Partner Has High Hopes for SQL Server 2014's In-Memory Technology
One Australian Microsoft partner has big plans for clients around SQL Server 2014, but he won't be citing the technology by name in sales discussions.
Tony Nicol, managing director at Servian, shared his views on SQL Server 2014 in a video discussion with Phil Sorgen, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Group, that was posted on Sorgen's Channel Chief blog Tuesday.
"With its focus on in-memory technology, it allows the client to quite simply do more with less," Nicol said of SQL Server 2014. "Clients are getting to the edge of their processor capability or their user responsiveness. Many of them are having to do big, big infrastructure upgrades that they'd really rather push off, particularly when cloud computing is more readily available to them."
Nicol said the in-memory capability of SQL Server 2014 could delay infrastructure upgrades for many years. "With the three- or four-time performance increase that you're going to get, it's an economic game changer, particularly when they can see what's coming over the next period."
Servian, with offices in Sydney and Melbourne, will also be looking ahead as it steers customers to SQL Server 2014. Microsoft will be spinning up local Azure services in Australia in the near future, Nicol said, and he expects SQL Server 2014's flexibility for moving workloads from on-premises to the cloud to be a type of investment protection.
"It allows many of our clients to upgrade right now with all the benefits they're going to get from 2014, and then simply migrate to the cloud-ready cousin when it's available later this year. That's a massive risk-mitigation exercise in itself that's worth the upgrade," he said.
Although he's looking forward to all those benefits, plus the unification of the codebase between SQL Server's OLTP and data warehousing systems, he doesn't plan to pitch the technology.
"As good as we think SQL Server 2014 is, the client, which to us is often marketing and sales people, they don't actually care. They care about the solutions that we can provide. We listen to what they need, we know the price-performance point that they've got to meet, and then we give them the right solution," Nicol told Sorgen.
Posted by Scott Bekker on April 16, 2014