Blade Watch

Chris called (from a rather windy Canary Wharf)  to say he’d written up the document comparing the Dell and HP blades, originally he’d asked me here what the Dell version of  a BL460c was. Anyway, I was asking him how stuff was when he asked, “What’s white labeling and why do you go on about it?” so the conversation below began.

Increasingly banks and other organizations are taking products or services that they have and allowing them to resell them white labelled, or customized for that target market, an example of this might be Virgin Mobile in the UK uses T-Mobile services. A Virgin handset obviously says Virgin on it when you switch it on, the applications and pricing are Virgin specific but the underlying network is provided by T-Mobile.

This is increasingly happening in the Financial Services sector, so my favourite example which one Business Sales guy I knew had told me was that “… phoned up and said, our system is not as fast or precise as yours, can we use yours and white label it to clients?”, the bank involved said yes, so their in house application got published on new infrastructure and was then presented to external clients who see the same interface, the same results (or possibly slightly adjusted results), however, the logo is different, and the help button says a different name and phone number.

It’s selling a white label service, an unbranded service to third parties which can then be re-branded, packaged and sold to end user communities, creating new opportunities and revenues. It’s an interesting way of doing business and as we evolve it to the next level, deploying applications in Citrix or on the web, or even deploy virtualization, like the educational organization I met a few months ago, have one blade infrastructure, with two sets of virtual infrastructure, one for in-house, one for the external client, so they get their domain, comprised of their applications with their branding for their specific clients and user-groups.

The next question related to this is how it affects the enterprise, particularly with cloud, as I start to strip down the infrastructure into components I provide and components I buy in, what elements of the application, of the infrastructure are me (my organization) and which are something else or non-core, what represents shareholder value and revenue. Is the value with the application that I designed, I re-sell to some third parities, or is the value with the third parties who have those clients, their share of the end revenue?

For service providers and vendors alike, it’s great news, more opportunities for revenue, for those applications where I just cannot share infrastructure or data between clients, for those situations where I need to have duplicate infrastructure for the external services due to security/firewalls or compliance. It also means more movements to cloud and application down the wire.

In relation to support how does this change things? The complexity of the organization, the application, indeed the revenue is getting more complex. IT used to just sell you a server and a place to plug it in, now we’re a service provider, are IT geared for this? Are the business? Is our infrastructure? An outside client needs handled completely differently, the dialog needs to be more sensitive, more customer focused, I can’t just hand a call to desktop and say rebuild the pc, (I’ll look at it if another user has a problem).

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