Channelworld Magazine January 2013 Issue

PLUS: STATE OF THE MART

SURVEY 2013

FEATURE: As you look back at the past year, read about how social media has affected companies. PAGE 38

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

JANUARY 2013 VOL. 6, ISSUE 10

VIPUL DATTA, CEO, Futuresoft Solutions ( L), and RAVI PUTTA, MD, Alliance Prosys, believe that private cloud and virtualization will be profitable for partners in 2013, among other technologies.

PLACE YOUR

BETS

As we usher in another eventful year, we take a look at six of the most favored technologies for 2013. >>> Page 18

CHANNELWORLD.IN

n EDITOR’S NOTE

Vijay Ramachandran

A Brave New Year

“Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so.”

— Noam Chomsky

H

OW DO you react to a world gone mad? What do

you do when your organization is stuck in the doldrums brought about by the lack of political will?

How do you manage cash flow as outstandings rise and sales cycles lengthen? These were critical questions for solution providers to ask of themselves in the year gone by.

The most significant trend in 2012 that impacted Indian enterprise IT was the slowdown in the economy. Obviously the brakes on growth did cause a crisis of confidence, but more than that it caused enterprises of all sizes to relook IT investments and their business impact.

As near-term business horizons shrank, multiple projects, fast rollouts and increasing change requests from business stressed IT teams.

While the rigor of justification increased, our research shows that IT spend was negatively affected in only about a fifth of mid-to large enterprises.

Sure, the fear of stumbling existed, however, a significant number of organizations hoped that the Darwinian nature of the slowdown would help take out competition, and thus took on highly strategic projects. It was heartening that more organizations worked on creating better customer connect

than those that focused primarily on cutting cost.

So will the slowdown cease to impact enterprises in 2013. Not really. More significantly with the threat of mid-term polls receding, I think we will see a lot more sanity return to India Inc. Though many enterprises will continue to tread with care, I feel that many more will open their pursestrings to make strategic investments—even in IT. This is the issue that captures the technologies that solution providers nationwide are betting on this year. Based on the State of the Mart 2013 survey (Page 26), these are BI & Analytics, Mobility, Private Cloud, Public Cloud, Security and Virtualization.

An interesting mix of technologies.

n Enterprises are looking to third party IT providers to fill in the talent and deadline gaps that exist.

However, based on my conversations with CIOs, technology providers and many of you, I believe that four trends will dominate the Indian enterprise IT landscape in 2013: Cloud Computing and Outsourcing, Mobility, and Analytics.

With efficiencies and effectiveness both coming into play, Indian organizations will get more agnostic about how they source and deliver their IT. The days of “my IT team knows best” are fast coming to a close, as enterprises look to third party IT providers to fill in the talent and deadline gaps that now exist.

Cloud and strategic outsourcing are going to gain ground this year, with IDG Research estimating that the capex to opex ratio will move to as high as 40:60 (this stood at 49:51 in 2011).

This is going to be as much about gaining new capabilities and improving organizational focus as it will be about reigning in operational cost. Very clearly

the private cloud rules in smaller enterprises too, with security and exit concerns still dominating the debate on the public cloud.

As organizational focus shifts from making the ‘product right’ to making the ‘right product’, analytics will play a key role in helping increase organizational productivity by making intelligence more visible. I also see embedded BI, in-memory analytics and visualization over smarter devices trending high.

I clearly see investments in enterprise mobility go through the roof, as organizations move from using apps and devices to increase productivity to gaining a competitive edge. With customers and employees demanding real-time information and senior management requiring access to business critical intelligence, most enterprises will put in place a mobility strategy that encompasses device management, app development and policies. What will clearly not happen in an Indian scenario is BYOD—enterprises tend to only trust devices that they own.

All these are areas for you to focus on and profit from this year. Do so.

Here’s wishing you a year filled with good fortune and happiness. n Vijay Ramachandran is the Editor-in-Chief of ChannelWorld. Contact him at vijay_ramachandran@idgindia.com

JANUARY 2013

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

1

FOR BREAKING NEWS, GO TO CHANNELWORLD.IN

Inside INDIAN CHANNELWORLD ■ JANUARY 2013

■ NEWS DIGEST 04 Oracle’s Stamp of Approval |

Some of SAP’s software products are now certified for use with Oracle’s Database Appliance, which is a streamlined version of its Exadata machine.

04 Seeking The Right Fit |

Juniper Networks acquired Contrail Systems, a startup that makes controllers for software-defined networks, for $176 million in cash and stock.

05 Will Microsoft Really Retire Windows XP In 2014? | Some

security researchers wonder if Microsoft will indeed retire Windows XP in 2014, as the vendor has announced. After that date, it will no longer distribute official security updates or bug fixes.

■ OPINION

01 Editorial: Vijay Ramachandran says that Indian organizations will get more agnostic about how they source and deliver their IT. The days of “my IT team knows best” are fast coming to a close, as enterprises look to third party IT providers to fill in the talent and deadline gaps that now exist.

40 Scot Finnie: A key force shaping IT today has roots in the early aughts, when corporations realized that it is possible to buy too much IT. Information technology can’t deliver endless productivity gains. As a result, IT budgets have been watched more closely, especially over the past five years.

Five years from now, successful IT organizations won’t just be cost centers.

■ THE GRILL

13 Hubert Yoshida, Vice

President and Chief Technology Officer, Hitachi Data Systems, foresees a definite influence of the evolving tech landscape on CIOs and channel partners.

■ COVER STORY

18 Place Your Bets

06 A Change In Strategy At Cisco | Cisco, the quintessential IT

The new year is a time when vendors launch their technology roadmap for the next 12 months, and enterprise channel partners jostle to readjust, realign and reshape their solution and services portfolio. Here are the six enterprise technologies that will gain maximum traction in 2013. Enterprise channel partners yearning for continued success need to place their bets now. Also read: State of the Mart 2013 survey.

hardware maker, wants you to start thinking about it as software and services company.

■ NEWS ANALYSIS 07 Looking for Answers |

Oracle’s Exadata, cloud revenues and surprisingly strong European results make fodder for discussion.

■ CASE STUDY

36 Making The Right Choice

13 Cover Design by UNNIKRISHNAN A.V

TOP TECHNOLOGIES FOR 2013

Thane Bharat Sahakari Bank needed to renew its processes.

Finacus Solutions, their trusted consultant, suggested a revamp, and a revaluation of its exsiting vendor. The move worked.

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

■ FAST TRACK

09 Periathambi Thangavel, Managing Director, Origin ITFS, says that focus on three

CHANNELWORLD.IN Publisher, President & CEO Louis D’Mello Associate Publishers Rupesh Sreedharan, Sudhir Argula ■ EDITORIAL

16 primary aspects has proved to be the perfect success mantra for his organization.

12 Rajeev Nair, Managing Director, Stallion Systems and Solutions, believes that his journey into RFID was predestined.

Nair says that the industry is all set to bloom.

■ ON RECORD

16 Dharmendra Kumar, President, India and SAARC, Aruba Networks, talks about why BYOD is the single largest focus for the company.

■ FEATURE

Six Ways Social Media Affected The Enterprise 38

SOCIAL MEDIA: Social media has changed

the way companies work. As you look back at the past year, here are six ways it affected organizations.

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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 ■ SALES

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News

WHAT’S WITHIN

PAGE 05: A New Record In the Storage Space PAGE 05: Will Microsoft Really Retire Windows XP? PAGE 06: A Change In Strategy At Cisco PAGE 07: Looking For Answers

F I N D M O R E A R T I C L E S AT CHANNELWORLD.IN

SOFTWARE

Oracle’s Stamp of Approval

S

OME OF SAP’s soft-

ware products are now certified for use with Oracle’s Database Appliance, which is essentially a streamlined version of its Exadata machine aimed at SMBs. All SAP products based on versions 7.0 and higher of the vendor’s NetWeaver middleware can be used with the database appliance, which was released in September 2011, according to an official Oracle blog post. The products must also be certified for Oracle database version 11g Release 2.

4

Single-node or RAC (Real Application Clusters) deployments are supported, but not Oracle’s RAC One Node option.

SAP application instances can’t actually be run on the Database Appliances, however. Instead, they must be installed on separate machines, with an Ethernet connection for data exchange with the Appliance, according to an Oracle white paper.

This falls in line with the three-tier architecture common to SAP, and provides customers with some advantages, according to Oracle.

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2013

Only SAP’s database administration tools and SAP Central Services are supported to run on Oracle’s appliance, according to the white paper.

The Database Appliance runs most of the software components associated with Exadata, which is aimed at large enterprises. The appliance’s hardware components include two servers, 192GB of RAM, 24 cores, 12TB of raw disk storage and 292GB of solid-state disk. List price is $50,000 (about Rs 27 lakh), with Oracle database licenses sold separately.

Oracle’s announcement comes some months after SAP introduced a version of its HANA in-memory database for SMBs, HANA Edge.

SAP is hoping to displace Oracle databases over time from within its installed base, with key work ongoing to support running SAP ERP software on HANA. With HANA, SAP also seems to be moving away from the three-tier architecture model, recently announcing that a software update for the platform will provide native application server capabilities.

HANA is sold in appliance form using hardware from a number of vendors, including IBM, HewlettPackard, Cisco and Dell.

—By Chris Kanaracus

ACQUISITION

Seeking The Right Fit Juniper Networks acquired Contrail Systems, a startup that makes controllers for softwaredefined networks, for $176 million (Rs 959 crore) in cash and stock.

Contrail was founded early this year by officials from Google, Cisco, Juniper and Aruba. CEO Ankur Singla served as CTO and vice president of engineering at Aruba Networks. CTO Kireeti Kompella had been CTO and Chief Architect of the Junos operating

system software at Juniper.

Juniper was on the hunt for an SDN controller.

Earlier this year, Executive Vice President Bob Muglia said Juniper is working with other industry players on an open source-based controller for SDNs that would be an alternative to proprietary offerings from VMware and Cisco.

— By Jim Duffy

-

STORAGE

A New Record In the Storage Space

D

“End users continue to capacity shipped invest in storage infraby vendors worldstructures despite persiswide surpassed 7 tent concerns surrounding exabytes for the first time global and regional econoin a quarter, according to mies,” Conner said in IDC’s Worldwide Quara statement. terly Disk Storage Systems In past quarters this Tracker report. year, total storage capacThe total disk storage ity shipped (which incapacity shipped cludes internal by vendors in disk drives and the third quarexternal arThe year-on-year ter reached 7.1 ray systems) growth recorded in exabytes or 7,100 ranged from 6.1 the total disk storage petabytes, repreexabytes to 6.6 capacity shipped senting 24.4 perexabytes per by vendors in the cent year-overquarter. third quarter. year growth, “The growth according to IDC. rates aren’t 60 percent like Driving the double-digit they were seeing three or growth in storage was defive, but there are headmand for multi-protocol winds out there we’re still storage systems, such as moving past,” said Eric Fibre Channel and EthernetSheppard, research direcbased storage combined in tor of Storage Systems one box, as well as a strong for IDC. demand for upper mid-range For example, storage and high-end storage syssales are facing a matems, said Liz Conner, a sejor economic downturn nior research analyst at IDC. in Eastern Europe and ISK STORAGE

24.4%

SOURCE: IDC

elsewhere. Additionally, technologies such as data deduplication, thin provisioning, solid-state drives (SSDs) and automated tiering has significantly increased storage utilization rates, which should have decreased the raw demand for storage capacity.

For the quarter, the total disk storage systems market posted just under $7.9 billion (Rs 43,000 crore) in revenues, representing 3.7 percent growth from the prior year’s third quarter.

IDC’s report also showed sales of just external disk storage systems in the third quarter totaled just over $5.9 billion (about Rs 32,00 crore), indicating 3.3 percent year-over-year growth.

EMC maintained its lead in the external disk storage systems market with 30 percent revenue share in the third quarter, followed

by NetApp and IBM, which were tied for with 11.9 percent and 11.7 percent market share, respectively. Hitachi and HP finished the quarter in a statistical tie for the fourth position with 9.7percent market shares each.

Will Microsoft Really Retire Windows XP in April, 2014? of course, but they will be vulnerable to attacks exploiting weaknesses in the operating system that are discovered after that date.

Michael Cherry, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft, conjured up this scenario: What happens if “a security problem with XP suddenly causes massive problems on the Internet, such as a massive [denial-of-service]

Dell announced the appointment of Suresh Vaswani as president of Dell Services. He previously led Dell Services’ application and BPO line of business. In his new role, he will report to chairman and CEO Michael Dell, and will be responsible for developing and delivering end-to-end IT services and business solutions for global corporations, state and local governments.

LifeSize, a division of Logitech, announced the appointment of Ingram Micro as its National Technology Distributor for India. Ingram Micro will distribute LifeSize’s HD video collaboration products and solutions.

Sunil Sapra has been appointed as the country manager for India at KEMP Technologies. He will be responsible for channel efforts, ensuring high availability and traffic delivery to Indian organizations.

— By Lucas Mearian

OPERATING SYSTEM

Some security researchers wonder if Microsoft will indeed retire Windows XP on April 8, 2014, as the vendor has announced.

After that date, it will no longer distribute official security updates or bug fixes for the ancient operating system—though it will offer them to enterprises that pay for high-priced support contracts.

PCs still running XP won’t just suddenly stop working,

Short Takes

WAIT AND WATCH Microsoft is expected to pull the plug in 2014.

problem?” That could become a worldwide tech crisis, and “in this scenario,” he said, “I believe Microsoft would have to do the right thing and issue a fix.”

Others disagree. “I think they have to draw a line in the

sand,” said Gartner analyst John Pescatore. “They’ve supported XP longer than anything else, so they’d be pretty clean from the moral end.”

Pescatore said the only scenario he could envision in which Microsoft extended XP’s life would involve business considerations, not security concerns: The company might continue to support XP as a way of holding on to customers still using the operating system rather than risk losing more market share.

—By Gregg Keizer

JANUARY 2013

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

5

STRATEGY

A Change In Strategy At Cisco

C

ISCO, THE quintes-

sential IT hardware maker, wants you to start thinking about it as software and services company.

CEO John Chambers told analysts that the switch/ router manufacturer that is also heavily invested in video and server gear that the company plans to double its revenues from software over the next five years from $6 billion (about Rs 33,000 crore) to $12 billion (about Rs 65,000 crore), according to a Reuters report.

Even so, the software will become just 25 percent of the company’s revenues, which Chambers says will grow steadily at 5 percent to 7 percent per year long-term.

The majority of engineering done at Cisco is already software engineering, producing results that are bundled with hardware, according to slides accompanying his remarks to financial analysts.

Other software offerings are wrapped up with custom chips and services that result in intelligent IP networks, the slides say. The game plan calls for expanding software across the Cisco portfolio of switching, routing, cloud, data center, mobility, video, services and security, they say.

This includes its IOS software, its software defined network initiative, its Nexus OS, Star OS, WebEx, Call Manager, IronPort and ScanSafe platforms, according to the presentation.

6

Chambers says the company will move from its SDN toward an applicationcentric intelligent network that can harvest data from networks, analyze it and create policies based on that analysis in order to improve network security and application performance.

That doesn’t mean Cisco is abandoning its hardware past, just that software and the intelligence it brings to networks will play a stronger role.

That’s necessary to bring about a change in how the company defines IT, from the study, design, development, application, implementation support or management of computer-based

Around

TheWorld Fourth in a Month For Cisco

Cisco announced its intent to acquire BroadHop, a developer of network management servers and software for carriers.

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. The acquisition is Cisco’s fourth in the past month.

BroadHop’s products provide policy control and service management for mobile and fixed carrier networks.

Cisco says it will help offer carrier customers more flexible control and personalization of their networks and services, and boost service

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2013

information systems to the same definition to something else by substituting the word “network” for “computer”.

This new model of IT is based on two major parts: Applications and a unified infrastructure, according to slides accompanying his presentation. Applications will include those developed by

revenue, by enabling end users to purchase customized premium service packages from service providers.

Jim Duffy

CA Technologies Appoints Global Boss

CA Technologies, has appointed IT services industry veteran, Michael Gregoire, as CEO, effective January 7, 2013.

The decision was made by the company’s Board of Directors, and was unanimous. He has also been elected to the Board.

Gregoire succeeds William McCracken, who has held the reins since January 2010 and at the age of 70, is retiring, effective March 31, 2013.

McCracken will also leave CA’s Board on January 7.

Nermin Bajric

third parties as well as traditional business processes and enterprise applications, applications for vertical markets and Cisco video and collaboration platforms.

The unified infrastructure applications will ride on unified data centers, core networking, and security.

— By Tim Greene

Blue Coat to Acquire Crossbeam Systems

Blue Coat Systems announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Crossbeam Systems.

“With Crossbeam, Blue Coat gains a best-in-class support infrastructure and a high performing platform that scales to meet the needs of even the most complex enterprise IT environments,” said Greg Clark, CEO, Blue Coat Systems.

ChannelWorld Bureau

n NEWS ANALYSIS

Looking for Answers

Oracle’s Exadata, cloud revenues and surprisingly strong European results make fodder for discussion.

By Chris Kanaracus

O

RACLE’S SECOND-

quarter earnings announcement beat expectations in some respects, but also raised a number of interesting and in some cases, unanswered questions.

Here’s a look.

Is Exadata carrying the day for Oracle’s “engineered systems?” Oracle has struggled to grow top-line revenue for the hardware business it gained through the Sun acquisition, while voicing a constant mantra that it’s focused on higher-margin “engineered systems” like the Exadata database machine. And indeed, hardware systems product revenues for Q2 fell 23 percent to $734 million (about Rs 4000 crore).

During a conference call, co-president Mark Hurd said Oracle had sold more than 700 engineered systems in the quarter, but he didn’t provide a breakdown, leaving open the question of whether Exadata, the first such machine Oracle introduced, is carrying the bulk of sales.

Hurd also cited wins for the Exalogic application server box and Exalytics analytic appliance, but didn’t give numbers. In addition, he didn’t break out how many of those 700 sales were for the lowercost Oracle Database Appliance, which is aimed at smaller companies.

What’s selling in Fusion Applications? Oracle spent years and billions

of dollars to develop its next-generation Fusion Applications, which can be deployed both on-premises and in Oracle’s cloud.

Oracle has touted that it has 100 Fusion products for sale now, spread over a number of functional pillars, such as financials, CRM and HCM (human capital management).

On a conference call, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said “the company is seeing rapid growth in Fusion across-the-board in CRM and in HCM.” It’s also beating rival cloud HCM vendor Workday “in the majority of deals,” Ellison said. Oracle is also having success with Fusion CRM against Salesforce.com, according to Hurd.

But co-president and CFO Safra Catz said “most of the [Fusion] pillars are doing very well.” That means some, perhaps ERP among them, aren’t catching fire just yet. Oracle is likely not worried about that, however, given the size of its E-Business Suite, JD Edwards and PeopleSoft ERP installed base.

How will Oracle manage the shift to cloud revenues? Oracle has begun reporting new software license revenues and cloud subscription revenues as a combined total. In Q2, the take was up 17 percent to about $2.4 billion (about Rs 13,200 crore). During the conference call, co-president and CFO Safra Catz revealed that cloud sales accounted for $230 million ( about Rs 1300 crore) of that.

The subscription model is common among cloud vendors but also a departure from Oracle’s comfort zone, which has long con-

JANUARY 2013

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

7

HARDWARE REMAINS A GREY AREA

O

8

RACLE has reported that net income jumped 18 percent to $2.6 billion (about Rs 14,300 crore) while revenue rose three percent to $9.1 billion (about Rs 50,000 crore)for the second quarter, but the company’s hardware revenue continued to show weakness.

Hardware systems product revenues for the quarter fell 23 percent to $734 million ( about Rs 4000 crore), and hardware systems support revenues dropped six percent to $587 million (about Rs 3200 crore).

New software license sales and cloud software subscriptions were up 17 percent to roughly $2.4 billion in the

quarter. Oracle launched a wide variety of cloud services this year, including its Fusion Applications, a PaaS and the Oracle Social Network.

Software license updates and product support revenues, which are highly profitable for Oracle and other software vendors, grew seven percent.

“Applications, middleware and database all had doubledigit growth in new software license and cloud subscriptions, with applications leading the pack with growth of over 30 percent,” co-president Mark Hurd said in a statement.

Oracle executives have repeatedly attempted to soften expectations for the hardware

sisted of large up-front perpetual license sales, following by predictable annual maintenance payments.

With cloud subscriptions, support is baked into the per-user, per-month pricing. But Oracle’s traditional maintenance business is its lifeblood, carrying extremely high profit margins and taking up nearly half of all revenue in Q2.

While Oracle will clearly seek to maintain some type of parity between cloud subscription pricing and on-premises licensing in order to preserve its margins, making the shift could still be tricky.

When asked by an analyst whether Oracle’s onpremises software maintenance revenues will take a hit as cloud sales rise, Catz stood firm, saying the cloud is “just not going to have a material impact.”

“Theoretically, [regular maintenance revenues] might not grow as quickly,” she added. “But at this point, we’ve got a long

way to go. So we expect that number to grow and our SaaS number to grow simultaneously at much higher percentages because it’s a smaller base.” Oracle is also enjoying extremely high renewal rates for maintenance, Catz said.

When will Oracle database 12c arrive and what will be the impact? Ellison had previously said that Oracle’s next-generation database, version 12c, would be arriving in the market either late this year or early next.

But at the OpenWorld conference a few months ago, Oracle announced that the release date would be sometime in “calendar year 2013,” a wording that gives Oracle some additional breathing room if required.

During the conference call, Ellison discussed 12c but didn’t firm up a launch date, instead focusing on extolling the release’s new features, calling it the first database “designed for the cloud.”

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2013

business it gained through the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, saying the company is more focused on specialized systems like Exadata, which combine servers and other components with Oracle software, rather than compete in the commodity hardware market.

“Sun has proven to be one of the most strategic and profitable acquisitions we have ever made,” Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said in a statement released with the earnings announcement. “Sun technology enabled Oracle to become a leader in the highly profitable engineered system segment of the hardware business.”

—By Chris Kanaracus

That’s because Oracle has incorporated the concept of multitenancy, an architectural approach long used in SaaS (software as a service), where many customers share a single application instance with their data kept separate. This gives SaaS vendors the ability to apply upgrades and patches to all of them at once, among other benefits.

“We’ve moved the multitenancy feature out of the application and down into the database layer, which gives people much better capability, much better security,” Ellison said. “So we think it will greatly enhance our own cloud offering. It will help all of the cloud companies that depend on the Oracle database. And it will be very, very attractive to our enterprise customers.”

However, while Oracle itself may move quickly to 12c for its cloud operations, history has shown that many Oracle database customers tend to wait until

the second release within a given cycle, preferring to feel comfortable that all the kinks have been worked out. Typically, Oracle has issued those second database releases a couple of years after the initial launch.

What do Oracle’s Q2 results mean for the global economy and other software vendors?

Oracle reported doubledigit growth in all regions, with sales strong even in Europe, which has been racked by economic crisis for some time.

Hurd was asked about the seeming anomaly, but his answer didn’t seem to bear good news for the software sector in general.

About a year ago, Oracle started hiring aggressively in Europe, and as a result, has simply generated more leads, according to Hurd.

Deals may still be difficult to close, but Oracle is simply engaged in more of them, so the numbers went up, he said.

That said, the market will get another telling indicator of IT spending health in Europe next month, when Oracle rival SAP is expected to report its fourth-quarter and year-end results.

Will Oracle make a big acquisition? Oracle is well known for its long history of acquisitions, both in terms of big-bang deals like the Sun purchase as well as an extensive string of smaller, niche buys.

If Oracle wants to make a Sun-level splash sometime soon, it certainly has the means, ending the second quarter with about $34 billion (about Rs 1.9 lakh crore) in cash and marketable securities. 

n FAST TRACK

REVENUE SPLIT

Origin ITFS

25%

25%

E – Governance

IT Infrastructure Solution

30%

20%

Distribution Business

IT Managed Services

Photograph by R. CHANDROO

SOURCE: ORIGIN ITFS

Snapshot

Founded: 1998

Headquarters: Chennai Revenue for 2010-11: Rs 60.7 crore

W

E MUST always

change, renew, rejuvenate ourselves; otherwise we harden,” said the German writer, artist and politician, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

For Periathambi Thangavel, managing director, Origin ITFS, this belief has seeped through to the core of his organization.

