Enterprise Channels February 14 by Enterprise Channels

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FEBRUARY 2014

ANNIVERSARY ISSUE

WWW.ENTERPRISECHANNELS.COM

“HP IS THE BEST CHANNEL FOCUSED COMPANY IN THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD” ANIRUDH SHROTRIYA OWNER, SHRO SYSTEMS PVT. LTD.

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“HP IS THE BEST CHANNEL FOCUSED COMPANY IN THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD” ANIRUDH SHROTRIYA OWNER, SHRO SYSTEMS PVT. LTD.

HOW DO YOU FIND HP SOLUTION COMPARED TO THE COMPETITION? HP has a comprehensive portfolio of products, services and management software which helps in complete solution positioning in the market place, most importantly there is a strong innovation engine working full time within HP which ensures that we are constantly seeing solutions evolve and we stay ahead of the curve.

WHAT ARE THE PRODUCTS OR SOLUTIONS ARE YOU DEALING IN? Shro is a complete IT solutions provider and we deal in everything in the IT infrastructure domain, for e.g. - Public and Private Cloud build solutions, Data centre solutions, Server computing, Backup and storage, Networking solutions, Managed Services Client computing, Printing solutions and IT software, Our motto is to help implement IT solutions to enable better business outcomes for our customers.

HOW HAS HP HELPED YOU TO GROW IN THE MARKET? HP has helped bring in a huge portfolio with industry leading products, a strong channel program, strong innovation and a compelling identity for Shro which helps us go out in the huge marketplace and acquire new customers as well as serve existing customers with the latest technological solutions. We have grown each year since we have partnered with HP.

WHAT IS YOUR OPINION ABOUT HP PRACTICES IN TERMS OF THEIR CHANNEL ENGAGEMENT? HP is the best Channel focused company in the whole wide world, this is a fact, be it their partner program, enablement, loyalty rewards, management focus on channel, and overall driving business and demand through the channel, there is no one else who does it more convincingly than HP, sure there are issues but there again we see a intent by HP to listen and improve through their in country partner advisory boards.

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EDITORIAL

How serious are YOU?

S A N J AY M A H A PAT R A S A N J AY @ E N T E R P R I S E C H A N N E L S . C O M

Enterprise Channels has successfully completed its first year of operation in India. Therefore I would like to express my gratitude to all our well-wishers in the Industry who have been quite supportive in our journey so far and expect to get similar support many more years to come. When we started this magazine, our intention was to create awareness about the impact of solutions and we have been successful in achieving our objective. But I know it is not just over yet, it is a journey and part of the evolution process. The delivery mechanism will keep on changing and the market has to adapt to that change and we will also bring in necessary changes to serve the industry. I know the true bellwether of the market is the government sector and the government procurement is not so healthy this year, which has impacted on the health of the industry and the biggest victim has been the PC market. But if one looks at the global IT market trend, there has been a lot of churning at the products level. The overall PC market growth has gone down. Company like IBM has sold its x86 server business to Lenovo because for years IBM was struggling for profits in its x86 business. There is also news that IBM is going to sell its chip business which is used for its own server. On the other hand everyone knows about how HP is faring in its hardware business. Dell similarly has changed its strategy to offer end to end solution than only relying on the hardware business of PC and server. Last but not the least, Sony, the Japanese PC maker, has offloaded its Vaio Business to get rid of Tokyo-based investment fund Japan Industrial Partners (JIP). It has come in the effect of its expected a net loss of ¥110 billion ($1.1 billion) for the year to the end of March. So, the effect in the market is absolute rejigging of overall strategy of the vendors therefore one can see so many layoffs globally and the channel partners who have aligned with them if they do not understand this sentiment are probably living in the fool’s paradise. The market situation, even after the national parliament election is over, is not going to change so much in favour of the hardware business as the government will surely look at investing more on the eGoverance where services and solutions will take centre stage not the hardware. ë

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CONTENTS VOLUME 02 ISSUE 01 FEBRUARY 2014 W W W. E N T E R P R I S E C H A N N E L S . C O M

2014

SOLUTION PROVIDERS 16

STORAGE SERVICES

DATA CENTER SERVICES

SECURITY SERVICES

CLOUD SERVICES

VIRTUALIZATION

NETWORKING SERVICES

ANNIVERSARY ISSUE

CHANNEL CHAMPIONS MY VIEWS /58

“Banking on our strong capabilities” ROTHIN BHATTACHARYYA CHIEF STRATEGY OFFICER, HCL INFOSYSTEMS

MY VIEWS /60

“Revolutionizing enterprise applications”

INNOVATION /62

QNAP TS-EC1679U-RP

Featuring the easyto-use QTS 4.0 operating system, provides a reliable and scalable NAS solution to fulfil data backup, file synchronization and remote access.

D-LINK

EMC

HDS

SAP

SMARTLINK

SYMANTEC

VMWARE

RED HAT

DELL

FORTINET

MCAFEE

CITRIX

XEROX

ESCAN

LENOVO

CISCO CYBEROAM

35 36

ASSOCIATION Rise of the Phoenix /56 In its 4th consecutive year, the ISODA Tech Summit provided a platform to all partners, distributors and OEMs to interact and discuss both the challenges faced in the past and explore new opportunities in the future.

MONISH DARDA CTO AND CO-FOUNDER, ICERTIS

CORPORATE STORY /54

“Covering up the lost ground” HITESH SHAH DIRECTOR – CHANNEL SALES, BLACKBERRY INDIA

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EDITORIAL:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: 03 CHANNELSTREET:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: 06 GUEST TALK::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: 15 ASSOCIATIONS ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: 19, 37 NEWS REPORT::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: 53 INNOVATION::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: 62

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201, Himshikhar, Plot No.133, Sector - 21 Nerul Navi Mumbai - 400706, Contact: +91 8097545226

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CHANNEL

STREET CRM SOFTWARE REVENUE TO REACH $23.9 B IN

According to Gartner, organizations are leveraging CRM technologies as a major part of their digital initiatives to enhance the customer experience. Gartner said that demand for modern technology customer relationships is driving refreshed or expanded integration and usage of all areas of CRM software. The outlook continues to be positive for CRM as buyers focus on technologies that enable more-targeted customer interactions in multichannel environments. Joanne Correia, RVP, Gartner, said, “CRM will be at the heart of digital initiatives in coming years. This is one technology area that will definitely get funding as digital business is crucial to remaining competitive. Hot areas for CRM investment include mobility, social media and technologies, Web analytics and e-commerce.”

INTEL TO INVEST OVER USD 120MN IN R&D Intel Corporation has announced that it will invest over USD 120 million in consolidating its existing research and development infrastructure in Bangalore. Intel said that it has a large campus at Sarjapur Ring Road with two buildings called SRR1 and SRR2. The new building, SRR3, will cover 18 acres of land and comprise of two buildings. The estimated completion date for SRR3 is early to mid-2015. The core competencies of Intel India include CPU, System-on-a chip, platform, software and graphics. Intel’s upcoming facility will be a global center of excellence for chip design.

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T SRINIVASAN, MD, VMWARE INDIA & SAARC.

VMware Leads In Desktop Virtualization in India VMware has been recognized as a leader in India in the latest IDC Asia/Pacific Centralized Virtual Desktop Market Analysis. According to IDC, VMware led the market with a share of 62.9 percent of the Centralized Virtual Desktop (CVD), or Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), market in India during the first half of 2013. IDC also estimates that the Centralized Virtual Desktop (CVD) market in India will grow at a CAGR of 37.8% to US $32.14 million by 2017[1]. Desktop virtualization enables organizations to adopt a user-centric, flexible approach to computing. By decoupling applications, data and operating systems from endpoints- and by moving these components into the data center, they can be centrally managed. In addition, desktop and application virtualization offers IT a more streamlined and secured way to manage users, and provide agile, on-demand desktop services. According to the report, while security remains a key driver for the adoption of Virtual

Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) in India, other factors, such as flexibility/mobility, operational cost reduction, management efficiency and longer refresh cycles are other major considerations for customers to deploy VDI in India. Most VDI opportunities occur during refresh cycles and software updates. T Srinivasan, MD, VMware India & SAARC, said, “Being recognized by IDC as a leader in VDI validates our End-User Computing strategy in India, and signals the ability of VMware to transform workforce mobility. IDC predicts that the IT-enabled Services (ITeS) and the banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) sectors will drive the demand for VDI in India over the next few years. These sectors are good examples where data management, storage and data security are of the utmost importance and where VDI can play a key role in managing data more efficiently and provide flexibility to employees.

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Storage

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CHANNEL STREET

Schneider Electric’s Energy Univ Empowers Data Center Professionals Schneider Electric has launched Data Center Certified Associate (DCCA) online certification program through Energy University. The DCCA certification program provides foundational knowledge relevant to designing or upgrading the physical data centre, including power, cooling, racks, cabling, fire protection, management, and physical security. The development path is created to guide users through the preparation and course requirements necessary to prepare for the Data Center Certified Associate exam. There are 14 courses in the path and the certification provides a global standard for determining an individual’s core knowledge of data center. Michelle Souza, Program Manager (Energy University), Schneider Electric, said, “Globally there is a high demand for skilled data center professionals and the challenges facing this

industry in terms of growth, infrastructure, and management underscore this certification’s value. Energy University provides a smart, convenient way to expand skill sets and improve on-the-job performance with certifications for professionals in industries such as data center, energy management and more.” The release said that the overall education program that started with Data Center University has provided energy efficiency education courses to professionals in over 165 countries and 13 languages since 2006. Currently Energy University has more than 350,000 users globally and more than 500,000 courses have been taken. Additionally the programs feature more than 22 global industry endorsements. The DCCA online certification program is now the second qualifying exam available online through Energy University.

KONICA MINOLTA EXPANDS REACH TO GUWAHATI To maximize its reach at pan India level Konica Minolta has entered into the Guwahati market by partnering with Vision India, its new partner for the range of A4 printers. Tadahiko Sumitani, MD, Konica Minolta Business Solutions India Pvt. Ltd., said, “We treasure our association with all our regional partners. Through mutual understanding and belief in each other, we wish to build and nurture our collaboration that will give way to a conducive environment resulting in fruitful association. All our products are based on cutting edge technology and Vision India association with Konica Minolta is sure to go a long way. We will provide them with the best possible printing solutions in India.”

INDIAN PC MARKET 1.9M IN IN Q4 The combined desk-based and mobile PC market in India totalled nearly 1.96 million units in the fourth quarter of 2013, a 19.9 per cent decrease over the fourth quarter of 2012, according to Gartner, Inc. “Consumers accounted for 49 percent of total PC sales in the fourth quarter of 2013,” said Vishal Tripathi, principal research analyst at Gartner. “In the absence of any government orders this quarter, the Indian PC market performed dismally, re-emphasizing the fact that with current economic sentiments and the current political scenario, enterprises are deferring their purchases.” White boxes (including parallel imports), which accounted for 44 percent of the overall desktop market, declined 10 percent in the fourth quarter of 2013 compared to the same period last year. In the fourth quarter, mobile PCs registered a 27 percent year on year increase. Dell increased its market share in 4Q13 due to strong growth in notebooks which increased 49 percent year over year. This growth primarily came from the consumer segment where Dell grew by 70 percent. HP’s market share in the consumer segment grew by 3 percent compared to the last quarter.

Epicor Partners Orient Technologies Orient Technologies, a leading SI and an IT premier solution provider is the latest company to join the Epicor Inspired Partner Network in India. The new partnership announced is part of an on-going global channel expansion strategy that is gaining momentum across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. As a part of this strategy, the company will continue to work on expanding the channel footprint in India through an industry-specific approach and recruit partners who have specialised domain knowledge in sectors such as manufacturing announced the press release. Epicor

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ANISH KANARAN,

plans to recruit 30 partners in India over the next two years. “In EMEA, we have already recruited over 25 new partners so

far -- four of these are from India and we are looking at increasing this number exponentially,” said Anish Kanaran, Channel Director, Epicor (Middle East, Africa and India). “Expanding the partner program allows us to deliver enhanced solutions. We invest heavily in making sure our partners have strong technical expertise, in-depth knowledge and a capable team. It’s also essential that our global solutions fit their products and services line-up, making the relationship an ideal match and creating a win-win situation for our customers.” As an Epicor channel partner

Orient Technologies will offer the next-generation Epicor enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution in India. It joins a list of new Epicor partners such as Daksha, Atna and RheinBrucke. “We are confident that our partnership with Epicor will add value to our service offering and benefit our clients,” said Satish Gaonkar, CEO for Orient Technologies India Pvt Ltd. “Our core focus aligns perfectly with the Epicor nextgeneration solutions and we believe that their increased focus on the Indian market brings much-awaited variety and competitiveness for the midmarket ERP segment.”

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CHANNEL STREET

IN PUBLIC

“In the absence of any government orders this quarter, the Indian PC market performed dismally.” VISHAL TRIPATHI, PRINCIPAL RESEARCH ANALYST AT GARTNER.”

SIR SPEEDY PLANS EXPANSION Sir Speedy India has entered into an agreement

CA Named a Leader CA Technologies is named a “Leader” in “The Forrester Wave: Service Virtualization and Testing Solutions, Q1 2014.” Forrester analysts evaluated multiple solutions from service virtualization and testing (SVT) vendors against 15 criteria to help application development and testing professionals select the right SVT solution. In this evaluation, CA Technologies received the top score in Scalability, and tied for the highest score in Global Presence and Installed Base when compared to other vendors. The company also received the top score for its current offering – CA LISA 7.1 in Developer/Tester Tools and Productivity, Simulation accuracy, Integration with DevOps and the highest among evaluated in Scal-

SECONDS

ability. In the strategy category, the company received the highest score possible for product roadmap, ability to execute and strategic enablement. According to the report, “CA focuses on DevOps. CA LISA has the strongest SVT product in our evaluation, making it ideal for organizations with a comprehensive SVT enterprise strategy.” Forrester evaluated vendor solutions against 15 criteria. To qualify for inclusion in the report, vendors had to meet the following conditions: Features to develop stubs to simulate real APIs and service behavior for testing. Market presence, strong growth momentum, and referenceable customers.

with Xerox India to drive strategic initiatives in the Indian market. The partnership will enable Sir Speedy to build up its India strategy and expand its footprint in the country by leveraging Xerox’s indomitable strengths in technology and pan India reach. Xerox has been globally associated with Sir Speedy since 30 years and helped them meet printing demands in the most efficient and cost controlled manner. Chandrajit Narra, MD, Sir Speedy India said, “We have seen success in our business and this has prompted us to look at further expansion in India. We are continually expanding the products and services that we provide in order to meet not only the changes that are taking place in the market, but more importantly, respond quickly to the changing demands of our customers and prospects.” BLUE STAR REVENUE RECORDS 44 PERCENT INCREASE IN Q3-FY13 Blue Star Infotech Limited has announced a 44% increase in consolidated total operating income at

D-LINK IP CAMERAS ARE NOW UL CERTIFIED

Rs. 6,833 Lakh for the quarter ended December

D-Link has announced that all its Dome and Box Camera are now UL (Underwriters Laboratories Inc.) certified. The company said that UL certification stands testimony to D-Link’s commitment towards offering highest standard of products or solution to meet the customer network demand. Sanjay Sehgal, VP (Sales), D-Link (India) Limited, said, “As an organization we have always laid high emphasis on quality & innovation. Over the years D-Link has built technology that has effectively contributed towards a safe & secure network for individual or organization. Now with D-Link cameras being UL certified only validates our efforts & commitment in offering world-class product or solution.” He added, “D-Link Dome and Box IP cameras are now UL certified. The UL mark and certificate enhances the trust in our product and the value of our brand globally. UL certifies, validates, tests, inspects, audits, advises and trains.”

quarter last year.

31, 2013, compared to Rs. 4,736 Lakh for the same The profit after tax for the quarter grew to Rs. 352 Lakhs compared to Rs. 214 Lakhs for the same period last year, a growth of 65%. YTD profit after tax is Rs. 1,065 Lakhs as against Rs. 438 Lakhs last year, marking a growth of 143%. The revenue for the first nine months at Rs. 19,141 Lakhs has surpassed the entire twelve month revenue of last year Rs. 18,711 Lakhs. 3D PRINTING WILL LEAD TO ETHICS AND REGULATION DEBATE The technology of 3D “bioprinting” (the medical application of 3D printing to produce living tissue

CYBEROAM AND SOPHOS COMPLEMENT EACH OTHER: HEMAL PATEL

and organs) is advancing so quickly that it will

In an official statement Cyberoam finally announced its acquisition by Sophos. Cyberoam “Cyberoam is a fine example that not all successful technology product innovation happens in Silicon Valley; it can happen anywhere, with the right drive and vision. We have been successful in building Cyberoam into a global IT product company that displays great product strength, team strength and unique innovation capabilities,” said Hemal Patel, MD & CEO, Cyberoam Technologies. “Cyberoam and Sophos complement each other in many ways in the fast-growing network security market.

printing of non-living medical devices such as

spark a major ethical debate on its use by 2016, according to Gartner Inc. At the same time, 3D prosthetic limbs, combined with a burgeoning population and insufficient levels of healthcare in emerging markets, is likely to cause an explosion in demand for the technology by 2015. “3D bioprinting facilities with the ability to print human organs and tissue will advance far faster than general understanding and acceptance of

HEMAL PATEL, MD & CEO, CYBEROAM TECHNOLOGIES

the ramifications of this technology,” said Pete Basiliere, Research Director, Gartner.

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CHANNEL STREET

NComputing Named a Major Player NComputing has declared that it has been named a “major player” in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Client Virtualization 2013 Vendor Analysis. The report highlights NComputing’s continued momentum and key strengths, including its ability to provide “simplified end-to-end virtual user session solution at a low cost, which has bred success in the midmarket and small enterprise.” The report highlights NComputing’s vSpace virtualization platform, a simple, powerful and affordable desktop and application virtualization platform that allows organizations to take full advantage of the benefits of desktop virtualization, but without the high cost and complexity of

associated with traditional desktop virtualization solutions. NComputing is also noted for its successful evolution from “a device-centric company” to a “software company with a client virtualization platform purpose built for simplicity, low cost, and minimal IT resources.” The report also states the company plans to release a unified workspace-as-a-service solution that “leverages NComputing’s existing vSpace technology and will enable secure access to any Windows, Linux, Web, SaaS application, and any on-premise or cloud content from any device.”

SYMANTEC ENABLES DATACENTERS Symantec has launched a new version of its Storage Foundation software, enabling data centers to leverage Solid State Drives (SSDs) in ways that could allow customers to access mission critical data and applications, 400 percent faster than traditional Storage Area Networks (SANs). Storage Foundation 6.1 functionalities and benefits include vendor-agnostic intuitive caching layer, enabled by Symantec’s SmartIO technology and Flexible Storage Sharing (FSS) technology. SmartIO detects critical application workloads and caches only the hot data on local SSDs, which could result in up to 400 percent improved performance over traditional secondary storage.

KASPERSKY LAB LEADS FOR THE 3RD YEAR Kaspersky Lab has announced that it has been named as “Leader” in the Gartner 2014 Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Protection Platforms for the third year in a row. Kaspersky Lab believes that this latest Gartner report honor once again confirms the company’s status as a top provider of endpoint protection solutions. The Magic Quadrant categorizes the included vendors of the research into four groups: “Leaders”, “Challengers”, “Visionaries” and “Niche Players”. “Leaders” demonstrate balanced progress and effort in the execution and vision categories. Their capabilities in advanced malware protection, data protection and/or management features raise the competitive bar for all products on the market, and they are shaping the course of the industry. Kaspersky Lab was included in this “Leaders” group for the third consecutive year based on these criteria.

CYBERARK EARNS LEADERSHIP POSITION IN PRIVILEGED ACCOUNT SECURITY CyberArk was named the overall market leader in Privileged Account Security in a new report issued by leading analyst firm KuppingerCole. In the report, “Privilege Management Leadership Compass,” the independent analyst firm cited that CyberArk earned the Overall Leadership position over the other 11 vendors analysed due to a combination of market, product, and innovation leadership, and that it’s the “one to beat in Privilege Management.” The KuppingerCole “Privilege Management Leadership Compass” closely analysed the market reach, product capabilities and innovation of 12 vendors in the Privileged Account Security Market. Due to increasing cyber attacks originating both from inside and outside of the enterprise that frequently use stolen privileged and administrative credentials, the report states that organisations should “expect further significant growth in the market segment for Privilege Management.” With more businesses requiring privileged management to secure privileged access across multiple environments (cloud, mobile, social), the KuppingerCole Leadership Compass provides businesses with an overview of the leading vendors in the market segment.

REDINGTON AND IVALUE TO OFFER HITACHI CLOUD SERVICES PROGRAM Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) has announced that Redington and iValue will now offer the Hitachi Cloud Services Connection program (HCSC) to enterprises in India. This program is a public cloud offering built on HDS cloud infrastructure and solutions and managed by HDS for partners to resell.

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Built on proven Hitachi platforms and managed by HDS, partners can rebrand and resell cloud services while allowing their brand to be associated with a well-known, information solutions player. Yogesh Sawant, director (partner sales and field alliance organization, India), Hitachi Data Systems, said,

“HCSC goes well beyond today’s cloud service by offering customers the experience, knowledge, solutions and enterprise-class features in one package, using an ITIL-certified, low latency, and local data center architecture with strong support.” Sriram, CEO, iValue, said, “We are seeing increased adoption of

cloud services across the industry and by partnering with Hitachi Data Systems we have launched a cloud service that combines Hitachi Data Systems facilities, infrastructure and service management with our sales, marketing, reseller and ISV recruitment to help our customers with their business growth.”

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CHANNEL STREET

NetApp Unveils R&D Center NetApp broke ground on a world-class research and development (R&D) facility at Mahadevapura, in Bangalore, India. The nearly one million square foot facility will offer world-class working, collaboration, and recreational spaces to foster continued innovation and cross-functional collaboration. Consistent with NetApp facilities around the world, the new research and development center will exceed rigorous global environmental and

NETAPP SENIOR LEADERSHIP

safety standards. Spread over 15 acres, the new facility will include a

highly efficient, 25,000 square foot data center to support global development and business operations. The facility is scheduled for completion in late 2015. Anil Valluri, President (India and SAARC Operations), said, “This new world-class facility will provide the convergence of our talent under one roof and underlines our commitment to push the boundaries of technology to help our customers’ deploy our solutions that deliver better business outcomes.”

WEB CLIPS CA RE-JIGS TOP MANAGEMENT CA Technologies has announced executive and organizational changes. After a 20 year career at CA, George Fischer, executive vice president and group executive of Worldwide Sales and Services, will be leaving the company. Throughout his time at CA, he held a number of senior positions, always focused on advancing the business and serving customers. “I want to thank George for his many contributions over the last two decades, as well as for his partnership over the past year as we worked to re-tool the sales organization for the future,” said Michael Gregoire, CEO, CA Technologies. RISE IN GLOBAL ADOPTION OF HCM SOLUTIONS

INTEGREON SHIFTS TO NEW CENTER IN NOIDA

SuccessFactors, an SAP AG company and

Integreon, a leading global provider of integrated legal, document, research and business support solutions has announced its move to a new delivery centre in Noida. The centre features 400 workstations, and will enable Integreon to better provide clients with its service offerings. Increased demand for Integreon’s range of value-add outsourcing services led to a 35% jump in Integreon’s overall India headcount in 2013. Addressing Integreon’s need for additional, more functional space, the new centre doubles Integreon’s capacity in the Noida (NCR) region. The company has already recruited more than 250 new associates to fill these seats, primarily for the company’s legal and research functions. Noida will also remain the global hub for clients of Grail Research, the research division of Integreon. Finally, the new facility will provide continued opportunity for expanding the company’s successful document services and business support services offerings.

software has announced a series of global

market-leading provider of cloud-based HCM customer wins across various industries, including Danone, Live Nation and MillerCoors. With its cloud-based HCM software, the company allows savvy companies to go beyond traditional human capital management (HCM) applications that enable them to engage their workforce in new and innovative ways that drive business transformation. SEAGATE REPORTS REVENUE OF $3.53 BILLION IN Q2 2014 Seagate Technology has reported financial results for the second quarter of fiscal year 2014 ended

MOVEMENTS PTC has appointed SUBASH NAMBIAR as Vice President and Country Manager for India. Emerson Network Power has appointed DR. A S PRASAD the as the general manager for the Indian product and marketing group. CA Technologies has appointed ALYSSA FITZPATRICK as senior vice president, Global Partners and Alliances. Yahoo has appointed GURMIT SINGH as Managing Director for Yahoo India. He will oversee Yahoo’s business in India, responsible for its growth in the country.

December 27, 2013. During the second quarter,

NUMBER GAME

Organizationswill Use Biometric Authentication for Mobile Devices by 2016 spending of $3.7 trillion.

the company reported revenue of $3.53 billion, gross margin of 28.0%, net income of $428 million and diluted earnings per share of $1.24. On a non-GAAP basis, which excludes the net impact of certain items, Seagate reported gross margin of 28.5%, net income of $455 million and diluted earnings per share of $1.32. *ASTTECS EXPANDS ZIMBABWE FOOTPRINT GreenDust *astTECS has appointed Zimbabwebased Adelrox Pvt T/A Etel Business Solutions as an enterprise partner, forming part of its strategy to leverage its skills base across the African continent. Said, Binish VJ, International Business Manager, *astTECS. “Zimbabwe is full of opportunities and we are seeing a significant growth amongst customers in the enterprise and SMB continuity space.”

