Channelworld Magazine December 2012 Issue

FOCAL POINT: Storage systems are becoming storage computers as vendors push functionality downstream. PAGE 39

ChannelWorld STRATEGIC INSIGHTS FOR SOLUTION PROVIDERS | COVER PRICE Rs.50

Within just six months of starting Ingenius Technologies, DIWAKAR KHATRI has already clocked Rs 23 crore in revenues.

Inside DECEMBER 2012 VOL. 6, ISSUE 9

Opinion

Another year’s coming to a close. The forecasts for 2013 are being made. How does the next year look for IT? Here’s one forecast for 2013: We in IT will start telling better stories. PAGE 18

Grill

Bob Kocis, Sr. Divisional VP, APAC Sales and Distribution, PTC, on value additions, acquisitions and more. PAGE 13

Case Study

GUTS! A growing number of industry veterans are launching partner companies in the face of a slowdown. Is this sheer gumption or is there a plan here? >>> Page 22

Delhi-based Associated Business Computers takes up the ultimate ‘uphill’ project: A datacenter 5,000 feet above sea level. PAGE 34

Feature

Hacking has evolved from a one-person crime of opportunity to an open market of sophisticated malware backed by crime syndicates and money launderers. PAGE 36

CHANNELWORLD.IN

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n EDITOR’S NOTE

Vijay Ramachandran Keep the Dots Connected “We buy only enough to fit into the plan of production… if transportation were perfect and an even flow of materials could be assured, it would not be necessary to carry any stock whatsoever.”

— Henry Ford

W

HEN HENRY Ford wrote the lines above in

My Life and Work in 1922, he was describing what decades later was referred to as a just-intime inventory strategy. A strategy, which cuts down waste, aligns production with demand and dramatically improves efficiency and ROI for an organization. And, the best bit about it is that it works just as well as whether the economy’s booming or in a depression.

Over the years many organizations, typically in the manufacturing sector, have adopted it in some form or the other—from the Piggly Wiggly supermarket chain’s restocking policy to the iconic Toyota Production System that it inspired. And, of course, the acronyms and jargon that have accompanied it are legion: Stockless production, continuous flow manufacturing (CFM), world class manufacturing (WCM), lean manufacturing...

The benefits are undoubtedly high. And, yet, there are issues that can derail the system, particularly during a slowdown.

The major problem with just-in-time operations is any large change in supply or demand leaves both principal or suppliers and downstream consumers vulnerable.

Among other terms this is referred to as the ‘Bull2

whip Effect’—when distorted information within a supply chain causes excessive inventories, lost revenues, messed up production schedules and bad customer service. I wonder how many organizations, despite full order books, are groaning under stock pile-ups or missed delivery schedules or customers that are refusing to pick up orders.

The culprit, quite obviously, is the data or information gap within the supply chain which makes a mockery of all forward planning.

When I spoke with Infosys Co-Founder and Executive Co-Chairman, S. ‘Kris’ Gopalakrishnan recently, he envisioned organizations that will not only see the slump through but

n IT has to be a critical tool in your kit, and not just one that you deploy for clients alone.

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD DECEMBER 2012

will also thrive. He added only one caveat: They will need to have in place systems that would give them near real-time information and control.

While not advocating spending on technology for its own sake, Kris said that the priority has to be on increasing business efficiently. Proper information flow is crucial for this.

“In today’s world, where reaction times are so important, creating these capabilities is extremely important. It gives companies confidence, flexibility and can save cost, which will pay for these investments,” he observed.

And, while conventional wisdom suggests that the supply chain is critical only for manufacturing organizations, I believe that services outfits, and especially integrators can really leverage it to stay on top of their game—after all being a solution provider is as much about the consult as it is about putting disparate pieces together to build a system.

How then is your organization geared up to maintain information flow? What systems, people and processes do you have in place to monitor your supply chain? How do you track payments and outstandings? What allows you to then take all of this information and translate it into insight and visible intelligence?

These are key questions that I’d like you to reflect on. By reducing your internal information gaps you’ll be able to be a more reactive outfit; one that will operate on optimal levels of productivity and efficiency.

And, if your responses to the questions above are in the negative or point to manual processes, I’m afraid you’ll need to rethink how you approach your business. IT has to be a critical tool in your kit, and not just one that you deploy for clients alone.

Apart from getting your teams more aligned with user needs, think of it as a dry run for a client, that prepares you for the pitfalls and the rewards that lie ahead.

I strongly hold that solution providers ought to be at the cutting edge of IT adoption themselves.

For if you do not have the courage to drink your own champagne, you also shouldn’t have the right to get others drunk on it.  Vijay Ramachandran is the Editor-in-Chief of ChannelWorld. Contact him at vijay_ramachandran@idgindia.com

FOR BREAKING NEWS, GO TO CHANNELWORLD.IN

Inside INDIAN CHANNELWORLD n DECEMBER 2012

■ NEWS DIGEST

■ THE GRILL

07 A Thumbs Down for Windows 8? | An expert on user

13 Bob Kocis, Senior Divisional

Vice President, APAC Sales and

interface design has called Windows 8 “disappointing” .

07 Safe for Now | AMD is denying

reports that executives have taken steps that could lead to the company’s sale. Sources say, AMD is not focused on an outright sale of the company but could be looking to offload its patent portfolio.

08 Big Growth for CRM and Collaboration | The global

13 Distribution, PTC, on value additions, acquisitions and more.

■ FEATURE 36 Ignored!

software market grew 4.7 percent in the first half of this year with CRM, virtualization and collaboration coming in as the fastest-growing segments, according to IDC.

Receptiveness of the vendors in the post sales period in assisting the partners with their client issues usually leaves much to be desired. Are vendors really supporting partners or is it just lip-service?

■ NEWS ANALYSIS

■ FAST TRACK

10 The Perfect Confluence | The

fonet, made a transition from PC sales to networking. The move proved to be a masterstroke.

hybrid cloud model brings together best of both worlds. And emerging and established markets in APAC are making the most of it.

■ OPINION 02 Editorial: Vijay Ramach-

andran strongly holds that solution providers ought to be at the cutting edge of IT adoption themselves.

18 Thornton A. May: Another

year’s coming to a close. The forecasts for 2013 are being made.

How does the next year look for IT? What will stir our imagination?

Cover Photograph by KAPIL SHROFF Cover Design by UNNIKRISHNAN A.V

15 Rajeev Goel, Director, Intec In-

22 ■ COVER STORY

22 Guts!

There’s a growing number of new-age entrepreneurs who are quitting their cushy jobs and launching their partner companies in the face of a slowdown. While no one can question their audaciousness, what everyone wants to know is: What’s the plan? Along the way these start ups are busting market myths and are finding new ways to thrive despite adversity.

■ CASE STUDY

34 Scale of Heights

Delhi-based Associated Business Computers takes on the ultimate ‘uphill’ project: A datacenter 5,000 feet above sea level for the Almora Urban Cooperative Bank.

FOR BREAKING NEWS, GO TO CHANNELWORLD.IN

Inside

CHANNELWORLD

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD n DECEMBER 2012

Publisher, President & CEO Louis D’Mello Associate Publishers Rupesh Sreedharan, Sudhir Argula

19 Paresh Babaria,

n EDITORIAL

Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Jupiter Automation, is all set to change the little known IT market in Surat. The closely knit business circles of Surat will help usher in change.

Geetha Building, 49, 3rd Cross, Mission Road, Bangalore - 560 027, India

CHANNELWORLD.IN

39 ■ FOCAL POINT

■ ON RECORD

16 K.K. Shetty, Director, India and

SAARC, Enterprise and Telecom Networks,

39 Storage Supersized STORAGE: Storage systems are becoming

storage computers as vendors push functionality downstream. Today, the emerging scale-out architecture lets users add many storage systems to an existing infrastructure and scale up not just capacity, but also performance, CPU, memory and networking equally.

41 Finding the Right Balance STORAGE: For cash-strapped IT shops

TE Connectivity, talks about the company’s way forward in India.

■ FACE OFF

44 Battle Royale: In a race to the top, who

has a complete enterprise cloud and social business strategy?

looking to get out from under manual storage management chores, storage orchestration software looks like a lifeline: It promises to let users choose from a catalog of predefined storage services and then handle the provisioning details behind the scenes. Storage orchestration software holds promise, but, are enterprise customers stuck with point tools.

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Cover on Cover & Pg 1

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Juniper Networks India Pvt.Ltd . . . . . . IFC, 20 & 21 This index is provided as an additional service. The publisher does not assume any liability for errors or omissions.

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Printed and Published by Louis D’Mello on behalf of IDG Media Private Limited, Geetha Building, 49, 3rd Cross, Mission Road, Bangalore - 560 027, India. Editor: Louis D’Mello, Printed At Manipal Press Ltd, Press Corner, Manipal-576104, Karnataka, India.

Editor-in-Chief Vijay Ramachandran Executive Editors Gunjan Trivedi, T.M. Arun Kumar Associate Editor Yogesh Gupta Deputy Editor Sunil Shah Assistant Editor Online Varsha Chidambaram Special Correspondents Radhika Nallayam, Shantheri Mallaya Principal Correspondents Gopal Kishore, Madana Prathap Senior Correspondents Anup Varier, Sneha Jha Correspondents Aritra Sarkhel, Debarati Roy, Eric Ernest, Ershad Kaleebullah, Shweta Rao, Shubhra Rishi Chief Copy Editor Shardha Subramanian Senior Copy Editor Shreehari Paliath Copy Editor Vinay Kumaar Lead Designers Jinan K.V., Suresh Nair, Vikas Kapoor Senior Designer Unnikrishnan A.V. Designers Amrita C. Roy, Sabrina Naresh n SALES

& MARKETING

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DEVELOPMENT

Senior Manager Projects: Ajay Adhikari, Chetan Acharya, Pooja Chhabra Manager Tharuna Paul Senior Executive Shwetha M. Project Co-ordinator Archana Ganapathy n FINANCE

& OPERATIONS

Finance Controller Sivaramakrishnan T.P. Sr. Manager Accounts Sasi Kumar V. Sr. Accounts Executive Poornima Manager Credit Control Prachi Gupta Sr. Manager Products Sreekanth Sastry Sr. Manager Production T.K.Karunakaran Sr. Manager IT Satish Apagundi n OFFICES

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News

WHAT’S WITHIN

PAGE 08: Big Growth for CRM and Collaboration

PAGE 08: IBM Kills the Lotus Brand

PAGE 10: The Perfect Confluence F I N D M O R E A R T I C L E S AT CHANNELWORLD.IN

OPERATING SYSTEMS

A Thumbs Down for Windows 8?

A

N EXPERT on user

interface design has called Windows 8 “disappointing” for novices and power users alike.

Jakob Nielsen, principal of the Nielsen Norman Group, studied how a dozen experienced PC users interacted with Windows 8, and the conclusion was not good.

“Windows 8 on mobile devices and tablets is akin to Dr. Jekyll: A tortured soul hoping for redemption,”Nielsen wrote.

“On a regular PC, Windows 8 is Mr. Hyde: A monster that terrorizes poor office

workers and strangles their productivity.”

Although the sample sizes of Nielsen’s studies are small, he argues that they provide more insight than larger studies focused on metrics.

Even if you don’t agree with that assertion, Nielsen does make some good points about how the design of Windows 8 needs improvement.

Nielsen’s main gripe, unsurprisingly, is the dual nature of Windows 8, which combines desktop and touchfriendly environments into a single operating system.

Not only is the user interface inconsistent, it also requires

users to remember where to go for which features, and to waste time switching between interfaces. Also, when users are running a Web browser in both interfaces, they can only access a subset of their open Web pages at any given time.

But even the modern-style interface on its own has some major problems in Nielsen’s view. He felt that the inability to open multiple windows of a given application creates a “memory overload” for complex tasks, because users have no way to see all the information they’ve collected.

Nielsen also pointed out a quirk in the Windows 8 settings menu: While most of the options are presented as flat, monochrome icons, the option to change PC settings is shown in plain text, so it “looks more like the label for the icon group than a clickable command.”

At the end of the report, Nielsen notes that he’s not a Microsoft hater—he praises the sometimes-maligned Ribbon of Microsoft’s desktop apps—and hopes for a better Windows 9, noting that the company has a history of correcting its mistakes. Also, keep in mind that nitpicking user interface issues is Nielsen’s job.

He’s previously done the same for Apple’s iPad and Amazon’s Kindle Fire.

DECEMBER 2012

—By Jared Newman INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

7

ACQUISITION

Safe for Now AMD is denying reports that executives have taken steps that could lead to the company’s sale.

Speculation began to spread after Reuters reported that AMD has hired JPMorgan Chase & Co to explore business options, including a potential sale.

According to Reuters, which cited unnamed sources, AMD is not focused on an outright sale of the company but could be looking to offload its patent portfolio.

However, AMD said it’s not looking to sell. “AMD’s

board and management believe that the strategy the company is currently pursuing to drive longterm growth by leveraging AMD’s highly-differentiated technology assets is the right approach to enhance shareholder value,” the company said in an email.

“AMD is not actively pursuing a sale of the company or significant assets at this time.

— By Sharon Gaudin

-

TECH MARKET

Big Growth for CRM and Collaboration

T

HE GLOBAL software

strong growth rates over the market grew 4.7 perlast two years,” according cent in the first half of to IDC. Enterprise social this year to $167 bilsoftware’s share of the seglion (about Rs 91 lakh crore), ment has grown from three with CRM, virtualization percent in 2008 to 11 percent and collaboration coming in this year. Team collaborative as the fastest-growing segapplication sales rose 15 perments, according to figures cent in the first half of 2012, released by analyst firm IDC. according to the report.

Economic Three of four difficulties in CRM market Western Europe subcategories dragged down the showed doubleThe growth observed market overall, digit growth so in the global software market in but software far this year, with the first half of sales in the US, contact center apthe year.

Latin America, plications seeing Russia, China and a single-digit inother areas showed growth, crease, IDC said. Customer according to IDC. service, sales and marketing Applications software was had a roughly 12 percent the fastest-growing segment growth rate overall. overall, with a 5.1 percent Some of this growth uptick, “largely driven” by can be reflected in the collaboration and CRM soft- performance of the US ware, IDC said. based Salesforce.com, the Within collaboration industry’s largest pure cloud applications, team collabsoftware vendor, which has orative and enterprise social products in all four CRM software “stand out with categories and is nearing $3

4.7%

SOURCE: IDC

billion (about 16, 500 crore) in annual revenue.