Origin ITFS’s present success has come from hard-fought battles.

The SI has, through the course of its growth and rise, faced fierce competition from small traders at one end, and large corporations at the other. They have ensured that they offer a portfolio of services to match customer demands. “Our USP lies in timely delivery of service that is within the stipulated

Revenue for 2011-12: Rs 72.5 crore Key business activities: Hardware solutions, managed services, infrastructure solutions Key Principals: Lenovo, Acer, HP, Sony, Delta India, Konica Minolta, Sagem Morpho, Fujitsu No of employees: 615 Key Executives: D.MuthukumarCOO; S.Gopalakrishnan-CFO Branches: Mumbai, Madurai, Hyderabad, Pondicherry Website: www.originitfs.com budget, and a consistent quality of service. Very few people can manage all the three consitently. Even in cases where cost overshoots the price, we have not gone back to the customer for an increase,” says Thangavel.

Initially, they started out with renting and maintenance of PCs. Over time they changed and improved their service. Today, Origin ITFS covers all aspects of IT infrastructure that includes communications to onsite hardware, systems support, as well as plug-and-play. “As our clients reach grew, we simultaneously ensured that support was available to them across locations.

This helped consolidate our panIndia presence,” says Thangavel.

The company’s partnership with Lenovo has helped immensely.

Certain projects like the one with Electronic Corporation of Tamil Nadu Limited (ELCOT) have them leapfrog into the big league with big orders. The SI bagged a big order from ELCOT in 2008 for the computerization of government offices and schools in Tamil Nadu, supplying close to 50,000 systems of Lenovo.

Presently, with a multi-vertical approach the SI’s focusing on plug-and-play, onsite support to large IT companies, marketing and support for high-tech noncomputer products.

Going forward the organization will be involved in upcoming e-Gov projects across the country and will be seen raising their on-site and WSP support levels. “We want to strengthen our presence and services in other parts of India with higher services,” states Thangavel. n —Aritra Sarkhel

A focus on three primary aspects has proved to be Thanagavel, MD, Origin ITFS’ success mantra.

JANUARY 2013

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

9

N is s

Yep, NetApp.

In fact, NetApp is saving IT more than $25 billion and counting.

Learn more at yepnetapp.in #yepnetapp

© 2012 NetApp. All rights reserved. NetApp, the NetApp logo and Data ONTAP are trademarks or registered trademarks of NetApp, Inc., in the United States and/or other countries. Source: NetApp internal estimates, June 2012: VNX, VNXe, Celerra NS can run any of Flare and Dart Operating Systems. Contribution of these products to the OS share has been estimated based on the proportion of NAS and SAN installations in these products (NAS – Dart; SAN – Flare).

NetApp Data ONTAP is the world’s #1 storage OS?

n FAST TRACK

REVENUE SPLIT

Stallion Systems and Solutions

30%

Channels and Distribution

70%

Solutions and Direct Business

P H O T O b y A J AY

SOURCE: STALLION SYSTEMS AND SOLUTIONS

Snapshot Founded: 1996 Headquarters: Kochi

W

HEN RAJEEV Nair,

MD of Kochibased Stallion Systems and Solutions started the company in 1996, he clearly knew he would be a pioneer in the niche domain of bar coding. Even as a B.Tech student in Chandigarh the early 90s, Nair showed signs of being a go-getter when he was picked by an American company to be a part of its core team that would develop barcode applications. Nair says, “My journey into RFID was pre-destined” Nair’s conscious decision to come back to his home state and start-off on his own has helped him carve a niche. In the last five years particularly, the company has witnessed tremendous interest in RFID related

Branches: New Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Tirupur Revenue 2010 -11: Rs 25 Crore Revenue 2011 -12: Rs 35 Crore Revenue 2012 -13 (Projected): Rs 50 Crore Employees: 300 Key Principals: Datamax O’Neil, Datalogic ADC, Shenzhen Promatic Secuirty Systems Key Technologies: Barcode, RFID, EAS Website: www.stallionglobal.com

technology. “RFID is much sought after. Some path breaking work has been done in terms of generating applications in this domain over the

last couple of years and we are reaping the benefits,” says Nair.

Having a finger in the vertical pie has ensured that Stallion Systems has offices across the country, and it is also an oft-mentioned name in the Middle East. The company services about 7000 customers across these markets. Nair reels off names like Big Bazaar, Wal-Mart, and Pantaloon as customers. Stallion has achieved this scale with the right mix of solutions and volumes business. Nair also admits that going forward the solutions business will continue to take precedence for the company. Having manufacturing outlets in Bangalore, Mumbai and Kochi, Stallion makes its own consumables, integrates it with hardware, and tops up the software (by developing its own applications) in order to present a complete package to its customers. “We are also reputed for our after sales service,” states Nair.

Stallion Systems has been observing that the Government is a potentially big buyer, citing that a recent local Government tender had atleast Rs 1000 crore as the bar coding component. Nair says, “We will be tapping the Governments in order to augment our vertical focus.” Stallion also has plans to foray into international markets like Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and pockets of Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Muscat in the coming year. n —Shantheri Mallaya

Rajeev Nair, MD, Stallion Systems and Solutions, believes that his journey into RFID was predestined.

12

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2013

Dossier Name: Hubert Yoshida Designation: VP and CTO Company: Hitachi Data Systems Current Role: He is responsible for defining the technical direction of HDS and further leads the company’s effort to help customers address their Data Life Cycle requirements to address compliance, governance and operational risk issues.

Photograph by SHAILESH

Career Graph: Prior to joining HDS in 1997, Yoshida spent 25 years with IBM’s storage division, where he held management roles in hardware performance, software development and product management.

n THE GRILL

Hubert Yoshida,

VP and CTO, HDS, foresees a definite influence of the evolving tech landscape on CIOs and channel partners.

Big data’s perceived to be the next big thing by most vendors but it is far from mainstream adoption in Indian organizations.

Do you have a strategy to stay ahead?

When people talk about big data they often jump to analytics. But one needs to first build the infrastructure to support that volume, velocity and variety of data. HDS builds this infrastructure, a

lot of it around virtualization which is executed dynamically. Infrastructure also means converged solutions as provisioning needs to be done quickly.

Our strategy remains infrastructure, content, and then the information bit.

We believe that we have an edge as a part of Hitachi Limited. Verticals determine the information required. Hi-

tachi is in transportation, construction, power and healthcare to name a few.

From their standpoint and vertical focus, they have developed programs and applications to extract information. They are doing big data analytics, and we are building the infrastructure foundation.

Big data today is mostly built around Hadoop, analytics, data warehouse, datamarts etc. We are implementing applications based on SAP HANA. We also support Hadoop.

According to Gartner the market leader, EMC, has a market share nearly four times that of HDS (at number five) in 2Q12. How would you bridge that massive gap? EMC does not have servers. We provide converged solutions with common management and the customers see the great value in this strategy. We have always believed in the concept of one management platform for all servers that are managed from one stack. We offer an easy single pane of management to the user now through vCentre. Those are key advantages over the current Vblock and VCE type solutions which need separate management for each element of the stack.

‘File and content’ is big plus as no vendor has that capability. We have objectbased storage and our content store is unique too. When you compare it with Centera, they might have the first mover advantage but it is not a content-based JANUARY 2013

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n THE GRILL | HUBERT YOSHIDA dent the market mainly, because of unified management.

The others are like proprietary management. HDS server in this environment is the only x86 which does LPARs. The blades have PCIE slots to plug in flash cache. Server plus integrated management gives us a competitive advantage.

We don’t believe in just acquiring technology to fill gaps.

It has to be integrated across our ‘one platform for all data’ policy and everything needs to be integrated into management.

store. Our ‘Open Standards’ approach supports more vendors. Organizations looking for more efficiencies, and hence see the value in our enterprise story.

In the last quarter (3Q12), we were among select few vendors that grew, which reconfirms the market acceptance of our strategy around virtualization and file and content.

HP (VirtualSystems), IBM (Puresystems), Dell (vstart) battle in the consolidated architecture or converged infrastructure space. Isn’t HDS’ Unified Compute Platform (UCP) a late entrant? We will definitely 14

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2013

Vendor lock-in is a given for converged infrastructure. What route will CIOs embrace in future—‘best of breed’ solutions or ‘one throat to choke’ vendor?

Demands of technologies like big data mean that the organizations cannot afford to micro manage multiple vendors.

Hence, they will be comfortable with ‘one throat to choke’ or maybe a dual vendor strategy. The vendors providing a whole stack of servers, storage and file management systems will be the preferred choice. We are in good position to be that vendor.

Has the role of an enterprise systems integrator changed with the advent of unified computing, cloud and big data? Yes. There has been phenomenal adoption of our approach and technologies by systems integrators in India. Some SIs are looking for alternatives. For large projects, partners reduce their cash burn through our efficient technologies which adds significant business value to customers and themselves. Many SIs conduct outsourcing/out-tasking activities. We have an efficient model like managed storage solutions where partners can provide private cloud infrastructure on a consumption-based business model.

SIs will convert to service providers.

The tier-2 and tier-3 partners will have a bigger portfolio like file content systems and UCP along with Hitachi services, compared to only storage before. With Hitachi cloud program, the resellers are becoming cloud service providers as they leverage our cloud delivery to service the SMB segment and become more profitable.

Dell’s embellishing its enterprise portfolio through the acquisitions of Sonicwall, Quest and Force 10. Are you aggressive

about mergers and acquisitions too? Not much. The problem with acquiring a tech company is different from, lets say, acquiring a bank. Assets are available in the bank, but for a tech acquisition, the asset is the mindset. You need to retain the intellect.

We worked with BlueArc for five years with sales and product roadmap.

At the right time we acquired the company without losing any key technology people. We don’t believe in just acquiring technology to fill gaps. It has to be integrated across our ‘one platform for all data’ vision, and everything needs to be integrated into management.

Will mergers and acquisitions spill over to storage industry too? It was the dynamic provisioning companies that were being acquired earlier. But more flash vendors are being acquired this year. There will be M&As, but we prefer to be more organic to stay at the peak of our core competence. We are the only, true R&D company left in the storage industry.

That’s why we can build flash controllers from scratch. There will be some consolidation in the storage market.

HDS recently launched industry’s first unified storage product that provides enterprise-class virtualization for all data types.

What is the roadmap for storage virtualization? We now have the opportunity to virtualize across boxes, not just vertical virtualization, but horizontal virtualization too. We can have LUN (logical unit number) that can spread across multiple systems through dynamic provisioning in a vertical way. But we can do it horizontally. We will take virtualization to another dimension.

Do you think that only handuful of the big, multi-technology companies will be left in five years? It maybe the other way round. Some big companies will not be around. There would be more start ups. This is a very technology intensive industry. Technology innovation and its reliability has been a high point for us. Analysts and competitors appreciate our technology, eventhough they may criticize our marketing at times.

For partners, customers and employees, we are an easy company to work with. 

n OPINION

GERALD KHOURY

A Change Maker The IT model is in for an overhaul.

Gone are the days where partnerships were a mainstay in a business to get IT up and running.

It’s time for leadership to usher in a new model and a new era.

Dr.Gerald Khoury is the managing director of GK Strategic, working in the areas of IT innovation and strategy.

He consults to the private and public sectors throughout Asia-Pacific.

W

E HAVE all seen the articles: Treating our

internal business stakeholders as customers is out; the supplier/customer model is dead. The new black is ‘business as a partner’. The idea behind this is that the supplier/customer

model is too reactionary and puts our IT department in a subservient position. It did serve a purpose. The supplier/customer model was a reaction to the bad old days of IT where business departments were made to feel subservient to the IT department.

Then, the business realised that IT wasn’t really that unfathomable, and IT realised that it better start being nice to the people who are actually paying for its services. But it soon discovered that the new supplier/customer model has its own limitations—it easily leads to an adversarial relationship.

The new ‘partnership’ model has been proposed as an improvement on the current model: One that leads to greater value for the business, and allows the IT group to take a more proactive position.

I’m not convinced.

The premise for this shift is that IT is now so important and pervasive that the supplier/customer model is no longer adequate. This is akin to Bill Gates in his heyday saying, “Microsoft is now so powerful and influential that we’re going to give away our success and allow all our customers to come in as partners.” In reality, asking your customers to come in as partners is basically asking for a bailout.

It’s not a sign of success; it’s a sign of failure. When a business is doing well, potential partners come to them asking to join in the spoils, and they pay a handsome fee for the privilege. Look at it this way: If the leader of another department came to you and said, “We don’t want to do this by ourselves anymore, let’s be partners”, what would you think?

Eventually, ‘partners’ are going to smell the coffee and realise that they have received the short straw. Then, they’ll be asking themselves: “If I need to do the thinking around IT strategy and innovation, why do I need an internal IT department at all? I could engage an external services provider who can work on their own and let me get back to my real business.”

Ultimately, the key problem with the partnership model is that it’s an admission that we really only know how to run IT as a commodity. The good news is that there is a far better model to which the strategic CIO will aspire.

IT is more important and pervasive than ever. However, instead of looking to shift our role from supplier to partner, we need to elevate our role to IT leader. From a business perspective, this is the only model that will lead to a higher level of value for the organisation as a whole.

Through visionary thinking and the development and communication of an effective IT strategy, we can reshape our IT services to better handle the requirements of the new technological and business landscape. In the same way that most large IT vendors evolve, we can move our focus from operations through to higher value consulting and leadership services. New sourcing models such as cloud computing can help to facilitate this transition.

Focus on partnership and IT will be seen as irrelevant. No guts, no glory. Focus on leadership, however, and IT will provide ongoing value and be seen as an essential element of the organisation’s success. n JANUARY 2013

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

15

Photograph by SUJITH

than 100 percent year-onyear. We added a lot more channel partners, including the top players like Wipro, AGC, IBM, and Dimension Data apart from many tier-2 partners. So the last 18 months have been about partner education and customer touch points.

ON RECORD n

Dharmendra Kumar,

President, India and SAARC, Aruba Networks, talks about why BYOD is the single largest focus for the company.

By Radhika Nallayam

16

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2013

You had noteworthy stints at Cisco and Force10. Was the role at Aruba equally challenging when you came onboard eighteen months ago?

KUMAR: Aruba was a very exciting assignment because it more or less has the market position in terms of mind share of a Cisco. But in terms of country operations, it was something like Force 10, and had to be built up. Aruba has a good connect with partners and customers. Wireless is a lesser understood technology compared to wired LAN, security etc. So, IT managers are keen to listen.

I came in with a threepronged deliverable agenda.

Increasing the footprint in the country was one of the important goals for us.

We, more than doubled our headcount, and our revenues have increased more

But vendors generally build partnerships with most of these tier-1 players at an early stage‌ KUMAR: We already had partnerships with some of these players, but the quantum of engagements has increased in the last 18 months. As we grew our team size, the number of transactions with these partners increased. In fact, we are part of the business plan of one of these tier-1 partners and they are very selective in terms of where they position other WLANs. So their primary offering is around Aruba.

If you look at the wireless LAN market, though you are placed second, you are far behind the top player Cisco in terms of market share.

Why such a huge gap?

KUMAR: In order to understand the market better, we will have to dwell deep into the usage patterns.

There are companies who buy couple of access points (APs) and are not really bothered about the management part. Cisco plays in that segment, but Aruba does not. Then, there is the SMB and mid-market which typically buys 30 to 50 APs. It is a very price/ performance metrics driven market. The gating criterion is pricing. That’s not our sweet spot, but Cisco again has an offering for this segment. The enterprise-class custom-

DHARMENDRA KUMAR | ON RECORD n ers, on the other hand, are looking at exhaustive and feature-rich wireless LAN solutions. These customers are very demanding on security, performance and application awareness. That is the market segment that Aruba plays in, and that is where we are most relevant.

And in that segment, if you do a technology versus technology comparison, we will be better placed compared to Cisco. Our focus is to move away from the centralized hardwarecentric access controllers and APs to a controller-less architecture.

While that explains the difference in market share, how exactly do you differentiate yourself

24.8% YoY growth recorded in the enterprise WLAN market in 2Q12.

SOURCE; IDC

focusing on building our partner community. Wireless requires more handholding and therefore you need knowledgeable and committed business partners. And that is the reason why we spent a lot of time enabling partners.

If you go out in the market and compare the customer experience on both the channels (Cisco and Aru-

This is something that the network has not been doing so far, because it was primarily wired.

So where exactly are you selling BYOD? KUMAR: Wherever good network is being sold today!

It will become a way of building access networks.

Client profiles have gone wireless and the preferred medium for devices is wireless. BYOD will happen everywhere. It’s just a matter of the first few executions and the rest will follow.

First step towards BYOD is matching your access network with the medium on which your client device prefers to connect, which is wireless today. Somehow the mental comfort for an

humble feature-rich WLAN experience to a role-based access which extends to enterprise mobility. It’s not a small compartment of solution, but something that allows us to position our entire portfolio. BYOD will be the biggest driver for serious wireless LAN implementations. And we have graduated from being a pure play wireless company to an enterprise mobility player to address this growing market.

What is your roadmap for 2013 in India?

KUMAR: We will continue to focus on the same areas and work with our partners to enhance their solution skills. There will be a slight restructure that will hap-

If you go out in the market and compare the customer experience on both the channels (Cisco and Aruba), you would get a far better satisfaction rating on the Aruba channel.” from players like Cisco?

KUMAR: Cisco has been around for almost 15 years in India, but we have had only two and half years of serious operation. Wireless LAN took a big fillip when 802.11n was introduced.

Now BYOD makes wireless more relevant for organizations. This is the time when customers are looking at newer vendors. Cisco has been very good at building wired networks. When it comes to wireless, neither Cisco nor anyone else has done anything different in terms of transitioning customers from wired networks to BYOD. That’s where Aruba becomes important today. Aruba will never grow to be a 700 person operation in India; Cisco is. In India, we are

ba), you would get a far better satisfaction rating on the Aruba channel.

Most of the vendors do not seem to have an all-inclusive BYOD story. What’s your strategy for this market?

KUMAR: Aruba’s wireless BYOD story is far more feature-rich as compared to anybody else in the industry today. If you look at BYOD, which is partially network intelligence and partially mobile device management (MDM), the network intelligence piece is far more important than MDM. The bigger challenge in BYOD is that, today when one user brings multiple devices,the network has to deliver a seamless experience, without compromising security.

IT manager is that, ‘if I have done my wired network, then I have my basics right’.

The more complex the BYOD, the better we are because of the intelligence that we bring in the access networks. We also have our ClearPass NAC solution and security capabilities to make the story more comprehensive. That makes our solution slightly complex to deliver at times. That’s why we are focused on improving the quality of channel in the market.

BYOD seems to be your single largest focus as of now. Aren’t you putting all your eggs in one basket?

KUMAR: BYOD is not a solution set, it is a driver. It is a boundaryless experience, which can start from a

pen with respect to our GTM. Our volume business will be driven mainly through our VADs, while our solutions partners will work directly with the Aruba team to drive our high-touch business. Education sector still happens to be the largest market for us, apart from enterprise, healthcare and government.

But is education sector a big buyer of BYOD solutions?

KUMAR: Students are the most performance hungry gadget users. As a result, the IT decision makers in the this segment are the most demanding customers we have. We have at least seven education institutions that have more than 1000 APs in the campus. There clearly is a huge demand for BYOD. n

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n COVER STORY

PLACE YOUR

BETS Six technologies will be the favored

by India Inc. in 2013. Are enterprise channel partners ready?

By Team ChannelWorld

18

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2013

N

EW Year. New Hopes. New Goals. Like each year, 2013 is not just a statistic. It’s a time when vendors unleash their technology roadmap for the next 12 months and enterprise channel partners jostle to readjust, realign and reshape their product, solution and services portfolio.

A plethora of pertinent questions flash across the minds of partners. n Which technologies will sky rocket this year? n Will Government be the biggest spender in IT? n How do I ensure more margins? n Is cloud really happening at a brisk pace? n What will be my company’s risk appetite?

The list of uncertainties and doubts seem endless.

Each enterprise solution provider aims for the perfect balance through big top lines and healthy bottom lines. But the math is complex.

With a tentative economic climate, winning deals in this competitive landscape is tough and the stakes run high.

Channels strive to identify the right technologies to invest their time, energy and money and devise an appropriate business plan for the year.

ChannelWorld’s State of the Mart 2013 survey (Four page detailed analysis on Pg.26) of enterprise partner organizations captures three important aspects–partner roadmap, technology direction and business outlook–of a solution provider for this year.

Interestingly, the top six technologies, according to the survey, are almost identical to the findings of the recent State of the CIO 2013 survey, an annual survey conducted by CIO (a sister publication of ChannelWorld) in November each year. The responses by the CIO community are in line with the technology roadmap predicted by enterprise partners for this year.

Here are the six enterprise technologies that will gain maximum traction in 2013.

Enterprise channel partners yearning for continued success and long term sustenance need to place their bets…now!

Inside 20 | BI & ANALYTICS Analytics and its usage is on the rise. Are partners equipped enough to ride this wave?

22 | MOBILITY The easy availability of smartphones and bandwidth will increase enterprise mobility adoption.

24 | PRIVATE CLOUD Private cloud remains the go-to choice for most organizations. Nothing much is expected to change this year either.

30 | PUBLIC CLOUD Although it isn’t as popular as the private cloud model, the public cloud is set for big growth.

32 | SECURITY Partners need to adopt new-age security practices. The opportunities appear huge.

34 | VIRTUALIZATION Virtualization was a top priority last year. It continues to remain so for partners and CIOs alike.

JANUARY 2013

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n COVER STORY | BI & ANALYTICS

Perfect Analysis

Analytics and its usage is on the rise. Are partners equipped to ride this wave? By Yogesh Gupta

E

providers are keen to explore the colossal business opportunities in business intelligence and analytics this year. Channelworld’s State of the MArt 2013 survey findings are a clear indicator. More than 78 percent of respondents (channel partners) expect IT spend to grow in areas of BI and analytics in 2013.

This statistic is similar to mobility and only second to security among the most preferred technologies in terms of IT spends by Indian organizations.

According to IDC, worldwide revenues for business analytics market in 2011 grew 14.1 percent year-on-year.

NTERPRISE SOLUTION

Of the three primary segments, data warehousing platform software segment grew the fastest in 2011 at 15.2 percent year-on-year, followed by the analytic applications segment at 13.3 percent. BI and analytic tools segment grew 13.2 percent.

“There’s a lot of unstructured data in terms of volume and velocity. The variety directly impacts businesses.

The need to sort data has become vital as the pressure on businesses mount amidst diminishing margins in such a competitive world,” says Sanchit Vir Gogia, Principal Analyst, IDC India. Hence the need for BI and analytics becomes imperative, he adds.

Voice of Experience

“IT governance is becoming a crucial issue for organizations as it involves IT asset management, IT accounting and extends to functions like procurement. These IT-enabled services need to be effectively enhanced by proper use of BI tools.”

WHAT’S NEW FOR PARTNERS? Mumbai-based AGS Sundyne Technologies has been deploying customized BI solutions across retail and telecom for the past couple of years. “The installation of POS software included an entire managed services project with POS infrastructure at a leading retail conglomerate. Hence the BI solution was developed by our team as an interface over existing OEM softwares to help the customer stay ahead of competition,” says Sandeep Gandhi, MD, AGS Sundyne Technologies.

BI and analytics contributes between five and ten percent of overall revenues, AGS Sundyne will target IT/ ITeS and Government in 2013 for these technologies. “The contribution is not much as of now but it is a good margin domain,” says Gandhi.

VDA Infosolutions, an EMC partner, is engaged in putting a business plan in place to explore data analytics with Greenplum (now EMC) portfolio. “We expect tier-1 organizations to look seriously at data analytics solutions apart from cloud,” says Ashutosh Deuskar, Director, VDA Infosolutions.