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CHANNEL STREET

Cloud Adoption Fuelling IBM PureSystems’ Growth As organizations look to consolidate their existing data centers and shift more of their workloads to the cloud, IBM announced that this trend has helped fuel the growing momentum for the IBM PureSystems family of expert integrated systems, which have now shipped more than 10,000 units through the 4th Quarter of 2013. Another aspect of this trend is that as more organizations embrace cloud computing, they are looking to Managed Service Providers (MSPs) to help them quickly develop and deploy cloud based services in a more secure and economical way. These MSPs – many in key regions such as India, Brazil and China - are increasingly turning to IBM PureSystems over other vendors’ offerings in order to transform their data centers and provide the IT infrastructure that meets the needs of their clients.

ABC Capital, one of the largest financial companies in Mexico, faced a difficult server consolidation project. After considering other vendors including HP, Dell and Oracle, ABC Capital chose to consolidate its entire IT infrastructure onto IBM PureFlex. “In order to become more competitive in the market, ABC Capital was looking to build an infrastructure that could support the mobile technology and social network requirements of our customers,” said Sergio Mendoza Alvarez, Director of Technology for ABC Capital. “The integration of our platforms using IBM PureFlex will allow us to meet these goals and reduce the migration time for our multicore systems, from two years to seven months.” The release further emphasized how For IBM Business Partners, PureSystems creates a new opportunity to help clients solve the complexity of enterprise IT, reduce costs and encourage innovation.

MICROSOFT POWER BI FOR OFFICE 365 IS NOW AVAILABLE Microsoft has announced the availability of Power BI for Office 365, its cloud-based business intelligence solution. Power BI for Office 365 spans cloud, productivity and business intelligence to give people new ways to work with data in the tools they already use, such as Excel and Office 365, announced the release. Besides, the company said that globally, organizations such as Conde Nast, Carnegie Mellon University and global advertising agency MediaCom are using Power BI for Office 365 to improve media brand performance, improve energy efficiency and assess ad campaign effectiveness.

FORTINET’S FORTIGUARD RECEIVED TOP HONORS Fortinet’s advanced threat protection (ATP) technology (FortiGuard) was named a Top Rated Product in AV-Comparatives’ December 2013 “Summary Report 2013.” The technology, which is used in the company’s network security (FortiGate) and endpoint solution (FortiClient), received a perfect three out of three stars for Proactive Catch Rate, Anti-Phishing, File Detection, Malware Removal and Real World Test. Throughout the year, FortiClient was tested against 21 other antivirus clients from multiple countries for their ability to block malicious software and not block legitimate content. At the end of every year, AV-Comparatives releases a summary report to comment on the various antivirus products tested over the year and to highlight the high-scoring products of the various tests. This report looks at all the comparative tests of 2013. Comments and conclusions are based on the results shown in the various comparative test reports of AV-Comparatives, as well as from observations made during the tests. “Fortinet FortiClient is aimed at business users and so some aspects of the program, such as the manual, differ from those found in typical consumer programs,” said Andreas Clementi, CEO and Founder of AV-Comparatives. “Nonetheless, we found the program to be easy to use on a desktop PC, with important features easily accessible.”

HID Global Acquires IdenTrust HID Global has acquired IdenTrust, a provider of solutions for globally interoperable digital identities that can authenticate, encrypt, and create electronic signatures for every type of transaction or activity where proof of identity is essential. The acquisition significantly expands HID Global’s ability to

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provide some of the most secure identity solutions to governments, corporations, and financial institutions around the world. IdenTrust is the largest supplier of digital identities for the Department of Defense’s External Certification Authority (ECA) program and the General Services

Administration’s Access Certificates for Electronic Services (ACES) program, and it provides identity management solutions for over twenty of the world’s largest financial institutions. “The acquisition of IdenTrust complements the previous acquisition of ActivIdentity and

considerably strengthens our HID Global value proposition around secure authentication, providing us with a Trust Framework for issuing, authenticating and using digital identities based on open standards,” said Denis Hébert, President and CEO, HID Global.

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CHANNEL STREET

ORACLE BETS BIG ON CLOUD Sharing its strategy and roadmap for social, modern marketing, customer experience and human capital management on the cloud Oracle India hosted its second global event series, CloudWorld in New Delhi. Mark Hud, President, Oracle, in a live webcast re-inforced the company’s global strategy to offer choice and flexibility to customers with a comprehensive, modern and secure portfolio of cloud products and services. The event attended by senior Oracle executives, customers and partners discussed how they are driving business transformation using Oracle Cloud. According to Forbes, twothirds of Indian CIO’s are expecting the majority of their information technologies to run on the cloud by 2015. The company also introduced 10 new Oracle Cloud services for customers and partners and also launched Oracle Cloud Marketplace. Some of the clients who have embraced Oracle cloud include Airtel Learning, Jabong.com, Thomas Cook, Maruti Motors, Hero MotoCorp etc. verticals like e-commerce, healthcare, manufacturing, telecom, IT/ITeS, real estate, food and beverages, media and other industries are also using Oracle cloud. Sandeep Mathur, MD, Oracle India, said, “Cloud adoption has gone mainstream. We are already one of the leading cloud software companies in the world, and will be investing heavily in building this business in India.”

Dell Engineer’s Club Completes One Year Dell Engineer’s has completed one year since its inception last year. Over the last year Dell has gathered close to 116 memberships and has received widespread appreciation for its training efforts for channel partners. The Dell Engineer’s club, an initiative by Global Commercial Channels to reiterate Dell’s long-term commitment to channel partners to enable technical experts across the IT industry to network, exchange ideas, and share industry trends and best practices for channel partners in the country has been well-received for its training initiatives. In the coming year, Dell Engineer’s club will conduct improved training programs for technical theory and academic training by partnering with local universities. The club also plans to announce third-party certifications from companies such as Microsoft, Intel, VM Ware and SAP, Q&A council platform, Dell Engineer’s Blog and Dell Engineer’s club monthly newsletter

in the coming financial year. The formation of the Engineer’s club was a result of the feedback received from channel partners to enable them to better sell products and solutions of Dell. Dell has a long-term aim to not just enable its partners to become solutions provider, but also to be considered IT consultants for their end-customers. Speaking at the first year anniversary of the club, Ajay Kaul, Director & GM, said, “Today, India has the most number of memberships to the club after China and the initiative is a fitting testimony to our commitment of mutual profitability to channel partners. In the coming year our Engineer’s club members have a lot more to look forward to with improved theoretical training programs and other updates.” The 1st Anniversary Event of Engineer’s Club also awarded the winners of various activities part of the club.

RED HAT CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE 4.0 HITS THE MARKET Red Hat has updated its OpenStack-powered cloud infrastructure offering, Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure. Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure 4.0 gives enterprises an on-ramp to a highly scalable, public cloud-like infrastructure based on OpenStack while providing infrastructure and cost efficiency announced the press release. The new version of Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure features tighter integration between its virtualization, cloud and platform components, enabling users to reduce image inconsistencies and duplications by only creating a single set of virtual images. As an ongoing effort to meet growing business demands, enterprises are quickly realizing the benefits of a cloud infrastructure, in addition to leveraging their existing data center investments. Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure 4.0 provides organizations with a comprehensive Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform that bridges operations over existing traditional virtualization environments, as well as new private and public cloud resources.

BARRACUDA EXPANDS COPY FILE SYNC & SHARE SERVICE FOR BUSINESSES Barracuda Networks announced a number of new features, updates and integrations to its Copy file sync and share platform, continuing to simplify the way organizations collaborate and work, from anywhere or any device. “Today’s announcement is all about improving the customer

experience, and we are excited about reaching this next milestone with Copy,” said Rod Mathews, GM Storage at Barracuda. “Our customers have asked for a more secure and easier to use solution, and Barracuda is answering. The new functionality and our Copy integrations withSignNow, Mover,

Redbooth and Kloudlessare great examples of Barracuda and our partners putting that security and convenience right in our customers’ hands. This new release of Copy makes it cleaner, better and easier to store, access, sign and share files – from anywhere.” Copy was designed with both

individuals and companies in mind – providing a more robust and feature-rich option. The Copy service brings powerful capabilities and control to users and administrators to safely access, sign and share critical business data.

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CHANNEL STREET

Ciena and Ericsson to Develop Open SDN for Converged IP Ciena Corporation, the network specialist, and Ericsson have announced a strategic global agreement that includes packet-optical distribution, converged IP/optical joint development and distribution as well as an SDN collaboration framework. Ericsson will offer Ciena’s Converged Packet Optical portfolio, including the 6500 PacketOptical Platform and 5400 family, to deliver a broader set of infrastructure solutions as customers migrate to new converged network architectures. In addition, Ciena’s WaveLogic coherent optical technology will be integrated into Ericsson’s IP portfolio, creating a solution that allows customers to interoperate routers with Ciena’s photonics. The release said that Ciena and Ericsson are committed to accelerating the availability of open, programmable, software-defined networks. Under a collaboration framework, the companies will seek to leverage their combined resources and expertise with plans to jointly develop and

co-market service provider SDN technology. Jan Häglund, VP and Head (Product Area IP & Broadband), Ericsson, said, “The strategic agreement combines Ciena’s and Ericsson’s strengths in the development of an open SDN network for converged IP and Optical transport. The re-seller agreement will allow Ericsson to complement our 4th Generation IP portfolio with Ciena’s industry-leading packet-optical products. This will create an even stronger offering to our customers.” Gary Smith, President and CEO, Ciena, said, “Consistent with our OPn network architecture for intelligent network evolution, the industry is moving toward an ecosystem of more specialized players as the transformation accelerates toward open, programmable, multi-vendor networks that scale and adapt to network-level applications and services. Together, Ciena and Ericsson will bring best-in-class solutions to customers around the globe to better address the evolving requirements for software-driven, converged networks.”

PACNET PEN AVAILABILITY ANNOUNCED Pacnet Enabled Network (PEN) is available in data centers throughout Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, and now the United States in response to strong market demand. The company said that PEN is a fully automated software-defined network (SDN) providing a flexible and scalable service platform that is agile and lowers total cost of network operations. Jim Fagan, President (Managed Services), Pacnet, said, “The launch of PEN enables customers to build the high-performance and cloud-ready networks needed to overcome networking challenges prompted by the growth of cloud computing. With PEN, Pacnet brings cloud provisioning to the network, empowering on-demand, scalable bandwidth provisioning based on customers’ unique performance and QoS requirements.” According to Transparency Market Research’s new market report “Software Defined Networking (SDN) Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast, 2012 – 2018”, the global market for SDN is expected to reach US$3.52 billion by 2018, growing at a CAGR of 61.5 percent from 2012 to 2018.

DELTA ASSOCIATES WITH AGMATEL Sharing Delta Power Solutions has announced that Delta MCIS India tied up with Agmatel, wholesale provider of technology products and supply chain management services. As per the release, Delta Power Solutions, a global multinational with revenue in excess of 8 billion USD in 2013, with its corporate office at Gurgaon and branches all across the country, is a world-class provider of power management solutions, telecom, industrial automation, solar power, display solutions, networking and components. Incorporated in 1992, Agmatel India is an established Technology driven and Client focused organization offering high precision Test & Measurement and advanced IT Solutions. The right blend of resources- technical, financial and human- coupled with a keen understanding of global market trends make Agmatel a unique enterprise informed the company. Leveraging Agmatel’s distribution network across 28 cities and towns, the alliance is set to help Delta MCIS India increase its market share in the UPS market. Suhas Joshi, Director, Delta Power Solutions, said, “Delta is keen to extend its stronghold in the government segment, the company’s tie-up with Agmatel is aptly timed to capitalize on the expected surge in the demand from government projects.”

JUNIPER DELIVERS FIREFLY SECURITY SUITE Juniper Networks has unveiled Firefly Suite, a virtualized security portfolio that provides granular, dynamic and secure connectivity for the private and public cloud. The suite introduces Firefly Perimeter, a virtual version of the Juniper Networks SRX Series Services Gateway, as well as Junos

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Space Virtual Director, an application that automates the management and deployment of Firefly Perimeter. When combined with enhancements to Firefly Host, which provides hypervisor-based protection between virtual machines, the suite secures traffic within a virtualized data center as well as traffic to and from it.

IT and security professionals are continually looking to deliver the benefits of virtualization and cloud technologies without undermining security. This requires finding ways to provide robust and granular protection for virtual machines (VM) that can meet the specific security requirements of different workloads,

while also being deployed as quickly as a VM instance can be created. The Firefly Suite proactively protects virtual workloads and applications in real-time with security intelligence, automation and unified control over virtual firewalls, enabling organizations to securely leverage these new cloud computing technologies.

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GUEST TALK

VIRTUALIZATION

Why Channel Partners should focus on Virtualization in 2014 In 2014 organizations which are setting up new businesses or infrastructures shall adapt and implement virtualization set ups from initial stage rather than going for traditional IT set ups.

n W O R D S : V I J E N D E R YA D A V , D I R E C T O R A N D C T O , P R O PA L M S n PHOTO: SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

With ever evolving market conditions, technology needs of Indian Enterprise and corporate segment has been growing exponentially over last decade. In order to achieve balance between growing business needs and IT expenses Indian CTOs, CIOs and IT Heads took a smarter technology approach which is Virtualization. Decade back we started talking about Server virtualization and within a short span virtualization became a buzz word in technology space. With the evolution in virtualization techniques, cost of virtualization is expected to reduce in near future. This is expected to increase viability of projects and more rampant implementations across industry segments. Studies show that Desktop Virtualization can reduce TCO of IT Infrastructure by 40%. Smarter implementation using various technology options can reduce it even up to 60%. In adverse market conditions with ever reducing IT budgets CIOs and CTOs in India are looking at virtualization as the only and perfect solution for their current challenges. Acceptance to VDI technology in India has been higher compare to global standards also cause of conservative but foresighted nature of Indian

business houses. Indian Enterprises could foresee business benefits of virtualization very early and hence acceptance to technology has been much faster. There has been few initial failures couple of years back cause of lack of awareness, expertise, and comprehensive solutions; but now India is fully geared up with right set of technology solutions and skill sets for a great augmentation of virtualization in 2014. This technology shift from physical to virtual environment demands lot of domain expertise which opens new source of opportunities for channel community in India. The large National System Integrators in country like Wipro, HCL, IBM, Data Dimension, etc. has been working on building skill sets for virtualization over last few years. But that is not enough for a large country like India. Gone are the days of high volume hardware business. With growing competition even operating margins for channel partners in traditional licensing business has also been shrinking drastically over last few years. In these challenging circumstances, it is important that regional System Integrators and large Resellers also need to prepare themselves to adapt to changing

market needs. Virtualization is as on date a highly complex domain and it requires skilled resources for successful implementation. Therefore in case SI carries expertise in this domain then market is wide open. If focused on virtualization, partners can enjoy higher margins in product business as well as earn sizable services revenue which can increase their bottom lines exponentially. Right from project planning, solution designing, hardware sizing, project implementation, roll out and administration every stage requires skilled resources. Those channel partners who had been traditionally involved in server, storage and networking business over the years; for them getting into virtualization is not really a difficult task. Rather, it’s just another domain which they can easily master themselves in. Cause successful virtualization requires expertise and knowledge of all these domains. Therefore for all these SI and Resellers, Virtualization is a next big business opportunity. As on date virtualization is been practiced or implemented majorly in large enterprise and corporate sectors in India. In 2014, we are expecting Indian SME’s to take virtualization path in order to reduce their cost of IT and maintain

or increase business profitability during these volatile and highly competitive market circumstances. In 2014, Large Enterprises and corporate are expected to implement and roll out highly complex Desktop Virtualization and Storage Virtualization kind of projects; whereas SME’s are expected to provide large number of Server Virtualization and Application Virtualization opportunities. There is one more market area which is expected to contribute to virtualization business growth in India that is; new enterprise set ups. India has 48.8 million SMEs spread across country and with government initiatives and increasing numbers of SEZs and Industrial units; these numbers are expected to grow more than 5% in 2014. Channel partners can find sizable numbers of virtualization opportunities out of these as well. Over all, Virtualization is need of hour for both enterprises as well as channel community in 2014. Both have to gear up themselves for this revolution in technology. For channel community it is more important cause if not, they can be left behind or can even be eliminated in this competitive and evolving market. So; take a step forward and say yes to virtualization business. ë

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SOLUTION PROVIDERS

STORAGE SERVICES

22BY7 SOLUTIONS

VENKAT MURTHY

FOUNDER AND CEO, 22BY7 SOLUTIONS

22by7 is a niche player in information security, networking and storage solutions, with unique abilities and strengths in solution design and architecture, implementation and services. It is a Bangalore-based innovative venture founded by experienced, talented, and highly qualified group of IT professionals. The company’s aim is to provide IT solutions to enterprises in information security and storage domains while ensuring business continuity and ability to recover from unforeseen disasters quickly. Especially under the gambit of storage-led services portfolio, the company offers its customers a wide variety of services, including tech-refresh from OLD/legacy hardware to the latest and greatest; cross-platform data migration; setting up disaster recovery and backup; storage portfolio assessments; and performance assessments amongst others. The company follows an approach in which it keeps its customers’ problems as the top most priority and work towards resolving the same with utmost precision and professionalism. And since the company presents itself as a vendor agnostic system

integrator, this portrayal has been very well appreciated by its customers. In the enterprise storage services space, the company has partnerships with the leading players like EMC, NetApp, Hitachi Data Systems, and Symantec. Apparently, 22by7 is the preferred partner for most of the vendors in architecting and implementing enterprise storage solutions. In a short span of time, 22by7 has completed deployments in most of the top corporations and a couple of defense organizations in its client list. Some of the company’s major customers in storage services domain include the biggies like Mercedes Benz, TUV, Viteos, LG CNS, Yokogawa IA Technologies, Weir Minerals, and Zyme Solutions amongst the other host of clients. Meanwhile, the contribution of storage services in 22by7’s overall business is somewhere about 50%. Besides Bangalore, the other key focus region for the company is Hyderabad where a majority of the business comes from IT/ITeS sector followed by the hospitality segment. The other major contribution comes from the education vertical.

STORAGE SERVICES

LOCUZ ENTERPRISE SOLUTIONS

DURGANADH K VENKATA

SENIOR VP – BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT AND OPERATIONS, LOCUZ ENTERPRISE SOLUTIONS

Locuz is a trusted partner to several global corporations and institutions for managing their end-to-end IT infrastructure life cycle and business critical processes. The company is a leading IT organization focused on delivering smart, next-generation solutions that help enterprises overcome their business IT challenges. The benefits delivered by the unique and integrated solutions from Locuz include accelerated time-to-market for new products and services, maximized productivity and efficiency in business processes, shorter turn-around times for service delivery and lower total cost of ownership. In the enterprise storage services domain, the company mostly provides unified storage and storage consolidation services and solutions to its customers. The other areas of expertise also include deduplication solutions and storage replication for disaster recovery. Locuz helps build an efficient information infrastructure that lets the customers store, protect, optimize, and leverage their information from a simple e-mail solution to their production databases / ERP solutions.

Parallel storage (using parallel file systems) and storage virtualization are the other areas in storage where Locuz has done commendable work for its enterprise customers. Meanwhile, Flash storage is the emerging area of focus for the company. The company believes that the deep domain understanding, technical competence, and solution architecting skills are the key success factors for Locuz in the storage services business. The key industry verticals are IT/ITeS, healthcare, financial services, insurance, manufacturing, education, and research and defense. Large technology services firms such as Honeywell, AMD, Syniverse and research institutions such as ISRO, and IITs amongst others are a few of its customers in the Indian market. Apparently, Locuz has over 60 active clients to whom it has offered storage specific solutions. Currently, storage services and solutions typically contributes about 12-15% of the total turnover of the comapny, but given some large customer wins in the year 2013, it expects the storage business to be around 20% of the total business in FY’14.

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SOLUTION PROVIDERS

STORAGE SERVICES

COMPTON

KAMAL VAHI

DIRECTOR, COMPTON BUSINESS SOLUTIONS

Incorporated on April 1996, Compton started as a retail player wherein it was associated with brands like HP and HCL. After 2002, when this retail business started facing margin constraints, then the company shifted focus towards the SME segment. Here, it started dealing in solution areas. Since it was primarily a technology company, it got very well accepted in the market with a good base of customers. And starting 2008-09, Compton graduated from small ticket cases to large enterprises. Currently, the company is offering services and solutions to enterprise customers as well as corporate having requirement of 1000 plus boxes. The key focus verticals include government, PSUs, private sector, media and entertainment, retail, and manufacturing sectors amongst others. In the government / public sector, its clientele are the likes of TCIL, NHPC, DRDO, etc. Education sector is another focus vertical for Compton. One of the major implementation has been done for Jamia Milia Islamia University. On the

corporate/private sector side, the company has done deployments for Adlabs, Central Communication, Dainik Bhaskar group, United Colors of Benetton, and others. In total, the company has 35-40 odd focused customers in the Indian market. Almost, 80% of the companyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s business comes from these focused customers. Compton started gearing up for storage services domain after realizing that the requirements for storage is growing every day. This is one area where the company doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have to look for new customers, as the existing customers always came for renewals. With the management of storage also becoming a challenge, and building up resources around storage is also expensive for a single customer, the company is able to share resources for multiple customers and thus providing cost benefits to them. Compton has forged partnerships with leading storage players like EMC, HP, Dell, and Hitachi Data Systems. The storage services currently contribute to about 30-35% in the overall business.

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SOLUTION PROVIDERS

STORAGE SERVICES

MINDLANCE INDIA

KAMAL SHARMA

GROUP CIO & ITIM SBU HEAD, MINDLANCE INDIA

A global IT Infrastructure service provider, Mindlance has been awarded by Deloitte as one of the 50 fastest growing private companies in the US. IT infrastructure management is a practice on which the company is planning to focus, be it managing, optimizing and automating IT operation for the clients spread across the globe. Mindlance helps its clients to get most out of their existing IT infrastructure by delivering them, the solutions which are focused on reducing operational costs and maximizing the availability and performance of their IT infrastructure. After entering the Indian market in 2010, the company has been consistently doing well in terms of customer acquisition, retention, growth and capturing pan-India services, the latter being one of the key areas that it excels in. Furthermore, managed services and Microsoft portfolio have given it a wider platform to serve customers. At Mindlance, managed storage service offers the complete management and monitoring of enterprise storage infrastructure from availability to troubleshooting. Under storage management and

monitoring as well as business continuity services (where it is focusing on data replication services), the company provides support for multi vendor storage technologies like EMC, HP, Hitachi, IBM, and Cisco; support for multi storage technologies like SAN, DAS, and NAS; and delivery using either full at-site delivery mode or using hybrid remote infrastructure management delivery mode. As part of storage management, the company further provides storage administration, monitoring and reporting. On the other hand, for data replication services, it provides support to well known replication software like VERITAS, HP, and IBM. Meanwhile, the company storage clients majorly in industry verticals like IT/ITeS, manufacturing, and BFSI segments. Recently, it has assisted one of the top automobile firms along with a couple of manufacturing clients to design and manage the storage solution catering to multi-location offices. Currently, storage services contribute close to 8% in its total business done in India, which the company wants to take it to double digit in the coming years.

STORAGE SERVICES

QUANTM

PAWAN KHURANA CEO, QUANTM

QUANTM is a 22 year-old leading system integrator in IT domain with its presence across India with offices in all metros and its global presence in UAE and USA. In addition to its strong SI practice, QUANTM today offers strategic outsourcing, managed services, business continuity solutions, and a host of other services to the enterprise customers. It also focuses on enterprise cloud solutions through its brand RAINQLOUD and business applications through its group company, TEAMWORQ, which it acquired in 2011. In the enterprise storage services domain, the company has gained significant business as it is keenly focusing on Flash-based technologies, Software-Defined Storage, Unified Storage, Managed DR solution, and converged infrastructure. It is having its own data center which is first green and ANSI / TIA-942 certified, Tier III data center in North India, which is in Seismic Zone 2. The solution provider also believes that the data will continue to increase and this trend is not going to stop. As the problem is increasing day by day, the solutions to stay ahead are also getting advanced.

The compelling reason behind its success in the storage services space is that QUANTM has certified and experienced team to deliver storage solutions. The company is one of the few system integrators in the country who is a Storage Specialty Partner with IBM and HP. In fact, it has partnerships with the top storage vendors â&#x20AC;&#x201C; be it IBM, EMC, NetApp, or HP. As enterprise storage market is growing, the services in this domain contribute almost 30% of the companyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s overall business. The key industry verticals where QUANTM has done major deployments include automobile, banking and insurance, government, FMCG, construction, entertainment, and hospitality. Looking at the current market scenario, the company is following a unique approach to address the increasing customer requirements. It believes that there are many customers in the market who are looking for DR as a solution; however, they do not want to make capex investment. In order to cater to this clientele, QUATNM is now offering its customer solutions on opex model.

