The CIO I spoke with said his biggest concern wasn’t really the BYOD movement; it was the security risk from the use of laptops outside the company — hacking or snooping at places like Starbucks and the potential for lost laptops. I had a big “Oh yeah” moment and was brought back into the real world, one I’d stopped thinking about a year or more ago. Shame on me for not focusing on the issues users have today and talking about solutions they can use. While making this mistake is a “my bad” situation for me, it’s much more serious for a VAR.

Being a year or two removed from what users are implementing is a mistake VARs can’t afford to make. They do need to bring in fresh ideas to show their clients, but they also have to keep their line cards stocked with a comprehensive set of solutions to the problems users have today. Taking the example of my discussion with the CIO above, data loss prevention (DLP) is a topic that probably got more ink from folks like me a year or two ago. It may never have scored particularly high in gee-whiz value, but it’s what he needs — and it’s what VARs should be showing him.

Other examples could be addressing performance issues on a SAN or a WAN or improving SAN troubleshooting. SSD caching and tiering are certainly collecting more than their share of attention, considering how much of those technologies users are actually buying as a percentage of their total IT spend. But there are some basic server-side SSD implementations that users should know about, like simply replacing a boot drive with an SSD.

The point is that while VARs do need to know about what’s coming up from a technology perspective, they must keep rooted in the “hear and now.” Customers want to hear about what they need now.

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