Coimbatore-based eCAPS Computers too has identified BI and analytics as a new focus technology for the new year. The saturation of hardware/ software services market and dwindling margins is the key reason, says Partheeban, Director, eCAPS Computers, to look at BI as a new area. The lower end of the market has become highly competitive as there will be no or minimal buying of entry level solutions for next three to five years, he adds.

“As we are focused on datacenter deployments around servers and storage, analytics makes perfect business

$51bn Expected business analytics market size between 201216 with CAGR of 9.8 percent

SANDEEP GANDHI, MD, AGS SUNDYNE TECHNOLOGIES SOURCE: IDC

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INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2013

BIG BUYERS

ANALYTICS IS A RISING STAR

Most CIOs will implement analytics in the next 12 months.

v Customer-segment analysis

and network analysis across telcos becomes important as they offer value added services.

Will implement in one year

23% 23%

Will implement in six months

v Any customer facing

industry which demands customer loyalty like durables and retail. IT/ ITeS is another promising vertical.

v Use of analytics in the BFSI

sector’s maturing at a quick pace. Network analysis is also vital for the insurance sector.

v Retail is an important

segment as large format players are targeting Indian consumer market to gain a foothold.

sense as the data growth needs to be stored effectively and intelligently at the enterprise end,” says Deuskar.

Beyond traditional analytics and warehouse tools, businesses are feeling the impact of social analytics, which does not mean the twitters and facebooks of the world. “The fork in the road is happening. Many traditional systems integrators already deploy

31%

19%

19%

30%

Upgrading/Refining

13% Currently implementing

Not interested

17%

n Analytics (not reporting) n Reporting (using BI tools)

13% 12%

SOURCE: CIO RESEARCH

BI and enterprise data warehousing tools. Social analytics using traditional toolset of BI to understand newer data types at customer end is a great opportunity to look forward for partners.” says Gogia. eCAPS is in talks with potential BI vendors. “The plan is to deep sell BI and analytics to the existing customers and then educate the new customers,” says Partheeban.

“We will be upgrading existing technical manpower for our foray into analytics and also recruit few resources,” adds Deuskar of VDA.

“Many traditional SIs already deploy BI and enterprise data warehousing solutions.

Social analytics using traditional BI toolset to understand newer data types at the customer end is a great opportunity to look forward for partners.”

SANCHIT VIR GOGIA, PRINCIPAL ANALYST, IDC INDIA

THE EARLY ADOPTERS “Analytics is aggressively for any customer facing industry which demands customer loyalty. Retail is an important segment as large format players are positioning their footprint in India,” says Gogia.

“IT governance is becoming a crucial issue for organizations which involves IT asset management, IT accounting, and extends to functions like procurement details. These IT-enabled services need to be effectively enhanced by proper use of BI tools,” says Gandhi.

BFSI and IT/ITeS are the early adopters of analytics for VDA Infosolutions. “We are in talks with at least four customers in the western region,” says Deuskar.

Customer segment analysis and network analysis across telecom is picking up as price becomes important as a value added service offering. Use of analytics is popular across BFSI and especially network analysis for insurance sector.

BI and analytics are moving to mobile devices but at a slow pace says Gogia. “In terms of priority for enterprises to introduce cross platforms, BI is not first as volume for its usage is not very huge. CRM and ERP are the first ones,” he reasons.

“This will be a huge market in the coming years. But the earlier we explore this trend the better it is for us,” says Deuskar. n JANUARY 2013

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n COVER STORY | MOBILITY

Making An Impact The easy availability of smartphones and bandwidth will increase enterprise mobility adoption. By Aritra Sarkhel

M

OBILITY HAS been

a much abused word over the last couple of years. A lot of talk has been generated around it among enterprise players but come 2013, all that talk will slowly give way to widespread enterprise mobility deployments by channel partners across India.

“Mobility is on the agenda and strategy of eight out of 10 CIOs in India, stretching across sectors and company sizes. Everyone is looking at enterprise mobility to extend value to their existing applications investment,” says Sunil Padmanabhan, Research, Director Gartner.

THE NEED FOR MOBILITY Reports from around the globe seem to justify the positive vibes in 2013 for enterprise mobility. According to a McKinsey report, titled Online and upcoming: The Internet’s Impact, half of the Internet population in India will be using the mobile phone as a device to access the internet.

On the technology front, IDC finds the increasing adoption of mobility and cloud computing stimulating the demand for mobile application platforms, integration and messaging solutions and cloud-enabling middleware or appliances. It expects a CAGR of 15 percent for third platform IT spending (includes mobility among other technologies), with cumulative growth (between 2013-20) of 70.4 percent.

While Gartner notes that, in India the importance of ‘anytime anywhere’ accessibility to enterprise information is placed high on the list. This is being looked upon as an opportunity for enterprises to make the right decisions based on information from enterprise applications like CRM, ERP or HCM solutions. “All these are drivers for business leaders and CIOs to extend the value of their application to mobility,”says Padmanabhan.

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INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2013

The need to put more of the mission critical enterprise applications on a mobile platform has prompted legacy IT vendors like Microsoft, IBM and Oracle to create mobility offerings for their respective enterprise application product suits. While the vendors alone cannot proliferate growth in 2013, there are a number of collaborations between the vendors and channel partner community to create a partnercentric mobility solution. Therefore, by adopting such a strategy the engagement between customers, partners and employees will be profound.

Padmanabhan expects around 25 to 30 percent of users to access enterprise applications through a smartphone or tablet. “Enterprise application leaders are compelled to revisit their mobility strategy despite all concerns for security and BYOD.” According to Channelworld’s State of the Mart 2013 survey, mobility accounted for the highest traction rate (33 percent) as a technology that SIs in India would most want to explore in 2013.

It will lead to the extension of business value to the end-customer by pro-

70%

Cumulative growth expected in third platform IT spending, which includes mobility, between 2013-20 SOURCE: IDC

viding mobile access to remote workers like the sales force, collection teams and distribution agents of large retailers.

For channel partners, mobility is going to be about the accessibility of enterprise information to the remote workers. In the process, SIs would get an integration opportunity in their enterprise and SMB customer deployment and further, an opportunity to maximise margins.

“With margins going down drastically in other solutions because of a recession ridden business environment, a growing business opportunity like mobility, apart from cloud and virtualization, can actually help the SIs make good margins”, says Ramachandra Suresh, Vice President, Navigator Systems.

Manish Tandon, Managing Director, Questa Software, a Mumbai-based SI and Microsoft cloud partner, has met

“Mobility is on the agenda and strategy of eight out of 10 CIOs in India across various sectors and company sizes. Everyone is looking at enterprise mobility to extend the value of their existing applications investment.”

SUNIL PADMANABHAN, RESEARCH DIRECTOR, GARTNER

MOBILITY IS SURGING AHEAD

CIOs have already planned or plan to get into mobility in the next 12 months.

19%

v Manufacturing will deploy

numerous enterprise mobility related solutions to increase scalability, productivity of workforce, add new clients and improve the speed at which the information reaches the customers.

Will implement in one year

16% Will implement in six months

26% Currently implementing

31% Upgrading/Refining

7% Not interested

mands of customers on the go, has led to a surge in mobility related solutions for SIs in India,” says Tandon.

Another SI, Zephyr Info Solutions too seems pretty upbeat. Mobility is still at a nascent stage in India but

Voice of Experience

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

v BFSI and retail sectors

will look at having mobility related solutions to meet the demand of the customers in real time.

v New media would be

SOURCE: CIO RESEARCH

client demand by implementing every Microsoft cloud solution on a mobile platform. “We need to pay heed to such a need as infrastructure costs in the country has increased manifold.

The accessibility of mobility and de-

BIG BUYERS

“Any enterprise would want to move into mobility. Certain parameters like the ease of deployment, security, managing backup, network complexity, and device management will open up a lot of avenues for SIs.” AJIT JHA, TECHNICAL DIRECTOR, ZEPHYR INFO SOLUTIONS

another big buyer. Without the presence of mobility related solutions, the new age media industry would be only half effective. The availability of smartphones and tablets has improved dissemination of information to a larger number of people.

from the partner’s perspective, Ajit Jha Zephyr’s Technical Director says that, going forward, the technology will be a profitable venture. “Any enterprise would want to move into mobility.

Certain parameters like the ease of deployments, security, managing backup, network complexity, and device management will open up a lot of avenues for the SIs,” he explains.

Interestingly, Zephyr Systems is also looking at exploring a collaboration with players like Mobile Iron for enterprise mobility related solutions for large Indian enterprises and SMBs. But this will happen only when the market reaches maturity.

Jha concurs with the Gartner foresight that around 30 percent mobile application development will be observed year-on-year.

“Enterprise mobility will be a standard operating procedure for enterprises, which will provide scalability and speed in terms of real time information and translate to large scale adoption,” he says. n JANUARY 2013

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

23

n COVER STORY | PRIVATE CLOUD

Leading the Charge Private cloud remains the go-to choice for most organizations. Even with the advent of the hybrid model, nothing much is expected to change. By Shantheri Mallaya

A

S WE usher

in the new year, IT will continue to see cloud as a discussion among the CIOs and the service provider networks alike. Research firm IDC put the Indian cloud market to be around $535m (about Rs 3000 crore) in 2011, with a growth of more than 70 percent expected for 2012 and almost 50 percent forecast for the next three years. So, the cloud computing market is a space that is fast maturing and seeing many new entrants with a broad range of investments and solutions taking key roles in the cloud ecosystem. Similarly, Gartner also believes that the Indian enterprise

is inclined towards the private cloud vis-à-vis the public cloud. Biswajeet Mahapatra, Research Director, Gartner India, says, “Organizations tend to retain their existing infrastructure; so solution providers would serve well to build a strong business case and strategy for the cloud—be it public or private.”

Mahapatra further says that the bigger players such as Wipro, TCS, HCL and Cognizant will continue to do well in 2013, while mid-level players like Mind Tree, and smaller players such as Allied Digital would continue to make inroads with their offerings. A robust service provider

Voice of Experience

“Devices such as smartphones and laptops are increasingly procloud. In the future solutions are not going to be CPU-centric, and that elevates the discussion to the next level.”

KETAN SHAH, DIRECTOR, KRUTI COMP INDIA 24

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2013

BIG BUYERS v Large Indian enterprises

particularly Government and BFSI will see a huge ROI in the private cloud due to the fear of breach of security of critical data.

v Telcos and service providers

will pitch the private cloud to their customers as well as their partners.

v SIs will deep dive to

existing customers and pitch all the cloud models to them. It is expected that the hybrid model will be the preferred mode of cloud adoption for large and small enterprises alike.

and SI ecosystem would take the cause of cloud computing further, he estimates.

While the market is quite gung-ho, there are solution providers such as Future Soft Solutions in New Delhi that are realistic about the cloud wave. Vipul Datta, CEO, Futuresoft Solutions, believes that the cloud should be pitched with caution because the idea is to optimize the opex model for the customer. He states, “Customers are still looking at low cost solutions, which may not necessarily be derived out of cloud-based solutions but yes, the cloud has its ROI, given a set of variables – number of users, scale of infrastructure etc.” Futuresoft Solutions is looked at hosted applications (ERP, CRM) and a hybrid pitch for its clientele, again,

70% Expected growth in the Indian cloud market for 2012

SOURCE: IDC

“Going forward, the hybrid model will make maximum sense to the Indian enterprise. More customers are headed this way.”

BISWAJEET MAHAPATRA, RESEARCH DIRECTOR, GARTNER INDIA

with a very tight eye on the annual outflow for the customer, which Datta estimates, in some cases, can get as high as Rs 70 lakh.

On the other hand, Dharmesh Anjaria, Executive Director, Dynacons Solutions, says cloud computing is out of the hype cycle, and sooner or later the Indian enterprise is going to head the cloud computing way and make their IT infrastructure very light by offloading as much to the cloud.

Dynacons is expecting a 20 percent increase in its cloud business the

coming fiscal. The company is going all out to promote private cloud.

Anjaria makes a valid observation when he says, “VDI and server virtualization are already getting quite a bit of attention. So what we are doing now is to have discussions with existing customers and then dive deep into selling the cloud.” Dynacons is approaching existing customers with the pros and cons of all the three cloud models—public, private and hybrid. Dynacons also believes that in a slow thickening market, it is vital to

PRIVATE CLOUD PREFERRED

Majority of CIOs will implement/refine private clouds in the next 12 months.

18% Will Implement in one year

14% Will Implement in six months

22% Currently Implementing

29% Upgrading/ Refining

16% Not Interested SOURCE: CIO RESEARCH

align with the right vendors in order to make sense. The company has tied up with IBM for SmartCloud Computing. Anjaria foresees challenges in the form of recession and the capex freeze in enterprise spend. He says, “Given the current scenario, solution providers must be able to suggest the right opex-capex model to customers in order to reach out.”

Gartner’s Mahapatra believes that the standard 69:31 ratio of opex to capex (both public and private setups) would work the coming year too, and organizations will increasingly look at pay-per-use models, with a dash of the subscription model. Like Futuresoft’s Datta, Mahapatra observed, “This is because SLAs between customers and service providers do not insist on availability and speed of performance clauses. So, customers find it viable to opt for pay-per-use rather than give in a bulk amount for ‘n’ number of mail boxes and so on, unless they have exceptionally limited usage levels.”

However, Ketan Shah, Director of Bangalore-based Kruti Comp India, says as far as the cloud is concerned, it is still a wait and watch game. The company is looking at the cloud scenario with some caution, while at the same time building its virtualization and video conferencing capabilities to service organizations with as many as two to five locations. Shah says, “Devices such as smartphones and laptops are increasingly pro-cloud.

In the future solutions are not going to be CPU-centric, and that elevates the discussion to the next level.” Kruti Comp estimates that the second half of 2013 will help the company get clarity, and galvanize its cloud strategy.

The common observation is that solution providers have to look at establishing ROI very seriously if they have to win customer confidence about the cloud. Says Datta of Futuresoft, “It is about utilizing budgets and keeping licensing costs low.”

Going forward, Mahapatra says that the hybrid model will make maximum sense to the Indian enterprise. More customers are headed this way. n JANUARY 2013

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

25

ChannelWorld STATE OF THE MART

n COVER STORY STRATEGIC INSIGHTS FOR SOLUTION PROVIDERS | COVER PRICE Rs.50

SURVEY METHODOLOGY

T

HE fourth edition of ChannelWorld State of the Mart 2013 survey was conducted online in the month of November and December 2012.

The 170 respondents from unique companies included systems integrators, value added resellers (VARs) and independent software vendors (ISVs) across India. These are enterprise channel partners who deploy solutions across SMBs and large enterprises.

The survey was filled by C-Level executives (CEO/ Director)/decision makers at partner organizations. About 59 percent of the respondents are systems integrators, while 22 percent are VARs. 26

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2013

Sixty eight percent of the respondents (partner organizations) have individual revenues (estimated for FY 12) below Rs 50 crore. Sixteen percent of the respondents expect a turnover of Rs 50 crore to Rs 100 crore, while the remaining 16 percent would touch revenues of over Rs 100 crore at the end of this fiscal.

The responses to the survey were demographically spread across three major regions of India. While 38 percent emerged from western India (mainly Mumbai, Pune, Ahmedabad and Surat); more than 35 percent of respondents were based out of south India (Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad and

Cochin). Nearly 24 percent of the responses came from north India (New Delhi, Noida and Gurgaon). The remaining responses came from the eastern part of India from cities like Kolkata and Bhubaneshwar. There were also sparse responses from channel partners located in smaller cities and states like Dehradun, Goa, Jammu, Ludhiana, Ambala, Coimbatore, Vadodara etc.

All responses of the survey were gathered using a secure server with all the individual data kept confidential. The degree of error is +/-6.3 percent at a 90 percent confidence level.

2013 COVER STORY n

Partner Roadmap

Better margins tops the partner wish list for 2013.

What is the Single Biggest Challenge You Expect to Face in 2013?

Which Sector’s IT Spend do You Expect to Grow in 2013?

35%

24% Government

18% BFSI

16%

25%

Manufacturing (includes Auto, Pharma, FMCG, etc)

14%

21%

Retail

6% Services (includes Tourism, Education, Logistics, etc)

9%

6%

8%

IT/BPO

3% Telecom Others

Staffing

Expanding Product/Service Portfolio

Expanding Customer Base

Growing Revenue

Pressure on Margins

10% Infrastructure and Utilities (Real Estate, Oil and Gas, Power etc.)

2%

2% Others

Is the Wishlist for 2013 Any Different from 2012?

48% 44%

What Will be Your Top Go-to-Market Strategy for 2013?

30%

Offer more services on a recurring revenue model Introduce new technologies to existing customer base

26%

18%

Help customers leverage technology to innovate in their industry

n 2013 n 2012

6%

27% 24%

3% 3%

Upgrade and refresh customers’ hardware infrastructure

2%

Others

5% 4%

Others

6% 5%

Increase in Market Development Funds

15%

Lower customers’ cost

6%

Improved Implementation & Technical Support

9% 9%

Help customers attract and retain new customers

Better Training & Certification programs

Generating Sales Leads

Better Margins

12% Improve customers’ business process

1/3rd

of channel partners believe pressure on margins will be the biggest challenge in 2013

ChannelWorld STATE OF THE MART

n COVER STORY STRATEGIC INSIGHTS FOR SOLUTION PROVIDERS | COVER PRICE Rs.50

Technology Direction

Cloud, mobility, and security will be the favored technologies.

STAY THE SAME*

Networking

49%

17%

34%

Security

81%

2%

17%

Storage

73%

8%

19%

Business Application Software

63%

9%

28%

Hardware Solutions

29%

35%

36%

Business Intelligence & Analytics

78%

8%

14%

Virtualization

78%

5%

19%

Private Cloud-Based Solutions

74%

7%

19%

Public Cloud-Based Solutions

76%

3%

21%

Mobility

78%

5%

17%

Big Data

63%

7%

30%

Social Media and Collaboration

68%

5%

27%

13% 14%

25% 26%

29% 30%

n 2013 n 2012

Hardware

Software

Services

Consulting Others

*Represents the number of channel partners who believe this.

Which Technologies Do You Intend to Explore in the Next 12 months?

33%

Mobility

30% Security

30%

Private Cloud-Based Solutions

25%

Public Cloud-Based Solutions

23%

Virtualization

22%

Big Data

22%

Business Application Software

22%

Storage

15%

Social Media and Collaboration SDN 28

9% INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2013

13% 12%

DECREASE*

36%

INCREASE*

TECHNOLOGY

Where is Your Revenue Coming From?

41%

How will the IT spend change for following technologies in 2013?

33%

of channel partners will get into mobility-based solutions in 2013

2013 COVER STORY n

Business Outlook

Partners are largely optimistic about business growth in 2013.

How Do You Foresee Your Business Environment in 2013?

25%

What Will be Your Company’s Risk Appetite in 2013?

30%

11% 3%

13%

1% 2% 9%

2%

58% 46% n Challenging n Very challenging n Neutral

n Easy n Very easy n Can't say

n High n Neutral n Could be Higher

In 2013, Do You Expect Your Business to...

n Low n Very High

Are Partners Open to More Risk This Year?

52% 46% n 2013 n 2012

29%

17%

22% 9% High

11%

72%

n Grow

n Stay the same

n Slow down

Neutral

5%

Low

46%

of the channel partners predict a high risk appetite for 2013

7% 2% Very High

n COVER STORY | PUBLIC CLOUD

Good Stride Forward Although it isn’t as popular as the private cloud model, the public cloud is set for big growth. By Radhika Nallayam

P

UBLIC CLOUD has always been approached with nervousness and skepticism mostly owing to the neverending issues around security, data protection and tricky SLAs. Even after years of discussions, testing and implementation, this model elicits some degree of brooding.

Solution providers, however, seem to have spotted clear opportunities.

More than 25 percent of the respondents of ChannelWorld’s State of the Mart 2013 survey wouldn’t otherwise reveal their intent to get into this market. While private cloud is considered to be the market where the actual money lies, public cloud seems to be equally promising, especially for tier-2 solution providers.

The reason isn’t vague: Public cloud adoption in the country is driven largely by the SMB segment, which has always been a sweetspot for such solution providers. Though the large enterprises are inclined towards private cloud implementations, they do fall back on the public model for certain specific requirements. This makes the public cloud market an interesting space to bet on.

The solution providers on the hand are ready to play their cards right this year. And for serious players, the options are plenty. One can choose to be a cloud broker/consultant, or a cloud service provider or resell a vendor’s cloud offerings.

Hyderabad-based Choice Solutions for instance has found multiple profitable models. The SI offers consulting services to its customers who want to migrate to any type of cloud. This required very significant investments to develop the right consulting capabilities and experienced manpower.

At the same time, the company recently decided to try its hand at offering cloud services. To begin with, Choice Solutions will be offering DR and back-up as a service to its existing SMB customers. “We are planning to offer these services only to SMBs initially, because the enterprises have totally different service level expectations. Besides, they are more interested in working with large solution providers. And if we take it to the existing customers, we don’t have to rebuild the trust factor. So our idea is to build

32%

Growth forecast for the public cloud services market in India in 2012 SOURCE: GARTNER

a sizeable customer base among SMBs, before we move to enterprise class customers,” says Jagannath Kallakurchi, CEO and MD, Choice Solutions.

In his experience, both consulting and services are far more profitable than product or solution selling, and that’s where he sees the future.

For Delhi-based CI Infotech, public cloud is a game-changer. The company is already offering Iaas and various Saas applications to its existing and new customers. Instead of building its own infrastructure, the SI has partnered with a host to offer these services. While most of the Saas offerings are the SI’s own IP, CI Infotech is also planning to partner with ISVs to develop more verticalspecific applications.

The SI has an interesting mix of SMBs and enterprises as its customers for the public cloud. “We can’t really equate the cloud to something like a

CHARTING THE RIGHT COURSE Analysts believe that the market will certainly grow, though the growth rate would remain unchanged as compared to 2012. Biswajeet Mahapatra, Research Director, Gartner, says, “The public cloud market is not going to witness any great change, and the growth rate will remain almost the same. The SMB sector will continue to be the largest driver for this market, especially services industries like education, hospitality, etc.” He believes that 2013 will see a lot of custom-made and vertical specific solutions being offered on a public cloud model, which will further propel adoption.

30

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2013

“If the observations of industry gurus are anything to go by, we can evidently see the bright future of public cloud.”

IRVINDER SINGH, DIRECTOR, CI INFOTECH

BIG BUYERS

Voice of Experience

v SMB sector will continue to drive cloud adoption in 2013.

v Companies will look for

vertical specific solutions on public cloud.

v Services-based industries like education and hospitality will propel growth in public cloud.

dot-com boom, but the market is definitely evolving. Customers, whether it’s SMBs or enterprises, want to understand benefits of opex models.

And if the observations by industry gurus are anything to go by, we can evidently see a bright future for public cloud,” says Irvinder Singh, Director, CI Infotech.

For security experts like Chennaibased Digital Track Solutions, public cloud has always been a great prospective market. After testing the market by offering managed security services to its existing customers, the company is now all set to offer security solutions on pay-as-yougo model. “We will be setting up infrastructure to host the security infrastructure for our customers.

“Remember, you are expected to showcase really matured consulting and services capabilities, and you will be constantly compared with large players in the industry” JAGANNATH KALLAKURCHI, CEO & MD, CHOICE SOLUTIONS

We have seen increasing demand from our existing customers for a service-based model like this,” says ST Muneer Ahamed, MD, Digital Track Solutions.

SET FOR GRADUAL GROWTH Public cloud will slowly pace itself up among Indian CIOs in the next 12 months.

13% Will implement in one year

12% Will implement in six months

12% Currently implementing

14% Upgrading/Refining

48% Not interested SOURCE: CIO RESEARCH

THINK BEFORE MOVING Experienced players, however, advise to be watchful about each move.

Unlike a product delivery or solution implementation, public cloud is not likely to give overnight returns and one should have a well thought out blueprint for atleast two to three years.

As a manpower intensive business model, the public cloud calls for extraordinary efforts around developing services capabilities, and above all a service-oriented culture within the organization. One might be required to spend surplus time understanding the overall IT vision of the customer and also in proving your credentials.