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ASSOCIATION

CHANNEL ASSOCIATION

“IAMCP India West: Reviving its Lost Glory” The International Association of Microsoft Channel Partners (IAMCP) India West chapter provided huge impetus to networking of Microsoft partners that was much needed after the elections held late last year. n WORDS: NIVEDAN PRAKASH <(NIVEDAN@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM)>

ATTENDEES AT IAMCP INDIA WEST CHAPTER EVENT, MUMBAI

pparently, a few of the partners came all the way from Pune to attend this meet, which has been organized for the first time post the formation of the new as well as first elected board. This new board was elected on September 27 last year at a cordial ceremony held at Microsoft office in Mumbai. The event started with a block-buster demonstration of SharePoint 365 from the most renowned expert on Microsoft Technologies, Dr. Nitin Paranjpe. Fun-filled and interspersed with his trademark humor, Dr. Paranjpe not only

demonstrated the product and features but also ran examples of how members can pitch and demonstrate benefits to their customers delivering competitive edge and sharpening their own pre-sales pitch. Post Dr. Paranjpe’s session, most of the veteran Microsoft evangelists confessed that they felt intimidated by the fact that despite working on Microsoft Technologies, they did not know 10% of what Dr. Paranjpe demonstrated in those 45 minutes. As Microsoft Dynamics, OEM and Cloud team

went around meeting members and dignitaries introducing themselves and assuring members a whole-hearted assistance and support, Mukesh Thumar, President of IAMCP India West chapter chose this occasion to announce the association’s vision for 2014 and beyond. “What is most important for an association that is focused on Microsoft technologies should be unflinching support and priority programs for members of IAMCP, and Microsoft will surely extend competitive benefits to IAMCP,” said Thumar. Adding further, Pravin Rege, Vice President of IAMCP India West chapter, stated, “It is now time for us to let Microsoft know that we need to be recognized and offered preferential treatment as IAMCP members. And I am sure this new team will make that happen. After the appointment of the new board members, this is the first even we are organizing. We are extremely delighted that partners have turned out in great numbers and this is surely a matter of pride for us.” Kartik Shah of Bitscape and also the Treasurer of the association went all out to point out ways and means for IAMCP members to make the most of IAMCP membership and Microsoft platform. He cleared the confusion on Worldwide Partner Summit and how members can win Microsoft laurels and most importantly expand their business practice worldwide with the help of IAMCP's thriving Microsoft partner community. While the august gathering congratulated Vimesh Avlani , Secretary of the association, on winning CIO Choice award for ‘emerging infrastructure management company’, the kind of effort put in by the new team in organizing the event while delivering the unprecedented quality also re-energized members who were disappointed with the way IAMCP was functioning for past couple of years. As an association body that is focused on Microsoft technologies and solutions built around them and the fact that it is the largest partner community worldwide, the new team of IAMCP has started well and raised expectations of members and partners. As members bonded together over dinner, IAMCP India (W) has certainly well begun. Meanwhile, the IAMCP India West chapter is currently having more than 50 members from Mumbai, Pune, and Ahmedabad. Managed by energetic board of directors, the India West chapter conducts regular members meetings, presents opportunities to the members to network, offers exclusive trainings, in-depth technology updates, and also endeavors to help partners grow their business. ë

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CHANNEL CHAMPIONS

terms of registration. Apparently, we have to close to 3000 registrations on this portal and that too in a short time frame. These are all either system integrators or value added resellers who engage on a regular basis. This is one noticeable milestone for us. I have also learnt in this journey that it is the relationship with the partners that helps you do the business successfully. All other aspects like product, pricing, marketing activities, etc. – come at the secondary level. Understanding the partners as well as customer requirements and giving them the comfort works any business. I believe that there has to be handholding experience with all the partners along with continuous engagement rather than case to case basis.

D-LINK

CHANGES IN ECOSYSTEM

SANJAY SEHGAL

VICE PRESIDENT – ENTERPRISE BUSINESS, D-LINK (INDIA)

CONTRIBUTION IN CHANNEL GROWTH The whole idea of forming the focused enterprise business primarily was to take solutions to the customers through channel partners. We have been able to segment the business and contribute to the overall growth of D-Link in terms of revenue in the last couple of years. When we started our contribution in the overall pie was about 10% but now if you see, this contribution has increased to around 30-35%. And if you look at the channel business, the biggest contribution has come from our side wherein partners feel at ease when they do business with us. Today, the interaction level with the partner community has not only increased immensely but improved as well. In this process, we also take care of their profitably. Bottom-line is what they work for and I can very confidently say that we have taken very good care of this aspect of channel business.

CHANNEL INITIATIVES We have brought a lot of schemes and rebates along with giving deal discounts in various projects. Here, we not only give standard discounts to partners when they close a deal but also keep a long term association with them and this helps in increasing their profitability.

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We followed a strategy wherein we went to all those partners who have been associated with D-Link for a very long period of time and gain back their confidence and in this process, create a long term approach. D-Link has been in the market since 1993 and that’s where we instilled the confidence amongst the channel partners. We told them not to look at short term goals of closing certain deals but rather focus on having a long term association with us. Today, more than the vendors, customers have more faith on the partner who is offering his services. Earlier, we were reactive in our approach but now the scenario has changed and 65-70% of the partners work on a proactive case. What I mean to say that partners have started pitching about D-Link products even before they are out in the market.

MAJOR TAKEAWAYS One of the major takeaways is the partner re-engagement which was our biggest high. And we have been very successful in this approach, as we put ourselves in the partners’ shoes and understand their pain areas and requirements in any project. Moreover, the training programs that we rolled out for these partners have started yielding good results for the organization. And the launch of our partner portal, dpartner, has seen tremendous response from the whole community in

We all know that change is inevitable and one has to continuously evolve with the time. The areas where we would like bring changes include giving more training to the partners in order to enhance their skill sets. With the advent of modern day technologies and knowledge that customers have today, they are certainly a step ahead of partners. But we believe that it should be the other way round, wherein partners should be ahead of customers. Here, the continuous process of learning will help them to be ahead and that’s why we want increase the level of training programs. Amongst other things, we also want to give them better service and experience as such by continuously improving the service level.

VISION FOR 2014 Our vision is to continue working on the ‘5S Solution’ philosophy. The only missing element was the storage aspect but now we have made significant investments in terms of manpower and products in the storage segment. And by the end of this quarter, the market will see us delivery products in storage category as well. With this, the ‘5S Solution’ basket will be completely filled. One the other hand, we will not only increase the numbers in channel but also educate them on new technologies.

MESSAGE TO PARTNER COMMUNITY At the outset, I would first like to thank all my partners who helped us to attain this position where we are today. I just want to say that keep on continuously evolving in terms of enhancing the skill-sets and ask for more profitability from the organization. Lastly, always look from the long term view. ë

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collaborate with other partners in the EMC ecosystem, and deliver to customers whatever they need from the EMC federation. Through the newly designed EMC Business Partner Program, we are aiming to create a program that Supports both EMC’s current strategic focus on IT Transformation in Cloud, Big Data, and Trust, as well as the emerging focus on the “Third Platform”; is aligned to our value proposition, particularly our “federation of businesses” model, so that partners can easily position solutions reaching across all EMC businesses; provides all of our core partner programs with a common structure and tiers; and is flexible and adaptable to rapidly evolving businesses, particularly as the lines between different types of partners blur, and they increasingly go to market with “hybrid models.”

EMC

VISION FOR 2014

PRAVEEN SAHAI

VICE PRESIDENT – CHANNELS, INDIA & SAARC, EMC

CONTRIBUTION IN CHANNEL GROWTH I have focused on two key areas in the past year. These have been around structuring the channel better for them to address key emerging opportunities of Cloud and Big Data and gearing/ enabling them through EMC. Several initiatives are underway and some will be rolled out in 2014 like the new EMC Business Partner Program.

CHANNEL INITIATIVES Since partner and customer satisfaction are key for us as an organization, we invested in increasing our engagement in it. For starters, we set up an India Customer Advisory Board comprising of important customers to provide insight on their needs, in addition to ongoing Partner advisory board meetings twice a year. Further, to take this new portfolio to market along with our partners, EMC also launched the Transformation Coach initiative, which is a mobile lounge which showcases solutions and demos focused on Cloud, Big Data and Trust and travel to key customers in India, bringing them closer to EMC’s world-class technology leadership.

MAJOR TAKEAWAYS 2013 has been a tough year for

business in India in general and the partner ecosystem has also been impacted by it. EMC had a strong year in 2013 with 45% growth in channel only segment plus 130% growth on distribution business, and now partners are looking at us to help them grow further to protect them against the broader weak business environment that exists.

CHANGES IN ECOSYSTEM EMC India keeps a sharp focus for all its partners based on a 3P philosophy – Profitability, Pipeline and Performance. It understands that the channel community is the key to build customer confidence. For EMC, channel enablement is the key to success and we work towards developing best practices and efficient models to create a competent channel workforce. We are committed towards empowering the channel with industry leading innovation in terms of product portfolio and providing them the necessary support and monetization opportunities to be able to address Indian enterprise needs around Cloud, Big Data and Security. To help them achieve this we are making some big changes to the channel program in 2014. We are also currently in the process of building the next - generation EMC Business Partner Program aimed to make it easier for partners to leverage the power of EMC’s federation of businesses,

2014 will be an interesting year for enterprises as they move along in their IT and business transformation journeys leveraging the power of Cloud and Big Data. We conducted a CIO Survey at the end of 2013 on State of Big Data adoption amongst 309 CIOs in India and the results were fascinating. A whopping 91 percent of Indian businesses agreed that Big Data will lead to better decision making and close to 70 percent believed that it will be a key factor in determining winners and losers in their industry. This presents a massive opportunity to the partner ecosystem and we are putting in place unparalleled measures to help them realize that. We are focused on addressing the CIO needs and support our partners in this IT transformation journey. In line with that we are designing the next-generation EMC Business Partner Program which will provide all our core partner programs with a common structure and tiers and will be adaptable to the rapidly evolving business. Similarly, we are also delivering technology innovation in Software defined Data Center and Software defined Storage that will enable them to tailor solutions for customers. The technology edge will essentially translate into additional pipeline for our partners in newer areas with highly profitable growth.

MESSAGE TO PARTNER COMMUNITY Invest in skilling themselves in new technology innovations like software defined data center, software defined storage and Big Data use case scenarios. Retain talent in the long term. And focus with EMC on profitable growth and build a strong pipeline with a clear technology edge. ë

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program with an all-in-one service offering for specific workloads and IT services.

MAJOR TAKEAWAYS

HDS

YOGESH SAWANT

DIRECTOR – PARTNER SALES AND FIELD ALLIANCE ORGANIZATION, INDIA, HITACHI DATA SYSTEMS

CONTRIBUTION IN CHANNEL GROWTH While it is a known fact that Hitachi Data Systems is a 100% channels organization, there was a market perception that HDS is only dominant in the enterprise accounts. It was further perceived that HDS’s solutions are only relevant only in certain verticals like BFSI and IT/ITeS. But last year, we forayed into government space as well by bagging a contract from NIC in partnership with HCL Technologies. System Integrators help us address the opportunities in the government space because this space requires a lot of system integration skills. VADs help us distribute in the wider market of the country and tier II partners take our technology and solutions deeper into the market and help us spread our reach. As we are a technology company, we have to ensure that not only our employees talk technology but also the partners are at the same intellect level. Otherwise, we will not be able to articulate the HDS story. We do a lot of enablement in terms of sales certification, scholarship workshops for pre-sales training, and post-sales training and certification.

CHANNEL INITIATIVES As a channel leader, we undertook

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many initiatives like engaging with new partners and making our play relevant in newer verticals like government and manufacturing. Today in those verticals, as a result of the consistent efforts of our partners and innovative wins, needless to mention, we are a force to reckon with. We also rolled out our award winning global TrueNorth Partner Program in India efficiently. The program provided our partners with exclusive access to the most innovative advanced business data solutions in the industry. We churned out promo bundles which helped our partner community with a faster response to their customer’s needs and helped them and us reach out to newer customer segments. In depth leverage of HDS the global alliances with VMware / Microsoft /SAP /Citrix / CommVault and Brocade. There were bundle solutions with specific alliances that the partner community took to market thereby leveraging the power our alliance partnership and HDS technology. We conducted regular training programs to enable our partner community to deliver better services to customers and are also investing in the form of scholarship programs, technology refresh courses, new products and solutions. We also rolled out many new programs especially services specialization programs (SSPs). We also built Hitachi Cloud Services Connection (HCSC) which is a cloud services partner

Our partner strategy is certainly paying off. We have seen significant growth of partners in our ecosystem. These new, as well as existing partners have brought in significant new customers to HDS. We will continue to enhance our partner program which will drive partner loyalties. We need to be more relevant with the customer to scale the partner motivation. Something that we have consciously working on with the partner and alliance community. Crédible leads encourage partner participation. HDS has undertaken numerous initiatives around for this and one clear direction that HDS will continue to drive in the coming future.

CHANGES IN ECOSYSTEM We would not want to change anything in our ecosystem but keep on adding various infrastructures to keep growing with our partners. A partner network helps extend the value of all solutions with their skills in industries, applications, and data center infrastructures.

VISION FOR 2014 This year we will continue to achieve milestones on our strategic evolution into an information solutions company that helps customers innovate with information to make a difference in the world. Our new cloud strategy will enable our support enterprise customers across sectors in their cloud adoption as they move from the infrastructure to the content cloud with the Hitachi Content Platform and HCP Anywhere. We will continue to focus on our social innovation strategy in association with our parent company Hitachi Ltd.

MESSAGE TO PARTNER COMMUNITY Our partner community is truly the extended sales and services arm of HDS India. We have the relevant technology which will help you address your customer’s pain points and unearth new opportunities. Keep engaging and leveraging the tools and programs that we are offering. We are here to ensure that your business is profitable. We want to help you with greater, repeatable success, for your success will be the true reflection of HDS India’s growth. ë

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We have unveiled new programs, tools, resources and sales incentives to help partners embrace the transformation to the cloud and platforms and though we still have more work to do, I’m pleased with the progress we’ve made so far.

MAJOR TAKEAWAYS

SAP

PRIYADARSHI MOHAPATRA

VICE PRESIDENT- ECOSYSTEM, CHANNELS & GENERAL BUSINESS, SAP INDIA

CONTRIBUTION IN CHANNEL GROWTH The requirement of channel ecosystem, as an extension of sales, has increased since the time I have taken over this role. In last couple of years, we have almost doubled our partner landscape by adding new partners across newer categories like platforms, cloud, mobile, and analytics apart from expanding our footprints in traditional applications portfolio. Our partner network now extends across 60+ cities in the country and continues to show significant growth. Last year, SAP introduced a new distribution model and appointed our first distributor which will enhance our reach and penetration to tier II- III cities. We also launched the Partner Edge Program for application development towards end of the year. This has provided us the access to the ISVs in India for adoption of our platform solutions. I’m proud to have had the responsibility to build an organization and a culture that embraces change and thrives on shaping the future, rather than being shaped by it. Partners have become the bedrock of SAP business and our continued success.

CHANNEL INITIATIVES SAP has made a significant investment in its ecosystem and channel business in the

last year where we have added reasonably large number of senior members from our organization to lead the channel transformation. We now have five leaders managing the channel engagement via partner development (responsible for partner recruitment, on-boarding, enablement, revenue activation and partner program management), strategic alliances, strategic initiatives, distribution and reselling channel and each supported by a dedicated marketing team to provide channel partners the support, coverage and direct touch with SAP. We have also added partners in platform, analytics and enhanced our reach through ISV, OEM and in the managed services space. SAP now has a big focus on cloud and we have added our capability in this category through partners and provided the flexibility to the customers to choose the business model based on their requirements. Channel enablement is one of the core aspects of our ecosystem relationship. We conduct these as a business through sales and technology enablement sessions and certification programs during the year. We have also done over 100 partner enablement sessions last year and incrementally added 20% new consultants to the SAP certified workforce through partners. In addition to these, SAP has initiated the co-innovation with partners and launched the Certified Rapid Deployment Solutions by industries created by partners.

For any company to grow its business, they need right partners –for both core products as well as new innovations. Partners not just provide an organization with reach – but they also considerably mitigate the risk of doing business with for the principal. However, partners have their own requirements, while the requirements vary from one partner to another, and it’s important for principals to understand these. For some it may be finance based while it will be people-centric for others. In order to build a strong partner ecosystem, it is vital for us to understand their individual requirements and build a partner strategy that is unique and tailor-made rather than a blanket partner plan.

CHANGES IN ECOSYSTEM I am extremely pleased with the current focus by the partners and the transformation journey they have embarked on with us. My only advice will be to keep the focus and be agile, enhance the skill sets proactively to be able to provide adequate and holistic coverage to the customers. This requires time, resource and patience in abundance. We are committed to make all our partners successful as our success is tied to their success.

VISION FOR 2014 Partners and principals need to recognize the changing landscape and customer demand. With evolution of mobility and cloud as strong choices for customers – the strategy is to reach the customer through partners need to be aligned with the same.

MESSAGE TO PARTNER COMMUNITY There is increased focus on modern IT (cloud, big data, insights, mobility and social) for better cost control and efficiency by customers and they are looking at you for solutions and being their trusted advisors. SAP has all the portfolio and delivery models that can cater to the customer needs profitably therefore keep the focus and enhance the skill sets to seize the opportunity of the next decade ë

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MAJOR TAKEAWAYS You need to keep on innovating as technology is evolving we have to evolve and stay tuned with it. Today market dynamic is changing rapidly and we need to be in pace with new requirements which is application driven.

CHANGES IN ECOSYSTEM

SMARTLINK

BIMAL RAJ

CEO, SMARTLINK NETWORK SYSTEMS

Nothing significant as today we are present in almost all the locations in India either directly or through our distributors or dealers. We have a strong distribution network of exclusive territory distributors, dealers, system integrators and resellers across the country and we have been working very closely with most of these partners since the past 2 decades. Now as e-commerce catching up, we will be creating our presence across all e-portals and will be creating a new channel for entering in LFRs as well.

VISION FOR 2014 CONTRIBUTION IN CHANNEL GROWTH In the last couple of years, our primary focus was to introduce an entire gamut of networking and lifestyle products and to reach out to our target audience across the country. Our focus was on quality and value added features of our products, which gave us an edge over our competitors. Despite launching the DIGISOL range in 2009, in a short span of time we are now visible and available across the country and are able to capture a good mind and market share. Some of the key initiatives taken include expansion of channel partners, initiatives towards channel, and product as well as geographic expansion.

CHANNEL INITIATIVES We have always been a channel driven company and our endeavor is to continuously improvise on our channel policies. Time and again we have been recognized by the channel community as one of the most channel friendly companies in India. We ensure healthy margins for the channels and also introduce new products with newer applications to increase the scope of growth for the channels. These new products and solutions enable the channel to value add and thus generate better profits from their customers.

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We have a major portion of our marketing funds for trainings and seminar which helps the channel to understand markets and be technically qualified for offering these solutions. We are enrolling more partners for our certification program which has been updated to include a lot of new technological innovations in the networking industry. We are supporting our partners with strong advertisement campaigns, retail branding and promotional material. Apart from this, we are conducting technical trainings, seminars, road shows and trade shows to keep them abreast with the latest technological trends in the market. We have been coming out with regular channel incentive programs wherein, we handsomely reward the partner community. Today, most of the DIGISOL partners realized that acquiring skill sets to handle new technologies and equipments is key factors for their future success and profitability and also create a differentiator in the enterprise market space. Therefore it will boldly help us to reach out to the new market segment with advance technology like SDN and put us in an absolutely leadership. To achieve this milestone our partner focus team have a lot of partner skill set development programs to provide customized, comprehensive and vendor neutral training programs running currently for our partners.

Active Products have been very much part of the company’s core competency right from day one. With in-depth knowledge of networking industry and well balanced resources, we have drawn up ambitious plans for the future. We have drawn up a road map that will focus on high potential verticals and the company will deploy significant resources to capture opportunities and make strategic investments to improve its competitiveness in the marketplace. The company is well positioned to now focus and further enhance its position in other existing businesses. DIGISOL – catering to the active networking space with wide range of networking products. DIGILITE - the motherboards, power-banks and other peripheral brand and DIGICARE – the one of a kind nationwide service support division. Newly launch tablets under DIGITAB, Smartlink also undertakes Electronic Manufacturing Services (EMS) at its state of the art facilities in Goa. Each of these businesses provides a robust platform for future growth.

MESSAGE TO PARTNER COMMUNITY We will advise our channels to stick to basics, up-sale in to your own customer base and yes, skill development among team members will be a differentiator. Also venturing in to technology areas like mobility and security and surveillance will be the need of the hour. ë

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partners generate new leads and opportunities. Moreover, we have continued to invest in large and medium scale demand generation programs and activities with our partners.

MAJOR TAKEAWAYS The pace of transformation in the market has picked up last year and we are seeing this change in the technology sector as an immense opportunity for growth for both us and our partners. It’s now time for our partners and us to leverage these opportunities to continue to make the right investments and grow alongside the industry.

CHANGES IN ECOSYSTEM

SYMANTEC

We are working on creating a true Value Added Distributor model which will help us scale up our business through distribution.

AMITABH JACOB

DIRECTOR – CHANNEL, INDIA & SAARC, SYMANTEC

CONTRIBUTION IN CHANNEL GROWTH Symantec is a channel-focused company and we strive to be seen as a partner of choice for our channel partners. We have strengthened our distribution network to help us build better capacity across both the information security and information management portfolios, as well as help us reach markets which are beyond the larger cities. We have, also invested heavily in helping our partners build their competency and skills and we are now looking at new/niche technology areas as well. At Symantec, partner profitability continues to remain a focus area and have taken the necessary steps to ensure that this objective is met. Currently, we are working on a new partner program for the next year, which will further look at this area in addition to helping partners further create value for their customers and build sustainable advantage. With this new initiative, I would emphasize upon rewarding partners for bringing us new business, rewarding partners for helping us grow our business, rewarding partners that are demonstrating the skills and capabilities around our solution set, and finally to reward partners for successful customer engagements. At this stage, our endeavor is also to enhance engagement with our customers and simplify the process of engagement. I am closely looking

at increasing our consistency when it comes to planning for partner profitability when engaging with Symantec as part of their go- to-market strategy. That is a transformation across our entire organization- to create a talent pool that is really passionate about the channel and really understands the value that the channel brings to the table. Ultimately we want to enable our distributors to build capabilities that will help them add value. With this, our objective is to achieve sustained profitable growth, higher than the market growth, by leveraging joint assets to deliver value to the customer.

CHANNEL INITIATIVES It is our constant endeavor to train and equip partners to be able to address each customer’s needs. In the last year, we introduced Backup appliances to our channel strategy last year and we have seen a lot of traction for the same. Besides this, we have made investments in increasing our partners’ competencies in terms of sales, presales and implementation. We also increased our distribution model to smaller cities through partner sign-ups and enablement. We are running our own internal sales boot camp, it’s important for our partners to get the same robust training that we are giving to our own people. We have also set up a demand generation engine (inside sales model) to support our

VISION FOR 2014 It is our goal to be seen as a partner of choice for our channel partners in India. Our strategy to achieve this is through offering industry leading solutions that help customers address their needs around information security and information management. While we do this, we will also continue to help our partners achieve high profitable growth as well as focus on high class solution enablement leading to superior and sustained customer and partner experience.

MESSAGE TO PARTNER COMMUNITY Our partners complement our technology with their reach and knowledge.In fact, a large part of our growth is based on the channel network and strength. We are changing the organization internally to be more passionate about the channel and driving more proactive and strategic investment and engagement and in order to help our channel partners succeed; and we will continue to provide them with industry leading solutions in the space of information security and information management. We believe our products and expertise will help our partners address the challenges they face in the market. We have ensured that our partners are provided with a superior and sustainable customer and partner experience, through simplified engagement. Our ultimate goal for our channel partners is to help them accelerate their profitability. It’s a very exciting time for us and it’s a very exciting time for the channel. We are very serious about growing our business through the channel. ë

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customer relationships as they will continue to see success even with any changes in the technology landscape. As partners deepen their VMware expertise, they benefit more, and so do their customers.

VISION FOR 2014

VMWARE

GANESAN ARUMUGAM

SENIOR DIRECTOR – PARTNERS & SMB SALES, VMWARE SOFTWARE

CONTRIBUTION IN CHANNEL GROWTH 2013 was an exciting year for us here in India. The channel team in the organization grew and we were able to put a lot of focus around building our partner ecosystem in a structured manner. We also focused on the development of our solution providers, system integrators, and OEM partners. Our relationships with our partners grew deeper and stronger and we ensured that VMware is one amongst the top 5 portfolios for every partner we engage with.

CHANNEL INITIATIVES We launched a new incentive scheme for our partners to increase focus in addressing the SMB market. As we recognize our partners for their solutions and competencies, we also undertook a number of partner enablement initiatives to help them develop new solutions and competencies.

MAJOR TAKEAWAYS The slowdown in the economy and a weakening rupee did impact the budgets of large enterprises this year. However, given the savings our products offer, we continued to see a strong demand for our offerings in India

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across segments. Business leaders recognize and expect IT to deliver much more ROI; they want the agility and flexibility to adapt to the dynamics of the marketplace while continuing to lower operating costs. The Indian market is still vastly untapped for us and this still remains an opportunity. We are putting our energies behind increasing the awareness and for our solutions and the benefits they deliver for the business. While we continue to see growth across all segments and sectors, the SMB segment and the emerging sectors such as the government & defense sectors will continue to be a key area of focus. Enterprises will continue to further extend the benefits of virtualization across their data centers.

