CRN - April 01 Issue by UBM India

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contents

April 01, 2012 l Volume 1 Issue 11

Cover Story Adoption of smarter education technologies is on the rise, and offers vast new opportunities to solutions focused partners

18 NEWS Analyses

Channel Chief

VMware enhances partner program

Kaspersky eyes upcountry

Acer consolidates and expands

Leadership change at Kaseya

Garde returns to head Dell India

SSDs see momentum as prices fall

Dell gets aggressive with Cloud Edge

Joergen Jakobsen Vice President, Channel Operations, EMC APJ, speaks about the company’s channel-led strategy for 2012

14 Special Focus Gaining momentum Business Intelligence has historically been the domain of enterprises but the advent of cloud, appliance model, and self-service platforms are leading to its adoption among SMBs

When go-getters get together Suresh HR and K Subrahmanya, Founders, Central Data System share their success story so far and highlight their future plans

Editorial 10

Feedback

Channel Buzz

New Products

Shadow Ram

Get Personal

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Role Model

Opinion

Tech Focus Dell’s giant leap into tiered storage Automated migration, data center bridging, now possible thanks to software updates in Dell’s EqualLogic PS6100 series

starting line MUST

VMware enhances partner program

Kaspersky eyes upcountry

n RAMDAS S

Read

Through its national distributor, Sakri IT Solutions, Kaspersky is eying growth for its single-user antivirus products in tier-2 and -3 cities in 2012. Besides reshuffling existing partners, Sakri will appoint Platinum partners in tier-2 and Gold partners in tier-3 cities. Plans are afoot to improve post-sales support even in the remotest corners of India. On its part, Kaspersky will appoint channel managers in all state capitals. Affirming the development, Jagannath Patnaik, Director, Channel Sales, Kaspersky Lab, South Asia, said, “We realized that we were weak in postsales, and partners had also complained that our toll-free number was always engaged. Based on this feedback we have created a mandate for each new appointee to train one person in technical and pre-sales for Gold, and two persons for Platinum. Sakri will also increase the number of support engineers from the current 30 to 50.” Kaspersky will leverage on the popularity of its brand ambassador, Sachin Tendulkar. “Sachin’s popularity is immeasurable across India, Jagannath Patnaik and we will leverage it in upcountry locations to create brand awareness and recognition among customers there. We will continue promoting cricket tournaments for computer dealer associations across India. We have promoted such competitions among IT associations in Jalandhar, Ludhiana, Pune, Chandigarh and Mumbai. We will cover more cities this fiscal,” Patnaik stated. In a bid to protect partners across all layers, Sakri has also brought subtle changes to the Partner Recognition and Incentive Management Application. For example, Gold and Silver partners will have to buy products from their local Platinum partner. Explained Patnaik, “As an incentive, Sakri will introduce schemes regularly for each partner level. A Gold or Silver partner would be able to earn 10-35 percent as sales incentive. The Platinum partner would earn a bonus for meeting targets each quarter.” n — Sonal Desai

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Mware has restructured its channel program to include new incentive schemes for all tiers; these schemes take potential margins on the license business up to 53 percent. The vendor has also unveiled plans to promote the VMware Service Provider Program (VSPP) to tier-2 partners. “We want to create avenues for partners to earn more. While a customer deploying virtualization opens up avenues for channels to earn 10-15 times the amount the customer spends on acquiring licenses, on servers, storage and services we want channels to earn more in terms of extra incentives,” explained Ganesan Arumugam, Director, Channel & Alliance, VMware Software India. Apart from the standard 23 percent which VMware offers as margins, the company is offering extra incentives for customer identification, new opportunity identification, new solution selling and upselling. “As a partner you can earn up to 10 percent purely on opportunity identification, and it does not really matter whether you close the order or we do it through another partner. All channel partners will be protected for their efforts, and this is now being offered even to a registered partner. We have also offered channels extra incentives for new solution opportunities,” Arumugam added. The new rebate is tied with the solution delivery competency of the partner. Every time a partner sells a solution outside the company’s infrastructure virtualization competency he gets 10 percent of the value of the license sold, as a rebate. The incentives are 2-10 percent depending on the specific opportunity and the amount of upselling that the partner has done. Said Arumugam, “We have

“You can earn up to 10 percent on opportunity identification. It does not matter whether you close the order or we do it through another partner” Ganesan Arumugam

Director, Channel & Alliance, VMware Software India

a cap of 30 percent, which still gives many partners scope to bundle value added services free to retain customers.” Another initiative from VMware has been to align with the partners of select OEMs, and offer them credit on their OEM sales of VMware licenses. Recently, Dell and VMware agreed to give Dell PartnerDirect partners credit in the VMware Partner Network for OEM license sales through Dell. According to Arumugam, while around 40 service providers have been signed on as part of the VSPP, few mid-market resellers have aligned to start a cloud business. “We are talking to midmarket resellers to launch their own branded cloud offerings. We have employed a pay-per-use model, which means that you can get the complete VMware product line for as low as $360 a month, and as they sign up customers they can pay us on an hourly basis. We offer a monitoring tool which would bill the partner, who in turn can bill customers.” While Arumugam said that there are no plans to aggressively add partners, the distributors have the mandate to expand the channels in B- and C-Class cities and other SMB hubs with both registered and professional partners. n

edit opinion Volume 1, Issue 11

HP’s urge to merge dhaval valia

his is not the first time that HP has decided to merge its internal printing and systems divisions. In 2005, the then CEO of HP, Carly Fiorina, had announced the unification of the two businesses. However that was hardly implemented and within two months Fiorina was ousted and her replacement Mark Hurd scrapped the decision. The reason that the first attempt didn’t work was perhaps the fear among the IPG division that a unified unit would lead to bundling and discounting, and that it would be impacted the most considering that the printer biz is low in volume and value compared to the PC biz. That would be the case even now. I foresee that the consolidation and realignment of the channel organization and policies will emerge as a sticky point at both the global and India level. Partners will recall that after the Compaq acquisition in 2001, for nearly four years there was a clear separation between the Blue (HP) channels and the Red (Compaq) channels. Compaq partners had a problem aligning with the HP channel managers, and vice versa. While IPG and PSG are part of the same company, partners have often pointed out the differences between the people and culture of the two divisions. Another aspect that is bound to have a negative impact on the partner business, atleast for the short-term, is the inevitable downsizing of the team. Any consolidation process leads to uncertainty among employees and affects the motivation of the sales team. Many partners, I spoke to during the past week, expressed the fear that the integration would take at least six months and that during this period HP’s business could suffer due to the above mentioned factor. HP will therefore have to ensure that the consolidation process is clear, effective and fast. The longer they stretch it, the more uncertainty it will create within HP and in the marketplace. From the partner and customer perspective, the biggest advantage of this unification is that they will no longer have to deal with multiple people and systems. It would help consolidate customer relationships and increase the responsiveness of the company. Considering the swiftness with which Meg Whitman has taken major decisions over the past 5 months, since she came on board, I am hoping that she has thought out an effective plan that will ensure least business discontinuity during the transition period. However, the thing that HP will have to do well over the next few months is to have a clear and transparent communication with its partners, updating them on the integration process and progress, consistently. n E-mail CRN Executive Editor Dhaval Valia at dhaval.valia@ubm.com 10

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Managing Director Printer & Publisher Director Associate Publisher & Executive Editor Group Commercial Director Contributing Editor Assistant Editor Principal Correspondent Senior Correspondent

: : : : : : : : :

Sanjeev Khaira Sajid Yusuf Desai Kailash Shirodkar Dhaval Valia Salil Warior Ramdas S Sonal Desai Abhijeet Mukherjee (Mumbai) Amit Singh (Delhi)

Design Art Director Senior Visualiser Senior Designer Designer

: Deepjyoti Bhowmik : Yogesh Naik : Shailesh Vaidya : Jinal Chheda, Sameer Surve Marketing Advertising Co-ordinator : Jagruti Kudalkar online Manager—Product Dev. & Mktg. : Viraj Mehta Deputy Manager—Online : Nilesh Mungekar Web Designer : Nitin Lahare Sr. User Interface Designer : Aditi Kanade Operations Head—Finance : Yogesh Mudras Director—Operations & Administration : Satyendra Mehra Sales bangalore Manager—Sales : Satish Kutty satish.krishnankutty@ubm.com (M) +91 98452 07810 Delhi Manager—Sales : Sanjay Khandelwal sanjay.khandelwal@ubm.com (M) +91 98117 64515 production Deputy Manager : Prakash (Sanjay) Adsul Logistics Assistant Manager : Bajrang Shinde Subscriptions & Database Manager : Manoj Ambardekar manoj.ambardekar@ubm.com Senior Executive : Deepanjali Chaurasia deepa.chaurasia@ubm.com Head Office UBM India Pvt Ltd, 1st floor, 119, Sagar Tech Plaza - A, Andheri-Kurla Road, Saki Naka Junction, Andheri (E), Mumbai 400072, India Tel: 022 6769 2400; Fax: 022 6769 2426 Printed and Published by Sajid Yusuf Desai on behalf of UBM India Pvt Ltd, 6th floor, 615-617 Sagar Tech Plaza - A, Andheri-Kurla Road, Saki Naka Junction, Andheri (E), Mumbai 400072, India. Executive Editor: Dhaval Valia Printed at Indigo Press (India) Pvt Ltd, Plot No 1c/716, Off Dadaji Konddeo Cross Road, Byculla (E), Mumbai 400027 RNI No. MAHENG/2011/39915 Associate Office - Pune Jagdish Khaladkar, Sahayog Apartment 508 Narayan Peth, Patrya Maruti Chowk, Pune 411 030 Tel: 91 (020) 2445 1574 (M) 98230 38315 email: jagdishk@vsnl.com USA Huson International Media (West) Tiffany DeBie Tiffany.debie@husonmedia.com Tel +1 408 879 6666 Fax +1 408 879 6669 Huson International Media (East) Dan Manioci dan.manioci@husonmedia.com Tel +1 212 268 3344 Fax +1 212 268 3355