“Remember, you are expected to showcase really matured consulting and services capabilities and you will be constantly compared with large players in the industry,” says Kallakurchi of Choice Solutions. For a product-oriented company, this means a lot of reshuffle and make-over. n JANUARY 2013

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

31

n COVER STORY | SECURITY

Making IT a Safe Bet

Partners need to adopt new-age security practices. The opportunities appear huge. By Yogesh Gupta

T

HE PROLIFERATION of devices, virtualization woes, APTs, among others have ensured that security ranks right at the top of a CIO’s to do list.

More than 80 percent of the respondents (enterprise solution providers) in ChannelWorld’s State of The Mart 2013 survey expect IT spends to increase in 2013 for security solutions.

“In 2013, investment in security will surpass the current year’s spending with the Government being actively involved through increased regulations,” says Ekta Aggarwal, Program Manager, Information & Communication Technologies (ICT), Frost & Sullivan.

Besides, traditional verticals like BFSI, service providers and government, sectors like retail, IT/ITeS, manufac-

turing and defence are expected to invest heavily in security, she added.

More than half of the respondents are already dabbling in the security domain and an additional one-third intend to explore this space in 2013.

“Advances in technologies such as cloud and next-gen networks will challenge enterprise architectures running on legacy systems. Investments to counter cyber threats will increase as more enterprises opt for Web-based platforms,” says Aggarwal.

THE CHANGED LANDSCAPE According to Sanchit Vir Gogia, Principal Analyst, IDC India, CIOs have been orchestrating services as they now look at public, private clouds, hosting and application heavy

Voice of Experience

“There is a fair amount of implementation and services attached with security. There is more opportunity than just better margins in the security domain around SIEM, encryption and log management.”

server farms. They are managing the changed environment which is complex with stricter SLAs. “Enterprises want to deploy cloud resources to fuel the growth but keep the operational cost low. Security is not a traditional offering but is sourced from datacenter federation, encryption etc,” he says.

Chennai-based Fourth Dimension Technologies has been implementing security solutions for the past five years. “Security has gone beyond firewall and anti-virus. SIEM, authentication and log management are the areas where we think adoption will happen as more devices invade the enterprise environment,” says N. Jagannath, CEO, Fourth Dimension Technologies. “The demand has increased lately due to the security concerns around BYOD and cloud. From an end-point security, DLP is important.”

2013 will be a year around application level security, database security and infrastructure platform for Bangalore-based Unisoft Infotech.

“Most customers realize information is an asset. Therefore, they will look at security from multiple levels.

With information going onto cloud, the concern is security. The success of cloud depends on how secure the information is,” says Deepak Nakil, Executive Director, Unisoft Infotech.

“BFSI and manufacturing are focus verticals. Deep selling to loyal customers is logical as they trust us. Also, there are few tier-2 partners with expertise to execute complex security projects,” says Jagannath. We expect to generate 15 to 20 percent of our revenue from security in 2013 compared to the 10 percent in 2012.

10%

of overall IT security enterprise capabilities will be delivered in the cloud by 2015

N. JAGANNATH, CEO, FOURTH DIMENSION TECHNOLOGIES SOURCE: GARTNER

32

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2013

BIG BUYERS v BFSI, IT/ITeS and telcos

remain the major verticals for security adoption mainly for new age offerings like DLP, SIEM, GRC etc.

v The supply chain from the

consumer products industry (manufacturing) to retail need security across the cloud and mobile devices.

v Surveillance (IP, intrusion

detection and transmission video) will witness a surge especially in Government and education, apart from the corporate sector.

SECURITY’S HERE TO STAY

What’s driving security spending within IT organizations?

47% Business continuity/disaster recovery

46% Economic conditions

43%

Internal policy compliance

43%

Change and business transformation

41% Outsourcing

41% Regulatory compliance

40%

Company reputation SOURCE: GLOBAL INFORMATION SECURITY SURVEY 2012

TRADITIONAL OFFERINGS TO STAY With new age technologies for security around cloud and mobility on the rise, will traditional offerings like UTM and IPS be shunted out? On the contrary, IDC’s Gogia believes, due to huge demand, the traditional market will grow although the growth rate might slow down.

Delhi-based Spark Technologies works with UTM vendors for information security, spam and virus firewall, Web application firewall and Web fil-

ter. “Web applications have increased, hence these offerings will have a constant demand across enterprises,” says S.R. Nautiyal, Managing Director, Spark Technologies.

“There are rich margins available in areas like cloud security for partners.

However, they need to have a balanced portfolio of high margin offerings and run-rate products like UTM, IPS among others,” says Gogia.

Spark is also working in the surveillance market through an alliance with Tyco Fire & Security. “IP surveillance,

“Advances in technologies such as cloud and next-gen networks will challenge enterprise architectures running on legacy systems.

Investments to counter cyber threats will increase as more enterprises opt for Web-based platforms.”

EKTA AGGARWAL, PROGRAM MANAGER, INFORMATION & COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES, FROST & SULLIVAN

intrusion detection, and transmission video surveillance is critical for government agencies and corporates.Growing bottom lines and margins are the key reason to focus on new security offerings like surveillance,” says Nautiyal.

PROFITABILITY FOR PARTNERS Visibility and analytics will become the key pillars for security enterprise believes Aggarwal. “It will become critical for enterprises to achieve visibility, and to understand user behavior not only at the network layer but also in cloud environments. Secondly, the need will also arise for analytics which will enable organizations to leverage actual usage to refine policy and security controls,” she says.

According to Jagannath, there is fair amount of implementation and services attached with security. There is more opportunity than just better margins in the security domain around SIEM, encryption and log management. Channel partners eventually find their sweetspot with technical expertise in the market.

More the endpoints, more the diversity and more complex is the IT architecture, says Gogia. But it means more opportunities for partners as they need to evaluate to ensure revenue streams and accordingly allocate dedicated resources for a three to five year horizon. n JANUARY 2013

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

33

n COVER STORY | VIRTUALIZATION

Staying the Course Virtualization was a top priority last year. It continues to remain so for partners and CIOs alike. By Aritra Sarkhel

I

DC BELIEVES that virtualization is

going to be one of the fastest growing segments in the global software market. It grew 4.7 percent in the first half of 2012 to $167 billion (about Rs 9 lakh crore) and has one of the most positive growth rates among the primary market segments.

According to Sanchit Vir Gogia, Principal Analyst, IDC India, there has been a lot of traction in server virtualization while network virtualization is yet to reach that stage. “We had the application service provider (ASP) model back in 2000 which was a complete failure in India because it was a cloud model without the virtualization infrastructure. Today, virtualized infrastructure happens to be the backbone of everything that we do,” says Gogia.

Other analysts like AMI Partners stated in a study that, though virtualization as a technology is in its growing stages, the opportunities are plenty in the market across server, desktop and storage virtualization

in India. The reports have affirmed that need for virtualized infrastructure will increase exponentially in the forthcoming years and the size of this untapped market is considerable, presenting a huge growth potential for leading participants in the market.

Gartner analysts mentioned in the Hype Cycle Report 2012 that the price-sensitive Indian enterprises have recently shown a tendency to invest in transformational technologies like virtualization which offers a

$167bn Growth observed in the virtualization market in the first half of 2012

SOURCE: IDC

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

“We are going to deploy virtualization solutions in the next 12 months and have already identified some resources in our office and will invest in associated tools.”

YOGESH MEHTA, DIRECTOR, SYSWARE INFOTECH

34

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2013

BIG BUYERS v Builders and manufacturers

are going to deploy virtualization in a big way.

The manufacturing industry utilizes multiple servers for their IT workloads. So, virtualization will bring down the maintenance costs and recurring costs for those units.

v The BFSI segment will

be one of the largest adopters of virtualization due to the presence of huge datacenters and the willingness to consolidate their IT resources in terms of servers, appliances and storage devices.

v The new media needs

virtualization to scale very fast as they have applications running on a SAS-based model.

significant upside in terms of agility or productivity gains. This dynamic shift in business conditions is considered vital to drive business benefits.

MEETING DEMANDS Channelworld’s State of the Mart 2013 survey pointed out that around 22.8 percent of SIs in India would want to get into virtualization in 2013. Earlier some SIs stayed away from it for various reasons.

While the ever increasing costs of datacenter and IT infrastructure has made virtualization a necessity, the technology would bring in additional revenue for SIs and increase their portfolio of services.

The need for virtualization is imminent, says Yogesh Mehta, Director, Sysware Infotech. “Enterprises want to reduce their carbon footprint and recurring costs. They are going to consolidate things and put more and more apps on fewer servers in a virtualized environment,” he adds.

“Virtualization related projects deliver a lot of profitability at the end of the project cycle. These kinds of

SET FOR BIG GROWTH

Over the last three years, virtualization has been popular among partners.

47% 43%

27% 28%

26%

23%

n Currently Operating n Planning Entry

2011

2012

solutions will allow SIs to be more effective players. We could make good margins in these,” says Ravi Putta, Co-founder and Managing Director, Alliance Prosys.

Moreover, the SIs would benefit from the services opportunity if the virtualized environment positioned

2013

SOURCE: CIO RESEARCH

for the customer is managed by the partner themselves. Vineet Dahiya, Co-Founder and Executive Director, Info Axon Technologies, says “Whatever solutions we offer, we put it on a virtualized environment. The hidden benefit of such a proposition is that more the complexity of the custom-

Voice of Experience

“Consolidation will happen soon. It will be a huge market for SIs only if the partners are ready to educate the customer on how to add value to the project.”

RAVI PUTTA, CO-FOUNDER AND MANAGING DIRECTOR, ALLIANCE PROSYS

er’s infrastructure, the more play we get in terms of services.”

Mehta from Sysware is upbeat about the company’s plans for virtualization, mostly owing the changed mindset of the customer. “We are going to deploy virtualization solutions in the next 12 months and have already identified some resources in our office and will invest in associated tools.”

Similarly, the need for virtualized environments for a better consolidated infrastructure is something Dahiya from Info Axon is vouching for. “Virtualization holds the promise of consolidation and reducing cost for enterprises by bringing in efficiency. It will help us get new clients in terms of bigger enterprises as a long-term strategic investment.”

MAKING THE MOST OF IT But while these partners seem upbeat about such virtualized deployments’ in the coming year, SIs like Alliance Prosys, one of the largest players of virtualization in India, has already reaped the benefits. “We have done a virtualization implementation for a client they were looking for an entire infrastructure consolidation. We sized an entire storage solution along with the consolidation of their networks and ERP licenses and had put it on a virtualization mode in a datacentre. We built a complete datacentre solution for the client and gave them the entire virtualization piece scalable for the next 10 years,” says Putta.

Successful implementations like these surely send a positive signal to the SI community for many such implementations in 2013 but with a cautionary note. Many factors prohibit the widespread implementation of virtualization. Firstly, the partner needs to educate the customer about the impact of virtualized infrastructure. Until and unless the customer comprehends the functioning, virtualization will not see full fledged deployments. Putta sums it up by saying, “Consolidation will happen soon and it will be a huge market for SIs, but only if the partners are ready to educate the customer on how to add value to the project.” n JANUARY 2013

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

35

Thane Bharat Sahakari Bank needed to renew its processes.

Finacus Solutions suggested a revamp, and a revaluation of its exsiting vendor.

The move worked.

By Shantheri Mallaya

M

RAMESH GOVINDAN (L), CMD, Finacus’ recommendation made perfect business sense to SRIRAM DATE, CEO, Thane Bharat Sahakari Bank.

Photograph by KAPIL SHROFF

MAKING THE RIGHT CHOICE 36

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2013

UMBAI’S THANE Bharat Sahakari Bank might be a small co-operative banking institution at the outset, but they come across as an entity that spares no effort in getting best practices in technology to surround their internal and external infrastructure.

Proof: The banked adopted Core Banking Solution (CBS) and got a class datacenter, both in 2008.

Fast-forward to 2012; there still was no room for complacency. It was time to renew existing processes that were now almost five years old. Sriram Date, CEO, Thane Bharat Sahakari Bank says, “The hardware in our datacenter had started outliving its warranty and use. The cost of maintenance was going to be a burden as a result.” With one application on one server, a small scheduled corporation bank could not possibly justify or realize the activity volume, it felt. Also, more importantly, an expansion was around the corner. Date says, “With a network of more than 20 branches in Maharashtra, we were looking at 25 more outlets in other states too over the next couple of years.”

As the bank was thinking about these plans and issues, they turned to Finacus Solutions, their long-time consultant advisory. Finacus had earlier assisted them in the CBS implementation. The consultant astutely told them that they must consider a revamp of their infrastructure and use virtualization for optimization of

CASE STUDY  resources. Once the composition was decided, Finacus also suggested that the bank must ideally invite multiple OEMs and then take the best call.

Ramesh Govindan, MD, Finacus Solutions, says, “The existing datacenter was built on HP, but we counseled the bank that they must evaluate HP visà-vis other vendors and then decide.”

Snapshot Key parties: Finacus Solutions, Thane Bharat Sahakari Bank Location: Mumbai Cost of Project: $200,000

BEST MAN WINS

Implementation time: Seven months

The main challenge that the bank faced was to actually contemplate a cross over of vendors, in understanding which vendor had the best offerings that would suit their current and future requirement with a clear roadmap of five to six years. Transition, despite a 5 year old relationship with a competitive vendor such as HP, and also getting the optimal deal would be the crux of the new project that Thane Bharat had embarked upon.

Govindan says, “In April this year, IBM’s team came in and did a demonstration of their latest PureFlex Systems. We went to Avnet’s (IBM Partner) Bladecenter, tested the benchmarks on the model solution to see how much better PureFlex was in relation to others.” IBM’s Bladecenter apparently excelled. The solution seemed to reduce the cost and complexity, provide additional security and also reduce new application deployment times. IBM was offering the bank with a solution consisting of IBM PureFlex System, Flex System Manager (FSM), V7000 Storage, Flex Chassis, BladeCenter H, and Tape Library TS 3100. Govindan says, “IBM gave us two options while competition came up with only one. So, based on value for money, the low installation time among other features, we recommended IBM.” As a specialist banking consultant, the main limitation for the ISV was the fact that there were few fully integrated solutions in the market for the banking sector. “As a consultant, I had the responsibility of providing a dispassionate counsel to a long standing customer without prejudice to IBM or bias against HP. Moreover, there were no earlier benchmarks with PureFlex that could be easily studied. So, from a decision making and strategy perspective, I was

Main Vendor: IBM (PureFlex Systems)

Key People Involved: Sriram Date, CEO, Thane Bharat Sahakari Bank; Ramesh Govindan, CMD, Finacus Solutions Key Technologies: Datacenter revamp and virtualization

Challenges: Total transition from one vendor to another, no earlier benchmark or reference as the implementation was the first PureFlex adoption in the BFSI sector Post implementation ROI: Increased transaction load intake and performance of core systems three fold, expected payback period less than 5 years, savings in AMC

personally present for all key discussions,” says Govindan.

The fact that the bank was potentially the first banking customer for PureFlex in India was not really on anyone’s mind; all that mattered was the quality of deliverables. “We were not aware of the milestone because that was not priority. We were very particular about PureFlex matching our needs as an upwardly mobile banking institution,” says Date. Apart from the detailed POC, the fact they offered future proofing and that they were also open to discussions held them in good stead. What actually won the day in favor of IBM was another sub plot that had happened last year. When Thane Bharat effected the RTGS fund transfer process as per RBI guidelines, they had turned to IBM as the ‘vendor of confidence’, as suggested by RBI. “So, the decision making post the POC though was easier, it was not a cakewalk,” says Date

Finacus had the onus of convincing the bank that this was indeed the right transition, without forcefully imposing anything upon them. This evidently delayed the final decision making process by three months.

Finacus guided the bank in doing an audit of the latest features and finalize the deal. “Their presence helped in insisting on certain things that might not have not incurred to us like future proofing, most importantly,” adds Date.

Govindan clarifies, “From the lead generation process when we called in the OEMs, to the time we settled for IBM for deployment, we had a lead time of seven months.” Finacus further deployed two architects and a database administrator towards the project while IBM and Avnet also put in their respective technical personnel to complete the transition.

ROI EXPECTATION As is expected of all deployments, ROI is the key bone of contention.

The initial feeback on the PureFlex deployment has apparently been very good. “We have observed that the process of speed, transaction load intake and performance have gone up three fold,” says Govindan. The bank, which was incurring huge AMC costs earlier, post the PureFlex transition, saw a savings in the same. “We got state-of-the art technology from a reputed vendor with a promise of no further cost,” he says. The bank is also expecting a payback in less than five years.

From Finacus’ point of view, the company got exposed to a new solution that could broaden their vision and understanding of what could fit the requirements of customers in future. Govindan clarifies, “While we would never blindly recommend any solution without completely mapping customer processes, we do believe Thane Bharat Sahakari Bank has got the best fit in PureFlex, as against the HP infrastructure.”

Thane Bharat Sahakari Bank’s case is possibly the first converged infrastructure success story in the Indian BFSI that would possibly encourage more banks to try newer solutions with an open mind.  JANUARY 2013

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

37

I

T ALMOST goes without saying

that social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn are changing the way companies do business. And while social media has probably had the greatest impact on marketing, it is also changing the way companies recruit, communicate with customers and employees, and handle sensitive data.

As you look back at the past year, here are six ways social media has affected companies, as reported by CIOs and other C-level executives.

Advertising,

1 Marketing and PR

WAYS SOCIAL MEDIA AFFECTED THE ENTERPRISE IN

Social media is an inevitable part of our routine.

During the last year, how has this phenomenon engaged the enterprise—and its workings?

By Jennifer Lonoff Schiff 38

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2013

Illustration by Unnikrishnan A.V

2012

The area where social media has affected the biggest change is marketing, advertising and public relations. Instead of having to spend tens of thousands of dollars a year on traditional print, television or radio advertising— or even online banner ads—companies can now get their message across for free (at least in theory).

“Social media has revolutionized the way businesses do marketing,” says Dave Kerpen, the cofounder and CEO of Likeable Media, a social media and word of mouth marketing agency.

“With social platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, companies hyper-target their exact relevant audience,” as well as quickly adjust their messaging.

Research and

2 Development

Thanks to the rise of social media, it’s easier than ever to find people passionate about your company or brand—brand ambassadors. And social media savvy companies have been “leveraging these passionate ambassadors, involving them in product development and design decisions,” says Blake Cahill, president, Banyan Branch, a full-service social media agency.

Social media sites allow business “to receive feedback on new products and services prior to honing final product design at very low costs over traditional market research.

We’ve even had clients allow social communities to name products and features,” says Cahill. The result: Greater word of mouth as well as increased early adoption.

SOCIAL MEDIA | FEATURE  Internal/Employee

3 Communications

“Social media facilitates collabo collaboration,” says Paul Liu, CIO, Freeborders, a provider of information technology services. “This is especially important for companies with teams that are located across different regions. At Freeborders, we use Yammer [a private social network] to exchange ideas and collaborate with team members from the US, China and Europe.”

Adds Marcelo Costa, chief marketing officer for Neoris, a global business and IT consulting firm: “Using social media [can be] very useful in managing communication among employees. We have a LinkedIn group exclusively for employees. The group is managed by the employees and they are the ones who create content, share news and comment on industry trends.

Employees are also in the habit of checking into Foursquare when they arrive to work at one of our locations around the globe.” In addition, Neoris created its own hashtag and set up a corporate Instagram account so employees can easily share photos and content, which has created a greater sense of community.

service 4 Customer and CRM

Social media has shifted the emphasis away from the traditional call center to tracking customer sentiment online.

Indeed, many businesses, as well as companies providing third-party customer service, now refer to what once were known as call centers as contact centers. That’s because, thanks to sites like Facebook and Twitter (and blogs and forums and message boards), “customer service has to be acutely aware of current [online] conversations and be able to respond in a timely manner,” says Jim Harder, principal, Visual Data Group.

“For the everyday consumer, posting on a company’s Facebook wall or leaving them a tweet is the most immediate and convenient point of contact, and it’s all public,” says Molly Glover Gallatin, vice president of Marketing, Compass Labs, which specializes in knowledge-based marketing and advertising.

“If the feedback is negative, it can affect customer perception of your brand. If it is positive, it can serve as insight into what’s working. Either way, companies now need to monitor and respond to what consumers are saying about them—in real-time— across social networks and [include

Enterprise Social Tech’s Priority In APAC Responses to the latest Enterprise Social Survey done by IDC indicate that organisations in APAC (including the geographies ASEAN, Australasia and Korea) have placed greater investment priority on enterprise social technologies than on cloud computing, business intelligence and their core networks.

According to IDC analysts working on this Microsoft-sponsored survey—which involved the interview of 352 key executives from medium and large enterprises across the region—at present, 52 percent of organisations in the APAC have an enterprise social network in place, and 23 percent intend to have one set up in the next 18 months.

However, there are still some challenges that need to be overcome, they said.

“Security, compliance, governance and lack of control are cited as the most important inhibitors to implement enterprise social,” said Claus Mortensen, director, Emerging Technology Research, IDC Asia/Pacific. “But it is not viable for companies to resist adoption as end-users may turn to Internet-based, consumer grade, and potentially less secure options.”

Microsoft executives believe that the rise in social technology adoption, as indicated by the IDC’s Latest Enterprise Social Survey, is being driven by such “factors” as “a young workforce, early adoption of gadgets and social media as well as cultural trends such as relationship-focused business dealings.”

— By F.Y.Teng

them in their] CRM platform. Do this right,” she says, “and you will quickly pinpoint brand advocates and rapidly diffuse any fires.”

Recruiting

5 Employees

“A site like LinkedIn provides a more efficient way to screen for possible job applicants, as you can see if people have recommendations, endorsements, etc.,” says Tracy Petrucci, a social media and online marketing consultant, who also notes that many recruiters also look at candidates’ Twitter feeds and Facebook profiles to assess whether the hire will be a good fit.

However, companies need to tread carefully when using social media sites to vet candidate worthiness, says Philip Voluck, a managing partner at Kaufman Dolowich Voluck & Gonzo, who specializes in employment practices liability.

“Companies should be aware that by using social media to vet applicants, hiring managers can find information that is protected by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the latest tool against discrimination, the Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act (“GINA”), which prohibits companies from merely acquiring or being in possession of such information,” Voluck notes. Moreover, “characteristics protected under Title VII or GINA cannot be the basis of a hiring decision, and hiring managers may need to be able to substantiate the legitimacy of their screening process, particularly when it involves social media.”

Security and

6 Privacy

“With expanded social media usage, companies [have] exposed themselves to new security risks [because] corporate social media accounts, and the data [contained therein], are no longer company-owned,” explains Vidya Phalke, chief technology officer, MetricStream, which specializes in risk management and compliance. This introduces new security risks for companies—and new concerns for CIOs. “To combat these risks, companies must put in place strategic policies around social media risk and compliance,” and train staff properly, to protect sensitive data.  JANUARY 2013

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

39

n OPINION

SCOT FINNIE

Making a Prediction Five years is long time. In IT years, even longer. But it is important that predictions are made. It helps clear the haze, and tread forward. So, what’s in store for IT?

Scot Finnie is Computerworld’s editor-in-chief. You can contact him at sfinnie@ computerworld.com and follow him on Twitter @ ScotFinnie).

40

W

ITH COMPUTERWORLD celebrating its

45th birthday, I got to thinking: What will the state of IT be in five years? One of the things I’ve noticed about IT predictions, especially as long as five years out, is that they tend to be

two-dimensional, featuring forecasts in which the big trend of the day takes over and completely changes IT, often in earthshattering ways. But the future is rarely so clear-cut. Trends often interact and move things in unexpected directions.

A key force shaping IT today has roots in the early aughts, when corporations realized that it is possible to buy too much IT. Information technology can’t deliver endless productivity gains. As a result, IT budgets have been watched more closely, especially over the past five years. Five years from now, successful IT organizations won’t just be cost centers. (They also won’t be steeped in the “culture of no.”) While IT budgets are apt to grow near term, I don’t see any significant letup in the focus on limiting technology costs.

Another underlying trend is that technology is not just a tool that serves workers, like an IBM Selectric. Technology has become the lifeblood of business. It’s in every department and branch of most companies.