CHANGES IN ECOSYSTEM Our partners are vital for our success – especially since our business is driven through them in India. Helping our partners grow their business is a priority for us and we create and run many programs to support this. Partners are encouraged to build competencies to differentiate themselves in the market; own the entire sales process with customers - this only benefits them as they will have more control over the sale. We will continue to focus on enabling them with the skills and know-how to sell our solutions; remain focused on cultivating strong

Over the next few months, we plan to ramp up our channel strategy around software-defined data centers (SDDC) as we are seeing good momentum around it. In 2014, we will be strongly focusing on the government and defense sectors In India, and will be working closely with our System Integrator partners and OEM partners. We are also aggressively pursuing the virtualization opportunity in the SMB segment and recently created a SMB unit in India to drive our channel-led go-to-market strategy and have added several new features to our partner rebate program. Earlier, we offered partner rebates on deals above $10,000, now we have lowered the threshold to deals as low as $6,000. We have also added incentives for new accounts signed-up by partners. VMware has also increased rebates for select products such as vSphere with Operations Management (SOM) from 10 percent to 15 percent. Another strategy we are adopting is to address more partners through our OEM relationships. To further strengthen VMware Virtual Service Provider program (VSPP), we have appointed Ingram Micro along with Kryptos for usagebased licensing business. The program has been uniquely designed to help service providers develop, promote and sell their cloud products, services and solutions.

MESSAGE TO PARTNER COMMUNITY Partners in India will continue to play a key role and as they deepen their expertise, they benefit more, and so do customers. We are encouraging the partner community to focus on building competencies to differentiate themselves in the market and to remain focused on cultivating strong customer relationships. I feel that the advantages partners have are the relationships that have been built and nurtured over years with customers. Technology will continue to evolve, but as long as partners remain focused on cultivating strong customer relationships, they will continue to see success even with any changes in the technology landscape. We are optimistic and excited about what’s ahead in 2014 as we help our partners and customers benefit from our technologies. ë

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RED HAT

PRADEEPTO DEY

SENIOR MANAGER – CHANNEL SALES, REGIONAL, RED HAT

CONTRIBUTION IN CHANNEL GROWTH I have been into this role for last two and half years and my biggest contribution is the inclusion of mainstream channel partners. This is one significant move in the right direction that we have made. Some of other investments that we made in areas like distribution have helped us align our strategies with distribution partners very well. We are also absolutely precise about the lead indicators (account mapping and vertical specific exercises) that make up channels pipeline, which starts right with identification, recruitment, and enablement. We make sure that there is face-toface enablement of our Advanced partners in at least 10 cities per quarter. This approach has really borne fruitful results for us. Besides, we have built a very strong and dedicated team of professionals over a period of time that is well trained to handle any type of market requirements.

CHANNEL INITIATIVES Through the channel programs, we offer our partners superior value, market differentiation, and sustainable revenue opportunities. Besides, these programs are designed to give partners the tools, training, support, and resources they need to advance their business.

integrating with our services team yielded good results for the organization. Today, we have evolved in the journey and have the right number of partners who could work as our extended arm and carry the message of Red Hat in the Indian market while addressing the customer requirements. We have realized in this journey that when we are going deeper into the market with a set of partners, we need to figure out the percentage of Red Hat’s revenue that is driven by these set of partners. And we have consistently grown year-on-year basis, thereby nurturing the interest of the partner to invest in our business as well as extracting the sweet-spots for us from these partners. This is something we have driven in the right direction. Besides, partners have seen huge value in our renewals that have been consistently growing in the market like India. This talks about Red Hat’s value proposition that customers get by aligning with us. Also, as a Channel Head, contingency planning should be paramount, especially when you are looking at the transformational ways of the company.

CHANGES IN ECOSYSTEM And not only this, the programs are easy to use and tailored to their specific business model. One of the unique channel initiatives that we launched last year was Red Hat OPEN, a new online partner enablement network. It is a training and accreditation platform designed to empower partners and supply them with the reliable guidance and technical information they need to assist customers in making sound technology decisions. As part of Red Hat OPEN, the Red Hat Partner Center will provide partners with 24x7 access to technical information as well as training resources, enabling partners to enhance their skills anytime, anywhere. This platform includes training courses that are designed to focus on developing role-based expertise and skills required to sell and deliver Red Hat offerings. Red Hat partners can earn accreditations by taking a prescribed combination of OPEN training courses.

MAJOR TAKEAWAYS From the internal facing standpoint, one of the key milestones for me is the investment in the right set of people. This is also significant because it took me 8 to 12 months to put everything in the right place. And from the external standpoint, taking this whole Red Hat value proposition to the relevant partners and making them see the margin opportunities while

There’s a saying called ‘never- saynever’. There is always scope for changes. For example, starting the new financial year, channel manager will be asked to actually pick up a focused set of 3-4 partners in their region and drive business through them. The idea is to go deep into the market with these dedicated and select partners.

VISION FOR 2014 Going forward, the focus will be on service providers or to be specific, cloud channel. Though it is still in the planning stage we will look at consolidating the cloud channel and bring them under one umbrella. We can then look at virgin territories where we can start work 12 months down the line by defining matrix and milestones and then it keeps on evolving.

MESSAGE TO PARTNER COMMUNITY We understand your need to bring in more and more services revenue. Our unique subscription business model as well as products and technologies clearly align and incline towards your services revenue desire. In summary, if you are a company or a partner who is looking to increase service revenue through your set of customers, then possibly Red Hat is the right choice to align with. ë

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Solutions for Success Events These are partner led Customer events covering major cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Bangalore ,Chennai, and even cities like Surat, Aurangabad, Rajkot, Nasik, Raipur in association with the local partners to provide visibility of Dell latest Solution Stack, product roadmaps, etc. to these customers. The aim is to empower the Dell partners to better address their customer requirements.

MAJOR TAKEAWAYS Having the right partner is instrumental to success in a country such as India that has highly differentiated market. You want a partner that will approach your business with the same level of enthusiasm and commitment that you have. With any partnership, a long-term covenant between two parties, it is important that partners share the same business philosophies in the long run

DELL

AJAY KAUL

DIRECTOR AND GENERAL MANAGER, GCC, DELL INDIA

CONTRIBUTION IN CHANNEL GROWTH It has been about one and a half year since I have been managing commercial channel business. We had set priorities on three key areas, Partner enablement, Effective engagement and driving ease of doing business. I am pleased to share with you that we have made tremendous progress in each of these areas. We launched various initiatives to train and enable partners, multiple programs and strategies which are relevant, keeping customer in mind and significant changes internally to ensure a smooth execution.

CHANNEL INITIATIVES In the past we have taken a lot of channel initiatives for our partner community. Some of them are: Emerging Markets Program The Emerging markets program aimed at bringing Dell Solutions through partnerships with preferred partners to Small and medium business customers in emerging markets. The program is designed to upkeep Dell’s long term focus on serving the growth markets of India and support local partners on technical and commercial front enabling Dell’s cutting edge technology solutions

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reach even these markets. Online Solutions Configurator We launched a marketing tool for Indian Channel Partners – The Online Solution Configurator which allows partners to create multipart, customized enterprise solutions for their customers in an easy, collaborative and intuitive way. This tool is also integrated with deal registration, thereby helping partners work as consultants, design the solution , leveraging various solution stacks and ensure right sizing. This enhancement to PartnerDirect provides pre-configured solutions and training videos, as well as the option to create custom solutions to meet specific customer needs 24*7 online. Dell’s Engineering Club Dell’s Engineers Club was launched in Jan 2013 and has seen one year of success in India. The Club trains and certifies the pre-sales people of partners, enabling them to have independent technical discussion with customers. This club also brings together the Partner Technical Experts across IT industry to network, exchange ideas, and share industry trends and best practices. The initiative purposes to equip partners with rich knowledge around data center technology- Storage, Networking, Servers and Enterprise Solutions. The members of the club are invited to virtual and face-to-face training events.

CHANGES IN ECOSYSTEM A good business partner should have solutions approach, that supports and complement your own. The more expertise your partner brings to the business, the easier it will be to find the perfect solution for your customers. You need to find a partner that understands the market end-to-end, , from the client to the network, to the storage, to the data center and to the cloud. At the same time, these solutions should be flexible and most relevant.

VISION FOR 2014 This year our focus will be on Coverage and Depth. We have already signed up with Ingram Micro for Distribution of commercial Laptops and Desktops covering more than 40 cities, wherein these products are available off-the shelf. Our endeavor will be to increase the product portfolio. We will also work with our Strategic and Major partners to meet the customer’s business needs through our latest and world class technology solutions around Datacentre, Compute, Storage and network.

MESSAGE TO PARTNER COMMUNITY This year we will witness a stupendous and never before growth in Channel Business and the partners will play a critical role. This is just the beginning of a winning partnership and we have a huge opportunity in front of us. I will look forward to a superb team work and striving towards the common goal. ë

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and comprehensively share them with Fortinet. With that automated tool, resellers can lock sales opportunities while, in exchange, benefit from Fortinet sales and technical support knowledge to help close the deal.

CHANGES IN ECOSYSTEM We are working on getting more certified partners to help them provide better support to customers and also learn about our new technology product offering. Certification will also help them come out of being box pushers or competing on price to start a value chain with technology specialization. Being a solution specialist in the long run will help them sustain and grow their business to more regions and technologies. Customer retention with timely renewals and solution upgrades is another of our key partner initiatives.

FORTINET

RAJESH MAURYA

COUNTRY MANAGER INDIA & SAARC, FORTINET

CONTRIBUTION IN CHANNEL GROWTH One of our major achievements over this period has been the increase in our partner base both in terms of market and regions. Today, we engage with nearly 400+ partners. We are currently consolidating our existing channels, but at the same time we are open to new partner engagements. We formed a Partner Advisory Council (PAC) to help the company reap greater synergies from its channel ecosystem and improve its responsiveness to customer needs.

CHANNEL INITIATIVES In 2013 Fortinet launched a few channel initiatives which helped partners to grow their Fortinet business. Dedicated Channel Account Manager for National SIs: Fortinet has recently appointed a dedicated channel account manager to strengthen relationships and better capitalize on business opportunities with its nationallevel partners in the country. This includes the following: Fortinet Partner Program expansion: Fortinet expanded its Partner Program for the EMEA and APAC regions. The new version of the FortiPartner Program (FPP) was designed to further align with Fortinet’s business strategy in

providing end-to-end network security solutions and recognize the investment made by its channel in skilled sales and technical resources, through adapted benefits in the areas of sales, marketing and training. The new FortiPartner Program included the following key elements: - Technology Specializations – New FortiWireless Specialization - Partner Teams Training – New Online Sales Trainin - Four-Tiered Program for Resellers – New Bronze+ Level Four-Point Program for MSSP partners: Fortinet has a four-point program that gives Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs) beneficial pricing, dedicated technical support and training, and MSSP-specific marketing programs.

MAJOR TAKEAWAYS Partner Certification: The biggest pain point for channels is lack of quality manpower particularly in the information security space. To address this challenge we have hired dedicated training manager and have reduced the cost for certification considerably. Deal Registration: We launched the Deal Registration Tool to protect channel partners who actively identify new business opportunities

VISION FOR 2014 The 2014 Channel Roadmap will unfold a new vision that proves Fortinet continues to evolve with its partners by maintaining a structured, best in-class channel ecosystem. Partner Expansion for Wireless Solutions: As more enterprises embrace BYOD (Bring-yourown-Device), a clear opportunity has emerged for an end-to-end security provider like Fortinet to take a larger slice of the wireless pie. Fortinet offers strong value proposition in wireless LAN security through its range of FortiGate, FortiWifi and FortiAP product lines. Quarterly sales session for partners: Fortinet will be organizing quarterly sales update sessions in 8 cities – Bangalore, Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Ahmadabad and Pune. These regular sales session will provide partners updates on markets, business opportunities, products, incentive programs and also help to improve relationships with partners. Promotions around Deal Registration Tool: Fortinet’s deal registration tool aims at protecting channel partners who actively identify new business opportunities and comprehensively share them with Fortinet.

MESSAGE TO PARTNER COMMUNITY

This is the year partners can look forward to grow their Fortinet business in the face of new opportunities in Wireless, NGFW, Web Application Security, DDoS prevention and Sandboxing. More importantly partners can look forward to earn better profit margins. ë

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organizations.

CHANGES IN ECOSYSTEM

MCAFEE

JAGDISH MAHAPATRA

MANAGING DIRECTOR, INDIA AND SAARC, MCAFEE

CONTRIBUTION IN CHANNEL GROWTH A significant trend in the channel market is how large system integrators are partnering with multiple vendors and are moving from delivering specific point solutions based on customer needs to a consolidated and holistic offering and thereby enabling the IT environment for their customers.

CHANNEL INITIATIVES We are a channel focused company and have an extensive framework to scale the ecosystem and equip partners through a partner profitability and enablement focus. McAfee Partner Enablement Initiative: The McAfee SecurityAlliance partner certification methodology offers several levels of training— • The McAfee Sales Advocate- This course is ideal as an introduction to McAfee for sales-related job functions. This certification is for inside sales, telemarketers, and new sales associates. • The McAfee Sales Professional- These courses give individuals the ability to describe the value of McAfee solutions, recognize opportunities by business problems, differentiate features and benefits, and communicate competitive differentiators. • The McAfee Technical Professional- These

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The biggest opportunities for us, from a market segment standpoint is emerging from two key areas• To conform to RBI guidelines, public sector organisations especially banks will need to demonstrate compliance on data protection, event collection and analysis, endpoint controls, and related security measures. • Indian SMBs largely represent knowledge based businesses such as chartered accountants, law firms etc. They are likely to have money moving around through (wire transfers, vendor payments, and customer payments) but they are constrained in terms of resources and budgets. The needs of the hour for SMBs therefore are comprehensive security solutions that lower the complexity and cost. The challenge would be to ensure partner readiness and capacity building to be able to address these priorities.

VISION FOR 2014 learning paths give individuals technical solution competency, including competitive landscape, how to conduct demos, and solution sizing. • McAfee ACE- This product training offers the highest level of training in the pre-sales technical arena, and partners are encouraged to have their best technical sales engineers earn this certification. Partner Profitability is at the cornerstone of our channel strategy. Our partner profitability Stack allows McAfee Security Alliance partners to earn additional front end margin, rebates or sales incentives for new or existing business, upselling and cross selling, as well as for delivering pre-sales business or technical value add activities. The extensive set of programs as part of this program include: Deal Registration, Incumbency Advantage, Rebates, Reward, Teaming Plan, Tiered Pricing

MAJOR TAKEAWAYS Partner ecosystem plays a crucial role for organizations to sell to the right customers. As partners work more closely with these customers, they offer advantage to organizations in terms of better market knowledge. This is especially important when you are working with customers, who are spread across geographies and have different set technological requirements. This has enabled McAfee in aptly promoting solutions through partners. Additionally, partners work as an extension for the

We have made key investments in verticals-government, banking, financial services and telecom in our enterprise business. We expect to capture significant market share in technologies like enterprise mobility, SIEM, real-time visibility of threat, advance threat defence, datacentre transformation and consolidate our position in technologies like intrusion prevention, endpoint security and vulnerability management. Since India has been identified as a priority growth market for McAfee and Intel, we’re investing in people, infrastructure, service and locations. The Indian market represents one of the highest growth businesses for us and therefore has top priority exposure within our company. We will continue to add more potential partners to expand our reach to new territories.

MESSAGE TO PARTNER COMMUNITY As the threat landscape becomes more and more prevalent, the need for security too is becoming a critical factor for organisations. In such a scenario the channel partners play a key role in bridging the gap and become trusted advisors for customers in their security buying. Hence it’s critical for security vendors such as McAfee and channel partners to collaborate and invest in deepening the domain expertise levels for a swift and proactive alignment with customer needs. ë

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the same when they place the order on us. As of now, we have started this for networking space. It achieved great success.

MAJOR TAKEAWAYS The consumerization of IT and availability of broad range of devices are driving a significant change in the workspace. This is how customers are now looking at the technology and how partners are looking to serve those customers. Convergence of all the technologies towards the varied devices has happened and this will continue in 2014 also. Citrix will play a major role in giving the customers a clear separation between the personal and professional work on all the devices and also give them the ability for a mobile workspace. That’s a huge takeaway for us.

CITRIX

KAUSHAL VELURI

DIRECTOR – CHANNELS & ALLIANCES, INDIA SUBCONTINENT, CITRIX

CONTRIBUTION IN CHANNEL GROWTH Citrix is a channel driven organization. Everything Citrix does in the market place is through channel partners. Our GTM is with Citrix Solution Providers (CSA) and our large SI partners like TCS and Wipro. Channel is an extended sales and technical team for Citrix. In order to scale our business, we need channel partners to carry the message. So, we need to build channel confidence on Citrix technology. One of the major contributions that has happened over past one year is building the channel confidence in taking our varied technologies to the market place and making sure that they understand how the technologies interoperate between each other. This helps them to build a complete solution for the customers. Citrix also as an organization has evolved from last few years from having a single product to having a complete solution of products and technologies that we can take to our customers. We worked with our channel partners across the journey. We have done regular training and enablement for sales and technical aspects for our channel partners. We also provide “on the job” training. If you leverage your partners well and work closely with them, you can reach a larger number of customers compared to what you could do yourself. We have gone with the partners to the customers to help them in opening new opportunities and helping them drive the sales cycle forward.

Last but not the least; another contribution is building traction in SI partners for Citrix technology.

CHANNEL INITIATIVES On the tool front, we had launched Partner Central which is a global initiative. Partner Central has become one single repository where the partners can download presentations, whitepapers, brochures and whatever they need to take the deal forward. We are also planning to launch another tool which will be available on a mobile phone, iPad, and laptop. This will enable partners to produce the information in front of the customer immediately. We did an eight city road show in first and second half of the year where we enabled and trained our partners on our technologies. We will do this every six months. Citrix Synergy will be in May and another one in October. We have partner accelerator programs where we talk to our partners on specific topic and show them a demo to give a better understanding. Last year we started a demo based demand generation event. We have “business in motion” events where our technology evangelist gives the demo for our customers who are brought in by the partners. To make the business of partners more profitable, we took a new initiative globally last year by starting “opportunity registration” where the partner gets the upfront discount once he logs in the details of an opportunity and wins

CHANGES IN ECOSYSTEM I wouldn’t say any drastic change in the ecosystem because we have got a fairly good landscape of our channel partners but I think some of the changes we are looking forward and hoping to achieve in this year is to build internal mindshare on partners. Also, on the partner’s front, I would like to see how they can make more money. I would also like to build greater traction of SI partners. Everything is interconnected and Citrix can’t grow if the partners don’t.

VISION FOR 2014 The strategy for next financial year will be two-fold. One is helping channel partners evolve into solution players and help them along that journey. We also want to see how we can get greater traction of SI partners.

MESSAGE TO PARTNER COMMUNITY The customers today are not just interested in understanding the benefits of the technology but are more concerned about how technology will help them make the business faster and efficient. This gives partners a tremendous opportunity to transform themselves as a single solution provider. I would say to the channel partners that just focus on building solutions, combining various technologies, stronger implementation capabilities and going to the customer and presenting them with solutions for the customers’ business needs. This is important for the channel partners. Elevate themselves in the discussions not just with the IT managers but now when you are building a solution, you can now talk to the CIOs. They should understand the business angle of technology. ë

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We also organized several refresher programs from time to time to ensure that the partners are updated on all product features, new technologies etc. as well as have a recall for the previous programs. Apart from these, we had organized two channel events on a big scale in 2013 to reward and recognize the champion channel partners. We plan to hold various channel events this year as well to keep them motivated and encourage them to constantly perform better.

MAJOR TAKEAWAYS

XEROX

VIPIN TUTEJA

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, TECHNOLOGY, CHANNELS & INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS, XEROX INDIA

CONTRIBUTION IN CHANNEL GROWTH Channel has always been a critical part of our business growth and our partners are the face of Xerox to our customers in most of the situations. Last year, we had set ourselves a target to expand our reach across the country and hence looked at expansion by increasing our partner base to top 200 cities. This was initiated early last year and we received an overwhelming response. The expansion was completed by increasing footprint of our partner network. Xerox India partner network consists of Distributors, Sub-distributors, Sales & Service Partners, Sales Partners, System Integrators, Graphic Arts Partners & Resellers. We worked towards strengthening the value proposition to ensure the return on investments for our partners. Specifically, we focused in running upcountry road shows and regional activations to engage with them. We also devised 12 India centric channel levers to keep our partners motivated, updated of the technological changes and also to train them at various levels. We organized a number of channel rewards and recognition events like Fantastic Macau and the Xerox Partner League at Kovalam to name a few, to recognize and reward their contribution and commitment to Xerox India. We further strengthened and integrated our sales tools in the country and constantly worked

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with partners to overcome the challenges faced on-ground; in the process, reinforcing our relations and achieving mutual growth.

CHANNEL INITIATIVES The 12 Indian-centric channel levers provide an ecosystem of support for Xerox partners, to deliver their true potential. l Strategic Partner Program (Partner First – Drive Growth. Together) l Training and Enablement Framework (XPERT – Engage, Learn, Succeed) l Quarterly Channel Newsletter (XConnect – Stay Connected) l Partner Portal (Partner Net – Portal of Choice) l Communication Platform (Partner Pulse : Communicating Effectively) l Reward & Recognition (XPL - Celebrating Channel Excellence) l Sales Kit (XCEED-Armed to Win) l Create a winning habit l Business Planning (XPAND) l Tactical Programs (XCITE – Rewarding the Achievers) l Partner On-Boarding – Creating a team of winners l Feedback Survey – Your Voice is important l Partner Advisory Council-Charting Strategic Directions

2013 proved to be a tough year for all businesses due challenged economic environment, currency volatility and political instabilities. But we took this as an opportunity to demonstrate and execute solutions, which help our customers to save on costs and increase productivity. We launched ConnectKey enabled MFPs which enabled true scenarios of cloud, mobility, security and BYOD and we have received an overwhelming response from the market. In 2014, we will continue to focus on the ConnectKey enabled MFPs and drive greater productivity, efficiency and convenience to our customers.

CHANGES IN ECOSYSTEM We have gone through the change in last two years. 2014 will be the year of consolidation.

VISION FOR 2014 In 2013, we went for the width and coverage. In 2014, we are aiming towards increasing the productivity of our business partners, who invest in our business. We will have specific channel development initiatives to further strengthen their business planning, training programs on product and technology, and improving skills of their sales and service resources to ensure their success in the market place. Our focus is to maximize on market potential & performance. We will be training our select partners to provide Managed Print Services (MPS) to the end customers. This would be targeted to the SMB and corporate customers.

MESSAGE TO PARTNER COMMUNITY 2014, like any other year will bring us newer and unknown challenges. The critical success factor is always determined by the strong business partnerships, which help and support to grow under any circumstances. We believe that your growth is critical our success. Our approach of partnership will ensure profitable growth. ë

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program that our partners with sales, marketing and technical support, as well as periodic channel incentive schemes to enhance their profit margins. In addition to this, we have a special eScan Customization Kit for our partners through which they can customize eScan products to display their company information to customers. We now also facilitate Electronic Software Distribution (ESD) license keys to our partners. This will help them to deliver eScan products to their customers 24x7, thus enhancing reach of eScan as well as margin for our channel partners. At eScan, we plan special marketing strategies together with partners to ensure they achieve higher revenues. Moreover, in case of security software, the license is required to be renewed every year. Hence, this leads to year-on-year revenue to our channel partners.

ESCAN

MAJOR TAKEAWAYS

ANIL GUPTA

product. This in turn helps them earn better margins.

Channel in India is getting more and more educated and tech savvy. We realize that today, channel partners need more and more personalize attention and grass root level support particularly in B and C class cities. Hence, we are equipping ourselves adequately to meet their needs. Moreover, Channel Sales business requires innovation and flexibility from region to region.

CHANNEL INITIATIVES

CHANGES IN ECOSYSTEM

ASSISTANT VICE PRESIDENT – INDIA SALES, ESCAN

CONTRIBUTION IN CHANNEL GROWTH I am currently associated with eScan as the Assistant Vice President – Sales for India. At eScan, I hold the responsibility of leading the sales team within India. I take care of two major channel segment product SKUs i.e. SOHO and SMB (Small & Medium Business) through the distribution channels, in addition to a sales model to cover the B, C and D class of cities in India for deeper penetration of eScan in the Indian continent. Recently, I have initiated many new strategies to enhance our market penetration in India and to attain eScan’s position as a leading brand in security software industry. However, this is all done as a team work along with my strong core team of highly skilled senior sales professionals that focuses on various regions across India. Along with this team, we have also initiated many strategic alliances with different brands, ISPs and distributors. Today, channel partners are keen to understand about the technologies behind the product and know each and every detail about the product. They are gradually becoming more open to new technologies and also have proper understanding of the market. This helps them to better understand the security needs of their customers and accordingly offer the right

Being a channel centric brand, channel initiatives are an ongoing process. Our first step is to ensure that eScan range of products meet the IT security needs of our customers belonging to various segments and verticals. It not only helps increase the confidence of our partners towards the brand but also motivates them to sell our products. eScan has a dedicated team pan India solely focusing on the partners who are catering to various segments and verticals. We strategically plan and regularly organize partner meets, workshops and other such interactive events exclusively for our channel partners with an intention to enhance their knowledge about eScan range of products. In addition, we also regularly introduce exclusive offers for our partners that help them enhance their profit margins. Moreover, we also regularly initiate various marketing activities, channel and customer technical meets to create awareness amongst them through various IT associations across the country. eScan has especially designed security solutions to fulfill the IT security needs of Enterprise segment. Moreover, being a channel centric brand, we have designed a special partner

We are very happy with the way our current channel ecosystem is working. Hence, we won’t like to change anything in our existing partner ecosystem.

