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CHANGE S EVE RYTHING

10/24/2013 6:11:16 PM

contents

November 01, 2013 l Volume 3 Issue 01

Cover Story Nobody is suggesting that distributors are going the way of dinosaurs, but they do need to adapt to the changing environment

22 Cover Design : Deepjyoti Bhowmik

NEWS Analyses

Channel Chief

Schneider ups SMB, mid-market focus

F1 Services seeks 50 percent growth

Canon spells out aggressive strategy

Sanovi aims to double its revenues

Editorial 12 Opinion

Feedback

Channel Buzz

New Products

Shadow Ram

Get Personal

Computer Reseller News

01/11/2013 www.crn.in

15 Special Focus Bottom of the pyramid Increased competition, branch expansion and regulatory compliance is driving investments in IT by cooperative banks and micro-finance companies

17 Role Model

Terry Wise Director, Worldwide Partner Ecosystem, AWS, speaks about his companyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s channel plans and future of cloud computing

In pursuit of peace and prosperity Though Parminder Singh Chawla, MD, MM9 Information, runs a profitable business he is aware that running a profitable business is not everything there is to life

Tech Focus 8 Reasons to upgrade to Windows 8.1 New customization capabilities enable it to behave in ways that best suit not only user preferences and habits but also the input devices they choose

starting line MUST

Schneider ups SMB, mid-market focus

F1 Services seeks 50 percent growth

n AMIT SINGH

Read

On the back of new service locations, increased team strength, a focus on new technologies and the addition of new customers, F1 Info Solutions & Services—formerly the services arm of Neoteric—is expecting topline growth of 50 percent in FY2013-14. The company was spun off in July 2012 as an independent entity when Shammi Moza, formerly Managing Director of RT Outsourcing, came on board as Director, F1. “By signing-up new OEMs, ODMs and corporate customers for FMS, and by launching new product categories, we are aiming to grab substantial marketshare in FY2013-14 out of an estimated addressable market of $500 million,” Moza said. At present F1 provides warranty support for 14 ODMs and OEMs such as Apple, Asus, BenQ, NEC, Iomega, Vivitek and Plustek; it also has six new tie-ups with Lenovo, Toshiba, Sony, Xolo, Hitachi and WD. The company’s FMS customers include names like Honeywell, HDFC and ICICI. F1 has also made inroads into automation and spares management. Shammi Moza The company has plans to increase its focus on converged technology solutions such as AV, unified communications and boardroom solutions. “Our roadmap for this year is to strengthen our backend support which includes service management software and supply chain processes,” informed Moza. To expand its reach further, F1 has added seven new service locations in FY2012-13 taking the total number to 112 through 40 branches and 82 ASPs. To support its expanding business the company is growing its workforce. Said Moza, “We added 100 people to our sales and service teams taking the total to 325. While we have developed a dedicated team of around 60 trained and certified engineers for warranty support, we have 15 engineers for FMS. We have also recently gone live with an ERP.” n — Abhijeet Mukherjee

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chneider IT Business is increasing its focus on the SMB and mid-market segments in India. The company is offering customized solutions for these segments and has identified 24 tier-2 and -3 cities to focus on. In addition, the company is increasing its focus on channel partners and aims to increase the contribution from channels from the current 60 percent to about 80 percent by 2014-end. The company is counting on its recently introduced InfraStruxure (ISX) for SMB IT, an integrated offering with UPS, racks and cooling units from Schneider Electric’s product brands APC, President and Uniflair. With this, Schneider is aiming to increase its SMB share in the current fiscal from the current 40 percent to about 50 percent. “We have taken a glocal approach with ISX for SMB IT, a customized India-for-India solution, and aim to tap the Indian server room market worth over `1,000 crore in 2013. ISX for SMB IT reduces TCO by up to 20 percent by raising efficiency,” said Jayabalan Velayudhan, Director, Strategy & Business Development, Schneider IT Business, India. He pointed out that with SMBs moving to cloud computing, virtualization and unified communications, and with the influx of challenging amounts of data, intelligent IT operations have become critical to business of any size. He said that with ISX for SMB IT partners can select from a wide range of pre-configured solutions or design a tailored combination. To increase its penetration among SMBs, Schneider is focusing on 24 tier-2 and -3 cities such as Madurai, Nasik, Raipur and Rajpur. “We expect these cities to grow immensely due to the ongoing industrialization and

“We have identified 24 cities across India whcih have a high concentration of SMBs, to drive our sales and partner GTM” Jayabalan Velayudhan, Director, Strategy & Business Development, Schneider IT Business India infrastructure growth happening among SMB and mid-market customers. We are mobilizing partners having customers in these locations to leverage on the growth cycle. We are also enabling partners to push solutions for nonIT applications in manufacturing and heavy engineering,” Velayudhan informed. The company is focusing on its Select and Premium partners, and will encourage Registered partners to target opportunities at SMBs. He explained, “Power solutions of 10-40 kVA usually go to SMBs which are largely catered to by our 3,000 Select and 70 Premium partners. Rather than looking for new partners we expect our Registered partners to graduate to upper levels.” The company is also conducting a 50-city roadshow to display its range of products. “We are highlighting the benefits of partnering with Schneider,” Velayudhan said. “Besides Indiafor-India solutions, partners can count on our 31 local manufacturing facilities across the country—of which 10 are for IT products—to effectively manage inventories. We have also launched a Service Bureau in Bengaluru to remotely manage UPSs, racks, cooling, etc in data centers and server rooms.” n

starting line MUST

Canon spells out aggressive strategy

Sanovi aims to double its revenues

n AMIT SINGH

Read

Sanovi Technologies, the disaster recovery (DR) and management software company, reached two milestones in FY2012-13—it signed up its 100th customer and it touched $10 million in annual revenue. The company is confident of doubling its turnover to $20 million in FY2013-14 on the back of some large deals in the BFSI, manufacturing, government, PSU, retail and telecom verticals. It signed on with UIDAI and the Department of Posts in the last six months, and has the Essar Group, Reliance, NTPC and ONGC as customers. Said Ashis Guha, President, Global Sales, Sanovi, “The demand for DR solutions arises from the strict compliance and regulatory requirements introduced by the watchdogs of different verticals. Secondly, recovery point objective and recovery time objective are now a reality, organizations such as retail, telecom and government are investing significantly in DR solutions.” Sanovi’s growth in the Indian market is aided by its national distributors, iValue InfoSolutions and RAH Infotech, and 50 tier-2 Ashis Guha partners. Informed Guha, “Only 5 percent of our business is direct; the rest is partner-led. 90 percent of our business comes by selling perpetual licenses; cloud and advisory services add to the rest.” Taking into account the growing need for DR solutions, in the last 3-6 months Sanovi has onboarded new partners such as Paladion Networks, Pace Network, Inspira Technologies, Omnitech InfoSolutions and Gemini Communications. Explained Guha, “We want to increase our presence and are looking for partners who have either domain expertise or a large customer base in a vertical.” Giving a glimpse into what a partner can make by way of specing, architecting and implementing a disaster recovery solution, Guha said that a partner can earn 20 percent additional margins on the normal margins he earns by way of selling perpetual licenses. n — Sonal Desai

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01/11/2013 www.crn.in

anon India is counting heavily on its Office Imaging Solutions (OIS) division for its digitization business, A3 MFPs and managed document services (MDS). The company is expecting overall revenue of `1,850 crore in 2013 of which OIS is expected to contribute more than `450 crore. “OIS is a high-growth business for us, and is compensating for the B2C business which is seeing a decline of 15 percent. Growth in the OIS business is coming from the customer’s need for the optimization of imaging infrastructure, the digitization of documents, and MDS,” explained Alok Bharadwaj, Executive Vice President, Canon India. The vendor has identified the digitization business, which includes scanners and services, as a high-potential area due to the immense latent opportunities. In 2013 it is targeting `100 crore from scanners and `10 crore from digitization services. “India still prints 150 billion documents a year against just 75 billion scans, hence there is tremendous opportunity for scanners and digitization services,” he said. Canon is witnessing growing demand from the government to digitize its land and revenue records. It recently bagged an 18,000-scanner deal from the MP government for digitization at the panchayat level. According to Bharadwaj, besides the government and PSU verticals, opportunities are also there in the enterprise, SMB, BFSI, education and home segments. As per IDC’s June 2013 report, Canon was the market leader in the A3 MFP segment with a 25.9 percent marketshare which it wants to increase to 29 percent by 2015-end. While about 50 percent of the OIS division’s revenue comes from the government

“India still prints 150 b documents a year against 75 billion scans; the opportunity for scanners and digitization services is tremendous” Alok Bharadwaj