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Important Every effort has been taken to avoid errors or omissions in this magazine. In spite of this, errors may creep in. Any mistake, error or discrepancy noted may be brought to our notice immediately. It is notified that neither the publisher, the editor or the seller will be responsible in respect of anything and the consequence of anything done or omitted to be done by any person in reliance upon the content herein. This disclaimer applies to all, whether subscriber to the magazine or not. For binding mistakes, misprints, missing pages, etc, the publisher’s liability is limited to replacement within one month of purchase. © All rights are reserved. No part of this magazine may be reproduced or copied in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher. All disputes are subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of competent courts and forums in Mumbai only. While care is taken prior to acceptance of advertising copy, it is not possible to verify its contents. UBM India Pvt Ltd. cannot be held responsible for such contents, nor for any loss or damages incurred as a result of transactions with companies, associations or individuals advertising in its newspapers or publications. We therefore recommend that readers make necessary inquiries before sending any monies or entering into any agreements with advertisers or otherwise acting on an advertisement in any manner whatsoever.

starting line Acer consolidates and expands n ABHIJEET MUKHERJEE & RAMDAS S

cer has consolidated its brand portfolio. It has decided to drop the eMachines brand, and focus more on the Gateway and the mother brand (Acer) in India. The company also plans to strengthen the Acer Outreach program, expand its support infrastructure, and retail network. Saji Kumar, Director, Product Management, Acer India, explained the reason for dropping eMachines. “We have seen tremendous success with eMachines which accounts for almost 30,000 units a quarter. We want to simplify our GTM for future. We are not exiting the very important entry-level market.” He said,”An affordable laptop brings fresh customers like firsttime buyers, students and valueconscious buyers especially from upcountry markets. We can create a value line with our Aspire brand which can help us cater to the customer base developed through eMachines.” Acer had launched the eMachines and Gateway models in 2009. While Gateway had limited exposure (being mostly positioned through LFRs), eMachines was said to be a bigger success. Now Acer will strengthen the Gateway brand, and will introduce several new models. “Over the next few months you will see Gateway addressing a wider market. Instead of a 3-brand strategy we will opt for a 2-brand strategy,” informed Kumar. Other strategies include strengthening the Acer Outreach program. Launched last year, Outreach has been Acer’s initiative to reach up to 4,000 cities by 2014. The company has identified hundreds of key towns and cities which are described as clusters which cater to a number of smaller towns in the region. Informed S Rajendran, CMO,

“We have witnessed 15-20 percent growth in many geographies due to the engagement under Outreach. Now our plan is to enhance the program” S Rajendran

Chief Marketing Officer, Acer India

Acer, “Outreach has enabled a market coverage of 850 cities and 3,000 Acer Galleries. We have witnessed 15-20 percent growth in many geographies due to the engagement under Outreach. Now our plan is to enhance the program further; this includes reaching Master Resellers in cluster towns who have access to resellers in nearby towns.” The enhancements to the Outreach initiative include providing better target-based incentives to resellers in the upcountry, and increasing the number of Acer Associates in the region. In the commercial segment Acer plans to increase its Select partners from the present 100 to 150. The company also intends to enhance its authorized support partner (ASP) network and has resorted to having a minimum of one qualified and authorized partner in each cluster who would be constantly audited and monitored for performance. In FY2012-13 Acer plans to have 100 new ASPs shadowing the Outreach cluster growth. It also has plans to provide premium post-sales support to its 150 enhanced corporate accounts. Acer would have a completely dedicated post-sales service mechanism to address them with the fastest response time. n

inside

out

Leadership change at Kaseya Girish Krishnamurthy is moving out of his current position as Country Head, Kaseya. He will continue to guide the company strategically. In the interim, Martin Ashby, Executive VP, APAC, will take over the reins of Kaseya India. “For the past 4 years, Girish has been instrumental in establishing and developing India market. He cultivated prospects nurtured customers, drove business through partners and the great talent we hired in India. He will continue to guide us strategically” commented Gerald Blackie, CEO, Kaseya. G Krishnamurthy “I am grateful to the customers, partners and the entire Kaseya team for the support that frove company to such incredible heights in India. It has been a rewarding and enriching experience with Kaseya both professionally and personally,” said Krishnamurthy. n

Garde returns to head Dell India Following internal restructuring globally, Sameer Garde has returned to Dell India as MD and President. He is currently VP and GM, Global Business based out of Austin. Garde has held several positions at Dell India, APJ and Global in the last decade. According to Dell, there is no other change in the executive team. Mahesh Bhalla will continue to drive the consumer and SMB business while Harsha Lal, will drive the public sector and large enterprise Sameer Garde business. Both will report to Garde. Garde will in turn report to Amit Midha who has taken over as President, APJ and Chairman, Global Emerging Markets. He was earlier VP, APJ CSMB, and Chairman, Dell China. n

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edit opinion Cloud is about cost transfer Robert Faletra

vendors on where they need to improve. All said, I want to congratulate CRN for doing the Channel Champions survey, and wish you the best in all your future endeavors.

he future of computing is increasingly going to see bigger efforts to transfer costs up the sales chain with the channel likely to see its fair share. Cost shifting is an old game but it is something you have to watch carefully and adjust your model to manage properly. In some cases, whoever bears the cost is just a function of who has the leverage. Now we are seeing a lot more cost transfer because it is a fundamental piece of the new cloud computing model. When I take on costs, especially costs I need to capitalize, my risk is high. But if I do not have to capitalize a technology deployment because I’ve transferred those fixed capitalized costs onto someone else, my risk goes down. The reality is this is a huge selling point to the end user but it is also going to become a significant selection point on the part of the channel. One significant decision point for partners building a cloud model is where do you transfer the costs. Are you going to transfer them onto your balance sheet by building out hosting services and data centers and offering them for rent? Or are you going to find hosting suppliers that give you the capability to offer their package as part of your underlying solution? Both models can work, but clearly the former is a more risky proposition, albeit it likely means greater reward if you are successful. In the old model, suppliers that were focused on shifting from a direct to an indirect sales model did so to transfer sales and support costs to partners, and hopefully sell to a wider audience that can not be effectively met directly. But the old model also meant the infrastructure costs ultimately got transferred to the end user at some point. Now we are heading toward a model where those costs are either going to sit on the suppliers’ balance sheets or on the solution providers.’ With that comes increased risk because customers can cancel, go out of business, get bought and an untold number of other things that can mean a loss of revenue. The new model, therefore, requires diversification of that risk by increasing the number of customers with whom you do business. It is necessary in any case because when the revenue generated by a sale is paid out in monthly fees rather than a one-time big check it requires you to have more customers to obtain a similar cash flow. Ultimately, the more risk you take on by allowing costs to be transferred onto your balance sheet, the higher your margin needs to be. For large hosting companies and cloud-service suppliers there is obviously a tipping point where the risk is spread across so many customers that the next customer on board barely moves the risk needle. But you need to decide where the cost will be before you can make long-term supplier selections. n Email Robert Faletra at robert.faletra@ec.ubm.com 12

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Abhay Shah DIT Consultant Mumbai

CRN Channel Champions 2011 The two editions of Channel Champions have been doing good service to the channels by presenting a neutral view of vendors’ channel policies and performance. I have been taking the survey for past three years and I really appreciate the efforts put by CRN team in doing the survey in a very unbiased way. Such a survey lends a voice to channel grievances and provide feedback to

Well done team CRN. I could not put down the magazine till I read the issues backto-back. Some of the wins were surprising, but not unexpected altogether. Some vendors who had been winning continuously for several years had to eat a humble pie. The results certainly reflect the changing mood of the channel, and is a warning for vendors to improve channel management and policies. Amit Jain The IT Shop Jalna

Send your feedback at editor@ubmindia.com or post your views on www.crn.in

Advertiser Index Company name

Page No Web site

Sales Contact

Smartlink

1 www.digisol.com

helpdesk@digisol.com

Smartlink

2 www.digilite.co.in

helpdesk@digilite.co.in

IBM

4 www.ibm.com

response@in.ibm.com

Trend Micro

avneet.kaur@trend-micro.in

Compuage-Odyssey

7 www.compuageindia.com

odyssey@compuageindia.com

Compuage-Edifier

9 www.edifier-international.com

info@compuageindia.com

IFSEC

25 www.ifsecsouthindia.com

pankaj.jain@ubm.com

Quick Heal

www.quickheal.com

info@quickheal.co.in

Abacus (Zion)

www.abacusperipherals.com

enquiries@abacusperipherals.com

Biz

34 www.indiaantivirus.com

sales@indiaantivirus.com

Viewsonic

5 www.in.viewsonic.com

deepak.sharma@in.viewsonic.com

Kaspersky

sales@sakri.in

www.trendmicro.co.in

www.sakri.in

starting line SSDs see momentum as prices fall n RAMDAS S

olid State Drive (SSD) prices have started tumbling and the industry has started betting on its wider adoption. The OEM contract rates are expected to cost less than a dollar per GB by beginning of April. With HDD prices still more than double its prices prior to Thailand floods, the gap between mainstream SSD drives and traditional hard drives has narrowed. However, despite hitting an all time low, SSD is about five times as expensive as HDD. Yet, partners have reported more sales in February and March, because more technology enthusiasts are buying SSD drives. “Performance has been the key reason for adoption of flash drives. Most customers see that despite using the latest processors, and loading their PC with 8 GB RAM, performance expectations are not being matched. They are all buying SSDs and are not looking back,” said Sharad Gowda, SN Systems, Bengaluru. Bengaluru-based Avance Technologies has also seen a significant increase in demand for SSDs. Kingston 64 GB drive prices have dropped to `4,500 in March, while the 128 GB drive prices have dipped below `10,000. With non-availability of enterprise SATA and SAS drives, enterprises have also started opting for SSD drives for servers. “While it is not still practical to use flash for large capacities because of prohibitive cost, for IO intensive apps SSD makes a world of difference. With 128 GB SSD and 146 GB SAS prices being in similar bracket, many customers see value in SSD,” said Sandeep Lodha, Director, Netweb Technologies, Delhi. There are few factors that