In many cases, it’s the key factor in differentiating a business from its competitors. It’s very difficult for a CIO and his or her team to make savvy, business-oriented recommendations about technology to every department in their organizations. One way or another, companies will need to find people who merge technical knowledge with an insider’s understanding of business needs.

As I see it, there are two types of IT. Five years from now, the underlying influences and enabling trends that are coming to the fore—like virtualization, cloud, Web-based apps, social, mobile, consumerization and outsourcing—will separate IT into two

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2013

chunks. The “central” part of IT will administer to the needs of the entire organization. Think of areas like security, the help desk, network and systems management, and at least some data center functions.

The other half of IT—think of it as data and applications—will be pushed out to line-of-business areas. Will embedded IT people be managing this technology?

Will technically oriented business people emerge to manage it? Both things will happen. It’s already beginning in forwardfocused companies.

Virtualization and cloud computing will underpin many of these applications.

But cloud isn’t a major force destined to dominate all aspects of IT. It’s a tool like any other; it will be harnessed for some applications but not others. Similarly, mobile isn’t a major new wave of IT; it’s a major new customer usage pattern making a short-term management demand of IT. What will the organizational structure of IT look like in 2017? Even at the speed of technology, change is gradual and asynchronous. When you’re talking about changes to business, different companies change in different ways.

At the heart of the question is a touchy subject: What happens to the CIO? My guess is that for some companies, the term CIO begins to disappear.

At the same time, other companies may embrace their CIOs, whose most important direct reports may be deputy CIOs who are partnered with specific lines of business.

Agree or disagree? Let me know what you think the future will bring. n

n EDITOR’S NOTE

Vijay Ramachandran

A Brave New Year

“Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so.”

— Noam Chomsky

H

OW DO you react to a world gone mad? What do

you do when your organization is stuck in the doldrums brought about by the lack of political will?

How do you manage cash flow as outstandings rise and sales cycles lengthen? These were critical questions for solution providers to ask of themselves in the year gone by.

The most significant trend in 2012 that impacted Indian enterprise IT was the slowdown in the economy. Obviously the brakes on growth did cause a crisis of confidence, but more than that it caused enterprises of all sizes to relook IT investments and their business impact.

As near-term business horizons shrank, multiple projects, fast rollouts and increasing change requests from business stressed IT teams.

While the rigor of justification increased, our research shows that IT spend was negatively affected in only about a fifth of mid-to large enterprises.

Sure, the fear of stumbling existed, however, a significant number of organizations hoped that the Darwinian nature of the slowdown would help take out competition, and thus took on highly strategic projects. It was heartening that more organizations worked on creating better customer connect

than those that focused primarily on cutting cost.

So will the slowdown cease to impact enterprises in 2013. Not really. More significantly with the threat of mid-term polls receding, I think we will see a lot more sanity return to India Inc. Though many enterprises will continue to tread with care, I feel that many more will open their pursestrings to make strategic investments—even in IT. This is the issue that captures the technologies that solution providers nationwide are betting on this year. Based on the State of the Mart 2013 survey (Page 26), these are BI & Analytics, Mobility, Private Cloud, Public Cloud, Security and Virtualization.

An interesting mix of technologies.

n Enterprises are looking to third party IT providers to fill in the talent and deadline gaps that exist.

However, based on my conversations with CIOs, technology providers and many of you, I believe that four trends will dominate the Indian enterprise IT landscape in 2013: Cloud Computing and Outsourcing, Mobility, and Analytics.

With efficiencies and effectiveness both coming into play, Indian organizations will get more agnostic about how they source and deliver their IT. The days of “my IT team knows best” are fast coming to a close, as enterprises look to third party IT providers to fill in the talent and deadline gaps that now exist.

Cloud and strategic outsourcing are going to gain ground this year, with IDG Research estimating that the capex to opex ratio will move to as high as 40:60 (this stood at 49:51 in 2011).

This is going to be as much about gaining new capabilities and improving organizational focus as it will be about reigning in operational cost. Very clearly

the private cloud rules in smaller enterprises too, with security and exit concerns still dominating the debate on the public cloud.

As organizational focus shifts from making the ‘product right’ to making the ‘right product’, analytics will play a key role in helping increase organizational productivity by making intelligence more visible. I also see embedded BI, in-memory analytics and visualization over smarter devices trending high.

I clearly see investments in enterprise mobility go through the roof, as organizations move from using apps and devices to increase productivity to gaining a competitive edge. With customers and employees demanding real-time information and senior management requiring access to business critical intelligence, most enterprises will put in place a mobility strategy that encompasses device management, app development and policies. What will clearly not happen in an Indian scenario is BYOD—enterprises tend to only trust devices that they own.

All these are areas for you to focus on and profit from this year. Do so.

Here’s wishing you a year filled with good fortune and happiness. n Vijay Ramachandran is the Editor-in-Chief of ChannelWorld. Contact him at vijay_ramachandran@idgindia.com

JANUARY 2013

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

1

FOR BREAKING NEWS, GO TO CHANNELWORLD.IN

Inside INDIAN CHANNELWORLD ■ JANUARY 2013

■ NEWS DIGEST 04 Oracle’s Stamp of Approval |

Some of SAP’s software products are now certified for use with Oracle’s Database Appliance, which is a streamlined version of its Exadata machine.

04 Seeking The Right Fit |

Juniper Networks acquired Contrail Systems, a startup that makes controllers for software-defined networks, for $176 million in cash and stock.

05 Will Microsoft Really Retire Windows XP In 2014? | Some

security researchers wonder if Microsoft will indeed retire Windows XP in 2014, as the vendor has announced. After that date, it will no longer distribute official security updates or bug fixes.

■ OPINION

01 Editorial: Vijay Ramachandran says that Indian organizations will get more agnostic about how they source and deliver their IT. The days of “my IT team knows best” are fast coming to a close, as enterprises look to third party IT providers to fill in the talent and deadline gaps that now exist.

40 Scot Finnie: A key force shaping IT today has roots in the early aughts, when corporations realized that it is possible to buy too much IT. Information technology can’t deliver endless productivity gains. As a result, IT budgets have been watched more closely, especially over the past five years.

Five years from now, successful IT organizations won’t just be cost centers.

■ THE GRILL

13 Hubert Yoshida, Vice

President and Chief Technology Officer, Hitachi Data Systems, foresees a definite influence of the evolving tech landscape on CIOs and channel partners.

■ COVER STORY

18 Place Your Bets

06 A Change In Strategy At Cisco | Cisco, the quintessential IT

The new year is a time when vendors launch their technology roadmap for the next 12 months, and enterprise channel partners jostle to readjust, realign and reshape their solution and services portfolio. Here are the six enterprise technologies that will gain maximum traction in 2013. Enterprise channel partners yearning for continued success need to place their bets now. Also read: State of the Mart 2013 survey.

hardware maker, wants you to start thinking about it as software and services company.

■ NEWS ANALYSIS 07 Looking for Answers |

Oracle’s Exadata, cloud revenues and surprisingly strong European results make fodder for discussion.

■ CASE STUDY

36 Making The Right Choice

13 Cover Design by UNNIKRISHNAN A.V

TOP TECHNOLOGIES FOR 2013

Thane Bharat Sahakari Bank needed to renew its processes.

Finacus Solutions, their trusted consultant, suggested a revamp, and a revaluation of its exsiting vendor. The move worked.

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

■ FAST TRACK

09 Periathambi Thangavel, Managing Director, Origin ITFS, says that focus on three

CHANNELWORLD.IN Publisher, President & CEO Louis D’Mello Associate Publishers Rupesh Sreedharan, Sudhir Argula ■ EDITORIAL

16 primary aspects has proved to be the perfect success mantra for his organization.

12 Rajeev Nair, Managing Director, Stallion Systems and Solutions, believes that his journey into RFID was predestined.

Nair says that the industry is all set to bloom.

■ ON RECORD

16 Dharmendra Kumar, President, India and SAARC, Aruba Networks, talks about why BYOD is the single largest focus for the company.

■ FEATURE

Six Ways Social Media Affected The Enterprise 38

SOCIAL MEDIA: Social media has changed

the way companies work. As you look back at the past year, here are six ways it affected organizations.

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 ■ SALES

& MARKETING

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ADVERTISERS’ INDEX Emerson Network Power India Pvt. Ltd . . . . . . . BC Epson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . IFC

HP- IPG . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .IBC NetApp India Marketing & Services Pvt Ltd. . . 10 & 11

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WHAT’S WITHIN

PAGE 05: A New Record In the Storage Space PAGE 05: Will Microsoft Really Retire Windows XP? PAGE 06: A Change In Strategy At Cisco PAGE 07: Looking For Answers

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SOFTWARE

Oracle’s Stamp of Approval

S

OME OF SAP’s soft-

ware products are now certified for use with Oracle’s Database Appliance, which is essentially a streamlined version of its Exadata machine aimed at SMBs. All SAP products based on versions 7.0 and higher of the vendor’s NetWeaver middleware can be used with the database appliance, which was released in September 2011, according to an official Oracle blog post. The products must also be certified for Oracle database version 11g Release 2.

4

Single-node or RAC (Real Application Clusters) deployments are supported, but not Oracle’s RAC One Node option.

SAP application instances can’t actually be run on the Database Appliances, however. Instead, they must be installed on separate machines, with an Ethernet connection for data exchange with the Appliance, according to an Oracle white paper.

This falls in line with the three-tier architecture common to SAP, and provides customers with some advantages, according to Oracle.

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2013

Only SAP’s database administration tools and SAP Central Services are supported to run on Oracle’s appliance, according to the white paper.

The Database Appliance runs most of the software components associated with Exadata, which is aimed at large enterprises. The appliance’s hardware components include two servers, 192GB of RAM, 24 cores, 12TB of raw disk storage and 292GB of solid-state disk. List price is $50,000 (about Rs 27 lakh), with Oracle database licenses sold separately.

Oracle’s announcement comes some months after SAP introduced a version of its HANA in-memory database for SMBs, HANA Edge.

SAP is hoping to displace Oracle databases over time from within its installed base, with key work ongoing to support running SAP ERP software on HANA. With HANA, SAP also seems to be moving away from the three-tier architecture model, recently announcing that a software update for the platform will provide native application server capabilities.

HANA is sold in appliance form using hardware from a number of vendors, including IBM, HewlettPackard, Cisco and Dell.

—By Chris Kanaracus

ACQUISITION

Seeking The Right Fit Juniper Networks acquired Contrail Systems, a startup that makes controllers for softwaredefined networks, for $176 million (Rs 959 crore) in cash and stock.

Contrail was founded early this year by officials from Google, Cisco, Juniper and Aruba. CEO Ankur Singla served as CTO and vice president of engineering at Aruba Networks. CTO Kireeti Kompella had been CTO and Chief Architect of the Junos operating

system software at Juniper.

Juniper was on the hunt for an SDN controller.

Earlier this year, Executive Vice President Bob Muglia said Juniper is working with other industry players on an open source-based controller for SDNs that would be an alternative to proprietary offerings from VMware and Cisco.

— By Jim Duffy

-

STORAGE

A New Record In the Storage Space

D

“End users continue to capacity shipped invest in storage infraby vendors worldstructures despite persiswide surpassed 7 tent concerns surrounding exabytes for the first time global and regional econoin a quarter, according to mies,” Conner said in IDC’s Worldwide Quara statement. terly Disk Storage Systems In past quarters this Tracker report. year, total storage capacThe total disk storage ity shipped (which incapacity shipped cludes internal by vendors in disk drives and the third quarexternal arThe year-on-year ter reached 7.1 ray systems) growth recorded in exabytes or 7,100 ranged from 6.1 the total disk storage petabytes, repreexabytes to 6.6 capacity shipped senting 24.4 perexabytes per by vendors in the cent year-overquarter. third quarter. year growth, “The growth according to IDC. rates aren’t 60 percent like Driving the double-digit they were seeing three or growth in storage was defive, but there are headmand for multi-protocol winds out there we’re still storage systems, such as moving past,” said Eric Fibre Channel and EthernetSheppard, research direcbased storage combined in tor of Storage Systems one box, as well as a strong for IDC. demand for upper mid-range For example, storage and high-end storage syssales are facing a matems, said Liz Conner, a sejor economic downturn nior research analyst at IDC. in Eastern Europe and ISK STORAGE

24.4%

SOURCE: IDC

elsewhere. Additionally, technologies such as data deduplication, thin provisioning, solid-state drives (SSDs) and automated tiering has significantly increased storage utilization rates, which should have decreased the raw demand for storage capacity.

For the quarter, the total disk storage systems market posted just under $7.9 billion (Rs 43,000 crore) in revenues, representing 3.7 percent growth from the prior year’s third quarter.

IDC’s report also showed sales of just external disk storage systems in the third quarter totaled just over $5.9 billion (about Rs 32,00 crore), indicating 3.3 percent year-over-year growth.

EMC maintained its lead in the external disk storage systems market with 30 percent revenue share in the third quarter, followed

by NetApp and IBM, which were tied for with 11.9 percent and 11.7 percent market share, respectively. Hitachi and HP finished the quarter in a statistical tie for the fourth position with 9.7percent market shares each.

Will Microsoft Really Retire Windows XP in April, 2014? of course, but they will be vulnerable to attacks exploiting weaknesses in the operating system that are discovered after that date.

Michael Cherry, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft, conjured up this scenario: What happens if “a security problem with XP suddenly causes massive problems on the Internet, such as a massive [denial-of-service]

Dell announced the appointment of Suresh Vaswani as president of Dell Services. He previously led Dell Services’ application and BPO line of business. In his new role, he will report to chairman and CEO Michael Dell, and will be responsible for developing and delivering end-to-end IT services and business solutions for global corporations, state and local governments.

LifeSize, a division of Logitech, announced the appointment of Ingram Micro as its National Technology Distributor for India. Ingram Micro will distribute LifeSize’s HD video collaboration products and solutions.

Sunil Sapra has been appointed as the country manager for India at KEMP Technologies. He will be responsible for channel efforts, ensuring high availability and traffic delivery to Indian organizations.

— By Lucas Mearian

OPERATING SYSTEM

Some security researchers wonder if Microsoft will indeed retire Windows XP on April 8, 2014, as the vendor has announced.

After that date, it will no longer distribute official security updates or bug fixes for the ancient operating system—though it will offer them to enterprises that pay for high-priced support contracts.

PCs still running XP won’t just suddenly stop working,

Short Takes

WAIT AND WATCH Microsoft is expected to pull the plug in 2014.

problem?” That could become a worldwide tech crisis, and “in this scenario,” he said, “I believe Microsoft would have to do the right thing and issue a fix.”

Others disagree. “I think they have to draw a line in the

sand,” said Gartner analyst John Pescatore. “They’ve supported XP longer than anything else, so they’d be pretty clean from the moral end.”

Pescatore said the only scenario he could envision in which Microsoft extended XP’s life would involve business considerations, not security concerns: The company might continue to support XP as a way of holding on to customers still using the operating system rather than risk losing more market share.

—By Gregg Keizer

JANUARY 2013

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

5

STRATEGY

A Change In Strategy At Cisco

C

ISCO, THE quintes-

sential IT hardware maker, wants you to start thinking about it as software and services company.

CEO John Chambers told analysts that the switch/ router manufacturer that is also heavily invested in video and server gear that the company plans to double its revenues from software over the next five years from $6 billion (about Rs 33,000 crore) to $12 billion (about Rs 65,000 crore), according to a Reuters report.

Even so, the software will become just 25 percent of the company’s revenues, which Chambers says will grow steadily at 5 percent to 7 percent per year long-term.

The majority of engineering done at Cisco is already software engineering, producing results that are bundled with hardware, according to slides accompanying his remarks to financial analysts.

Other software offerings are wrapped up with custom chips and services that result in intelligent IP networks, the slides say. The game plan calls for expanding software across the Cisco portfolio of switching, routing, cloud, data center, mobility, video, services and security, they say.

This includes its IOS software, its software defined network initiative, its Nexus OS, Star OS, WebEx, Call Manager, IronPort and ScanSafe platforms, according to the presentation.

6

Chambers says the company will move from its SDN toward an applicationcentric intelligent network that can harvest data from networks, analyze it and create policies based on that analysis in order to improve network security and application performance.

That doesn’t mean Cisco is abandoning its hardware past, just that software and the intelligence it brings to networks will play a stronger role.

That’s necessary to bring about a change in how the company defines IT, from the study, design, development, application, implementation support or management of computer-based

Around

TheWorld Fourth in a Month For Cisco

Cisco announced its intent to acquire BroadHop, a developer of network management servers and software for carriers.

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. The acquisition is Cisco’s fourth in the past month.

BroadHop’s products provide policy control and service management for mobile and fixed carrier networks.

Cisco says it will help offer carrier customers more flexible control and personalization of their networks and services, and boost service

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2013

information systems to the same definition to something else by substituting the word “network” for “computer”.

This new model of IT is based on two major parts: Applications and a unified infrastructure, according to slides accompanying his presentation. Applications will include those developed by

revenue, by enabling end users to purchase customized premium service packages from service providers.

Jim Duffy

CA Technologies Appoints Global Boss

CA Technologies, has appointed IT services industry veteran, Michael Gregoire, as CEO, effective January 7, 2013.

The decision was made by the company’s Board of Directors, and was unanimous. He has also been elected to the Board.

Gregoire succeeds William McCracken, who has held the reins since January 2010 and at the age of 70, is retiring, effective March 31, 2013.

McCracken will also leave CA’s Board on January 7.

Nermin Bajric

third parties as well as traditional business processes and enterprise applications, applications for vertical markets and Cisco video and collaboration platforms.

The unified infrastructure applications will ride on unified data centers, core networking, and security.

— By Tim Greene

Blue Coat to Acquire Crossbeam Systems

Blue Coat Systems announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Crossbeam Systems.

“With Crossbeam, Blue Coat gains a best-in-class support infrastructure and a high performing platform that scales to meet the needs of even the most complex enterprise IT environments,” said Greg Clark, CEO, Blue Coat Systems.

ChannelWorld Bureau

n NEWS ANALYSIS

Looking for Answers

Oracle’s Exadata, cloud revenues and surprisingly strong European results make fodder for discussion.

By Chris Kanaracus

O

RACLE’S SECOND-

quarter earnings announcement beat expectations in some respects, but also raised a number of interesting and in some cases, unanswered questions.

Here’s a look.

Is Exadata carrying the day for Oracle’s “engineered systems?” Oracle has struggled to grow top-line revenue for the hardware business it gained through the Sun acquisition, while voicing a constant mantra that it’s focused on higher-margin “engineered systems” like the Exadata database machine. And indeed, hardware systems product revenues for Q2 fell 23 percent to $734 million (about Rs 4000 crore).

During a conference call, co-president Mark Hurd said Oracle had sold more than 700 engineered systems in the quarter, but he didn’t provide a breakdown, leaving open the question of whether Exadata, the first such machine Oracle introduced, is carrying the bulk of sales.

Hurd also cited wins for the Exalogic application server box and Exalytics analytic appliance, but didn’t give numbers. In addition, he didn’t break out how many of those 700 sales were for the lowercost Oracle Database Appliance, which is aimed at smaller companies.

What’s selling in Fusion Applications? Oracle spent years and billions

of dollars to develop its next-generation Fusion Applications, which can be deployed both on-premises and in Oracle’s cloud.

Oracle has touted that it has 100 Fusion products for sale now, spread over a number of functional pillars, such as financials, CRM and HCM (human capital management).

On a conference call, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said “the company is seeing rapid growth in Fusion across-the-board in CRM and in HCM.” It’s also beating rival cloud HCM vendor Workday “in the majority of deals,” Ellison said. Oracle is also having success with Fusion CRM against Salesforce.com, according to Hurd.

But co-president and CFO Safra Catz said “most of the [Fusion] pillars are doing very well.” That means some, perhaps ERP among them, aren’t catching fire just yet. Oracle is likely not worried about that, however, given the size of its E-Business Suite, JD Edwards and PeopleSoft ERP installed base.

How will Oracle manage the shift to cloud revenues? Oracle has begun reporting new software license revenues and cloud subscription revenues as a combined total. In Q2, the take was up 17 percent to about $2.4 billion (about Rs 13,200 crore). During the conference call, co-president and CFO Safra Catz revealed that cloud sales accounted for $230 million ( about Rs 1300 crore) of that.

The subscription model is common among cloud vendors but also a departure from Oracle’s comfort zone, which has long con-

JANUARY 2013

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

7

HARDWARE REMAINS A GREY AREA

O

8

RACLE has reported that net income jumped 18 percent to $2.6 billion (about Rs 14,300 crore) while revenue rose three percent to $9.1 billion (about Rs 50,000 crore)for the second quarter, but the company’s hardware revenue continued to show weakness.

Hardware systems product revenues for the quarter fell 23 percent to $734 million ( about Rs 4000 crore), and hardware systems support revenues dropped six percent to $587 million (about Rs 3200 crore).

New software license sales and cloud software subscriptions were up 17 percent to roughly $2.4 billion in the

quarter. Oracle launched a wide variety of cloud services this year, including its Fusion Applications, a PaaS and the Oracle Social Network.

Software license updates and product support revenues, which are highly profitable for Oracle and other software vendors, grew seven percent.

“Applications, middleware and database all had doubledigit growth in new software license and cloud subscriptions, with applications leading the pack with growth of over 30 percent,” co-president Mark Hurd said in a statement.

Oracle executives have repeatedly attempted to soften expectations for the hardware

sisted of large up-front perpetual license sales, following by predictable annual maintenance payments.

With cloud subscriptions, support is baked into the per-user, per-month pricing. But Oracle’s traditional maintenance business is its lifeblood, carrying extremely high profit margins and taking up nearly half of all revenue in Q2.

While Oracle will clearly seek to maintain some type of parity between cloud subscription pricing and on-premises licensing in order to preserve its margins, making the shift could still be tricky.

When asked by an analyst whether Oracle’s onpremises software maintenance revenues will take a hit as cloud sales rise, Catz stood firm, saying the cloud is “just not going to have a material impact.”

“Theoretically, [regular maintenance revenues] might not grow as quickly,” she added. “But at this point, we’ve got a long

way to go. So we expect that number to grow and our SaaS number to grow simultaneously at much higher percentages because it’s a smaller base.” Oracle is also enjoying extremely high renewal rates for maintenance, Catz said.

When will Oracle database 12c arrive and what will be the impact? Ellison had previously said that Oracle’s next-generation database, version 12c, would be arriving in the market either late this year or early next.

But at the OpenWorld conference a few months ago, Oracle announced that the release date would be sometime in “calendar year 2013,” a wording that gives Oracle some additional breathing room if required.

During the conference call, Ellison discussed 12c but didn’t firm up a launch date, instead focusing on extolling the release’s new features, calling it the first database “designed for the cloud.”

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2013

business it gained through the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, saying the company is more focused on specialized systems like Exadata, which combine servers and other components with Oracle software, rather than compete in the commodity hardware market.

“Sun has proven to be one of the most strategic and profitable acquisitions we have ever made,” Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said in a statement released with the earnings announcement. “Sun technology enabled Oracle to become a leader in the highly profitable engineered system segment of the hardware business.”

—By Chris Kanaracus

That’s because Oracle has incorporated the concept of multitenancy, an architectural approach long used in SaaS (software as a service), where many customers share a single application instance with their data kept separate. This gives SaaS vendors the ability to apply upgrades and patches to all of them at once, among other benefits.

“We’ve moved the multitenancy feature out of the application and down into the database layer, which gives people much better capability, much better security,” Ellison said. “So we think it will greatly enhance our own cloud offering. It will help all of the cloud companies that depend on the Oracle database. And it will be very, very attractive to our enterprise customers.”

However, while Oracle itself may move quickly to 12c for its cloud operations, history has shown that many Oracle database customers tend to wait until

the second release within a given cycle, preferring to feel comfortable that all the kinks have been worked out. Typically, Oracle has issued those second database releases a couple of years after the initial launch.

What do Oracle’s Q2 results mean for the global economy and other software vendors?

Oracle reported doubledigit growth in all regions, with sales strong even in Europe, which has been racked by economic crisis for some time.