Executive Vice President Canon India

and PSU segments, the division is now more focused on SMBs and is expanding its presence in upcountry markets. Canon has 165 partners, of whom 110 are active with a minimum billing of `5 lakh per month. It has plans to grow this active partner base to 200 by 2014-end. In addition, it will expand its service presence from the current 546 locations to 700 by that date. Canon’s intent is to grow its partners and help them sell more by offering sales training programs, sharing marketing expenses, and helping them to retain employees by providing incentives targeted at their salespersons. Added Bharadwaj, “With the Compulsory Registration Order for BIS certification, the genuine A3 MFP market of 1 lakh units per annum will grow substantially as the equally large gray market will be curbed.” On the MDS front Canon is targeting `100 crore in 2013. It presently has 90 customers of which 15 are partner-led. “We have got 20 partners for MDS and want to add more serviceoriented partners. Overall, we are expecting to bag a total of 125 MDS customers by 2013-end,” said Bharadwaj. n

edit opinion Volume 3, Issue 01

Reinventing distribution dhaval valia

he IT ecosystem is undergoing a transformation and this means the business models of the distribution channels will change. The concept of pay-as-you-go is gaining ground, which implies that revenue models will also change in a major way. The component of hardware and software sales will reduce, and a sizeable chunk of IT will be delivered as-a-service. BYOD and the consumerization of IT are allowing employees to bring their own devices and download their own software from the company’s self-service portal. On the consumer side the shrinking assembled PC ecosystem, the decline in the market for traditional PC clients, the proliferation of alternate devices and the growing online sales have many distributors wary of what the future holds. In this ongoing transformation will the present core competencies of IT distribution—logistics, market outreach, credit financing, warehousing, channel development and enablement—be as relevant as they are today? Or will the distributor need to build new competencies? In my view the role of distributors will become even more critical for the success of these new technologies and concepts. What makes cloud computing potent is the fact that it makes IT affordable to the masses. But to reach the masses distribution outreach will be critical. This would actually require more effort from distributors for partner development and enablement so that the benefits of these mass technologies are leveraged by customers, small and large, in the remotest geographies. At the same time, distributors will need to add new competencies such as creating virtual storefronts for resellers to buy from, provisioning and billing of white-label cloud services, and extending their capabilities to provide a technical help-desk for the cloud to customers and partners alike. Over the past few decades we have seen several technology disruptions and at every such occurrence there have been predictions of disintermediation. In every one of the instances the distributors have disproven the pundits who predicted doom for them. For example, in 2000, when the dot-com boom was at its peak and new concepts such as e-commerce and reverse auctions were much touted, analysts had predicted disintermediation of the channels. It didn’t happen, and instead, the role of the market and the distributor only expanded. I believe that IT distributors will have to play a greater role in this disruption cycle. However, to succeed, they will need to change their core competencies. n E-mail CRN Executive Editor Dhaval Valia at dhaval.valia@ubm.com 12

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

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Joji George Kailash Pandurang Shirodkar Anees Ahmed Dhaval Valia Ramdas S Sonal Desai Amit Singh (Delhi) Abhijeet Mukherjee (Mumbai) Deepjyoti Bhowmik Yogesh Naik Shailesh Vaidya Jinal Chheda, Sameer Surve Samta Datta Viraj Mehta Nilesh Mungekar Nitin Lahare Aditi Kanade Yogesh Mudras Satyendra Mehra Jagruti Kudalkar

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edit opinion Innovation at its best Srikanth RP

espite being a leader in IT services and being called the IT outsourcing hub of the world, many analysts still believe that India is lacking behind in creating a product company in the league of a Google or Microsoft. The lack of a strong domestic IT market was said to be one of the reasons why India could never produce a disruptive technology company that completely altered or shaped markets. While this scenario is changing gradually—partly led by smart technology startups that are leveraging technologies such as cloud computing to make the leap into the big league— India is also witnessing deployment of smart technologies to transform the way companies deliver service. A case in point is Delhi Waste Management, a firm that is entrusted with collecting waste. The firm has devised a technology solution that leverages RFID tags and GPS technologies to automate waste management. The firm has installed RFID tags on each city bin to get details on lifting location and time. It has also provided an RFID reader basedwrist watch to volunteers who are entrusted with the task of collecting waste. Houses are also tagged with RFID tags. Whenever a volunteer visits a house, he matches his RFID watch in front of the RFID tag of the house. This information is transmitted to a central server which enables the corporation to track waste collection in real time. The firm has totally transformed the way waste is collected and highlights how technology can improve efficiencies. Delhi Waste Management, is just one example, from the list of innovative projects we received for EDGE, InformationWeek’s annual initiative to identify, recognize and honor end-user companies in India that have demonstrated the best use of technology to solve a business problem and improve business competitiveness. At EDGE, we received several interesting case studies—some firms show how to handle complex and huge projects, some show huge process innovation, while others demonstrate how business models can be changed entirely using technology. ICICI Bank, for example, is using tablets to cut down the time taken for opening an account. The Maharashtra Government is using cloud computing to deliver virtual servers at just `4,000 a month to various government departments using a chargeback model. Godrej Properties is using IT to deliver products with an objective to deliver a ‘zero defect’ product to customers. At InformationWeek, it is a privilege to honor some of the most interesting and innovative technology deployments in the IT industry. We do hope that that EDGE inspires the IT ecosystem to attain greater heights of business technology excellence. I invite CRN readers to read the innovative projects implemented by Indian enterprises on www.informationweek.in. n Srikanth RP is the Editor of InformationWeek. Email him at srikanth.rp@ubm.com

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Surface Pro 2 or iPad 4? I just finished reading the article on comparison between Microsoft’s Surface Pro 2 and Apple’s iPad 4, in the CRN October 15 issue. In my opinion, the comparison should have been with Surface 2 and not with Surface Pro 2. The Pro version is a different tablet altogether meant for users who want their Photoshop, and other Enterprise Class apps, more aimed at ultrabook and tablet replacement. It’s the Surface 2 which is in direct competition with iPads and Galaxy Notes of the world. Suresh Ramani CEO, TechGyan

10 hot opportunities to bet on Kudos to team CRN for writing a great story on

the bright opportunities in newer technologies for channel partners. While many partners have developed niche solutions and are doing well, there are many more who are at the cusp, are fumbling and want somebody to handhold them. I believe that with this cover story, CRN has done just that. The base of the technology remains the same, but the developments on top make it an interesting and challenging environment for solution providers. Reading about the trends and the perspectives of both partners and OEMs provides us insight as to how a tier-2 partner can leverage opportunities and make money. Truly, a fulfilling read! Vikas Jadhav Ahmednagar Via email

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 & 2

helpdesk@digisol.com

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4 www.hp.com

hp.com/in/inkadvantage

Kodak

5 www.kodak.com

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Canon

1800 180 3366

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Epson

9 www.epson.co.in

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Supertron

11 www.supertronindia.com

suptendu@supertronindia.com

IFSEC

13 www.ifsecsouthindia.com

pankaj.jain@ubm.com

Interop

20 & 21

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salil.warior@ubm.com

Adata

36 www.adata-group.com

adata_in@adata-group.com

TP-Link

37 www.tp-link.in

sales.in@tp-link.com

Biz

38 www.indiaantivirus.com

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IBM

39 www.ibm.com

ibm.com/cloud/in

Kaspersky

40 www.kaspersky.co.in

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channel chief “India is a large opportunity for AWS” Amazon Web Services has evolved into an influential player in cloud computing space. Terry Wise, Director, Worldwide Partner Ecosystem, AWS, spoke to Ramdas S about the company’s channel plans and future of cloud computing The AWS business model is almost alien to Indian channel partners. How do you plan to woo them to adapt to your business model? Across the world, including India, we have seen that cloud computing has been disruptive to the business practices followed by traditional IT channels. However, over the past 3-4 years, we have also managed to build a channel ecosystem which is thriving based on the same disruption. It’s not likely to be different in India. In fact, we consider the Indian market as a very large opportunity. We already have 100+ partners engaging with us in the country. Many of them have adapted to the realities around the cloud and infrastructure-as-a-service, and are getting their customers on board. We have been constantly educating our partners about opportunities and how they can build a business model that’s more profitable than the existing transactional business models. Opportunities in the public cloud for channels is all about building value-added platforms, services, consulting and solutions.

Partners tell us that AWS does not offer any margins on its existing list prices for various cloud services. So how does a partner make money with you? We do not offer transactional discounts on the various AWS products. We do not work the way hardware is sold traditionally. In a pay-as-you-go model the pricing is dynamic; we expect partners to offer value-added services or build business models on top of the AWS infrastructure, and then offer them to the customer. Customers across the world from small businesses to large enterprises are clear that they need partners who can add value. Over the past few years we have seen several hundred partners building services and products on top of different AWS platforms, and this is the future. We also have partners buying various infrastructure pieces from AWS and then putting together a platform with a price model that’s comfortable for their customers. This is the freedom and flexibility offered by AWS.

“In the past three years, we have managed to build a channel ecosystem thriving on cloud computing. We are engaging with more than a 100 partners in India”

At the same time, we do offer rebates and incentives for partners who are signing on customers. While the precise incentives will depend on the volumes, I can assure you that the rebates and incentives will match those offered by the best-of-breed hardware vendors.

Does this mean there’s no role for a traditional corporate reseller at AWS? Can you provide details about your partner programs? We have broadly two sets of partner relationships. The AWS Technology Partner program is targeted at ISVs. This includes names such as Red Hat, Novell, Microsoft and SAP, as well as hundreds of smaller software and platform makers. In India an example could be Ramco, which migrated its ERP platform to the AWS cloud. APN Consulting Partners are professional services firms which help customers of all sizes to design, architect, migrate and build new applications on AWS. Consulting Partners include SIs, strategic consultancies, resellers, agencies and VARs. We have thousands of such partners globally, and we want more Indian SIs to sign up. While cloud computing offers the customer a number of advantages such as doing away with upfront investments in infrastructure, even after opting for a pay-as-you-go model and ceasing to worry about core infrastructure downtimes the customer still requires support. He will need a partner who could offer just that. While I will not say that traditional VARs have no role, their role will be very diminished in favor of partners who can consult, design, develop and support.

Some partners say that $2,000 as a partner sign-up fee is too steep. On the contrary I believe it’s just a nominal investment which you need to make to come onboard with us and be committed to building a successful cloud practice. The sign-up fee collected can be completely redeemed against AWS credits for training, developer support and other support which anyway the partner would require. So partners pay virtually nothing.

