ChannelVision Magazine

It had a nice run, lasting about 50 years, but Gordon Moore’s “law” no longer can be assumed. According to Hewlett Packard scientists, clock speeds are no longer doubling every 18 months, so as might be expected, the annual doubling of component density on a circuit – at minimum manufacturing costs – was too good to last forever. “It was great while it lasted,” said Kirk Bresniker, Hewlett Packard Labs chief architect and HPE fellow. Not that HPE scientists are necessarily worried new limits will hamper development. Rather, they’re hopeful hardware limitations will spur creativity toward all sorts of new programming models or even the invention of biologi- cally inspired devices, circuits and architectures. “Innovation isn’t slowing down,” said HPE research scientist Cat Graves. There are, however, concerns that even though assumptions about comput- ing performance always increasing no longer hold true, computational needs continue to explode. Consider the booming AI sector. It’s quickly becoming “a factor in our daily lives,” said Natalia Vassilieva, HPE senior research manager of the AI group at HP Labs. “And it’s not exactly a news flash that the trend is to apply AI technologies to vertical markets and industries. But we can’t accomplish those AI goals using general-purpose computers.” “Today, ‘just in time’ means real time,” added Kirk Bresniker, HP Labs chief architect and HPE fellow. “We don’t have the luxury of waiting for information to trickle into a data center. We have microseconds to analyze petabytes of data. And it all has to happen at that edge, close to the sensors and actuators.” And so the pendulum continues to swing – from smart network, dumb device to dumb device, smart network (surely always there will be some smarts in both) – but it would seem any shift toward intelligence at the edge is the better hand for “feet on the street” channel partners. Whenever complexity is brought to the customer premises, after all, it would seem to also bring with it the need and advantages of local ties and the local touch, at least in terms of reaching all those sprawled out suburban strip malls and office parks. Certainly, as we achieve the dream of IoT/M2M and a centrally orchestrated, fully cloud-connected world – the real-life version of the Matrix – much of channel partners’ roles also will move “to the cloud.” Like many other career paths, “the robots will take those jobs.” But this won’t happen overnight. So in the nearer term, it’s hard to view the influx of computing devices to the customer site as anything but good news to the all sorts of channel partners that resell end-user computing devices, as well as the solutions that run on top of those devices. No Moore’s Martin Vilaboy Editor-in-Chief martin@bekabusinessmedia.com Tara Seals Contributing Editor tara@bekapublishing.com Percy Zamora Art Director percy@bekabusinessmedia.com Berge Kaprelian Group Publisher berge@bekabusinessmedia.com Rene Galan Associate Publisher rene@bekabusinessmedia.com Anthony Graffeo Associate Publisher anthony@bekabusinessmedia.com John Macchia Marketing & Digital Media john@bekabusinessmedia.com Beka Business Media Berge Kaprelian President and CEO Neil Ende General Counsel Corporate Headquarters 15560 N Frank Lloyd Wright Blvd Suite B4 – 5433 Scottsdale, AZ 85260 Voice: 480.503.0770 Fax: 480.503.0990 Email: berge@bekabusinessmedia.com © 2018 Beka Business Media, All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in any form or medium without express written permission of Beka Business Media is prohibited. ChannelVision and the ChannelVision logo are trademarks of Beka Business Media LETTER 6 Channel Vision | January - February, 2018