“Already the prices have come down by 20-30 percent in the past couple of quarters. Another 30 to 40 percent price drop in the coming months will increase adoption” MA Mannan

Country Manager, Corsair India

remain a matter of concern, one of them is the reliability of technology. “We had seen some failure rates in initial days. But in the past one year we did not have any RMA issues,” noted MA Mannan, Country Manager, Corsair India. Vendors such as Corsair, Intel, Transcend and Kingston have been promoting SSD over the past few quarters, and a number of channel partners have started recommending SSD drives. “Many business customers are using a combination of SSD and regular drives, with SSD being used to host operating systems and key applications and the drive being used to store files. These customers have seen performance improvements that is unbelievable,” added Mannan. Mannan expects by April end, consumer SSD prices for 128 GB SSD to dip below `8,000. “The prices have come down by 20-30 percent in the past couple of quarters. We would see another 30 percent drop in price in the coming months.” Anshuman Gupta, CEO, Strontium Technologies added, “We will see rapid adoption of SSDs, forcing manufacturers to invest more into manufacturing, which would further drive down prices.” n

MUST

Read

Dell gets aggressive with Cloud Edge Dell has outlined an aggressive strategy to push its Cloud Edge server portfolio through partners. “These are purpose built servers to enable customers to go on the cloud for HPC needs. For the last 18 months, we were focused on the analytics, oil and natural gas, research and community segments. Now, we are seeing demand in the upper mid-market segment, essentially those with 500 or more employees, and are working with tier2 partners to address the market ,” said Sitaram Venkat, Director, Enterprise Solutions Business. Since the launch of Cloud Edge portfolio in 2010 Dell has signed up 70 customers in India. The company is increasing the number of products to be sold. “Till a few months back, we had four products, today, we have 10 SKUs. The products come with enterprise class features such as workload orchestration, power and cooling, optimization, and intelligent management. ” said Venkat. Dell has also rationalized the pricing of the Cloud Edge servers, which Venkat said cost 20 percent lesser than similar Sitaram Venkat products offered by the competition. “To aid cloud architecture, the servers are embedded with hypervisor, and we have added a new tool on virtualization into our tool advisory,” he added. With the new partner-led strategy, Dell plans to target the mid-market customers chiefly regional ISPs, scientific research institutes, media and entertainment, broking firms, and auto ancillaries. “Under our Global Commercial Channel program, we have created a special track for HPC products. We are working with partners like Mumbai-based Inspira Enterprise, Hyderbad-based Locuz Enterprise Solutions and Delhi-based Team Computers to do joint customer events. We will offer partners access to our three COEs—two in Bengaluru and one in Delhi so that they can create better engagement with customers,” informed Venkat. n — Sonal Desai

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channel chief “2012 is the Year of the Channel for EMC” Joergen Jakobsen spearheads EMC’s strategic channel initiatives, and is responsible for building out and accelerating its business in the Asia-Pacific and Japan. He spoke to Dhaval Valia about the company’s channel-led strategy for 2012 What are the channel initiatives for 2012? 2012 is going to be the Year of the Channel for EMC. The channel has worked as a prime growth engine for our GTM, and has helped in shaping EMC’s objectives. One of our focus areas is to make it easier for partners to do business with us. We have reorganized internally as a unified channel organization so that channels can access our portfolio including the EMC VNX, Data Domain and Isilon. Apart from the product portfolio enhancement, we are focusing on partner enablement. In line with this, we are adding an EMC staff force called Partner Technical Consultants (PTCs) to mentor partners to acquire the right skills set, the right learning curve about the industry, and product information. PTCs will play a critical role in creating a pool of specialized partners to give the best solution set to our customers. In addition, we are making it easy for our partners to sell, implement and support EMC products. To achieve this, we are implementing a new deal registration process which ensures partner protection for registered deal opportunities via incremental discounts. It provides incremental discount support in winning new accounts with EMC and improves the speed of the deal registration process through internal process improvement.

You have made changes to the flagship Velocity Partner program. Could you tell us something about that? EMC continues to invest in and enhance the Velocity Solution Program by making it easier for resellers to join and access EMC’s broad portfolio, receive extensive training, and increase profitability. EMC products are enabling our partners to transform their customers’ businesses. The enhanced EMC Velocity Solution Provider Program is designed to foster customer specialization while rewarding partners through increased revenue

“We are adding Partner Technical Consultants to mentor partners to acquire the right skills set, learning curve about the industry, and product information” 14

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opportunities and expanded market penetration. In India EMC sells almost everything through channels except to some global accounts which need direct selling. Further to our Velocity program, EMC is investing in presales partners’ training, accreditation and certification. This has been proven as mutually beneficial, and we have grown by depending on our channel partners. We can analyze the market much better now and act accordingly. One of the main thrusts of EMC will be to keep developing a pool of specialized partners who can do as much as system installation and implementation. EMC is looking forward to empower its partners to deliver high-end products such as Symmetrix, Greenplum, Isilon (big data and analytics solutions), and Documentum. The objective of these programs is to encourage partners to do customer marketing at their level, to improve their competitiveness in the market and retain customers. We have separate portals for our partners; the portals provide a platform for communication between EMC and its partners. Worldwide, we added 1,700 new partners to sell EMC products and solutions in 2011. They generated slightly less than half of the channel growth for EMC WW. The large increase in new partners wanting to sell EMC is a testimony to the success of the EMC product range and channel program.

Last year you launched the VNXe portfolio specifically for the SMB segment. How has that fared globally and in India? Has it helped EMC penetrate this segment? In 2011 EMC launched two channel-only products focused on the SMB segment —the VNXe, an entry-level unified storage product, and the EMC DD160, a deduplication storage system. VNXe is designed to provide simplicity, efficiency and affordability to the growing SMB segment in India and other emerging markets. With an entry price of less than $10,000, its small form factor, management simplicity, unified multi-protocol architecture, and application-aware management deliver the ideal consolidation/virtualization storage solution for SMB environments, mid-market companies, and enterprises where IT generalists need

channel chief simple, efficient and affordable storage. I don’t have the India numbers, but globally 2,000 new customers bought the VNXe solution in 2011. This demonstrates that we are gaining share in the SMB segment.

What are the growth areas you see in the Indian market? We are working with the channel community to target new solution areas including archiving, backup, information security and governance. Apart from these, new opportunity areas in big data are opening as a result of the data deluge. Although as of now big data solutions are limited to tier-1 channels, there is a clear opportunity for tier-2 channels as well. In 2012 we are focusing on two key growth areas for our 200-odd Velocity partners—Storage-as-a–Service and Backup-as-a-Service. Both these services offer huge opportunities in India. We are working with Tulip to offer these services; please stay tuned for some major announcements very soon. We are also working with a few of our partners to enable them to offer cloud-based services using EMC technology and solutions. For instance, Electrosales has set up its own cloud environment to offer public cloud services to its customers, while Ace Data has launched its white-label Backup-as-a-Service targeting small businesses.

“Our relationship with Cadensworth is in line with our intent to focus on the SMB and mid-size segments for which building out a dedicated route to the market is essential” You recently got into an equity-led partnership with Redington. What was the reason behind such a unique partnership, and how does it impact your other distributors? Earlier this year we entered into a strategic partnership with Cadensworth, the wholly-owned subsidiary of Redington India. Under this move, Cadensworth will sell our information infrastructure technology, and may sell complementary and non-competing product lines, solutions and services. Through this relationship we aim to leverage the mid-size and SMB segments in India. This is in line with our intent to focus on the SMB and mid-size segments for which building out a dedicated route to the market is essential. We are fully committed to all our distributors and partners, and this move doesn’t impact our other distributors. EMC has clear and transparent rules of engagement as part of our partner program. n

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special focus Gaining momentum

Business Intelligence has historically been the domain of enterprises but the advent of cloud, appliance model, and self-service platforms are leading to its adoption among SMBs n Ayushman Baruah

ith data growing exponentially, there is greater pressure on organizations to analyze the data and extract meaningful information, instead of just storing it. This challenge of analyzing huge amount of data, fashionably known as Big Data, is forcing enterprises to look at new ways of accessing or deploying BI. Another growing trend is the rapid consumerization of IT, where people not only want to access their information on the mobile phone of their choice, but also want to share this information or analysis real-time with their counterparts in a social way. Technology vendors have been quick to react to this demand, and accordingly, the market has witnessed the rapid advancement of SaaS offerings, mobile BI, BI appliances, and enterprise applications embedded with social capabilities. As a result, enterprises now have a huge range of new deployment options for BI.