Following the recent NSA scandal, a lot of privacy and security advocates are advising against hosting data with US-based companies. How are you ensuring data security for customers? First of all, Amazon does not participate in any of the US

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01/11/2013

www.crn.in

channel chief National Security Agency-funded surveillance programs including Prism. As a corporate entity we have been fiercely safeguarding our users’ data and privacy. If a customer is concerned about his data, through simple APIs he can encrypt it. In the AWS model the customer controls the encryption keys. We don’t have access to any of the keys, and as long as they remain with the customer the customer’s data is safe.

The debate around public vs private vs hybrid clouds has been on for ages. Where do you think the market will move in the next few years? I don’t see the debate going away anytime soon. You need to respect the fact that there are reasons for every customer to choose one or more of these computing models. We are seeing increasing acceptance of the public cloud, with many segments such as government and large enterprises committing more investments to AWS this year. Today we have enterprises such as Shell, Unilever and Nasdaq hosting their critical applications on AWS. With SAP and Oracle offering their applications off the AWS cloud, we have more enterprise customers opting for the public cloud. With the public cloud you always get the benefit of using the most up-to-date technology at the most optimized price without the fear of being obsoleted. Over the past three years we have slashed our pricing almost 30 times, so customers get the latest and most updated prices for their daily usage of infrastructure. You can sign-off any day and move on to whatever you choose to without being concerned about investments. At the same time, for mostly policy reasons, certain types of workloads will run off private clouds. What we are trying to offer is easy inter-operability so that these customers can move these workloads on demand to the AWS platform, and we work with all the major private cloud software vendors to ensure this. Over a period of time we see the majority of customers running their infrastructure on public clouds, or investing in hybrid

“Enterprises like Shell, Unilever, Nasdaq are hosting critical apps on AWS. With SAP and Oracle offering apps off AWS cloud, more enterprises are opting for public cloud” clouds to take advantage of both models.

There’s a lot of hype around OpenStack. OpenStack is a very interesting development which we are observing closely. As more adoption happens on OpenStack—and depending on customer demand—we will make specific announcements.

Latency is a major concern for Indian customers. The nearest AWS data center is in Singapore. When would you set up a data center in India? India is a very important market. We have already set up our Content Delivery Network hosting centers (Amazon CloudFront) in Mumbai and Chennai in July 2013. There’s no information to share on an India-based AWS data center as of today.

You have been targeting start-ups with AWS. What is the strategy? Most start-ups either do not want to or do not possess enough resources to invest in infrastructure, and this is the reason why many of them prefer public clouds. Amazon has been working with thousands of start-ups from their initial days and several successful of them have become multi-million dollar enterprises, Netflix being one example. A month back we announced Amazon Activate, a program targeted at start-ups. Apart from free usage tiers for a year, we provide several other benefits such as Webbased training, a month of developer-level support, and several other AWS credits. The response to the program has been phenomenal. n

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

www.crn.in 16

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special focus bottom of the pyramid Increased competition, need for branch expansion and regulatory compliance is driving significant investments in IT by cooperative banks and micro-finance companies n amit singh

opportunity for IT solution providers is huge,” says Arup ccording to Gartner, the Indian BFSI segment will Roy, Research Director, Gartner India. spend `46,200 crore on IT products and services “According to one estimate, cooperative banks will in 2014, an increase of nearly 9.8 percent over the spend about `5,000 crore on IT over the next three years. 2013 figure of `42,100 crore. With increasing competition from nationalized banks Industry experts say a sizeable share of this spending offering sophisticated facilities, cooperative banks are will be by cooperative banks and micro-finance units. under pressure to invest in IT to retain customers,” There are more than 2,000 cooperative banks which have explains Rakesh Sinha, Director, Banking & Capital between them over 22,000 branches. The micro-finance Markets, Microsoft. sector is estimated to have 500,000 Adds Rajat Varma, AVP, Strategic units, almost 70 percent of which are Sector snapshot Sales & Alliances, AGC Networks, not computerized. According to IDC, Industry data: 40,000 scheduled rural “Gone are the days when cooperative this segment will grow at 35 percent bank branches; 22,000 cooperative bank banks and micro-finance units used till 2015. branches; 500,000 micro-finance units to rely on personal relationships to IT spending in this segment is Demographics: Pan-India serve their customers. Today, with driven by the RBI guidelines, the their clients moving to multiple expansion of the banks’ networks, and IT spend: 0.5-1.5 percent of annual locations for work and demanding increasing competition. “Compared revenue banking services at multiple to the nationalized banks which Opportunities: Core banking, locations, cooperative banks need spend 3-4 percent of their revenue on allied software, smart-cards, cloud to expand their presence through IT, cooperative banks spend 0.5-1.5 computing, CRM, surveillance branches and ATMs.” percent. Looking at the numbers and Source: Eprobe Research, RBI While the overall Indian BFSI the large gap in IT infrastructure, the

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special focus universe is expanding, there will also be expansion in cooperative banks and micro-finance units with spending on core banking systems (CBSs), allied applications, cloud computing, smart-cards and micro-ATMs.

Core banking RBI has mandated that all urban cooperative banks (UCBs) need to implement a CBS in all their branches before December 31, 2013, and that failure to do so could result in a denial of facilities such as expansion of branches or areas of operation. “In the last five years CBS adoption in cooperative banks has increased but is still far from what it needs to be. With the RBI mandate, there will be significant increase in adoption,” says Pratip Banerji, Director, Sales, BFSI, CA Technologies. There are around 1,620 UCBs in India; this represents a huge opportunity for partners catering to the segment. The implementation of CBS will essentially require the UCBs to establish a centralized data center and connectivity among all their branches. “Most of the IT spending in this segment will be driven by CBS implementation,” says Neel Shah, Director, Insight Business Machine, Mumbai. “While many of the small banks started by hosting their applications at the shared data centers of large cooperative banks, many are now gradually moving toward on-premise CBS infrastructure. While the small cooperative banks with 5-20 branches are spending `50 lakh-`80 lakh on IT infra, large banks with more than 50 branches spend over `1.5 crore.” Insight has executed five on-premise CBS projects including one for the Hindustan Cooperative Bank.

Allied applications With RBI getting strict about money laundering, and with the need to analyze risks before providing loans and to improve overall management, cooperative banks are looking for standardized applications to handle numerous operations besides core banking. “Only a few cooperative banks have treasury packages,” notes Sinha. “Moreover, packages for risk management for home and corporate loans, as well as mechanisms to track the origin of money are missing. Existing manual systems are prone to errors, hence there’s the opportunity for IT partners to collaborate with ISVs to offer end-to-end solutions around functions such as asset liability, anti-laundering, risk management and loan origination system.” Besides, he says that there are several backend processes like wealth management, business audit, and

“While large banks spend 3-4 percent of revenues on IT, cooperative banks spend 0.51.5 percent. Owing to their vast numbers and a large gap in IT infra, this opportunity is huge” Arup Roy, Research Director, Gartner India

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Focusing on a niche pays off

hennai-based Quadsel Systems entered the cooperative banks segment in 2011. “We realized there were great opportunities in this segment because most cooperative banks did not have any core banking system (CBS) and they were grappling with heavy competition from large nationalized and private banks,” explains Girish Madhavan, MD, Quadsel. The company partnered with Polaris and offered data center infrastructure for CBS implementation. However, customer acquisition was not easy. Recalls Madhavan, “At the time of our entering the partnership with Polaris its CBS was on the Windows platform which was expensive; this didn’t go down well with the pricesensitive cooperative banks. However, within eight months Polaris migrated to the Linux platform which brought the cost down by `10 lakh-`15 lakh.” Thanks to the cost reduction, in the last fiscal Quadsel bagged seven large projects from cooperative banks for CBS Girish Madhavan implementation. “Average deals for data centers for cooperative banks range from `50 lakh to `1 crore. Customers are also asking for virtualization for an optimized approach,” continues Madhavan. Cooperative banks contributed `4.5 crore to Quadsel’s revenue in the last fiscal; the company expects 100 percent growth in its revenue from this segment in the current fiscal. “As the RBI deadline to implement CBS in all the branches of UCBs nears, these banks are readily investing in IT infrastructure,” Madhavan says. Quadsel expects additional revenue with cooperative banks expanding their ATM networks. It has partnered with Diebold to win ATM installation projects and with Sharon Solutions for solutions around smart-cards. n

Average deals for data centers for cooperative banks range from `50 lakh to `1 crore. Customers are also asking for virtualization for an optimized approach” planning and resource management for which banks are looking for a hosted model. “Although the opportunity in allied and backend applications is stupendous, there is a need to spend a good amount of time educating customers because many of them are still working on Windows 98 and Server 2000 with banking software from local vendors,” comments Manish Tandon, MD, Questa Software, Mumbai. “Their purchasing behavior is driven by their peer bankers as well as consultants who cater to hundreds of banks. We must tap these consultants to target cooperative banks.” Questa started focusing on this segment in April 2013 and already has 12 cooperative banks as customers.

special focus “Cooperative banks will spend `5,000 crore on IT. With increased competition from large banks, they are under pressure to invest in IT to retain customers”

“While CBS adoption in smaller banks has increased, it is far from what is needed. With the RBI mandate, there will be significant increase in adoption”

Rakesh Sinha

Pratip Banerji

Director, Banking & Capital Markets, Microsoft

Director, Sales, BFSI, CA Technologies

With the RBI mandate to safeguard customer data, cooperative banks are also realizing the benefits of enterprise security. Says Mohit Puri, Country Manager, WatchGuard, India & Saarc, “Until now this segment was relying on endpoint security but is now opting for UTMs as well. The need is to educate them about the prevailing threats and the benefits of UTMs.” WatchGuard along with its partner, TM Systems of Ahmedabad, recently bagged a deal for 700 UTM appliances from a large cooperative bank with branches across Gujarat and Rajasthan.