CRM is also driving new license sales as companies replace aging on-premises systems with cloud-based offerings from Salesforce. com and other vendors.

On the infrastructure side, virtual machine and cloud system software grew 17.8 percent in the first half of this year.

“Virtual machine software unit shipments still remain healthy and growing, but have seen some slowdown in mature markets that have high virtualization rates,” IDC analyst Gary Chen said in a statement.

“Business models are shifting as well, with the hypervisor drawing less direct revenue and increasingly becoming an embedded feature of operating systems and cloud system software.”

Despite the gains in these software categories, this year is “the beginning of a more conservative growth period with gains in the single digits, down slightly from the growth experienced in 2010 and 2011,” IDC said in a statement.

IBM Kills the Lotus Brand

8

This beta also signals the point where Notes and Domino will join IBM’s other software products in sporting only the IBM name, which the company feels is a stronger brand than Lotus, according to Brill.

The Lotus brand became part of IBM when the company acquired Lotus Development Corporation in 1995.

The new release of Notes and Domino was previously known as 8.5.4, but it includes

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD DECEMBER 2012

VMware announced that it has signed on RCV Innovations’ ThinkCloud as a VMware Authorized Training Center (VATC) in India. ‘ThinkCloud’ is a training and consulting initiative for cloud computing by RCV Innovations, a Hyderabadbased IT company with a focus on healthcare and cloud computing.

Brocade has announced the appointment of Edgar Dias as regional director for India. Based in Bangalore, Dias will deliver on the region’s revenue plan and drive overall growth for the company’s business in India.

Dell India has announced that Ajay Kaul, director and general Manager, will lead the Global Commercial Channel (GCC) business for Dell in India. Kaul’s focus will be to oversee the expansion of Dell’s partner community and its growth in the upcountry markets.

— By Chris Kanaracus

COLLABORATION

IBM is planning to release, on December 14, a public beta of Notes and Domino 9.0 Social Edition that will no longer use the Lotus brand.

IBM has decided to offer a public beta, the first in a long time for Notes and Domino, because of the importance of the release, Ed Brill, director of product line management and in charge of IBM’s Collaboration Solutions, said in a blog post.

Short Takes

SEVERED IBM will no longer use the Lotus brand.

so many new features that IBM feels it deserves to be called 9.0. There will still be an 8.5.4 maintenance release, with no new features, sometime in 2013, Brill said.

One of the new features allows some Notes applications

to run unmodified in a browser on a Windows PC, once the browser has been equipped with a plug-in. Enterprises don’t have to install the full Notes client for the application to work.

The Notes and Domino Social Edition was first unveiled at Lotusphere 2012 and has been in development for more than a year, according to Brill.

The first external beta code was released in April this year on a limited basis.

The plan is to have the new release ready for launch by the first quarter of next year.

— By Mikael Ricknäs

n NEWS ANALYSIS

The Perfect Confluence

Regardless of geographies, improved availability is the top reason quoted by respondents who have cloud plans or have actually them implemented. Flexibility and enhancing disaster recovery capabilities are the close second and third reasons respectively. In APAC, however, disaster recovery is the top reason behind cloud projects. Nevertheless, all these initiatives and figures suggest that year 2013 will be a tipping point for cloud deployment in the Asia Pacific region.

THE CASE FOR HYBRID CLOUDS

The hybrid cloud model brings together best of both worlds. And emerging and established markets in APAC are making the most of it.

By Taylor Man

T

HE ASIA Pacific

market has become a pressure cooker.

A jolt in the regional economy is straining current IT infrastructures.

Increasing workloads and incessant demands any time and from anywhere are seeing many traditional infrastructures creaking under pressure.

A decentralized, scalable IT infrastructure is the obvious answer. But getting the expertise, resources and investment to deploy and manage such an infrastructure within the four walls of a corporate is not only expensive but also time and labor intensive.

Besides, ripping out old infrastructures in today’s cost-conscious environment is a huge gamble for many IT decision makers.

TIME TO GO HYBRID Instead, many in Asia 10

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD DECEMBER 2012

Pacific are taking a keen interest in hybrid clouds, according to a recent survey commissioned by NTT Communications and conducted by IDG Research Services. Entitled Global Market Pulse: Cloud Computing Infrastructure Study, the study examines the opinions of 300 IT decision makers evenly distributed across the US, EMEA (UK) and APAC (Hong Kong and Singapore).

Cloud computing is gaining momentum and APAC is the region to watch in the next 12 months, according to survey results that indicate 31 percent of APAC IT decision makers plan to implement clouds in the next 12 months; 26 percent look to pilot-test cloud projects; and 28 percent have implemented cloud in one or more locations.

Hybrid cloud, according to the study, is going to be big in Asia. Sixty-five percent of respondents said that they are now using, evaluating, or planning to implement a combination of company-owned and third-party servers. (See box on next page for the perspective of Indian CIOs) Additionally, 80 percent of APAC IT decision makers expect their enterprises to use a mix of in-house and third-party infrastructure in future.

What makes the situation more complicated is that enterprises don’t just look at hybrid clouds as those between private and public clouds. They are also looking at them as solutions that bridge the infrastructure gap between clouds and legacy environments that many of enterprises would not or could not virtualize right away due to technical or resources issues.

So why should enterprises go hybrid? And why will hybrid clouds be a buzz in Asia Pacific?

The answers to these questions lie in the real-

n NEWS ANALYSIS

HOW INDIAN CIOs VIEW THE CLOUD

Most Indian CIOs who are planning—or already using the cloud—say they prefer private clouds.

14%

38%

Public Cloud

Hybrid Cloud

That said, 59 percent of Indian CIOs are already using a hybrid cloud—or plan to—in six months or a year.

25%

Will implement in one year

41%

Not Interested in hybrid cloud

13%

48%

Private Cloud

14%

Upgrading/ Refining

Will implement in six months

7% Currently Implementing SOURCE: CIO RESEARCH

world advantages of hybrid cloud infrastructure, with the top two being customization and flexibility it allows.

Many Asia Pacific decision makers see the flexibility offered by hybrid clouds—as compared to restrictions brought by third-party vendors—as a huge advantage when it comes to service provision. Enterprises’ biggest fear is often related to: Customization and flexibility (51 percent); security (47 percent); availability of in-house IT infrastructure (43 percent); and necessary skill set/ training (39 percent).

Hybrid clouds offer an ideal solution that addresses all these concerns.

SPOTLIGHT ON NETWORK VIRTUALIZATION A clogged pipeline will be a major roadblock for firms that rely on networks to access their services and data. Survey respondents are concerned about capacity limitations 12

(75 percent) and possible downtime when changing network configurations (73 percent). These are also key critical success factors when it comes to evaluating, planning or implementing cloud services.

All these factors are driving strong interest in network virtualization.

Benefits such as availability, redundancy, quick recovery from hardware failures, and the ability to re-allocate unused bandwidth for better utilization are wanted by the APAC IT decision maker community. In fact, the region’s top IT decision makers said that they have a strong interest in cloud computing that includes a virtualized network service for improved performance (68 percent) and reliability (64 percent).

TRENDS THAT MATTER APAC’s fascination for hybrid clouds could not have come at a better time.

With strong GDP growth, and trends such as mobility and IT consumerization

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD DECEMBER 2012

shaping purchasing behavior and productivity, many enterprises are experiencing growing pains. Traditional IT infrastructures are ill-prepared to meet ondemand requirements and respond rapidly to changing business needs.

Fully aware that they can’t manage everything by themselves, many enterprises look to bank on the expertise and services of third-party vendors. At the same time, they look to implement highly flexible IT strategies that are also cost-efficient.

Hybrid clouds, especially those that come with a virtualized network service, can help APAC enterprises gain control, scale to dynamic requirements, and deliver highly customizable solutions to meet ondemand expectations.

According to survey results, most IT decision makers in the region are already taking a hard look at all these.

High satisfaction level is also pushing interest to new heights. According

to the survey, APAC IT decision makers report high levels of satisfaction with the effectiveness brought by their cloud investments. Flexibility and improved scalability are results of their cloud projects, these respondents pointed out.

This offers an ideal opportunity for global cloud service providers that have their own datacenters and offer virtualized network services as well as a strong value proposition for enterprises who want to alleviate their growing pains, capture market opportunities quickly and demand a highly secure and controlled infrastructure. As key partners, they also offer expertise and experience to shape new IT strategies to meet new demands from customers, stakeholders, and regulators.

As deployment and proponents multiply in the APAC region, hybrid clouds are well poised to become the regional enterprises’ secret for success. 

n THE GRILL

Bob Kocis,

Sr. Divisional VP, APAC Sales and Distribution, PTC, on value additions, acquisitions and more.

PTC has jumped into the Service Lifecycle Management (SLM) bandwagon (referring to acquisitions such as Servigistics) a bit late as compared to competitors such BMC Software who have been talking about SLM and also making acquisitions for a decade now. So, PTC has a long way to go before making major gains. Your thoughts. I don’t think so. In February, we launched a strategy around five key segments. The first one, MCAD, which is our traditional business, is the largest segment, and is growing at five to six percent a year. PLM is second largest (15 percent), growing at 30 percent a year. Then we looked

at ALM, with MKS Integrity being one of the leading technologies in the world. This is growing at 10 to 15 percent a year. Then SCM, the fourth area, for which we acquired 4CS. This is an emerging segment. And the last one, iSLM, is a $180 million (about Rs 991 crore) business for PTC and is also growing at 15 to 20 percent a year. The addressable market size over the next two years is $3 billion (about Rs 16,500 crore). We would like to reassess our leadership position with these acquisitions. With Servigistics, we looked at technical documentation and mortgage claims. Maybe a few

Dossier Name: Robert (Bob) Kocis Designation: Senior Divisional Vice President, APAC Sales and Distribution Company: PTC Present Role: In this role, Kocis is responsible for all PTC sales and distribution in the Asia Pacific region. He works from PTC’s Asia Pacific headquarters in Shanghai.In May of 2003 he took charge of the PTC Channel Advantage Program as the Senior Vice President of Worldwide Channel Sales.

Career Graph: Kocis joined PTC in 1998 and has since held a variety of positions of increasing responsibility within the sales organization.

Prior to PTC, Kocis was a sales manager for Nalco Chemical Company in Naperville, IL.

n THE GRILL | BOB KOCIS

We are making astute investments to take PLM to the next level in India by bringing in new people to spearhead operations. We have the right story, and hope the message gets across.

years ago, we were not there, but now, with rounded solutions, we are in a position where we can compete with an IBM or an Oracle. It looks like we are going slowly, but we are getting there, and we will see faster growth.

It is felt that PTC should start rationalizing its multiple acquisitions and its expanded product portfolio, which now include the assets from acquired companies. There are overlapping, capabilities and business process 14

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD DECEMBER 2012

workflow scenarios, which can put customers in a tight spot. What’s your perspective on this? Our CTO has a clear vision on where our product strategy should move towards, which is sharply built around six focus verticals. We are making acquisitions which are strategic in terms of technology. There might be an overlap, but that can be handled and integrated.

While it’s early days to comment about Servigistics, we know for a fact that we have a done a pretty good job with all our acquisitions. With MKS Integrity, for example, we have a well integratedvirtual platform. We give the customer an option to buy Integrity as a standalone or an integrated platform.

That is the strategy we follow.

value for enterprise customers. We have a Services Advantage Program (launched about 18 months ago) that will support the services partners.

Coming to PTC Integrity, the company is quite vocal about its collaboration with BMC BSM. How far will collaborations work for you in the long run? Is this your way of establishing open standards for customers and partners? On the PLM side, we don’t believe customers can get value without world class partners.

These partnerships are critical to our deliverables. We would definitely have an overlap with competitors. It is inevitable because of what customers might buy at different points in time.

Interoperability is the way forward.

You have recently moved to China and have assumed charge of APAC sales and distribution, after a successful stint with worldwide channels. What kind of global competencies do you bring into your current role in APAC? I had a unique role earlier with worldwide channels, but I also had the responsibility of emerging markets, such as Russia, India and Brazil. So, I do have an idea and flavor of working in fast-developing countries. I do think that many of the competencies that work in the more established markets work very well here also, though we change things a bit, depending on the local geography.

I have four country managers reporting to me now. I allow them to run things differently depending on local conditions.

PLM-on-demand would have been a nice option for the SMBs. Why isn’t it a big focus as yet for PTC? Hosted PLM is a brilliant deployment option. Ondemand is a good option where no IT infrastructure exists. But it comes with problems—infrastructure, in terms of Internet bandwidth and accessibility.

You have to conform to a standard form of PLM, which is fine, but it comes with its own set of issues.

PTC has spoken about offshoring its services component to partners. Being a product company, how does this approach work for partners? The services story is actually working very well. This year, we went through a rebranding: From being a product development company to being a product and service company. This approach will help transform the landscape and provide opportunities. SMB partners, who start out small, grow with us and create

CIO discussions indicate that mobility is the next big trend and that they are keen to invest in solutions surrounding it. How does your PLM strategy fit into these new demands? PLM was not considered strategic five years back. But we now see CIOs asking us important questions about ALM and SLM. As far as mobility is concerned, we are not trying to be ahead of it.

It is still a deployment option. Our mobility strategy will involve what customers want in core areas, and building technology around that.

India is your second largest market in APAC. With PLM being niche, do you foresee the Indian market overtaking China? In the short term, I would say no. In China, we are number one in PLM and also in aerospace, defense and electronics. Like we did with China a few years ago, we are making astute investments to take PLM to the next level in India by bringing in new people to spearhead operations.

We have the right story, and hope the message gets across. However, I wouldn’t be able to speculate on how many years it would take for India to overtake China.  — Shantheri Mallaya

n FAST TRACK

TECHNOLOGY SPLIT

Intec Infonet

7%

Video Surveillance

22%

Network Security

18%

38%

Wireless

Switching and Routing

8%

2%

Servers and Storage

5%

IP Telephony /UC

Application Delivery and Optimization

P h o t o g r a p h b y S R I V AT S A S H A N D I LYA

SOURCE: INTEC INFONET

Snapshot

Numerous implementations have assisted in adding layers to Intec’s growth curve, and has led to a major knowledge enhancement. The network upgradation at Jadavpur University in Kolkata, funded by the World Bank’s Technical Education Quality Improvement Programme (TEQIP) in partnership with Nortel, was one such memorable project. “This project helped us build a favourable reputation. It was one of the first implementations in India and South-East Asia where VoIPon-Wireless was successfully commissioned and is still running,” says Goel.

