Icw january 2014

FOCAL POINT: How are company-owned-personally-enabled devices helping organizations regain control of data shared by employees? >>> PAGE 80

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

CUSTOM FEATURE | EMC

Nitin Aggarwal, Director, Trifin Technologies, says, “EMC’s training sessions have ensured that we have highly capable and certified engineers in our team.”

NON-PERFORMANCE IS

NOT AN OPTION

The people who deploy any technology are as important as the technology itself. Choose a vendor that equips them with the necessary skill sets to grow and perform better.

3

WAYS TO BOOST PERFORMANCE Turn Over

Non-Performance is Not an Option Nitin Aggarwal, Director, Trifin Technologies, shares insights on how the association with EMC has helped the system integrator stand out from the rest and empowered its personnel to deliver consistent performance.

How do you see your EMC Business growing in the future?

We have formulated several business strategies aimed at driving the sales of EMC technologies further, for which we are closely working with the EMC Partner Development team. We are investing both our time and money to mark our presence among customers as one of the leading system integrators who provide solutions on EMC’s offerings. EMC has helped Trifin stand out as a technology-driven organization offering valuebased solutions to customers.

Also, Trifin’s latest engagement with the EMC marketing team will help us achieve our bottom lines easily.

Which recent EMC initiatives, according to you, will ensure more business for Trifin Technologies?

How has your alliance with EMC helped upgrade the skill sets of your team?

EMC has been actively conducting various development programs for partners, such as the Channel Development Training—virtual as well as practical training sessions with certifications for the partners’ sales and pre-sales teams. Besides this, EMC’s recent partner enablement workshop—The Power of Stories for Sales—was very effective with its live scenarios and solutions-focused approach to help elevate our service to the next level.

Being a focused partner, we are part of a series of interactions with EMC which are related to services and new product engagement around BRS and unified storage.

NITIN AGGARWAL, Director, Trifin Technologies

Trifin, as an organization, has a very strong team comprising personnel with the latest skill sets and certifications in sales, business development, and technical capabilities. EMC’s training sessions have ensured that we have highly capable BRS TA and BRS IE-certified engineers in our team who can carry out any implementation and POCs of EMC solutions. We have also invested in demo appliances and created a demo lab for showcasing EMC technologies, and conduct POCs at customers’ premises. Our team is technically equipped to implement EMC solutions for both SMBs and complex customer environments like large enterprises.

THREE TIPS TO BOOST PERFORMANCE 1

Take a solutiondriven approach which adds value at the customer’s end rather than taking the traditional way of just selling boxes.

2

3

Encourage team members to leverage additional benefits and promotional schemes offered by the vendor, which in turn can increase overall profit.

Think big with a singleminded determination.

It is equally important to innovate continuously.

The more adaptive you are to change, the more successful you can be.

FOCAL POINT: How are company-owned-personally-enabled devices helping organizations regain control of data shared by employees? >>> PAGE 80

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

JANUARY 2014 VOL. 7, ISSUE 10

INDUSTRY VIEWS

Alok Bharadwaj Anil Valluri Bhaskar B Debjani Ghosh Dhanya Thakkar Jagdish Mahapatra Jeff White Karan Bajwa Minhaj Zia Neelam Dhawan Nikhil Pathak Rajesh Janey Ravi Chauhan Sandeep Mathur Sanjay Deshmukh Sunil Khanna Sunil Manglore Surendra Singh T.Srinivasan Tushar Sighat Vivekanand V

Canon NetApp Check Point Intel Trend Micro McAfee Cisco Microsoft Polycom HP Schneider Electric EMC Juniper Networks Oracle Citrix Emerson CA Technologies Websense VMware D-Link Hitachi Data Systems

Pulse of the Market What does 2014 bode in terms of opportunities and challenges?

Industry titans, experts and partners voice their views >>>Page 22

32%

BUSINESS EXPECTED FROM NEW CUSTOMERS

29% PARTNERS EXPECT SALES LEADS

ANALYST VIEWS

GARTNER ERNST & YOUNG PWC FORRESTER IDC

CHANNELWORLD.IN

n EDITOR’S NOTE

Vijay Ramachandran

Hybrid It Is! A lonely impulse of delight Drove to this tumult in the clouds; I balanced all, brought all to mind…

W

—W.B. Yeats

HEN I first wrote an edit on cloud computing

six years ago, there was buzz around SOA, server virtualization was turning to magma, and an enterprise-class cloud was little more than vapourware. You’d think that after so many moons and increased maturity, cloud computing would be gathering momentum, and at a goodly pace. The typical large enterprise one expects would set up a highly virtualized environment, increase automation, add in an orchestration layer, throw in better

manageability, migrate apps and voila—the private cloud.

So would it surprise you to note that that’s not how enterprise cloud strategy is playing out?

Many conversations that I’ve been having with a host of CIOs point to a new trend emerging. A trend, substantiated by IDG Research. India Inc. is seeing a slowdown in investments into the private cloud, with a “hybrid first” model emerging across enterprises big and small.

If you take today’s business demands of efficiency, agility and speed, add the blurry business horizon, with a generous helping of business end-goals and stir in the acute shortage of internal IT talent most organizations are staring at a

recipe for catastrophic business failure. CIOs in trying to avoid this would have few options than to move some workloads to the public cloud, while keeping the more critical ones within the perimeter.

Increasingly, however, I’m observing organizations begin the move to the public cloud early. Earlier than even putting a ‘private cloud’ in place!

n India Inc. is seeing a slowdown in investments into the private cloud, with a “hybrid first” model emerging across enterprises big and small.

Also increasingly, organizations aren’t just choosing a hybrid model to offload ‘peripheral workloads’ like mail, messaging and collaboration to the public cloud— core business apps are also making the transition. Yet whichever path gets chosen, it leads to one inescapable destination—the here and now and future of the cloud is hybrid. Companies might choose to keep some data and applications at home to escape issues with latency or compliance, the rest will need homes elsewhere— homes that will be rented.

Homes that they will rent from you on behalf of your principals.

When the path isn’t in question, it’s a given that the scrutiny of the landscape increases. I suspect that this

will also lead to aggressive conversations on pricing, SLAs, audits, controls, and the levels of confidentiality they can expect as clients.

If you haven’t begun having such conversations, prepare to have them shortly.

A survey of IaaS providers conducted by 451 Research’s CloudScape practice found that methods for cloud consumption vary hugely between providers—not just in terms of virtual machines, but also in terms of bundling, billable attributes, and usage metrics. While on-demand pricing “enables experimentation; alternative pricing enables cost-effective implementation”.

All of this will distress those who swear by ‘private clouds’. Many technology providers had built their cloud stories around that reality. A reality that’s now changed.

Let’s be honest, without two-way secure bursting a reality, the private cloud is essentially a foundation layer for the cloud without any of its agility or scale or flexibility. The higher business velocity and cost efficiency that hybrid models offer seem to indicate that managements will lean that way.

Are you prepared to catch the changing current? n Vijay Ramachandran is the Editor-in-Chief of ChannelWorld. Contact him at vijay_ramachandran@ idgindia.com

JANUARY 2014

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

5

Inside

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD n JANUARY 2014

SPECIAL REPORT

An all-inclusive coverage on industry outlook, business blueprint and technology trends of vendor companies and enterprise channels in 2014. >>>Page 22

Pulse of the Market STATE OF THE MARKET

AGENDA 2014

STRATEGIC DIRECTIONS

SURVEY 2014

INDUSTRY

ANALYSTS

>>>Page 24

Partners poll their sentiments, expectations, pain points and challenges for the coming year.

>>>Page 33

Top decision makers reveal their technology roadmap and channel expectations for the next 12 months.

>>>Page 75

Top analyst firms forecast trends and make predictions potential for the industry at large.

FOR BREAKING NEWS, GO TO CHANNELWORLD.IN

Inside

18

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

CHANNELWORLD.IN

Publisher, President & CEO Louis D’Mello

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD n JANUARY 2014

n EDITORIAL

n NEWS DIGEST 09 Faster Silicon to Make Inroads | Intel has

beefed up its networking silicon in a bid to capture a bigger share of enterprise, carrier, and cloud-provider networks for its chip architecture. It announced a networking platform codenamed Highland Forest 10 PC’s Decline is Far Worse than Expected | IDC reported that the PC market is

expected to plunge by more than 10 percent this year, with consumer PC sales dipping by about 15 percent.

n FEATURE

18 Risks and Rewards of VDI: If implemented correctly VDI can deliver substantial savings to enterprise IT shops.

n FOCAL POINT 80

‘COPE’ing with

Mobile Devices

BYOD | Company-owned-personally-enabled

devices is a hybrid that sits between freefor-all BYOD and traditional company-owned

12 Sweeping Changes to Riverbed’s Partner

Program | Riverbed’s partners will begin adhering to its revamped partner program—one that changes from a revenue attainment based model to a competency-based one.

n NEWS ANALYSIS

14 The Year That Was | It has been a long and

eventful year. Here are a few developments that gathered interest in the IT world.

computers that forbade personal use and held zero expectations of privacy for employees.

n OPINION

82 Raise

05 Editorial: Vijay Ramachandran says India Inc. is seeing a slowdown in investments into the private cloud, with a “hybrid first” model emerging across enterprises big and small.

84 PlainSpeak:Yogesh Gupta construes the ‘Hope’ mantra for enterprise channels to conquest ‘business of technology’ in India and strike gold through 2014.

Awareness Against Mobile Risks

BYOD | Read about

some simple actions that can protect your devices from harm.

ADVERTISERS’ INDEX Cyberoam Technologies Pvt. Ltd. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

Grass Roots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

D-Link India Ltd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

HP IPG. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . IFC

EMC IT Solutions India Pvt Ltd . . . .Cover on Cover

HP Storage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Emerson Network Power India Pvt. Ltd . . . . . . . BC

NetApp India Marketing & Services Pvt Ltd . 20 & 21

Epson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Schneider Electric IT Business India Pvt Ltd. . .IBC

This index is provided as an additional service. The publisher does not assume any liability for errors or omissions.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced by any means without prior written permission from the publisher. Address requests for customized reprints to IDG Media Private Limited, Geetha Building, 49, 3rd Cross, Mission Road, Bangalore - 560 027, India. IDG Media Private Limited is an IDG (International Data Group) company.

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

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

& MARKETING

President Sales & Marketing Sudhir Kamath Vice President Sales Sudhir Argula Vice President Special Projects Parul Singh General Manager Marketing Siddharth Singh General Manager Sales Jaideep M. Manager Key Accounts Runjhun Kulshrestha, Sakshee Bagri Manager Marketing Ajay Chakravarthy Manager Sales Support Nadira Hyder Senior Marketing Associates Anuradha H. Iyer, Archana Ganapathy, Benjamin Jeevanraj, Rima Biswas, Saurabh Patil Marketing Associate Arjun Punchappady, Cleanne Serrao, Lavneetha Kunjappa, Margaret DCosta, Nikita Oliver, Shwetha M. Lead Designer Jithesh C.C. Senior Designer Laaljith C.K. n OPERATIONS

Vice President HR & Operations Rupesh Sreedharan Financial Controller Sivaramakrishnan T.P. CIO Pavan Mehra Senior Manager Operations: Ajay Adhikari, Chetan Acharya, Pooja Chhabra Senior Manager Accounts Sasi Kumar V. Senior Manager Production T.K. Karunakaran Senior Manager IT Satish Apagundi Manager Operations Dinesh P., Tharuna Paul Manager Credit Control Prachi Gupta Sr. Accounts Executive Poornima n OFFICES

Bangalore IDG Media Pvt. Ltd. Geetha Building, 49, 3rd Cross, Mission Road, Bangalore 560 027, Karnataka Tel: 080-30530300. Fax: 080-30586065 Delhi IDG Media Pvt. Ltd. DLF Corporate Park, Tower 4 B, 3rd Floor, Room 301, MG Road, DLF Phase 3, Gurgaon- 122001, Haryana Tel: 0124- 3881015 Mumbai IDG Media Pvt. Ltd. 201, Madhava, Bandra Kurla Complex, Bandra East, Mumbai 400051, Maharashtra Tel: 022-30685000. Fax: 022-30685023

News

WHAT’S WITHIN

PAGE 10: PC’s Decline is Far Worse than Expected PAGE 10: New Licensing Scheme Will Make Life Easy PAGE 12: Sweeping Changes to Partner Program PAGE 14: The Year That Was

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

NETWORKING

Faster Silicon to Make Inroads

I

NTEL HAS beefed up its networking silicon in a bid to capture a bigger share of enterprise, carrier, and cloudprovider networks for its chip architecture.