Mobile BI takes off In India, specifically, as the mobile workforce continues to grow, offering BI on the mobile platform is gradually gaining traction. “Customers need a mobile strategy to quickly manage and analyze today’s explosion of data—turning it into meaningful decision-ready information, and then deliver that data to end users at the point of decision, and back again. In India, we are seeing organizations move from planning to deployment of mobile BI, but at a slower adoption rate than anticipated,” says Maneesh Sharma, Head, Business Analytics and Technology, SAP India. Factors like reduction in 3G tariff and the arrival of 4G LTE bandwidth are also increasing the adoption of mobile BI. “The arrival of high-end smartphones on operating systems like iOS, Android, etc. will drive utilization. Usage cases around field maintenance and sales operations are visible in the region. Executive dashboards seem to be another area where mobile BI requirements are emerging,” says Prashant Tewari, Country Manger, Business Analytics, IBM India. This trend is likely to grow as more information workers go mobile. This trend is corroborated by a Gartner report, which states that by 2013, more than 33 percent of BI functionality will be consumed by handheld devices, and the number of BI users will increase substantially and include a more mainstream audience. Mobile BI or BI-on-the-go will get more prominence as the availability and adoption of smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices continue to explode.

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Business analytics firm Mu Sigma however cautions that while mobile BI, as a technology, is already mainstream, it may take a couple of years before it fully matures. “It should be borne in mind that when we say ‘mobile,’ the focus is primarily on tablet devices, as opposed to smartphones. The tablet form of mobile devices is ideal from the point-of-view of BI consumption, exploration and collaboration. Smartphones, however, are not quite suited to display BI frontends, and less activity is seen in this space,” asserts Deepinder Singh Dhingra, Head, Innovation & Development, Mu Sigma.

Power of In-Memory With the emergence of solutions such as SAP HANA, inmemory analytics has again become an area of focus for vendors and enterprises. The need for real-time analysis of information is providing impetus for in-memory technologies. “The in-memory technologies are not restricted to BI and extend to the fundamental layer of database and data warehouses that are the causes of the latency in reporting. Since a majority of data storage, calculation, aggregation, etc, takes place on a disk, it substantially impacts end-user experience,” says Sharma of SAP. With the advent of 64-bit computing and the steep decline in prices, in-memory analytics is taking off. The traditional BI systems while all-encompassing had a few drawbacks such as poor flexibility, diminished scope of analysis and relatively slow response times. “In-memory analytics has advantages such as fast queries against Big Data, less need for aggregates and real-time end-user analysis. This would breach the boundaries to uncover the next big frontier,” says Sumanth Tarigopula, Director, Best Shore Application Services, HP India. Unanimously, speed is the foremost reason for in-memory BI to gain rapid adoption. “In-memory BI removes the biggest bottleneck of slow access of data. It moves the analysis power closer to the device used by BI user rather than on backend servers,” says Ashwini Kuber, Business Leader, eBiz Practice, KPIT Cummins.

Will BI appliances get accepted? With easy deployment options, appliancebased BI is also gaining popularity. Oracle, a major proponent of bundled appliances, recently made available its Big Data Appliance, which is designed to work alongside Oracle Database 11g, its Exadata appliance and its recent Exalytics appliance for BI applications. Other popular names include SAP HANA and IBM Netezza.

special focus clients are increasingly requesting for Appliances like IBM Netezza also offer “The arrival minimal need for IT support, which is users the choice to scale from 1 TB to of high-end one of the top factors driving interest in 1.5 petabytes and allow users to perform smartphones SaaS or cloud-based BI,” says Kuber of rapid analysis of large data volumes. on operating KPIT Cummins. Similarly, HP has collaborated with systems like iOS Industry experts however feel the Microsoft for the HP Business Decision self-service BI platform would need Appliance. As the BI solution is and Android will a complete business focus for it to be pre-tested, it takes away the pain of drive mobile BI fully functional. “All end-users need configuring and testing out the solution. utilization” to be educated on the functionalities However, there are others who of self-service BI platform. A believe appliance-based BI will Prashant Tewari common well-defined process needs to suffer network externalities and lack of Country Manger, Business Analytics, IBM India/South Asia be defined to support the end users,” standardization going forward. “The use says Tarigopula of HP India. may be limited due to specific use of the The range of options for deploying BI has helped in appliance, disparate data sources, lack of standardization extending BI even to smaller companies. BI software of data (clickstream, scanner or social networking) coming has historically been the domain of larger enterprises — from various systems. Context-based BI data gathering and mainly due to skill, time and cost required to implement, analysis would be another challenge for appliance-based but today it’s being used by businesses of all sizes. Salil BI. There will be low acceptance due to high cost of Godika, Chief Strategy & Marketing Officer, Happiest appliances as well,” says Kuber of KPIT Cummins. Minds Technologies says that the advent of cloud, appliance model, faster and more agile BI implementations are Cloud as a delivery platform leading to democratization of BI. “Mid-size and small-size BI delivered on the cloud is also gaining momemtum. “By organizations or business units of bigger companies are deploying BI on the cloud, organizations can analyze their making BI a cornerstone of their business strategy.” data and take informed decisions in a timely and costWhile the overall BI market is concentrated among effective manner. While cloud offers compelling benefits several large vendors, the market for self-service BI is in terms of high efficiency, high availability, elastic scalwide open. Self-service BI is increasingly being embraced ability and fast deployments, customer concerns around because it lowers dependence on IT by creating a security, compliance and quality of service need to be self-sufficient user base. addressed,” says Akash Sahni, Sales Director, EPM & BI Applications, Oracle India. That said, cloud-based BI is still in its infancy. “The The social side of BI cloud does not make a good platform for I/O intensive Social BI is gaining popularity as user shared information operations such as BI. For BI to work on the cloud, we available on the Internet is booming. Social BI tools need to have the ability to scale-out block computing,” allow users to edit and annotate content online, and cautions Sunny Neogi, Director, Aditi Technologies. seamlessly collaborate during data exploration and decision making. Many mainstream BI tools are adding social BI capabilities.For instance, Tibco Spotfire recently came Do It Yourself BI out with a platform that allowed its users to communicate There is a clear shift towards self-service BI as it offers and collaborate over its enterprise social messaging users both power and flexibility, reducing their platform called Tibbr (similar to Twitter). Similarly, dependence on IT. Self-service products allow users to SAS has a hosted solution called ‘SAS Social Media quickly respond to changes, and ask and answer their own Analytics,’ which enables organizations to act on questions, while avoiding long turnaround times typically intelligence collected from online conversations on experienced in IT operations. “Data can be explored in professional and consumer-generated media sites. different ways simply through a few clicks, rather than by Going forward, as data explodes at a faster rate, one requesting for updated queries or reports. The advent of can expect organizations to start looking at the cloud to user-friendly, in-memory tools requiring very minimal deintegrate multiple data sources, and velopment effort is making self-service “Advent of provide analytics on the fly. In line BI possible,” says Dhingra of Mu Sigma. with the current trends, one can also For the last decade, BI adoption rates cloud, appliance expect businesses to embrace emerging in companies were about 20-25 permodel, faster technologies such as in-memory to percent, which means that on an average and more form real-time analysis of information. only one-fifth employees had access to agile BI But the biggest and most significant BI tools and interfaces. In this context, implementations trend is the emergence of self-service self-service BI is seeing an increase in are leading to BI — a trend that will provide the adoption as companies are working to democratization of BI” power of analytics in the hands of extend BI across all employees. information workers and push enter“Plenty of recent BI product Salil Godika prise productivity to a new level. n upgrades are purely for the sake of Chief Strategy & Marketing Officer, self-service BI and improvements in Happiest Minds Technologies Courtsey: www.informationweek.in systems admin and management. BI

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cover story

Adoption of smarter education technologies is on the rise, and offers vast new opportunities to solutions focused partners n AMIT SINGH & abhijeet mukherjee

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cover story

he Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India has estimated that the country’s market for primary, secondary and tertiary education will be worth over $50 billion by 2015. The country has close to 13 lakh educational institutes. Of this, 12.8 lakh are schools, the rest colleges and universities. “The Indian higher education system is one of the largest in the world. Against only 20 universities and 500 colleges with 0.1 million students at the time of independence, we now have about 611 universities and university-level institutions and 31,324 colleges as of August 2011,” says Sanjeev Pathak, Country Head, Attach & Emerging Business, Personal Systems Group, HP India. The sheer size of the educational system in India presents a huge opportunity for IT. At the same time, educational institutions are increasingly looking at IT as an enabler to spread quality education. According to a report from Springboard Research, India’s education sector will step up its IT spending to $704 million in 2012. In addition, the education sector is delighted with the recent announcements in the union budget. An increase in allocation by 21.7 percent for the Right to Education, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, to `25,555 crore, and by 29 percent for Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan to `3,124 crore, reiterates the government’s commitment to education. As proposed, 6,000 schools will be set up at the block level as model schools in the 12th Five Year Plan. The government has articulated several initiatives to give a boost to public-private partnerships (PPPs) in this sector. PPP schemes for 2,500 schools and the credit guarantee fund for education loans to students is likely to pave the way for more private investment in higher education.

Growth factors Factors such as online learning, foreign collaboration, competition among institutes offering higher education, and the efforts of vendors and partners have been driving the demand for IT products and services in the sector. Many colleges and universities have invested in or plan to invest in online courses, virtual classrooms, and sector-specific software applications. WLAN, SAN and ERP are the three most popular IT solutions adopted by educational institutes in India. A lot of investments are happening in the education segment. “I think these investments will grow by 40-50 percent in the next 12 months. We have seen more than 30 private equity and venture capitalist funds active in this space. The investments are expected to increase from $100 million to $300 million plus in the next one year,”

forecasts Abhilesh Guleria, Country Head, Multimedia Product Group & IT Platform, NEC India.