VISION FOR 2014 In the next financial year, we look forward to strengthen our security markets by providing solutions for smartphones and tablets. Today the world is moving from desktops and laptops to smart hand held devices and this market is growing by leaps and bounds year-on-year basis which is creating lot of opportunities for IT security solution vendors like us. Also, now after having successfully tapped the channel community, our next step is to create awareness amongst the IT users. This year we are planning to majorly focus on end consumer marketing activities through road-shows, online portal and social media in the public domain.

MESSAGE TO PARTNER COMMUNITY As we always say to our channel partners that, ‘eScan is for them, eScan is with them and eScan is because of them.’ ë

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market, we still managed to grow, owing to the relationships we enjoy with our channel partners. We have built a robust channel ecosystem which has stood us in good stead, and as a result, we have successfully maintained a strong market share in the commercial business category.

CHANGES IN ECOSYSTEM Our channel structure for the enterprise business is driven by the need to develop a core channel partner ecosystem in India – as observed in Lenovo China. Today, 85% of our India business has a channel influence and we are focused on creating a strong network with nationwide reach, backed by a mutually beneficial professional relationship. Today, we have a stable channel ecosystem; however, we always look out for opportunities to make the relationship even more meaningful.

LENOVO

RAHUL AGARWAL

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR – COMMERCIAL BUSINESS, LENOVO INDIA

CONTRIBUTION IN CHANNEL GROWTH Nitin Garg, our channel head, and I have been focused on two key priorities - partner management, and improving engagement and share of wallet with our top 50 partners. Today, these partners account for more than 80-85% of channel driven business and we clearly want to increase our dependence on each other. Secondly, as a market leader with a 25% plus market share, we strongly believe that we also need to add more mid-sized partners who can get us incremental business in the LE space (500-1000 employees) and business beyond the top 8 cities. We have seen increase in business in the current year from both these sectors as a result of our focus, and this has helped us increase our leadership gap vis-à-vis our peers. In addition, we have tried to make it easier for partners to work with Lenovo by laying out simple processes, clear escalation management and faster response. Since our India business has a channel influence, we are focused on creating a strong network with nationwide reach that is backed by a mutually beneficial professional relationship.

CHANNEL INITIATIVES 2013-14 has been a good year for Lenovo. We further consolidated our strength

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in the REL business and became No. 1 in this segment (outside mega deals), which would have not been possible without consistent support from our channel partners. We focused on active channel enablement programs for the REL business and ran multiple initiatives for partners during the year. For example, we introduced Black Knights, an initiative to incentivize our partner sales team to generate new customer wins. It is our endeavor at Lenovo to create opportunities for our partners and align our goals with theirs so that we can jointly accelerate sales and maximize growth. Black Knights has already seen a very encouraging response from our partners. The scheme is aimed at rewarding partners for new business acquisitions in the commercial and enterprise segments. It is targeted at sales executives of partners, and Lenovo expects participation from around 450-500 sales executives. Furthermore, we strengthened our Business Management Systems, maintained active engagement with our top partners and regularly hosted Quarterly Business Reviews with them. Lastly, we also conducted multiple training sessions to arm our extended sales team on iconic Think products.

MAJOR TAKEAWAYS One of greatest learning of the last year was that despite a declining

VISION FOR 2014 Consumerization of IT is creating more opportunities for mobile devices, as organizations look to engage with customers and employees. We see a tremendous potential for growth in the enterprise IT market with increasing demand for enterprise grade mobile devices at the workplace and the impact of mobility as a business enabler. As more organizations realize the importance of technology, we expect a substantial interest in technologies like cloud computing which could offer an opportunity for increased front-end client purchase, a strength area for Lenovo. We see these technologies driving process innovation, reducing operational costs, and helping organizations focus on their core competencies. To make the most of the opportunities that we see in the enterprise IT segment, we will invest in enablement of our partners with end-to-end support on products and gathering feedback from the community in order to meet customer demands.

MESSAGE TO PARTNER COMMUNITY We would like to thank all partners for their continued support in a tough market situation like this. Their support through the last year has been our strength in the segment. We would also like to congratulate Enterprise Channels on its anniversary and congratulate for filling the void of an enterprise-specific channel magazine and bringing us rich content, month after month. ë

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Increase their market addressability – they prefer to align with a brand that helps them win over new clientele. It’s also essential that the vendor helps them to create a differentiated approach to capture the market better. The vendor must also provide the intrinsic marketing support to help them scale to new heights.

CHANGES IN ECOSYSTEM

CISCO

B. RAGHAVENDRAN

DIRECTOR, PARTNER ORGANIZATION, CISCO INDIA AND SAARC

We are continuously working towards channel evolution. Because a healthy, profitable partner ecosystem is crucially important to help us and our partners thrive and grow. Together with our partners, we are in a perfect position to capture the market transitions. We are committed to our partners with consistency of programs that helps them lead in solutions and services they take to market, be realistic in how we win together, and understand how to readjust ourselves in a market changing with tremendous speed.

VISION FOR 2014 CONTRIBUTION IN CHANNEL GROWTH Cisco is a partner-centric organization and the way we engage with our partners defines our success. We believe in empowering our partners to move up the value chain to become a solutions provider in their own right and enable them to harness the market opportunities and transitions that are taking place. Over the past few quarters, we have significantly increased our channel efforts to augment partner capabilities by providing leading practices, tools, and knowledge transfer, which in turn enable them to have more repeatable, successful, and profitable customer engagements.

CHANNEL INITIATIVES Cisco has been promoting Hybrid IT business mode that enables partners to address the market transitions and provide traditional IT (on premise) solutions, managed services, private/public/hybrid cloud services, packaged with professional services, and offered with different SLAs and consumption models. The company is increasing its investment in partnerships with Independent Software Vendors (ISVs). Cisco gives ISVs access to a wealth of resources, expertise, connections, and opportunities. The first step in partnering with Cisco is to join the Cisco Developer Network (CDN). Cisco also announced the new Cloud Business Trans-

formation Playbook that provides a blueprint for partners transitioning their business from a product reseller model to include annuity-based cloud revenue. The company introduced its growth and investment strategy to capture the significant revenue opportunity available in the mid-market. We made significant new investments and enhancements to our cloud partner strategy to accelerate Cloud Services Resellers ability to capture new revenue from the cloud market opportunity. Cisco further announced the availability of dCloud, Cisco’s cloud-based demonstration service that allows the partners to conduct, customize, and share demonstrations anywhere, at any time. This platform allows the partner to show a wide variety of scripted Cisco solutions and products with optional endpoint equipment at tradeshows, on customer sites, in Cisco offices, or virtually. In addition to this, we also introduced several incentive programs that were designed specifically to reward and recognize channel partners for the value they bring to customer engagements, versus the volume of products they sell.

MAJOR TAKEAWAYS Over the years, I have realized that partners prefer to work with a vendor who invests in their overall growth and profitability, through multiple endeavors such as Demand Generation - identification of new market transitions and generating new/validated market leads.

Cisco’s vision in the next year is to help transform the life experiences of 1.5 billion people through technology. Over the next three years, we want to be the most relevant IT Company and trusted advisor for the government and industry in India and partners will have a huge play in making this possible. From the partner-led standpoint our strategy is to be connected with the partner eco-system. We will continue to transform our existing partners and develop new eco system.

MESSAGE TO PARTNER COMMUNITY

The biggest difference between now and the past is that it is not only technology that is changing, but business models are also changing. The channel has never undergone such seismic change. However, whether we’re talking about technology architectures, software integration, or the way customers want to buy IT, each of these major changes involves a smarter, more intelligent way in which you provision IT to your customers, and this is a major opportunity for our channel partners. Cisco, with its channel partners, is focusing on three key areas to evolve their business - make hybrid IT a foundation of your value proposition, lead with solutions and professional services, and transition your sales teams to address new buying centers. Cisco is committed to be a salient entity that is constantly present with our partners as they transition their businesses to harness the plethora of new opportunities, through the IT industry’s most partner-friendly model. ë

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grievances instantly or get more information. Besides, we also have a dedicated tele-calling team constantly passing on leads to the channel, which keeps them going. I would say a lot has been done but we still have a lot to do, to make our partner program the best in the industry. Cyberoam is a leading security player in the Indian market. We have built this leadership on the basis of several unique initiatives, efforts and research involving our customers and partners. Leaving no stone unturned, we have offered adequate and timely support and education to our customers and their users in improving their understanding and awareness into rapidly changing threats landscape. Similarly, we have enabled our partners to meet customers’ evolving security needs by effectively communicating Cyberoam’s value proposition to address security challenges.

CYBEROAM

MAJOR TAKEAWAYS

SUNIL SHARMA

VICE PRESIDENT, SALES AND OPERATIONS, INDIA & SAARC, CYBEROAM TECHNOLOGIES

CONTRIBUTION IN CHANNEL GROWTH The first would be building strong ethical relationships, both internal and external. Secondly, we ensured that the organization’s vision and goals are communicated clearly to the partners and our internal teams. Today I can proudly say that we have a robust partner base driving Cyberoam’s business and the entire channel is motivated for working towards one goal. We have won many accolades throughout the year. This demonstrates the trust our partners have in us, which in turn, is an outcome of forging strong ethical partnerships. I am glad that we have been successful at winning the trust of our partners in every way. All these efforts have resulted in the organization growing by approximately 40% year-on-year. Cyberoam understands that its partners now have to address very demanding customers and support challenging use cases and requirements where security, compliance and performance needs go hand in hand. Moreover, customers seek long term relevance for their investments. It’s about time our partners get the right skills and portray evolved understanding for the changing times. We are taking them beyond box selling and are committed to transform their business with advanced network security expertise skills,

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offerings, business models & resources, including world-class customer support & financial incentives for partners’ growth appetite. Training and Certifications, rebates, lucrative incentive schemes, dedicated resource to provide leads to partners, dedicated channel manager to resolve partner issues / grievances and ensure smooth operation of business all together form this agenda. In the light of technological advancements, growing awareness of security and evolution in threats, channel partners also realize that it is no longer business as usual and they need to evolve their offerings in order to seize emerging prospects. Partners are more than willing to change their business strategy according to customer requirements. They are selling holistic solutions or becoming the single point of contact for the customer’s requirements.

CHANNEL INITIATIVES Partner engagement has been our way of operations from the start. We have rolled out attractive rebate programs, last mile incentive programs for partners, trainings and certifications - technical and non-technical, webinars etc to maximize our partner engagements. For ease of operations we have a dedicated Channel Manager who is the single point of contact for our partners, who can be approached to sort out their

When the going gets tough the tough gets going – that has been our mantra for success. This year has been a great challenge for the entire industry. With the gloomy market situation, organizations were cash strapped. Every order has been rightfully earned. If we could succeed in such times it indicates we are on the right track. We intend to continue working like this in the next year as well.

CHANGES IN ECOSYSTEM We would like to ensure that a Cyberoam Partner located in the interiors on the country has CCNSP and CCNSE trained resources that will empower them to win deals.

VISION FOR 2014 Our focus this year would be rolling out products and solutions as per the market requirements. Besides, we would be increasing the partner revenue earning share by 50% compared to 2012-13. Also, we will focus on increasing our active partner base by 30%, appointing more partners in the tier 2 and 3 markets, and increasing our turnover by 40% in 13-14. We will also be keenly focusing more on verticals like BFSI and Hospitality. To sum it up, we have a lot to look forward to and so do our partners.

MESSAGE TO PARTNER COMMUNITY We want our partners to stay hungry as well as focused. Seize the day because it’s today and not tomorrow that is important. That’s the mantra of survival in such tough market conditions. ë

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ASSOCIATION

ASIRT

Takes lead in addressing channel concerns ASIRT’s first mega Tech Day of the year 2014 was unique in many ways. The tone of the event was set from the very beginning with Business Software Alliance (BSA) introducing Verafirm portal to all the members of the association. n WORDS: NIVEDAN PRAKASH <(NIVEDAN@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM)>

hile giving details of Verafirm portal and how it will be helpful in the business growth of all the members, Gul Arora of BSA not only explained the usage of this vendor independent Software Asset Management SAM tool but also demonstrated live how this portal can make life easier for companies to track their software. With this demonstration from BSA, members learnt how they can start software audit practice while maintaining records of their customers’ software on Verafirm portal, which is accessible from anywhere in the world. Through this portal, members can also protect their customers from illegalities and associated risk apart from saving their customers from excessive and haphazard spend on licenses. During the course of her presentation, Arora brought cheers on the faces of the members when she displayed the advertisement in Financial Express and lauded 14 ASIRT members as compliance leaders and members who had completed Verafirm registration earlier. The other highlight of the Tech Day was presence of the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) representatives who had come all prepared to address all the concerns of the ASIRT members. BIS has been in the news lately for the fear created on amendments brought in by Government of India with respect to IT hardware. In his presentation, Narinder Singh of BIS, highlighted all the recent amendments brought about by the government with regards to IT hardware. His session evoked a lot of questions and interest as the new BIS laws had clearly shaken the industry

by its tough looking amendments. He took on some tough questions, some uncomfortable ones relating to intent of government with great ease and compassion and ultimately heartened members with a great sense of relief that PC desktops are currently not covered under the BIS laws. Asus always prefers ASIRT forum to make big splash. This time ASUS team displayed another first showcasing its premium desktop – the Vivo PC - of the size of a palm on Windows platform. Swapnil Bharate, Product Manager, Desktop Business introduced the product to the august gathering and gave details of the company’s latest offering to the market. Bharate also urged the members to look at this premium PC as a likely sale option for customers needing home theatre PCs or media and space saving business PCs. During the event, Asus had set up a booth where it also showcased the Vivo mouse. While keeping its tradition, Asus prefers to prelaunch its products at ASIRT forums, even before it makes formal media announcement. In June last year, Asus had announced Asus Transformer Pad, the super-premium Windows and Android dual OS, triple form factor desktop, remote PC and 18.5-inch tablet at the event and this time they announced Vivo PC. On the other hand, the representatives from Microsoft presented the latest Windows 8.1 operating system in detail, not only from a technical and features perspective but also how Microsoft Windows 8.1 is more suited to enterprises and businesses apart from being an all-device OS. Interestingly, the Microsoft team pointed out how the current business environment is being

NARINDER SINGH

OF BUREAU OF INDIAN STANDARDS

“BIS laws had clearly shaken the industry by its tough looking amendments.” influenced by growing trends like enterprise mobility and BYOD. And this is where it will inevitable for the companies to ignore technological advancements like Windows 8.1 that can actually helps businesses save money by reducing the count of devices. The Microsoft team will be arranging a training session especially for ASIRT members on Windows 8.1. Most importantly, this training session will be open not only to members but also to their sales and technical leads. The Tech Day culminated with a session on labor laws by Ramesh Soni, an expert on the subject who has trained over 10,000 people across the country. His detailed presentation on the various labor laws concerning small businesses detailed unknown aspects about the Shop and Establishment rules and the Bonus Act. Members were enthralled by his knowledge and expertise on the subject as well as his inimitable style that kept audiences in splits despite the fear of various archaic draconian aspects of these laws. ASIRT plans to conduct a detailed workshop with Soni in near future for members’ benefits. As the long evening came to an end, members were refreshed with the enormous learning and opportunities presented to them at the end of 5 hours they invested. ë

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SOLUTION PROVIDERS

DATA CENTER SERVICES

SIFY TECHNOLOGIES

PARESH DATTANI

VP – DATA CENTER SERVICES, SIFY TECHNOLOGIES

Established in 1995 and headquartered in Chennai, Sify Technologies today is among the largest integrated ICT solutions and services companies in India offering end-to-end solutions with a comprehensive range of products delivered over a common telecom data network infrastructure reaching more than 1250 cities and towns in India. This telecom network today connects 36 data centers across India, including Sify’s 5 tier III data centers in Chennai, Mumbai, Delhi and Bengaluru. The company offers a host of data center services like storage and virtualization, managed services, managed shared firewall services, back-up and recovery, and Fortknox services. Sify brings to the table over 13 years of operational and technical expertise in data centers serving over 300 customers spread across various industry verticals like BFSI, telecom, pharmaceutical, retail, manufacturing, media and others. Sify has 5 owned tier III data centers, 6 State Data Centers and several more for private client DCs. All these DCs adhere to leading industry standards including ISO 27001, ISO 9001 and ISO 20000, SAS

70 complaint and SAP certified. During the year 2013, the company added additional capacity by way of a 10 Megawatt Tier III data center facility at Noida. This data center has received design certification by the Uptime Institute, and the first phase is now open to business. Six new customers were signed up in the first quarter of last year, one of them being a prominent public sector bank. Besides, one of the largest international Telco players has expanded and consolidated their business with Sify in a new multi-year contract. A major Indian bank consolidated its Near-DR business into a large multi-year DC & DR contract. In the second quarter, renewals came from across all industries including a logistics major, a state government electricity board, a telecom multinational and the largest banking conglomerate in India. New business included one of India’s leading English-language publications, a home-grown banking major, and one of the oldest Indian companies in the mobile power business. Besides, the work on the new data center at Mumbai also got accelerated to expand capacity.

DATA CENTER SERVICES

NXTGEN

A S RAJGOPAL

MD AND CEO, NXTGEN DATACENTER & CLOUD TECHNOLOGIES

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NxtGen provides data center and cloud services from its own high density data center (HDDC) facilities or can deploy centrally managed on premises data centers (OPDC). NxtGen’s OPDC are designed for current IT load and scalable easily to meet future demand. The range of OPDC data centres start from a single rack which is completely self-contained with UPS and cooling solutions, single row that ranges from two racks to six racks, and dual row data centres that can be expanded from eight racks to over hundred racks. The OPDC can be deployed on a normal office floor and does not require expensive raised floor options. Each of the racks from NxtGen can hold three times more servers compared to a conventional server room and offers huge savings on running cost. Besides, the energy efficient design brings down operational cost from the first month of operation onwards and offers a quick Return on Investment. The OPDC is a centrally managed solution offering customers a reliable and highly-efficient infrastructure to host 3 times more servers and storage in the same space.

NxtGen’s OPDC offers data center infrastructure that pays for itself (costs saving from energy efficiency), deployed within weeks, invest on capacity required, expand on demand. The company also offers hosting and co-location services from its HDDC at Whitefield and will soon be launching its second HDDC at Bidadi. With NxtGen, infrastructure can now be located anywhere. Since customers often prefer the company’s own datacenter, alternately it can be delivered at customer premises as well. Additionally, NxtGen provides industry first built-in 24 x 7 monitoring and control devices reporting to the Central Command Center (CCC) and manages the data center from its CCC with state-of-the-art tools. The company has customers across verticals like manufacturing, logistics, state government bodies, financial services, medical/healthcare, media/entertainment and software companies. The elite list of clientele includes the likes of Prime Focus Technologies, Reliance Entertainment, Jindal Steel, etc.

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21/02/14 9:59 am

SOLUTION PROVIDERS

DATA CENTER SERVICES

HCL SERVICES

GEORGE PAUL

EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT, HCL SERVICES

HCL Services, a wholly owned subsidiary of HCL Infosystems, offers a wide spectrum of IT services across the enterprise IT stack. The company has a strong foothold in data center services domain, wherein it helps organizations to transform IT data center with its wide range of technology services across consulting, build/design, managed services, migration and support services. These services are provided through different practices like infrastructure managed services, life cycle services, and infrastructure solutions and services amongst others, which work in tight collaboration under one leadership. While this ensures that the different practices can focus on core areas and innovate, it also provides a higher value to end customers. The company uses a highly evolved data center services framework combined with an ITL v3 delivery and a strong governance model. Through its extensive suite of data center services, HCL serves organizations across public and private sectors in verticals like BFSI, manufacturing, telecom, and healthcare amongst others. Some of the major engagements include – managing one of

the most complex and largest data centers for the government of India comprising more than 5000 data center assets; data center managed services for a major Power Distribution firm in Delhi; data center build services for a major R & D organization in India; data center migration services for a major MNC bank in India; and complete data center assessment, migration and build service for RAK Ceramics, which is the world’s largest ceramic manufacturer based in Middle East. Some of the key strengths that give the company an edge over others are - 15,000 plus data center assets under Management; 20,000 TB of data under management; 10,000 TB of data replication/backup; 1300 plus skilled data center support experts; ITOperations Centre for Remote Management which is a world-class data management centre; and HCLs next generation in-house service management tool, called Tefilla. Data center related services contributes in single digit to the overall service revenue and is growing at a significant growth rate year-on-year and is one of the biggest focus areas for HCL for the next 3 years.

DATA CENTER SERVICES

NETMAGIC SOLUTIONS

SEEMA AMBASTHA SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT – BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT, NETMAGIC SOLUTIONS

Netmagic Solutions, a company owned by NTT Communication, is India’s only Datacenter Infrastructure Lifecycle Management (DILM) organization. Founded in 1998, the company delivers services to plan, design, manage, support and migrate IT infrastructure running mission critical applications for over 1200 enterprises across the globe. It delivers services from 7 carrier-neutral, state-of-the-art datacenters located across India with over 2,00,000 sq. ft. floor space. Netmagic’s services portfolio includes co-location, managed hosting, public cloud, hybrid cloud, hosted private cloud, remote infrastructure management, managed security, application hosting, DR-as-aService, DR on Cloud, and hosted messaging and collaboration. At Netmagic Solutions, the teams work on the C-S-P methodology, which stands for Customer Centricity / Customer Satisfaction, SLA driven delivery, and Proactive Support. This methodology has been developed by the company based on its years of experience in datacenter and IT infrastructure

management. Meanwhile, the company has been the infrastructure evolution partner for market leaders like Ratnakar Bank, Flipkart, India Infoline, Thomson Reuters, H&R Johnson, Hungama, Yatra, Eureka Forbes, Mahindra Holidays, C-Edge and others. The breadth of its customers cuts across diverse industry verticals spanning banking and financial services, insurance, e-commerce, healthcare, manufacturing, media and entertainment, IT and ITeS, logistics, hospitality, and education. A milestone of last year was when Consul Consolidated, a leading player in the field of power conditioning, selected Netmagic to host India’s first SAP HANA implementation. This deployment will enable it to run its businesses in real time by unifying business transactions and operational analytics on to a single, open in-memory computing platform. Netmagic has been selected due to the deep understanding the company has from its experience of having managed mission-critical IT Infrastructure requirements of enterprises for the last 15 years, with equally deep knowledge of the SAP environment.

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SOLUTION PROVIDERS

DATA CENTER SERVICES

CTRLS

SRIDHAR REDDY CMD, CTRLS

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Founded in 2007, the company’s claim to fame is its well thought out and well-built Tier-4 data centers. One of the most secure datacenters in the country, these data centers offer SLAs that guarantee 99.995 percent uptime with facilities that are carrier-neutral and can be accessed through all major telcos in the country. The idea for CtrlS was triggered by an incident, which led it to the realization that India lacks world class IT infrastructure. Cataclysmic events in the economic landscape were changing the perception of CIO’s and ITDMs towards IT outsourcing, however, the choices in front of them did not justify outsourcing. This is when the company decided to take up the challenge of building IT Infrastructure with quality on par with the rest of the world, right here in India. The biggest challenge was of course, the lack of any ready reference or framework. The company had to visit the top datacenters globally to understand what set it apart and then build practices and infrastructure relevant to India. From the beginning, CtrlS decided to focus only on Tier-4 data center. Secondly, it realized that the industry and clients were looking for more than just IT infrastructure. They were looking for solutions to their business challenges. They wanted someone who would take deep and sustained interest in the client’s business - what is called as total ownership. These aspects made CtrlS think for the benefit of its clients business rather than focus on selling products or solutions. This approach has helped CtrlS to develop many conventional and unconventional solutions in response to specific business challenges faced by its clients and prospects. For example, DR on demand solution is an industry standard today, which was first developed and executed by the company in response to the challenge of creating cost effective and cost efficient DR solutions. Hence, its USP is on clearly providing the best in breed IT infrastructure solutions in a cost effective and cost efficient manner. The company does not believe in one-size fits all approach and specific solutions are built for specific

situations. As an example, when one of its clients talked about virtualization, the company understood that they did not want to deal with technology obsolescence but the management of their IT assets and IT security. CtrlS further realized that the customer needed a highly customized Desktop as a Service solution that not only met their needs but also saved the client about 34 crores annually. The company also takes its clients’ businesses seriously and that is why its solutions come wrapped in layers of security and are programmed to high availability. For example, cloud has been talk of the town for a few years now, but it was clear that clients were not yet convinced about the security of their data on the cloud or about the control they have on it. So, when CtrlS launched its cloud solutions, it also gave them enhanced security and an unmatchable proposition. The company’s cloud offerings comes with standard DR support and near zero data loss feature and this comes with more than four layers of security that it has already fortified the cloud solution with. At the same time, CtrlS believes in entrepreneurial hunger that helps it implement solutions for clients at a fast pace. For example, a leading MNC credit card provider needed to set-up a telco based Financial Transaction System on an urgent basis and this is where the company did the implementation in one-third time and cost. Apparently, the India sub of the MNC had created a benchmark for the global teams. Going forward, CtrlS does not only want to be recognized as the most dependable and reliable partner to its clients but also envisages to create an impact for their business. In fact, each and every member of the organization lives and breathes this dream. The company’s innovation bench and product roadmap has over 25 plus interesting and path breaking ideas in areas like BYOD, collaboration, workforce productivity, archiving, IT security, and automation amongst other areas. Within the organization, it has automated even the minutest of processes to ensure total effectiveness and efficiency.