Cloud computing Vendors and partners believe that the cloud is the future for cooperative banks and micro-finance units. “I believe there will be rapid adoption of not only cloud-based CBS but also backend applications. In fact, banks like Kurmanchal Nagar Sahkari Bank and Shamrao Vithal Cooperative Bank are using Infrasoft CBS on an IBM cloud,” informs Roy. Adds Shah of Insight, “CBS on the cloud is proliferating in a big way among small and large cooperative banks. Micro-finance units are also using software solutions provided by parent banks on the cloud model. Cloud CBS from C-edge, a collaboration between TCS and SBI, is enabling small banks to save upfront expenses on on-premise infrastructure and instead pay on a monthly basis. In this set-up IT partners provide hardware and antivirus licenses as well as get contracts for maintenance.” In one of the biggest initiatives, Nabard, in collaboration with TCS and Wipro, is bringing 205 state and central cooperative banks with 7,091 branches on cloud-based CBS. Meanwhile, “The Federation of Cooperative Banks in Gujarat has come together and signed up with application software solution providers such as TCS, CA, MindTree and HCL to provide specific solutions over the community cloud,” informs Apurva Dave, CEO, Innova Systems, Ahmedabad. Similarly, cooperative banks in Kerala are contemplating the implementation of core banking solutions off the cloud.

Smart-cards, micro-ATMs Once core banking is in place, cooperative banks will increase their focus on services such as debit cards, ATMs and online transactions. Nabard is promoting core banking to bring all cooperative bank accounts on a common platform supported by the National Payment Corporation of India with the RuPay technology which offers flexibility

and nationwide accessibility to account holders while withdrawing money or making payments using debit cards. “The next big opportunity is around smart-cards,” forecasts Sinha of Microsoft. “The market for cooperative and rural banks is so broad and scattered that large players may not be interested, hence there is opportunity for small players to collaborate for smart-cards.” A few of the large cooperative banks are offering micro-ATMs in rural areas. Banks such as Hindustan Cooperative Bank are offering mobile ATMs in remote areas. “In most cases, small merchants with business places act as some kind of ATM centers with smartcard readers. The customer comes in with a smart-card, swipes it, and deposits or withdraws money. The total cost of implementation is typically less than `15,000 per center, while the smart-card costs `100-`200,” explains Mahendra Verman, Director of the Mumbai-based SilverByte Solutions. The Center for Scientific Research is known to be testing the waters in rural UP and Rajasthan for mobile micro-finance solutions which use tablets with biometric software for authentication. Mobile-based technologies are likely to lead the way in cooperative banks and micro-finance units. “Mobility will be the torch-bearer for banking,” states Arindam Mukherjee, Manager, Regional Sales, BFSI, Cisco India & Saarc. “Looking at the lower literacy rate in rural areas, mobile applications are being launched in local languages.”

Conclusion IT partners are identifying cooperative banks and microfinance units as high-growth segments and see immense scope for IT adoption. Says Mukherjee, “While the current phase is around core banking, the next phase will be driven by DR, CRM and BI solutions.” “There is potential for cross-selling among all categories of banks in India. Given that cross-selling is highly cost-effective compared to all other means of customer acquisition, banks need to adopt CRM strategies aggressively in pursuit of cost–effective business models,” says Banerji of CA Technologies. Sinha sees increasing adoption of content management and display solutions to disseminate messages to customers visiting branches. “Content management, display solutions and video conferencing will be big opportunities in the next 18-20 months. At least 30 percent of the cooperative and rural banks will be spending on them.” n

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cover story

Nobody is suggesting that distributors are going the way of dinosaurs, but they do need to adapt to the changing environment n RAMDAS S & SONAL DESAI

ver the past three years a number of disruptive technologies and trends have emerged on the IT landscape and are threatening the twodecade-old IT channel model. Cloud computing, enterprise mobility, the consumerization of IT, bring your own device (BYOD) and a shift toward the opex modelâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;instead of outright purchaseâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;are affecting the business of IT distributors of all shapes and sizes. The PC market has seen multiple quarters of negative growth globally while tablets and smartphones have thrived. Many small distributors focused on components and system builder channels have also reported negative growth.

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These trends have come out of the hype circle, impacted the vendor-distribution-partner relationship, and are forcing each of these stakeholders to transform to meet newer challenges.

Impact of the cloud According to Gartner, infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), including cloud compute, storage and print services, is expected to grow by 47 percent in 2013 to $9 billion. The researcher also predicts that the IaaS market will grow at 28 percent CAGR over the next three years. Meanwhile, the software-as-a-service (SaaS) market, estimated at around $16.4 billion in 2012, is expected to top $21 billion in 2013.

cover story “In a pay-as-you-go model, a distributor’s role is minimal. The payments are monthly and bill values smaller. The attractions of credit, finance, etc are not there”

shifts in distribution

Rahul Meher

CEO, Leon Computers

“The cloud is real,” declares Rahul Meher, CEO, Leon Computers, Pune. “We have perhaps not yet felt the impact of the cloud, but we will in the near future. Except for a couple of distributors, Ingram Micro being one, I don’t think distributors are ready to address partners on cloud opportunities.” Meher adds, “In the cloud or in any pay-as-yougo model, the role of a distributor is very minimal. In most cases payments are monthly and bill values are smaller. The usual requirements that partners have from distributors, that of credit, finance and logistics are not there,” Meher explains. Observes Suresh Ramani, the CEO of TechGyan in Mumbai, “Quite honestly in the cloud business model, the role of a distributor is not clear. Many cloud services companies don’t have distributors. While those like Microsoft have distributors, there is very little value they are adding beyond providing market coverage. Credit and logistics which were the main value-adds of a distributor are no longer needed in a cloud economy.” Smaller cloud services providers are altogether skipping distributors. “We are presently working directly with a few cloud services providers. They currently don’t need a distributor but probably when the volumes build up for cloud services and they desire to expand they may tap distributors. Hopefully by then distributors will have created a value-add model for the cloud economy which they presently don’t have,” remarks Devesh Aggarwal, CEO, Compusoft, Mumbai. However distributors disagree and claim that they are doing immense value-add in the cloud computing market.“The role of Ingram Micro or any other distributor will not be diminished by the cloud. We have a successful cloud practice globally and in India. We are offering value to both cloud service providers and partners by offering training and advisory services through our Cloud Connect program,” says K Jaishankar, MD, Ingram Micro, India. Another company which has stepped up its cloud

he cloud, enterprise mobility, BYOD, the shift toward opex and the consumerization of IT are all disruptive trends which will affect the way IT is sold to enterprises. Of these I believe the shift toward opex has been the most disruptive so far, and I expect the other trends to affect IT decisions over the next two years. Finance options: The only way distributors can build on their growth as customers move to an opex model is to offer finance as an option and find creative ways to sell that. For the past two years EMC has been running zero-EMI schemes. Now it’s time IT channels worked with third-party financiers for tripartite / quadripartite agreements with the customer, partner, financier and even the vendor as the case may be. I believe Redington already has a leasing arm, so other distributors must take the initiative. The industry which our channels must study is the automobile industry which has admirably withstood several downturns in the economy by working on creative finance models. Most enterprise vendors, I think, will chip in to keep the numbers growing. I believe software companies have already started offering pay-as-you-go options for on-premise business. Closed distribution: This is an idea which mature economies have moved to a long time ago, and maybe vendors and distributors here must consider it. Unlike India, for almost a decade the majority of mature economies have seen IT growth in the single digits. Many vendors there have distributors assigned to a set of partners so that the distributors can focus on investing in relationships rather than fighting for an Praveen Sahai extra percent of margins; in this way, the partners also do not spend time and resources in searching for a better price. Aggregation: We believe the cloud will be mostly a mix of hybrid and private clouds, with a few businesses opting for a public cloud model. While it’s business as usual in private clouds, hybrid clouds will require distributors to have alliances with public cloud providers. Distributors must evolve into aggregators and must have a single point of contact for a partner for cloud services. Channel enablement: With technology changing rapidly, it’s important for partners to keep upgrading their skills-set. Distributors need to work with vendors to deliver training and certification more effectively so that partners’ profitability increases and their sales revenue grows. While there are disruptive changes around BYOD and enterprise mobility, for a distributor-vendor alignments and new channel acquisitions will make the transition smoother. n — Praveen Sahai is the Vice President of EMC India. He spoke to Ramdas S

“We believe the role of Ingram Micro or any other distributor is not diminished by the cloud. We have a successful cloud practice globally and in India”

The industry which our channels must study is the automobile industry which has admirably withstood several downturns in the economy by working on creative finance models

K Jaishankar

MD, Ingram Micro India

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cover story Distributors must build value

istributors bring three strengths to the table which are tough to ignore even if we transition into a predominantly clouddriven services-oriented world: velocity, variance and volume. Distributors can reach an OEM product or solution faster (velocity), they offer various options (variance) for a channel partner to offer to the enduser, and their business model has always been driven by volumes. The Indian public cloud and software-as-a-service are still in their infancy. Consider the cases of cloud application providers (such as Microsoft and SalesForce) which have made some inroads into the market and you will find that they have invested in distributors to reach their cloud-based services to partners. For distributors to ensure their relevance in a transformed IT world they must not forget the three values they bring in. Without doubt, reaching channel partners deep and wide across the country is an advantage that will remain, and through a distributor any service provider can reach customers faster. To ensure that partners have a wider choice to choose from distributors must adopt the role of an aggregator of cloud services by associating with more vendors and providing partners a single point of contact for availing such services. Aggregation need not necessarily mean they create a cloud aggregator platform, but they will need to provide the same value from a transactional perspective including localized currency billing and credit to the channel partner. For distributors to add value they will have to come up with better pricing, better purchasing and deal registration processes, and better market development by crosssubsidizing the rebate programs of Ashok Pamidi multiple vendors. To put it bluntly, the biggest value which distributors bring is to ensure that volume business happens for the vendor so that the periodic sales targets are met—at least on paper for cloud services. The practice of dumping inventory on channels has always been facilitated by a distributor. Almost all vendors have resorted to this practice even when the products sold have been software licenses. The million-dollar question is whether such a model can be replicated in a cloud-based economy so that vendor sales teams can achieve number targets and bring in predictability. If a distributor can offer that advantage, then almost all cloud-based vendors would like sign on. This is an idea that distributors should work on, and this could be achieved by giving a cloud touch to the present model of running schemes with attractive incentives. n — Ashok Pamidi is a former Director of HP and IBM India. He spoke to Ramdas S