Opportunities for partners One of the top attractions of the education sector for partners is the long opportunity window it assures. According to industry observers, even basic computerization has not reached several thousand schools in the country. Through the government’s ICT@Schools program, of 1.6 lakh secondary schools 50,000 are already computerized with 1.1 lakh still to be covered. But even after the target is achieved, 11.2 lakh schools will still lack computerization. Due to the composite nature of this sector, there is place for every type of channel partner. Due to the vast spread of schools and colleges in the country, IT vendors have to rely heavily on their partner networks to target the sector. “Barring large state-led education orders, no manufacturer can hope to go direct. Although several engineering colleges and business schools speak directly to vendors for bulk pricing and technology discussions, the order fulfillment is always done by channels,” says Karthik Padmanabhan, Country Manager, ISV & Developer Relations, IBM Software India/South Asia. “The higher and technical education stream is looking at packaged solutions, so there are opportunities in virtualization, security, bandwidth, automation, etc. As far as the K-12 and higher education addressable markets are concerned, they are expected to touch $600 million in 2012,” says Sitaram Venkat, Director, Enterprise Solutions Business, Dell India. Adds Tarun Malik, Director, Product Marketing, Microsoft India, “K-12 is looking at fast upgradation and adoption of infrastructure products like mail systems and networking. Higher education is looking at ERP, CRM and other productivity as well as infrastructure tools.” “A huge opportunity exists for partners under the government initiative to connect all universities through WAN under the National Mission on Education,” says KK Shetty, Director, Sales, TE Connectivity. “Partners can leverage their skills to design LANs and wireless networks, implement them, and handle service contracts.” Partners also confirm the traction in the sector. “About 30 percent of our total revenue comes from this sector. We have experienced growth of 15-20 percent YOY in our revenue from education,” informs Harinder Salwan, Director, Tricom Multimedia. “Only on the education front, we have grown 30 percent in FY2011-12 compared to the last fiscal,” says

“More than 30 PE and VC funds are active in the education space. The investments are expected to increase from $100 million to $300 million plus in the next one year”

“We train faculty and students of IITs and NTTs in LAN cabling and fiber installations. This gives us the opportunity to create a brand among future decision-makers”

Abhilesh Guleria, Country Head, Multimedia Product Group & IT Platform, NEC India

KK Shetty

Director, Sales, TE Connectivity

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cover story “Most opportunities are around end-to-end solutions. Partners should acquire capabilities to deliver IT-as-a-Solution, be it networking, servers, storage, etc”

“We are working on a project to digitze learning across 1,300 schools in Bihar. The total project would be worth `125 crore, we may earn upto `1 crore”

Sandeep Vahi

Ajay Maitin

CEO, Compton Computers

Sandeep Vahi, CEO, Compton Computers, a Delhi-based solutions provider. According to Vahi, “Since most of the opportunities in education demand end-to-end solutions and not box-selling, partners need to improve their capabilities to deliver IT-as-a-Solution, be it content, networking, servers, storage or data center.” While there is huge demand for PCs, servers and software, new opportunities exist in e-learning, digital classrooms, educational content, campus networking and connectivity.

Digital & virtual classrooms From blackboard teaching to technology-enhanced pictorial teaching, education has gone through major changes over the past decade. “Education today is drifting toward interactive methods of teaching. The market size for digital classrooms was estimated at `3,000 crore in 2011 and is expected to grow by 25-30 percent in 2012,” says Rajesh Sethia, Head, Marketing, Tata Interactive Services (TIS). According to Sethia, opportunities for partners exist in the digitization of classrooms through hardware deployment, software packaging as well as support services. TIS has so far executed about 300 digital classroom projects, including 40 for Campion School, Bhopal, and 40 for St Thomas School, New Delhi. “Another 400 projects are under execution, the majority of them in tier-3 and tier-4 cities,” informs Sethia. He says that schools in tier-3 and tier-4 cities are competing with their counterparts in tier-1 and metro cities, hence there is greater opportunity in those locations. TIS has executed projects in places like Tirunelveli (TN), Kurnool (AP), Latur (Maharashtra), Kulti (WB), Danapur (Bihar) and Sasaram (Bihar). Adds Anand Ekambaram, VP, HCL Learning, “We have Implemented the HCL Digischool solution in various places such as the Udgam School, Ahmedabad; Ebenezer Marcus School, Chennai; and Kamaraj Matriculation School, Chennai. Recently the solution has been deployed in St Paul’s School, Darjeeling.” “We are in talks with Guwahati University and Maharshi Dayanand University, Rohtak,” informs Vahi. “Each project would cost around `3.5 crore. The entire mechanism would have a small data center within the university; a video conferencing facility with cameras, microphones and speakers; and middleware to connect the setup to the students through thin clients.”

E-learning & educational content E-learning is the one of the buzzwords of the moment.

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CEO, Graphic Trades

“Since regular courses in India are getting very expensive and highly competitive, distance and online education is fast becoming an option for students,” says Pathak. Players like TIS, Campus Collab, Educomp, Everonn and NIIT have developed dedicated solutions targeted at educational institutions that aid learning or bring automation to administration. “There are close to 50 e-learning systems which are being licensed for `301,300 per student per month,” says Raj Kamal, Managing Partner, Interactive Learning Systems. “The opportunity lies in not just reselling but in deployment, training and support.” Several IT vendors have collaborated with content vendors to offer classroom solutions to educational institutes. “We have tied up with smart class content providers such as Pearson and Everonn, and are involved in several mid to large school projects across India,” informs Venkat. “We are working on a project where 1,300 schools across 38 districts of Bihar are going in for digital learning,” adds Ajay Maitin, CEO, Graphic Trades. “While the total project may be worth about `125 crore, our contribution in terms of providing large format displays may run into about `1 crore.”

Campus networking Campuses are opting for Internet connectivity, and this presents one of the juiciest opportunities for partners. Several partners have tied up with ISPs to provide lastmile connectivity. “We have tied up with Sify to provide broadband connectivity to organizations. There has been demand from schools and colleges which are looking at extending Internet services to campuses,” says Badri R, Manager, Business Development, Webkraft, a Sify partner. Many partners have implemented end-to-end networking solutions in various institutes and universities. Reveals Ajit Mital, MD, Acme Digitek Solutions, “We completed a networking project worth `2 crore for Purvanchal University, Jaunpur. Another project worth `2 crore was for Kumaon Engineering College, Dwarahat, Uttarakhand.” Wireless technology is emerging as a choice among many premier institutes and universities because it can easily provision or de-provision network resources depending on requirements. Since it eliminates the use of cables, it means less capex and fewer cables to throw away at the end of their lives. Informs Manjit Singh, MD, Ruckus Wireless India, “We have deployed solutions at VIT Vellore and VIT Chennai to support a campus-wide, high-speed Wi-Fi network for

cover story “Manufacturers can go direct only for large state-led orders. Engineering and business colleges do approach for bulk pricing, but the order is fulfilled by channels”

“Schools are thinking beyond basic Websites, and are using the Web to communicate key information to parents. The Web will be an important delivery tool”

K Padmanabhan, Country Manager,

Ganesh Mahabala

ISV & Developer Relations, IBM Software

Senior VP, Value Point

over 20,000 students.” “Most educational institutions are upgrading their infrastructure; this also means an opportunity for WAN connectivity,” says AL Srinath, CEO, Shell Networks. “Funds are being allocated through different schemes, and since decisions are decentralized the opportunities for partners are excellent.”

Cloud computing Institutions are now looking at the cloud model of infrastructure and software. Besides automating fees collection and the admission process, they are putting educational ERP and e-learning content on the cloud. “Although these are currently popular among the top 5-10 percent schools, they are expected to proliferate among other schools looking to automate their processes,” remarks Padmanabhan. “There is a high chance that institutions which are not adopting IT today and do not have major investments in data centers and server farms will directly move to the cloud model. There are ample opportunities in the education sector for this,” comments Pari Natarajan, CEO, Zinnov Management Consulting. “Both public and private institutions can use the cloud to deliver better services even as they work with fewer resources,” agrees Malik. “By sharing IT services in the cloud, educational institutions can outsource non-core services and better concentrate on offering students, teachers and non-teaching staff the essential tools to help them succeed.” Informs Salwan, “We implemented the MS Sharepoint application on the cloud for the Public Health Foundation of India, Delhi, on a pay-per-use model at `500 per user per month. We also implemented Adobe Connect in the Shailesh Mehta School of Management at IIT Mumbai; this enables lecturers to share lectures and educational content with students from any location. The annual subscription to the cloud-based solution costs `1,000 per user per year.”

Social networking Schools and colleges are investing in modern Web 2.0 applications and taking to social networking tools to connect with parents, students and teachers. According to Ekambaram, “Teachers and students are using social networks as a communication tool to extend classroom discussions; to post assignments, tests and quizzes; and to assist with homework outside of the classroom setting.” “Social media have emerged as a trend among

institutions to attract the most talented students as well as faculty. It helps them to create a social network and initiate interactions among students which goes up to the alumni level. Schools are readily going in for active Websites with facilities to connect with students and alumni and get feedback,” notes Padmanabhan. Venkat points out that “institutions are also encouraging BYOD (bring your own device) which encourages social networking; the research community is also involved in social networking wherein they form forums for discussions.” “Schools have started thinking beyond basic Websites, and are using the Web to communicate key information (such as the performance of students to parents). The Web will be a very important delivery tool,” says Ganesh Mahabala, Senior VP, Value Point.

Security While a number of educational institutions are already investing in IT infrastructure, security has also got their attention now. Apart from traditional UTM solutions, data loss prevention and content filtering are necessary for any educational institution connecting to the Internet and offering free broadband to students. “There has been a huge uptake of security software by this sector in the recent past. We work with companies such as Educomp as partners for large projects. On an average we sell 5,000 licenses per month in Pune only. We see a growth of 15-17 percent in the next five years,” discloses Shyamal Das Gupta, AGM, Government & Education Verticals, Quick Heal. “Recently we did a smart classroom project with Educomp for the Bihar State Electronics Development Corporation with a requirement for 2,000 licenses. We also did similar projects for BIT, Mesra (in Jharkhand) for 1,800-2,000 licenses.”