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21/02/14 9:59 am

SOLUTION PROVIDERS

SECURITY SERVICES

AGC NETWORKS

ATUL KHATAVKAR

VP – IT GOVERNANCE, RISK & COMPLIANCE, AGC NETWORKS

Information security, governance, risk and compliance are the specialized areas that AGC Networks has been focusing on. The company has built a lot of intellectual property and services around security. The gamut of services that the company offers include very high end consulting i.e. IT governance, risk and compliance wherein it helps CEOs and CXOs to build IT security strategy, framework for compliances, and helps them get compliance certifications like ISO 27000. The other services include vulnerability assessment, penetration testing, ethical hacking, and host of other services in high end security where it makes the senior management of any organization to understand where they are positioned with regards to security posture. The other significant area of focus for AGC is providing solutions in terms of technical implementation strategy where it helps the customers to build and implement those products and, at the same time, maintain and monitor those solutions. In total, the company offers wide range of services through consulting and technical solutions. On the technical solution side, AGC launched

cloud-based managed security services last year, which is helping the companies to manage all its branches using this cloud solution. The company also launched security incident and event monitoring (SIEM) system for large banks and manufacturing sector. The other technology areas where the company is keenly focusing on include Web Application Firewall, Database Access Monitoring, and Network Access Control. AGC believes that these are some of the unique and niche areas where a very few technology players are currently offering their services. Here, again the company has taken the lead and did some successful implementations last year. The biggest USP of AGC is the combination of consulting and technical solutions that it offers to the customers. This means that post consultation, the company not only helps in building those solutions, but also monitor them on 24x7 basis. Meanwhile, AGC has been working very closely with customers from BFSI sector and telecom companies like Vodafone and Tata Teleservices.

SECURITY SERVICES

IVALUE INFOSOLUTIONS

SUNIL PILLAI

CO-FOUNDER AND MANAGING DIRECTOR, IVALUE INFOSOLUTIONS

As a premium technology enabler, iValue InfoSolutions offers end-to end solution and related services for digital asset protection and data, network, and application management areas. The company has direct partnerships with 20 plus OEMs and address more than 5000 customers through 400 plus local, regional and national system integrators. It offers solutions and services in onsite/capex as well as cloud/opex model. As far as the strength in security services is concerned, the team at iValue has been focusing on the digital asset protection area for the last 15 years. Most of the leading brands of today have been introduced and established by this team. This focused approach has helped the company to build deep technology insights along with domain expertise for key verticals. The company further believes that information security business is driven by governance, risk and compliance. Hence, the verticals with most compliance needs such as BFSI, telecom, ITeS, manufacturing, government, and e-Governance projects are the key verticals for security solutions and services of iValue. In fact, iValue has complete

offerings around data, network, application protection and management areas with high relevance to customers across size and vertical. Since iValue has vertical teams for BFSI and government sectors, most of the projects have been undertaken in these vertical industries. The company has done deployment of security services for MNC, private, government and co-operative banks; MNC and private insurance companies; most of the leading global system integrators for their internal use and for their customers; and leading manufacturing and pharmaceutical companies. Moreover, it has deployed multiple solutions to e-Governance initiatives such as SWAN, APDRP, SDC, Treasury, SCADA, CCTNS across multiple states mainly through national system integrators. Even the country’s top telecom companies are its repeat customers. iValue believes that consulting is the first step in security practice, as it leads to security solutions and services opportunities. Probably why, close to 10% of iValue’s overall revenue comes from security services and 40% from security solutions and services.

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SOLUTION PROVIDERS

SECURITY SERVICES

COMGUARD INFOSOL

HARISH RAI

COUNTRY MANAGER – INDIA, COMGUARD INFOSOL

Comguard Infosol is a part of Spectrum Group of Companies with offices in Dubai, Riyadh, Tunisia, Singapore, Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi. The company started its operations in India in 2009 as a niche network and security technology distributor, wherein its product portfolio is studded with world class IT vendors like Kaspersky, WinMagic, Gateprotect , Accunetix, Array Networks, Aruba Networks, EnGenius, Brocade, Sangoma, Contentkeeper and GFI. Comguard has supported project requirements of leading enterprises in the Indian region. Leveraging on in-house technical support resources and strong channel support, the company has been recognized for its dedicated and sustained efforts to add value to its distribution role. As a Value Added Distributor, Comguard has created a niche for itself in the product distribution space, through its strong channel support, in-house technical support, trainers and inherent strength in infrastructure and customer service skills. Comguard’s resource pool consist of certified and quality pre and post-sales service, technical services

and support teams as well as in house marketing team which has been and is following the vision and mission which the company has envisioned for the future. The company also has in-built training facilities. While the company has its footprint in most of the verticals industries, its clientele consists of government, banks, and corporate sector amongst others. Comguard, over the time has been recognized and has now become a renowned VAD. Over the years, Comguard has been involved into many projects. One recent project that is worthmentioning here is that of Maharashtra Police, City Thane, wherein the company’s efforts have been acknowledged and appreciated by the top official from the Police department. The project lasted for more than 6 months wherein it not only did the successful implementation but also trained more than 50 plus policemen from the cyber department. Meanwhile, the company believes that IT security service industry is growing immensely and the market has great potential.

SECURITY SERVICES

ESSEN VISION

NITYANAND SHETTY

MANAGING DIRECTOR, ESSEN VISION

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Essen Vision has emerged as the next generation security and services organization. True to its reputation of being an end-to-end security company, Essen Vision today has solutions for customers in different verticals with a highly skilled workforce in the technical and services department. The emergence of technologies such as Privileged Identity Management (PIM), Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs), Next Generation Firewalls (NGFW), Web Application Firewalls (WAF), WAN Optimization solutions, and Mobile Device Management solutions has compelled the company to offer services in these areas. Besides, Essen Vision is providing solutions in the areas like Network Intrusion Prevention Systems, Data Loss Prevention, security incident and event monitoring (SIEM), Web and Email Security, Load Balancing of Applications, Servers and Links, Information Rights Management, Application Performance Management, Security Devices Risk, Assurance and Compliance, and Endpoint Antivirus and Encryption.

In the security services domain, Essen Vision’s strength is its partnerships with OEMs in the above-mentioned technologies that have helped its technical force get regular trainings and certifications. Also, it is one of the few companies who have stuck to its vision to specialize in the domain of security which has helped it to focus and has given customer confidence in its technical capabilities over the years. Meanwhile, Essen Vision has large customer base in the vertical industries like banking, pharmaceutical, ITeS, manufacturing, financial services, and FMCG amongst others. The major projects include implementation of a Privileged Identity Management solution for a large pharmaceutical customer as well as and a Credit Rating company; implementation of Global Server Load Balancers between the DC and DR for another Credit Rating company; and deployment of a Web Proxy, Security and Data Leakage Prevention solution for a large Consumer Power company for about 5000 users.

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SOLUTION PROVIDERS

SECURITY SERVICES

ALLIED DIGITAL

SANJIV PATKI

CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER, ALLIED DIGITAL

Allied Digital has been in infrastructure management space for well over three decades, and today it is also known as Global Transformation Architect and Master System Integrators. The company has presence in more than 194 locations across the world. And more specifically in India, it has direct presence in 142 locations across the Indian market. Currently, Allied Digital is about 3000 employee organization with most of them being technical and carrying certifications in various areas. One of the country’s leading solution providers, Allied Digital started its remote management practice in the year 2007and today, it has matured processes and evolved delivery model. As a part of its remote management services, the company offers managed security services as one of the major offerings. The portfolio of managed security services includes end-to-end management of security posture of an enterprise. Starting from end user security, it provides data center security, application level security, and perimeter security. The major advantage Allied Digital has over other solution providers is that it is one-stop-shop for security services and while ensuring information protection for the organization, it provides meaningful reports and correlated dashboards to various owners and consolidated single dashboard for CIO/ CISO to understand the security posture of their organization. Allied Digital provides unique offerings in the space of security services. It offers security services for end-user computing devices, mobility devices, data center devices, applications, networking devices and perimeter devices. One of the company’s unique services is Threat Notification Advisory Services (TNAS), wherein these notifications are sent to customers across the world. This helps its customers to guard themselves against possible attacks. Allied Digital has been able to prevent many ‘zero day attacks’ using TNAS. Another major strength is its evolved and matured processes which have been perfected over last several years. These processes help the company to contain any attack which may occur on its customers’ equipment by coming up with counter measures. Allied Digital has been an early mover in the field of Security. It had setup our Security Operations

Center (SOC) in Mumbai when not many people were aware about security threats. The company has also got necessary certifications for its SOC. This includes ISO 27000. Naturally, it has an early mover advantage. Additionally, it has a strong tool which is a big positive for the company in the security services domain. Also, it has well documented processes and a well-populated knowledge base. It resources are well trained and they follow the process. Last but not the least there is clarity in deliverables, SLAs and measurement criterion, which shows that Allied Digital has a robust delivery engine. During the last seven years, the solution provider has acquired and provided managed security services to several customers across various vertical industries including logistics, BFSI, pharmaceutical, hospitality and government agencies. Meanwhile, the company has customers not only in India but also in the US and the UK. In the last three years, Allied Digital has done several projects in the security services domain. For example, it has provided manage security services to one of the government bodies in the US, wherein it managed end user computing devices by providing DLP, Anti-Virus, and Anti-Malware solution. In the data center space, it has provided VA and PT for all devices. The gaps have been filled and processes have been corrected. Even at Application level, it has provided recommendations to make applications more robust. Allied Digital has also provided security incident and event monitoring (SIEM) solution to this customer. Besides, it provided periodic reports to the CIO of the company enlisting weakness in their security implementations. Allied Digital’s protection measures have been so strong that it was able to protect the organization even from Cryptolocker attacks. Although the company has a fairly matured security services practice with large customer base, it does not contribute large share in its overall business. Currently, managed security services contribute to about 5-7% of the total business of Allied Digital. It feels that Indian security industry is at an inflection point and from here only those players who have strong security practice will survive. Hence, it sees a huge growth potential in security services space.

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SOLUTION PROVIDERS

CLOUD SERVICES

ICERTIS

MONISH DARDA

CO-FOUNDER AND CTO, ICERTIS

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Icertis is a born-in-the-cloud CSV (Cloud Software Vendor) that builds enterprise solutions on the Microsoft Cloud. Enterprise software has traditionally been difficult to build, hard to deploy, expensive to maintain and took long drawn cycles to adopt. Breaking tradition, Icertis took on the challenge of developing products in the “ERP Surround” space by leveraging the cloud for the enterprise. Icertis is built on three core premises: • All enterprise software that touches the customer, partner, vendor, or consumer – ERPsurround software – will move to the cloud. • The cloud’s elasticity, availability, and ubiquity will drive game changing innovation in ERPsurround software. • The coming decade will belong to enterprise software companies with products that can be swiftly deployed, rapidly iterated on, and quickly customized to customers’ specific business challenges. Anchored in these foundation principles and with focus exclusively on Windows Azure, Icertis is one of the select few companies in the world building and implementing cloud native products and solutions. Icertis has so far successfully launched the following innovative products on the Windows Azure platform to address specific business needs of the enterprise• Icertis Contract Management • Icertis Transportation Management • Icertis Fleet Management • Icertis PublicTransport Management Icertis Contract Management –Contracts are the foundation of every business and as a result contract management plays a critical role in fiscal management, controlling spending, mitigating financial risks, managing compliance and speeding revenue recognition. Icertis Contract Management system is a Windows Azure based comprehensive contract management system that helps businesses to manage their complete contract lifecycle and empowers them to effectively manage compliance. The system leverages a clause and template library with a robust approval rule engine to enforce strong governance on contracts, drives compliance using contract commitment tracking and significantly enhances productivity and adoption using an inspired user interface. Contract management is a key leverage that can not only significantly impact revenues and bottom line but also influence viability and sustainability of a business. Icertis Transportation Management - is an innovative breakthrough solution architected natively on Microsoft Windows Azure Platform that addresses

the challenges that plague supply chain execution operations. The system leverages the true potential of the cloud to deliver a best of breed, flexible, agile and transparent TMS. Icertis PublicTransport Management - Built on Windows Azure, the product enables city and inter-city bus operators to manage their complex operations in a sustainable and profitable manner, while offering world class service to passengers in a safe and secure way. The product is the only end-to-end capability offering in the bus transport space in India. Deployment of the Icertis PublicTransport product helps operators to have access to intelligent analytics to enable effective tactical planning and real time operational control. The reduction in operating cost achieved is between 5-10% and revenue generation is improved by 10%. The Planning Engine of the system ensures intelligent assignment of vehicles and drivers to achieve fuel economy and can save up to 2-4% of fuel expense every day which translates to 1-2% direct improvement in margins for the operator. A new breed of enterprise cloud applications is evolving, with engaging user experiences that bring consumer application ease of use to enterprise applications that brings the extended enterprise of partners, customers, vendors and enterprise users together. Icertis is at the forefront of that innovation – with born-in-the-cloud enterprise applications that are easy to deploy, easy to use and integrate with line of business applications easily. Icertis is changing the game for “ERP surround” applications in enterprise contract management and transportation management that are faster, better, inexpensive to deploy and maintain and leverage the cloud to deliver critical services to the extended enterprise. With advanced prescriptive analytics that allow more informed decisions and powerful “what-if ” scenarios, Icertis is delivering value to customers worldwide. Overall Icertis has 20+customers globally across its portfolio of offerings. The customer additions are from various industry verticals and are using Icertis’ products to solve their supply chain execution, contracting and ERP-surround challenges. Some of the customers successfully using our products are Microsoft, Janney Montgomery Scott LLC, KPIT, bwin.party, Prasanna Purple Mobility Solutions among others. They range from IT services, financial and fund management, online gaming and pharmaceutical companies.ë

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SOLUTION PROVIDERS

CLOUD SERVICES

PROGRESSIVE INFOTECH

PRATEEK GARG

MANAGING DIRECTOR & CEO, PROGRESSIVE INFOTECH

Progressive is a 15 year old ICT Services company with pan India footprint and extending into Middle East. It has over 1100 employees and focuses to provide ICT Transformation Services at three levels namely Business Transformation, Operations Transformation and Cloud Transformation. Under Cloud transformation, Progressive provides the following services/solutions: Cloud Consulting, Integration Services, Cloud Management Services, Cloud Migration Services, Backup and Recovery Solutions, and Disaster Recovery solutions on cloud. Cloudnonstop.com is designed to be a cloud consulting practice based on in-depth research on the innovation that is taking place every single day in order to help businesses chose and integrate the right cloud services aligned to where they are today and where they ought to be tomorrow, enabling “Lean IT” while keeping it elastic and sustainable. MyDataSync, unified cloud backup and

business continuity solution, is the combination of de-duplication of data, continuous deltas, compression and cloud changes the economics of protecting data in businesses favour. The company has built deep skills on public and private cloud technologies including Microsoft Azure, Amazon, VMware and Hyper –V. It is unique in its ability to help architect, construct, deploy, integrate and manage cloud infrastructure across the enterprise. The customers span across verticals like large hospitality, manufacturing, telecom VAS service provider, Oil & Gas, retail, insurance etc. Progressive has been on a transformation journey for the last three years, exiting from the hardware business and moving in to services. Hence, its revenue mix has been changing with not much alteration in its top line. On an average, the revenue is of 75 Crores over the last three years.

CLOUD SERVICES

Q3 TECHNOLOGIES

ANUJ MATHUR

CEO, Q3 TECHNOLOGIES

Q3 Technologies is focused on custom software products and applications development including technology consulting, application migration and modernization, end-to-end support & maintenance and IT/Infrastructure support services. For over 20 years, the company has helped its clients with their enterprise software and application needs with a growing focus on enterprise mobility, cloud migrations and big data solutions. Q3 has two development centers in India located in Gurgaon and Jaipur with a team of more than 400 software engineers with expertise in MS .NET, Java and Open source technologies. Q3 cloud service offering includes the development, hosting and management of medium to large enterprise application on leading cloud platforms including Amazon Web Services, Rackspace Cloud and Windows Azure. Additionally, Q3 offers a very strong capability in development of applications using cloud service APIs to interface with and automate the resource management on these cloud platforms Q3’s cloud service offering is unique in the sense that it is able to undertake end-to-end cloud service management for clients’ applications. This includes interfacing with the cloud service providers and managing the contract with them for clients, implementation and/

or migration of clients’ applications on any major cloud platform available and providing post development maintenance and support for clients’ cloud infrastructure and deployment. Some of the major customers for cloud services include one of the largest railroad service providers in Europe, responsible for running the London Rail Services and bus services in the USA, one of the largest Employee Benefits Managers in the USA, one of the largest Gems & Jewelry Manufacturers in the world, one of the largest Event Search and Ticket Retailing website in Australia. One of the major projects by Q3 included the one aimed at development and management of the enterprise and customer service applications for the largest railroad providers in Europe. The applications were developed and deployed on Rackspace Cloud and consisted of a suite of customer service Blackberry Smartphone applications hosted on the Blackberry Enterprise server. Q3 developed and managed the end-to-end development, deployment and maintenance of these 53 applications and is still providing the client with post-delivery maintenance and support. A good estimate of the contribution of cloud and cloud related services to the company’s overall business would be in the range of 25-30% and growing.

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SOLUTION PROVIDERS

CLOUD SERVICES

APPLANE

FY 2011-12

1.37CR

37 LAKH

REVENUE SNAPSHOT

18.5 LAKH

YOGESH AGARWAL

PRESIDENT, APPLANE

Applane is a Cloud ERP company whose flagship products Applane Education and Applane Business help educational institutions and business enterprises respectively, streamline their processes and drive efficiencies higher through automation. As a part of Applane Education, the company has solutions that automate the admission, attendance, report card generation, transport, etc., while Applane Business is an integrated solution with Customer Relationship Management, Human Resource Management, Financial Management and Project Management suites. Applane has many areas of strength in cloud services with financially backed SLA for 99.9% uptime, comprehensive and seamlessly integrated modules and dashboards and accompanying mobile apps, to mention a few. Applane has also got the rare distinction of being the only education ERP company running on Google Cloud and being backed by a Google Cloud Service Partner. CBSE has also taken cognizance of Applane's brilliance and shortlisted it as one of the top school ERP software. Currently, more than 200 schools are running on Applane Education including prominent names like APS Dhaula Kuan, KR Mangalam, DPS International and Universal High Education Group. Furthermore, Applane Business has a customer base ranging from large logistics companies like Darcl

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FY 2013-14 TILL DATE

Logistics to data intensive high growth companies like CarDekho and Navigant Technologies. One of the major projects that Applane undertook and delivered in the recent past is the implementation of Applane Education across the length and breadth of Universal High Education Group, which included 10 schools and eight colleges. The company initially implemented its Cloud ERP in the schools. Impressed with Applane's performance, Universal asked to implement Applane in all their colleges as well. Applane is entirely on cloud. Hence, cloud services make a major contribution in the overall business.

CLOUD SERVICES

CLOUDMANTRA

NILESH MORE

FOUNDER & CEO, CLOUDMANTRA

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Started in November 2013, cloudmantra is on track to achieve revenue of INR 1 Cr in FY 2013-14. cloudmantra is a provider of 24x7, cloud based services & technical support to consumers and businesses in India, USA, UK, Canada and Australia. While the company’s positioning is more consumer centric, its works closely with software providers for bringing their technology to consumers and combine their offerings as a part of its services. Cloud-centric services and support forms 100% of the company’s revenue. cloudmantra enables its customers to stay connected and their connected devices to perform optimally and securely. Some of the services that cloudmantra provides in the cloud domain include Cloud based security services to small business and corporate as a managed service provider, Cloud leveraged security solution designed specifically for

Telcos, Consulting to leverage SMAC ( Social Media, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud) and Technical Support to consumers and businesses via cloud. cloudmantra is the only company in India responsible for bringing the power of cloud to not only secure PCs/Laptops/Mobiles but also helps consumers and small businesses to run their entire IT systems smoothly & optimally. The company terms this as its strength. Its Service Plans leverage the power of cloud technology and allow customers to experience their connected devices seamlessly. Major customers are from much targeted sectors like Retail, Telecom and Banking. It is currently executing a strategic consulting assignment for a very large software player to leverage SMAC in their company. Also, it is in advance stages for enabling a very large retail chain to leverage cloudmantra’s mobile security solution.

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SOLUTION PROVIDERS

VIRTUALIZATION

ORIENT TECHNOLOGIES

AJAY SAWANT

MANAGING DIRECTOR, ORIENT TECHNOLOGIES

Established in 1992 and headquartered in Mumbai, Orient Technologies is a premier system integrator organization. The company’s employee strength is 1000 plus with offices in Mumbai, Pune, Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Delhi, Gurgaon, and Kolkata. The system integration business of Orient has been growing by leaps and bounds in the recent times. Over a period of time, the company has expertise in various technology domains like networking, security, enterprise solutions (ERP, BI and Analytics), its biggest USP is the virtualization solutions and services that it offers to the customers. The company’s core strength is on virtualization and its different forms. Orient has developed virtualization as a practice within the organization, wherein it does server, desktop, network, application, and storage virtualization. For example, it has done server virtualization for Eureka Forbes; then it has implemented desktop virtualization for Future Retail and Aegis BPO; network virtualization has been done for customers like CNBC TV 18; storage virtualization has been done for customers like Blue Star; and lastly, application virtualization has been

done for telecom companies like Airtel and Idea. The virtualization piece of Orient is also vendor agnostic, wherein it works with VMware, Citrix, Linux, Oracle, etc. This means that the company works very closely with any form of virtualization and with any vendor or OEM. Before entering into the virtualization space, Orient understood the IT market and the trends coming in. Since the year 2000, the company started learning about the whole concept of virtualization and that’s when it developed the practice around virtualization. In the last financial year, the group clocked the revenue of Rs.152 crore. And out of this turnover, virtualization that comprises of enterprise servers and virtualized storage contributes around 45 crore. Meanwhile, the year 2013 was a bottomline driven business wherein the company might grow by 15-20%; whereas the top-line might grow by 5-10%. Taking virtualization success as base, the company is building expertise in cloud technologies and mobility. Last year, it acquired Bangalore based Orbiz Media Technologies, a mobility software company.

VIRTUALIZATION

PROGRESSION INFONET

J.B. HOODA

CO-FOUNDER AND DIRECTOR, PROGRESSION INFONET

Progression has been at the forefront of technology delivering outstanding IT infrastructure services to create significant business value for its customers. With team strength of over 150 and growing, Progression has engineers trained and certified in designing, architecting, selling, servicing and optimizing computing infrastructure based on products from market leaders such as VMware, HP, Oracle and Microsoft. Progression is widely recognized for its passion to stay abreast of the latest technology innovations and breakthroughs. It has been a leader in Server virtualization/consolidation solutions builds Private Clouds and offers Public Cloud computing services for business critical applications. Progression has developed a knack of identifying technologies that work best for a business requirement. Progression was amongst the pioneers in not only adopting virtualization technology but also deploying it for the benefits of its customer. In virtualization domain, Progression provides Server and Storage virtualization and consolidation, Network Virtualization, Build and Manage Private Cloud, Build and Manage Public Cloud.

Leading names is the Auto, Media, Transportation and Glass Packaging Industry are the company’s major customers. Most of its virtualization clients were running on physical servers initially which was time consuming and not cost-effective. Whenever these organizations had a new project or requirement scaling up was a complex and a cumbersome process. Consequently AMC costs were also shooting up. Progression consolidated there infrastructure using virtualization technology due to which they are able to manage their IT in a considerably less time, expense and effort. Their downtime has also reduced considerably. Interglobe Technologies, Absolut Data & Matrix Cellular are some of the key virtualization projects that Progression has undertaken in the past year. Progression Infonet has grown been growing. It has recorded its revenue in the last three years as 35 cr, 42 cr, and 50 cr respectively.

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SOLUTION PROVIDERS

VIRTUALIZATION

SYNDROME TECHNOLOGIES

84CR

76CR

CEO, SYNDROME

REVENUE SNAPSHOT

72CR

SIDDHARTH MEHTA

Syndrome Technologies is among the fastest growing leading provider of IT Infrastructure services encompassing integration and management of complex Infrastructure. Today’s dynamic business environments demands effective and upgraded infrastructure management to enhance business continuity and improve service quality. And that’s where Syndrome comes in. As demands on the IT infrastructure is rapidly increasing, several companies are looking for a reliable and profitable means for maintaining their IT applications and systems and revamping their internal infrastructure management processes. Today, IT infrastructure needs to be available 24x7 with extremely high uptime requirements. It requires humongous investment in support organization to maintain such infrastructure which Syndrome helps to manage the IT Infrastructure optimally. Syndrome’s technology and solutions are designed to address such unique and diverse infrastructure management needs. The company provides technology solutions that enable business and inflate process efficiently. Its technology includes best of brands in network management products, apart from strategic consulting that is designed to deliver value straight to customer’s bottom line. Syndrome Virtualization Professional Services

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2011-12

2012-13

offer end-to-end consulting services for Datacenter, Virtualization Management, Desktop Virtualization and Cloud Services. The service offerings are based on in-depth virtualization expertise, proven best practices, and repeatable delivery methodologies to help customers realize the full value of virtualization for IT as a service computing models faster, and with less risk. Virtualization services contribute 1crore to Syndrome’s overall business.