Distributors must find a way to ensure volumes even in a cloud-based economy so that vendor sales teams can achieve number targets and bring in predictability

“Vendors need to build models that would de-risk distributors from the market and enable them to become more investment-and expansion-friendly” Sudarsan Ranganathan CEO, Veeras Infotek

practice is Avnet India. “We have signed up with 20 ISVs for solutions in verticals such as fleet management and HR, and we are helping partners sell these SaaS offerings,” says Naresh Desai, Country General Manager, Avnet Technology Solutions, India. Avnet sees its role evolving into a cloud aggregrator where it would offer partners options to choose the cloud services they want to offer to their customers. “Our ISV cloud program is aimed at enabling as many ISVs to port their vertical-specific applications on the cloud and then reselling those through our IT partners who can pick and choose the applications their customers want, and white label them,” he says. Bengaluru-based NxtGen Datacenter & Cloud Services, which launched its cloud services, too believes that distributors will be required to take cloud services to the masses. “While we don’t have a distributor currently, once we reach a critical size, we will require distributors to take our offerings to the market. We would want them to recruit, train, and enable the mass channel,” says AS Rajgopal, MD, NxtGen. However Rajgopal cautions that selling cloud services is very different from selling hardware boxes or software licenses. “Revenue models will change and when that happens distributors have no option but to change their business model. This is not a top-line driven business. Instead of a smaller number of highvalue bills you will be doing large volumes of smallvalue bills every month,” he adds. Agrees Bengaluru-based iValue InfoSolutions.“A service-oriented approach requires teams to rethink the way they approach a customer. Business does not end with a transaction, and service-level agreements need to hold good for the lifetime of the relationship because the billing is monthly,” says S Sriram, CEO, iValue.

Consumerization of IT and BYOD This is another trend that could undermine IT distributors. With employees bringing their own

“While the threat from telcos is real, I would still bet on a traditional distributor working with a solution provider to execute a project” Praveen Sahai

VP, Channels, EMC India

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cover story devices to their workplace, the client device market is expected to change. Many organizations that have started adopting BYOD are allowing their employees to bring devices of any form factor to the workplace. Agrees Jaishankar, “The IT client market as we know is bound to change with concepts like BYOD. We are betting on our mobile handset business to grow much faster than the PC-based client market in the next two years. Currently, we are leveraging the global best practices to set-up a robust mobility practice in India.” Also Consumerization of IT will change the way IT is bought by enterprises, believe most analysts. According to Gartner, by 2015, nearly 18 percent of the new enterprise software licensing revenues may shift to applications that were originally consumer applications readied for the enterprise. “The primary impact of the consumerization of IT is that it is forcing businesses, especially large enterprises, to rethink the way they procure and manage IT equipment and services,” says Ramani. Adds Shaishav Singh, CEO, Dotcad, Ahmedabad, “Distributors will create their own marketplaces in the near future for mobile applications and even cloud services to ensure that the new opportunities do not elude them.” Many also contend that telcos would prove to be

“Cloud is not a top-line driven business. Instead of small number of high-value bills distributor will be billing large volumes of smallvalue bills every month” AS Rajgopal MD, NxtGen

tough competition to IT distributors in future. “Telcos have a strong channel and an operation that is attuned to utility billing. They are well positioned to deliver a lot of pay-as-you-go services by combining it with their communications offerings,” he believes. However there are also others who point out that telco providers cannot match the service capabilities of IT channel partners. “Unlike in the US, in India most phone companies have not been using the telco route to sell their smartphones. We are therefore not worried about an application deluge through telcos which may end up taking software revenue from us,” says Jaishankar. While everyone agrees that the telcos have built a very efficient channel for delivery, they opine that the telcos have still not been able to work with SIs

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cover story Reach will help us grow

here’s no doubt that the component, and to some extent the accessory market, is shrinking at a rapid pace. Most distributors, including Rashi, are aware of this trend and are refocusing and regrouping their business to ensure that continuous growth is assured. In our case, as of September 2011, approximately 74 percent of our business was driven by the components and accessories business. The disk drive shortage triggered in October 2011 ensured the shrinking of the assembler market, so from around 750,000-800,000 units a quarter in Q32011 today the system builder market would be less than 450,000 units. Realizing this trend we started adding more vendors on the systems, software and mobile front, and by the end of September 2013 only around 30 percent of our business was from components. Having [recently] signed up a major vendor in Intel, this may go up to 40 percent in the next two quarters, but we expect almost all distributors to see continuous de-growth in their existing components business. With the PC market also shrinking over the past 3-4 quarters we expect all distributors to add more vendors and target growth areas such as mobile phones, tablets, networking, servers, and enterprise storage and software products. The biggest worry is the rupee fluctuation. Most distributors will decrease their dependence on direct imports and will be eager to work with vendors that offer rupee billing. Channel inventory is a big concern. The need of the hour is for vendors to be realistic about their targets and to ensure that there is Suresh Pansari less pressure on distributors. We expect that during the current fiscal the bad debts across the industry would be bigger than in FY2012-13. At Rashi, while we continue to empower, advise and support existing channels, we are also on the look-out for newer channels as our vendor focus changes and new vendors are added. This I believe is true for all distributors. Since some of the trends (such as online) are disruptive for an average partner, we expect vendors to streamline their partner strategies and that this would benefit the distributors. The biggest value which a distributor of our size would bring will be reach, and we will continue investing in reaching partners in small towns. Today we bill to just under 800 towns, and by next year we expect to bill partners across 1,000 towns. As technology matures we will soon see today’s niche technologies targeted at enterprises becoming mainstream, and vendors would depend on us for more reach. n — Suresh Pansari is the CMD, Rashi Peripherals. He spoke to Ramdas S

At Rashi, while we continue to empower and support existing channels, we are also on the look-out for newer channels as our vendor focus changes and new vendors are added

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“What we need is fewer distributors at each level; each will still have a sizeable market to address and a reasonable profit to make on their investment” Pattabiraman Raghuraman CEO, Saleszart

efficiently, nor have they been able to offer systems integration services to end users themselves. “While the threat from telcos is real, I would still bet on a traditional distributor working with a solution provider to execute a project,” says Praveen Sahai, VP, Channels, EMC India.

The shift to opex Enterprise buying has been fairly stagnant in the past two years because of more scrutiny from the finance department on the ROI of a capex deal. Most CFOs are wary of investing upfront and are seeing merit in IT projects implemented on an opex model. Over the past two years iValue has shifted a considerable amount of its business to a project-driven model. “Last year we executed around 150 projects on ROI driven Opex model where payment from customer were made once a pre-agreed ROI milestone was achieved,” reveals Sriram. He however admits that the model is not very scalable and that the distributor is working on processes whereby it can help partners to execute more projects. While some partners suggest that distributors should aggressively pursue leasing and IT rentals which is presently an unorganized market, others recommend that distributors should focus on enabling channel partners to execute projects better. Offering professional training and services is an option that many of the smaller partners suggest, while others point out that complex Indian laws do not allow the delivery of services through a multi-tier channel. “Rather than being a conveyer belt for vendors to deliver products, distributors must explore opex-based models based on different financial models that can be delivered in the marketplace. Vendors need to build models that would de-risk distributors from the market and enable them to become more investment- and expansion-friendly,” opines Sudarsan Ranganathan, CEO, Veeras Infotek, Chennai.

Shrinking market Outside the commercial and enterprise segment the PC market and the component market have seen a sharp decline in volumes. The system builder market has fallen by 50 percent since Q42011 while the PC business driven through channels is estimated to have dipped by 20 percent in absolute numbers during this period. Another factor that has hit the market hard has been the fluctuating rupee. Says S Sudhir, CEO of the

cover story Bengaluru-based Inspan India, “We have slowed down our imports considerably for the past two quarters because of the instability of the rupee. We cannot play the guessing game—where the rupee is headed and how much we are going to make or lose.” Most distributors and regional distributors have added new lines of business to compensate for the drop in volumes. “From less than 10 percent of our business a year back almost 40 percent of our revenue in October 2013 came from mobile phones and accessories. This is where we see growth, and the predictability is much better,” says George Thomas, the CEO of Aldous Glare, Kochi. While vendors have shown signs of desperation by re-juggling distribution options and even signing on new distributors, analysts and partners say that the need of the hour is consolidation. Remarks Pattabiraman Raghuraman, the CEO of Saleszart, a consultancy based in Delhi, “In a shrinking market what we need is fewer distributors at each level so that each of them will still have a sizeable market to address and a reasonable profit to make on their investment. It should happen at all tiers, hence distributors must cut down on the number of subdistributors they address for a particular category or product line.”