Founding: 1991

Headquarters: New Delhi Branches: Kolkata, Mumbai, Bangalore, Singapore

A

CCLAIMED AMERICAN

author and journalist Gail Sheehy said, “If we don’t change, we don’t grow. If we don’t grow, we aren’t really living.”

Rajeev Goel, director, Intec Infonet has imbibed this thought process and applied it to his organization. In the two decades since its inception, Intec Infonet has managed to survive and thrive despite the changing dynamics of the IT industry, by investing in robust solutions, and thereby avoiding depleting margins.

THE TRANSITION This systems integrator started its journey with PC sales and maintenance. The realization that the possibility of a value addition was minimal prompted a change in approach. Goel

But, sheer focus and hard work helped the SI scale-up its business in the networking domain. “Intec has been able to create mindshare and goodwill in the industry by designing an internal process bent towards maintaining quality and high ethical standards in all our dealings which includes employees, principals, distributors and competitors,” says Goel.

Revenue for 2009-10: Rs. 64.64 Crore Revenue for 2010-11: Rs. 78.37 Crore Revenue for 2011-12: Rs. 90.13 Crore No of employees: 120 Key technologies: Converged network (data, voice and multimedia), network security, wireless networking, surveillance security Key Principals: Avaya, Juniper, Extreme Networks, Ruckus Wireless, Radware, Molex, EMC, Dell decide to focus on networking. “It was a challenging transition to make, from PC business to networking,” he says. “It was tough to build experience and credentials in networking.

Until that happened, many customers were not ready to trust us.”

With a continued focussed on networking, and the education vertical, the SI has managed to work successfully with multiple OEM’s. A diversified product and solutions portfolio has enhanced its reach. “Multi-vendor partnerships have helped us position ourselves according to the USP of each vendor,” says Goel.

In the next couple of years, the company is looking to add new skill sets in datacenter technologies which include SAN application delivery and optimization.  —Aritra Sarkhel

Rajeev Goel, Director, Intec Infonet, made a transition from PC sales to networking. The move worked.

DECEMBER 2012

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

15

P h o t o g r a p h b y S R I V AT S A S H A N D I LYA

for multi-level experience…

SHETTY: On the channel front, this is quite challenging. But our strategy is to recommend the right specialists to customers who require multiple technologies to be integrated.

So there are multiple SIs involved in such projects.

Besides, our tier-1 SIs are already capable of offering such turnkey solutions by converging all the three product lines.

ON RECORD n

K.K. Shetty,

Director, India and SAARC, Enterprise and Telecom Networks, TE Connectivity, talks about the company’s way forward in India.

By Radhika Nallayam

TE Connectivity has different product lines for enterprise, telecom and wireless. Are these different markets?

SHETTY: In a way, yes they are. But in some particular market segments, the products converge. For example, in a huge campus network project, you will see multiple technologies converging. While we offer separate solutions for enterprise, telecom and wireless segments, we can also converge the three, if required, to offer a consolidated solution. In large airports and infrastructure projects for instance, we see this convergence happening.

We also have our intelligent networking solutions that go into such projects.

From a channel perspective, this can be quite challenging as it calls

16

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD DECEMBER 2012

But, otherwise, is your business model for each market segment different?

SHETTY: For the enterprise market, we follow a threetier distribution model.

Apart from three national distributors—Ingram Micro, Redington and CompuIT— we also have tier-2 distributors/regional distributors. This is because we thought we needed to bring in a lot of flexibility in terms of credits and service levels, especially for small resellers. Regional distributors focus on resellers and smaller markets, while national distributors focus more on tier-1 and tier- 2 SIs. For our telecom segment, we have tier-1 SIs like Ericsson, who offer solutions to telecom service providers. The channel in some cases overlap, but otherwise, we have different channels for different markets.

Post the acquisition of ADC Telecom, have you integrated the product lines and the channel?

SHETTY: ADC has its own customer preferences globally, as well as in India. So we have maintained both the brands separately. We have even kept sales separate for

K.K. SHETTY | ON RECORD n these two brands. We do not mix them. The channel is separate too. We are encouraging traditional ADC partners to focus more on ADC products.

We have a channel manager and channel enablement team focusing on the ADC brand.

We felt that if we merge the channel, it might lead to a lot of competition and confusion. At times, a partner will propose two brands to the same customer. We believe that the brand is an emotional entity, both for customers and the channel. A lot of partners prefer to be associated with a particular brand that they have been selling for years. At the same time, we have made

into completely different markets. That’s the reason why we decided to rename the company to TE (which is Tyco Electronics) Connectivity. However, we have kept most of the brands unchanged as of now. But moving forward, we are going to position TE as the brand to our customers.

How do you look at players like Schneider Electric who, post-acquisitions, have a large portfolio of products under one roof?

SHETTY: We believe that we have always been clear leaders in our focused markets. Our acquisition strategy is to go for companies that have complementary products. ADC’s

or the reaction is either overly positive or very negative. It’s difficult to find that balance. We are not for aggressive acquisitions. It should be in line with our areas of competency. TE has no plans to get into areas where we have no expertise.

At the same time, you have newer entrants like 3M into this market, who are very aggressive about customer acquisitions. How are you planning to tackle them?

SHETTY: We have seen all types of competitors in the last 15 year. But the fact remains that we still have 80 percent market share. We believe that our strategy, talent, and execution are our differen-

we witnessed more than 30 percent growth in our government-sector business. We have contractual agreements with NIXI and NIC. We have done projects for multiple state datacenters and APDRPs. We have also been quite active with some of the leading government educational institutions.

It’s an ocean, but we don’t want to be seen everywhere. There are low-end and high-end customers, and the lowend segment is a very price-sensitive market.

We don’t, as a matter of policy, work with customers who are extremely price-sensitive. Government is clearly going to remain a focus for us, but

There are low-end and high-end customers in the government sector.

The low-end segment is very price-sensitive. We don’t, as a matter of policy, work with customers who are extremely price-sensitive.” changes on the distribution side. We consolidated all the distribution, and brought all the ADC products under TE’s national distributors. We have a very brand specific approach down to the reseller ecosystem.

What was the idea behind changing the company’s name from Tyco to TE Connectivity? Customers always saw you as Tyco.

SHETTY: When we were Tyco Electronics, people, especially customers who didn’t know much about us, thought that we are an electronics company. The Board of Directors felt that we need to truly represent what we are doing. There were other units under the Tyco brand, which were

acquisition for instance, brought in matching products in the enterprise market, and also helped us add some very interesting products for markets like telecom and wireless. The acquisition also helped us to be better positioned in certain geographical areas where ADC was traditionally strong. But I think the market is moving from products to solutions to services. So we need to talk to customers about services, work with partners to come up with solutions, and then fit in the right products.

We have a gradual approach towards acquisition, integration, training and streamlining. But I have seen that in most acquisitions, the result

tiators. We definitely have better end- customer support, channel enablement and distribution systems, which is key for a market like this. We conduct regular events and other initiatives to maintain our position in the market. We just have to be careful not to be complacent. So our focus is on leveraging our strengths.

Government hasn’t been a focus area for you here. But they are one of the largest buyers of connectivity solutions. Aren’t you missing out on a huge opportunity?

SHETTY: We were not focusing on the government sector till the end of 2010 when we spotted a clear opportunity. In 2011,

the idea is not to grab a huge market share. We are addressing this market through our tier-1 and a few select tier-2 partners.

Again, we focus more on turnkey projects.

Going forward, what will be the growth drivers for TE’s business in India?

SHETTY: We will bring in a regional focus. We see an increased convergence among our enterprise and telecom technologies, and are expecting wireless technologies to join the fold. Fiber to the Home (FTTH) will be another growth area. Besides this, we expect hosted and enterprise datacenters to propel a lot of demand for our solutions. 

DECEMBER 2012

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

17

n OPINION

THORNTON A. MAY

A Year for Stories Another year’s coming to a close. The forecasts for 2013 are being made. How does the next year look for IT?

Thornton A. May is author of The New Know: Innovation Powered by Analytics and executive director of the IT Leadership Academy at Florida State College in Jacksonville.

You can contact him at thorntonamay@aol.com or follow him on Twitter (@ deanitla).

18

H

ERE’S MY No. 1 forecast for 2013: We will start

telling better stories. In the new year, the IT career guillotine will sever the necks of those less facile in the narrative arts. The technology industry in general and IT leaders in particular

desperately need to tell more compelling, actionable and understandable stories about the future. In a word, we need to become better forecasters. 2013 will be the year technologists rediscover storytelling.

The person with the best narrative about the future wins.

We will craft scenarios of what the future might look like. We will start to dream again, to envision worlds that take full advantage of the technology wonders available to us. And lest we be accused of being lotus-eating, silicon-worshipping Utopians, we will also give voice and visibility to things that we don’t want to happen (e.g., data breaches and outages). We will articulate the costs and prophylactic preparations required to make sure that to-be-avoided scenarios are in fact avoided.

A respected Harvard Business School professor, lecturing a group of healthcare innovators, recently opined, “The only thing I know when someone brings me a business plan . . . is that it is wrong.” This statement embodies an industry-wide misunderstanding of the process of forecasting and the role of forecasters. The focus and measure of a forecast and a forecaster should not be accuracy alone; behavior change must also be taken into account.

Accurate forecasts that fail to get something valuable started or something stupid stopped are just so much noise.

It was said that when Cicero spoke, audiences wept. But when Caesar spoke, men marched. 2013 will be the year of forecasts that get IT marching.

Forecast No. 2: IT is going to get its entrepreneurial freak on. In other words, IT

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD DECEMBER 2012

needs to use technology to create value.

The stories CEOs and boards of directors want to hear are how IT grew the top line (or, in the not-for-profit sector, how IT achieved or expanded the mission). IT executives will be increasingly evaluated on their ability to generate revenue and create second-horizon businesses.

In 2013, boards will be watching whether in-place IT is capable of doing something with technology that differentiates and creates value.

Forecast No. 3: Vendor gibberish will be outed. The power of storytelling will manifest itself on the vendor side of the equation as well. IT decision-makers on the buying side will start to score the narratives of their strategic partners. Many a CIO has emerged frustrated and confused from “technology road map briefings” with vendors. Much of the slideware being humped around meeting rooms today borders on gibberish.

Historically, this dissatisfaction with poor vendor messaging has remained internal to the enterprise. This will change in 2013.

Forecast No. 4: IT leaders will gossip.

News flash for the vendor community: CIOs talk. They talk a lot and with an expanded array of people about future IT investments. High-performance CIOs will involve university faculty, thought leaders and other members of the value ecosystem to evaluate partner “pitches.” It has never been easier or more important to get a second opinion on major technology investments and partnerships.

In the IT space, there has been a shortage of words that stir the imagination.

Let’s hope 2013 changes that. 

n FAST TRACK

VERTICAL SPLIT

Jupiter Automation

5%

15%

Education

Gas/Oil

20% Dairy

15% Power

5%

Textile

10%

15%

Corporate/ SMB

15%

Diamond

Govt

P H O T O b y A J AY

SOURCE: JUPITER AUTOMATION

Snapshot Founded: 1998 Headquarters: Surat

S

URAT IS considered to be

one of the fastest-growing cities in the country. What adds to the city’s newfound sparkle is its much sought after jewelry and diamond sector. But when it comes to IT, customers still seem to prefer the traditional ways, or at least, that is what Paresh Babaria, co-founder and managing partner of Jupiter Automation believes. “Surat is a very relationship-based market, unlike tier-1 cities. Enquires won’t come to you easily, unless you develop a database of customers and build a good rapport with them.” This market mindset, however, has turned out to be a boon for a player like Jupiter, which been around since 1998.

Jupiter’s systems integration business has been witnessing double-

Key Executives: Paresh Babaria, Bipin Ladumore, Co-Founders Revenue 2010–11 : Rs 22 crore Revenue 2011–12: Rs 26 crore Revenue 2012–13 (projected): Rs 33 crore Employees: 25 Key Principals: HP, Epson, Dell, Cisco, Microsoft, Acer, Lenovo Key Technologies: Servers, storage, networking, projectors, computing Website: www.jupiterautomation. com

digit growth over the years. Babaria ensured this growth by focusing on basic infrastructure solutions for traditional industries situated in and

around Surat. “Dairy, diamond, textile, government and corporate sectors have been our growth drivers.

We have a stronghold in energy, and oil and gas industries as well. The requirements of these customers are quite basic in nature, but fortunately have been growing consistently,” says Babaria.

Jupiter’s rate contract with various government departments ensures continuous business with them. The SI has also been part of many digital classroom projects carried out by some of the leading educational institutions in Surat.

The future looks radiant for Jupiter.

The dairy sector is expected to offer lot more business according to Babaria. “A lot of dairy cooperatives are now planning to reach out to rural areas by setting up their operations in remote villages. This would mean that there are more opportunities in the datacenter infrastructure space for us. We already have some of the leading dairies like Sumul, Vasudhara and Banas as our customers. We are now expecting a three-fold increase,” says Babaria.

The diamond industry’s IT requirements are expected to grow as most of these businesses have started using specialized software.

Storage solutions for SMBs and corporate customers in southern Gujarat is something Babaria is betting big on to take Jupiter to the next phase of growth.  —Radhika Nallayam

Surat isn’t renowned for its IT industry. But Paresh Babaria, Co-Founder, Jupiter Automation, is all set to change that.

DECEMBER 2012

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

19

HOTLINE VIEW FROM THE TOP

Energizing Juniper’s Partner Program Juniper’s revamped Partner Advantage Program will reward high-performing partners and help others find their sales mojo.

The program represents an unparalleled focus on mutual opportunity and is proof of our continuing commitment to our partners’ success.

JITENDRA GUPTA Director Channels & Alliances, India & SAARC, Juniper

How critical are channel partners to the success of Juniper’s Indian operations?