It announced a networking platform code-named Highland Forest, combining an existing Xeon CPU and the new Coleto Creek chipset for new levels of performance in several specialized functions as well as throughput. Intel says a common x86 architecture can help networking vendors build new, more effi-

cient types of infrastructure for enterprises and service providers. Rather than developing and refreshing a wide range of specialized boxes using different chip architectures, vendors can start to move toward x86 and a single software platform throughout most of the network, slashing the time and cost required to come out with new gear, said Rose Schoolar, vice president and general manager of Intel’s communications and storage group.

The company has been pitching x86 as a superior

alternative to proprietary networking chips and equipment for years and has made some inroads, especially with controlplane chips in switches and routers, according to Linley Group analyst Bob Wheeler. NFV (network functions virtualization), designed to shift tasks in carrier networks from specialized devices to standard, virtualized server hardware, could help Intel to propagate x86 further into networking, Wheeler said.

Carriers want to match the flexibility of providers of so-called over-the-top Internet services by having similar virtualized datacenters. But some network functions still lend themselves to specialized hardware, so there are limits to what Intel may accomplish there, Wheeler said. “It’s not as simple as it sounds,” he said.

Intel’s networking chipsets offer a common set of functions across Atom and Xeon solutions for small to large systems. Those functions include IPsec and SSL security, Intel’s DPDK (Data Plane Development Kit) technology for faster packet processing, and Hyperscan deeppacket inspection powered by technology Intel acquired earlier this year with Sensory Networks.

JANUARY 2014

—Stephen Lawson INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

9

STOCKS

Fujitsu Delists LSE Shares

Japanese technology behemoth Fujitsu is to cease trading its shares on the London Stock Exchange in a bid to cut costs.

The firm applied for the delisting of its shares adding that it will continue to list on Japanese markets in Tokyo and Nagoya.

“Fujitsu has decided to apply for the delisting to reduce the administrative work and costs associated

with being a listed company on the LSE,” the company said in a statement.

“This delisting is not expected to have a material impact on shareholders and investors due to the low trading volumes of the Shares and EDR (European Depositary Receipts) taking place on the LSE.” Fujitsu anticipates that the delisting will be finished by the end of January 2014. The liquidation is expected to complete by March 2015.

—Sam Shead

-

PERSONAL COMPUTING

PC’s Decline is Far Worse than Expected

I

DC REPORTED that IDC previously the PC market is predicted a drop of 9.7 expected to plunge by percent after Windows 8.1 more than 10 percent sales failed to materialize. this year, with consumer “Perhaps the chief PC sales dipping by about concern for future PC 15 percent. That’s by far demand is a lack of the steepest PC market reasons to replace an decline in history. older system,” said Jay In total, the number Chou, a senior research of PCs sold is analyst, at IDC, expected to in a statement. decline by 10.1 “While IDC is the expected precent in 2013, research finds decline in the PC slightly below that the PC market in 2013. the previous still remains Consumer PC sales is expected to be down projection of the primary 15 percent.

9.7 percent. computing Source: IDC IDC expects device—for PC unit sales of about example, PCs are used 314.8 million, which is more hours per day than on pair with 2008 sales tablets or phones—PC figures. IDC reported usage is nonetheless that commercial PC sales declining each year as will fare slightly better, more devices become dropping about 5 percent, available. And despite but that consumer PC industry efforts, PC sales will fall about 15 usage has not moved percent compared to significantly beyond the prior year. IDC also consumption and expects that worldwide productivity tasks to PC sales will fall 3.8 differentiate PCs from percent in 2014 as well. other devices. As a result,

10%

PC lifespans continue to increase, thereby limiting market growth,” Chou said.

IDC defined the PC as desktops and notebooks, as well as hybrid devices that could function both in clamshell and tablet mode.

In mature markets like the US, IDC said that the PCs—whether they be desktops or laptops—will continue to decline, barely recovering by 2017 with just 0.4 percent growth. And in emerging markets, only notebooks will show any real increases—4.8 percent in notebooks, and 2.2 percent overall—by 2017. By then, IDC predicts that the PC market will total 305.1 million units, 120.8 million of those within mature markets like the US. Some now consider tablets and phones to be personal computing devices, which means that the picture could be far rosier for companies with diversified hardware portfolios. But for traditional PC suppliers like Dell and HewlettPackard, it looks like stormy seas ahead.

—Mark Hachman

LICENSING

New Licensing Scheme Will Make Life Easy Midsize companies should get ready this month as Microsoft introduces a new purchasing scheme that changes the way it deals with its volume licensing customers. The company says the purpose of the new Microsoft Products and Services Agreement (MPSA) is to make buying and managing volume licenses easier, according to a blog by Richard 10

Smith, the general manager of Microsoft’s World Wide Licensing and Pricing.

MPSA replaces Microsoft Business and Services Agreements, Select Plus Agreements, and Microsoft Online Services purchasing terms and conditions.

The program will include a new Website that offers a new set of options for making purchases

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2014

MAKE OVER: One agreement will cover all in the future.

and keeping track of agreements easier, according to Smith.

An online seminar on the MPSA was scheduled for Dec. 10 for UK customers, accord-

Short Takes  Vodafone Business Services (VBS), the enterprise vertical of Vodafone, has estimated that the growth of the SME market is twice as fast as the enterprise segment, and set out has aggressive plans to tap the SME space in India. Deepak Pande, EVPSME Sales, VBS, outlined the strategy and the way forward for VBS.  Lenovo has announced its “Black Knights” incentive scheme for channel partners in India.

This initiative is aimed at rewarding channel partners for new business acquisitions, as a means of boosting sales for Lenovo’s enterprise business, as well as incentivizing partners to go the extra mile.  Schneider Electric IT Business India announced a price increase between 5-8 percent across all its products as an outcome of the depreciating value of the rupee depending on the SKU’s form, size and usage of raw material.

ing to the blog Software Ruminations.

Customers using hybrid clouds based on Microsoft products want more flexible licensing to accommodate their unique needs, Smith writes in his blog.

The contract structure for volume licenses changes under MPSA so there will be one agreement covering all of a customer’s organizations and individual entities in a way that “delivers the best overall value based on total volume,” as Smith describes it.

—Tim Greene

L e s swor r y …

c onc er naboutyourbus i nes swhenyou’ r enott her e. . .

DCS6010L

Cl oudf or I Ps ur vei l l anc e

Wi r el es s

…mor epe a c eof mi nd Wi t hDL i nk ’ snewDCS 6010L360oF i s hey el ensCl oudc a mer ai t ’ snev erbeen ea s i ert ok eepa ney eony ourbus i nes s , whet hery ou’ r ewor k i ngr emot el y , on t hemov e, F a nt a s t i ci ma gequa l i t ya ndc ov er a gegua r a nt eed, t heF i s hey el enspr ov i des i ew i nc r edi bl ewi dea ngl ec ov er a ge.

Mount edonawa l l f orapa nor a mi c180ov ofar oom, oront hec ei l i ngf oraf ul l 360ov i ewwi t houtbl i nds pot s .

T hec a mer ai smy dl i nk ena bl ed,s oy ouc a na c c es s ,v i ew a ndc on gur ei t r emot el y , noma t t erwher ey oua r et hr ought hemy dl i nkwebs i t e, orwi t ht he my dl i nkmobi l ea ppdi r ec t l yony ouri OSorAndr oi dmobi l edev i c e.

Swi t c hi ng DNR322L

St oar age

Sec ur i t y

T heper f ec ts ol ut i onf ora nybus i nes swhenus edwi t ht heDNR322LNet wor k Vi deoRec or der , as t a nda l ones t or a gedev i c et ha tc a nr ec or dv i deos i mul t a neous l yf orupt oni nenet wor kc a mer a swi t hf oot a get ha tc a nbea c c es s ed r emot el yv i aawebbr ows erf r om a nydev i c ec onnec t edt ot hei nt er net .

DL i nkc a nboos ty ourbus i nes sper f or ma nc ei not herwa y st oo, wi t hi t sr a nge ofex i bl ea ndc os t effec t i v eWi r el es s , S t or a ge, S ec ur i t ya ndI PS ur v ei l l a nc e s ol ut i on. .

Conne c tt oMor e>>>E ma i l : s al es @dl i nk. c o. i nor Vi s i t : www. dl i nk. c o. i n

PARTNER PROGRAM

Sweeping Changes to Partner Program

B

EGINNING JAN

6, 2014, Riverbed Technology’s fouryear-old partner program is all set to see a major shift. Partners will begin adhering to the vendor’s revamped partner program—one that changes from a revenue attainmentbased model to a competency-based one, the company announced.

Changes to the partner program will impact Riverbed’s 2,100 channel partners worldwide. The changes include enhanced partner benefits, streamlined training and certification, and new competencies and partner levels. The vendor is also making investments to simplify processes. In an e-mail confirmation, Anil Batra, managing director, Riverbed India, stated that these developments would be “relevant for India and will be applicable as per the global programs and guidelines, and would come to effect in India on the same day.”

Riverbed’s new competency-based partner model aligns with its business units and includes four competencies: WAN optimization, storage delivery, application delivery, and performance management, which is an umbrella term for network performance management and application performance management.

Riverbed is also changing its discount structure.

Discounts will increase as a partner increases the number of competencies it holds. A partner with one

12

competency gets the minimum level of discount. A partner with two or more competencies gets a higher level of discounts and a partner with three or more competencies gets an even higher level of discounts— all on the front end.

Another major change to the program is the number of partner levels: Three instead of four. The new framework includes authorized partners, or those who make the minimum investment with Riverbed and have no competencies; premier partners, who hold a minimum of one competency, and Elite partners, who hold a minimum of three competencies.

Around

TheWorld New President and CEO at Polycom

Polycom announced that Peter A. Leav has joined the company as President and CEO. He also will serve as a Director on Polycom’s Board of Directors. Leav succeeds interim CEO Kevin Parker, who will continue serving as Chairman of the Board of Polycom, and will work closely with Leav on a transition plan.

—ChannelWorld Bureau

IBM Plans to be Cloud Storage Broker

IBM is developing software that will allow organizations to use multiple cloud storage

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2014

According to Riverbed, authorized partners can resell the company’s products and services, have minimal training requirements, receive the lowest level of benefits, and are not eligible for deal registration or non-standard

services interchangeably, reducing dependence on any single cloud vendor and ensuring that data remains available even during service outages.

Although the software, called InterCloud Storage (ICStore), is still in development, IBM is inviting its customers to test it.

Over time, it will fold the software into its enterprise storage portfolio, where it can back up data to the cloud. The current test iteration requires an IBM Storewize storage system to operate. ICStore was developed in response to customer inquiries, said Thomas Weigold, who leads the IBM storage systems research team in IBM’s Zurich, Switzerland, research facility, where the

discounts. Both premier and elite partners are eligible for deal registration and discounts.