“We will witness a gradual evolution in IT distribution and not a rapid transformation. Adapting to new challenges will ensure that distributors remain relevant” S Rajendran CMO, Acer India

Conclusion Trends such as the cloud, mobility, service orientation and the consumerization of IT are all disruptive forces that will impact distribution the way we know it. But if the distributors continue evolving, re-invent themselves, and adapt to the demands of a changing market they will continue to be relevant. This requires a new mindset, more focus, and the ability to understand services better. “I believe we will witness a gradual evolution in IT distribution and not a rapid transformation,” says S Rajendran, CMO, Acer India. “Adapting to new challenges will ensure that distributors will remain relevant for the foreseeable future.” n

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market focus Changing Market Dynamics While the home UPS market is declining, the overall power solutions segment in India is on an upswing largely driven by SMBs and enterprises n Abhijeet Mukherjee ccording to an IMS Research Report, the overall Indian UPS market is estimated at $630 million in 2013 and is projected to reach $834 million by 2016. The report further states that this market is expected to grow by 6.3 percent in 2014. While these growth numbers are healthy, they are in no way spectacular. Yet for channel partners the UPS market continues to offer immense opportunities. Unlike the core PC business which has been hit hard by low demand following the shift by consumers to smartphones and tablets, the UPS market is likely to keep growing because of the huge power deficit across the country as well as the overall low quality of power.

Consumer demand The Indian UPS market is divided into the home and commercial segments. The home segment is addressed by UPS makers typically offering systems with power ratings ranging from 600 VA to 1 kVA. According to MAIT, over the past one year the market for home UPS has been flat, and is expected to drop by 25 percent to 1.5 million units during the current fiscal. “The home UPS market has always depended on the desktop market, with attach rates of at least one UPS for every three desktops sold in the segment. However, with the consumer desktop market shrinking, the home UPS market is also shrinking at a rapid pace,” opines Sushil Virmani, Sales Director, South Asia, Eaton Power. A key trend which vendors are expecting is consolidation among a handful of manufacturers. From late 2009 there has been an influx of Chinese and local players importing UPS systems from China to address

“Over next five years around 60,000 server rooms across the country will upgrade to modular rack centers to save on real-estate and simplify management” Gurudutt M, Director, Channel & Mid-market Business, Schneider Electric

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opportunities in India. However, with the home UPS market shrinking, a number of vendors have dropped out. “The home UPS market is still healthy, and with the AIO market growing the home desktop market is here to stay. However, the feedback is that most manufacturers importing from China are facing a high percentage of RMA issues because Indian power conditions demand a number of tweaks to the design of power systems. To succeed in the Indian market UPS makers will need local manufacturing and assembly units,” says Gurudutt M, Director, Channel & Mid-market Business, Schneider Electric. To counter the decline in the home UPS market, manufacturers have started exploring other markets. For example, Schneider is seeing the increasing use of UPS systems for sensitive electronic devices such as projectors and home theater systems. Gurudutt adds that home UPS channels need not worry about alternate channels such as online disrupting their market. “With even the smallest home UPS weighing more than five kilograms, it’s not viable for most online retailers to do home delivery.”

Enterprise trends Most UPS makers are trying to address the SMB segment through stock-and-sell channels. With capacities ranging from 1-20 kVA, this segment is definitely the fastest growing especially outside the metros. Increasing demand from new markets in tier-2 and -3 cities is also a reason for growth in the UPS market. “Rural India is yet to grow to its full potential. Other areas of growth are the hospitality industry and educational institutions. This will give a boost to the UPS and inverter industry,” states Virmani. Banking and financial institutions are giving a push to UPSs up to 5 kVA, and RBI recently allowed thirdparty ATM networks in the country. For example, Muthoot Finance has got approval to set up 1,000 white-label ATMs in the first year of operations and another 8,000 in the following two years. Similarly, the Federal Bank has tied up with Tata Communications

market focus “Although the recurring cost of a solar rechargeable UPS is low, it needs high initial investment to the extent of `8 lakh for a 2 kVA UPS”

“Power monitoring & management is a new trend. Enterprise customers are looking for solutions that monitor and provide feedback on load capacity and utilization”

Yogesh Godbole

Sandeep Vahi

Director, Ace Brain Systems

CEO, Compton Computers

to install 15,000 white-label ATMs across the country. Apart from the financial industry, kiosks have been deployed by other segments to set up solutions such as digital signage. The government is another vertical for UPS growth in the 10 kVA-20 kVA segment. “The government is focusing on the computerization of its various departments, including land registration. e-governance projects are also being implemented,” says Yogesh Godbole, Director, Ace Brain Systems, Pune. The company recently installed 500 UPSs with capacities above 10 kVA for the Maharashtra government. UPSs of more than 20 kVA capacity see traction from large data centers and server rooms, and for electronic and medical equipment which require high levels of power supply with uninterrupted service. “In data center environments real-time insights into the power infrastructure have become more critical than ever. Dynamic changes in load and server refresh, and complexities arising from such refreshes, are prompting CIOs to deal with dynamic load variations in the data center,” says Ankesh Kumar, Director, Channel Products & Marketing, Emerson Network Power, India. With companies consolidating there is a growing opportunity for power back-up solutions in the retail and IT-ITeS verticals. Says Alok Gupta, Director, Cache Digitech, New Delhi, “Most companies are now consolidating their infrastructure, and downsizing from multiple servers to one. Customers are looking for improved technology, better efficiency and costeffective power backup solutions.” Both Emerson and Schneider have launched their integrated modular enclosures which have both a UPS and a cooler, and are already wired for plug-and-play installation of compute, storage and network hardware. “This is one of the largest markets, and we estimate that over the next five years around 60,000 server rooms across the country will upgrade to modular rack centers to save on real-estate and to simplify management,” says Gurudutt.

Power monitoring Increasingly, UPS systems come integrated with software that makes the UPS more dynamic in usage depending on loads. “Power monitoring and management is a new phenomenon. More enterprise customers are looking for solutions that can monitor and provide feedback on load capacity and utilization. There are online UPS systems which offer intelligent monitoring and network management functions,” says

Sandeep Vahi, CEO, Compton Computers, New Delhi. Because of growing virtualization and the increasing popularity of the cloud, power management and monitoring have become key concerns. “Monitoring software provides every detail including heat generation and power requirements,” notes Kumar of Emerson. Emerson had recently announced a tie-up with Bengaluru-based NxtGen Data Center & Cloud Services to offer monitoring solutions through channels for its SmartRow and SmartCabinet solutions.

Eco-friendly UPS With the aim of conserving energy and reducing their carbon footprints, more vendors are coming up with an eco-friendly UPS or with an eco-mode built in. Vendors such as Eaton and Socomec have launched their ecofriendly UPSs in Q1FY2013-14. Explains Denis Finck, Director, Data Center Market, Socomec, “The current challenges of medium and large data centers are energy efficiency and reduced floor space requirements. These units, which are lighter, smaller and lose less heat, are also suitable as integrated critical power solutions.” Green UPS technology offers higher efficiency of up to 94-97 percent against the normal 80-88 percent.

Solar UPS The demand for solar power is mostly from the rural areas, large NGOs, the hospitality industry and retail. “Since solar UPSs cannot support power supply upward of 10 kVA they are not very popular in Class A cities, hence they are used mostly in the rural sector,” explains Godbole. “Although the recurring cost of a solar rechargeable UPS is low, it needs high initial investment to the extent of `8 lakh for a 2 kVA UPS.” With the Tamil Nadu and Gujarat governments announcing a number of policy changes promoting solar usage, a number of partners are working on solutions around solar power. Mumbai-based Vardhaman Technology is trying to develop an integrated PC with a built-in UPS that draws solar power.

Conclusion While the home UPS market is likely to be flat, channels have no reason to be worried about declining opportunities in the UPS market. The country’s power woes are not likely to disappear soon, and with growing technology use the demand for power systems is likely to grow. n

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role model In pursuit of peace and prosperity Though he runs a profitable business he is aware that running a profitable business is not everything there is to life. Presenting Parminder Singh Chawla, MD, MM9 Information Technologies n Amit Singh fter grappling with different jobs for a few years and then attempting a partnership business, Parminder Singh Chawla, MD, MM9 Information Technologies, proved himself as an entrepreneur. The Gurgaon-based company is now regarded as one of the leading enterprise VARs with clients including Honda, Hero MotoCorp, Aviva, GlaxoSmithKline, Yatra.com, Ranbaxy, PVR Cinemas, DLF, InterGlobe and SpiceJet.

In the beginning Chawla had no inkling that he would become an entrepreneur. After completing his Masters in Statistics from Punjab University in 1987 he worked with companies such as Shyam Computers, CMS Computers and Modi Business Machines. “However, after being in service for about seven years I observed the road-blocks and started looking for options.” Though he is a first-generation entrepreneur, MM9 was not his first venture. He had earlier entered into a partnership business in printing solutions and automation with four of his friends. Unfortunately, things fell apart and he had to start afresh. “We got into the partnership without any serious thought and planning which resulted in mismanagement and friction. That’s why I decided to re-start independently.” He named his new company MM9 to memorize his start of the entrepreneurship journey on the morning of Monday, January 9, 1995. “I believed in myself, and that the beginning was most important, and not whether I won or lost.” Chawla won his first contract worth `1 lakh from Shriram Pistons & Rings to maintain 25 PCs and printers for a year. “To build on this I leveraged my skills in DTP solutions and gained strength in PC assembling and IT sales. I also made efforts to be in constant touch with customers to identify their painpoints and get reference orders.”