Hurd was asked about the seeming anomaly, but his answer didn’t seem to bear good news for the software sector in general.

About a year ago, Oracle started hiring aggressively in Europe, and as a result, has simply generated more leads, according to Hurd.

Deals may still be difficult to close, but Oracle is simply engaged in more of them, so the numbers went up, he said.

That said, the market will get another telling indicator of IT spending health in Europe next month, when Oracle rival SAP is expected to report its fourth-quarter and year-end results.

Will Oracle make a big acquisition? Oracle is well known for its long history of acquisitions, both in terms of big-bang deals like the Sun purchase as well as an extensive string of smaller, niche buys.

If Oracle wants to make a Sun-level splash sometime soon, it certainly has the means, ending the second quarter with about $34 billion (about Rs 1.9 lakh crore) in cash and marketable securities. 

n FAST TRACK

REVENUE SPLIT

Origin ITFS

25%

25%

E – Governance

IT Infrastructure Solution

30%

20%

Distribution Business

IT Managed Services

Photograph by R. CHANDROO

SOURCE: ORIGIN ITFS

Snapshot

Founded: 1998

Headquarters: Chennai Revenue for 2010-11: Rs 60.7 crore

W

E MUST always

change, renew, rejuvenate ourselves; otherwise we harden,” said the German writer, artist and politician, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

For Periathambi Thangavel, managing director, Origin ITFS, this belief has seeped through to the core of his organization.

Origin ITFS’s present success has come from hard-fought battles.

The SI has, through the course of its growth and rise, faced fierce competition from small traders at one end, and large corporations at the other. They have ensured that they offer a portfolio of services to match customer demands. “Our USP lies in timely delivery of service that is within the stipulated

Revenue for 2011-12: Rs 72.5 crore Key business activities: Hardware solutions, managed services, infrastructure solutions Key Principals: Lenovo, Acer, HP, Sony, Delta India, Konica Minolta, Sagem Morpho, Fujitsu No of employees: 615 Key Executives: D.MuthukumarCOO; S.Gopalakrishnan-CFO Branches: Mumbai, Madurai, Hyderabad, Pondicherry Website: www.originitfs.com budget, and a consistent quality of service. Very few people can manage all the three consitently. Even in cases where cost overshoots the price, we have not gone back to the customer for an increase,” says Thangavel.

Initially, they started out with renting and maintenance of PCs. Over time they changed and improved their service. Today, Origin ITFS covers all aspects of IT infrastructure that includes communications to onsite hardware, systems support, as well as plug-and-play. “As our clients reach grew, we simultaneously ensured that support was available to them across locations.

This helped consolidate our panIndia presence,” says Thangavel.

The company’s partnership with Lenovo has helped immensely.

Certain projects like the one with Electronic Corporation of Tamil Nadu Limited (ELCOT) have them leapfrog into the big league with big orders. The SI bagged a big order from ELCOT in 2008 for the computerization of government offices and schools in Tamil Nadu, supplying close to 50,000 systems of Lenovo.

Presently, with a multi-vertical approach the SI’s focusing on plug-and-play, onsite support to large IT companies, marketing and support for high-tech noncomputer products.

Going forward the organization will be involved in upcoming e-Gov projects across the country and will be seen raising their on-site and WSP support levels. “We want to strengthen our presence and services in other parts of India with higher services,” states Thangavel. n —Aritra Sarkhel

A focus on three primary aspects has proved to be Thanagavel, MD, Origin ITFS’ success mantra.

JANUARY 2013

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9

n FAST TRACK

REVENUE SPLIT

Stallion Systems and Solutions

30%

Channels and Distribution

70%

Solutions and Direct Business

P H O T O b y A J AY

SOURCE: STALLION SYSTEMS AND SOLUTIONS

Snapshot Founded: 1996 Headquarters: Kochi

W

HEN RAJEEV Nair,

MD of Kochibased Stallion Systems and Solutions started the company in 1996, he clearly knew he would be a pioneer in the niche domain of bar coding. Even as a B.Tech student in Chandigarh the early 90s, Nair showed signs of being a go-getter when he was picked by an American company to be a part of its core team that would develop barcode applications. Nair says, “My journey into RFID was pre-destined” Nair’s conscious decision to come back to his home state and start-off on his own has helped him carve a niche. In the last five years particularly, the company has witnessed tremendous interest in RFID related

Branches: New Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Tirupur Revenue 2010 -11: Rs 25 Crore Revenue 2011 -12: Rs 35 Crore Revenue 2012 -13 (Projected): Rs 50 Crore Employees: 300 Key Principals: Datamax O’Neil, Datalogic ADC, Shenzhen Promatic Secuirty Systems Key Technologies: Barcode, RFID, EAS Website: www.stallionglobal.com

technology. “RFID is much sought after. Some path breaking work has been done in terms of generating applications in this domain over the

last couple of years and we are reaping the benefits,” says Nair.

Having a finger in the vertical pie has ensured that Stallion Systems has offices across the country, and it is also an oft-mentioned name in the Middle East. The company services about 7000 customers across these markets. Nair reels off names like Big Bazaar, Wal-Mart, and Pantaloon as customers. Stallion has achieved this scale with the right mix of solutions and volumes business. Nair also admits that going forward the solutions business will continue to take precedence for the company. Having manufacturing outlets in Bangalore, Mumbai and Kochi, Stallion makes its own consumables, integrates it with hardware, and tops up the software (by developing its own applications) in order to present a complete package to its customers. “We are also reputed for our after sales service,” states Nair.

Stallion Systems has been observing that the Government is a potentially big buyer, citing that a recent local Government tender had atleast Rs 1000 crore as the bar coding component. Nair says, “We will be tapping the Governments in order to augment our vertical focus.” Stallion also has plans to foray into international markets like Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and pockets of Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Muscat in the coming year. n —Shantheri Mallaya

Rajeev Nair, MD, Stallion Systems and Solutions, believes that his journey into RFID was predestined.

12

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2013

Dossier Name: Hubert Yoshida Designation: VP and CTO Company: Hitachi Data Systems Current Role: He is responsible for defining the technical direction of HDS and further leads the company’s effort to help customers address their Data Life Cycle requirements to address compliance, governance and operational risk issues.

Photograph by SHAILESH

Career Graph: Prior to joining HDS in 1997, Yoshida spent 25 years with IBM’s storage division, where he held management roles in hardware performance, software development and product management.

n THE GRILL

Hubert Yoshida,

VP and CTO, HDS, foresees a definite influence of the evolving tech landscape on CIOs and channel partners.

Big data’s perceived to be the next big thing by most vendors but it is far from mainstream adoption in Indian organizations.

Do you have a strategy to stay ahead?

When people talk about big data they often jump to analytics. But one needs to first build the infrastructure to support that volume, velocity and variety of data. HDS builds this infrastructure, a

lot of it around virtualization which is executed dynamically. Infrastructure also means converged solutions as provisioning needs to be done quickly.

Our strategy remains infrastructure, content, and then the information bit.

We believe that we have an edge as a part of Hitachi Limited. Verticals determine the information required. Hi-

tachi is in transportation, construction, power and healthcare to name a few.

From their standpoint and vertical focus, they have developed programs and applications to extract information. They are doing big data analytics, and we are building the infrastructure foundation.

Big data today is mostly built around Hadoop, analytics, data warehouse, datamarts etc. We are implementing applications based on SAP HANA. We also support Hadoop.

According to Gartner the market leader, EMC, has a market share nearly four times that of HDS (at number five) in 2Q12. How would you bridge that massive gap? EMC does not have servers. We provide converged solutions with common management and the customers see the great value in this strategy. We have always believed in the concept of one management platform for all servers that are managed from one stack. We offer an easy single pane of management to the user now through vCentre. Those are key advantages over the current Vblock and VCE type solutions which need separate management for each element of the stack.

‘File and content’ is big plus as no vendor has that capability. We have objectbased storage and our content store is unique too. When you compare it with Centera, they might have the first mover advantage but it is not a content-based JANUARY 2013

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

13

n THE GRILL | HUBERT YOSHIDA dent the market mainly, because of unified management.

The others are like proprietary management. HDS server in this environment is the only x86 which does LPARs. The blades have PCIE slots to plug in flash cache. Server plus integrated management gives us a competitive advantage.

We don’t believe in just acquiring technology to fill gaps.

It has to be integrated across our ‘one platform for all data’ policy and everything needs to be integrated into management.

store. Our ‘Open Standards’ approach supports more vendors. Organizations looking for more efficiencies, and hence see the value in our enterprise story.

In the last quarter (3Q12), we were among select few vendors that grew, which reconfirms the market acceptance of our strategy around virtualization and file and content.

HP (VirtualSystems), IBM (Puresystems), Dell (vstart) battle in the consolidated architecture or converged infrastructure space. Isn’t HDS’ Unified Compute Platform (UCP) a late entrant? We will definitely 14

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2013

Vendor lock-in is a given for converged infrastructure. What route will CIOs embrace in future—‘best of breed’ solutions or ‘one throat to choke’ vendor?

Demands of technologies like big data mean that the organizations cannot afford to micro manage multiple vendors.

Hence, they will be comfortable with ‘one throat to choke’ or maybe a dual vendor strategy. The vendors providing a whole stack of servers, storage and file management systems will be the preferred choice. We are in good position to be that vendor.

Has the role of an enterprise systems integrator changed with the advent of unified computing, cloud and big data? Yes. There has been phenomenal adoption of our approach and technologies by systems integrators in India. Some SIs are looking for alternatives. For large projects, partners reduce their cash burn through our efficient technologies which adds significant business value to customers and themselves. Many SIs conduct outsourcing/out-tasking activities. We have an efficient model like managed storage solutions where partners can provide private cloud infrastructure on a consumption-based business model.

SIs will convert to service providers.

The tier-2 and tier-3 partners will have a bigger portfolio like file content systems and UCP along with Hitachi services, compared to only storage before. With Hitachi cloud program, the resellers are becoming cloud service providers as they leverage our cloud delivery to service the SMB segment and become more profitable.

Dell’s embellishing its enterprise portfolio through the acquisitions of Sonicwall, Quest and Force 10. Are you aggressive

about mergers and acquisitions too? Not much. The problem with acquiring a tech company is different from, lets say, acquiring a bank. Assets are available in the bank, but for a tech acquisition, the asset is the mindset. You need to retain the intellect.

We worked with BlueArc for five years with sales and product roadmap.

At the right time we acquired the company without losing any key technology people. We don’t believe in just acquiring technology to fill gaps. It has to be integrated across our ‘one platform for all data’ vision, and everything needs to be integrated into management.

Will mergers and acquisitions spill over to storage industry too? It was the dynamic provisioning companies that were being acquired earlier. But more flash vendors are being acquired this year. There will be M&As, but we prefer to be more organic to stay at the peak of our core competence. We are the only, true R&D company left in the storage industry.

That’s why we can build flash controllers from scratch. There will be some consolidation in the storage market.

HDS recently launched industry’s first unified storage product that provides enterprise-class virtualization for all data types.

What is the roadmap for storage virtualization? We now have the opportunity to virtualize across boxes, not just vertical virtualization, but horizontal virtualization too. We can have LUN (logical unit number) that can spread across multiple systems through dynamic provisioning in a vertical way. But we can do it horizontally. We will take virtualization to another dimension.

Do you think that only handuful of the big, multi-technology companies will be left in five years? It maybe the other way round. Some big companies will not be around. There would be more start ups. This is a very technology intensive industry. Technology innovation and its reliability has been a high point for us. Analysts and competitors appreciate our technology, eventhough they may criticize our marketing at times.

For partners, customers and employees, we are an easy company to work with. 

n OPINION

GERALD KHOURY

A Change Maker The IT model is in for an overhaul.

Gone are the days where partnerships were a mainstay in a business to get IT up and running.

It’s time for leadership to usher in a new model and a new era.

Dr.Gerald Khoury is the managing director of GK Strategic, working in the areas of IT innovation and strategy.

He consults to the private and public sectors throughout Asia-Pacific.

W

E HAVE all seen the articles: Treating our

internal business stakeholders as customers is out; the supplier/customer model is dead. The new black is ‘business as a partner’. The idea behind this is that the supplier/customer

model is too reactionary and puts our IT department in a subservient position. It did serve a purpose. The supplier/customer model was a reaction to the bad old days of IT where business departments were made to feel subservient to the IT department.

Then, the business realised that IT wasn’t really that unfathomable, and IT realised that it better start being nice to the people who are actually paying for its services. But it soon discovered that the new supplier/customer model has its own limitations—it easily leads to an adversarial relationship.

The new ‘partnership’ model has been proposed as an improvement on the current model: One that leads to greater value for the business, and allows the IT group to take a more proactive position.

I’m not convinced.

The premise for this shift is that IT is now so important and pervasive that the supplier/customer model is no longer adequate. This is akin to Bill Gates in his heyday saying, “Microsoft is now so powerful and influential that we’re going to give away our success and allow all our customers to come in as partners.” In reality, asking your customers to come in as partners is basically asking for a bailout.

It’s not a sign of success; it’s a sign of failure. When a business is doing well, potential partners come to them asking to join in the spoils, and they pay a handsome fee for the privilege. Look at it this way: If the leader of another department came to you and said, “We don’t want to do this by ourselves anymore, let’s be partners”, what would you think?

Eventually, ‘partners’ are going to smell the coffee and realise that they have received the short straw. Then, they’ll be asking themselves: “If I need to do the thinking around IT strategy and innovation, why do I need an internal IT department at all? I could engage an external services provider who can work on their own and let me get back to my real business.”

Ultimately, the key problem with the partnership model is that it’s an admission that we really only know how to run IT as a commodity. The good news is that there is a far better model to which the strategic CIO will aspire.

IT is more important and pervasive than ever. However, instead of looking to shift our role from supplier to partner, we need to elevate our role to IT leader. From a business perspective, this is the only model that will lead to a higher level of value for the organisation as a whole.

Through visionary thinking and the development and communication of an effective IT strategy, we can reshape our IT services to better handle the requirements of the new technological and business landscape. In the same way that most large IT vendors evolve, we can move our focus from operations through to higher value consulting and leadership services. New sourcing models such as cloud computing can help to facilitate this transition.

Focus on partnership and IT will be seen as irrelevant. No guts, no glory. Focus on leadership, however, and IT will provide ongoing value and be seen as an essential element of the organisation’s success. n JANUARY 2013

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

15

Photograph by SUJITH

than 100 percent year-onyear. We added a lot more channel partners, including the top players like Wipro, AGC, IBM, and Dimension Data apart from many tier-2 partners. So the last 18 months have been about partner education and customer touch points.

ON RECORD n

Dharmendra Kumar,

President, India and SAARC, Aruba Networks, talks about why BYOD is the single largest focus for the company.

By Radhika Nallayam

16

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2013

You had noteworthy stints at Cisco and Force10. Was the role at Aruba equally challenging when you came onboard eighteen months ago?

KUMAR: Aruba was a very exciting assignment because it more or less has the market position in terms of mind share of a Cisco. But in terms of country operations, it was something like Force 10, and had to be built up. Aruba has a good connect with partners and customers. Wireless is a lesser understood technology compared to wired LAN, security etc. So, IT managers are keen to listen.

I came in with a threepronged deliverable agenda.

Increasing the footprint in the country was one of the important goals for us.

We, more than doubled our headcount, and our revenues have increased more

But vendors generally build partnerships with most of these tier-1 players at an early stage‌ KUMAR: We already had partnerships with some of these players, but the quantum of engagements has increased in the last 18 months. As we grew our team size, the number of transactions with these partners increased. In fact, we are part of the business plan of one of these tier-1 partners and they are very selective in terms of where they position other WLANs. So their primary offering is around Aruba.

If you look at the wireless LAN market, though you are placed second, you are far behind the top player Cisco in terms of market share.

Why such a huge gap?

KUMAR: In order to understand the market better, we will have to dwell deep into the usage patterns.

There are companies who buy couple of access points (APs) and are not really bothered about the management part. Cisco plays in that segment, but Aruba does not. Then, there is the SMB and mid-market which typically buys 30 to 50 APs. It is a very price/ performance metrics driven market. The gating criterion is pricing. That’s not our sweet spot, but Cisco again has an offering for this segment. The enterprise-class custom-

DHARMENDRA KUMAR | ON RECORD n ers, on the other hand, are looking at exhaustive and feature-rich wireless LAN solutions. These customers are very demanding on security, performance and application awareness. That is the market segment that Aruba plays in, and that is where we are most relevant.

And in that segment, if you do a technology versus technology comparison, we will be better placed compared to Cisco. Our focus is to move away from the centralized hardwarecentric access controllers and APs to a controller-less architecture.

While that explains the difference in market share, how exactly do you differentiate yourself

24.8% YoY growth recorded in the enterprise WLAN market in 2Q12.

SOURCE; IDC

focusing on building our partner community. Wireless requires more handholding and therefore you need knowledgeable and committed business partners. And that is the reason why we spent a lot of time enabling partners.

If you go out in the market and compare the customer experience on both the channels (Cisco and Aru-

This is something that the network has not been doing so far, because it was primarily wired.

So where exactly are you selling BYOD? KUMAR: Wherever good network is being sold today!

It will become a way of building access networks.

Client profiles have gone wireless and the preferred medium for devices is wireless. BYOD will happen everywhere. It’s just a matter of the first few executions and the rest will follow.

First step towards BYOD is matching your access network with the medium on which your client device prefers to connect, which is wireless today. Somehow the mental comfort for an

humble feature-rich WLAN experience to a role-based access which extends to enterprise mobility. It’s not a small compartment of solution, but something that allows us to position our entire portfolio. BYOD will be the biggest driver for serious wireless LAN implementations. And we have graduated from being a pure play wireless company to an enterprise mobility player to address this growing market.

What is your roadmap for 2013 in India?

KUMAR: We will continue to focus on the same areas and work with our partners to enhance their solution skills. There will be a slight restructure that will hap-

If you go out in the market and compare the customer experience on both the channels (Cisco and Aruba), you would get a far better satisfaction rating on the Aruba channel.” from players like Cisco?

KUMAR: Cisco has been around for almost 15 years in India, but we have had only two and half years of serious operation. Wireless LAN took a big fillip when 802.11n was introduced.

Now BYOD makes wireless more relevant for organizations. This is the time when customers are looking at newer vendors. Cisco has been very good at building wired networks. When it comes to wireless, neither Cisco nor anyone else has done anything different in terms of transitioning customers from wired networks to BYOD. That’s where Aruba becomes important today. Aruba will never grow to be a 700 person operation in India; Cisco is. In India, we are

ba), you would get a far better satisfaction rating on the Aruba channel.

Most of the vendors do not seem to have an all-inclusive BYOD story. What’s your strategy for this market?

KUMAR: Aruba’s wireless BYOD story is far more feature-rich as compared to anybody else in the industry today. If you look at BYOD, which is partially network intelligence and partially mobile device management (MDM), the network intelligence piece is far more important than MDM. The bigger challenge in BYOD is that, today when one user brings multiple devices,the network has to deliver a seamless experience, without compromising security.

IT manager is that, ‘if I have done my wired network, then I have my basics right’.

The more complex the BYOD, the better we are because of the intelligence that we bring in the access networks. We also have our ClearPass NAC solution and security capabilities to make the story more comprehensive. That makes our solution slightly complex to deliver at times. That’s why we are focused on improving the quality of channel in the market.

BYOD seems to be your single largest focus as of now. Aren’t you putting all your eggs in one basket?

KUMAR: BYOD is not a solution set, it is a driver. It is a boundaryless experience, which can start from a

pen with respect to our GTM. Our volume business will be driven mainly through our VADs, while our solutions partners will work directly with the Aruba team to drive our high-touch business. Education sector still happens to be the largest market for us, apart from enterprise, healthcare and government.

But is education sector a big buyer of BYOD solutions?

KUMAR: Students are the most performance hungry gadget users. As a result, the IT decision makers in the this segment are the most demanding customers we have. We have at least seven education institutions that have more than 1000 APs in the campus. There clearly is a huge demand for BYOD. n

JANUARY 2013

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

17

n COVER STORY

PLACE YOUR

BETS Six technologies will be the favored

by India Inc. in 2013. Are enterprise channel partners ready?

By Team ChannelWorld

18

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2013

n COVER STORY | BI & ANALYTICS

Perfect Analysis

Analytics and its usage is on the rise. Are partners equipped to ride this wave? By Yogesh Gupta

E

providers are keen to explore the colossal business opportunities in business intelligence and analytics this year. Channelworld’s State of the MArt 2013 survey findings are a clear indicator. More than 78 percent of respondents (channel partners) expect IT spend to grow in areas of BI and analytics in 2013.

This statistic is similar to mobility and only second to security among the most preferred technologies in terms of IT spends by Indian organizations.

According to IDC, worldwide revenues for business analytics market in 2011 grew 14.1 percent year-on-year.

NTERPRISE SOLUTION

Of the three primary segments, data warehousing platform software segment grew the fastest in 2011 at 15.2 percent year-on-year, followed by the analytic applications segment at 13.3 percent. BI and analytic tools segment grew 13.2 percent.

“There’s a lot of unstructured data in terms of volume and velocity. The variety directly impacts businesses.

The need to sort data has become vital as the pressure on businesses mount amidst diminishing margins in such a competitive world,” says Sanchit Vir Gogia, Principal Analyst, IDC India. Hence the need for BI and analytics becomes imperative, he adds.

Voice of Experience

“IT governance is becoming a crucial issue for organizations as it involves IT asset management, IT accounting and extends to functions like procurement. These IT-enabled services need to be effectively enhanced by proper use of BI tools.”

WHAT’S NEW FOR PARTNERS? Mumbai-based AGS Sundyne Technologies has been deploying customized BI solutions across retail and telecom for the past couple of years. “The installation of POS software included an entire managed services project with POS infrastructure at a leading retail conglomerate. Hence the BI solution was developed by our team as an interface over existing OEM softwares to help the customer stay ahead of competition,” says Sandeep Gandhi, MD, AGS Sundyne Technologies.

BI and analytics contributes between five and ten percent of overall revenues, AGS Sundyne will target IT/ ITeS and Government in 2013 for these technologies. “The contribution is not much as of now but it is a good margin domain,” says Gandhi.

VDA Infosolutions, an EMC partner, is engaged in putting a business plan in place to explore data analytics with Greenplum (now EMC) portfolio. “We expect tier-1 organizations to look seriously at data analytics solutions apart from cloud,” says Ashutosh Deuskar, Director, VDA Infosolutions.

Coimbatore-based eCAPS Computers too has identified BI and analytics as a new focus technology for the new year. The saturation of hardware/ software services market and dwindling margins is the key reason, says Partheeban, Director, eCAPS Computers, to look at BI as a new area. The lower end of the market has become highly competitive as there will be no or minimal buying of entry level solutions for next three to five years, he adds.

“As we are focused on datacenter deployments around servers and storage, analytics makes perfect business

$51bn Expected business analytics market size between 201216 with CAGR of 9.8 percent

SANDEEP GANDHI, MD, AGS SUNDYNE TECHNOLOGIES SOURCE: IDC

20

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2013

BIG BUYERS

ANALYTICS IS A RISING STAR

Most CIOs will implement analytics in the next 12 months.

v Customer-segment analysis

and network analysis across telcos becomes important as they offer value added services.

Will implement in one year

23% 23%

Will implement in six months

v Any customer facing

industry which demands customer loyalty like durables and retail. IT/ ITeS is another promising vertical.

v Use of analytics in the BFSI

sector’s maturing at a quick pace. Network analysis is also vital for the insurance sector.

v Retail is an important

segment as large format players are targeting Indian consumer market to gain a foothold.

sense as the data growth needs to be stored effectively and intelligently at the enterprise end,” says Deuskar.

Beyond traditional analytics and warehouse tools, businesses are feeling the impact of social analytics, which does not mean the twitters and facebooks of the world. “The fork in the road is happening. Many traditional systems integrators already deploy

31%

19%

19%

30%

Upgrading/Refining

13% Currently implementing

Not interested

17%

n Analytics (not reporting) n Reporting (using BI tools)

13% 12%

SOURCE: CIO RESEARCH

BI and enterprise data warehousing tools. Social analytics using traditional toolset of BI to understand newer data types at customer end is a great opportunity to look forward for partners.” says Gogia. eCAPS is in talks with potential BI vendors. “The plan is to deep sell BI and analytics to the existing customers and then educate the new customers,” says Partheeban.