VIRTUALIZATION

WYSETEK SYSTEMS

CHERIAN THOMAS AND RAJESH MATHKAR

DIRECTOR, WYSETEK SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGISTS

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Wysetek, a VMware Premier Partner as well as a PSO – VMware Professional Services Partner has been providing Virtualization and Cloud Infrastructure Solutions and Services for the past several years. It is in its 25th year of existence. Wysetek offers Professional Services for Consulting, Designing, Capacity Planning, Implementation and Configuration as well as 24/7 ongoing supports. It provides entire Virtualization range i.e. Server, Application, Network and Desktop Virtualization. Beyond the basic Virtualization and Server consolidation, Wysetek also provides Specialists Virtualization Management & Security Solutions. Wysetek prides itself in being a ‘genuinely comprehensive player’. The team has strong skills in virtualization. It is one of the very few professional services partners which is a proof of the same. Wysetek has done virtualization projects with Large

Private Banks, Leading Paint Manufacturer, a leading Airline and many more. Besides these, there are many SMB/SME projects. In past one year, Wysetek has undertaken a major project with Parle Agro where it implemented their entire data centre on VMware virtualization. Using VMware Disaster Recovery (DR) solution, Site Recovery Manager (SRM) Wysetek deployed DR project for Parle Agro. Prior to this, for one of the leading travel agency, where 2000 clients use SAP environment which runs out of virtualized set-up implemented by Wysetek. For another cooperative bank, the company has taken all its workload on the virtualized platform including the core banking. The company clocked around 90 cr of revenue in last three years. Earlier, virtualization contributed 5% but this year it could be around 10%. However, the the estimation may vary according to projects.

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SOLUTION PROVIDERS

VIRTUALIZATION

CALSOFT

MAR 2011

$13.5 MN

$8.5 MN

REVENUE SNAPSHOT

$4 MN

PARAG KULKARNI

VP ENGINEERING, CALSOFT

Established in 1998, Calsoft is recognized as an award-winning technology company, specializing in software product engineering services with niche expertise in Storage, Networking, Virtualization, and Cloud. With highly skilled resources, innovative business models, and reusable Accelerators IP, Calsoft helps its customers to minimize time-tomarket, improve quality, reduce risk of failure, and enhance brand value. In addition, it helps to improve predictability and reliability of engineering processes while minimizing over-all engineering costs. Companies from Silicon Valley start-ups to Fortune 500 Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) or software enabled businesses, entrust us with important, often critical pieces of their technology and products. What makes it different is the company’s approach, attitude, technological edge, and focus. Calsoft provides end-to-end product development services in Virtualization domain that includes helping its customer from ideation to development, sustenance and quality assurance. It helps customer build entire software products or certain components of these software for independent software vendors (ISV) in Storage, Virtualization, Networking and Compute domains. A lot of times this entails tying the knot between storage vendors and virtualization platforms by building new or modifying existing products to support and expand the virtualized datacenter markets. Software product vendors hire Calsoft for competent end-to-end product development services. Calsoft has been helping companies with all elements of Product Development Life Cycle (PDLC) i.e. Innovation, Design, Product Development, Testing & QA, and Deployment with Support & Maintenance activities for more than a decade now. To ensure a truly positive end-user experience and meet customer’s expectations in shortest possible time, Calsoft delivers solutions at right time keeping quality intact. Calsoft hires qualified technologists with deep domain expertise and extensive experience in SNVC (Storage, Networking, Virtualization and Cloud domains). The teams of domain experts work collaboratively to meet the customer’s product specifications and designs. Calsoft provides services in software development and QA over a wide variety of virtualization platforms and technologies. It ranges from VMware, MS Hyper-V, KVM to providing niche solutions in HA, CA, DR, Backup and Recovery, Datacenter monitoring, management as well as building cloud ready enterprise applications. At Calsoft, Virtualization is core systems

MAR 2013

background. For the last 14 years the company has worked on systems projects and that gives it a great platform for understanding virtualization technologies and their markets. Not to mention that it was one of the first vendors to work with VMware. Calsoft has a great team of 500+ engineers and it only gets better with more projects it executes. Calsoft’s expertise in server virtualization technologies such as VMware’s ESX, Microsoft’s Hyper-V, Citrix’s Xen Server, and KVM allows storage and networking product vendors to integrate with virtualized data centers. Here are some key components in a virtualized data center: • Virtual data center orchestrator • Virtual data center manager • Hypervisor • Virtual data center operations manager The current customers include world’s leading Virtualization ISV as well as some leading edge technology start-ups. Additionally, in this domain, the company has helped a lot of eco-system companies to Virtualization. Due to strict NDA agreements with its customers Calsoft cannot disclose their names. Calsoft has built a complete high-availability solution for a major virtualization software vendor, has worked with a lot of storage and compute vendors to integrate their products and appliances to work with heterogeneous virtualization platforms. It recently worked with top storage vendor to provide backup and recovery solutions for VMware. Virtualization contributes a significant amount to overall Calsoft’s revenue and growth areas of the company. The company has kept a constant growth rate of approximately 50% YoY and continues to do so. Looking ahead at the markets, Calsoft is currently targeting to reach $18Million -$20Million soon.

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SOLUTION PROVIDERS

NETWORKING

IVALUE INFOSOLUTIONS

SUNIL PILLAI

CO-FOUNDER & MANAGING DIRECTOR, IVALUE INFOSOLUTIONS

A premium technology enabler, iValue InfoSolutions drives adoption of cutting edge technology solution and services through the entire life cycle stages for IT Security, Storage & Managed enterprise wireless space. With a Mission to empower organizations effectively manage their “Digital Assets” which are critical business differentiators, for protecting and growing the business, iValue offers solutions and services that are aligned & optimized for customer business needs through its partnerships. The team at iValue have proven track record of creating robust & scalable delivery models for niche & emerging solutions/services, while continuing to provide additional growth for matured solutions. Business centric approach to understand and address customers business and IT challenges, deep domain knowledge in security, storage and networking technologies, mix of niche and popular offerings with high relevance to customers across size and vertical which helps partners grow business profitably at quick pace, approach of aligning with right partners for select set of solutions and working together to grow business

profitably for each other in a focused way are the some of the strengths of iValue Infosolutions. Data, Network and Application are the three pillars of any modern day business leveraging IT. Hence the relevance of the company’s offering is across size and vertical. Key verticals based on business volume are BFSI, eGovernance, Telecom, ITeS, Manufacturing, Education & Research and Hospitality. The company has project teams focusing on BFSI and Government verticals. It has been involved in over 20+ projects deployments across central and state government entities, Data centre projects across MNC, PSU and Private banks, Insurance & ITeS companies, campus wide wireless deployment in universities, sporting events and IT campus etc. during the last 12 months.

NETWORKING

AGC NETWORKS

BHAVIN BARBHAYA

VICE PRESIDENT, SALES - NETWORK & DATA CENTER, AGC NETWORKS

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Incorporated in 1986, AGC Networks Limited is a global ICT Solutions Provider and Integrator seamlessly delivering technology based solutions across global market. Headquartered in India, AGC has presence in the Middle East, North America, Australia, New Zealand, US and Africa. Other than Europe, AGC covers the entire world. AGC is equipped with global technology alliance partners like Avaya, Juniper, NICE Systems, Aspect, HP, Polycom, Cisco, Microsoft, EMC, Dialogic, NetApp, Checkpoint and Jabra among 70 other OEMs. AGC has a spectrum of applications and services in Unified Communications, Network Infrastructure, Data Center & Virtualization and Enterprise Applications. Till 2010, AGC was known only primarily for UC but now after the change in leadership, AGC has become a full-fledged solutions integrator. AGC Networks is a subsidiary of Aegis Limited, an Essar Enterprise. AGC terms itself as a Solutions Integrator not Systems Integrator because it works on customising solutions meeting the business needs of customers. It is not just a box pusher. Boxes are manufactured by

the OEMs but how well it integrates into a customer environment to get business outcome, this is where AGC differentiates. In networking, AGC provides services for branch offices, campus, data centres or even the multilocation solutions which includes LAN, WAN, mobility, wireless along with security. OEMs with which AGC operates in this domain are Juniper, Cisco, and Avaya. The customers range from the top players in IT/ ITeS, BFSI, PSUs, education, telecom etc. In the last one year, one of the major projects undertaken by AGC is when it won a sizeable order of Summit Communications Ltd. in Bangladesh, one of the upcoming ISP who can provide broadband services in the country. AGC’s role was in providing solutions to the grass root ISP catering to entire country and how they can scale when the customers increase. AGC demonstrated the entire process and POC at its customer experience centre. Three years back, networking portfolio contributed only 1% to business and today it contributes in the range of 22-25%.In 2013, AGC clocked revenue of 1016 crore.

F E B R U A R Y 2014

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SOLUTION PROVIDERS

NETWORKING

SYNDROME

84CR

76CR

CEO, SYNDROME

REVENUE SNAPSHOT

72CR

SIDDHARTH MEHTA

Syndrome Technologies is among the fastest growing leading provider of IT Infrastructure Services encompassing integration and management of complex infrastructure. Within the networking solutions technology space, Syndrome’s solutions include Local Area Networks, Wide Area Network, Wireless Network Solution, Remote Access & VPN, Application- Oriented Networking, Bandwidth Management & Optimization, Network Management and Network Security Solution. Syndrome is a Cisco Silver Certified Partner. Its strength is in solution selling approach, financially self-reliant, strong customer relationship, self execution and implementation team, certified and industry experienced team and end to end IT infra portfolio (Complimenting solutions like AudioVideo integration, Virtualization, Data Center build & structured cabling). Syndrome’s lifecycle services approach to networking allows it to ensure high levels of customer satisfaction at each stage of a solution’s deployment. This approach gives it the ability to provide secure network platforms for customer’s

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2011-12

2012-13

businesses by matching the business, technical and operational needs with the capabilities of their chosen technology. For one of the India’s largest private sector shipping company, Syndrome has provided core DC networking revamp. In another project, the company has provided core DC networking and LAN for one of the leading KPO.

NETWORKING

TEAM COMPUTERS

252CR

262CR

REVENUE SNAPSHOT

211CR

MAHESH TOMAR

DIRECTOR, TEAM COMPUTERS

Incorporated in 1987, Team Computers has has emerged as a leading IT solutions provider, supporting more than 1,800 customers across the country. Team Computers serves as a bridge between business needs, and the world of high quality and affordable IT solutions. It provides complete IT solutions from Creating IT Infrastructure to Managing it, Enabling Businesses with Applications and helping companies with better business decisions using Business Intelligence. It provides send-to-end networking solutions to mid-sized, enterprise and PSU/Govt customers, starting from consulting and designing the intelligent structured-cabling solutions (LAN) to proposing robust and cost-effect solutions around Data Centers -consisting of high-end core routing, switching, security and Wi-Fi connectivity. For Networking (Connectivity) patch, Team Computers majorly partners with Cisco, Riverbed, F5, Juniper, TE Connectivity (AMP), Commscope (Systimax). The company takes pride in having contributed to national security framework by car-

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2011-12

2012-13

rying out computerization and networking projects on difficult terrains, under demanding deadlines. Recently, it built and managed a high-end secured network environment comprising of DC and DR for a leading cooperative bank, across 200+ locations, with 100% uptime assurance.

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SOLUTION PROVIDERS

NETWORKING

NEOTERIC INFOMATIQUE

VARUN MATA

BUSINESS HEAD – CONVERGED TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS, NEOTERIC INFOMATIQUE

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Established in 1991 and headquartered in Mumbai, neoteric infomatique ltd. is one of India’s leading national value-added distributors in the IT space with 35 plus branches, 700 plus employees catering to 10,000 plus partners across 500 cities. neoteric caters to AV, componeNTS, consumer and memory, creative, enterprise, PC group of products and solutions. Some of neoteric’s top vendors are Acer, AJA, Alcatel-Lucent, AMX, Belkin, BenQ, Bowers & Wilkins( B & W), Canon, Corsair, Cybernetyx, Canon, Dell, Emerson, Gigabyte, Giesecke & Devrient ( G&D ), G-Tech, HGST, Incase, Kramer, LaCie, Lenovo, LG, Lite-On, Logitech, Matrox, NEC, Numeric, Panasonic, Polycom, Trend Micro, UMAX, Wacom, Western Digital (WD) and Xerox. Since inception, neoteric has been a market leader in bringing the latest products and technology solutions to the Indian market and finding new ways to add value to customers. neoteric acts as a vital link in the technology value chain connecting solution providers in India with vendors worldwide. Brief on NTS: In 2008, neoteric had made a foray into enterprise business under the name - neoteric technology solutions (NTS). NTS, the solutions arm of neoteric, today, is focused on enabling channel partners to pitch complete solution offerings and act as a onestop support for all their technology requirements. NTS offers end-to-end solutions, with demandgeneration culminating into partner-enablement. It gears up partners to serve the customer end-to-end and in turn, add value to them, thus completing the value cycle till the last tier. Right from consulting and solution architecting, the partners are trained and developed to manage the entire gamut of services ranging from sizing, designing, implementation/ installation, training and certification along with hosted services and remote maintenance. The team includes pre-sales, business development as well as post-sales technical experts who train channel partners to incubate from a mere box-selling trader to a solutions provider. The NTS group’s offerings broadly include Audio Video solutions, IP telephony solutions, Networking solutions, Digital Signage solutions, Security & Surveillance solutions and Media & Entertainment solutions. This BU has been signing up various brands that cater to sectors like Education, Hospitality, Retail, Healthcare and Manufacturing. 2013 saw NTS engaging in a flurry of activities to further engage with channel partners and inch closer to its larger objective of taking technologydistribution and consumption in India to the next

level. This includes its participation at Infocomm India 2013, Broadcast India 2013 and Interop 2013 whereby the Team showcased products, solutions and services that included leading brands like AJA, Alcatel-Lucent, AMX, Canon, Cybernetyx, Dell, Emerson, Harman, Kramer, Leviton, LG, Matrox, NEC, Panasonic, Polycom, Promise, Wallflower and Wacom. At each of these events, the NTS Team, through in-depth training and live demonstrations, helped visitors explore and understand how new transformative technologies can be put to practice and integrated, to avail maximum benefits. NTS’s edge lies in its expertise to provide endto-end solutions, right from demand-generation to partner-enablement. With its focus on enabling channel partners to pitch complete solution offerings and acting as a one-stop support for all their technology requirements, NTS gears up partners to serve the customer end-to-end and in turn, add value to them, thus completing the value cycle till the last tier. The partners are trained and developed to manage the entire gamut of services that includes consulting and solution architecting, sizing, designing, implementation/installation, training and certification along with hosted services and remote maintenance. The team includes pre-sales, business development as well as post-sales technical experts who train channel partners to incubate from a mere box-selling trader to a solutions provider. The NTS group’s offerings broadly include Audio Video solutions, IP telephony solutions, Networking solutions, Digital Signage solutions, Security & Surveillance solutions and Media & Entertainment solutions. This BU has been signing up various brands that cater to sectors like Education, Hospitality, Retail, Healthcare and Manufacturing. Sterlite, Airport Authority of India, Sarovar Hotels, ZF Steering, Synechron, are some of the cutomers. Some of the major projects undertaken in the past one year or so include : Synechron, one of the leading IT/ ITES firms based out of Pune, we proposed data networking solution for one of their upcoming facilities which was scalable to 4000 users. neoteric implemented high-performance 2-tier 10 G network backbone architecture using Alcatel-Lucent OS 6900 Compact Core Switch having all 10 G ports and consuming less space and power, resulting in lower TCO and faster ROI. neoteric successfully pitched and deployed Unified Alcatel-Lucent Voice/ Data/ Wifi solution at Sarovar Hotels. The converged solution led to ease of management and tighter integration across all technology platforms resulting in more efficient service delivery.

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NEWS REPORT

SECURITY

“Need for Robust Cyber Security Measures”

The Pune chapter of ISACA, a voluntary, professional, and non-profit organization that advocates for professionals involved in information security, assurance, risk management, and governance, organized its annual event. n NIVEDAN PRAKASH <(NIVEDAN@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM)>

he two day conference was inaugurated in the presence of Dr. A K Hirve, Chief General Manager – IT, RBI, and Sandeep Godbole, President of ISACA Pune chapter. G. Gopalakrishna, Executive Director, RBI, joined the other dignitaries via videoconferencing. At the inauguration ceremony of the event, Dr. Vijay Kelkar, Chairman – India Development Foundation and former Chairman of Finance Commission, stated, “Indian Economy will bounce back in future and Information Technology will play an important role in boosting its growth performance and GDP.” He also highlighted that liberalization has helped to increase competition in domestic and international markets. While globalization, reluctant attitude, tax reformation and increased domestic investments are the few reasons for a stabilized Indian Economy, it is impossible to double the income every ten years but India and China succeeded in it. “In 2009-10, India had highest growth rate of 8% but it dropped down in next year to 4.5% because of changes made in economic policies by the government. Increment in fiscal deficit was also the main reason for downslide of growth rate map,” he further added. RBI’s executive director G. Gopalakrishna released the ISACA publication on ‘RBI Guidelines Mapping with COBIT5’ and addressed the audience. He described the work of RBI in cyber security space in electronic banking. He

mentioned that unlike in the western countries, India is safe place for electronic banking and e-commerce. However, there is still a need to improve the technology by adopting robust technology for cyber security. “The US and Canada have multilayer Internet banking process, whereas Indian banks do not provide multilayer Internet banking. To improve this or to regulate this scenario, RBI provides some guidelines to the banks such as to keep security and risk measuring unit within defined timelines considering increment increase in the number of users of electronic banking and misuse of the technology,” pointed out Gopalakrishna. He further added that it is important to enable EMV chip, PIN and AADHAR (biometric validation) in electronic banking as security measures in future. In his keynote address, Sandeep Godbole, President of ISACA, Pune Chapter, explained the use of Internet for banking purposes and ISACA’s work and research in cyber security. He revealed that ISACA has prepared certification courses for cyber security and is investing in research. “Today, the whole world is facing information explosion where 80% data that is made available on the Internet has been created in the last few months. Hence, data security as well as IT governance, IT security, IT assurance, IT management, IT audit and IT controls are facing biggest challenges in the country today. And according to the National Cyber Security Act 2013, India needs 5

SANDEEP GODBOLE,

PRESIDENT OF ISACA, PUNE CHAPTER

“Today, the whole world is facing information explosion where 80% data that is made available on the Internet has been created in the last few months.” lakh cyber security experts,” added Godbole. Giving a brief of ISACA, Godbole explained, “The association, which has 200 chapters worldwide, advances and validates businesscritical skills and knowledge through the globally respected Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA), Certified Information Security Manager (CISM), Certified in the Governance of Enterprise IT (CGEIT) and Certified in Risk and Information Systems Control (CRISC) credentials. ISACA has also developed and continually updates COBIT, a business framework that helps enterprises in all industries and geographies govern and manage their information and technology.” ë

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CORPORATE STORY

BLACKBERRY

“Covering up the lost ground”

In its bid to gain back the Indian market confidence and revive the lost glory, BlackBerry is putting in all possible efforts to forge a strong partnership with the channel community. The company has started to build the foundation once again from the grass root level in order to bounce back soon. n NIVEDAN PRAKASH (NIVEDAN@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM)

or BlackBerry, the year 2013 was full of highs and lows. The year began with the launch of much touted BlackBerry 10 operating system and smartphones based on this platform, which was created to give consumers a truly unique mobile computing experience that constantly adapt to their needs. However, all the hype created around this platform failed to gather steam in the global market. Even the subsequent devices, which were launched later in the year, failed to impress the trade pundits. The situation came to such a point where the company was almost written off be it the channel partners or customers. And India was no different story. Hitesh Shah, Director – Channel Sales, BlackBerry India, says, “We quickly realized our mistake. Every technology industry has its ups and downs. We missed the boat once because we were late in launching BB10 and that’s where competition gained ground. The average usage of any device is 12 to 18 months and after that, the sales cycle changes. When a customer does not get the new technology from his preferred band, then he switches over. That’s where we were late in the game while bringing BB10. But once it was launched, people were latching on to it.” “I won’t say it was a very difficult year because when you look at the functioning of the markets like India, it works on trust. When you are open and transparent in your approach and when

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you talk to your partners with right numbers and information, market do understand your situation. It’s a bit of challenge for me but at the same time I can foresee a lot of opportunities. There’s a lot of work that can happen as you can see a lot of potential in the market. The way our brand is respected that today everybody wants that BlackBerry should bounce back soon. Channel partners are now openly saying that they are ready to support the brand in the best possible way. This is the beauty that I appreciate about the trade, which works on relationship and passion. They speak from the heart than the mind,” adds Shah. Through constant communication with its channel – from the distributors to the last mile people who mattered including the regional distributors and key retailers – BlackBerry is trying very hard to revive its lost glory and build the confidence in the market. In fact, the company has set up a direct line of communication with its partners in the country through which it is getting a lot of inputs from the ground level highlighting the areas of improvement. “Our both distributors, Redington and Ingram Micro, are super engaged and excited with us, as they work very closely with us to an extent that I almost spend an hour and half everyday talking to them. It wasn’t difficult as we were transparent and had trust within us. The market has always seen money with us. As the channels believe in us, we were compelled to go back to them to revive the lost glory,” asserts Shah.

Now, BlackBerry claims to have understood the Indian dynamics very clearly, wherein it has realized that Indian customers always look at value proposition that comes with a brand. And that’s the reason why, the company is taking many initiatives to ensure that it gives the right value proposition to the customers. This is the strategy BlackBerry is going to follow in future as well in order to ensure that it entices the customers in various brackets. “It’s a technology wave or cycle that we missed. And obviously, when you do so, it takes time to recover. Now, we are getting the right expertise in order to ensure that we run a little faster to play the catch up game and be at the top of the race. Never miss a technology cycle – that’s the biggest lesson we learnt. This is one of the most basic fundamentals of the business. Another important element is to always launch the right products at the right value propositions. You always have to keep moving with the technology and ensure that you keep delivering as per the customers’ requirements. You also need to have a clear definition of the market you want to cater to,” explains Shah. Meanwhile, the company’s strategy and focus going forward would be on enterprise space. Realignment of marketing strategies has been done as well in order to garner a better market position here in India. Now, BlackBerry is going ‘hyper local’, which means it is working as per the market requirements. The company has decided to associate with the market and work in line with the requirements to ensure that it keeps on

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CORPORATE STORY

HITESH SHAH,

DIRECTOR – CHANNEL SALES, BLACKBERRY INDIA

“You always have to keep moving with the technology and ensure that you keep delivering as per the customers’ requirements. There is also a need to have a clear definition of the market you want to cater to” connecting the way it is required to. Even the company’s top management is moving ahead while connecting with the local market and that too with the right messaging. Shah points out, “We have made some conscious decisions, wherein there is a lot of focus on enterprise business. Today, if you look at the whole BYOD concept and the way market is behaving, it is very difficult to segregate between an enterprise and a consumer. At the end of the day, you are a consumer working for an enterprise. Our USP or strength has been in the enterprise space. We have the legacy of addressing this segment of the market. The kind of standards that we have set that today, everybody aspires to be like BlackBerry in the enterprise space.” The company’s dominance in the enterprise segment is evident with the the growing adoption of BlackBerry 10 and BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 (BES10) by Indian enterprises across a range of sectors. BlackBerry has a strong market position in India where the company has seen more than 1,000 Indian enterprises adopting or testing BES10 since its launch in January 2013. A few of the company’s esteemed customers include ITC, Indiabulls, and Emcure Pharmaceuticals amongst others. Moreover, the rising number of organizations embracing BES10 in India as part of their mobile strategy showcases the enterprise commitment to the BlackBerry solution, which is recognized as the gold standard in security for Enterprise Mobility Management.

“We have a very strong relationship with carriers as they do a lot of fulfillment work for their customers. Organizations like Infosys always buy through carriers. While we have developed the right channel because of Redington and Ingram Micro, we also have an added advantage by having carriers on our side who go and sell on BlackBerry’s behalf to enterprises. This is one avenue where others are still playing the catching up game where as we are way ahead in this race,” highlights Shah. Traditionally, the company’s business model was only through carriers and it has developed the ecosystem further without letting it go. This is where BlackBerry has a bigger play. Both the channels put together complement each other rather than competing. And that’s the whole piece it has enabled into the retail channel as well – be it LFR, online, or others. “At the same time, we don’t want to focus on the width of the distribution but the depth. It’s better to have the right partners working with you because BlackBerry as a platform, we want to ensure that we deliver the experience for the customers rather than just focusing on the price. And though we lose out on a few partners during the tough times, fortunately none of the 142 regional distributors left,” adds he. As part of its commitment and focus on enterprise mobility, BlackBerry opened up Enterprise Solutions Centres in India, which are first-of-their-kind outside the US, at Mumbai and Gurgaon. The BlackBerry Enterprise Solutions

Centres in India are designed to help customers take advantage of the benefits of enterprise mobility. “People have appreciated our initiative of launching enterprise solution centers in Mumbai because they want to see what you can deliver. When you see things physically or in person, then you start believing it. These centers have been able to provide value add to our customers. The BlackBerry Enterprise Solutions Centres will detail for enterprises the BES10 security architecture and how mobility can enhance corporate productivity. The centre will train BlackBerry Enterprise VARs and customers on deploying BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10, and plans to offer courses for BlackBerry certifications for IT administrators who are currently managing a BES infrastructure or want to enhance their skills on BlackBerry Enterprise Solutions,” says Shah. BlackBerry’s enterprise channel has been led by Ingram Micro which is present across the country. Ingram’s distribution strength on the enterprise side is unmatchable and it is predominantly due to their VAR structure. Currently, there are 32 VARs under Ingram that take of BlackBerry’s enterprise business.