Juniper Networks earns all its revenue in India and South Asia through partners and we are therefore committed to making each and every partnership a success. In that sense, 2012 has been a very exciting year for us.

Successful partnering remains a key element of our growth strategy at Juniper Networks. In that light, we have significantly revamped our Partner Advantage Program.

What’s the Partner Advantage Program all about?

Juniper Partner Advantage program is all about scaling with precision, investing with impact, and recognizing achievement.

The program aims to deliver on its promise to differentiate high-performing partners and create more compelling value for all of Juniper Networks’ partners. In addition to simplicity, it contains three main components: Reach, Accelerate, and Reward. Each designed to help partners grow, communicate with greater impact, and scale their businesses more effectively.

How different is it from its previous avatar?

The new program comprises a revamped channel initiative like opportunity registration, a learning academy, a joint marketing concierge, a Juniper champion program, MDF, and incentives. We have also overhauled our channel team from the ground up,

with a focused view on strengthening our channel base across the South Asian region.

Under the program, Juniper will enable a partner to engage with customers at a deeper level. The program provides an on-ramp to the New Network Platform Architecture, with an expanding array of Juniper Learning Academy resources.

Training and accreditation will help partners develop and hone their sales and technical skills to differentiate themselves in this increasingly competitive market.

The second component Accelerate will allow partners to engage with a marketing engine that helps partners drive efficient co-marketing with Juniper Networks.

Delivered through the Juniper

Marketing Concierge, this contains a toolbox of leadingedge marketing campaigns to generate market awareness.

Finally, the reward program is designed to reward partners for identifying new opportunities, showcasing expertise, and closing deals more quickly. There are several key elements including a global product promotions catalog, discounts and rebates for opportunity registration program, and for qualified Juniper partners, a holistic performance incentive.

The program represents an unparalleled focus on mutual opportunity and is proof of our continuing commitment to our partners’ success.

How many Channel Partners does Juniper Networks currently have and how does it engage with them?

This year, we have completed a channel tour of six cities, namely Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore, Pune, and Hyderabad, and plan to cover cities like Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Chandigarh, Kochi, Colombo, and Dhaka to further our channel outreach.

At present, we have around 500 registered VARs and our plan is to have not more than 50 Juniper ‘high touch’ partners in collaboration with whom we will work, invest, and grow our businesses with the guiding principal of extending our relationship further.

CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP

PRODUCT SHOWCASE

WLAN AND MAG

EVENTS

Juniper’s Events Blitz Juniper held an event series called Simply Connected Partner Tech Day and Partnering in six cities including Pune, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Bangalore, Dhaka and Colombo, between August and October. The aim of the event was to drive awareness and educate Juniper’s tier II partners.

The event agenda contained technology-focused sessions around the Simply Connected Architecture with a live demo by senior technology consultants from Juniper. Partner pre-sales and sales experts participated in the event. Over 250 partners

Juniper recently entered a technology partnership with Riverbed Technology in wide area network (WAN) optimization, application delivery and mobility.

With this partnership channel partners can:

participated from about 100 partner organizations. The event has helped Juniper’s partners learn how to use it’s leadingedge technology to help drive the business results their customers are looking for including the need to increase revenue, decrease costs, and increase customer satisfaction.

Juniper also held another series of partner CXO roundtables, allowing Juniper to have

closed room sessions with a C-level audience including owners, heads of sales, CEOs, and VPs to share it’s roadmap and strengthen its relationship across India and SAARC. The short-format evening events were held in nine cities including Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai, Pune, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Dhaka, and Colombo, from August to October. Partners learnt about new network opportunities with Juniper, and the Partner Advantage Program which enables them to closely associate with Juniper as certified/specialized partners. The event series had about 200 C-level partners from over 120 partner organizations.

PARTNER PROGRAM

Juniper’s Marketing Concierge

The portal allows partners to create their own marketing assets.

The Juniper Marketing Concierge is designed to help Juniper’s partners gain a competitive edge by leveraging innovative new technology and proven best practices. With Juniper Marketing Concierge, partners can customize and create marketing campaign assets to promote Juniper-related services and solutions.

The concierge service is essentially an online marketing platform that

allows Juniper partners to easily customize and create professionally-crafted, partner-led demand generation campaigns and events. Partners can customize content, content choose from an existing selection of campaign assets, and execute campaigns. They can also completely create their own campaigns. paign Juniper Marketing Concierge is avail-

able Juniper partners within the reseller partner community, for distributors, and the strategic partner community.

The platform has an intuitive user interface and features functionalities such as social media integration and dynamic content search.

Juniper is developing more designs and layouts for customizable marketing tactics that will provide even more options in the future.

Take advantage of the growing WLAN market by expanding their WLAN practice with Juniper Build differentiation with the Simply Connected portfolio of wireless, switching and security products Penetrate their EX and SRX installed base with Juniper WLAN Cross-sell Juniper WLAN with new EX sales Upgrade their end-users to 802.11n Help customer’s transition to the MAG Series, allowing them to support mobile devices, BYOD, cloud services and more Offer customers more flexibility through the MAG Series’ dual personality SSL VPN and UAC capabilities, as well as application acceleration in higher-end models Re-engage with customers who purchased SA2000, SA4000 or SA6000 appliances three or more years ago, and open the door to selling additional Juniper products With Juniper Simply Connected WLAN, channel partners can provide their customers with an affordable, highperformance, easy to manage and highly reliable WLAN and LAN network.

With Migrate to MAG, partners can offer their customers a solution that enables fast and secure access to corporate networks and resources, as well as cloud applications, for telecommuters, mobile workers, branch office employees, headquarter-based employees, contractors, guests, partners and others—while minimizing costs.

For more details, visit:

jmc.juniper.net

Authorized Distributor

n COVER STORY

DIWAKAR KHATRI Age: 40 Present Role: Founder & CEO, Ingenius Technologies

Previous Role: COO, Micro Clinic India

Experience in the IT Industry: 18 years

SLOW DOWN There’s a growing number of newage entrepreneurs launching their partner companies in the face of a slowdown. But it’s going to take a lot more than sheer audacity to ensure their success.

By Yogesh Gupta

T

Khatri, founder and CEO of Ingenius Technologies, made a sales pitch to an IT/ITeS organization, he remembers the incredulity with which its CIO asked him, “How old is your company that you think you can execute such a complex project?”

Without missing a beat Khatri said: “My company is as old as my experience in this industry; that’s two decades.” His confident reply, says Khatri, landed him the deal.

It’s hard to blame the CIO for being astounded by Khatri’s audacity; at that time Ingenius Technologies was barely four months old.

Khatri isn’t the only SI entrepreneur out there. He is part of a growing band of start-up channel players who are defying the slowdown odds their more established peers are facing, and opening their own businesses.

That’s a trend that hasn’t escaped Vijay Sethi, VP & CIO, Hero MotoCorp, who says he’s noticed more system integrators—and even CIOs—launching their own systems integrator companies.

Ashok Cherian, CIO, J.K. Cement, also agrees. “There is an increasing movement of executives from larger SI companies or OEMs who want to set up IT shops to leverage their knowledge, connections, and networks.”

What’s special about Khatri is the amount of success he has had. As of December 1, 2012— within just six months of operations—Ingenius Technologies had already clocked revenues (direct and indirect business) worth Rs 23 crore. And it plans to make Rs 58 crore in revenues by March 2013.

Gutsy entrepreneurs like Khatri are faced with a tough market. As IT budgets are being squeezed—according to CIO research (CIO is a sister publication of ChannelWorld) in 2012 IT budgets grew only slightly faster than inflation—more CIOs are forced to rent, go cloud, postpone investments, and turn to internal staffers to fulfill the IT needs of their organizations. Much of this comes at the expense of a channel partner or system integrator. And even those CIOs who do have the budgets to spend with an SI are less likely, in today’s economic climate, to risk it on a Johnny-come-lately.

But in true entrepreneur spirit, start-ups like Ingenius Technologies are finding their way successfully around these challenges by intelligently picking out sweet spots and using their industry experience, domain expertise—and their small size—to get ahead of competitors.

DECEMBER 2012

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

23

Photograph by KAPIL SHROFF

DEFYING THE

HREE MONTHS ago, when Diwakar

n COVER STORY J.K. Cement’s Cherian, for instance, says that with smaller SIs, it’s easier to find better value and a greater comfort level.

That’s probably why surprisingly large companies are willing engage with start-up SIs. Sethi from Hero MotoCorp, for example, says he is currently working with as many as four new players.

According to him, these “20

recommendations more ‘practical’. However, the so-called ‘new age integrators’ relate more easily to this side (the CIO side) of the table,” he says.

The advent of more new players is also having a ripple effect on the SI community at large. From a competitive perspective, when larger SIs see smaller partners engage large orga-

Bangalore, Indore, Chennai, Mohali, and Cochin. Customers supported us, thanks to the rapport I’ve shared with them from the past.

Was money an important factor in your decision to quit your job and launch your own company?

Money is one of the criteria to grow in life but not the most important one. Mon-

One needs to be highly innovative to make money in this market. The trick, for a channel partner, is to find a way to structure a deal so that it benefits the customer, the principal—and himself.”

INGENIUS TECHNOLOGIES Founded: July 2012 Headquarters: Mumbai Branches (Service Support): Bangalore, Delhi, Chennai, Indore, Mohali, Cochin, Kolkota, Cuttack, Pune

Employees: 25 Vendor Alliances: Cisco, HP, IBM, Juniper, Lenovo, VMware

Key Technologies: Thin Client, Virtualization, Personal Computing, Enterprise Applications

Expected Revenues (FY 12-13): Rs 18 crore Expected Revenues (FY 14-15): Rs 50 crore 24

to 40-man” organizations are nimble as they have to prove a point and establish their credibility.

“We start a new partner with small projects to evaluate the strength of their solution offerings and their willingness to walk the extra mile. Once they prove their competence, we engage with them on bigger projects,” says Sethi.

Another case in point is C.V.G. Prasad, CIO at ING Vysya Bank, who says that he “works with new and smaller systems integrators/ solution providers mainly for niche technologies or emerging technologies. These are mainly for focused initiatives that require specialized skills or solutions,” he says.

That said, Prasad adds that for large projects that are domain intensive, ING Vysya Bank prefers working with larger and more established systems integrators and solution providers.

That’s not something Sethi entirely agrees with.

“CIOs and IT managers often have to invest time and energy with [bigger SIs] to make solutions and

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD DECEMBER 2012

nizations, they tend to pull up their socks, says Sethi.

“Bigger systems integrators have to reinvent the wheel to be more flexible and revamp their USPs to catch up with these new players,” agrees Cherian at J.K. Cement.

To find out more about what it takes to be an SI entrepreneur, ChannelWorld caught up with Khatri from Ingenius Technologies’.

Why did you decide to become an entrepreneur in this competitive market?

I’ve always been an entrepreneur at heart. I set up and ran the operations of Micro Clinic’s western region for eight years, which was like being an entrepreneur. Also, after having been associated with a partner company for 11 years, it was a tad difficult to work for another company. The only path forward was to launch my own venture.

There were people in the industry who had apprehensions but we were determined to follow our beliefs.

By mid-August, we were operational across Delhi,

ey is incidental, something I believed in even during the time I spent at my previous company.

As an entrepreneur, the prime objective is working with like-minded people to script success and in the course of that make money.

If you do a good job, you will get more customers and hence more profitability.

That’s my philosophy.

The decade-plus years you’ve put in must have come handy when you made the transition.

I still value my time with my previous company because I learnt the intricacies of the business and operational details. I respect the trust that Micro Clinic’s stakeholders had in me. To be very honest, transformations occur in business relationships and one has to chase a separate career path. Today, I am at ease runing my own balance sheet as I am solely responsible for my company’s success—and its failure.

What was it like approaching customers from your previous company?

When I launched the company, those customers had trust in me and my previous commitments. For customers, the bottom line is deliverables because they have a business to run. That said they do not change partners overnight. We did approach old customers and they offered us a chance through very small orders. Gradually, they offered us few big orders.

We are also approaching new customers who initially give us small orders, typically sub-Rs 10 lakh, to gauge our services and support.

It’s important to remember that the industry doesn’t give you a second chance and hence we have to strategically develop customers— new or existing ones.

How supportive were vendor companies when you wanted to sign on as a channel partner?

Vendors rely on an executive’s track record. Among other OEMs, HP has been at the forefront in believing in us. We consciously add value to our association and that’s how the principal company values us.

That said, some vendors want numbers first which can be a deterrent. We build such relationships in baby steps through small orders.

What are the major challenges you encountered as a start up?

Financial power. Without credit support from a distributor, a partner runs two balance sheets in this capital intensive market. At the same time some distributors

have believed in us as we delivered good business to them. Remember, distributors who have supported startups in the past have become big themselves.

Attrition is another problem. I want my employees to grow as their efforts will catapult my company to new heights. Every employee here is a stakeholder across the hierarchy and that motivates them to walk the extra mile. Stake infuses loyalty, accountability and belonging in an employee.

We want to build responsibility centers—not blame centers—in our company.

How do you ensure margins, which has always been the top priority for channel partners?

Margins are a challenge everywhere. There is no dearth

of partners who will work for as low as 1 percent margin. We do not move away from such deals, because today, CIOs too face constrained by IT budgets, but try to find workarounds with more business models. For example, we engaged with a customer with a 2 percent margin at the start, but we suggested an Opex model later, which doubled our margins on that account.

Acquiring a customer is more important; moneymaking opportunities will emerge through add-on projects. One needs to be highly innovative to make money in this market. The trick, for a channel partner, is to find a way to structure a deal so that it benefits the customer, the principal— and himself.”

WHY INDIA INC LOVES START-UP SIs If you thought that large enterprises automatically shut their doors on start ups, think again.

“The leadership teams of newer players give much more attention to each customer as they work on fewer projects than large SIs. They might also have fewer people, but the quality of technical people is extremely high. There is no protocol concern as even their CEO is quite accessible.”

VIJAY SETHI, VP & CIO, HERO MOTOCORP

“Start ups have their own methodology and business models as they are more nimble and DECEMBER 2012 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD flexible, and they are also entrepreneurial. They bring newer ideas to integrate solutions and offer RoI-centric models, like Opex, to outdo big SIs and benefit enterprise customers.”