And, as mentioned, those at the elite level will have to meet certain revenue requirements.

— ChannelWorld Bureau

software was created.

—Joab Jackson

Drones are “Fantasy”: eBay CEO

In the race to deliver online shopping purchases faster, drones don’t impress eBay’s CEO. “We’re not focusing on long-term fantasies, we’re focusing on things we can do today,” John Donahue said in a televised interview with Bloomberg TV. He was reacting to a television interview Jeff Bezos, CEO of e-commerce rival Amazon.

—Martyn Williams

Channel_world.pdf 1 18-12-2013 PM 06:54:08

n NEWS ANALYSIS

The YEAR

that was It has been a long and eventful year.

Here are a few developments that gathered interest in the IT world.

By Chris Kanaracus

14

I

T’S BEEN another busy year in the enterprise software industry, marked by high-profile acquisitions and IPOs, the rise of in-memory computing, a red-hot HCM (human capital management) market, and even the apparent settling of a long-running Silicon Valley feud. Here’s a look at some of the highlights.

In-memory databases going mainstream: SAP has been hyping its HANA in-memory computing platform for a few years now, but the clamor around in-memory got even louder in 2013.

In June, IBM introduced in-memory features for its DB2 database and the new Microsoft SQL Server 2014 also includes in-memory capabilities. But perhaps most telling was the inmemory option Oracle

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2014

announced for its flagship database, which has long held the most market share, during the OpenWorld conference in September.

The in-memory option will provide “ungodly” database speeds, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said during a keynote at the event.

SAP has been attempting to migrate customers from Oracle’s database to HANA, promising them better performance and simplified deployments, and the in-memory option certainly seems like a hedge against this.

While Ellison didn’t attack HANA during the keynote, expect some chest-thumping from the CEO next year, when Oracle’s in-memory option is scheduled for release. IBM, Microsoft and others won’t be silent either.

HCM heats up: HCM was one of the hottest enterprise software categories this year, particularly in SaaS form. While much attention went to Workday’s successful IPO in October, plenty of other HCM vendors had strong years, said analyst Ray Wang of Constellation Research.

Companies have been running their legacy human resources systems for 20 years, and the replacement cycle is revving up, Wang said. “There’s a

whole life around this stuff that didn’t exist before.

There’s so much interest and pent-up demand.”

Customer experience, not CRM: CEM (customer experience management) emerged as a defined category this year, as vendors made strings of acquisitions in order to build out software suites that combine sales automation with customer service, social media analytics, and marketing.

The common goal: Sell these unified technologies not to CIOs, but to chief marketing officers that want to build stronger and ultimately more lucrative connections with customers.

“People realize the age of digital business is here,” Wang said. “Every interaction is an opportunity to sell or impart an experience. We don’t sell products and services anymore.

Customers are buying experiences and outcomes.”

Salesforce.com announces Salesforce1: During the Dreamforce conference in November, Salesforce.com announced Salesforce1, a new version of its development platform with a particular focus on mobile applications. Although partly a rebranding effort, Salesforce1 pulls together the company’s original Force. com platform along with development tools from its Heroku and ExactTarget acquisitions.

It also provides coders with 10 times as many APIs as before and a new mobile application that serves as a type of portal for not only Salesforce.com’s software but also applications from third parties.

In a recent blog post, consultant and analyst Esteban Kolsky took a

I NSI PI D

PARTNER PROGRAMST AL KDOWNT OTHEMARKET

www. gr as s r oot s i ndi a. i n

267mm

267mm

200mm

n NEWS ANALYSIS deep dive into the technical plumbing and strategic implications of Salesforce1, calling it a “well-developed concept with a lot of potential,” albeit one only 60 or 70 percent complete. “It has the potential to change the way software vendors work with each other. It has the potential to change how organizations think about ecosystems, about systems of engagement, and about everything from personalization to revenue models,” he wrote.

Shakeups at SAP: Highlevel executive changes at software vendors don’t necessarily have an immediate impact on customers’ dayto-day lives, but some key moves SAP made this year could over time.

In May, SAP shook up its development organization, putting responsibility for all products under the auspices of executive board member Vishal Sikka, who has been HANA’s champion and is close to company co-founder Hasso Plattner. A streamlined development reporting structure could help SAP bring products to market more quickly, their ultimate success notwithstanding.

Then in July, SAP announced that co-CEO Bill McDermott would become sole CEO next year, after co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe departs the company. While SAP has had a single CEO in the past, McDermott will be the first American to hold such a role at the German vendor.

Also, the last sole SAP CEO, Leo Apotheker, had a rocky, short run at the top and was ousted within a year, only to later become Hewlett-Packard’s CEO and subsequently lose that job rather quickly as well.

16

Old was New Again in Security in 2013

T

HE security space may have been abuzz with activity in 2013, but Blue Coat Systems product marketing director, Jonathan Andresen, said it was essentially the same trends recycled with some adjustments.To illustrate his point, Andresen compared 2013’s trends in security to fashion, in that what was once out of style comes back eventually.

“For example, we recently saw a malvertising attack centred around fake Java attacks,” he said. “Malvertising itself is nothing new, but what we saw with this is how much more believable and real the message looks, including more realistic domain names.”

Exploit kits also gained significant usage throughout 2013, with Andresen picking the Blackhole package as one of the more popular ones.With the continued adoption of services such as Facebook and Twitter, Andresen said the last few demonstrated how social media is being used increasingly to “open the door to cyber attacks.” Cybercrime is forecast to become more sophisticated in 2014, particularly with the upsurge of ransomware, a type of malware holds a company’s IT and corporate data hostage.

Andresen has seen many enterprise IT organizations tackle the ransomware problem with traditional network security solutions, though investment in purpose built web security solutions is seen are more beneficial. “It is obvious that the Internet and Web applications are becoming an extension of the corporate datacentre, and most enterprises are completely unprepared for the security vulnerabilities that this means,” he said. “Industry leading secure Web gateways has improved significantly and is now a necessary first layer of defence for Web threat protection.”

—Patrick Budmar As sole CEO, McDermott will have to keep existing customers happy and attract new ones as SAP faces ever-stiffer competition from rivals such as Oracle, Salesforce.com, NetSuite and Workday. The strategy he chooses will be one to watch.

Ellison makes up with Benioff, or did he?: It was a watershed moment back in June: Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Benioff holding a joint press conference announcing a partnership between their companies, and they were actually nice to one another.

The long-time rivals seemed to bury the hatchet as they announced Salesforce.com would recommit

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2014

to using Oracle’s software and hardware technology for the long term, and Oracle would work on integrating some of its products with Salesforce.com’s.

Benioff, who once had a keynote he was scheduled to give at Oracle’s OpenWorld suddenly cancelled

by Ellison, went as far as inviting Ellison to attend Salesforce.com’s own Dreamforce event, and Ellison accepted.

But Ellison was seemingly nowhere to be found at Dreamforce. Benioff also announced a partnership at Dreamforce with HewlettPackard, under which Salesforce.com customers will be offered privately hosted instances of Sales-

force.com software based on HP’s Converged Infrastructure software.

The HP deal could be seen as a snub to Oracle, given that Salesforce.com said it would be using Oracle’s own Exadata and Exalogic machines, as well as the high-profile legal battles between Oracle and HP. So, was the June announcement just for show, with Oracle getting the rub from close alignment with the industry biggest pure SaaS (software as a service) vendor, and Salesforce. com getting a good deal on Oracle licenses?

An Oracle spokeswoman confirmed that Ellison didn’t go to Dreamforce but declined to comment on his motivations as to why.

Infor emerges: For most of its existence, Infor has served as the ERP software’s sleeping giant, despite being the largest ERP vendor after SAP and Oracle.

But under the leadership of CEO Charles Phillips, a former co-president of Oracle who came aboard in 2010, Infor has been steadily raising its profile through a series of new products, acquisitions and a focus on modern user experiences.

Infor launched its new user interface, SoHo, earlier this year. It was created with the help Hook & Loop, an internal design agency Phillips created. Overall, Phillips’ gambits seem to be paying off. The company added more than 3,000 customers during the past 12 months, according to spokesman Dan Barnhardt.

It’s also enjoying strong adoption of its ION integration framework, with the total number of customers using it nearly doubling to more than 1,700 this year, Barnhardt said. 

CUSTOM SOLUTIONS CUSTOM GROUP FEATURE FORTINET CYBEROAM

SECURING

PARTNER SUCCESS Sunil Sharma talks about how Cyberoam believes in being a trusted partner to its customers even as adoption of security solutions goes into an overdrive.

By Gopal Kishore SUNIL SHARMA,

VP, Sales and Operations, Cyberoam, India & SAARC

Sharma has over 21 years of experience in the IT Industry, having been part of companies such as McAfee, EMC, and Iris Computers in his previous assignments. He is also an eminent speaker in various forums.

What are the innovations that Cyberoam has been driving in the security space?

Cyberoam has always demonstrated steadfast commitment to evolve network security solutions for its customers, meeting present challenges and future security needs for their business and IT goals. Redefining network security, over the past year, Cyberoam has launched NG series UTM appliances equipped with Next Generation Firewall (NGFW) and gigabit speeds to protect physical and virtual network environments. Cyberoam moves beyond offering comprehensive network security to make security management simple, convenient and faster for organizations with multiple offices with its centralized security management and centralized visibility solutions. Moreover, to help critical infrastructure, strengthen and streamline network security against evolving threats landscape and rise in attacks, Cyberoam recently launched security for Industrial Control Systems (ICS) like SCADA networks. Cyberoam’s innovations come with next-generation security features and are optimized to enable faster network performance.

How does Cyberoam take the lead in providing a power packed product at a pocket friendly price?

IT decision makers are finding it challenging to justify investments into cloud, virtualization, BYOD and more. Cyberoam understands this evolution and knows how security ties with key IT and business priorities. The idea is not limited to reducing capex and opex alone. Other factors such as better security and IT management, readily available and easy support, regulatory compliance needs, supporting multiple and emerging connectivity requirements, operational simplicity and minimal need for manpower training are also seen as important aspects.

With Cyberoam, customers do not experience ‘value’ only in monetary terms but in the total sense.

Can you expand on your efforts to make your partner program world class, and how are your partners benefiting from it?

Being a channel friendly organization, our partner’s success comes before ours. We provide extensive pre- sales and post-sales training and support, to equip our partners to face challenging deployment scenarios.

This includes a unique sales orientation program called CCSC. This enables and educates Cyberoam partners on effective sales methods, helping them win customer confidence and meet requirements more easily. We also train and certify our partner’s workforce with CCNSP and CCNSE certifications.

Our Partner Portal helps them automate and streamline several critical tasks such as designing customer solutions, analyzing the competition, educating customers on products and offerings while managing sales orders with ease from anywhere. We are also adding new incentives to the partner program, including cash rebates apart from their regular margins, and introducing exciting

incentive schemes every quarter.

What are the reasons for Cyberoam’s exceptional growth and how do you see the industry shaping over the next few years?

In order to achieve higher growth, it is essential to build trust and experience with a wide range of customers. Cyberoam partnered with customers from a myriad of verticals. This is one key reason for how we have achieved a steady and impressive yearon-year growth.

Unlike other IT organizations, we saw a bigger opportunity in entrenching our presence and reach among SMEs and tier 2-3 towns. Now we are replicating this success story with large enterprises. Apart from enterprise-ready solutions Cyberoam has also strengthened security technology with global certifications like EAL4+. Moreover, our other divisions such as Cyberoam Threat Research Labs and industry’s first ISO 20000 certified Global Support Management Centre, are adding to our growth and strengthening business for our customers and partners.