Software applications Schools and colleges are taking a keen interest in deploying licensed software. This includes operating systems, office applications, school management software, school ERP, databases and teaching aids. “These days we are seeing low levels of piracy in educational institutions. Vendors like Microsoft and Adobe offer discounts up to 70 percent on software solutions for the education sector. For students they offer up to 90 percent discount. This has led to the use of original software in most of the institutes,” says Salwan. Vendors are also trying to create low-entry barriers for educational institutions to adapt to their technologies and software. For example, IBM and Microsoft are working

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cover story “Vendors like Microsoft and Adobe offer discounts up to 70 percent on software solutions for educational institutions and up to 90 percent for students”

“We carry out market development initiatives such as Live@edu and the Microsoft Dreams Park, that catalyze the adoption of IT in schools and colleges”

Harinder Salwan

Tarun Malik

Director, Tricom Multimedia

with universities by offering them free software and hardware for courses in the curriculum that promote their technologies. “Microsoft carries out several market development initiatives such as Live@edu and the Microsoft Dreams Park that catalyze the adoption of IT in schools and colleges,” adds Malik. Opportunities in such cases come in deployment and training, for which partners are often roped in. “We have offered floating licenses of Modo 3D software at `10,000 per year to various institutes like IITs and the JJ College of Architecture, Mumbai,” says Salwan.

Client infrastructure Opportunities for partners have increased manifold in the education segment with better form-factors like tablets and thinner AIOs, apart from desktops and notebooks. The prices of the products have also reduced over the past two years. Apple has plans to launch its iBook2 and eBooks for students in India. Various schools (such as Mumbai’s Billabong High International School) are intending to introduce iBooks for their students from June. Sam Pitroda, advisor to the Prime Minister, has introduced the country’s first cloud-based tablet solution called E-tutor for students of Class 1-12. This would be available at `7,500, inclusive of content, from April 2012. “The spread of the tablet into schools is bound to be a big opportunity,” remarks Venkat. “At the moment it is popular only in the metros, but it will percolate to tier-2 and -3 cities in the next 2-3 years.”

Peripherals A number of specialized educational tools are being positioned for the segment including printers, projectors, digital whiteboards and markers. “The projector market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 50 percent for the next five years,” says Rajeev Singh, Country Manager, BenQ India. “We are seeing more traction from private players than government schools. Private players contribute 75 percent of our revenue from education, the rest comes from government institutions.” “Education plays a key role in Epson’s business, and the contribution from this vertical for key businesses like projectors is around 30 percent in FY2011-12. As institutions integrate ICT with education, the adoption levels have grown the most compared to other sectors,” says Samba Moorthy, Senior GM, Sales & Marketing, Epson India. BenQ has 15 short-throw projector SKUs meant for the education segment, four entry-level SVGAs, and more

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Director, Product Marketing, Microsoft India

than 20 SKUs in entry-level SGA projectors. The company has also launched its Smart Eco projectors, in association with Philips, targeted at the education segment.

Physical security & biometrics Schools and colleges are becoming sensitive about their physical security needs. They have started investing in CCTV, biometric authentication and other surveillance solutions. A few colleges have deployed biometric systems to automate the recording of staff attendance. Many partners, in addition to upfront sales, also offer pay-as-you-go models of such solutions to their education customers. Another solution is a vehicle tracking system which is increasingly being used to track school buses. “We have created a SaaS platform which schools can use to track buses and inform parents about the movement of the buses,” informs S Raghu, Director, Telematics4u, Bengaluru. In FY2011-12 Bangalore University spent `1.44 crore on an innovative program of smart cards for students through which they can get access to their mark sheets besides the library and other facilities.

Thin clients Many educational institutions are considering investment in thin clients, primarily for security reasons but also to reduce energy costs. Says Manish Sharma, VP, Ncomputing, “We see thin clients being deployed especially in cases where schools have challenges in terms of power, and also especially in B- and C-class cities and rural India.” HP is another vendor which has been betting on endto-end virtualization for the education market. Pathak explains. “The HP MultiSeat t150 thin client allows up to 10 students to simultaneously share a single host computer using a simple USB connection, hence schools can maximize the number of computer seats without increasing their technology budgets. No separate power is required, and all the users can be connected to the network through the host PC.”

Vendors’ strategies Vendors support channel partners through focused marketing exercises. Informs Moorthy of Epson, “We conduct special events targeting decision-makers in educational institutions. We participate in exhibitions targeting the segment and advertise in trade and industry-specific journals. We also do direct marketing campaigns to update decision-makers about new

cover story products and solutions.” Vendors like Cisco, IBM and TE Connectivity popularize their solutions by setting up laboratories for free in various premier institutions. “We have set up laboratories in universities and institutes like IITs and NITs, and also train faculty and students in LAN cabling and fiber installations. This gives us the opportunity to create a brand among future decisionmakers,” says Shetty. “Students recently started shying away from IT specialization. We realized that the major reason for this was that the existing curriculum was not in sync with the requirements of the industry. We therefore collaborated with various institutions to develop and update the curriculum to meet the requirements of the industry,” says Krishna Kant, Senior Program Manager, EMC Education Services. EMC has collaborated with the Rajiv Gandhi Proudyogiki Vishwavidyalaya to provide knowledge in the field of information storage and management, cloud infrastructure services, backup recovery systems, data science and big data analytics. According to Kant, “So far EMC has forged alliances with 150+ educational institutions in India and has trained over 65,000 students.” “Under its Live@edu program, Microsoft offers hosted email and calendaring with a 10 GB inbox and instant messaging via Outlook Live; the ability to access, share and collaborate via SkyDrive with 25 GB online storage

space; and the ability to create, view, edit and share MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote files online with SkyDrive,” informs Malik.

Challenges Some of the challenges partners speak of in this sector are pressures on margins and delayed payments. However, as the partners move deeper into the solutions and services game, margin pressure ceases to be an issue. Another roadblock in the sector is the haphazard order placement due to a long decision-making hierarchy and last-minute interventions by trustees or senior management in some cases. The best solution for this, according to seasoned channel players, is to improve relationships with all the people involved in the decisionmaking process and continue with rigorous follow-up. “The challenge in this segment is delays in approvals,” says Vahi. “Unless the project is decided by the cabinet or the HR ministry, getting local-level approvals in government universities is very difficult. Compared to this, in private institutions, the decisionmaking is quick. The lack of infrastructure is also an issue as most of the universities with e-classes plan to have examination centers at remote locations that do not have even electricity.” Adds Venkat, “One of the biggest challenges is that IT is not a priority on the agenda of most schools, and therefore we need to put in a lot of effort to create awareness and show them the benefits.” n

Clear Credible Competent Consistent Compassionate Communicative CRN Creative CRN – the 8th C of Channel Marketing www.crn.in

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role model When go-getters get together Suresh HR and K Subrahmanya founded Central Data Systems in 2003. They tell us why they are as excited about the business now as they were when they started n RAMDAS S

he promoters of the Bengaluru-based Central Data Systems (CDS), Suresh HR and K Subrahmanya (Subbu), feel that the past nine years have just flown by. The `45 crore systems integrator (SI) is entering its tenth year of operations, but the promoters are as excited about the business now as they were in 2003. Suresh and Subbu met while working for another Bengaluru-based SI in 1998. They executed large projects together for four years, and also shared dreams and aspirations. “We were both go-getters and formed a successful team when we worked together. Both of us wanted to turn entrepreneurs and decided to take the plunge after some deliberation,” recalls Suresh, now CEO & Director, CDS. “The name ‘CDS’ was chosen because from day one we had the vision of being the central part of our customers’ business and information systems,” explains Subbu, Director. The duo roped in an initial team of eight professionals and decided to focus on systems integration because the partners already knew the tricks of the trade. They signed on HP, Cisco and APC, and went after the IT/ITeS industry which was growing very quickly in Bengaluru at that time. The initial year was a success, and the company clocked around `4 crore in revenue. “In fact the first two years were very good. We clocked around `11 crore in 2005, and were growing fast,” notes Suresh. He adds, “Once you reach the `10 crore bracket you start seeing the challenge of further growing your business. It is then that you start struggling with the problems related to scaling up. Up to a certain size you can manage your business with your personal strengths, but beyond a critical mass you need strong systems, processes and planning. I believe that point starts at around `10 crore in an Indian SI business.” By 2006 the business had grown to nearly `15 crore, and there was no shortage of fresh business, but executing, financing and managing it became a challenge. “During the first three years we were very focused on new customer acquisitions and were eager to get more orders. However, a very huge chunk of the business was selling PC products to corporate customers,” recalls Subbu.

“2003 was the right time to start since we had seen the dark side of business. The timing was also perfect because customers were looking at investing in IT after several quarters of not making investments” 24

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Suresh HR

Margins on PC sales had dropped badly, and it was reflecting on their balance sheet. Though by 2007 CDS decided to focus on the bottom-line, the big realization happened only when the slowdown started in 2008. “It is easy to get trapped in the numbers game and be topline-driven,” Subbu points out. “While you always know the importance of the bottomline, it sometimes takes a recession to get your act right.” Till 2008 the business was almost 100 percent dependent on the IT/ITeS sector. The decision was then made to start attending to other verticals such as government, automobile, manufacturing and healthcare. “We therefore reduced our dependence on IT/ITeS to less than 60 percent,” explains Suresh.