25

ASHOK CHERIAN, CIO, J.K. CEMENT

“New entrepreneurs have great innovations especially with niche technology. We have no qualms laying our bets on them even if we are their first enterprise customer. They might have good solutions for specific projects which are needed at our end.”

C.V.G. PRASAD, CIO, ING VYSYA BANK DECEMBER 2012

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

25

n COVER STORY

The advent of more new players is also having a ripple effect on the SI community at large. From a competitive perspective, when larger SIs see smaller partners engage large organizations, they tend to pull up their socks 26

What are some of the things a start-up like you should know or watch out for to ensure the cash registers keep ringing?

The IT business works on customer referrals. If we execute five projects well, we get two new customers—on an average. We are also projecting the company on social websites. We plan to form forums of new entrepreneurs, including nonIT ones, for cross-referrals where we share only the riches—not the expenses.

Also, collection of payments from customers is our major strength; it is credit that drives the market. Winning an order is relatively easy but collecting payment on time remains the biggest asset for a partner organization.

Also, vendors are quite upbeat about working with the fresh blood that comes with start ups because although companies like us are not big, we possess more innovative business models.

More than 80 percent of our business comes through opex models (mainly in association with HP). I executed this strategy at Micro Clinic earlier, and I am putting old wisdom to use in this chapter of my career.

Let’s talk money. What are Ingenius Technologies’ profits like?

We have 18-plus customers across diverse verticals including IT/ITeS, manufacturing and media and entertainment. Our indirect business, Rs 15 crore, from distributors/principals has added substantial profitability to the overall pie.

By March 2013, we will register around Rs 50 crore in revenues (including Rs 18 crore of direct business) and we will double our present employee strength

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD DECEMBER 2012

“The IT business works on customer referrals.

If we execute five projects well, we get two new customers—on an average.”

DIWAKAR KHATRI, FOUNDER & CEO, INGENIUS TECHNOLOGIES

to 55. We will always stay focused on value business rather than volume.

We will soon add more support locations including Hyderabad. We plan to open a Singapore office (for logistic support) by April 2013.

We are also supporting a customer in Philippines through the distributor route.

Is Ingenius Technologies investing in emerging technologies like virtualization and the cloud?

Virtualization from the server side, and VDI from the client side have been our success stories as we continue to win big deals.

As a professional partner of VMware, we conduct VDI consultancy by highlighting factors like money savings and RoI to our customers.

Ingenius is focusing on the cloud in alliance with HP. The server solutions on a cloud model do reduce hardware turnover, but storagerelated opportunities like upgrades allow for good

revenues in terms of profitability and scalability.

Two years from now, what will Ingenius Technologies be recognized as: A sales, technical, or services company?

We want to be a known as a ‘valued service partner’ to enterprises. The first phase will be sales centric so that we can generate immediate revenues for the long-term and also invest in servicescentric models. We will register Rs 1 crore of services business this fiscal.

This 10 percent figure (of total revenues) will double in the next few years.

Starting with a pure services model is tough for new entrepreneurs as the profits need to be reinvested in newer models and the guesstimate period is longer. You might die before taking off. I need adequate fuel before this rocket takes off; the ability to sustain is the biggest factor for the initial two years of a start up. 

n COVER STORY

Advantage

Niche Business Integre Softsol does not aspire to be acknowledged as a run-ofthe-mill solution provider. And its unusual course looks promising.

A

FTER A successful

career spanning three decades at senior positions with leading IT companies like NIIT and Wipro, when most people his age would have been contemplating retirement, 59-year old SK Basu decided to do something different. He decided to take an entrepreneurial route and set up Integre Softsol.

And this experienced M Tech wasn’t setting up a regular systems integration business, but pursuing a distinctive business model through vendor alliances specializing in niche software solutions for select verticals (mainly government, defence and PSUs).

INTEGRE SOFTSOL Founded: July 2012 Headquarters: Delhi Branches: Bangalore Employees: 9 Vendor Alliances: ANSYS, Intergraph, SAS

Key Technologies: Engineering Simulation, Business Analytics, GIS

Expected Revenues (FY 13-14): Rs 6 crore 28

THE RICH EXPERIENCE Armed with a different strategy, Basu quietly started building partnerships with vendors that trusted him and his vision. “We want to emerge as a preferred partner for customers in government, defence, and security verticals in engineering simulation, GIS and Business Analytics,” says SK Basu, CEO, Integre Softsol.

Simulation software company ANSYS, which was expanding across the government segment in India, was just one of his first ports of call. With years of experience managing the government business (including

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD DECEMBER 2012

defence & security), Integre became the apposite choice for ANSYS. The experience of developing product business like Oracle, Microsoft, and Sybase at NIIT also helped Integre towards a tie up with SAS and Intergraph.

“By virtue of experience, I had the confidence to create a good company,” says Basu.

“Fortunately, we interacted with the right OEMs who were identifying competent partners. I believe it was the right time to launch Integre,” says Basu.

Today, Integre is an exclusive partner for selling and supporting ANSYS in the government and public sector organizations in India. Besides, Integre has a partnership with Intergraph Security, Government & Infrastructure (SG&I) to provide geospatially powered solutions to the public safety and security, defense and intelligence, government, transportation, utilities, and communications industries.

“This is again a niche technology,” says Basu.

manpower and brand identity take its toll. Also the business risks associated are lower in our sort of company,” says Basu.

Specialized products take more time to sell as the business is more skewed towards specific customers. “With the unique solutions in our portfolio, we have built a healthy customer funnel for various products,” he says.

“From my previous roles at different companies, I knew close to 40 percent of the customers I have met after forming Integre,” he adds.

Basu says that he has less competition from other channel partners. Integre is an exclusive partner for government sector for Ansys.

“For SAS and Intergraph, we operate only in select verticals or select accounts.

Hence for next 6 months or so, I do not see much competition,” he says.

“With vendor alliances like Microsoft and IBM; this minimal fighting is not possible as they operate on volume sales. This model I have created fits me well,” he says.

DIFFERENT STRATEGY, LESS COMPETITION

EQUATION WITH VENDORS

Basu explained the reason behind company’s niche route. “You don’t need much investment to start operations in niche technologies.

For a routine SI setting shop, the resources in terms of

ANSYS, Intergraph and SAS are upbeat about the momentum of Integre in the marketplace, says Basu adding, “Vendor companies evaluate the credibility of the promoter of a start up company. Their connect

P h o t o g r a p h b y S R I VAT S A S H A N D I LYA

S.K BASU

“The advantage vendors get is the higher hunger and tremendous initiative of a start-up to achieve results. Vendors look for that aggressiveness in all partners.”

Age: 59

S.K. BASU, CEO, INTEGRE SOFTSOL over the years in the marketplace is a major plus.”

Basu says “The advantage a vendor gets is the higher hunger and tremendous initiative of a start-up to achieve results. The vendor looks for that aggressiveness in all partners.”

OEMs work with partners with specific domain knowledge who can be their reliable ‘brand ambassadors’ in the market.

However the disadvantage for start ups is that OEMs sometimes tend to lose focus and offer less support to new companies.

THE PROFITABLE OUTLOOK Integre plans to engage with over 150 customers and have about 25 employees in next two years. It expects revenues of about Rs 5-8 crore by that time. “We will have limited invoice but the margins are higher than pure top lines. This is also a more hassle free business model,” he says.

Besides product sales, installation and training will ensure service revenues.

The company expects to garner about a third of its revenues from services.

“Once we have a substantial

Current Role: Director customer base with a longer association and better trust, we will push services more. After the first year of operations, we will have a separate focus on services,” informs Basu.

With major chunk of revenues expected from government, will the sector’s slower sales cycle induce cash flow issue for Integre?

Basu replies, “For the first two quarters, business will start rolling up and then cash flow will get streamlined. Government business is nevertheless less risky than corporate,” he says.

& CEO, Integre Softsol

Previous Role: Vice President , NIIT Technologies

Experience in IT industry: 30 years Next year, Integre will focus on big data, mobility applications and cloud.

However the company will remain a 100 percent software company. “We will not venture into hardware, which is a low-margin mass market,” says Basu. 

DECEMBER 2012

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

29

n COVER STORY

Networking for Success Backed by a decade of industry experience in networking, Sarfaraz Dhanji of WTech India Solutions, is exploring newer opportunities in the domain and beyond.

O

WTECH INDIA SOLUTIONS

Founded: July 2011 Headquarters: Mumbai Employees: 11 Vendor Alliances: Cisco, Edge-Core, Ezzi Networks, IBM, Lenovo, Maksat, WatchGuard

Key Technologies: Customized Wi-Fi Solutions, Enterprise Networking, Power Conditioning, Personal Computing

Expected Revenues (FY 13-14): Rs 5 crore 30

NCE YOU get to

the top of a vendor company, you can either stay there for rest of your career or you jump to another vendor, where your profile would be repetitive. Or launch your own venture,” says Sarfaraz Dhanji, former country manager India & SAARC for SMC Networks. The 40-year old chose the latter option and pursued his ambition to become an entrepreneur.

Dhanji launched his own partner organization, WTech India Solutions, in July this year, after working as SMC’s regional sales manager in the Middle East for seven years, and its India country manager from 2008 to 2012.

“The new venture will give me additional exposure to the corporate industry.

With my previous role, I was restricted predominantly to networking only,” says Dhanji, who carried his entire team from SMC with him into the new venture.

HIGH ON WI-FI WTech tied up with Maksat and Ezzi Networks to enhance its value proposition for Wi-Fi installations. “The objective is to design and further monetize seamless Wi-Fi solutions for corporates,” says Dhanji.

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD DECEMBER 2012

Aligning with ISPs, WTech and its team are engaged in creating Wi-Fi hotspots across college and university campuses, shopping malls, cafes, shopping gateways, and corporate houses.

“Most offices give access to a visitor using a user name and password on their wireless network,” he says.

“This is a risky proposition.”

WTech has adopted a more secure route.

“A password is sent on a visitor’s mobile phone. We will maintain a server at the client or ISP’s end through our customized software,” he says. The customer will receive periodic reports about Internet use and user demographics from the company. In any untoward incident, the mobile details of the miscreant will be available on the system.

WTech executes pointto-point and point-to-multipoint solutions for offices and their branch offices.

“Though leased lines are an option, the civil work and the associated permissions from authorities lead to delays. Wi-Fi has a much faster time-to-market and is cheaper,” he says.

The device by Maksat, an outdoor access point, delivers good range and extreme throughput. Its hardware and enclosure installed in

corporate buildings do not interfere with other gigahertz topology in the vicinity, says Dhanji.

WIN, WIN, WIN Dhanji expects over 50 percent revenues from networking and most of it will emerge from Wi-Fi installations and footprint expansions.

How will customers, ISPs, and WTech benefit from this business model? Dhanji explains. “ISP is a crowded space as customers change service providers for cheaper Internet packages. However data Internet will still be a cheaper option than fastgrowing mobile Internet.”

“WTech is delivering a total value proposition solution for customers to attach to a single ISP for a longer period. For an ISP, as Internet usage increases, the client will subscribe for more bandwidth,” he says.

Apart from Wi-Fi installations and server set ups, the company excels in configuring firmware across routers and switches of various vendor companies. This is the most crucial aspect for wireless according to Dhanji.

WTech also offers the server (for Wi-Fi installation) to the customer on an Opex model.

Ezzi Network’s cloud technology will power the mon-

OVERCOMING HURDLES Besides wireless, networking services also include network management (LAN and WAN setup and support) through wired enterprise switching solutions.

“We still need to gain the confidence of enterprises and vendor companies. It’s not happening as smoothly as of now but it will ease out in couple of quarters,” says Dhanji.

“With more clarity on sales leads with vendors, we will prove ourselves as a competent partner. The distributors too will eventually give more credit timelines with more business,” he says.

The small number of challenges does not impede WTech’s intent to position itself as a one-stop IT provider (desktop to datacenter) for enterprises.

WTech is targeting SMEs across auto, pharma, media, and banking to name a few.

“We will address large enterprises later as we scale

up operations and swell our customer reference base,” says Dhanji.

THE DREAM Business works more on customer relationships than just deal size, says Dhanji.

“Competition will have price advantage at times. However, many customers realize our eagerness to do business and hence we would quote the best price,” he says.

Services revenues (from AMC and FMS) will help build customer confidence and fatten the bottom line

“We still need to gain the confidence of enterprises and vendor companies. It’s not happening as smoothly as of now but it will ease out in couple of quarters.”

SARFARAZ DHANJI, DIRECTOR, WTECH INDIA SOLUTIONS

for a start-up like WTech.

Besides keeping customers happy through dedicated service support, “we keep our employees happy first as they drive the business for you,” he says.

In the next two years, WTech plans to open branches across Delhi, Chennai, and other major cities and expects employee strength to rise to 25 by March 2014. “I yearn for WTech to be a public listed company one day, which is the dream of any entrepreneur,” says Dhanji. 

SARFARAZ DHANJI Age: 40 Present Role: Director, WTech India Solutions

Previous Role: Country Manager India & SAARC, SMC Networks

Experience in IT industry: 19 Years

Photograph by KAPIL SHROFF

etization, seamless roaming, and meshing of WTech’s WiFi Footprint, says Dhanji.

n COVER STORY

Profiting

from Services 3in Solutions derives a major chunk of its revenues from the services business. This ensures healthy bottom lines and longer-lasting customer loyalty.

A

RUN SG, employed

Employees: 10

with Frontier Business Systems for 15 years, took a call to launch his own company, 3in Solutions, in December 2010. “With the rich industry know-how behind me, I clearly understood the business intricacies of partner organizations.

I also realized that, apart from large systems integrators, there is a huge gap across regional channel partners,” says Arun SG, Director, 3in Solutions.

There was a colossal opportunity brewing for Arun to position his newly-formed company between a smalltime reseller and big-time SI. And he took the plunge.

Vendor Alliances: Cisco,

TIMING IS EVERYTHING

Citrix, D-link, Dell, IBM,

It was the right time for Arun to start 3in Solutions in March 2011. Frontier had aggressively started focusing on services over the last three to four years. “The experience of that business model has helped me today.

If I had set up my IT shop earlier, then I would have been just another reseller, and not a services-oriented systems integrator!” he says.