With emerging IT trends getting more entrenched over the next couple of years, adopting security solutions would be critical, which will drive more awareness for enhanced investments in next-generation security offerings.

This Interview is brought to you by IDG Services in association with

n FEATURE | VDI from using external devices. With images and data stored in a server infrastructure, backups may be performed centrally on servers or storage devices rather than from client machines.

Some organizations adopt VDI to increase flexibility for end-users.

This doesn’t necessarily equate to cost savings. If your shop must react quickly to business changes, such as setting up a branch office or quickly changing locations in the event of an emergency, then rolling out VDI could be a good bet.

NEED FOR NETWORKS, SERVERS, AND STORAGE

Risks and

Rewards of VDI

After years of false starts, VDI products are here. If implemented correctly they can deliver substantial savings to enterprise IT shops. By Ed Tittel and Kim Lindros

V

IRTUAL DESKTOP infrastructure (VDI) is designed to deliver virtual desktops to client computers over a network from a centralized source. With traditional VDI, you create a master image (reference computer, or core) to use for all clients, then personalize images as needed.

The process of distributing patches and updates is simplified because you only have to update images, not every physical desktop. Plus, you can push desktops across a variety of platforms and devices, from desktop PCs to thin clients and mobile devices.

VDI offers numerous benefits, mainly in the form of simplified desktop management and fewer hardware purchases. This, in turn, can lead to re18

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2014

duced capital expenditures and operating costs. When implemented properly, some organizations report that VDI reduced the cost of each desktop by up to 40 percent.

Today’s VDI products give you the option to extend the life of older client hardware. Legacy computers that ran Windows XP can be transformed into perfectly fine VDI thin clients for employees who don’t use CPU- and RAMintensive applications.

Likewise, administrators spend less time managing physical client computers. Once VDI is implemented, all a client needs is a remote desktop connection to receive the virtual desktop.

VDI also offers increased security and easier backups. Administrators can lock down images and prevent users

As good as VDI sounds, it’s not without some pitfalls. How many times have you been on the phone with a customer service rep and you hear, “Sorry, I’m having a problem accessing your records. My computer is slow today”?

Key challenges with VDI include network capacity, server capacity, and adequate storage. VDI users can’t work offline, and they’ll be unable to perform their jobs if the network or server is down. IT needs to provide fast network or WAN links to push desktops and data to clients in real time, and its servers must be able to keep up that pace. Some organizations must also add serious storage capacity to house the number of images needed for VDI if users require numerous customized desktops.

Building the infrastructure required to support VDI, if it’s not already in place, can be expensive and must be considered when initially planning any VDI implementation. Another cost element is virtual desktop access licenses, which can run from just under $25 (about Rs 2,500) to about $100 (about Rs 6,100) per seat, depending on the vendor and solution selected.

That said, data deduplication can go a long way toward reducing storage requirements, usually by 70 percent or more. It also makes the use of solid state drives (SSDs) more viable for VDI images. While SSDs tend to have lower storage capacities than traditional disks, they also use fewer resources, which can lower the power and cooling requirements in a datacenter.

VDI NEEDS PLANNING AND TESTING Before diving into a full-scale VDI

implementation, look at your organization’s departments or business units and pick the one that’s best-suited to VDI. Remember, VDI is not a good fit for every user or business function; employees who need a lot of processing power or who demand local storage won’t benefit from VDI. Begin with a pilot project and monitor the end-user experience. User satisfaction will be an important factor in the success of your project. If your solution doesn’t meet users’ performance expectations, it risks being shelved or abandoned.

VMware and Citrix are the VDI market leaders, but be sure to research other vendors for features that might work better in your environment. As you evaluate VDI options and narrow your choices, look for scalability and flexibility in case you decide to expand the implementation in the future.

It’s fairly simple to scale up from 50 users to 100 users, but things can get complicated after that. If your pilot is successful and you want to expand, but your solution doesn’t scale well, you might have to start over with a different architecture or solution—and, essentially, another pilot project.

VDI is acceptable only if provides a functional or financial benefit to your organization, where cost is usually the greatest factor. Consider both the initial and long-term costs, including licensing, storage, and network infrastructure elements. This guide to calculating ROI from VDI is a good place to start. If you’ve already narrowed your choices down to a few preferred vendors, use their planning tools as well.

To reduce IT costs even further, employ VDI automation tools that streamline deployment, distribution and updates. If you run Hyper-V, for example, Microsoft provides a library of scripts with Windows Server 2012 R2, as well as Hyper-V Cmdlets for Windows PowerShell online. VirtualizationAdmin. com is also a useful information source on automation tools. Check out the HP Sizing Tool, tools for Microsoft App-V and VMWare Workstation and more.

ALTERNATIVES Mobile users with ultra-thin laptops or tablets want to use those devices

Our VDI Will Succeed Where Others Have Stumbled: AWS

A

mazon Web Services (AWS) hopes that its new WorkSpace VDI service will appeal to enterprises with low cost and maintenance. With the launch of a new hosted VDI service called WorkSpaces, AWS is hoping to convert more enterprises to virtual work environments, something other IT companies have enjoyed only modest success in doing.

“Earlier, VDI was very challenging.

There was a lot of complexity and cost,” said Matt Wood, AWS principal data scientist. “We see the opportunity in simplifying things, making it easy for customers to use VDI at an attractive price-point.”

As the name suggests, VDI encapsulates an instance of an operating system and its desktop within a virtual container that can be accessed over a network. Most all of the virtualization software vendors, such as Citrix, VMware, and Oracle, offer VDI platforms.

The VDI approach offers a number of advantages over regular desktop deployments. But, VDI adoption in the enterprise has moved slowly over the past decade, perhaps due to cost issues and complexities in implementation. Amazon is hoping to lure more enterprises in through a combination of lower prices, less maintenance, and superior performance.

As with other VDI offerings, WorkSpaces provides a virtual desktop environment that can be accessed from multiple devices, such as Apple Macs or iPads, computers running Windows, or Android tablets. When the user moves to another device, the

with all the perky features that come with them—so much so that they’re willing to bring their own devices to work. VDI can pose a challenge in forcing those users to access a virtual Windows desktop remotely.

For those particular users, your organization could consider moving applications to the cloud, subscribing to SaaS, or virtualizing applications that can then run on any device or platform. VMware Horizon Workspace, part of the Horizon Suite, is one option to provide mobile workers with

desktop will be in the same state as it was in the previous device. “Persistent state is incredibly attractive to customers,” Wood said. When the user logs on to a new device, the session on the previously used device automatically shuts down.

Although the user must have a network connection to use WorkSpaces, AWS did a lot of work in minimizing network latency, which can slow VDI responsiveness.

To help in this regard, WorkSpaces uses the PCoIP (PC-over-IP) remote display protocol, first developed by Teradici.

Amazon also deployed its SDX (Streaming Experience) protocol, which is based not on the standard TCP (Transmission Protocol) but rather on the less chatty UDP (User Datagram Protocol). AWS also used variable bit rate (VBR) encoding to smooth performance in choppy bandwidth.

“It will adjust the bit rate coming down from the cloud depending on what conditions are on the network,” Wood said.

It also includes multi-channel redundancy, for where there are two or more networks available. So if one network offers better throughput than another, “it is smart enough to know which one to use,” Wood said. WorkSpaces can provide advanced (for VDI) features such as video streaming and support for USB devices (except for printing). Another advantage WorkSpaces can offer is a competitive price. A WorkSpaces desktop with one virtual CPU and 50GB of storage space will cost $35 (about Rs 2,100).

—Joab Jackson

VDI. Another possibility is a hosted VDI solution, also known as Desktopas-a-Service. With DaaS, you host virtual desktops in the cloud, either in-house in a private cloud or through some third-party provider. The benefit of using a third-party comes from offloading IT of the responsibility for maintaining back-end technology, such as load balancing, resource provisioning, and network problemsolving. Instead, IT can focus on managing clients, their virtual desktops and their applications. n JANUARY 2014

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

19

Insight Though all manufacturers have their own strengths and weaknesses, NetApp rules the roost when it comes to unified storage and efficient data management.

Ashish Malhotra, Director–Sales and Finance, Netsoft Consulting Services, details how collaborating with NetApp can provide great benefits for partners.

By Shweta Rao

The Backbone of Storage Technology

Authorized Distributor

What is the evolution that is currently happening in the storage space and unified architecture market?

In the current era, the architectural vision for datacenters is in tune with the commitment to addressing emerging IT challenges. Mapping IT innovations to deliver business impact is the most critical aspect of this business today. Companies such as NetApp are rapidly coming up with solutions to achieve increased reliability, availability, and cost savings.

The last decade has seen several changes in the structure and emphasis of enterprise IT systems. Specific infrastructure trends have included the emergence of large consolidated datacenters, the adoption of virtualization and modularization, and an increased commoditization of hardware. At the application level, both the workload mix and usage patterns have evolved to an increased emphasis on service-centric computing and SLA-driven performance tuning. These, often dramatic, changes in the enterprise IT landscape motivate equivalent changes in the emphasis of architecture research.

How has NetApp helped you expand your storage portfolio in all these years?

NetApp has definitely helped us take solution-based selling to the highest level.

Their pre-validated offerings in collaboration with Cisco, and hypervisors called FlexPod have opened up opportunities, for partners, in all the four components of the datacenter, namely: Hypervisors, compute, network, and storage.

FlexPod supports the growing need to tie storage, networks, applications, and analytics (such as big data) into a more automated, responsive system that increases efficiency and lowers operational expense. The new offerings build on NetApp’s and Cisco’s joint vision and strategy to unify branch offices, core datacenters, service providers, and dedicated application infrastructures.

Is there a connection between customer benefits and your association with NetApp? Definitely. Let me elaborate this with an example. Today, we can inform an existing NetApp customer about the benefits of disk2disk backup, archiving, and even disaster recovery mechanism, thereby giving the customer flexibility, and, at the same time, gaining an opportunity to expand architecturally even on an existing NetApp environment.

Also, the unique capability of data-in-

NetApp strongly believes that partners are a vital cog in the wheel of business. Our expertise in diverse areas of storage will provide them with valuable cross-selling, up-selling opportunities. — Rajeev Saxena, Regional Director, NetApp India

place upgrades which effortlessly replace legacy NetApp storage controllers with the state-of-the-art ones present a business opportunity to approach existing NetApp customers and introduce them to the latest cutting-edge NetApp controllers and their benefits.

What, according to you, gives NetApp an upper hand over the competition?

I think the biggest advantage with NetApp is the first impression its technology has over a potential customer. Though all manufacturers have their own strengths and weaknesses, NetApp rules the roost when it comes to unified storage and efficient data management. The set of features Data ONTAP brings to the table definitely sets NetApp apart in this genre of storage.

Can you identify a few trends that you see with respect to enterprise class storage and market for the same?

Enterprise storage technology has evolved greatly in the past couple of years, and big data as well as qualitative data mining have been driving this trend further. At the same time, some newer trends have emerged and are playing a role in bolstering the future of enterprise storage technology to new levels. For example, Solid State Devices are now being strongly considered for primary storage. Software-defined storage is also being widely considered for the cost savings it offers organizations. Other emerging trends include unified storage, converged architectures like FlexPod, big data, clustered storage, and file storage.

How can collaborating with NetApp benefit partners?

NetApp is the backbone of our storage solutions offerings, and that is primarily because it is also the backbone in the evolution of storage technology. We share a very good and comfortable rapport with NetApp, and we look forward to expanding our relationship with them further across the domains of sales and services.

IDG SERVICES

STATE OF THE MARKET | SURVEY 2014 Partners poll their sentiments, expectations, pain points and challenges for the coming year.