“We will be upgrading existing technical manpower for our foray into analytics and also recruit few resources,” adds Deuskar of VDA.

“Many traditional SIs already deploy BI and enterprise data warehousing solutions.

Social analytics using traditional BI toolset to understand newer data types at the customer end is a great opportunity to look forward for partners.”

SANCHIT VIR GOGIA, PRINCIPAL ANALYST, IDC INDIA

THE EARLY ADOPTERS “Analytics is aggressively for any customer facing industry which demands customer loyalty. Retail is an important segment as large format players are positioning their footprint in India,” says Gogia.

“IT governance is becoming a crucial issue for organizations which involves IT asset management, IT accounting, and extends to functions like procurement details. These IT-enabled services need to be effectively enhanced by proper use of BI tools,” says Gandhi.

BFSI and IT/ITeS are the early adopters of analytics for VDA Infosolutions. “We are in talks with at least four customers in the western region,” says Deuskar.

Customer segment analysis and network analysis across telecom is picking up as price becomes important as a value added service offering. Use of analytics is popular across BFSI and especially network analysis for insurance sector.

BI and analytics are moving to mobile devices but at a slow pace says Gogia. “In terms of priority for enterprises to introduce cross platforms, BI is not first as volume for its usage is not very huge. CRM and ERP are the first ones,” he reasons.

“This will be a huge market in the coming years. But the earlier we explore this trend the better it is for us,” says Deuskar. n JANUARY 2013

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

21

n COVER STORY | MOBILITY

Making An Impact The easy availability of smartphones and bandwidth will increase enterprise mobility adoption. By Aritra Sarkhel

M

OBILITY HAS been

a much abused word over the last couple of years. A lot of talk has been generated around it among enterprise players but come 2013, all that talk will slowly give way to widespread enterprise mobility deployments by channel partners across India.

“Mobility is on the agenda and strategy of eight out of 10 CIOs in India, stretching across sectors and company sizes. Everyone is looking at enterprise mobility to extend value to their existing applications investment,” says Sunil Padmanabhan, Research, Director Gartner.

THE NEED FOR MOBILITY Reports from around the globe seem to justify the positive vibes in 2013 for enterprise mobility. According to a McKinsey report, titled Online and upcoming: The Internet’s Impact, half of the Internet population in India will be using the mobile phone as a device to access the internet.

On the technology front, IDC finds the increasing adoption of mobility and cloud computing stimulating the demand for mobile application platforms, integration and messaging solutions and cloud-enabling middleware or appliances. It expects a CAGR of 15 percent for third platform IT spending (includes mobility among other technologies), with cumulative growth (between 2013-20) of 70.4 percent.

While Gartner notes that, in India the importance of ‘anytime anywhere’ accessibility to enterprise information is placed high on the list. This is being looked upon as an opportunity for enterprises to make the right decisions based on information from enterprise applications like CRM, ERP or HCM solutions. “All these are drivers for business leaders and CIOs to extend the value of their application to mobility,”says Padmanabhan.

22

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2013

The need to put more of the mission critical enterprise applications on a mobile platform has prompted legacy IT vendors like Microsoft, IBM and Oracle to create mobility offerings for their respective enterprise application product suits. While the vendors alone cannot proliferate growth in 2013, there are a number of collaborations between the vendors and channel partner community to create a partnercentric mobility solution. Therefore, by adopting such a strategy the engagement between customers, partners and employees will be profound.

Padmanabhan expects around 25 to 30 percent of users to access enterprise applications through a smartphone or tablet. “Enterprise application leaders are compelled to revisit their mobility strategy despite all concerns for security and BYOD.” According to Channelworld’s State of the Mart 2013 survey, mobility accounted for the highest traction rate (33 percent) as a technology that SIs in India would most want to explore in 2013.

It will lead to the extension of business value to the end-customer by pro-

70%

Cumulative growth expected in third platform IT spending, which includes mobility, between 2013-20 SOURCE: IDC

viding mobile access to remote workers like the sales force, collection teams and distribution agents of large retailers.

For channel partners, mobility is going to be about the accessibility of enterprise information to the remote workers. In the process, SIs would get an integration opportunity in their enterprise and SMB customer deployment and further, an opportunity to maximise margins.

“With margins going down drastically in other solutions because of a recession ridden business environment, a growing business opportunity like mobility, apart from cloud and virtualization, can actually help the SIs make good margins”, says Ramachandra Suresh, Vice President, Navigator Systems.

Manish Tandon, Managing Director, Questa Software, a Mumbai-based SI and Microsoft cloud partner, has met

“Mobility is on the agenda and strategy of eight out of 10 CIOs in India across various sectors and company sizes. Everyone is looking at enterprise mobility to extend the value of their existing applications investment.”

SUNIL PADMANABHAN, RESEARCH DIRECTOR, GARTNER

MOBILITY IS SURGING AHEAD

CIOs have already planned or plan to get into mobility in the next 12 months.

19%

v Manufacturing will deploy

numerous enterprise mobility related solutions to increase scalability, productivity of workforce, add new clients and improve the speed at which the information reaches the customers.

Will implement in one year

16% Will implement in six months

26% Currently implementing

31% Upgrading/Refining

7% Not interested

mands of customers on the go, has led to a surge in mobility related solutions for SIs in India,” says Tandon.

Another SI, Zephyr Info Solutions too seems pretty upbeat. Mobility is still at a nascent stage in India but

Voice of Experience

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

v BFSI and retail sectors

will look at having mobility related solutions to meet the demand of the customers in real time.

v New media would be

SOURCE: CIO RESEARCH

client demand by implementing every Microsoft cloud solution on a mobile platform. “We need to pay heed to such a need as infrastructure costs in the country has increased manifold.

The accessibility of mobility and de-

BIG BUYERS

“Any enterprise would want to move into mobility. Certain parameters like the ease of deployment, security, managing backup, network complexity, and device management will open up a lot of avenues for SIs.” AJIT JHA, TECHNICAL DIRECTOR, ZEPHYR INFO SOLUTIONS

another big buyer. Without the presence of mobility related solutions, the new age media industry would be only half effective. The availability of smartphones and tablets has improved dissemination of information to a larger number of people.

from the partner’s perspective, Ajit Jha Zephyr’s Technical Director says that, going forward, the technology will be a profitable venture. “Any enterprise would want to move into mobility.

Certain parameters like the ease of deployments, security, managing backup, network complexity, and device management will open up a lot of avenues for the SIs,” he explains.

Interestingly, Zephyr Systems is also looking at exploring a collaboration with players like Mobile Iron for enterprise mobility related solutions for large Indian enterprises and SMBs. But this will happen only when the market reaches maturity.

Jha concurs with the Gartner foresight that around 30 percent mobile application development will be observed year-on-year.

“Enterprise mobility will be a standard operating procedure for enterprises, which will provide scalability and speed in terms of real time information and translate to large scale adoption,” he says. n JANUARY 2013

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

23

n COVER STORY | PRIVATE CLOUD

Leading the Charge Private cloud remains the go-to choice for most organizations. Even with the advent of the hybrid model, nothing much is expected to change. By Shantheri Mallaya

A

S WE usher

in the new year, IT will continue to see cloud as a discussion among the CIOs and the service provider networks alike. Research firm IDC put the Indian cloud market to be around $535m (about Rs 3000 crore) in 2011, with a growth of more than 70 percent expected for 2012 and almost 50 percent forecast for the next three years. So, the cloud computing market is a space that is fast maturing and seeing many new entrants with a broad range of investments and solutions taking key roles in the cloud ecosystem. Similarly, Gartner also believes that the Indian enterprise

is inclined towards the private cloud vis-à-vis the public cloud. Biswajeet Mahapatra, Research Director, Gartner India, says, “Organizations tend to retain their existing infrastructure; so solution providers would serve well to build a strong business case and strategy for the cloud—be it public or private.”

Mahapatra further says that the bigger players such as Wipro, TCS, HCL and Cognizant will continue to do well in 2013, while mid-level players like Mind Tree, and smaller players such as Allied Digital would continue to make inroads with their offerings. A robust service provider

Voice of Experience

“Devices such as smartphones and laptops are increasingly procloud. In the future solutions are not going to be CPU-centric, and that elevates the discussion to the next level.”

KETAN SHAH, DIRECTOR, KRUTI COMP INDIA 24

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2013

BIG BUYERS v Large Indian enterprises

particularly Government and BFSI will see a huge ROI in the private cloud due to the fear of breach of security of critical data.

v Telcos and service providers

will pitch the private cloud to their customers as well as their partners.

v SIs will deep dive to

existing customers and pitch all the cloud models to them. It is expected that the hybrid model will be the preferred mode of cloud adoption for large and small enterprises alike.

and SI ecosystem would take the cause of cloud computing further, he estimates.

While the market is quite gung-ho, there are solution providers such as Future Soft Solutions in New Delhi that are realistic about the cloud wave. Vipul Datta, CEO, Futuresoft Solutions, believes that the cloud should be pitched with caution because the idea is to optimize the opex model for the customer. He states, “Customers are still looking at low cost solutions, which may not necessarily be derived out of cloud-based solutions but yes, the cloud has its ROI, given a set of variables – number of users, scale of infrastructure etc.” Futuresoft Solutions is looked at hosted applications (ERP, CRM) and a hybrid pitch for its clientele, again,

70% Expected growth in the Indian cloud market for 2012

SOURCE: IDC

“Going forward, the hybrid model will make maximum sense to the Indian enterprise. More customers are headed this way.”

BISWAJEET MAHAPATRA, RESEARCH DIRECTOR, GARTNER INDIA

with a very tight eye on the annual outflow for the customer, which Datta estimates, in some cases, can get as high as Rs 70 lakh.

On the other hand, Dharmesh Anjaria, Executive Director, Dynacons Solutions, says cloud computing is out of the hype cycle, and sooner or later the Indian enterprise is going to head the cloud computing way and make their IT infrastructure very light by offloading as much to the cloud.

Dynacons is expecting a 20 percent increase in its cloud business the

coming fiscal. The company is going all out to promote private cloud.

Anjaria makes a valid observation when he says, “VDI and server virtualization are already getting quite a bit of attention. So what we are doing now is to have discussions with existing customers and then dive deep into selling the cloud.” Dynacons is approaching existing customers with the pros and cons of all the three cloud models—public, private and hybrid. Dynacons also believes that in a slow thickening market, it is vital to

PRIVATE CLOUD PREFERRED

Majority of CIOs will implement/refine private clouds in the next 12 months.

18% Will Implement in one year

14% Will Implement in six months

22% Currently Implementing

29% Upgrading/ Refining

16% Not Interested SOURCE: CIO RESEARCH

align with the right vendors in order to make sense. The company has tied up with IBM for SmartCloud Computing. Anjaria foresees challenges in the form of recession and the capex freeze in enterprise spend. He says, “Given the current scenario, solution providers must be able to suggest the right opex-capex model to customers in order to reach out.”

Gartner’s Mahapatra believes that the standard 69:31 ratio of opex to capex (both public and private setups) would work the coming year too, and organizations will increasingly look at pay-per-use models, with a dash of the subscription model. Like Futuresoft’s Datta, Mahapatra observed, “This is because SLAs between customers and service providers do not insist on availability and speed of performance clauses. So, customers find it viable to opt for pay-per-use rather than give in a bulk amount for ‘n’ number of mail boxes and so on, unless they have exceptionally limited usage levels.”

However, Ketan Shah, Director of Bangalore-based Kruti Comp India, says as far as the cloud is concerned, it is still a wait and watch game. The company is looking at the cloud scenario with some caution, while at the same time building its virtualization and video conferencing capabilities to service organizations with as many as two to five locations. Shah says, “Devices such as smartphones and laptops are increasingly pro-cloud.

In the future solutions are not going to be CPU-centric, and that elevates the discussion to the next level.” Kruti Comp estimates that the second half of 2013 will help the company get clarity, and galvanize its cloud strategy.

The common observation is that solution providers have to look at establishing ROI very seriously if they have to win customer confidence about the cloud. Says Datta of Futuresoft, “It is about utilizing budgets and keeping licensing costs low.”

Going forward, Mahapatra says that the hybrid model will make maximum sense to the Indian enterprise. More customers are headed this way. n JANUARY 2013

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

25

ChannelWorld STATE OF THE MART

n COVER STORY STRATEGIC INSIGHTS FOR SOLUTION PROVIDERS | COVER PRICE Rs.50

SURVEY METHODOLOGY

T

HE fourth edition of ChannelWorld State of the Mart 2013 survey was conducted online in the month of November and December 2012.

The 170 respondents from unique companies included systems integrators, value added resellers (VARs) and independent software vendors (ISVs) across India. These are enterprise channel partners who deploy solutions across SMBs and large enterprises.

The survey was filled by C-Level executives (CEO/ Director)/decision makers at partner organizations. About 59 percent of the respondents are systems integrators, while 22 percent are VARs. 26

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2013

Sixty eight percent of the respondents (partner organizations) have individual revenues (estimated for FY 12) below Rs 50 crore. Sixteen percent of the respondents expect a turnover of Rs 50 crore to Rs 100 crore, while the remaining 16 percent would touch revenues of over Rs 100 crore at the end of this fiscal.

The responses to the survey were demographically spread across three major regions of India. While 38 percent emerged from western India (mainly Mumbai, Pune, Ahmedabad and Surat); more than 35 percent of respondents were based out of south India (Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad and

Cochin). Nearly 24 percent of the responses came from north India (New Delhi, Noida and Gurgaon). The remaining responses came from the eastern part of India from cities like Kolkata and Bhubaneshwar. There were also sparse responses from channel partners located in smaller cities and states like Dehradun, Goa, Jammu, Ludhiana, Ambala, Coimbatore, Vadodara etc.

All responses of the survey were gathered using a secure server with all the individual data kept confidential. The degree of error is +/-6.3 percent at a 90 percent confidence level.

2013 COVER STORY n

Partner Roadmap

Better margins tops the partner wish list for 2013.

What is the Single Biggest Challenge You Expect to Face in 2013?

Which Sector’s IT Spend do You Expect to Grow in 2013?

35%

24% Government

18% BFSI

16%

25%

Manufacturing (includes Auto, Pharma, FMCG, etc)

14%

21%

Retail

6% Services (includes Tourism, Education, Logistics, etc)

9%

6%

8%

IT/BPO

3% Telecom Others

Staffing

Expanding Product/Service Portfolio

Expanding Customer Base

Growing Revenue

Pressure on Margins

10% Infrastructure and Utilities (Real Estate, Oil and Gas, Power etc.)

2%

2% Others

Is the Wishlist for 2013 Any Different from 2012?

48% 44%

What Will be Your Top Go-to-Market Strategy for 2013?

30%

Offer more services on a recurring revenue model Introduce new technologies to existing customer base

26%

18%

Help customers leverage technology to innovate in their industry

n 2013 n 2012

6%

27% 24%

3% 3%

Upgrade and refresh customers’ hardware infrastructure

2%

Others

5% 4%

Others

6% 5%

Increase in Market Development Funds

15%

Lower customers’ cost

6%

Improved Implementation & Technical Support

9% 9%

Help customers attract and retain new customers

Better Training & Certification programs

Generating Sales Leads

Better Margins

12% Improve customers’ business process

1/3rd

of channel partners believe pressure on margins will be the biggest challenge in 2013

ChannelWorld STATE OF THE MART

n COVER STORY STRATEGIC INSIGHTS FOR SOLUTION PROVIDERS | COVER PRICE Rs.50

Technology Direction

Cloud, mobility, and security will be the favored technologies.

STAY THE SAME*

Networking

49%

17%

34%

Security

81%

2%

17%

Storage

73%

8%

19%

Business Application Software

63%

9%

28%

Hardware Solutions

29%

35%

36%

Business Intelligence & Analytics

78%

8%

14%

Virtualization

78%

5%

19%

Private Cloud-Based Solutions

74%

7%

19%

Public Cloud-Based Solutions

76%

3%

21%

Mobility

78%

5%

17%

Big Data

63%

7%

30%

Social Media and Collaboration

68%

5%

27%

13% 14%

25% 26%

29% 30%

n 2013 n 2012

Hardware

Software

Services

Consulting Others

*Represents the number of channel partners who believe this.

Which Technologies Do You Intend to Explore in the Next 12 months?

33%

Mobility

30% Security

30%

Private Cloud-Based Solutions

25%

Public Cloud-Based Solutions

23%

Virtualization

22%

Big Data

22%

Business Application Software

22%

Storage

15%

Social Media and Collaboration SDN 28

9% INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2013

13% 12%

DECREASE*

36%

INCREASE*

TECHNOLOGY

Where is Your Revenue Coming From?

41%

How will the IT spend change for following technologies in 2013?

33%

of channel partners will get into mobility-based solutions in 2013

2013 COVER STORY n

Business Outlook

Partners are largely optimistic about business growth in 2013.

How Do You Foresee Your Business Environment in 2013?

25%

What Will be Your Company’s Risk Appetite in 2013?

30%

11% 3%

13%

1% 2% 9%

2%

58% 46% n Challenging n Very challenging n Neutral

n Easy n Very easy n Can't say

n High n Neutral n Could be Higher

In 2013, Do You Expect Your Business to...

n Low n Very High

Are Partners Open to More Risk This Year?

52% 46% n 2013 n 2012

29%

17%

22% 9% High

11%

72%

n Grow

n Stay the same

n Slow down

Neutral

5%

Low

46%

of the channel partners predict a high risk appetite for 2013

7% 2% Very High

n COVER STORY | PUBLIC CLOUD

Good Stride Forward Although it isn’t as popular as the private cloud model, the public cloud is set for big growth. By Radhika Nallayam

P

UBLIC CLOUD has always been approached with nervousness and skepticism mostly owing to the neverending issues around security, data protection and tricky SLAs. Even after years of discussions, testing and implementation, this model elicits some degree of brooding.

Solution providers, however, seem to have spotted clear opportunities.

More than 25 percent of the respondents of ChannelWorld’s State of the Mart 2013 survey wouldn’t otherwise reveal their intent to get into this market. While private cloud is considered to be the market where the actual money lies, public cloud seems to be equally promising, especially for tier-2 solution providers.

The reason isn’t vague: Public cloud adoption in the country is driven largely by the SMB segment, which has always been a sweetspot for such solution providers. Though the large enterprises are inclined towards private cloud implementations, they do fall back on the public model for certain specific requirements. This makes the public cloud market an interesting space to bet on.

The solution providers on the hand are ready to play their cards right this year. And for serious players, the options are plenty. One can choose to be a cloud broker/consultant, or a cloud service provider or resell a vendor’s cloud offerings.

Hyderabad-based Choice Solutions for instance has found multiple profitable models. The SI offers consulting services to its customers who want to migrate to any type of cloud. This required very significant investments to develop the right consulting capabilities and experienced manpower.

At the same time, the company recently decided to try its hand at offering cloud services. To begin with, Choice Solutions will be offering DR and back-up as a service to its existing SMB customers. “We are planning to offer these services only to SMBs initially, because the enterprises have totally different service level expectations. Besides, they are more interested in working with large solution providers. And if we take it to the existing customers, we don’t have to rebuild the trust factor. So our idea is to build

32%

Growth forecast for the public cloud services market in India in 2012 SOURCE: GARTNER

a sizeable customer base among SMBs, before we move to enterprise class customers,” says Jagannath Kallakurchi, CEO and MD, Choice Solutions.

In his experience, both consulting and services are far more profitable than product or solution selling, and that’s where he sees the future.

For Delhi-based CI Infotech, public cloud is a game-changer. The company is already offering Iaas and various Saas applications to its existing and new customers. Instead of building its own infrastructure, the SI has partnered with a host to offer these services. While most of the Saas offerings are the SI’s own IP, CI Infotech is also planning to partner with ISVs to develop more verticalspecific applications.

The SI has an interesting mix of SMBs and enterprises as its customers for the public cloud. “We can’t really equate the cloud to something like a

CHARTING THE RIGHT COURSE Analysts believe that the market will certainly grow, though the growth rate would remain unchanged as compared to 2012. Biswajeet Mahapatra, Research Director, Gartner, says, “The public cloud market is not going to witness any great change, and the growth rate will remain almost the same. The SMB sector will continue to be the largest driver for this market, especially services industries like education, hospitality, etc.” He believes that 2013 will see a lot of custom-made and vertical specific solutions being offered on a public cloud model, which will further propel adoption.

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“If the observations of industry gurus are anything to go by, we can evidently see the bright future of public cloud.”

IRVINDER SINGH, DIRECTOR, CI INFOTECH

BIG BUYERS

Voice of Experience

v SMB sector will continue to drive cloud adoption in 2013.

v Companies will look for

vertical specific solutions on public cloud.

v Services-based industries like education and hospitality will propel growth in public cloud.

dot-com boom, but the market is definitely evolving. Customers, whether it’s SMBs or enterprises, want to understand benefits of opex models.

And if the observations by industry gurus are anything to go by, we can evidently see a bright future for public cloud,” says Irvinder Singh, Director, CI Infotech.

For security experts like Chennaibased Digital Track Solutions, public cloud has always been a great prospective market. After testing the market by offering managed security services to its existing customers, the company is now all set to offer security solutions on pay-as-yougo model. “We will be setting up infrastructure to host the security infrastructure for our customers.

“Remember, you are expected to showcase really matured consulting and services capabilities, and you will be constantly compared with large players in the industry” JAGANNATH KALLAKURCHI, CEO & MD, CHOICE SOLUTIONS

We have seen increasing demand from our existing customers for a service-based model like this,” says ST Muneer Ahamed, MD, Digital Track Solutions.

SET FOR GRADUAL GROWTH Public cloud will slowly pace itself up among Indian CIOs in the next 12 months.

13% Will implement in one year

12% Will implement in six months

12% Currently implementing

14% Upgrading/Refining

48% Not interested SOURCE: CIO RESEARCH

THINK BEFORE MOVING Experienced players, however, advise to be watchful about each move.

Unlike a product delivery or solution implementation, public cloud is not likely to give overnight returns and one should have a well thought out blueprint for atleast two to three years.

As a manpower intensive business model, the public cloud calls for extraordinary efforts around developing services capabilities, and above all a service-oriented culture within the organization. One might be required to spend surplus time understanding the overall IT vision of the customer and also in proving your credentials.

“Remember, you are expected to showcase really matured consulting and services capabilities and you will be constantly compared with large players in the industry,” says Kallakurchi of Choice Solutions. For a product-oriented company, this means a lot of reshuffle and make-over. n JANUARY 2013

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n COVER STORY | SECURITY

Making IT a Safe Bet

Partners need to adopt new-age security practices. The opportunities appear huge. By Yogesh Gupta

T

HE PROLIFERATION of devices, virtualization woes, APTs, among others have ensured that security ranks right at the top of a CIO’s to do list.

More than 80 percent of the respondents (enterprise solution providers) in ChannelWorld’s State of The Mart 2013 survey expect IT spends to increase in 2013 for security solutions.

“In 2013, investment in security will surpass the current year’s spending with the Government being actively involved through increased regulations,” says Ekta Aggarwal, Program Manager, Information & Communication Technologies (ICT), Frost & Sullivan.

Besides, traditional verticals like BFSI, service providers and government, sectors like retail, IT/ITeS, manufac-

turing and defence are expected to invest heavily in security, she added.

More than half of the respondents are already dabbling in the security domain and an additional one-third intend to explore this space in 2013.

“Advances in technologies such as cloud and next-gen networks will challenge enterprise architectures running on legacy systems. Investments to counter cyber threats will increase as more enterprises opt for Web-based platforms,” says Aggarwal.