The numbers back up his claim. “In the first year of operations, close to 50 percent of our revenues were services oriented. This

3IN SOLUTIONS Founded: March 2011 Headquarters: Bangalore

Lenovo

Key Technologies: End User Computing (VDI, Mobility Solutions),Storage Consolidation, Virtualization, UC and Collaboration

Revenues (FY 11-12): Rs 7 crore

Expected Revenues (FY 12 - 13): Rs 18 crore 32

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD DECEMBER 2012

fiscal, though hardware volumes have increased, we will still end with at least half of our yearly revenues from services,” he says.

Part of the reason is that his company focuses on implementations and services. Hardware service includes implementation which is one-time (VMware or Citrix) and takes 20 to 25 days. His engineers travel for the implementation across cities where 3in Solutions do not have a branch office. “In the implementation business, outsourcing does not help as it does not give any margins.”

Arun believes that apart from large players like Wipro and Avnet, none of the smaller partners can deliver solution-based offerings and services with technical expertise and fullfledged support. “This has made us a leading SI in the marketplace in a short span of time,” he says.

CREATING THE BRAND Any start-up partner company needs to gain access with enterprise customers. “Customers have their loyalties with existing channel partners. However, enterprises do need complete solutions including server, storage, networking, and UPS, hence we engaged with various

vendors to emerge as single point source,” he says.

However he clarifies, “We were clear not to position ourselves as a reseller or just another box pusher; but as a solution provider capable of offering simplified solutions to enterprises.”

A big advantage, says Arun is that many vendors know of his reputation as someone capable of carrying their solutions as a brand ambassador to customers.

It also helps that 3in Solutions isn’t weighed down by many of the protocols larger players need to put in place.

“This limited directory translates into fast decisions and probably winning more deals. We are not as process driven as big companies, which allows us to be flexible with customer needs,” he says.

TEETHING ISSUES During the company’s first few months, many enterprises worked with 3in Solutions. Others, he recalls, pigeonholed his company as a start up, making it tough for him to convince them to give 3in Solutions opportunities. “One opportunity is enough for us to hold that account for ever,” he says.

Another challenge is that established systems integrators have adequate financial

ARUN SG Age: 39 Current Role: Director, 3in Solutions

Previous Role: General Manager-National, Frontier Business Systems

Experience in IT industry: 17 years power behind them. “They can easily execute deals around worth Rs 3-4 crore.

Most customers do not look at us for such high-value deals though we have good credit limits in the industry,” he says.

Big deals never come to start-up companies as most of these orders are stitched up by vendors and bigger partner organizations.

There is also lack of focus from principals as they engage more with big partner organizations, says Arun.

There is more emphasis at 3in to target large enterprises. From April, the company will start a branch at Chennai. There is also a plan for service outlet in Mumbai as it has a lot of implementations in Mumbai and Pune, says Arun.

Well-versed with the hierarchy of vendors, Arun often calls them personally for any issues including fixing customer problems instantly. “The decade-plus years I put in the industry has educated me in terms of which is the right button to press in case of an emergency. This ensures customer stickiness,” he says.

Bigger partners might have financial strength to win orders but the ‘business

Photograph by SUJITH

PULLING THE PLUG

“We were clear not to position ourselves as a reseller or just another box pusher; but as a solution provider capable of offering simplified solutions to enterprises.”

ARUN SG, DIRECTOR, 3IN SOLUTIONS relationship’ with vendors helps us to a large extent, he says.

“It’s my dream to start operations in Singapore from a

logistics perspective and other service segment,” he says.

The company name ‘3in Solutions’ is derived from three ‘ins’: Innovative, intel-

ligent and integrated solutions. And that’s precisely what enterprises want in their modern IT infrastructure, says Arun. 

DECEMBER 2012

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

33

SCALE OF

HEIGHTS Associated Business Computers, displayed

perseverance and skill sets to successfully execute an ‘uphill’ project for a Co-operative bank.

By Yogesh Gupta

Sujeet Narula, MD, Associated Business Computers P h o t o g r a p h b y S R I V A T S A S H A N D I LYA

W

HEN SUJEET Narula, Man-

aging Director, Associated Business Computers (ABC), sold a printer and a desktop worth a lakh rupees to the Almora Urban Co-operative Bank (AUCB) way back in 2000, little did he realize that this was the beginning of a long relationship. After all ABC is a firm based in Delhi, a city famous for its unruly traffic and aggressive attitude of its inhabitants. While AUCB is headquartered in Almora, a calm town nestled in the Himalayas at a height 34

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD DECEMBER 2012

of more than 5000 feet above sea level and surrounded by thick forests.

However, things started changing in 2008, when AUCB decided to overhaul its IT infrastructure. This was necessitated by the increased competition that the bank was facing and its realization that it had to upgrade its IT infrastructure to compete effectively in the market.

“Most of the nationalized and private banks in our area had implemented a core banking solution (CBS) and to compete with them we decided

to go for CBS,” explains P.C. Tiwari, CEO, AUCB. Since ABC was servicing the requirements of AUCB ever since the first sale of printers and desktops, Narula naturally got a call. But, he wasn’t the only one in the race. A vendor company and a tier 1 systems integrator were also in the fray to bag the project.

After all the project was worth about Rs 8 crore.

ABC faced competition from the cloud proposition of other vendors.

However, after about twelve months

CASE STUDY n of negotiations, ABC finally received the order in April 2010. “The solutions

by ABC completely suited our existing problems and hence the board decided to engage with them for the datacenter project,” says Tiwari.

Considering aspects like scalability, security and the bank’s own vision of its IT infrastructure, an in-house datacenter (DC) and disaster recovery (DR) solution was zeroed in on. “With our own datacenter, we are in complete control of all software and hardware, and are able to achieve the demands of a high-functioning organization at all times,” says Dhiraj Pathak, Head IT, Almora Urban Co-operative Bank.

CLIMBING A MOUNTAIN “After several rounds of meetings and considering the geographical conditions, we decided to have our own datacenter at out headquarters in Almora, Uttarakhand.” informs Tiwari.

A datacenter at Almora seemed quite a daunting task. Additionally, most of the 26 bank branches were in remote and hilly areas of the state of Uttarakhand. According to Narula, several issues like difficulty in logistics and unavailability of manpower were posing a major concern.

ABC prepared the blue print to build a primary DC site at Almora and a secondary DR site at Haldwani district.

Apart from operational challenges like delay in delivery and change in requirement, the real hindrance was the geographical location. Accessibility and further ensuring delivery of IT equipment across different branches seemed a tough task.

At this point, the branch office of ABC at Haldwani came in useful, says Narula. ABC formed a core team of five people—three in Delhi and two in Haldwani—across different roles for this mammoth project.

ABC tied up with a local transport company in Haldwani to streamline logistics of the hardware equipment to the datacenter. The DC was to be built on the second floor of the building.

“Even the car halts 100 meters away.

We employed local coolies to lift the equipment from the trucks to the main building. At times, pulleys were used to transport the equipment to the second floor,” recalls Narula.

“After several rounds of meetings and considering the geographical conditions, we decided to have own datacenter at our HQ in Almora, Uttarakhand.”

P.C. Tiwari, CEO, Almora Urban Co-operative Bank In addition, Sify and Tulip were unable to commit to last mile connectivity as some branches of bank were near Nepal border. The connectivity issues were finally resolved after a few months as BSNL provided the main leased lines and a back-up of ISDN.

MORE ROADBLOCKS The project extended a bit longer and we had to stretch our bank limits at times, though we regularly received small installments from customers, explains Narula. “But we knew the worth of this investment,” he adds.

Snapshot Key Parties: Almora Urban Cooperative Bank, Associated Business Computers Location: Almora, Uttarakhand Project Cost: Approx. Rs 8 crore Implementation time: 12 months Main vendors: HP, APC, InfrasoftTech Key People involved: P.C. Tiwari,

CEO and Dhiraj Pathak, Head-IT, Almora Urban Co-operative Bank; Sujeet Narula, MD, Associated Business Computers

Key Technologies: Architecture

and design of the datacenter (blade servers, storage, networking, software), power conditioning, data consolidation & Back up

Post implementation RoI:

Standardization of processes, better productivity, enhanced custome service, competitive advantage, increased business

There were also some issues with the principal company, HP, as per Narula, with the timely delivery of material at the datacenter and the branches to contend with.

Half way through the project; Uttarakhand experienced a big landslide in August 2010. It further delayed the project by few weeks but luckily no damage was incurred on the datacenter, says Narula.

“We handled all the intricacies ranging from civil works to installation of entire hardware at DC/DR sites. The engineers worked day in day out,” says Narula.

REACHING THE TOP There was immense anxiety for the first 12 months after the requirement was floated, and later a year while implementing the project, admits Narula.

“We are reaping the rewards of implementing a CBS including standardization of processes, better customer service leading to retention and increased customer traffic,” says Tiwari adding, “There has been an increased in business volumes with better asset liability management and risk management.”

Today, AUCB has 38 branches as twelve new ones were added in past 18 months. The connectivity of these branches to the datacenter and CBS is an incremental business for ABC. We undertook a similar project in Dehradun after this one though the site is at a much lower height, explains Narula.

Narula conducted few dozen trips (each of 300 km) from Delhi to Almora to personally supervise the project. And his visits seem to have paid off handsomely.  DECEMBER 2012

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

35

BIGGEST

IT’S

SECURITY THREATS

I L LU S T R AT I O N BY U N N I K R I S H N A N A .V

Hacking’s gone from a one-person crime of opportunity to an open market run by crime syndicates and money launderers.

By Roger A. Grimes

Y

the typical hacking scenario involved a lone attacker and maybe some buddies working late at night, pumped up on Mountain Dew, looking for public-facing IP addresses. When they found one, they enumerated the advertising services (Web server, SQL server, and so on), broke in using a multitude of vulnerabilities, then explored the compromised company to their heart’s content.

Often their intent was exploratory.

If they did something illegal, it was typically a spur-of-the-moment crime of opportunity.

EARS AGO

MY, HOW TIMES HAVE CHANGED. When describing a typical hacking scenario, these days you must begin well before the hack or even the hacker, with the organization behind the attack. Today, hacking is all crime, all the time, complete with bidding markets for malware, crime syndicates, botnets for hire, and cyber warfare gone amok.

Here are the nine biggest threats facing today’s IT security pros.

36

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD DECEMBER 2012

9

Cyber Crime Syndicates Although the lone criminal mastermind still exists, these days most malicious hacking attacks are the result of organized groups, many of which are professional. Traditional organized crime groups that used to run drugs, gambling, and extortion have thrown their hats into the online money grab ring. Competition is fierce, led not by mafiosos but several very large groups of professional criminals aimed specifically at cyber crime.

Many of the most successful organized cyber crime syndicates are businesses that lead large affiliate conglomerate groups, much in the vein of legal distributed marketing hierarchies. In fact, today’s cyber criminal probably has more in common with an Avon or Amway rep than either wants to admit.

Small groups, with a few members, still hack, but more and more, IT security pros are up against large corporations dedicated to rogue behavior. Think full-time employees, HR departments, project management

THREAT

NO.1

teams, and team leaders. And it’s all criminal, no more funny messages printed to the screen or other teenage antics. Most operate in the open, and some—like the Russian Business Network—even have their own Wikipedia entries. Kind of makes you wish for yesteryear, doesn’t it?

Specialization and division of labor are at the heart of these organizations. A single mastermind, or an inner circle, will run the collective.

Sergeants and subdivisions will specialize in different areas, with an arm dedicated to creating malware, another dedicated to marketing, another that sets up and maintains the distribution channel, and yet another in charge of creating botnets and renting them to other evildoers.

It’s little wonder why popular IT security practices just don’t work against today’s malware, given that cyber crime has evolved into a multi-level, service-oriented industry with the blatant goal of fleecing companies and people out of their money and intellectual property.

9

Small-time Cons—and the Money Mules and Launders That Prop and Support Them Not all cyber criminal organizations are syndicates or corporations. Some are simply entrepreneurial in nature, small

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SECURITY | FEATURE n businesses after one thing: Money.

These malicious mom-and-pop operations may steal identities and passwords, or they may cause nefarious redirection to get it. In the end, they want money. They initiate fraudulent credit card or banking transactions and convert their illgotten gains into local currency using money mules, electronic cash distribution, e-banking, or some other sort of money laundering.

It’s not hard to find money launders.

There are dozens to hundreds of entities competing to be the one that gets to take a large percentage cut of the illegally procured loot. In fact, you’d be surprised at the competitive and public nature of all the other people begging to do support business with Internet criminals. They advertise “no questions asked,” “bulletproof” hosting in countries far from the reaches of legal subpoenas, and they offer public bulletin boards, software specials, 24/7 telephone support, bidding forums, satisfied customer references, anti-malware avoidance skills, and all the servicing that helps others to be better online criminals. Many of these groups make tens of millions of dollars each year.

Many of these groups and the persons behind them have been identified (and arrested) over the past few years. Their social media profiles show happy people with big houses, expensive cars, and content families taking foreign vacations. If they’re the slightest bit guilty from stealing money from others, it doesn’t show.

Imagine the neighborhood barbeques where they tell neighbors and friends that they run an “Internet marketing business”—all the while social engineering their way to millions to the consternation of IT security pros who have done just about everything you can to protect users from themselves.

9

Hacktivists Whereas exploit bragging was not uncommon in the early days, today’s cyber criminal seeks to fly under the radar—with the exception of the growing legions of hacktivists.

These days IT security pros have to contend with an increasing number of loose confederations of individuals

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dedicated to political activism, like the infamous Anonymous group. Politically motivated hackers have existed since hacking was first born. The big change is that more and more of it is being done in the open, and society is readily acknowledging it as an accepted form of political activism.

Political hacking groups often communicate, either anonymously or not, in open forums announcing their targets and hacking tools ahead of time.

They gather more members, take their grievances to the media to drum up public support, and act astonished if they get arrested for their illegal deeds.

Their intent is to embarrass and bring negative media attention to the victim as much as possible, whether that includes hacking customer information, committing DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks, or simply causing the victim company additional strife.

More often than not, political hacktivism is intent on causing monetary pain to its victim in an attempt to change the victim’s behavior in some way. Individuals can be collateral damage in this fight, and regardless of whether one believes in the hacktivist’s political cause, the intent and methodology remain criminal.

