Technology Reseller v20 2019

Continued... AI technolog y reseller.co.uk 27 James Goulding hears how Arrow ECS is helping channel partners profit from AI enable us to say ‘You didn’t get insurance because you didn’t hit these criteria and you scored low here’ has been a long time coming. The front end of AI, the machine learning piece, is relatively simple; it’s the eco-system of tools that go around it that is more difficult. I liken it to virtualisation and cloud. On day one, virtualisation was a server and some virtualisation software that gave you VMs. That’s not a cloud. A cloud is where you have provisioning and monitoring and logging and clever networks that optimise themselves. At the moment, AI is just a box you can do some machine learning with. To make it into something that is appropriate for the enterprise, you need an eco-system of tools around it that enables you to do all the clever machine lifecycle management, automated testing and so on. Global technology solutions provider Arrow Electronics held its inaugural technology conference at London Olympia on May 8. With exhibitors and speakers from across the AI technology eco- system, Vision 2019 is an important part of Arrow’s strategy to become a leader in this emerging market. At the event, Technology Reseller met up with David Fearne, Arrow Electronics Global Practice Leader for AI and Data Intelligence, to find out more about how its distribution arm, Arrow Enterprise Computing Solutions (ECS), is helping channel partners profit from AI. We started by asking him why Arrow chose AI as the focus for its first Vision event. David Fearne (DF): “We feel AI has come of age and moved out of the experimental phase. The tooling to do the data science – the stuff that lets you model and build these clever AI systems – has been growing in maturity for many years. What hasn’t been so mature is the set of technologies that lets a business take advantage of a piece of AI software, machine learning or whatever, and deploy it in a usable way. That has now come to maturity, so much so that putting it into enterprise adoption is no longer seen as the risk it was. In fact, it is now seen as disadvantageous to a business not to adopt AI in a big way. “In that sense, the tables have turned. AI has come of age very quickly – it has done in 5 years what cloud did in 15 – and the balance between risk and reward is now even, if not tilting more to reward. Organisations are looking to partners to provide advice and guidance around AI, just as they have done for cloud, and networks before that. They want to know how they can adopt AI strategically, repeatably and with scale. Technology Reseller (TR): It has to be done strategically because there are complex considerations to do with data privacy and ethics. DF: That’s the thing. One of the biggest problems we have had with AI from Day One is that while we can build all these fancy models, it is difficult to explain how they come to their conclusions. The ability to put in a framework and tooling that, in the case of insurance scoring, would TR: And you provide your resellers with that eco-system? DF: Our value in this space is expertise and understanding. I run our global data intelligence practice and my team’s role is to look at the latest developments in this space and how they translate into the channel. We are always on the look-out for net new vendors – not the big anchor vendors like NVIDIA or IBM, but the glue vendors that stick it all together, that take these disintermediated parts and glue them together into something that feels solid and production-ready. There are very few end-to-end solutions in AI, which is why Distribution is so important. We have huge value in a complex and disintermediated market, because we have the ability to take this, this and this, bring them together, package them up and deliver an outcome. That’s never been more important than with AI. TR: Are your resellers able to meet customers’ needs in relation to AI or do they lean on you? DF: In these new technologies, they lean heavily on Arrow. One of our biggest roles is enablement. We are a scale organisation. We don’t work well if we have to hand-hold every single deal a reseller goes through. That’s not what resellers want either. The resellers that are successful and profitable are the ones we help to become self-sufficient, who use us for fulfilment or occasionally when things get complicated come to us and say ‘Can you help us with this one?’. We work really well when we can scale Are you ready for AI? AI has come of age very quickly – it has done in 5 years what cloud did in 15 – and the balance between risk and reward is now even, if not tilting more to reward