FINALLY... Moving ahead, in the year 2014, India is going to priority market for BlackBerry. The company would be focusing on the enterprise space, wherein it will keep on delivering the right experience with right value proposition. ë

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ASSOCIATION

CHANNEL ASSOCIATION

Rise of the Phoenix

In its 4th consecutive year, the ISODA Tech Summit provided a platform to all partners, distributors and OEMs attending the event to interact and discuss both the challenges faced in the past and explore new opportunities in the future. n NIVEDAN PRAKASH (NIVEDAN@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM)

nfotech Software Dealers Association (ISODA) organized its annual flagship event, Tech Summit, from January 23 to 26 at Pattaya, Thailand. The season 4 of Tech Summit began with much fanfare, where the event saw more than 70 delegates attending it from all the regions of the country. The 4th edition of this annual event, which the association has been successfully organizing since 2011, gave each one of its members the opportunity to meet, interact, learn new technologies and lay foundation for new business relationships and everlasting friendship. Giving the inaugural speech, Nityanand Shetty, Chairman of ISODA, said, “During the course of the Tech Summit, we hope to give all of you an insight into our plans for the year and introduce you to some innovative technologies in the industry. Besides the quarterly regional meets, the annual Tech Summit is meant to be a confluence and true reflection of the happenings in each geographical corner of the country and insights into the software industry.” “The Tech Summit is a Platform to interact and discuss both the challenges faced in the past and explore new opportunities in the future. ISODA is a true representation of the software industry too. We get to meet members who specialize in different domains, different verticals and different regions. This year we will be entirely focused on collaborations and networking within our community to upscale our business opportunities,” added Shetty. This year’s theme of the event was ‘Phoenix’, which according to Greek mythology is a longlived bird that is cyclically reborn and regener-

ated. Taking cure from this theme, Shetty pointed out that in the past year, the market scenario worldwide including India was not conducive to accelerated growth. The year 2013 can easily be defined as a tough year, dollar fluctuations to global slowdown to tax complexities, and the industry has faced the brunt, in more ways than one. He further stated, “We have to face some impending issues in 2014 and beyond. And that’s why there is a need to adapt to changing times by giving business empowerment to the member community; help members win businesses from competition; and think local and act national wherein we not only want to be the single and most influential IT association for software resellers and developers nationally but also work at local levels to influence state level decision making and liaison with local bodies.” “We are on the road back but certainly not there yet. Uncertainty is more pronounced today than in the past. The need of the hour would be innovative ideas and strategies. We at ISODA believe we are only limited by our own bounds and though the risks are many the opportunities are much more. At ISODA, it will be our endeavor, through the year 2014, to provide you the right platform to overcome these challenges through leadership, networking, deeper collaborations, and pooled resources. We need to break through the traditional shackles and reinvent ourselves and like the Phoenix rise from the ashes to soar high and far towards prosperity,” asserted Shetty. The previous Tech Summits were all about ISODA 1.0, wherein all the members came

NITYANAND SHETTY,

CHAIRMAN, ISODA DELEGATES AT THE TECH SUMMIT, PATTAYA, THAILAND

“We need to break through the traditional shackles and reinvent ourselves and like the Phoenix rise from the ashes to soar high and far towards prosperity” together for a common cause, putting efforts to fight the government in rectifying the manifold ills surrounding the software community and taxation issues. However, after achieving success in most of these areas, all the members decided to evolve together as an association and bring ROI to the time and energy that they invest in ISODA. Hence, during the course of the event, the association embarked on a new journey, called ISODA 2.0, which is all about collaboration and networking and translating these concepts into actual business. The members have decided to use the ISODA platform in a structured

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ASSOCIATION

manner to increase market reach both in terms of geography and skill sets. Shetty further highlighted, “ISODA 2.0 is about how ISODA can help its members expand their business boundaries. ISODA 2.0 is the impact we hope to bring to members business in the real sense and finally, ISODA 2.0 is to create a need for the world to connect with ISODA members. With this, I propose to embark on this journey with a project that can transform ISODA in to a highly visible brand rather than just a community of software dealers, distributors and developers.” In this endeavor, the association is launching an ISODA portal. This project entails designing and running an end customer facing portal to help them find ISODA members across the length and breadth of the country. This portal is for everybody from enterprise customers, SME owners and IT managers, SOHO customers, government bodies and education sector. The main goal is to make the ISODA members the destination for all the software needs of the customer. “This ISODA portal would help us with an emphatic presence and provide us with more visibility. Though we haven’t yet kept any name for the portal, this will be one place that will be promoted by India’s best software association that helps customers find the members easily. This portal will work on the lines of ‘shaadi.com’, wherein you know your requirement and put forward those based on your query, results are thrown up so you can choose what you think matches your requirement the best,” pointed out Shetty. It will be a one place portal where visitors can

search for members using pre-defined specializations, city, area, name or simply a free text search. However, the big challenge in front of the association is not just to design the portal but to build brand ISODA and in the process help India to see this portal as a ‘defacto’ place to find the best IT software partners. Moreover, the association wants to achieve this by coming up with a holistic promotion campaign to promote the portal as the first and best place to meet software needs. The campaign will cover online and offline promotions that would come with substantial cost. Funds can come from sponsors, banners, advertisements (TBD). “However having said that, ISODA aims to make the member community visible and wants to send business your way. Also, I want to add, that this can be the most important membership benefit that ISODA can offer its members. Getting this kind of visibility can leapfrog sales opportunities for each of us,” stated Shetty. During the course of the event, Ahmedabadbased Dev Information Technology was chosen as this year’s proud winner of the ‘THE ISODA – M.P.KINI BEST RESELLER AWARD FOR BUSINESS EXCELLENCE’, whereas Secure Network Solutions India of Chennai was runnerup for this award. The Tech Summit was well-supported by the leading vendors including McAfee, SymantecVerisign, Juniper Networks, Radware, Microsoft, EMC, VMware, Adobe, Array Networks, Gemalto, and WatchGuard. “We do not know what endless opportunities await each one of us but now is the time to raise the curtain on ISODA 2.0 and brand ISODA in

BENEFIT OF ISODA 2.0 FOR MEMBERS & ASSOCIATION BENEFIT TO MEMBERS n Regional Meet n Tech Summit n New Business Leads and opportunities n Immense visibility, credibility under brand ISODA BENEFIT FOR ISODA n Revenue through Ads on indiasoftwarestreet.com n Revenue through Sponsors n Attract New members n ISODA will become a stronger brand with stronger recall value n ISODAas an Association will become stronger

this year of 2014. It was a successful Tech Summit and we have got lot of congratulatory mails both from the delegates as well as our sponsors,” concluded Shetty. ë

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MY VIEWS

ROTHIN BHATTACHARYYA

CHIEF STRATEGY OFFICER, HCL INFOSYSTEMS

“Banking on our strong capabilities” AS THE INDIAN IT INDUSTRY IS POISED TO GROW REMARKABLY IN THE COMING YEARS, THE SERVICE PROVIDERS TOO WOULD LIKE TO JOIN THE PARTY BY OFFERING A WIDE RANGE OF DIVERSIFIED SERVICES. ENTERPRISE CHANNELS SPOKE TO ROTHIN BHATTACHARYYA, CHIEF STRATEGY OFFICER, HCL INFOSYSTEMS TO GET AN INSIGHT INTO THE COMPANY’S IT SERVICES BUSINESS AND SUPERIOR OFFERINGS IN THIS SPACE. EXCERPTS.

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How will the Indian IT industry evolve by the end of this decade? Indian organizations are looking at IT as one of the key change enablers. According to the Nasscom perspective 2020, the Indian IT industry is undergoing major transformations in various spheres and the evolved landscape of 2020 will present several opportunities for the Indian technology and business services industry. With global enterprises increasingly adopting disruptive technologies like social media, mobility, analytics and cloud, Indian IT players have an opportunity to develop their strategies and expand their presence on a global scale. Additionally, with a rise in new computing and delivery models, small and medium businesses will have an opportunity to enter the global market and increase their foothold. The evolved landscape of 2020 will present transformational opportunities for the Indian technology and

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MY VIEWS

business services industry. Keeping in mind these technological breakthroughs and innovations, the IT industry will look forward to diversify their service offerings. What all opportunities does this scenario bring for the Indian IT business? The evolved landscape presents a number of opportunities for the Indian technology business. The business models across the IT spectrum will evolve to offer a different customer value proposition. Indian companies will have to move away from their traditional approach of focusing on their core markets using the offshore-centric model. There is a growing need to venture into new markets. There is a need to enhance the Indian technology industry’s credibility by creating a delivery model that focuses on service delivery. With the global companies shifting to the pay-per-use and pay-as-you-go models, the Indian technology industry will prepare itself to provide services based on different delivery models. Any particular vertical industry or customer segments that will largely invest in IT? Some of the verticals which will see significant IT investments in the forthcoming years include banking and financial institutions. IT is helping BFSI players in extending their reach to the unbanked population of India. Core banking solutions, security and compliance, business intelligence, mobile banking, mobility solutions, social networking and online banking and services driven market are some of the key areas where IT will play an important role. The other sector at the forefront of adoption is healthcare. This industry has developed a dependence on information technology for maintaining and improving both clinical and business operations. Healthcare industry will be one of the next big adopters of SMAC, as personal health monitoring picks up significantly. Also, electronic health record (EHR) is at a nascent stage in India and IT will play a crucial role in facilitating its availability. Also, the Indian retailers are leapfrogging in terms of leveraging IT, as it can give the organized retail sector a major boost. Mobile points of sale, digital signage, intelligent database, customer relationship management (CRM) are some of the key areas where retail will benefit from technology. And not to forget, under the government sector, office automations, records digitization, e-public services, and e-Governance projects are some of the areas where technology will add a huge value.

While the industry has the potential to generate revenues of US$ 225 billion in 2020, a portion of this opportunity is at risk if continuing problems are not tackled soon. Highlight some of the common challenges that needed to be overcome? Some of the challenges that need to be overcome are: Device fragmentation: There is a need to integrate multiple operating systems and device formats which involves high costs. Moreover, the technical complexity of supporting multiple formats is an immense challenge too. Data security: With the rise in trends such as cloud and BYOD, data security and privacy issues are on the rise. Different models and types of devices lead to compatibility issues. Data backup and data security are some of the bigger challenges. Unfavorable government policies and taxation framework: The current ecosystem in India is not favorable for domestic IT players. There is a need for a policy framework that will address issues such as transfer pricing and revamp of tax regime. As a leading player, what will be the contribution from your end to

and managing extremely large data centers that house thousands of servers and 10s of peta-bytes of storage. We have built a unique capability to manage data, store data, present data and analyze data using various state of the art open source technologies such as Hadoop, MongoDB, Liferay, Pentaho and MySQL. While India’s technology and business services industry has flourished in the last decade. Industry stakeholders will need to break out of the traditional mould that resulted in past successes and step up to the aspirations of 2020. Please comment. Going forward, organizations will have to bank upon effective value delivery through new-generation IT-offerings in the space of Big Data, cloud and mobility. These outcome based IT solutions are increasingly making way into the mainstream as it helps firms take focused business decisions. Organizations on the other hand, have an opportunity to better serve customers with cost-effective and fast deployable solutions which are at par with the international IT standards. We will see organizations driving more business and innovation through different commercial models, delivery models and integration of several IT systems; making these the key drivers for IT investments ahead.

“WITH A WIDE PORTFOLIO, WE AIM TO OFFER OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE, MAXIMIZE EFFICIENCIES AND BRING TECHNOLOGY ENABLED BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION TO OUR PARTNERS AND CUSTOMERS”

build the domestic market? We want to differentiate ourselves through our best-in-class service offerings while at the same time expanding our existing customer base and importantly increasing engagements with our existing customers too. With a wide portfolio of IT services and solutions, we aim to offer superior operational excellence, maximize efficiencies and bring technology enabled business transformation to our partners and customers. We will continue to contribute to the upcoming technology trends through our wide range of IT services such as Infrastructure Services including Managed Services and Life Cycle Services. Enterprise Application Services is another focus area including business intelligence, ERP and ECM. We have gained enormous experience and expertise in designing, building, migrating

What’s your vision and goal for 2020? Please outline your roadmap to achieve this goal? We intend to drive and grow our IT services business, focus on enterprise customers and continue to deliver through our superior offerings in this space. Infrastructure Services and EAS are two key focus areas which include managed services, life cycle services, business intelligence, Enterprise Content Management and others. We have strong capabilities such as IT Operations Centre and an unparalleled reach of 4000 plus towns, which enables us to deliver best in class service to our customers. We have also built capabilities and expertise on state of the art Open Source technologies such as Hadoop and MongoDB, which will further enable us to provide next gen data management services to customers. ë

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MY VIEWS

MONISH DARDA,

CTO AND CO-FOUNDER, ICERTIS

“Revolutionizing enterprise applications” AS THE INDIAN ENTERPRISES ARE LOOKING AT CLOUD TECHNOLOGY TO FUEL THEIR BUSINESS GROWTH, THE CLOUD SOFTWARE VENDORS ARE COMING UP WITH PRODUCTS AND SERVICES ADDRESSING SPECIFIC ENTERPRISE BUSINESS NEEDS. ENTERPRISE CHANNELS SPOKE TO MONISH DARDA, CTO AND CO-FOUNDER, ICERTIS TO GET INSIGHT INTO THE INDIAN IT INDUSTRY AND THE COMPANY’S CLOUD OFFERINGS. EXCERPTS.

We are at the beginning of a new year. How do you see Indian IT business evolving? The Indian IT industry will start seeing the effects of devices, the cloud and the freedom of the end

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user and the opportunities and also the snares of disruptive technologies. Companies that can better cater to an end user-centric set of services will see massive opportunity open up, and the traditional Indian IT off-shoring model will see

its first big cracks appear in 2014. Disruptions take time to disrupt, and 2014 will show that the time has come. Not that revenue will fall – but threats will come closer, and not being proactive could be deadly even for established services companies. At the same time, I believe 2014 will be another incredible year for Indian entrepreneurs to start new technology companies and try and rethink traditional software models. The biggest evolution should happen with the transition of a services-centric IT business to an intellectual property (IP) centric one. With our population and rapidly increasing access to technology to this user base and previously unexplored market segments, the applications market in India will grow exponentially. Competing in other markets with the centre of gravity in India will continue to become easier and we should see a few billion dollar software product companies coming out of India by 2020.

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MY VIEWS

What are your growth projections for the Indian IT market? I am predicting that the 2013 growth rates (substantially better since 2009) will continue for the next 3-4 years plateauing and then even dipping for most services businesses. I am expecting this plateau and decline to be more than compensated by product export revenues as India transitions to be a hub of innovation and IP. The dollar will keep playing is pivotal role, but more impactful will be the cost arbitrage of product development and the increase in the number of entrepreneurs. Government policy and spending will also have even more material impact in how business shapes up. Here is an interesting thought – the Indian IT industry was fuelled by the generation which settled abroad, and as it grew older, wielded more and more influence in the western economy to drive work back home. The next generation, who benefited this growth, will now influence the Indian IT business more than ever, bringing entrepreneurship and global aspirations. With more people thinking why companies like Microsoft and Oracle cannot be built closer to home, I am expecting another boom, this time from IP, in Indian IT going forward. Tell us about futuristic trends that will drive IT business landscape and create new opportunities for the industry? Social behaviour will change and refine even further - As privacy concerns and barriers break down even more (despite the Snowden incident), people will become more connected, more informed and live more into the present. This trend will fuel IT products and services growth, especially in areas like consumer retail and communications with potentially the second biggest market for these services in the world opening up its doors. Big data going mainstream – Big Data because of its propensity for size has opened doors previously unimaginable – out of seemingly trivial data, interesting facts are emerging, with the very real possibility of changing completely how we perceive data. Cloud everywhere –As good system administrators become a vanishing breed, and IT becomes even more core to business, the cloud will take centre stage for IT departments across organizations in the next 5-7 years. Indian organizations especially SMB’s are gradually leveraging this technology to fuel their business growth and make their IT work seamlessly. What kind of opportunities does this evolved landscape of 2020

present for the Indian IT business? The biggest transformational opportunity the evolved landscape will offer is to deliver to the world market innovative products at a fraction of the cost, building on the strong IT services story. Tools like crowd sourcing should cash in on India’s talent pool and with the changing social scenario and nuclear families, should also bring in the professionalism and dedication to work where the western world has an edge today. Highlight the vertical-wise adoption of some of the technologies? Manufacturing, government, pharmaceuticals and BFSI sectors will continue to grow from the perspective of IT. According to industry sources, applications pertaining to CRM, ERP and supply chain management will be among the popular applications where organizations would be keen on investing their money in next 12 or 24 months. How are you looking to build the Indian domestic market? Icertis is a born-in-the-cloud CSV (Cloud Software Vendor) that builds enterprise solutions in the Microsoft Cloud. We understood the

How will the role of channel partners evolve with these changing times? I believe channel partners are the local face of global solutions, which means as Indian entrepreneurship flourishes, channel partners will be one of the important catalysts for new solutions, ideas and methodologies. We should also see an inter-network of channel partners emerge, with solution providers being channel partners to each other as they go up the value chain. While India’s technology and business services industry has flourished in the last decade. Industry stakeholders will need to break out of the traditional mould that resulted in past successes and step up to the aspirations of 2020. What are your thoughts on this? This has always been the case as companies have had to transform to face competition, changing business scenarios and disruptive technologies. From the body-shopping days of the 90s, the IT services business has come of age, and I am sure it will go through more transformations. I think one of the biggest ways will be to build an agile

“WE PROVIDE ENTERPRISE SOLUTIONS WITH LOCAL FEATURES THAT WORK ACROSS THE WORLD, AND WILL CONTINUE TO HELP BRING THE TRANSFORMATION TO IT LED BUSINESSES FOR BRICK AND MORTARS ACROSS INDIA”

specific business challenges faced by customers, with the knowledge that the current breed of global solutions prerequisite certain level of maturity and readiness in the ecosystem for it to deliver projected benefits; this often leads these solutions to not effectively address the nuances of a developing market scenario. Affordable, quick to deploy, easy to maintain and flexible enterprise software solutions have the ability to change the game for Indian brick and mortar companies and to make them globally successful. Icertis provides these solutions with local features that work across the world, and will continue to help bring the transformation to IT led businesses for brick and mortars across India. With its public transport solutions, a huge potential exists to touch the lives of the common man through better, safer, reliable and cost effective public transport.

culture internally, and to be flexible on business models. What’s your vision and goal going forward? We are a true CSV. The company’s vision, mission and values guide its business model. Business today is facing unique challenges and ever growing opportunity – agility and quality of execution is critical, and the cloud allows the business to free up important resources to focus on core strengths. We intend to address more geography through direct sales, partner GTM eco-system, and strategic partnerships with large system integrators. We already have strategic alliances with KPIT and Infosys BPO to expand our reach to global customers, allowing us to scale and add value to services offerings for the enterprise. ë

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INNOVATIONS

QNAP TS-EC1679U-RP QNAP TS-EC1679USAS-RP, featuring the easy-to-use QTS 4.0 operating system, provides a reliable and scalable NAS solution to fulfil data backup, file synchronization and remote access. This supports SAS hard drives delivering exceptional performance coupled with full duplex functionality, and supports cross-platform

file sharing, comprehensive backup solutions, iSCSI and virtualization applications, and many practical business functions, making it the ideal choice for SMBs to secure important business data. It also includes abundant multimedia applications backed by its powerful hardware specifications. It supports SAS 6Gbps hard drives driving over

3,000 MB/s throughput and 400,000 IOPS. Featuring with Intel Xeon 3.4GHz Quad Core Processor and 8GB DDR3 ECC RAM, the TS-EC1679U-SAS-RP greatly enhances efficiency of CPU-consuming tasks and serves more concurrent tasks at the same time. Owing to QTS 4.0â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s intuitive user interface, system operations of the

TS-EC1679U-SAS-RP are smooth and handy. Its intelligent desktop allows you to find the desired functions quickly, create desktop shortcuts or group shortcuts, monitor important system information on a real-time basis, and open multiple application windows, bringing greater working efficiency. It supports SSD caching which can greatly boost IOPS performance of storage volumes.

KEY CAPABILITIES n Provides numerous security options, such as encrypted access, IP blocking, n IT administrators can control the access rights of each user to different folders n Supports VMware VAAI and Microsoft ODX to increase performance n Digital videos can be quickly stored and edited directly over the network. n The Qsync utility turns the system into a safe data center for file synchronization with large storage capacity. n Offers a professional surveillance solution with the user-friendly NVR (network video recorder) management interface n You can also install the VMobile app on your iOS or Android mobile devices to manage the monitoring channels anytime and anywhere, and safeguard your office environment.

PLEASE SEND YOUR FEEDBACK AT INFO@ ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

POLYCOM CX8000 Polycom CX8000 room system for Microsoft Lync, a video conferencing system that brings the power of Microsoft Lync to the conference room with HD video, simple room controls and an optional, centre-of-table experience with the industryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s only family of 360-degree cameras for Microsoft Lync. Tight integration with Microsoft Outlook will help users, both in the meeting room and remote participants, start and manage meetings more efficiently. It includes several features that help users take advantage of Lync 2013 such as built-in multiparty video and a better overall audio and video experience that leverages the open standards-based scalable video coding (SVC) implementation. The addition of lifecycle services helps drive adoption for video and voice collaboration in Lync environments, ultimately increasing usage and driving a greater return on investment. The Polycom CX8000 builds on the award-winning, centre-of-table experience of the Polycom CX5000 Unified Conference Station, a 360-degree, panoramic 720p HD video collaboration system, and the only phone and camera combination in the world today that is natively integrated with Microsoft Lync. Companies of all sizes recognise the need to break down the barrier of distance between dispersed teams of customers, partners and employees to harness the benefits of collaborating together in real time to solve everyday challenges. The Polycom CX8000 room system for Microsoft Lync meets this need with an intuitive and natural experience.

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KEY CAPABILITIES n Unique 360-Degree Audio and Video Experience n You get astounding voice quality and entire 360-degree view of the conference room, n Instant messaging HD video conferencing n HD audio n Virtual white boarding n Touch display-powered presentations n Application sharing n Editing on shared documents

F E B R U A R Y 2014

21/02/14 10:23 am

Scale-up

REXP-1600U-RP Expansion Enclosure

NAS Storage up to

500TB

Achieve unparalleled expandability with SAS-Enabled Turbo NAS

TS-EC1679U-SAS-RP

Extreme Performance Equipped with a Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® 3.4GHz processor, 8GB DDR3 ECC RAM and 10GbE support, the TS-EC1679U-SAS-RP delivers over 3,000MB/s throughput, 400,000+ IOPS, SSD caching and thin provisioning to drive your business forward.

Flexible Storage Options & Scalability Supporting a wide range of 2.5”/3.5” SAS/SATA 6Gbps hard drives & SSDs, the TS-EC1679U-SAS-RP can also naturally expand your storage capacity with the flexible & economical REXP-1600U-RP/REXP-1200U-RP expansion enclosures to support over 500TB raw capacity.

Effortless Privilege Management The Windows AD and LDAP directory services greatly save IT administrators time and effort in account setup. The Windows ACL (Access Control List) feature offers sophisticated shared folder permission settings that simplifies IT management and privilege control.

Built for Business Designed purely to fit business needs, the TS-EC1679U-SAS-RP offers unified storage for both NAS and iSCSI applications and is ideal for server virtualization storage, business data backup, file sharing and IP surveillance storage.

TS-EC1279U-SAS-RP

TS-EC1679U-SAS-RP

Advts.indd 2

SS-EC1279U-SAS-RP

SS-EC1879U-SAS-RP

SS-EC2479U-SAS-RP

www.qnap.com 18/02/14 9:58 pm

RNI NO: DEL ENG/2013/49006 Postal Reg. No.: DL-SW-1/4169/13-15

Date of Publication: 18 of Every Month Date of Posting: 20 & 21 of Every Month

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Turning CIO into the next-generation catalyst Cyberoam NGFWs enable enterprise CIOs harness IT & network transformation with insights beyond security, helping them innovate, monetize and differentiate.

Key business benefits of Cyberoam NGFWs to CIOs: • Next-generation threat protection (also secures critical infrastructure / SCADA networks)

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Also available through

NICSI / NIC

Cyberoam Product Line : Network security appliances (Next-Generation Firewalls/UTMs)

Centralized Management (Hardware & Virtual)

Centralized Reporting

Advts.indd 4

26/02/14 10:28 am