THE CHANGED LANDSCAPE According to Sanchit Vir Gogia, Principal Analyst, IDC India, CIOs have been orchestrating services as they now look at public, private clouds, hosting and application heavy

Voice of Experience

“There is a fair amount of implementation and services attached with security. There is more opportunity than just better margins in the security domain around SIEM, encryption and log management.”

server farms. They are managing the changed environment which is complex with stricter SLAs. “Enterprises want to deploy cloud resources to fuel the growth but keep the operational cost low. Security is not a traditional offering but is sourced from datacenter federation, encryption etc,” he says.

Chennai-based Fourth Dimension Technologies has been implementing security solutions for the past five years. “Security has gone beyond firewall and anti-virus. SIEM, authentication and log management are the areas where we think adoption will happen as more devices invade the enterprise environment,” says N. Jagannath, CEO, Fourth Dimension Technologies. “The demand has increased lately due to the security concerns around BYOD and cloud. From an end-point security, DLP is important.”

2013 will be a year around application level security, database security and infrastructure platform for Bangalore-based Unisoft Infotech.

“Most customers realize information is an asset. Therefore, they will look at security from multiple levels.

With information going onto cloud, the concern is security. The success of cloud depends on how secure the information is,” says Deepak Nakil, Executive Director, Unisoft Infotech.

“BFSI and manufacturing are focus verticals. Deep selling to loyal customers is logical as they trust us. Also, there are few tier-2 partners with expertise to execute complex security projects,” says Jagannath. We expect to generate 15 to 20 percent of our revenue from security in 2013 compared to the 10 percent in 2012.

10%

of overall IT security enterprise capabilities will be delivered in the cloud by 2015

N. JAGANNATH, CEO, FOURTH DIMENSION TECHNOLOGIES SOURCE: GARTNER

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BIG BUYERS v BFSI, IT/ITeS and telcos

remain the major verticals for security adoption mainly for new age offerings like DLP, SIEM, GRC etc.

v The supply chain from the

consumer products industry (manufacturing) to retail need security across the cloud and mobile devices.

v Surveillance (IP, intrusion

detection and transmission video) will witness a surge especially in Government and education, apart from the corporate sector.

SECURITY’S HERE TO STAY

What’s driving security spending within IT organizations?

47% Business continuity/disaster recovery

46% Economic conditions

43%

Internal policy compliance

43%

Change and business transformation

41% Outsourcing

41% Regulatory compliance

40%

Company reputation SOURCE: GLOBAL INFORMATION SECURITY SURVEY 2012

TRADITIONAL OFFERINGS TO STAY With new age technologies for security around cloud and mobility on the rise, will traditional offerings like UTM and IPS be shunted out? On the contrary, IDC’s Gogia believes, due to huge demand, the traditional market will grow although the growth rate might slow down.

Delhi-based Spark Technologies works with UTM vendors for information security, spam and virus firewall, Web application firewall and Web fil-

ter. “Web applications have increased, hence these offerings will have a constant demand across enterprises,” says S.R. Nautiyal, Managing Director, Spark Technologies.

“There are rich margins available in areas like cloud security for partners.

However, they need to have a balanced portfolio of high margin offerings and run-rate products like UTM, IPS among others,” says Gogia.

Spark is also working in the surveillance market through an alliance with Tyco Fire & Security. “IP surveillance,

“Advances in technologies such as cloud and next-gen networks will challenge enterprise architectures running on legacy systems.

Investments to counter cyber threats will increase as more enterprises opt for Web-based platforms.”

EKTA AGGARWAL, PROGRAM MANAGER, INFORMATION & COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES, FROST & SULLIVAN

intrusion detection, and transmission video surveillance is critical for government agencies and corporates.Growing bottom lines and margins are the key reason to focus on new security offerings like surveillance,” says Nautiyal.

PROFITABILITY FOR PARTNERS Visibility and analytics will become the key pillars for security enterprise believes Aggarwal. “It will become critical for enterprises to achieve visibility, and to understand user behavior not only at the network layer but also in cloud environments. Secondly, the need will also arise for analytics which will enable organizations to leverage actual usage to refine policy and security controls,” she says.

According to Jagannath, there is fair amount of implementation and services attached with security. There is more opportunity than just better margins in the security domain around SIEM, encryption and log management. Channel partners eventually find their sweetspot with technical expertise in the market.

More the endpoints, more the diversity and more complex is the IT architecture, says Gogia. But it means more opportunities for partners as they need to evaluate to ensure revenue streams and accordingly allocate dedicated resources for a three to five year horizon. n JANUARY 2013

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n COVER STORY | VIRTUALIZATION

Staying the Course Virtualization was a top priority last year. It continues to remain so for partners and CIOs alike. By Aritra Sarkhel

I

DC BELIEVES that virtualization is

going to be one of the fastest growing segments in the global software market. It grew 4.7 percent in the first half of 2012 to $167 billion (about Rs 9 lakh crore) and has one of the most positive growth rates among the primary market segments.

According to Sanchit Vir Gogia, Principal Analyst, IDC India, there has been a lot of traction in server virtualization while network virtualization is yet to reach that stage. “We had the application service provider (ASP) model back in 2000 which was a complete failure in India because it was a cloud model without the virtualization infrastructure. Today, virtualized infrastructure happens to be the backbone of everything that we do,” says Gogia.

Other analysts like AMI Partners stated in a study that, though virtualization as a technology is in its growing stages, the opportunities are plenty in the market across server, desktop and storage virtualization

in India. The reports have affirmed that need for virtualized infrastructure will increase exponentially in the forthcoming years and the size of this untapped market is considerable, presenting a huge growth potential for leading participants in the market.

Gartner analysts mentioned in the Hype Cycle Report 2012 that the price-sensitive Indian enterprises have recently shown a tendency to invest in transformational technologies like virtualization which offers a

$167bn Growth observed in the virtualization market in the first half of 2012

SOURCE: IDC

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

“We are going to deploy virtualization solutions in the next 12 months and have already identified some resources in our office and will invest in associated tools.”

YOGESH MEHTA, DIRECTOR, SYSWARE INFOTECH

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BIG BUYERS v Builders and manufacturers

are going to deploy virtualization in a big way.

The manufacturing industry utilizes multiple servers for their IT workloads. So, virtualization will bring down the maintenance costs and recurring costs for those units.

v The BFSI segment will

be one of the largest adopters of virtualization due to the presence of huge datacenters and the willingness to consolidate their IT resources in terms of servers, appliances and storage devices.

v The new media needs

virtualization to scale very fast as they have applications running on a SAS-based model.

significant upside in terms of agility or productivity gains. This dynamic shift in business conditions is considered vital to drive business benefits.

MEETING DEMANDS Channelworld’s State of the Mart 2013 survey pointed out that around 22.8 percent of SIs in India would want to get into virtualization in 2013. Earlier some SIs stayed away from it for various reasons.

While the ever increasing costs of datacenter and IT infrastructure has made virtualization a necessity, the technology would bring in additional revenue for SIs and increase their portfolio of services.

The need for virtualization is imminent, says Yogesh Mehta, Director, Sysware Infotech. “Enterprises want to reduce their carbon footprint and recurring costs. They are going to consolidate things and put more and more apps on fewer servers in a virtualized environment,” he adds.

“Virtualization related projects deliver a lot of profitability at the end of the project cycle. These kinds of

SET FOR BIG GROWTH

Over the last three years, virtualization has been popular among partners.

47% 43%

27% 28%

26%

23%

n Currently Operating n Planning Entry

2011

2012

solutions will allow SIs to be more effective players. We could make good margins in these,” says Ravi Putta, Co-founder and Managing Director, Alliance Prosys.

Moreover, the SIs would benefit from the services opportunity if the virtualized environment positioned

2013

SOURCE: CIO RESEARCH

for the customer is managed by the partner themselves. Vineet Dahiya, Co-Founder and Executive Director, Info Axon Technologies, says “Whatever solutions we offer, we put it on a virtualized environment. The hidden benefit of such a proposition is that more the complexity of the custom-

Voice of Experience

“Consolidation will happen soon. It will be a huge market for SIs only if the partners are ready to educate the customer on how to add value to the project.”

RAVI PUTTA, CO-FOUNDER AND MANAGING DIRECTOR, ALLIANCE PROSYS

er’s infrastructure, the more play we get in terms of services.”

Mehta from Sysware is upbeat about the company’s plans for virtualization, mostly owing the changed mindset of the customer. “We are going to deploy virtualization solutions in the next 12 months and have already identified some resources in our office and will invest in associated tools.”

Similarly, the need for virtualized environments for a better consolidated infrastructure is something Dahiya from Info Axon is vouching for. “Virtualization holds the promise of consolidation and reducing cost for enterprises by bringing in efficiency. It will help us get new clients in terms of bigger enterprises as a long-term strategic investment.”

MAKING THE MOST OF IT But while these partners seem upbeat about such virtualized deployments’ in the coming year, SIs like Alliance Prosys, one of the largest players of virtualization in India, has already reaped the benefits. “We have done a virtualization implementation for a client they were looking for an entire infrastructure consolidation. We sized an entire storage solution along with the consolidation of their networks and ERP licenses and had put it on a virtualization mode in a datacentre. We built a complete datacentre solution for the client and gave them the entire virtualization piece scalable for the next 10 years,” says Putta.

Successful implementations like these surely send a positive signal to the SI community for many such implementations in 2013 but with a cautionary note. Many factors prohibit the widespread implementation of virtualization. Firstly, the partner needs to educate the customer about the impact of virtualized infrastructure. Until and unless the customer comprehends the functioning, virtualization will not see full fledged deployments. Putta sums it up by saying, “Consolidation will happen soon and it will be a huge market for SIs, but only if the partners are ready to educate the customer on how to add value to the project.” n JANUARY 2013

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Thane Bharat Sahakari Bank needed to renew its processes.

Finacus Solutions suggested a revamp, and a revaluation of its exsiting vendor.

The move worked.

By Shantheri Mallaya

M

RAMESH GOVINDAN (L), CMD, Finacus’ recommendation made perfect business sense to SRIRAM DATE, CEO, Thane Bharat Sahakari Bank.

Photograph by KAPIL SHROFF

MAKING THE RIGHT CHOICE 36

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2013

UMBAI’S THANE Bharat Sahakari Bank might be a small co-operative banking institution at the outset, but they come across as an entity that spares no effort in getting best practices in technology to surround their internal and external infrastructure.

Proof: The banked adopted Core Banking Solution (CBS) and got a class datacenter, both in 2008.

Fast-forward to 2012; there still was no room for complacency. It was time to renew existing processes that were now almost five years old. Sriram Date, CEO, Thane Bharat Sahakari Bank says, “The hardware in our datacenter had started outliving its warranty and use. The cost of maintenance was going to be a burden as a result.” With one application on one server, a small scheduled corporation bank could not possibly justify or realize the activity volume, it felt. Also, more importantly, an expansion was around the corner. Date says, “With a network of more than 20 branches in Maharashtra, we were looking at 25 more outlets in other states too over the next couple of years.”

As the bank was thinking about these plans and issues, they turned to Finacus Solutions, their long-time consultant advisory. Finacus had earlier assisted them in the CBS implementation. The consultant astutely told them that they must consider a revamp of their infrastructure and use virtualization for optimization of

CASE STUDY  resources. Once the composition was decided, Finacus also suggested that the bank must ideally invite multiple OEMs and then take the best call.

Ramesh Govindan, MD, Finacus Solutions, says, “The existing datacenter was built on HP, but we counseled the bank that they must evaluate HP visà-vis other vendors and then decide.”

Snapshot Key parties: Finacus Solutions, Thane Bharat Sahakari Bank Location: Mumbai Cost of Project: $200,000

BEST MAN WINS

Implementation time: Seven months

The main challenge that the bank faced was to actually contemplate a cross over of vendors, in understanding which vendor had the best offerings that would suit their current and future requirement with a clear roadmap of five to six years. Transition, despite a 5 year old relationship with a competitive vendor such as HP, and also getting the optimal deal would be the crux of the new project that Thane Bharat had embarked upon.

Govindan says, “In April this year, IBM’s team came in and did a demonstration of their latest PureFlex Systems. We went to Avnet’s (IBM Partner) Bladecenter, tested the benchmarks on the model solution to see how much better PureFlex was in relation to others.” IBM’s Bladecenter apparently excelled. The solution seemed to reduce the cost and complexity, provide additional security and also reduce new application deployment times. IBM was offering the bank with a solution consisting of IBM PureFlex System, Flex System Manager (FSM), V7000 Storage, Flex Chassis, BladeCenter H, and Tape Library TS 3100. Govindan says, “IBM gave us two options while competition came up with only one. So, based on value for money, the low installation time among other features, we recommended IBM.” As a specialist banking consultant, the main limitation for the ISV was the fact that there were few fully integrated solutions in the market for the banking sector. “As a consultant, I had the responsibility of providing a dispassionate counsel to a long standing customer without prejudice to IBM or bias against HP. Moreover, there were no earlier benchmarks with PureFlex that could be easily studied. So, from a decision making and strategy perspective, I was

Main Vendor: IBM (PureFlex Systems)

Key People Involved: Sriram Date, CEO, Thane Bharat Sahakari Bank; Ramesh Govindan, CMD, Finacus Solutions Key Technologies: Datacenter revamp and virtualization

Challenges: Total transition from one vendor to another, no earlier benchmark or reference as the implementation was the first PureFlex adoption in the BFSI sector Post implementation ROI: Increased transaction load intake and performance of core systems three fold, expected payback period less than 5 years, savings in AMC

personally present for all key discussions,” says Govindan.

The fact that the bank was potentially the first banking customer for PureFlex in India was not really on anyone’s mind; all that mattered was the quality of deliverables. “We were not aware of the milestone because that was not priority. We were very particular about PureFlex matching our needs as an upwardly mobile banking institution,” says Date. Apart from the detailed POC, the fact they offered future proofing and that they were also open to discussions held them in good stead. What actually won the day in favor of IBM was another sub plot that had happened last year. When Thane Bharat effected the RTGS fund transfer process as per RBI guidelines, they had turned to IBM as the ‘vendor of confidence’, as suggested by RBI. “So, the decision making post the POC though was easier, it was not a cakewalk,” says Date

Finacus had the onus of convincing the bank that this was indeed the right transition, without forcefully imposing anything upon them. This evidently delayed the final decision making process by three months.

Finacus guided the bank in doing an audit of the latest features and finalize the deal. “Their presence helped in insisting on certain things that might not have not incurred to us like future proofing, most importantly,” adds Date.

Govindan clarifies, “From the lead generation process when we called in the OEMs, to the time we settled for IBM for deployment, we had a lead time of seven months.” Finacus further deployed two architects and a database administrator towards the project while IBM and Avnet also put in their respective technical personnel to complete the transition.

ROI EXPECTATION As is expected of all deployments, ROI is the key bone of contention.

The initial feeback on the PureFlex deployment has apparently been very good. “We have observed that the process of speed, transaction load intake and performance have gone up three fold,” says Govindan. The bank, which was incurring huge AMC costs earlier, post the PureFlex transition, saw a savings in the same. “We got state-of-the art technology from a reputed vendor with a promise of no further cost,” he says. The bank is also expecting a payback in less than five years.

From Finacus’ point of view, the company got exposed to a new solution that could broaden their vision and understanding of what could fit the requirements of customers in future. Govindan clarifies, “While we would never blindly recommend any solution without completely mapping customer processes, we do believe Thane Bharat Sahakari Bank has got the best fit in PureFlex, as against the HP infrastructure.”

Thane Bharat Sahakari Bank’s case is possibly the first converged infrastructure success story in the Indian BFSI that would possibly encourage more banks to try newer solutions with an open mind.  JANUARY 2013

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I

T ALMOST goes without saying

that social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn are changing the way companies do business. And while social media has probably had the greatest impact on marketing, it is also changing the way companies recruit, communicate with customers and employees, and handle sensitive data.

As you look back at the past year, here are six ways social media has affected companies, as reported by CIOs and other C-level executives.

Advertising,

1 Marketing and PR

WAYS SOCIAL MEDIA AFFECTED THE ENTERPRISE IN

Social media is an inevitable part of our routine.

During the last year, how has this phenomenon engaged the enterprise—and its workings?

By Jennifer Lonoff Schiff 38

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2013

Illustration by Unnikrishnan A.V

2012

The area where social media has affected the biggest change is marketing, advertising and public relations. Instead of having to spend tens of thousands of dollars a year on traditional print, television or radio advertising— or even online banner ads—companies can now get their message across for free (at least in theory).

“Social media has revolutionized the way businesses do marketing,” says Dave Kerpen, the cofounder and CEO of Likeable Media, a social media and word of mouth marketing agency.

“With social platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, companies hyper-target their exact relevant audience,” as well as quickly adjust their messaging.

Research and

2 Development

Thanks to the rise of social media, it’s easier than ever to find people passionate about your company or brand—brand ambassadors. And social media savvy companies have been “leveraging these passionate ambassadors, involving them in product development and design decisions,” says Blake Cahill, president, Banyan Branch, a full-service social media agency.

Social media sites allow business “to receive feedback on new products and services prior to honing final product design at very low costs over traditional market research.

We’ve even had clients allow social communities to name products and features,” says Cahill. The result: Greater word of mouth as well as increased early adoption.

SOCIAL MEDIA | FEATURE  Internal/Employee

3 Communications

“Social media facilitates collabo collaboration,” says Paul Liu, CIO, Freeborders, a provider of information technology services. “This is especially important for companies with teams that are located across different regions. At Freeborders, we use Yammer [a private social network] to exchange ideas and collaborate with team members from the US, China and Europe.”

Adds Marcelo Costa, chief marketing officer for Neoris, a global business and IT consulting firm: “Using social media [can be] very useful in managing communication among employees. We have a LinkedIn group exclusively for employees. The group is managed by the employees and they are the ones who create content, share news and comment on industry trends.

Employees are also in the habit of checking into Foursquare when they arrive to work at one of our locations around the globe.” In addition, Neoris created its own hashtag and set up a corporate Instagram account so employees can easily share photos and content, which has created a greater sense of community.

service 4 Customer and CRM

Social media has shifted the emphasis away from the traditional call center to tracking customer sentiment online.

Indeed, many businesses, as well as companies providing third-party customer service, now refer to what once were known as call centers as contact centers. That’s because, thanks to sites like Facebook and Twitter (and blogs and forums and message boards), “customer service has to be acutely aware of current [online] conversations and be able to respond in a timely manner,” says Jim Harder, principal, Visual Data Group.

“For the everyday consumer, posting on a company’s Facebook wall or leaving them a tweet is the most immediate and convenient point of contact, and it’s all public,” says Molly Glover Gallatin, vice president of Marketing, Compass Labs, which specializes in knowledge-based marketing and advertising.

“If the feedback is negative, it can affect customer perception of your brand. If it is positive, it can serve as insight into what’s working. Either way, companies now need to monitor and respond to what consumers are saying about them—in real-time— across social networks and [include

Enterprise Social Tech’s Priority In APAC Responses to the latest Enterprise Social Survey done by IDC indicate that organisations in APAC (including the geographies ASEAN, Australasia and Korea) have placed greater investment priority on enterprise social technologies than on cloud computing, business intelligence and their core networks.

According to IDC analysts working on this Microsoft-sponsored survey—which involved the interview of 352 key executives from medium and large enterprises across the region—at present, 52 percent of organisations in the APAC have an enterprise social network in place, and 23 percent intend to have one set up in the next 18 months.

However, there are still some challenges that need to be overcome, they said.

“Security, compliance, governance and lack of control are cited as the most important inhibitors to implement enterprise social,” said Claus Mortensen, director, Emerging Technology Research, IDC Asia/Pacific. “But it is not viable for companies to resist adoption as end-users may turn to Internet-based, consumer grade, and potentially less secure options.”

Microsoft executives believe that the rise in social technology adoption, as indicated by the IDC’s Latest Enterprise Social Survey, is being driven by such “factors” as “a young workforce, early adoption of gadgets and social media as well as cultural trends such as relationship-focused business dealings.”

— By F.Y.Teng

them in their] CRM platform. Do this right,” she says, “and you will quickly pinpoint brand advocates and rapidly diffuse any fires.”

Recruiting

5 Employees

“A site like LinkedIn provides a more efficient way to screen for possible job applicants, as you can see if people have recommendations, endorsements, etc.,” says Tracy Petrucci, a social media and online marketing consultant, who also notes that many recruiters also look at candidates’ Twitter feeds and Facebook profiles to assess whether the hire will be a good fit.

However, companies need to tread carefully when using social media sites to vet candidate worthiness, says Philip Voluck, a managing partner at Kaufman Dolowich Voluck & Gonzo, who specializes in employment practices liability.

“Companies should be aware that by using social media to vet applicants, hiring managers can find information that is protected by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the latest tool against discrimination, the Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act (“GINA”), which prohibits companies from merely acquiring or being in possession of such information,” Voluck notes. Moreover, “characteristics protected under Title VII or GINA cannot be the basis of a hiring decision, and hiring managers may need to be able to substantiate the legitimacy of their screening process, particularly when it involves social media.”

Security and

6 Privacy

“With expanded social media usage, companies [have] exposed themselves to new security risks [because] corporate social media accounts, and the data [contained therein], are no longer company-owned,” explains Vidya Phalke, chief technology officer, MetricStream, which specializes in risk management and compliance. This introduces new security risks for companies—and new concerns for CIOs. “To combat these risks, companies must put in place strategic policies around social media risk and compliance,” and train staff properly, to protect sensitive data.  JANUARY 2013

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n OPINION

SCOT FINNIE

Making a Prediction Five years is long time. In IT years, even longer. But it is important that predictions are made. It helps clear the haze, and tread forward. So, what’s in store for IT?

Scot Finnie is Computerworld’s editor-in-chief. You can contact him at sfinnie@ computerworld.com and follow him on Twitter @ ScotFinnie).

40

W

ITH COMPUTERWORLD celebrating its

45th birthday, I got to thinking: What will the state of IT be in five years? One of the things I’ve noticed about IT predictions, especially as long as five years out, is that they tend to be

two-dimensional, featuring forecasts in which the big trend of the day takes over and completely changes IT, often in earthshattering ways. But the future is rarely so clear-cut. Trends often interact and move things in unexpected directions.

A key force shaping IT today has roots in the early aughts, when corporations realized that it is possible to buy too much IT. Information technology can’t deliver endless productivity gains. As a result, IT budgets have been watched more closely, especially over the past five years. Five years from now, successful IT organizations won’t just be cost centers. (They also won’t be steeped in the “culture of no.”) While IT budgets are apt to grow near term, I don’t see any significant letup in the focus on limiting technology costs.

Another underlying trend is that technology is not just a tool that serves workers, like an IBM Selectric. Technology has become the lifeblood of business. It’s in every department and branch of most companies.

In many cases, it’s the key factor in differentiating a business from its competitors. It’s very difficult for a CIO and his or her team to make savvy, business-oriented recommendations about technology to every department in their organizations. One way or another, companies will need to find people who merge technical knowledge with an insider’s understanding of business needs.

As I see it, there are two types of IT. Five years from now, the underlying influences and enabling trends that are coming to the fore—like virtualization, cloud, Web-based apps, social, mobile, consumerization and outsourcing—will separate IT into two

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2013

chunks. The “central” part of IT will administer to the needs of the entire organization. Think of areas like security, the help desk, network and systems management, and at least some data center functions.

The other half of IT—think of it as data and applications—will be pushed out to line-of-business areas. Will embedded IT people be managing this technology?

Will technically oriented business people emerge to manage it? Both things will happen. It’s already beginning in forwardfocused companies.

Virtualization and cloud computing will underpin many of these applications.

But cloud isn’t a major force destined to dominate all aspects of IT. It’s a tool like any other; it will be harnessed for some applications but not others. Similarly, mobile isn’t a major new wave of IT; it’s a major new customer usage pattern making a short-term management demand of IT. What will the organizational structure of IT look like in 2017? Even at the speed of technology, change is gradual and asynchronous. When you’re talking about changes to business, different companies change in different ways.

At the heart of the question is a touchy subject: What happens to the CIO? My guess is that for some companies, the term CIO begins to disappear.

At the same time, other companies may embrace their CIOs, whose most important direct reports may be deputy CIOs who are partnered with specific lines of business.

Agree or disagree? Let me know what you think the future will bring. n

RNI NO.KARENG/2007/20996

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