9

IP Theft and Corporate Espionage While the likelihood of dealing with hacktivists may be low, most IT security pros have to contend with the large group of malicious hackers that exist only to steal intellectual property from companies or to perform straightup corporate espionage.

The method of operations here is to break into a company’s IT assets, dump all the passwords, and over time, steal gigabytes of confidential information: Patents, new product ideas, military secrets, financial information, business plans, and so on. Their intent is to find valuable information to pass along to their customers for financial gain, and their goal is to stay hidden inside the compromised company’s network for as long as possible.

To reap their rewards, they eavesdrop on important e-mails, raid databases, and gain access to so much information that many have begun to

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develop their own malicious search engines and query tools to separate the fodder from the more interesting intellectual property.

This sort of attacker is known as an APT (advanced persistent threat) or DHA (determined human adversary).

There are few large companies that have not been successfully compromised by these campaigns.

9

Malware Mercenaries No matter what the intent or group behind the cyber crime, someone has to make the malware. In the past, a single programmer would make malware for his or her own use, or perhaps to sell. Today, there are teams and companies dedicated solely to writing malware. They turn out malware intended to bypass specific security defenses, attack specific customers, and accomplish specific objectives.

And they’re sold on the open market in bidding forums.

Often the malware is multi-phased and componentized. A smaller stub program is tasked with the initial exploitation of the victim’s computer, and once securely placed to ensure it lives through a reboot, it contacts a “mothership” Web server for further instructions. Often the initial stub program sends out DNS queries looking for the mothership, itself often a compromised computer temporarily acting as a mothership. These DNS queries are sent to DNS servers that are just as likely to be innocently infected victim computers. The DNS servers move from computer to computer, just as the mothership Web servers do.

Once contacted, the DNS and mothership server often redirect the initiating stub client to other DNS and mothership servers. In this way, the stub client is directed over and over (often more than a dozen times) to newly exploited computers, until eventually the stub program receives its final instructions and the more permanent malicious program is installed.

All in all, the setup used by today’s malware writers makes it very difficult for IT security pros to defend against their wares.

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n FEATURE | SECURITY

9

Botnets as a Service Botnets aren’t just for their creators anymore.

Having more than likely bought the malware program that creates the bot, today’s owners will either use the botnet for themselves or rent it to others by the hour or another metric.

The methodology is familiar. Each version of the malware program attempts to exploit thousands to tens of thousands of computers in an effort to create a single botnet that will operate as one entity at the creator’s bidding. Each bot in the botnet eventually connects back to its command and control server(s) to get its latest instructions. Botnets have been found with hundreds of thousands of infected computers.

But now that there are so many active botnets (literally tens of millions of infected computers each day), botnet rentals are fairly cheap, meaning all the more problems for IT security pros.

Malware fighters will often attempt to take down the command and control servers and/or take over their control so that they can instruct the connecting bots to disinfect their host computers and die.

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All-in-one Malware Today’s sophisticated malware programs often offer all-in-one, soup-to-nuts functionality. They will not only infect the end-user but also break into websites and modify them to help infect more victims. These allin-one malware programs often come with management consoles so that their owners and creators can keep track of what the botnet is doing, who they are infecting, and which ones are most successful.

Most malicious programs are Trojan horses. Computer viruses and worms have long since ceased to be the most popular types of malware. In most cases, the end-user is tricked into running a Trojan horse that’s advertised as a necessary anti-virus scan, disk defragmentation tool, or some other seemingly essential or innocuous utility.

The user’s normal defenses are fooled because most of the time the Web

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page offering the rogue executable is a trusted site they’ve visited many times.

The bad guys simply compromised the site, using a host of tricks, and inserted a few lines of JavaScript that redirect the user’s browsers to the Trojan horse program.

9

The Increasingly Compromised Web At the most basic level, a website is simply a computer, just like a regular end-user workstation; in turn, Webmasters are end-users like everyone else. It’s not surprising to find the legitimate Web is being increasingly littered with malicious JavaScript redirection links.

But it’s not entirely a matter of Webmasters’ computers being exploited that’s leading to the rise in Web server compromises. More often, the attacker finds a weakness or vulnerability in a website that allows them to bypass admin authentication and write malicious scripts.

Common website vulnerabilities include poor passwords, crosssite scripting vulnerabilities, SQL injection, vulnerable software, and insecure permissions. The Open Web Application Security Project Top 10 list is the authority on how most Web servers get compromised.

Many times it isn’t the Web server or its application software but some link or advertisement that gets hacked. It’s fairly common for banner ads, which are often placed and rotated by general advertising agencies, to end up infected. Heck, many times the malware guys simply buy ad space on popular Web servers.

Because many of the evildoers present themselves as businessmen from legitimate corporations, complete with corporate headquarters, business cards, and expense accounts, it’s not always so easy to separate the legitimate ad sources from the bad guys, who often begin advertising a legitimate product only to switch out the link in the ad to a rogue product after the ad campaign is under way. One of the more interesting exploits involved hackers compromising a cartoon syndicate so that every newspaper republishing the affected cartoons ended up

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pushing malware. You can’t even trust a cartoon anymore.

Another problem with hacked websites is that the computers hosting one site can often host multiple sites, sometimes numbering in the hundreds or thousands. One hacked website can quickly lead to thousands more.

No matter how the site was hacked, the innocent user, who might have visited this particular website for years without a problem, one day gets prompted to install an unexpected program. Although they’re surprised, the fact that the prompt is coming from a website they know and trust is enough to get them to run the program. After that, it’s game over. The end-user’s computer (or mobile device) is yet another cog in someone’s big botnet.

9

Cyber Warfare Nation-state cyber warfare programs are in a class to themselves and aren’t something most IT security pros come up against in their daily routines. These covert operations create complex, professional cyber warfare programs intent on monitoring adversaries or taking out an adversary’s functionality, but as Stuxnet and Duqu show, the fallout of these methods can have consequences for more than just the intended targets.

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CRIME AND NO PUNISHMENT Some victims never recover from exploitation. Their credit record is forever scarred by a hacker’s fraudulent transaction, the malware uses the victim’s address book list to forward itself to friends and family members, victims of IP theft spend tens of millions of dollars in repair and prevention.

The worst part is that almost none of those who use the above malicious attacks are successfully prosecuted.

The criminals on the Internet are living large because the Internet isn’t good at producing court-actionable evidence. It’s anonymous by default, and tracks are lost and covered up in milliseconds. Right now we live in the “wild, wild West” days of the Internet. As it matures, the criminal safe havens will dry up. Until then, IT security pros have their work cut out for them. 

Focal Point EVERYTHING ABOUT STORAGE

Storage Supersized Storage systems are becoming storage computers as vendors push functionality downstream. By Stacy Collett

D

URING VMWORLD

in San Francisco, five-year-old storage vendor Scale Computing launched a new storage appliance that eliminates the entire I/O storage network that resides between servers

and storage. Instead, the appliance uses powerful processors that are capable of hosting multiple virtual machines in the same storage box. The appliance requires no virtualization software and no external storage, which could cut

DATA STORAGE COSTS BIG MONEY Worldwide, organizations hold about 2.2 zettabytes of data and spend about $1.1 trillion (about Rs 52 lakh crore) to secure and provide access to it, according to Symantec.

Those sky-high numbers about the amount of data and what’s spent to hold it were based on the results of a survey of 4,056 information technology professionals at organizations in 38 countries for Symantec’s State of Information survey. The survey found on average $38 million (about Rs 201 crore) is being spent annually by larger enterprises, and $332,000 (about Rs 1.8 crore) by SMBs, to store and secure their business data. In all, 30 percent said they suffer from “information sprawl” as data is held outside the organization as well as inside it.

Sean Regan, senior director of product marketing, Symantec, notes that SMBs spend slightly more on a per-employee basis annually on information storage, security and management—$3,670 (about Rs 2 lakh) per employee—compared with the $3,297 (about Rs 1.8 lakh) per employee that enterprises spend each year. Economies of scale are often what account for that, he said.

Information is so important to all organizations, according to the survey, the 4,506 IT professionals said they believe it represents 49 percent of an organization’s “total value.”

But though business data is of critical worth, the IT professionals acknowledged the struggles they had in managing it.

Today, about 75 percent of business data is stored in-house and about 25 percent in the cloud, according to the survey. And in many cases, companies also appear to be have “barely utilized their storage,” Regan says, making use of only 31 percent of what they’ve already bought. This low storage utilization rate of “31 percent inside the firewall and even lower (18 percent) outside,” according to the survey, is somewhat surprising, Regan said.

— By Ellen Messmer storage costs by as much as 75 percent for small and midsize businesses with limited resources and storage expertise.

Some industry watchers call it a breakthrough.

Others call it an expected progression in storage architecture. But all agree that the evolution of storage from basic systems to high-powered storage computers is a trend that’s taking hold at organizations of all sizes.

“They’re the first one I’ve seen that’s done something like that,” says Dick Csaplar, an analyst at Boston-based Aberdeen Group, referring to Scale Computing’s “collapsed”

architecture, which combines servers, storage and virtualization in one appliance. “It seems fairly straightforward. It’s one of those ‘Why didn’t it happen earlier?’ types of questions.”

In fact, many veteran and startup storage vendors have been plotting moves into high-powered storage computers for some time, as more functions are being driven down into storage systems.

One of the key reasons why it’s possible to move computing power down into storage is the emergence of scale-out architectures, which can bring a lot more CPU, memory and networking to the storage

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n FOCAL POINT | STORAGE level. Traditional storage architectures, with their fixed amounts of CPU, memory and networking, weren’t designed to host applications natively on storage systems.

Today, the emerging scaleout architecture lets users add many storage systems to an existing infrastructure and scale up not just capacity, but also performance, CPU, memory and networking equally.

Advances in processing power have also prompted the move to storage computing. With 16-core processors, for instance, systems have “incredible amounts of computing power. Utilizing some of that power for things other than straight application processing is coming,” Csaplar says.

Server virtualization has also pushed traditional storage systems to the tipping point, with sometimes 20 to 30 servers virtualized onto one server. “So now storage administrators are faced with a tremendous load coming into one storage system,” says Hu Yoshida, CTO at Hitachi Data Systems.

“That has increased the demand for I/O processing.”

STAKING THEIR POSITIONS Storage giant EMC is working on next-generation scale-out capabilities at the storage level, but the vendor doesn’t have a new product to announce yet.

“It’s certainly an area of interest,” says Sam Grocott, vice president of marketing.

“From an industry standpoint, I think everybody is looking at that. We have CPU cycles and cores and a lot more memory that is available for not just storage tasks today, but now for application use cases as well.”

40

STORAGE HYBRIDS More companies than ever before are blending cloud and onpremises storage, says Dick Csaplar, an analyst at Aberdeen Group. On-premises systems are “fast, immediate, close by,” he notes, adding that they have “very little latency because you’re not dealing with a WAN—just a LAN.” But as the data ages—and in some cases, before it’s even archived—“you can relocate it in the cloud and take advantage of the low cost of cloud storage, but still have direct access to the data” even if there’s a delayed response, says Csaplar.

Red Hat did this with its hybrid cloud storage architecture after acquiring Gluster, an open-source storage software company, in October 2011. Swedish vendor CompuVerde has a similar offering.

“They all have different variations on the theme of what [storage] is on-premises versus what’s in the cloud,” Csaplar adds. “But this link of making your storage continuous across both the cloud and on-premises is a trend I think we’re going to see a lot more of as well.”

— By Stacy Collett Hitachi Data Systems has been steadily moving toward powerful storage computing since 2000, Yoshida says.

Today, its Virtual Storage Platform can move data to high-performance storage when an application needs it and move it to lower-class storage when performance is no longer required.

“It’s not just a storage computer—it’s a hybrid multiprocessor,” Yoshida says.

“We also do that in our highperformance NAS product.”

The next step will be “unification,” he adds. “In our midrange product, we’ve added an optic file system [so] users can do file as well as block processing. Our file system is built around an object architecture, so I can do a query against the metadata and find things quickly. This is how we combine hardware and CPUs running software to speed up the process.” Hitachi included that file system in its Unified Storage System in April.

“We’re going to see more hybrids from Hitachi,” says

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Andrew Reichman, an analyst at Forrester Research.

“They’ve got the tools, but they’re slow to market.

They take their time but build something that is very well engineered.”

Nearly a dozen startups have entered the market, Reichman says. Nutanix, for instance, has rolled out a server/storage hybrid designed to be scaled out, highly automated and easy to use. Nimble Storage offers a next-generation hybrid combination of disk/ solid-state drive. Tegile Systems, MorphLabs, Tintri, Pivot3 and Astute Networks also offer one-stop storage computing boxes.

INTRICATE CHALLENGES High-performance storage computing requires certain kind of expertise in servers, storage and applications. Many vendors will have to forge partnerships to be successful.

“Those three pieces are key to [making] this a scalable model,” Grocott

says. “The storage [vendors are] going to have to have strong partnerships with the application players, because they need to become aware that [applications] live on storage and are not going through traditional networks. But also you create that scalable infrastructure via hypervisors to house these multiple applications within the storage infrastructure.”

He does acknowledge that creating scalable infrastructure via hypervisors could add a layer of complexity and expense.

“It’s a constant trade-off” when it comes to choosing among high performance, easy scalability and lower costs, Grocott says. “I think that’s the piece that needs to evolve the most —making sure the application [vendors] are aware of this new storage environment and we partner together to figure out what’s the right model, both from an integration and economic standpoint.”

Right now, storage computing appliances are being marketed to midsize companies. “It’s simplification for the midsize enterprises who are just getting hammered with all the complexity of the big guys and no resources to deal with it,” Csaplar says. But large enterprises will likely benefit most from the highly optimized architecture to deliver a handful of applications that are virtualized on storage, and they’ll be willing to pay extra for better performance, Grocott adds.

“You will see different models in the market, but to find that ultimate solution, and we’ll need a lot of swings and misses before somebody hits the ball out of the park,” Csaplar says. 

Finding the Right Balance Storage orchestration software holds promise. But, are enterprise customers stuck with point tools. By Robert L. Scheier

F

OR CASH-STRAPPED

IT shops looking to get out from under manual storage management chores, storage orchestration software looks like a lifeline: It promises to let users choose from a catalog of predefined storage services and then handle the provisioning details behind the scenes.