ChannelWorld 75%

18% Grow

Increase in IT spend around Big Data in 2014

In 2014, do you expect your business to...

7% Slow Down

26%

78% PAG E

24

Partners to explore ‘Software-defined everything’ technology

Status Quo

2014 Pulse of As we step into the new year, it is the right time to take stock of reality in order to prepare

ourselves for the uncertainties ahead. ChannelWorld’s exclusive special report highlights the

THE YEAR AHEAD | CIO SURVEY 2014 Excerpts from an exhaustive CIO poll on the top emerging technologies for 2014 ---Cloud, Big Data, Mobility and Datacenter.

Cloud Direction

42%

Do You Use Big Data Tools?

22

Hybrid

28

42%

17% Public

PAG E

Private

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2014

50% NO!

56%

Of Indian organizations allow employees to use personal devices at work

PAG E

33

AGENDA 2014 | INDUSTRY Top decision makers reveal their technology roadmap and channel expectations for the next 12 months.

Alok Bharadwaj Canon

Anil Valluri NetApp

Bhaskar Bakthavatsalu Check Point Technologies

Karan Bajwa Microsoft

Minhaj Zia Polycom

Neelam Dhawan HP

Sanjay Deshmukh Citrix

Sunil Khanna Emerson

Sunil Manglore CA Technologies

Debjani Ghosh Intel

Dhanya Thakkar Trend Micro

Jagdish Mahapatra McAfee

Jeff White Cisco

Nikhil Pathak Schneider Electric

Rajesh Janey EMC

Ravi Chauhan Juniper Networks

Sandeep Mathur Oracle

Surendra Singh Websense

T.Srinivasan VMware

Tushar Sighat D-Link

Vivekanand Venugopal Hitachi Data Systems

the Market ‘State of the Market Survey 2014’, backed by the voices and views of industry titans,

CIOs and research analysts for a holistic representation of the road ahead in 2014.

PAG E

STRATEGIC DIRECTIONS | ANALYSTS Top analyst firms forecast trends and make predictions potential for the industry at large.

FORRESTER GARTNER

ERNST & YOUNG

75 IDC

i

PwC JANUARY 2014

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

23

STATE OF THE MARKET 2014 T

SURVEY METHODOLOGY

Easy

2%

2% Cant Say

Neutral

8% 27%

Very Challenging

62%

How do you think your business environment will be in 2014?

Challenging

18%

In 2014, do you expect your business to Low Others Very High 5% 3% 6%

Stay the Same

75% Grow

7%

Slow Down

Could be Higher

43%

14%

High

29% Neutral

What do you think will be your company’s risk appetite in 2014?

Market Reality Steep Challenges High Risk Appetite

HE FIFTH edition of ChannelWorld ‘State of the Market 2014’ Survey earmarks the views, concerns and predictions of the enterprise partner community as they step into a new year. This definitive and exhaustive survey conducted online in November and December 2013, measures the focus of partner organizations for 2014. Besides highlighting the expectations of channels from vendor companies, it also talks about the challenges and roadblocks to be faced with over the next twelve months.

The survey delves into the technology directions that Indian channel companies would be likely to take in 2014.

The 137 respondents included a balanced mix of Systems Integrators, VARs, ISVs and MSPs – who operate across the enterprise segment in India.

Approximately 43% of the partner organizations have annual revenues (expected FY13) of over Rs. 25 crore. The respondents spanned across 16 Indian cities of India, with an even mix across the major regions of India - west, north and south. There was participation from the Eastern part of India too.

The majority of partner organisations were from metros and tier-1 cities such as New Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Pune, amongst others. Surprisingly, there was a small but powerful set of responses from channel companies situated in far flung tier-2 cities such as Bhilad, Kanpur, Nagpur, Jaipur, Bhopal, Agra, Vadodara and Kochi, amongst others. The mix across regions gives a fairly representative flavor of the year ahead, thus helping to evolve the solution provider agenda for 2014.

More than half of the respondents play across more than three offices across India, with about 86% of the respondents having less than 250 employees in their organizations. The respondents were generally the top decision makers of their companies.

The findings of the survey threw up some known aspects of the channel organizations and some hitherto unknown ones as well. Among the highlights to look forward to, it is interesting to note that a substantial chunk of

STATE OF THE MARKET 2014 n the partner organizations are upwardly mobile and profess great interest in geographic expansion, also with a desire to plunge into new technologies, with gusto, for high profitability. The partners also have a wish list for their OEM partners, making the survey highly competitive and

revealing; an eye-opener with a takeaway for all stakeholders.

All responses to the survey were gathered using a secure server with all of the individual data kept confidential. The degree of error is +/- 4.6 percent at a 90 percent confidence level.

Big Data has clearly begun to interest both our large and smaller customers. The whole focus of 2014 will be to bring Big Data to the smaller organizations cost effectively.

DEMOGRAPHICS OF SURVEY RESPONDENTS PARTNER PROFILE 60% Systems Integrator

PRAVEEN DWARKANATH, CEO, Fourth Quadrant Technologies

24% Value Added Reseller (VAR) 4% Valu Added Distributor (VAD) 2% Independent Software Vendor (ISV) 5% Managed Service Provider (MSP) 5% Others

REVENUES FY13/14(EST.) 9% > 100 Cr 17% 50 - 100 Cr 17% 25 - 50 Cr

27% < 10 Cr

30% 10 - 25 Cr

60%

In these tough times, increasing services revenue is top of the line in terms of priority for any business to sustain. The next year will see a lot of action in this regard, and we hope to achieve around 10 percent increase in services toplines, and an overall increase of 30 percent in revenues.

of the partner organisations have at least three offices across India

86%

GURPREET SINGH, MD,

Arrow PC Network

of the partner organisations have less than 250 employees

REGION WISE SPLIT

25%

Partners companies across

16

37%

7%

31%

cities of India participated in the survey

As a business, we have a high risk appetite and going to market as a consultant is one of the ways and means to achieve that. In 2014, we are looking at BI and analytics as a focus area, while our existing portfolio in private cloud solutions, security and virtualization will add meat to our offerings to customers.

RAHUL MEHER, MD,

nWest nNorth nSouth nEast

Leon Computers JANUARY 2014

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

25

n STATE OF THE MARKET 2014

Partner Issues Concerns, Expectations

Partner Wishlist

What is your biggest wish from a vendor in 2014?

What is the single biggest challenge you expect to face in 2014?

Figures in %

36

Figures in % Better Margins

41

29 Generating Sales Leads

4 Improved Implementation & Technical Support’

1 Better Training & Certification programs

13

Decline in customer IT spends/budgets

8

Adding net new customers

2

Expanding Product/Service Portfolio

Pressure on Margins

Growing Revenues

11

Attracting & retaining talent

13

12

Expanding Customer Base

4 Increase in Market Development Funds

8 Opex based business model

5 Support for marketing and brand building activities

11 Longer Credit Period/Flexible Credit Terms

2 Others

Go-to-Market Strategy Services Way to Go

BFSI,Telecom Rise in Spend

What will be your Top ‘Go to Market’ Strategy for 2014?

Which sector’s IT Spend do you expect to grow the most in 2014?

Offer more services on a recurring revenue model 14% Leverage or position yourself as a technology consultant 22% Introduce new technologies to my existing customer base

26%

22% 11%

11% Focus to drive business from key accounts

8%

6% Geographical expansion, in and out of India 2% Others 26

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2014

2%

n Government n BFSI (Banking, Financial

7%

11% Lower TCO and maximise ROI on IT investments by customers

8% Cross-sell/ Up-sell technologies

2%

6%

25% 17%

Services, & Insurance) n Manufacturing (includes Auto, Pharma, FMCG,) n Telecom n Retail n Services (includes Tourism, Education, Logistics) n IT/BPO n Infrastructure & Utilities

(Real Estate, Oil & Gas, Power) n Media & Entertainment

SPECIAL REPORT n

Tech Roadmap Big Bet Security, Storage, Virtualization

26%

Which technologies will you explore in 2014 vis-a-vis 2013?

11%

Big Data

36

33%

18%

n 2013 n 2014

Business Application Software 17%

31%

Business Intelligence & Analytics

39%

8%

Mobility

of the respondents plan to invest in software-defined everything over next 12 months

28%

27%

53%

28%

Workstations (desktops, laptops, servers, thin clients) Networking

68%

11%

of revenues are expected to be derived from Services

41%

29%

Private Cloud Based Solutions Public Cloud Based Solutions

31%

20%

62%

26%

Security UC and Collaboration

65%

27%

17%

68%

23%

Storage

51%

15%

Virtualization

increase expected in social media and collaboration spend in 2014 over the previous year

16%

23%

Others

Huge Spend Big Data, Cloud, SDx In which technologies do you expect IT spend to change in 2014?

Figures in %

100

21

13 4

75

62

85

19

17

4

8

7

65

Storage

83

Social Media and Collaboration

47

Security

85

7

SDN / SDS / SDDC

18

Public Cloud Based Solutions

75

Networking

46

Private Cloud Based Solutions

22

Mobility

57

28

4

Workstations

78

Business Intelligence & Analytics

Big Data

20

Business Application Software

40

9

13 2

1

60

31

77

Virtualization

31

14 1

80

0

36

24

34

22%

75

n Increase n Decrease n Stay the Same JANUARY 2014

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

27

n THE YEAR AHEAD 2014 | CIO SURVEY

Cloud Computing: Rising on Thermals As more Indian organizations embrace cloud computing in its multiple forms, CIOs are finding new benefits and lower resistance.

Cloud Direction

Public Cloud Benefits

CIOs were asked to select which cloud model their organizations are using or would like to use.

The top benefit of public clouds (it's ability to increase business agility) has not changed since the last year.

48% 42%

42% 38%

53% Increases business agility

2013 2014

45% Reduces Total Cost of Ownership

44% Helps us take advantage of the latest technology

40% 17%

14%

Reduce infrastructure costs

38% Better support for remote and mobile workers

36% Hybrid Cloud

Private Cloud

Public Cloud

Converts capital expenditures to operating expenses

Private Cloud Benefits

Top Public Cloud Concerns

A year ago, 70% of CIOs said a private cloud's greatest benefit was its ability to leverage existing assets and increase efficiency.

Across every risk item, fewer CIOs have concerns with the public cloud.

2014

2013

Unauthorized access to or leak of our customersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; data

53%

54%

Vendor lock-in

50%

56%

Security defects in the technology itself

48%

52%

Unauthorized access to or leak of proprietary data

47%

52%

44%

Integration of cloud data with our internal systems

43%

53%

37%

Business continuity and DR readiness of provider

27%

27%

Application and system performance

25%

26%

Business viability of provider (risk company will fail)

25%

29%

55% Builds in better scalability

52% Ability to leverage existing assets and increase efficiency

46% Reduces time to deliver applications to the business Reduces total cost of ownership Maximizes compute resources, but is a high cost option

34% Leverages investment in existing infrastructure

Foggy on the Legalities

Hurdles to Private Clouds

Over 42% of CIOs are not sure or don't know their company's legal obligations where cloud computing is concerned.

41% Updating our current infrastructure

34% Not Sure

42% Integrating existing IT products

32% 58% Yes

Making the business case for a private cloud

25% Acquiring employee skill sets

23% 8%

Acquiring cloud software and hardware

23%

No Managing automation 28

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2014

SPECIAL REPORT n

Big Data: Small Steps Big data might be making big waves, but the approach of most Indian organizations to analytics hasn’t changed too much in the last year.

BI Tools Maturity Scale Note that the more mature a solution is, the more likely it's not being used extensively.