“Cyberoam enabled us to take our security business to the next level. We executed almost 60 projects of average value of `8 lakh during 2006-08” 30

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The strategy worked, and the company started getting orders from customer references. It won an order for 21 assembled PCs worth `8.5 lakh from Usha Amorphous Metals. Continuously striving to build skills, Chawla focused on passive networking when the concept of networking just started in India during 1998-99. MM9 then won a structured cabling project from Hotel Rajvilas, Jaipur. “It was a prestigious project because there were few partners with cable-laying skills at that time. In the next couple of years we executed several sub-contracted projects. But we decided to quit networking in 2001 because passive networking projects were being taken up by large interior decorators and then sub-contracted with less scope for margins.” In the same year the company partnered with HP. “We started offering HP’s complete product line including PCs, printers and servers. With our continued focus and investment, we became the first HP authorized service center in Delhi NCR in 2001,” recalls Chawla. To expand its portfolio the company partnered with Microsoft in 2005. Chawla explains, “The idea was to offer a complete solution and capture a larger share of the wallet from existing customers. A focus on software licenses enabled us to increase project values by 30-50 percent.” A major boost for MM9 came in 2005 when it entered the security domain to fulfill a customer’s demand for UTM. “Later we recognized network security as a lucrative business and realized that many of our existing customers were demanding these solutions,” says Chawla. Getting serious about security MM9 then partnered with Cyberoam in 2006 to fulfill the demand for firewalls. “Cyberoam enabled us to take our security business to the next level. We executed almost 60 projects of average value of `8 lakh during 2006-08. Of these, many were from the education segment,” he informs. Another turning point came with its new focus on virtualization after it partnered with VMware in 2009. “We started getting big-ticket projects for virtualization,” Chawla says. “Although the hunt was always on for new customers, we always focused on farming as a strategy. We stressed on identifying both

Role model our customers’ pain-points and our own weaknesses to be aware of the areas to be worked on.”

1995

Current business

MILESTONES Started MM9 Information Technologies

customers at an early stage. “Telecommunications is the first requirement of any new or expanding organization, hence we partnered with Airtel to seize such opportunities. We leverage telecom deals to pitch for other solutions; this gives us a larger share of the wallet of the customer.”

2013

2009

2006

2005

2001

1999

Over the last three years MM9 witnessed flattish growth. From a Entered passive networking, turnover of `48 crore in FY2010won a structured cabling 11 it grew 25 percent `60 crore in project from Hotel Rajvilas, FY2011-12 but then dipped by 17 Jaipur percent to `50 crore in FY2012-13. On the agenda Chawla attributes the While the company is expecting Partnered with HP; MM9 company’s growth in FY2011-12 flat growth this fiscal due to a became first HP authorized to new customer acquisitions and continuing de-focus on volume its investment in competencies deals, it is targeting revenue of service center in Delhi NCR around storage and server `100 crore in the next five years. Partnered with Microsoft to technologies. “We invested in “We will continuously move away competencies in security and from top-line growth and will resell software licenses virtualization around storage instead focus on the bottomline and servers, gained a Symantec and consultation services,” says Partnered with Cyberoam, Gold Partnership, and became a Chawla. bagged projects in education VMware Enterprise Partner.” MM9 is betting on its cloud MM9 drafted separate strategies business with Office 365 and Ventured into virtualization for large enterprise customers and TCS iON, and expects its cloud with VMware SMBs. Says Chawla, “Most global revenue to grow by several times customers demand the same brand in a couple of years. The company Registered a turnover of used by their headquarters abroad, anticipates that 20 percent of its `50 crore hence we pitched MNC brands to printing business will move to such customers. But we targeted managed print services. SMBs and the education segment Further, MM9 has partnered with Cyberoam. The strategy worked well.” with Samsung to venture into enterprise mobility, and According to him, the de-growth in the last fiscal has bagged six customers for BYOD initiatives. happened because of moving away from volume sales and focusing on value deals with fat bottomlines. Getting personal “Rejecting many box-selling deals gave us a hit of about Chawla has passion for acting and has acted in many 25 percent, but we managed to cover the major part advertisements and even a superhit movie down south. with a solutions focus.” One of his memorable commercial was the Petrol Khatam Hi Nahi Hota for Maruti. He has done ads for Dabur and Safola, and acted in a Telugu blockbuster, Best practices Stalin. A follower of Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and a strong Chawla has a 3-layer strategy for his organization. believer in empowerment and inclusive growth, Chawla According to him, the basics of the business are to first now stays away from day-to-day transactions at his express love and respect for peers and customers and company and dedicates his time to preaching on the Art only then to expect any gains. The second important of Living to corporates and societies. He is an Honorary thing is to gain skills, expand, and then think of Faculty on Spirituality and Management at the JK excelling in the business. The final step is to empower Institute of Business Management. and enable people to take decisions and gradually Chawla got hooked with the Art of Living movement move away from transactional business. “I have always when he attended one of its sessions in 2010. “The worked on these principles and am currently on the session was really intriguing and forced me to think final step of empowering people and staying away about my responsibilities toward society. I realized from transactional business. This approach helps my there is no education system which teaches us to live employees to have a sense of ownership and get the peacefully. We keep stressing on how to earn money but motivation to perform.” not how to live happily.” The man has a unique strategy to win His wife, a teacher by profession, runs an NGO to educate and offer financial help to children from poor “Although we were looking for new families. While he spends most of his free time with his seven-year-old daughter, playing the drums or refining customers, we focused on farming as his culinary skills, he also finds time to join his wife in a strategy. We wanted to identify our her NGO activities. n

customers’ pain-points and our weaknesses”

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tech focus

8 Reasons To Upgrade To

Windows 8.1

New customization capabilities enable it to behave in ways that best suit not only user preferences and habits but also the input devices they choose n Edward J Correia

he release this week of Windows 8.1 is a mea culpa of sorts for Microsoft. The version formerly code-named Windows Blue addresses many of the complaints lodged by those who tested it, including the CRN Test Center. And after spending a good deal of time with Windows 8.1, our disdain for it has abated. New customization capabilities enable it to behave in ways that best suit not only user preferences and habits but also the input devices they choose. In other words, Windows 8.1 is actually pretty good, and here are eight reasons why.

Start button It has been widely reported that the Start button is back. It is not, at least not as we had come to know it. What has appeared is a Start Screen/Desktop toggle switch that formerly was hidden in the screen’s lower left-hand corner. We have been critical of that control and its counter intuitive behavior since the beginning; it used to disappear when trying to click directly on it. We like it better now that it’s glued onto the Desktop’s task bar, from where it brings up the Start screen. It still hides away when in the Start screen, but it pops up and can be tapped or clicked on when pointing to the lower left-hand corner.

Unified wallpaper Windows 8.1 permits the same background image that’s on the desktop to also be used on the Start screen. Such

Context-sensitive help in Windows 8.1 is improved. When searching from the Start screen, terms are shown in context of their placement, making feature finding easy 32

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a cosmetic change might seem minor, but it makes switching between the desktop and Start screen visually seamless. It’s almost as if Metro never even existed. Setting this up is done through a new control panel called Taskbar and Navigation. It doesn’t get a Tile by default, so the fastest way to find it is by typing Taskbar from the Start screen. Open the panel and click on the Navigation tab. There you will find a checkbox for “Show my desktop background on Start.” It’s greyed in the Enterprise edition that CRN used for testing, so instead of matching the images, we just picked the same solid background color. Now there’s far less uneasiness toggling between the Desktop and the Start screen; it all seems like one big operating system.

All apps view Microsoft provides another way to dull the differences between Win 7 and Win 8, by allowing the Start screen to default to Apps view instead of Tiles. In this view, apps can be sorted alphabetically or by date installed, or they can be grouped by most/least used (shown) or a fixed set of categories similar to the default folders of the Start Menu of olde. This too is set up through the Navigation tab of the new Taskbar and Navigation control panel. The checkbox for this is labelled Show the Apps view automatically when I go to Start. Interestingly, a sub-checkbox under this option instructs Windows 8.1 to search everywhere instead of just my apps when I search from the apps view. This partially addresses a search limitation of Win 8 the Test Center identified in October 2012, but it still excludes system files from searches here.

tech focus Startup to desktop Finally! Windows 8 now allows start up in Desktop mode. While this was technically possible in Windows 8.0, starting up in Desktop mode (or in some cases Windows File Manager) required jumping through a few hoops. Now all it takes is to check one box, and it’s done in that great new Taskbar and Navigation properties panel. By the way, this panel can be brought up while in Desktop mode by right-clicking on the Taskbar and selecting Properties. Once there, move to the Navigation tab and check the first box in the Start Screen section.

Grouping tiles For a company that placed so much stock in the success of the Start screen, one would think Microsoft’s UI designers would have thought of this one out of the gate. Windows now allows Tiles to be organized into groups. And, it’s easy to do. Just select one or more tiles and drag them to an open space. When a gray bar appears, release them to create a new group. A title bar will appear on top that can be tapped or clicked to accept the group’s name. To change the location of a group, zoom out by pinching or clicking the zoom icon in the screen’s lower left-hand corner. Drag and drop the group where desired and unzoom. This is a huge improvement for the Start screen and might actually change some minds about using it regularly.

Better help While it’s not quite the caliber of Mac OS, contextsensitive help in Windows 8.1 is vastly improved. When searching from the Start screen, search terms are shown in the context of their placement in various apps and dialogs, making feature finding much easier than before. Although if they would have asked the Test Center, we would have brightened the search term in the results list rather than the context. But it’s a step in the right direction, as are Microsoft’s Windows 8.1 pages, which present videos alongwith

Windows 8.1 delivers native support for 3-D printing, NFC, and Wi-Fi Direct printing and media streaming with the Miracast specification small chunks of knowledge about what’s inside and what’s new.