It’s a worthy vision, and one vendors are moving toward. However, there’s currently no “single pane of glass” product that can automatically provision, resize, back up and recover storage across multiple public and private clouds, across systems from different vendors and for virtual machines running hypervisors from

multiple vendors. Most orchestration tools support only a single product line, are optimized for certain functions or don’t support the public, multi-tenant object-based storage services that provide the lowest cost and most flexibility.

It’s even more rare to find orchestration tools that can manage both virtual machines and storage. Creating true global orchestration is an expensive, complex task usually tackled only by the largest enterprises or service providers that can spread the investment across multiple customers.

Today, storage management is “very fragmented, and things don’t necessarily work well together,” says

Forrester Research storage analyst Andrew Reichman.

“For the most part, [tools] are quite expensive, complex to use and have mixed results with [other vendors’] products.... The automation level of storage lags that of servers,” especially when comparing storage management systems with server virtualization platforms such as VMware. With storage, “there is still a lot of manual, mundane work being done,” says Reichman.

Despite some acceptance of standards for defining common storage and server functions, vendors are understandably reluctant to use them to make it easier for customers to move data from their products to those of their competitors. Some are also too busy integrating technologies they have acquired to focus on interoperability with their competitors.

Many of today’s orchestration platforms are more like service catalogs that offer various service levels for different applications and use application programming interfaces (API) to storage and server management tools to deliver the services. HCL Technologies’ MyCloud, for example, is “not like a management tool, but more like an aggregation platform [that] can integrate with the native management tools” from infrastructure providers such as VMware or Amazon, or existing management vendors such as BMC or CA, says Kalyan Kumar, associate vice president and head of cloud at HCL. Customers can request compute and storage services through it, but they must log in to each platform’s management console to perform more sophisticated operations,

such as archiving data, he says.

In the absence of universal orchestration, customers are using tools that support their hardware and software to solve problems in areas such as application availability, disaster recovery and quality of service.

These products fall into several broad categories.

STORAGE ‘HYPERVISORS’ A growing number of vendors are offering “storage hypervisors” that virtualize the storage and, in some cases, their associated file servers to create scalable, flexible pools of storage.

This virtualization layer often runs on standard x86 servers and is optimized for specific functions, storage protocols or applications. One example is DataCore Software’s SANsymphony-V, which links to VMware’s vCenter to automatically discover VMware servers running in a customer’s environment. A systems administrator can then associate a given class of storage with various servers, and SANsymphony automatically provisions it.

Hosting and integration services firm Amnet Technology Solutions has been using SANsymphony for close to three years, and senior technologist Rich Conway says the product has provided “absolutely phenomenal” redundancy.

“The entire storage infrastructure was essentially mirrored, where both sides are active/active, and if any component of either side fails for any reason, our entire grid stays up and our customers don’t even notice,” he says. SANsymphony has also enabled Amnet to eliminate planned down-

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n FOCAL POINT | STORAGE time for routine maintenance such as firmware upgrades, says Conway.

IBM plans to release IBM SmartCloud Virtual Storage Center, an appliance-based virtualization layer that will provide services such as backup, load balancing and snapshots across applications and provision the right storage for each class of service, says Steve Wojtowecz, vice president of Tivoli storage software development at IBM. Combining IBM’s SAN Volume Controller storage virtualization platform with its Tivoli Storage Productivity Center management software and the Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager, the SmartCloud Virtual Storage Center will provide consistent performance on multiple vendors’ storage arrays in datacenters within 300 kilometers of each other, says Wojtowecz. But it doesn’t currently support block storage, he adds.

Zadara Storage runs its storage virtualization layer on commodity servers in its own colocated cloud facilities, turning directattached disk drives into virtual SAN arrays. Noam Shendar, vice president of business development, says this gives those drives the performance, reliability and security of more expensive SANs, and provides capabilities such as clustering using familiar SAN management tools.

Other vendors use a global file system to separate the details of where and how VMs or data are stored from the higher-level management objectives, such as meeting the terms of various SLAs. Among the vendors coming the closest to offering 42

ASK YOURSELF When choosing a storage orchestration tool, Greg Schulz, senior adviser at the Server and StorageIO Group, recommends asking the following questions: l Does it enable the setup and scheduling of snapshots, replication, backup and other functions that ensure data availability? lH ow does the platform coordinate with other technologies, such as dynamic path management, that provide load management as application loads change? lH ow will the platform’s performance and price be affected as your company adds more servers, storage and networks? lW ill it be easy to install the vendor’s system and integrate it into your company’s environment? lH ow well does the vendor’s platform integrate with your existing service catalog? lC an the platform recognize and comply with your policies on security, regulatory compliance and quality of service?

- By Robert L. Scheier combined server/storage management with this approach is Tintri, whose “VM-aware” storage appliances are designed to replace traditional storage units such as volumes, LUNs and files with virtual disks. Tintri’s VMstore file system monitors and controls I/O performance for each virtual disk, communicating with the VMware vCenter to detect which virtual machines are active and how they are using storage. It then automatically chooses the best combination of storage for each virtual machine, including fast but expensive solid-state drives and slower but less costly disks.

Meanwhile, open-source vendor Red Hat claims that its Red Hat Storage Server, based on its GlusterFS file system, provides better scalability than rivals because it doesn’t rely on a metadata server, more effectively distributes data and uses parallelism to maximize performance. Nutanix combines storage and server manage-

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ment, along with its own storage and performance management software, in a physical package that includes three to four x86 server nodes. Cisco takes a similar approach to combining computing, storage and networking with its FlexPod products.

BRIDGING DIFFERENCES One approach to crosscloud storage management uses gateways that mask the differences among the APIs used by various cloud storage providers. TwinStrata’s physical or virtual CloudArray (bundled with SANsymphony), for example, makes storage from any of 13 cloud providers appear as iSCSI devices to customers and applications.

This allows connectivity and the use of a common management platform for functions such as disaster recovery and replication, says CEO Nicos Vekiarides.

Benefits plan administrator RxStrategies uses the TwinStrata gateway for

cloud-based backup of its virtual machines and data.

“On the outside, it looks like a SAN, which is old technology, but on the other side, it was actually part of the cloud, which enables us to transparently push our backup to Amazon or Rackspace,” says senior developer Rick DeBay. In the future, he says he would like to be able to store data on more than one public cloud and easily move compute workloads to Amazon’s EC2 public cloud and Amazon’s S3 storage platform.

Other orchestration offerings are, however, limited to certain products or certain parts of the cloud.

CA Server Automation and CA Automation Suite for Clouds integrates with NetApp’s OnCommand storage management software to provision NetApp storage for various classes of servers.

Caringo’s CloudScaler virtualization layer provides automated, policy-based management—but only of storage, not virtual machines.

Like many other orchestration platforms, it doesn’t currently support the block-based storage used in low-cost, multitenant public storage clouds such as Amazon S3, but Caringo is working to offer that in the future.

Storage Automator, a storage service catalog and policy engine from iWave, currently supports only selected EMC and NetApp arrays, although broader support is due this year.

While it’s the leader in server virtualization, VMware is working to differentiate itself from competitors such as Microsoft and its Hyper-V offering by “pushing to include more orchestration,” says Reichman. With VMware vSphere 5.0, for example, it introduced storage profiles that

let users map the capabilities of a storage system to a storage profile, helping to ensure each virtual machine uses the appropriate data store.

This summer, VMware acquired DynamicOps, whose architecture will allow vSphere and infrastructure administrators to model infrastructure services.

This will enable the policy, governance and self-service management capabilities in vSphere to be extended to other hypervisors, hardware and clouds, according to a blog post by Ramin Sayar, VMware’s vice president and general manager for cloud infrastructure and management.

FUNCTIONSPECIFIC OFFERINGS Many vendors’ offerings are focused on areas such as data protection and disaster recovery, which were the most common needs cited

by VMware users in a July 2012 survey conducted by the Wikibon technology analysis website.

Actifio, for example, tackles backup, disaster recovery and business continuity with its Protection and Availability Storage (PAS) appliance, which virtualizes both storage and storage functions such as copy, store, move and restore. But the PAS appliance supports only fibre channel-attached storage, such as SANs, and only disaster and recovery, not the dynamic reprovisioning required to maintain the performance of production applications.

Even if this creates a stand-alone silo of tools and data for backup and recovery, that’s an improvement over the multiple silos (and multiple copies of data) many companies use for anything from testing to disaster recovery or data

analytics, says Andrew Gilman, senior director of global marketing at Actifio.

He also says Actifio’s globally deduplicated objectbased file system reduces costs by storing and moving only changes to data.

VirtualSharp Software says its ReliableDR “goes into the different layers of virtualization inside the cloud” and uses the APIs provided by storage vendors to create runbooks (defined sets of operations) to execute and verify disaster recovery and failover.

However, it does this only for applications running on VMware hypervisors, and only for applications, not

one component. This helps ensure that the terms of SLAs for the storage tier are set properly and that performance can be measured.

Continuity Software’s recently announced Availability Cloud/Guard aims to improve reliability by detecting problems such as situations where “clustered servers can’t see new storage” because of a failure to map the new storage device to all the appropriate servers. That’s a problem an administrator often wouldn’t be aware of until the server “tries to use the storage [and] fails,” says CTO Doron Pinhas. Cloud/ Guard helps find such problems by comparing a custom-

recently announced the first public cloud support for Sanbolic AppCluster, a module within its Melio data management software that provides failover/migration, load balancing and quality-of-service support for Microsoft SQL Server.

As more routine storage functions are automated, and as businesses focus more on service levels rather than on the mundane tasks required to achieve them, the task of storage administration will move “from a pure storage administrator to maybe a DBA or maybe a policy administrator,” Reichman predicts. “Instead of storage administrators doing only

Customer demands will eventually force vendors to provide more complete orchestration. Until then, enterprises will have to deal with the fragmented character of the market. for the data they use.

Also, the tool supports only clouds running within corporate datacenters, because, says CEO Carlos Escapa, “the market is so huge behind the firewall and the protection mechanisms are lacking.” He adds that the fact that ReliableDR is capable of running multiple disaster recovery tests per day more than makes up for its lack of broader management capabilities.

Symantec’s Virtual Business Services doesn’t handle VM management or even storage provisioning such as zoning SANs or creating LUNs, says senior director of product management Douglas Fallstrom. It instead allows customers to define dependencies among the tiers of an application stack (including VMs and their associated storage) to better understand how the stack responds to the failure of

er’s deployment with 6,000 deployment scenarios from the vendor’s customers to “observe your effort to build the environment... and gently steer [the customer] in the right direction,” he says.

Neverfail says its software provides “application-aware” disaster recovery and high availability for applications in hybrid public/private clouds. It does this, says CTO Paddy Falls, by intercepting file system updates from applications and storing a copy of the application on other servers on-premises or in the cloud. It allows the high-availability or disaster recovery server to run on a different platform than the production server, he says, and to mix physical and virtual servers or different hypervisors. The software doesn’t, however, support object-based storage services.

Some tools focus on specific applications. Sanbolic

storage, expect to see more application administrators managing the infrastructure, [with] some of what was the server and storage team moving into those application or workload teams.”

However, says Shahin Pirooz, CTO at hosted services provider CenterBeam, “you still need a core team of people to configure the orchestration” and build the infrastructure for higher-level administrators to manage.

Customer demands will eventually force vendors to provide more complete orchestration. Until then, CIOs who are evaluating storage management tools should find out which specific storage and hypervisor platforms the vendors support, determine which functions or applications they focus on and, above all, assess the total cost of ownership and ease of use of their offerings. 

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n FACE OFF

Oracle Vs. Salesforce.com

SIDHARTH MALIK,

ATUL TULI,

AVP India, Salesforce.com

Director Cloud Applications, Oracle Asia Pacific

Battle Royale

In a race to the top, who has a complete enterprise cloud and social business strategy?

O

RACLE’S CLOUD strategy is focused on transform-

ing customer and employee experiences by delivering a complete and functionally rich suite of SaaS applications, built on a complete and functionally rich suite of PaaS applications, enriched with rich data services and crowd sourced social insight. All these capabilities work together seamlessly on a common infrastructure based on industry standards.

Our cloud applications portfolio not only address customer experience management and sales or marketing, it also includes numerous mission-critical business functions like human capital management, talent management, financial management, procurement, project management and governance, risk and compliance.

Oracle Social Relationship Management helps organizations use social data and applications to increase customer engagement, make better business decisions, and strengthen relationships.

These applications are built on industry standards— Java standards-based middleware on a service-oriented architecture—which simplifies integration. All these applications feature enterprise strength business intelligence and have integrated mobile applications.

Our cloud portfolio has expanded with the development of Fusion applications and strategic acquisitions of RightNow, Vitrue, Collective Intellect, Taleo and more—all leaders in their respective solution areas. With Oracle Cloud, customers—large or midsized, get enterprise-grade services based on best-in-class applications and the industry’s best database and middleware managed by experts with over a decade of cloud delivery experience.

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INDIAN CHANNELWORLD DECEMBER 2012

T

ODAY, A worldwide

social revolution is taking place, partly in plain sight, but even more in places most people don’t see. More than 4.5 billion people, of all ages, have more than 150 million conversations every day on popular services like Facebook—but there is also a less visible “Internet of Things” that’s projected to involve 25 billion devices by 2020. People will interact with machines, in ways that will transform our lives.

Every business must address this social opportunity— and challenge. While Fortune 100 companies experience explosive growth with the number of Facebook fans, their website traffic declines. A 2012 McKinsey Global Institute study reports that 70 percent of companies have adopted social technology, and estimates that these technologies may unlock $1.3 trillion (about Rs 56 lakh crore) in business value.

Salesforce.com helps companies use social and mobile technologies, enabled by scalable and secure cloud services to connect with customers, partners, and products in new ways. Just as Salesforce.com transformed how companies sell and service their customers, the company is now revolutionizing marketing in this social era.

The Salesforce Marketing Cloud is the first comprehensive social marketing suite. It enables companies to integrate social listening, content, engagement, advertising and measurement. As the leader in enterprise cloud computing, Salesforce.com is empowering customers to create a social front office that transforms the way they sell, service, market, collaborate, work, and innovate—in the socially connected enterprise.

— As told to Shantheri Mallaya

RNI NO.KARENG/2007/20996

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