Used Extensively

Limited Use

Plan to Use

75%

20%

4%

Spreadsheets / Microsoft Excel Reports

74%

19%

5%

Dashboards

40%

38%

18%

Query and analysis software

31%

41%

20%

Scorecards

19%

37%

30%

Alerts

30%

38%

24%

Embedded BI

6%

18%

39%

Mobile (smartphone- or tablet-based)

9%

20%

55%

dashboards / data visualizations

Do You Use Big Data Tools?

Which Tools?

31%

Yes

9%

Hadoop Distro

28% NoSQL Data Store

No

50%

Not yet, but we have plans to do so or are in the process of implementing

41%

28% Real Time Event Processing Tools

25% Columnar Databases

20% HPCC (High Performance Computing Cluster)

11% MapReduce framework/architecture

Big Data Understanding

Barriers to Analytics Adoption

CIOs were asked whether their organizations distinguish “data” from “big data,” and use distinct tools for higher volume, complexity and dynamic data processing.

The top three challenges haven’t changed in the last year.

55% Data quality problems 38%

47%

Software licenses are too expensive 35% Integration/compatibility issues with existing/multiple platforms

38%

34% BI/analytics talent is too expensive to hire 28%

15% Yes

No

Not sure

No clear ROI 26% Challenges scaling the technology across the entire organization JANUARY 2014

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

29

n THE YEAR AHEAD 2014 | CIO SURVEY

Consumerization and Mobility As more Indian organizations embrace cloud computing in its multiple forms, CIOs are finding new benefits and lower resistance.

56%

Consumerization of IT: Concerns Only 7% of Indian CIOs have no concerns regarding the consumerization of IT.

55% Potential theft of intellectual property 54% Difficulty meeting compliance requirements 52% Potential network security breaches 49% Additional overhead to support devices

Of Indian organizations allow employees to use personal devices at work Personal Devices Employees Use at Work At 77%, Android is the most popular mobility platform supported by enterprises.

46% Possible loss of customer data

75%

What They Are Doing CIOs were asked what business tasks were performed by staffers using personal devices.

44%

90%

90%

33%

Smartphones

Tablets

Laptops / Notebooks

Benefits of Consumerization of IT

Other enterprise apps

9%

CRM

ERP

17%

18%

31% Collaboration

Social media apps

Phone calls

Email

38%

Less than 10% of CIOs believe that the risks associated with the consumerization of IT outweigh any benefits.

Higher employee productivity

64%

Enhanced employee access to information

54%

Better internal collaboration

44%

Improved customer service

41%

Better employee satisfaction

39%

Policy For Personal Devices at Work

Just under a fifth of CIOs say their organizations do not support personal devices at work.

6% Provide support for any device 30

36% Support a limited list of devices

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2014

33% Plan to put a policy in place

7% No plans to implement a policy

SPECIAL REPORT n

Data Center: Changes at the Heart of IT The datacenter is where IT strategy rubber hits the road. As CIOs try to keep their datacenters up with the times, they continue to face challenges.

Top 3 DC Pain Points Backup and recovery lifecycle

34%

Single points of failure increasing the level of risk

31%

Management complexity due to multiple tools

29%

Strategies to Tackle Rising Demands on DCs

A significant number of Indian CIOs are turning to the cloud to take the stress off their datacenters.

71% Server virtualization and consolidation 45% Upgrading legacy IT equipment for greater power efficiency

The Effects of DC Complexity A fifth of CIOs say that DC complexity has no impact on their organizations.

15%

Moving less critical systems to cloud services 30% Expanding useable floor space within existing facilities 29% Outsourcing datacenter requirements completely 20% Moving less critical systems out to co-location 17% Constructing new datacenter facilities 15% 11%

4%

7%

7%

Modifying cooling systems to supplement hot spots 9%

15%

23%

Higher cost Longer lead times to provision compute resources Reduced agility Missed SLAs Compliance incidents Higher downtime Security breaches

40%

Retrofiting new power and cooling systems to existing facilities

Level of Server Virtualization Within Indian Enterprises 16%

14%

18% Between 20% and 30%

Between 10% and 20%

Less than 10% virtualized

Issues with Running Mission-critical Apps in a Virtual Environment Over 40 percent of CIOs say that they have no issues with running mission-critical apps in a virtual environment.

32%

Some applications are not good candidates for virtualization

23%

Increased latency and performance issues

23%

Application workload difficult to define

19%

Inadequate in-house skill sets necessary for the migration

16%

Problems with back-up

16% Between 30% and 40%

37% More than 50%

THE YEAR AHEAD 2014 | CIO SURVEY The Year Ahead Survey 2014 was administered online by CIO Magazine - a sister publication of ChannelWorld - over two weeks in November 2013. Three hundred eighty-six Indian IT leaders participated. Twenty-two percent of respondents were from organizations with annual revenues of over Rs 10,000 crore; 32 percent from enterprises between Rs 2,000 crore and Rs 9,999 crore; 23 percent from organizations between Rs 500 and Rs 1,999 crore.

A cross-section of Indian industry participated. CIO editors ensured all participants are bonafide IT leaders.

All responses were gathered using a secure server with all individual data kept confidential. The degree of error is +/- 5.5 percent at a 95 percent confidence level.

JANUARY 2014

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

31

W

E ARE setting

a growth target of 15 percent in 2014 to achieve revenues of Rs 2300 crore. There is a sluggish demand cycle. However India Inc. is impatient to register growth and expansion in smaller markets. This may trigger some investment. We are seeing traction in managed print services, digitization, and more security in document management etcetera, particularly in BFSI and pharma segments.

P h o t o g r a p h b y D E LT R I M E D I A

OPPORTUNITIES New business outsource services seem to be the single biggest new opportunity for the industry as well as for Canon. Services like digitization services, print room services, technical document management services, business cloud services for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are the new â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;endto-end outsourcingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; domains which the industry on the whole is pushing itself towards.

Segments like digital cinematography imaging, digital medical imaging, digital commercial printing like books, photo albums will see higher growth than conventional segments in 2014.

The biggest challenge is the instability of the US dollar. Our economy has exposed its fragility and vulnerability to the US dollar and a depreciating rupee is the biggest nightmare for our IT and electronic hardware industry.

CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT

AGENDA 2014 n

Alok Bharadwaj, Executive Vice President, Canon India, speaks on the emergence of new business outsourcing services across organizations.

There are primarily three touch points where the consumers experience Canon. At our 110 retail stores in 52 cities, on their site with our B2B document services, and on their desk with online CRMs. We continue to strengthen all these routes to further enhance the engagement with our customers.

Other major initiatives for 2014 will be networking all customers acquired by our channel partners. We will also be launching our portal for the enterprise segment.

CHANNEL STRATEGY We are contemplating three main JANUARY 2014

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

33

-

n AGENDA 2014 | ALOK BHARADWAJ areas in which, we would like our channel partners to have a differentiated approach in 2014.

First, we will enhance their knowledge and skills to sync with the changing tech landscape and the changed needs at customer end.

We have set up Canon-Integrated sales training Academy (C-SITA) which has a rich curriculum of product, competitive advantage, and functional skills.

Second, by making partners create a solution and service strategy enables them to shift from the traditional hardware focus.

Third, enterprise channels have to move up the ‘value chain’ and track the value market share instead of old practice of monitoring volume share.

Canon will also encourage partners to expand scope, scale, and size of current relationship value.

We are seeing traction in managed print services, digitization, and more security in document management particularly in BFSI and pharma segments.

34

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2014

ADVICE TO CHANNELS Enterprise channels for Canon equals partners, who have cracked the magic formula of helping customers by enabling them to improve the efficiency of their operations while optimizing and automating their processes.

They have helped enterprise customers to build a performing workplace for employees and most importantly serve their customers more effectively, by deploying technology, applications, solutions and services. l Develop a strong service strategy as a part of business model and create substantial contribution from service and solutions. l Build strong CRM as a DNA

Mega Trends  Cloud Printing: It would see a big push in 2014. Enterprise and employees see merit in adopting cloud printing solutions that facilitate mobile workspace.  Wi-Fi: Wi-Fi is ubiquitous and 2014 will see numerous launches of Wi-Fi connected devices by different technology vendors.  Biometrics: This technology is being incorporated across multiple applications in enterprises. As we move into 2014, we will see many more new applications around biometrics.  Document Management System and Digitization: Content archival, retrieval, speed, search, sharing, security and statutory compulsions (the 5S’) will push enterprises to adopt DMS and digitization.  Outsourcing of Services: This trend will pick up speed as even medium size enterprises (besides enterprises and large enterprises as the early adopters)will see business value in this outsourced option.

of business approach for deeper relationship with same set of customers. l Build high performing and innovation oriented culture. 

T

HE STAKEHOLDERS of success

of are our customers, partners, and employees. Our objective is to ensure that each constituency realizes their true potential— ensure customers realize NetApp’s power of innovation and our partners through growth and profitability.

Constant learning and skill-set enhancement are the key priorities of our employees. We want NetApp employees to retain our ‘Great Place to Work’ rankings.

OPPORTUNITIES

P h o t o g r a p h b y D E LT R I M E D I A

Opportunities are abound for NetApp in India market in the year of 2014 and the years to come. Organizations today—large and SMBs are highly concerned and are actively working towards extracting every bit of competitive advantage with the new enablers—flash, cloud, social media and analytics. And we [NetApp and its partners] are right at the center of this industry transformation.

For the past year, we have seen the challenging environment in which we are operating in India. Nonetheless, we truly believe that we are well positioned to enhance our market share with innovative product roadmap, compelling solutions offerings and robust partner strategy.

AGENDA 2014 n

Anil Valluri, Managing Director, NetApp India and SAARC, says SDS and cloudready products are a compelling proposition for customers.

CHANNEL STRATEGY All of NetApp’s business in India is done through its set of competent channel partners. Today, the enterprise partners see a tremendous value in embedding NetApp technologies to ensure that they can deliver better business outcomes for their customers.

Our strategy is very simple. Going forward in 2014 too, we will enable growth and profitability for our enterprise partners by delivering exceptional value with our innovation around the latest technology trends.

Therefore, there has been and always will be great emphasis laid on further enhancing partner competency to help them address the changing environment at customer-end amidst fast changing technology landscape.

CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT There is greater focus on making our customers successful with our JANUARY 2014

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

35

-

n AGENDA 2014 | ANIL VALLURI partners, products, and solutions.

Our hugely differentiated proposition comes with software defined storage and cloud ready products. These solutions offer compelling business value to our customers. We want to have a tighter collaboration with our alliance partners to further enhance the robustness of solutions that our customers buy from them.

Finally, our ‘Unified Pathways’ engagement model for our partners helps them to respond well to the new service and consumption models that our target markets are evolving to at a rapid pace.

ADVICE TO CHANNELS

Organizations are concerned and actively working towards extracting every bit of competitive advantage with the new enablers—flash, cloud, social media, and analytics.

36

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2014

Enterprise channels complete and complement our vision and value proposition for our esteemed set of customers. Channels undoubtedly have a big stake in our success and growth in the marketplace. l Deliver comprehensive and differentiated solutions beyond the ‘box push’ products. Enterprises today prefer to work with a competent partner who can offer solutions than the routine offerings by other players. l Adopt new, emerging business and consumption models to stay more relevant to the changing needs at customer environment. Opex-driven models are becoming a norm with most enterprises and mid-market in today’s economically challenging climate. Most of the new business models are quite flexible in nature which is in sync with the agile infrastructure across organizations. l Focus more on transforming IT as service for your customers. Besides a value proposition to the customer, IT-

Mega Trends  Flash: Flash adoption will be accelerated as customers balance performance, costs, and agility in their datacenter with flash’s new metrics.  Converged infrastructure: Strong momentum as customers focus on business outcomes leaving the integration of open, scalable systems to the vendors and partners.  Clustered Storage: The adoption will rise as customers look at seamless scalability of their storage with zero downtime.  Software-Defined Everything: This vision will gain acceptance as customers and partners look to abstract the infrastructure to derive control and efficiency.  Private and Hybrid Cloud: More enterprises will adopt hybrid and private cloud options that allow them to maintain sovereign control of their data with the advantage of cloud computing economics.  Decision support systems: These rollouts will accelerate on the fulcrum of big data and analytics.

as-a-service enhances bottom-lines to the partner revenues and facilitates long-term business association with the customer. 