Current business CDS’ turnover grew from around `30 crore in FY200910 to around `38 crore in FY2010-11. In the current fiscal the SI hopes to close at around `45 crore, with nearly 50 percent of it coming from virtualization and data center deals. Almost 40 percent of the business is generated by Cisco. “One of our key growth areas has been networking. We are a Cisco-certified partner in a number of areas including borderless networking. We recently signed up with Avaya for unified communication solutions, and have implemented around four projects in this area in the last 12 months,” says Subbu. Since power solutions were always a focus area for CDS from day one, getting into the data center business was a logical move. Some large projects implemented by the company in the past two years include the `4 crore

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and our experience taught us a data center deployment for Cibersites, MILESTONES lot. Empowering employees and and a similar project for the SLK ensuring that their aspirations are Group for `2.5 crore. CDS also set up met have been major reasons for the entire infrastructure comprising Started CDS and clocked our success. If your team does not clients, networking, server room, `4 crore in the first year share your passion you cannot storage, etc for the Bengaluru deliver,” Subbu says. CDS also operations of Brazilian conglomerate Created specialization in added tools and systems to increase Gerdau in a project worth `2 crore. power solutions its productivity. Another project for Intuit valued at Implementing an ERP was another `1.5 crore involved deploying Cisco’s Diversified to manufacturing, key step. Informs Suresh, “We first borderless networks. govt and healthcare verticals replaced Tally with Sage ERP, then Most customers have provided went in for SAP Business One. This repeat business in the past 18 months, Created a network integration has helped in faster responses and and this has fueled growth. Says practice focusing on advanced also helped us profile customers on Suresh, “Almost 15 percent of our technologies the basis of their credit standing. One growth can be attributed to the busiimportant result of this has been the ness from IBM (software), Fortinet and Ventured into data center reduction in accounts receivables Citrix. We are an IBM software partner from 60 days to 45-50 days.” while we are positioning Citrix for solutions VDI solutions. We have also impleBagged its largest data center Growth plans mented three unified security projects along with Fortinet.” At present CDS has three focus project worth `4 crore While 80 percent of the company’s areas—consulting, systems business is still driven from integration and support services. Implemented SAP B1 ERP to Bengaluru, new branches in Chennai Suresh explains: “We started improve internal processes and Hyderabad have also started consulting as a practice because contributing. “We added 12 new most customers now see us a trusted customers in Chennai last year,” Subbu reveals. advisor for their business and not just for IT.” The plans are to reach `100 crore turnover by FY201516 through both geographical expansion and new solution Best practices offerings. “Last year we started offering enterprise “Your bottom-line is dependent on your relationships software solutions from IBM and Oracle; these are helping with your customers and vendors. Beyond transactional us to acquire new customers and also generate additional margins, does the customer see value in you to pay extra services revenue,” Suresh says. The cloud is another area for value added services?” Subbu asks. the company is betting on. Similarly, he asserts, vendor relationships are also extremely important. “Vendors need partners who are committed, and loyalty pays in this industry. It is On a personal note extremely important to understand the vendor’s vision, Both the men are passionate about traveling. According and take the relationship beyond transaction.” to Subbu, “One of the perks of being in the tech business The partners believe that healthy margins can be is that it gives you a lot of opportunity to travel and managed by showing value to both customers and experience different cultures.” vendors. They say that adhering to the programs offered They are also passionate about adventure sports and by vendors does help a long way in ensuring better recreation. “The Western Ghats is a personal favorite margins. “One of the key things is to see that you attain of mine, and I spend time hiking in some of the not-soall the necessary vendor certifications. Even now I take well-known spots to refresh my mind, body and soul,” at least 4-5 exams a year. Apart from certifications, it is says Suresh. His role model is Narayana Murthy, the important as promoters to understand the intricacies of co-founder of Infosys. “What he has achieved without the technology you are selling,” advises Suresh. compromising on integrity is something we would love Both Suresh and Subbu say that employee to emulate.” management and empowerment is the key to growth. Subbu is inspired by Mukesh Ambani, Chairman, “We worked as employees for an SI for several years, Reliance Industries, and John Chambers, CEO, Cisco. “Ambani is so bullish about India that it inspires us to be in this business. I admire Chambers for the way he marketed technology and built a company that is so “Vendors need partners who are committed, admired in the industry.” and loyalty pays in this industry. It is Both the men say they have never thought about a business outside technology. “The tech industry is extremely important to understand the exciting with its dynamism, it is a place where change vendor’s vision, and take the relationship is the only constant. Then why change?” questions beyond transaction” Suresh. n 26

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01/04/2012 www.crn.in

tech focus

Dell’s giant leap into tiered storage Automated migration, data center bridging, now possible thanks to software updates in Dell’s EqualLogic PS6100 series n Edward J. Correia

f you are gearing up to pitch Dell’s trade-in program to enterprise customers looking to expand their iSCSI storage, you might be interested to know about some significant advances Dell has made recently in its EqualLogic storage systems. The company in February unveiled the EqualLogic PS6100, a series of 1 GB and 10 GB, 2U or 4U iSCSI arrays, some of which can mix solid-state with spinning hard drives and be configured in multiple storage tiers with automatic data migration. That is right; Dell now offers the ability to configure multi-tiered storage in a single array. The EqualLogic PS6100XS can accept up to seven 400 GB SSDs plus another 17 600 GB 10K RPM 6 GB/s SAS drives for a total storage capacity of nearly 13 TB, including 2.8 TB of very fast SSD storage. And this all takes place with 2.5 inch drives in a single 2U array. The predecessor to this model housed a maximum of 16 3.5 inch drives in a 3U chassis. But the magic really happens in the software. Dell’s migration algorithm constantly monitors data movement and performance across all arrays and migrates the most active data where there is the least latency, taking into account disk media, RAID level and other factors, the company said. This array-based intelligence enables the system as a whole to take on greater workloads, and is well suited to spiky workloads typical of VDI and online transaction processing environments. The 6100 series also now adds more resiliency and fault tolerance with vertical port sharing. “In the event of a cable failure or accidental disconnect, rather than losing the bandwidth because the cable is no longer there, the communications simply switches to the other port and cable,” explained Jeff Junker, Technical Marketing Consultant, Dell. The feature also can help with network clutter. “A cross point switch inside each controller allows each port to use the corresponding port on the redundant controller as a backup, so you can still get full bandwidth and fail-over with half the cables,” Junker said. “This is particularly useful in port constrained environments like remote offices where network ports are maxed or at a premium.” For testing, Dell sent the CRN Test Center a PS6110, the 10 GB version of the array populated with 24 900

GB 2.5 inch 10k RPM 6 GB/s SAS drives. This unit was equipped with redundant controllers, each with two 10 GB/s interfaces plus management and serial ports. To test its fault tolerance, we simply unplugged a data cable while testing the array’s performance. It never missed a beat. As for throughput performance, PS6110 was able to handle as much as IOmeter could throw at it. In other words, our test fixture was unable to reach the unit’s maximum performance potential. Dell also sent CRN a PS6100 4U array fully populated with 24 3.5-inch 3 TB 7200 RPM 6 GB/s SAS drives. By the way, Dell has discontinued use of SATA drives altogether. It will continue to supply replacement drives for all drive types currently in use in the field, but new deliveries will be provisioned only with 6 GB/s SAS drives. The PS6100 and its 1 GB/s interfaces also performed as expected, maxing out IOmeter and our text fixture with hardly a notice. It too was equipped with redundant controllers, each with four 1 GB/s Ethernet ports plus management and serial ports. When it updated its firmware to version 5.1 last fall, Dell added the ability to automatically perform load balancing and optimize latency between arrays. According to Junker, Dell implemented this in such a way that it maintains the same capacity balancing but swaps what it calls hot and cold pages. “It is always evaluating and performing active load balancing withing a pool, but if you had SSDs in an array, the hot pages would migrate to those.” Also new in 5.1 is data center bridging, which can allocate segments of available bandwidth for certain applications. “Let us say you’re a media company doing live broadcasts,” Junker said, for example. “You would not want a production person to be able to grab full bandwidth when rendering a video and put your live broadcast off the air.” The technology would permit, a percentage of the pipe to a particular class of application. DCB is intended to interoperate with converged environments such as those incorporating Fibre Channel and Ethernet. It works only in Dell’s 10 GB/s arrays and requires DCB-aware switches and NICs on all ends. Dell’s EqualLogic PS6100 arrays start at around $10,000, and they are recommended by the CRN Test Center. n

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tech focus

The fastest yet

The new Intel SSD 520 series nearly doubles the system performance n Edward J. Correia

aving tested some of the fastest computer systems available today, it takes a lot to impress us here in the CRN Test Center. But the out-of-the-box performance of Intel’s solid state drive 520 series, the company’s latest line of SATA III SSDs for consumers and the enterprise, was nothing short of amazing. The specifications read well enough. Intel rates the drive’s throughput at 550 Mbps for sequential reads and 520 Mbps for writes, and a transaction processing rate of up to 80,000 IOps. But we have seen published rates like that before, but in testing none came close. Until now. We connected the drive to one of the SATA III ports of our six core Intel Core i7-based test fixture, which consists of an Intel DX58SO Extreme motherboard with Core i7 980 X Extreme processor, 4 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 memory running 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate N. As does Intel itself, the CRN Test Center uses IOMeter to measure transaction processing and data throughput performance. We developed our own optimization methodology that gradually increases the number of pending IOs per target until performance of the unit under test no longer increases. Separately, Intel suggested a queue depth of 32, which we also found to be optimal. Out of the box, the 240 GB review unit delivered a sustained transfer rate for 32 KB sequential read operations of 512 Mbps, close to its theoretical maximum rate of 550 Mbps. For sequential writes of the same size blocks, the drives delivered a sustained rate of 289 Mbps. The drive also impressed in terms of transactional

