadcom was doing. Shifting from a perpetual licensing model to a subscription-based model and the cost associated with that.

When it comes to the Broadcom-VMware pricing are you in a position where you are helping customers control their core counts? Are your services that involved in the customer’s environment?

Yes. Our team is absolutely looking at that.

It comes back down to TCO. You have to see the most efficient way to run a hypervisor. We have customers that say, “We're tired of what's going on with VMware right now. We want to go to Nutanix.” But they look at it and they go, “Wow, there's a lot more cost to consider than we originally thought.”

It's not as easy as just flipping a switch. And then we have customers that say we have remote locations, that we have these data centers in a box, opportunities that are independent of everything else we're running right now.

What makes sense for us is it Nutanix? Is it containers? Is it VMware?

And that's where we really need to break down the total structure of what they're doing from an operations perspective. And you know there's one of the big pieces of it is the training of the internal team.

What are the capabilities? That's a major variable that we have to go in and assess early on to understand where we can take them, what direction we can take them in the future, because we certainly don't want to put anyone in a position to fail.

We want to put our customers in the best long-term trajectory for success.

Can I ask you about containerization? That keeps coming up in conversations with people who are looking past the hypervisor. How are you looking at that?

I can’t say that’s the direction long-term at all. I mean everyone said cloud was the future 10 years ago. Containers aren’t new anymore . They’ve been around.

If you have a lot of changing pieces from an applications perspective, and you have microprocesses then absolutely, that’s the route to go.

If you have an infrastructure that doesn't have a ton of applications changing happening by the day, then maybe that taking on a separate infrastructure, leveraging containers, doesn't make sense.

If you’re shifting to a whole new operating model based on containers then there’s a lot of training involved. It’s not just infrastructure. It’s not just running a cloud. You have to train your team and have the right people. There are major costs.

You folks are a Dell Platinum partner. Dell has partner first for storage, they have opened partner of record to client device. It seems like channel engagement is ramping up considerably over on that side. What are the areas you are excited about?

Now that Dell has kind of shifted their strategy and saying we're all in with partners, it makes it a lot easier for partners to go in and talk about the entire solution stack

I think it's phenomenal.

Dell's made a full commitment to the channel to not only support the channel from a data center perspective and go all in.

But on the endpoint too. Because there's a lot of partners out there, that's a big focus for them, the complete service management of that end point. Almost desktop as a service, and they can do that now through the channel.

As for Avalon, there's a lot of things we're really excited about. Powerflex is exciting to us, and it's because it gives customers the flexibility to choose.

If VMware is the right fit for them. We can run it on Powerflex. If Nutanix is the right fit for them, run it. If they want to partner with Red Hat and start running containers, they can do it. I’ve had a lot of customers that have had phenomenal experience.

The focus has really been on enterprise, but the mid-market can really take advantage of it.

Another area I'm excited about is the new partnership Dell has announced with Nutanix, with their XC Plus nodes where they can get the hypervisor in the box. Procure it as one unit, versus taking bits and pieces and nailing it together so you can curate and get the software all in one and get it all supported to Dell. So that makes things a lot easier for customers, especially if they're already a Nutanix customer.

Are you seeing customers for that Nutanix XC product? I think it just became generally available last month.

There are a lot of customers that are extremely interested in going down that path and see if it's a good fit. And I would tell you there's several that are very interested in putting it at manufacturing facilities where they don't have a core data center, having free, no clusters, and running workloads close to where the data is required, and then sending information back to the core data center for the cloud.