I

N THE year of 2011-12, Check Point India made a commitment to its enterprise customers to make security - holistic, simpler and better. We also took upon ourselves the responsibility of enabling our partners to become trusted consultants and advisors to customers and not just act as a fulfilment partner. We believe that we have lived up to our promise to a large extent.

As we usher in 2014, we reaffirm our dedication to have more customers and partners enjoy the benefits of a simple, practical, scalable, and effective security infrastructure.

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

OPPORTUNITIES

AGENDA 2014 n

Bhaskar Bakthavatsalu, Regional Director, India and SAARC, Check Point Technologies, speaks on the value of ROI from security solutions for enterprises.

Due to the regulatory and compliance pressure during the last couple of years, the core sectors of the industry such as banking and telecom have taken huge strides to ramp up their security posture. There is a growing awareness on security matters amongst the National Critical Infrastructure customers like government, defence, power and utilities, etcetera. And these are poised to be the biggest opportunity in the times to come.

The real need for intelligence would be a large area of focus, since data needs to be transformed into information or intelligence, which needs the data analysis for the larger windows of structured as well unstructured data and this leads to big data story. Check Point offers Smart Event and Smart Centre as Management products that are both offering currently and are on the roadmap for big data handling for information intelligence.

However, the political landscape of the country especially the 2014 general elections is likely to be a game changer with the investments really maturing into these accounts.

CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT Check Pointâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s landmark initiative of 3D Assessment started couple of years back and has given us a whole new meaning to customer engagement. On the one hand, we have been able to add new customers consistently year on year. On the other, we have also been able to tangibly showcase their return of investment on security. Possibly for the first time in the history of information security, CISOs JANUARY 2014

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

37

-

n AGENDA 2014 | BHASKAR BAKTHAVATSALU and CIOs are able have a discussion with their management around security as a ROI subject, instead of the traditional TCO discussion held erstwhile. In 2014, we shall specifically be launching focused CSAT initiatives.

CHANNEL STRATEGY

We took upon ourselves the responsibility of enabling our partners to become trusted consultants and advisors and not just act as fulfilment partners.

38

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2014

The enterprise channel for Check Point is the ecosystem of system integration, value creating distribution, consulting partners, and stakeholders. These partners help the enterprise customers as advisors in bridging the complex gap between customer needs and genuinely mature solutions. With the fast changing technology landscape and increasingly varying customer environment, these partners are important to help the security posture of today’s organisations.

We expect to further strengthen our alliances with both – the existing channels and new competent channel partners in the year of 2014. The five areas which we will keep in mind while working with our enterprise partners will be profitability, new technologies, training, reliability, and motivation. Check Point will launch programs to attain this objective and further grow its partner business in India.

ADVICE TO CHANNELS Check Point India’s success is attributed to our esteemed partners. l We encourage our partners (even prospective ones) to align with CheckPoint and use the 3D Assessment tool (used for network security assessment of customer environments)for fastest possible results. l Customers are looking at more security controls, so partners should understand the positioning and benefits of Check Point Software

Mega Trends  Mobility (BYOD): All endpoints, which are mobile needs more security. Check Point offers solutions like Mobile Access Blade, SSL VPN solutions to address this emerging trend.  Cloud: Securing the virtualized systems in the datacenter for private and/or public cloud infrastructure will gain momentum in 2014.  Internet

of Everything: For everything and anything to be connected to the Internet needs to be secure IPv6 aware infrastructure. Check Point products are IPv6 ready.

 Big Data: The data analysis for the larger windows of structured as well unstructured data leads to big data story.  Technology Collaboration: The outcome of multiple technologies and/or vendors for securing the companies’ networks like Check Point Threat Cloud. However there is applications’/OS collaboration in the form of getting popularity of Open Source applications/OS.

Blades Architecture to deliver greater value to customers. l They must build capabilities to sell security as an architecture or a framework to customers and not as point solutions. 

O

UR KEY goal is to drive domestic adoption and usage of technology in the country. Domestic technology adoption is still in a nascent stage. That can primarily be attributed to the fact that people are unaware of how technology can improve their lives.

With the National Optic Fibre Network (NOFN) implementation seeing the light of day, pervasive broadband will not be a barrier any longer and a multi device play will emerge. What needs to develop is strong local content and usage model ecosystems that will help people use their PCs and tablets effectively. And most importantly, people need to be trained to use these devices for their benefit.

To overcome these challenges of awareness and relevance at the grass root level, Intel will work closely with the government in its efforts to scale digital literacy, education, and delivery of government services to citizens. Our goal is to remove all barriers to tech adoption working with our ecosystem as well as the government.

Photograph by SUMEET SAHWNEY

OPPORTUNITIES

AGENDA 2014 n

Debjani Ghosh, Managing Director-Sales and Marketing, Intel South Asia, is keen to drive domestic adoption and usage of technology.

With over 65 percent of the population under the age of 35, India is poised to be one of the largest consumption markets for computing worldwide. However, due to low levels of literacy, lack of local and relevant content, and limited Internet access, India is significantly lagging behind countries like China, Brazil and Russia with respect to using technology for personal development and domestic growth.

Technology, when used right, has the potential to provide people at the grass root level with access to better education, healthcare, and basic e-governance services that can ultimately result in inclusive growth. This challenge is being turned into an opportunity as we speak.

The government is committed to ensuring that at least one person in every family is e-literate by 2020.

This is a huge market opportunity for all device makers to innovate and offer the right devices with locally relevant features and content (not necessarily cheap devices).

CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT The low level of technology adoption is JANUARY 2014

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

39

-

n AGENDA 2014 | DEBJANI GHOSH because of low awareness levels. Awareness precedes engagement. So, we work with our industry partners to reach out to the end customers and create awareness not just about our products, but also what can one use it for.

We will continue with our “My Discovery zones” across the country that are focused on providing customers with a first-hand experience of our devices making it easier for them to decide which product is most suited to their needs. Additionally, we will continue to educate them on the benefits of owning a PC through social media channels.

CHANNEL STRATEGY

One of the key focus areas with enterprise channels is to up level skills and reach in the HPC domain where customers are looking for HPC specific skill sets and solutions.

40

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2014

Enterprise channel plays a key role in the implementation of latest IT solutions for our large customers. It’s important that we keep them abreast with the constantly changing technology world around us, as they are the ones who eventually implement and deliver solutions to the customers.

One of the key focus areas with enterprise channel is to up level their skills and reach in the high performance computing (HPC) domain where customers are looking for HPC specific skill sets and solutions. Another area we will focus on is a solution selling approach, rather than just focusing on hardware.

Mega Trends  Computing: It’s not too far when devices will respond to senses more than touch.  Connected Devices: Expected to touch 15 billion by the end of 2015, big data analytics will give rise to an industry around predictive analysis and raw data.  Enterprise Mobility: The demands of new generation employees will enable tighter integration of consumer usages with enterprise applications, driven by higher security needs beyond the OS.  Internet-of-Things: It’s ultimate potential will be realized with the ability to derive value from data captured at every step in the system—from sensor controllers to edge gateways to cloud to client.  Inclusive Growth: Initiatives like Aadhaar , NOFN, and decreasing cost of devices will make technology pervasive and with that, the delivery of education, government, health and financial services will transform.

ADVICE TO CHANNELS Enterprise channels are an all-important thread that delivers the goodness of our brand and value proposition to the customer. l Channel partners need to start looking at selling solutions, not products, to build stickiness and loyalty among their customers. l They should broaden their portfolio

of offerings, especially in Intelligent Systems space (security surveillance, storage, data analytics) which offers significant opportunity to add new revenue streams. l They should invest in creating a market as against just fulfilling existing demand. The opportunity is there. It needs to be nurtured. 

T

HE PAST year has been an interesting one in the world of cyber security. Mobile malware has become a large-scale threat and cybercrime continues to steal money from individuals and businesses. With release of our security predictions and our constant backing with optimum products, we set out to anticipate advanced persistent threats and keep our existing and prospective users updated.

With our major focus on enterprise security, we aim to raise awareness amongst enterprises and businesses about the safety and security issues being faced, and would provide useful advice to them timely, and equip them with information and tools to help them manage these issues. Trend Micro would be the smart security choice as our customers journey to the cloud. As a company, we will continue to lead in the enterprise security space and ensure that we provide advanced security solutions to our customers ahead of any other player in the market.

OPPORTUNITIES

AGENDA 2014 n

Dhanya Thakkar,

Managing Director, Trend Micro India and SAARC, on the revamped strategy to address security needs of large enterprises better.

Enterprises and their understanding of security and its importance have evolved significantly over the past couple of years. They have understood the magnitude of their intellectual property, and other business critical data.

Businesses being open about deploying the relevant security solution services give us better opportunity to materialise our goal of making this world safe for exchanging information.

The challenge lies in the fact that cybercriminals will increasingly use targeted-attack-type methodologies like open source research and highly customized spear phishing, along with multiple exploits. And Trend Micro needs to always stay ahead of them in providing adequate solutions to our customers in this era of advanced threats.

CHANNEL STRATEGY We will be largely focusing on enterprise security in 2014. We will be introducing schemes which are certain to assist our channel community in reaching out to greater audience with our superior range of products. It is our constant endeavour to support partners in JANUARY 2014

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

41

-

n AGENDA 2014 | DHANYA THAKKAR increasing their profitability, reducing their cost of business, and at the same time making sure they build a huge services business. Trend Micro believes in mutual growth with channel partners and wishes to boost its partner ecosystem with robust growth opportunity.

Channel partners are our extended family assisting us to further in our ultimate goal of making the world safer place for exchanging digital information. We support them by availing the best-in-class solutions and seek their backing with utilizing their resources to reach our end users.

CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT

As we gain market momentum in 2014, we will continue to grow our channels for better and far reach across the different verticals in India.

42

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2014

We have a powerful sales and channel engine that works with our customers on an on-going basis. All our large customers have direct access to our resources and technology to ensure that we meet their needs and security challenges. As we gain market momentum in 2014, we will continue to grow our channels for better and far reach across the different verticals in India. We shall invest in enabling them to meet the market dynamics and the customer requirements.

ADVICE TO CHANNELS Channels are our extended arm in the market place. Being customer centric and pro-active in meeting with the customer requirements is paramount for them. l Partners should be very conscious about the quality of the products and services they offer to their enterprise clients. The solutions should be in coherence with the requirements of their customers. l They should avail schemes and of-

Mega Trends  Mobile Devices: This form factor will become the attack vector of choice, bringing in nastier threats and attacks. The basic two-step verification will no longer be sufficient.  Targeted Attacks: The line dividing cyber and targeted attacks will blur as cybercriminals adopt methodologies more identified with targeted attack campaigns. Attackers, whether cyber or targeted, will continue the search for new exploits of choice and use reliable and easily obtainable exploits to get what they want.  The Deep Web: Law enforcement agencies will step up but face new challenges in the form of unknown territory—the Deep Web—and public distrust caused by revelations of state-sponsored monitoring.  Internet of Everything: Though it is still a buzzword though, the wait for the so-called “killer app,” that one app or device that will change the landscape as we know it, will continue.

fers from our end as it always further assists in offering added value to the customer, hence resulting in better business for them. l They should be well adept with the features of solutions they are offering in order to avoid any ambiguity resulting in negative word from on as well as the brand. 