More visual aids It’s apparent Microsoft has worked hard to make Windows 8’s features easier to find and use. Short of clobbering people over the head, new cues can be as subtle as a small arrow or clumsy. The large arrow, which gyrates left and right, appeared after a few unsuccessful attempts to invoke the app switcher using a mouse. Something else that didn’t escape notice was that all instructions now include language for touch taps and for mouse clicks.

Better PC settings The PC Settings panel now provides more control of host computer settings as well as those for accounts, cloud access, searching, sharing, networking and devices. The panel also now organizes related settings into groups; the older panel (inset) lumped them all together into a single panel in no apparent order. The original Control Panel is still present and still required for a good many tasks.

The bottom line Windows 8.1 delivers native support for 3-D printing, NFC, and Wi-Fi Direct printing and media streaming with the Miracast specification. Absent any of those needs, Windows 7 users might stay where they are. For systems with Windows 8 or below, moving to 8.1 will be worth the time. Before you download Windows 8.1, you will be asked where your original version came from. If you installed the preview from Windows Store or disc or USB media while Win 8 was running, Microsoft says you will be able to upgrade in place at no charge and keep the computer’s settings but that apps will need to be reinstalled. However, if you install Win 8.1 preview version from an ISO, you will need to restore your original Windows version before upgrading. Otherwise, you will have to purchase a Win 8.1 Pro license and activate shortly after updating. In any event, if you end up with Win 8 now or in the future and decide it’s not for you, visit CRN to learn how to downgrade Windows 8 to Windows 7. n

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channel buzz

n The winners of the Members’ Choice of Best Vendor Awards chosen by CMDA members through an online survey

CMDA Pune concludes vendor meet The Computers & Media Dealers Association (CMDA) Pune recently concluded its vendor meet at Hotel Ramee Grand in the city. The objective of the meet was to discuss the business challenges faced by partners and decide on an action plan. The meet was attended by 80 participants comprising vendors and national distributors.

n (L-R) Harish Rai, Country Manager, ComGuard; Meiling You, VP, APAC and Steffen Bajerke, Global IT Head, GateProtect, at the event

Comguard, GateProtect hold meet ComGuard and GateProtect, the provider of UTMs and firewalls, recently concluded a partner meet themed Extreme Security For The Next Generation. Held in New Delhi, the meet was attended by 80 partners. The vendors provided product details, and shared best practices on how to increase efficiency and grow, with partners. Harish Rai, Country Manager, ComGuard India, VAD for GateProtect, said, “As we expand into and penetrate the Indian IT market, it becomes important to keep our network strong. We are happy to organize this event along with GateProtect, and we would like to conduct more such events in future to help our partners exchange knowledge and frame a businessoriented approach.” n

The highlight of the meet was the Members’ Choice of Best Vendor Awards which were decided by CMDA members through an online survey. Asus and D-Link won the award for Best Component Business, while HP and Lenovo won the award for Best Branded Systems Business. In the software space Quick Heal and Tally won the award for Best Software Business while Dell and Best IT World won the award for Best Service & Support. The awards ceremony was followed by a panel discussion on the challenges faced by partners. The panelists were Vinay Shetty, Country Manager, Asus; Suryakant Sharma, Service Head, Accel Frontline; Suresh Joshi, Chairman & MD, Cache Technologies; Sanjeev Pathare, Owner, Computer Shoppe; Amitabh Mukharjee, RSM, West, HP; and Mridul Saran, DGM, West, Ingram Micro. “Through the panel discussion partners brought out their issues in front of the vendors who promised to take action through channel programs and technical and sales training. The discussion also highlighted issues such as the threat from online and LFR entities,” said Ratnesh Rathi, President, CMDA Pune. n

n Vishal Parekh, Marketing Director, Kingston Technology, with Rex—the superhero mascot at the event

Kingston completes 26 years Kingston Technology recently celebrated in Mumbai, its completion of 26 years in the industry. The celebrations included an exhibition of Kingston products and the launch of Rex, its superhero mascot. The event was attended by 50 partners. The company showcased its latest products including HyperX Nitro boosters, USB flash drives and solid-state drives. Speaking at the event, Vishal Parekh, Marketing Director, India, Kingston, said, “We are elated to complete 26 years in the industry. Taking cues from the fantastic response received from the markets, we will continue to build a better experience for our network and endusers.” n

To feature your company’s events in CRN, send write-ups with photographs to editor@ubmindia.com 34

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new products Lava E-Tab Ivory

Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1

ava has launched its 7-inch multi-touch capacitive tablet, E-Tab Ivory, which comes with 3G video and voice calling facility. The device is powered by a 1.2 GHz dual core MediaTek processor and runs on Android Jelly Bean 4.1 OS. The tablet features a front 0.3 MP camera and rear camera with 2.0 MP resolution. It comes with 1 GB RAM and an internal memory of 4 GB expandable to 32 GB. The device is backed by a 3,000 mAh battery that supports five hours of talk-time. For connectivity options the tablet offers Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0 and micro USB. The tablet is priced at an MRP of `10,199, and carries a 1-year warranty. n

Genius Eco power banks

enius recently launched its three new portable universal power banks, ECO-u500, ECO-u700 and ECO-u1000 for recharging smartphones and tablets. The ECO-u500, ECO-u700 and ECO-u1000 have large backup capacities of 5,200, 7,800 and 10,400 mAh respectively, which means that when completely charged the devices can fully recharge smartphones up to four times and 7-inch tablets more than two times. The power banks come with two USB ports and a micro USB cable to allow recharging up to two portable devices upto 2.1 amps simultaneously. The devices are available in two colors, black and white, and feature four LED power capacity indicators. The ECO-u500, ECO-u700 and ECO-u1000 are priced at an MRP of `2,299, `2,999 and `4,099 respectively, and carry a 1-year limited warranty. n

amsung recently launched its Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet which features a 10.1-inch WQXGA of 2,560x1,600 resolution with Super Clear LCD display. It comes in two variants, one with Wi-Fi/3G, 1.9 GHz Exynos a series of ARM-based system-on-chips quad and 1.3 GHz quad processor, and another with an LTE 2.3 GHz quad processor. It sports a 3 GB RAM and 16 GB internal storage, and runs on Android 4.3 Jelly Bean OS. The device features an 8 MP rear camera with BSI sensor and autofocus accompanied by an LED flash, and a 2 MP front camera. The tablet has an S Pen stylus. It comes with features such as Action Memo, Scrapbook, Screen Write and S Finder. The device houses a large 8,220 mAh battery, and comes pre-loaded with Samsung Knox for enhanced security. Connectivity options on the tablet include WiFi, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi Direct and AllShareCast, as well as 3G. The tablet is available in two colors, Jet Black and Classic White. It is priced at an MRP of `49,999, and carries a 1-year warranty. n

Netgear M4100 switches

etgear recently launched its Intelligent Edge M4100 series L2+ managed switches which provide comprehensive Layer 3 routing. The M4100 series consists of 12 fully managed switches ranging from 8-port Fast Ethernet to 50-port Gigabit Ethernet. The M4100 series delivers a secure edge in commercial buildings and campus LAN environments. The switches have features such as automatic multivendor VoIP prioritization based on SIP, H323 and SCCP protocols; 16K MAC addresses; up to 100 Gbps switching fabric; 9K jumbo frames; Green Ethernet; an industry-standard command line interface and fullyfunctional Netgear Web interface. The Netgear M4100 series is priced at an MRP of `22,500-`1.46 lakh, and carries a lifetime warranty. n

The products featured here have not undergone any benchmarking or testing. The trailers contain information provided by vendors and distributors. To feature your companyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s products in CRN, send write-ups with photos to editor@ubmindia.com

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shadow ram Competition wary of HP

very PC OEM is worried about the aggressiveness demonstrated by HP in the last one year when it comes to tendering for large government deals. After winning the UP government deal for the supply of 1.5 million notebooks, HP won the tender from the Rajasthan government as well, for 2 lakh units. Now, for a Delhi government tender for 60,000 notebooks, HP is the lowest bidder with a gap of more than `3,000 compared to other OEMs. “The Delhi government had re-tendered for this project recently at the behest of PC OEMs because of the massive increase in dollar value soon after the first tender. Interestingly, while most PC OEMs rebidded 15-20 percent higher than their last bid, HP bid was lower than their previous tender,” said a reliable source. A possible theory behind HP’s aggressive tendering is that it has forged very strong relationships with both Microsoft and AMD and hence is getting a price that no other vendor seems to be getting. In all this, AMD is pretty happy as the UP, Delhi and Rajasthan deals promise to give the company a strong 30 percent share in the Indian notebook market. n

GET

Personal

“I would develop the Indian healthcare system” Ganesan Arumugam, Senior Director, Partners & SMB Sales, VMware, has over 20 years of experience in direct sales, channel and global partner management. He was previously associated with Hitachi Data Systems and Symantec.

Ganesan Arumugam

If not in the IT industry: I would have run my family business.

Biggest passion: Driving. Behind the wheels: I own a Suzuki, but would like to drive a Ferrari. Gadgets I can’t live without: My iPhone. Weekends are for: Family. Favorite holiday destination: Goa in India, Australia outside. Hate the most: People who lack integrity and back stabbers. Favorite movie: I like comedy and action movies. Favorite stars: Kamal Haasan. Role model: My uncle, a hardworking person, who developed his business from scratch. Ultimate ambition: To be the CEO of a company. Wildest thing I have ever done: Yet to do. Thing I most want to do in life: None. If I became the PM: I would develop the Indian education and healthcare system, and eradicate corruption. Celebrity I would like to spend a day with: No one. One person I would like to meet and why: Abdul Kalam, to understand his intrinsic value which helped him to become the President of India. Deepest and darkest fear: Life without my family. n — CRN Network

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