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The 240 GB review unit delivered a sustained transfer rate for 32 KB sequential read operations of 512 Mbps, close to its theoretical maximum rate of 550 Mbps performance. With 512-byte blocks, the 520 series delivered a sustained read rate of 97.5K IOps, and a sustained write rate of 85K. In our tests, the drive fell short of its rated transaction rate for 4 KB random reads of 50K. The 520 series of 2.5 inch SSDs includes 60 GB ($140 list price), 120 GB ($229), 180 GB ($369), 240 GB (tested, $509) and 480 GB ($999) models, each with a five-year warranty. They are made by using Intel’s multi-level cell 25-nm NAND flash memory, data compression, AES 256-bit encryption and end-to-end data protection with CRC, parity and ECC checks from the host interface to the NAND and back. Intel claims that as a result of internal benchmark testing, it has determined that systems equipped with an Intel solid state drive series 520 drive can improve business user productivity through an increase in system responsiveness by as much as 78 percent, or as much as 88 percent for gamers. While the CRN Test Center did not seek to verify these claims, we did find the Intel’s drive to be the fastest we have ever tested, and we recommend it with confidence. n

channel buzz ASIRT: Driving channel development The newly formed channel association aims to foster partner collaboration and impart business-relevant training to resellers

n The founding members of Asirt

arch 16, 2012 witnessed the birth of a new channel association—Association of Systems Integrators and Retailers in Technology (ASIRT)—at an event in Mumbai. With the aim of fostering partner collaboration and imparting business-relevant education and training, ASIRT has been promoted by 17 systems integrators (SIs) and retailers in the city. Explaining the need for a new association, Kshitij Kotak, Member, Governing Board, ASIRT, said, “IT retailers, system builders and SIs have been the frontrunners of the IT industry as they are the ones who service end-customers across all verticals. They are the people

who influence customer buying and deliver the positive impact of IT to end-customers. However, this community is also the most disregarded, and faces numerous problems such as low margins, price wars and unsustainable financial health. It is therefore clear that the entire ecosystem needs to be improved to ensure better business conditions. The core objective of ASIRT is to help this community realize its potential in a sustainable and profitable way.” ASIRT’s main charter will be to foster collaboration and inculcate best business practices among members. “Most small and emerging SIs do not have access to management training. That is why our main

n Kshitij Kotak explaining the objective of forming ASIRT

n Intel’s B Suryanarayanan lighting the lamp

charter is to train and educate the channel community in best business practices. From April we will be conducting regular training programs. Membership and training program details are available on our website (asirt.in),” informed Kotak. To enable collaboration between

Founding members of ASIRT Arvind Singh, Maxnet Computers Atul Khatri, Kaytek Computer Services Bharat Jethani, Bell Computronics Chetan Shah, Xpress Computers Dhananjay Thakar, Hi Tech Computer Services Gaurang Bhatt, Asset Infotech Hiren Bafna, Digital Technologies Jagdip Singh, Thukral Systems Kartik Kaji, Ktronics Kshitij Kotak, Fortune Grecells Pankaj Shah, Technoplus Systems Pravin Rege, Durga Computers Ravi Bhavnani, Taurus Computers Sanket Kathrani, Shreeji Infocom Sunil Daultani, Classic Systems & Services Ulhas Kulkarni, IT Mart Vimesh Avlani, Graftronics

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channel buzz its members, the association will soon roll out an online partnering portal, ASIRTCONNECT. “Collaboration and partnering can happen in terms of sharing of skills, best practices and even business opportunities. The platform will provide avenues for partners to collaborate with each other to increase the addressable market opportunity,” said Chetan Shah, Member, Governing Board, ASIRT. The launch ceremony was attended by more than 100 partners and leading channel chiefs from various tech companies. B Suryanarayanan, Director, Sales & Marketing, Intel, and Arvind KS, VP, Marketing, Tally Solutions, along with the ASIRT founder members, lit the traditional lamp. The formation of ASIRT has been welcomed by various industry leaders. Said Vinay Shetty, Country Manager, Asus India, “This is a thoughtful initiative as the charter for the association is to help partners

n Chetan Shah sharing the training and collaboration plans

n Attendees listening attentively to the presentation

grow profitably which is the need of the hour for the IT industry.” Navin Pansari, Director, Rashi Peripherals, also welcomed ASIRT. “There has been a long-standing need to have such a platform to address the challenges faced by the channel and to provide a forum to augment the industry’s growth. With its focus on training members for building a profitable and sustainable IT business, ASIRT will enable a healthy marketplace.” Other associations have also welcomed the launch of ASIRT.

Harinder Salwan, Secretary General, ISODA, said, “I congratulate the founding team for the vision shown in taking up relevant issues of their community. We would be glad to work with ASIRT in areas where we have common interests.” ASIRT has already signed up 60 members and aims to sign up 200 by the end of June. “Initially our focus will be Mumbai and the adjoining cities. Once we successfully roll out our training and partnering initiatives in Mumbai we will expand to other regions,” informed Kotak. n

To feature your company’s events in CRN, send write-ups with photographs to editor@ubmindia.com

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new products Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook

World’s smallest 3G router

ell launched the XPS 13 Ultrabook which is 6-18mm thick and weighs 1.36 kg. It has a 34 cm HD WLED, 300nit (1366x768) 720p resolution display, which is protected by edge-to-edge Gorilla Glass, precision and crafted machined aluminum with a carbon fiber base.

The Ultrabook comes with 128 GB SSD or 256 GB SSD drive options with Intel Rapid Start Technology. It is powered by Intel Core i5 2467M and i7 2637M processors, has Intel HD 3000 video graphics, 4 GB DDR3 SDRAM 1333 MHz memory, battery life of up to 9 hours. The price of the product starts at `79,900 exclusive of taxes, comes with a 2-year warranty, and is available with Dell authorized partners.

dimax Technology launched a 3G compact wireless router called 3G-6200nL, which the company claims is the smallest in the world. The router supports 3G/3.5G connection speeds of upto 7.2 Mbps. It has a USB 2.0 port for UMTS/HSDPA/CDMA mobile Internet services, and supports print servers. It is compatible with IEEE 802.11n wireless standards, and also supports WEP, WPA, WPA2, DDNS, QoS, anti-DoS firewall, MAC/IP filtering, URL blocking and virtual servers. The product is priced at `3,999, comes with a 1-year warranty, and is available with Edimax authorized distributors.

WD TV Live media player

estern Digital (WD) launched its WD TV Live streaming Wi-Fi media player. It has a user interface that delivers movies, TV shows, music and Internet content from companies like Vimeo, Playjam, Deezer, TuneIn, SnagFlims, Comedy Time, Watch Mojo, YouTube, and Facebook to TV in Full-HD 1080p resolution. It comes with 802.11n wireless connectivity, allows viewing of personal media on home entertainment systems, and supports a wide range of file formats, digital camcorder, camera, network drive or any networked PC. The MSRP of the product is `7,900, comes with 1-year limited onsite warranty, and is available with WD authorized distributors.

Intex tablet

ntex Technologies launched its first tablet–the i-Tab which is based on Android 2.3. i-Tab is powered by a 1 GHz cortex A8 core processor and 512 MB DDR3 RAM. It has an 8 inch capacitive two point touch screen display and a 360 degree G-Sensor. It has a memory capacity of 8 GB which is expandable upto 32GB. The tablet has a battery back-up of 6 hours. It has a front camera and a 3.5mm audio jack out with built-in microphone. It comes with pre-loaded applications, Android Market and popular games. It weighs 475 grams and has in-built Wi-Fi connectivity. The product is available at a price of `11,900, comes with 2-year warranty, and is available through Intex authorized distributors.

The products featured here have not undergone any benchmarking or testing. The trailers contain information provided by vendors and distributors. To feature your company’s products in CRN, send write-ups with photos to editor@ubmindia.com

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shadow ram GET

HP PSG-IPG unification raises speculations

Personal

he channel has been rife with speculations ever since the HP printer and PC business integration was announced on March 21. Who will lead the unified division and which team will have an upper hand are the hot topics of discussion. Not just resellers but even HP employees are speculating. IPG team is clearly unhappy with the decision and the speculation is that Rajiv Srivastava owing to his seniority would head the unified division and that he would chose many of his managers to head key positions in the integrated business unit. A few are even speculating that the key objective behind merging the two divisions is that HP wants to sell or spin off the printer and PC business. The combined business would fetch higher valuations compared to selling them separately is their reasoning. Speculations will continue considering that this is the biggest event for channels as HP has the largest channel network. HP on its part will have to beef up its partner communication to ensure that the speculations are contained and that resellers are informed enough to provide clarity to their customers.n

“Want corruption free India” Unaez Quraishi is Director, Sales & Distribution, Systems Business Group, Asus India. He is responsible for driving the company’s notebook portfolio among channels and also manages key accounts in verticals like government, education and telecom.

Unaez Quraishi

If not in the IT industry: I would have been a pilot for the air force.

Biggest Passion: To perform or perish. Behind the wheels: Honda Accord. Gadgets I can’t live without: My Blackberry. Weekends are for: Sleeping, and lazing around. Favorite holiday destination: Any destination near the sea. Hate the most: Traveling to work in Mumbai traffic. Favorite Movie: MAD MAX. Favorite Stars: Harrison Ford and Sharon Stone. Role Model: Winston Churchill because of his no nonsense attitude in World War II. Ultimate ambition: Be persistent in perfection. Wildest thing I have ever done: Scuba diving in Sharm Al Sheikh, and dune bashing in Qatar. Thing I most want to do in life: Jumping off a cliff into the sea. If I became the PM: I would improve roads, hygiene, and remove corruption in India. Celebrity I would like to spend a day with: Angelina Jolie. One person I would like to meet and why: Warren Buffet, because he is the smartest man on the earth. Deepest and darkest fear: Recession in India. n

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— CRN Network

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