A

KEY GOAL to be pursued in 2014 will be to focus on real time situational awareness for security across enterprises.

There is a robust strategy for McAfee India to grow faster than the market and focus on emerging technologies like Advanced Threat Defence. There will be an extra effort to engage more with various industry forums in India to deepen the relevance of security amongst CEOs of organizations. An ongoing focus from our end that would gain more momentum this year will be creating and nurturing more security professionals through training and enablement initiatives.

Ph o t o g r a p h by FOTO C O R P

OPPORTUNITIES

AGENDA 2014 n

Jagdish Mahapatra,

Managing Director, India and SAARC, McAfee, highlights the companyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s vision to secure next-gen datacenters.

The biggest opportunities for us in 2014, from a market segment standpoint will come from public sector companies, banks and SMBs. This will be dictated by the following factors: l To conform to RBI guidelines, public sector organizations especially banks will need to demonstrate compliance on data protection, event collection and analysis, endpoint controls, and related security measures. l Indian SMBs largely represent knowledge-based businesses such as chartered accountants or law firms.

They are likely to have money moving around through (wire transfers, vendor payments, and customer payments) but they are constrained in terms of resources and budgets. The needs of the hour for SMBs therefore are comprehensive security solutions that lower the complexity and cost.

The challenge would however be to ensure the partner readiness and their capacity building to be able to address these priorities and help improve the security posture of the companies against the fast-changing threat landscape.

CHANNEL STRATEGY We have an extensive framework to scale the ecosystem and equip partners through a partner profitability and enablement focus. The strategy for the next year would be to engage with top channel partners. The objective is to make McAfee the most profitable partner for doing business and ramp up partner profitability initiatives toJANUARY 2014

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

43

-

n AGENDA 2014 | JAGDISH MAHAPATRA wards it.

There will be a renewed effort and company drive to increase channel enablement and readiness in front of their customers through training and certification programmes. Joint marketing activities with focused partners in the form of road shows and events will be conducted this year.

CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT

There is a robust strategy for McAfee India to grow faster than the market and focus on emerging technologies like Advanced Threat Defence.

44

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2014

There is plan to increase sales team to have a direct touch with more number of enterprise customers and as a result achieve enhanced sales capacity this year. Equipping more solution architects to be ‘McAfee ready’ and build more business relevance practices in the market will help improve our engagement with the customers.

Through our partner enablement initiative, we will develop sales and technical resources to further gain knowledge of McAfee products and grow skills based on the role within the organization. Strengthening professional services practices at McAfee to offer training and advisory services to the organizations and also attract customers to experiential briefing centres in McAfee would extend our value proposition in the market.

Mega Trends  Enterprise Mobility and BYOD: BYOD needs to be looked at from different dimensions like DLP, NAC, authentication, internal IPS, internal firewalls etcetera. This demands companies to relook the security architecture to fit BYOD needs.  Real-Time Visibility of Threat Trends: The volume of threats and the nature of hidden, stealthy malware will require every organization to have instant visibility across devices.  Advanced Threat Defence in Security: To combat advanced malware, there is a need to adopt advanced threat defence solutions to respond to attacks faster and seamlessly move from analysis to protection and resolution.  Datacenter Transformation: With the blurring of boundaries between physical, virtual, and public/private clouds, organizations are on an evolutionary curve towards nextgeneration datacenters.

ADVICE TO CHANNELS Being a partner invested company the enterprise channels community is our extended arm and forms the cornerstone of McAfee’s success in Indian market.

Our advice to channel partners to register more business and make more money in 2014 would be to: l Learn new and upcoming technolo-

gies in the market and build in house capability in security domain through best practices. l Engage early with the customers to get maximum benefit of all possible profitability stacks. l Increase services attached to the deals for healthy bottom lines to your company revenues. 

O

UR VISION in India is to transform the life experiences of 1.2 billion people in India. We have aligned ourselves with the national agenda and we at Cisco are a transformational partner for leading companies across key industries.

We have a very clear aspiration to be the number one IT company which we define in terms of relevance and business outcomes for our customers.

OPPORTUNITIES

P h o t o g r a p h b y D E LT R I M E D I A

There are a number of transitions that are happening across the main sectors wherein we are focused through a streamlined strategy.

These key verticals are the service provider segment; Banking, Financial Services & Insurance (BFSI), IT Services, Public Sector and Commercial sectors in India market. These transitions, driven by macro-economic, in-country or technology changes, have deep implications for companies in these industriesâ&#x20AC;Śin terms of how they compete, how they reach out to their customers, what their business outcomes are and how differentiated their customer experiences can be.

We believe Cisco as a technology leader has a huge opportunity in helping these companies bring business based outcomes quicker to the market.

AGENDA 2014 n

Jeff White,

President, Cisco India and SAARC, believes that there is a huge potential value for Internet of Everything in India.

CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT In line with our aspiration to become the number one IT Company in India, we have retooled our organizational structure and brought to bear a lot of Ciscoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s different parts. Our evolved organization structure allows to be much more customer centric and partner driven - which we believe are important characteristics for a successful technology vendor.

We have decreased the number of high touch customer accounts allowing us to better target opportunities in industries such as the Public Sector. This approach definitely gives us the breadth and depth in customer engagement, and has allowed us to be more engaged and relevant with CIOs and other parts of the business.

CHANNEL STRATEGY Cisco is a partner-centric company.

JANUARY 2014

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

45

-

n AGENDA 2014 | JEFF WHITE

We have a very clear aspiration to be the number one IT company which we define in terms of relevance and business outcomes for our customers.

46

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2014

It’s in our DNA. For the year of 2014 we have earmarked two clear focus areas. The first one is to transform existing channel partners and help move them up the value chain, to become a solutions provider in their own right. Over the past few quarters in 2103, we have significantly increased our channel efforts to augment partner capabilities by providing leading practices, tools, and knowledge transfer, which in turn enable them to have more repeatable, successful, and profitable customer engagements.

The second focus for the year of 2014 in terms of channel strategy would be to develop a new partner ecosystem. Our customers are asking us to deliver complete solutions that truly solve not just their IT problems but their business problems. To address these issues at the customer end, Cisco will need to partner with a variety of software, storage and converged infrastructure players to deliver solutions that capture these market transitions, and truly meet the business imperatives of different kinds of buyers.

ADVICE TO CHANNELS Enterprise channels to Cisco means that together with our partners we make things happen like no one else. The suggestions to the partner community to garner more business opportunities and register healthy bottom-line for this year are: l Create differentiated offerings to emerge as a partner of choice for your enterprise customers. l Take a ‘solutions-led’ approach for better customer connect than the tra-

Mega Trends  Mobility: The modern workspace will support mobility trends that enable people to access information and communicate from their device of choice—while maintaining security.  Cloud: Public, private, and hybrid cloud environments based on static configurations will give way to dynamic and multi-vendor cloud environments.  Data Analytics: The effectiveness of real-time analysis is dependent on the ability of different technologies to process data in seconds or minutes.  The Application Economy: Every industry is becoming an applicationcentric industry, and the business model shift is only accelerating. This shift to an application economy is perhaps the biggest IT market transition of all.  Internet of Things: The next phase of the Internet will be all around the Internet of Everything: People, process, data, and connecting the things. At Cisco we see the potential value of Internet of Everything in India at $18 billion.

ditional ‘products’ approach. l Leverage newer technology offerings to solve customers’ business challenges. 

W

E ARE truly breaking

through this year, as a devices and services company.

Our opportunity is clear, and it has never been greater. Going forward, our strategy will focus on creating a family of devices and services for individuals and businesses that empower people at home, at work, and on the go, for the activities they value most.

The cloud and mobility story evolved couple of years ago. We are discussing cloud and mobility extensively and our partners too are excited now. Today cloud and mobility is no longer a trend or a forecast. It is very much here and our partners are keen to know more about our offerings and its economics.

Photograph by SUMEET SAHWNEY

OPPORTUNITIES

AGENDA 2014 n

Karan Bajwa,

Managing Director, Microsoft India, says the company’s products and programs will accelerate its success across SMBs.

SMEs are a critical growth engine for jobs and economies today. There is tremendous opportunity for economic growth. Our objective is to help more SMEs transition to, and benefit from, modern IT. For customers, it means providing product training and helping SMEs understand the full range of available devices and services, but it also means community and industry investments such as skills training.

Microsoft’s products and programs are playing a key role in driving SME success in India.

SMEs in India comprise businesses that have a large breadth of IT needs and IT experience. They are spread out geographically, operate in different languages, and need services and solutions that range from technology selection to deployment to ongoing support. Given this, Microsoft believes that for SMEs to succeed and grow through the use of IT, we and our solutions partners need hand hold our SME customers. The good news is that we have 10,000 partners in the country and a large number of them already understand and work in this space.

CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT Microsoft India recently announced the launch of Microsoft CityNext in the country. Microsoft’s CityNext puts people first and builds on a new infrastructure of collaborative technology to engage citizens, businesses, and government leaders to do ‘new with JANUARY 2014

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

47

-

n AGENDA 2014 | KARAN BAJWA less’. We are excited about the possibilities this opens up to help enable cities compete effectively on a global scale and foster economic, social, and environmental sustainability.

Also, as a part of our go-to-market strategy in the consumer space, we engage in collaboration with our OEM partners to drive compelling consumer experiences for Windows family of devices.

CHANNEL STRATEGY

Boundaries for knowledge sharing are blurring in new ways at a fast pace. It’s a transformative time for the IT industry and for Microsoft.

48

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2014

The Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) community includes OEMs, resellers, and system builders and is the starting point for partner network core benefits.

We are a partner-centric organization and there are almost 10,000 partners in our ecosystem in India. There are large partners who focus on deals with enterprises that are in technical domain.

We adopted a 3C approach—capacity, capability and commitment—for our partner community to help them adopt new technologies like cloud solutions, thereby adding value to their business from a long-term perspective.

Moving forward our enterprise channel strategy for 2014 will be to continue to support the development of capacity and capability of partners for the present and the future. We will strengthen our co-selling activities to help our partners grow and invest in the expansion of our partners reach to new geographies and customers.

ADVICE TO CHANNELS Enterprise channels have been and will be our partners in growth. We value them, depend on them, and are committed to their success. l Deepen relationships through an-

Mega Trends  Cloud: Today, cloud is the new normal. As more and more businesses, NGOs, and people move to the cloud, it’s getting more government attention.  Enterprise Social: It’s real power is when you can connect your employees and partners with customers. More than 85 percent of Fortune 500 companies have already begun deploying social solutions.  Mobility: The proliferation of new devices along with the connectivity of the cloud is making businesses and consumers more mobile and changing the way they work and play.  Big Data: It is everywhere and it has the potential to change the way governments and organizations conduct business and make discoveries.  Touch:

Microsoft is moving its entire ecosystem to touch. Windows 8 brings touch to all form factors with the tablets, laptops, and PCs.

nuity relationships like cloud. In multiple surveys, cloud-oriented partners significantly outperformed their peers in terms of higher revenue, higher customer acquisition, and faster growth. l Target whitespace—acquire new customers l Capitalize on the cycle of new technology—devices and services 

W

E HAVE set three important goals for ourselves in 2014.

Be the most trusted brand in Audio/Visual Collaboration in India (Polycom has been a frontrunner in this space and we intend to consolidate our position further as an undisputed leader). Secondly, we want to simplify our GTM and make it easy for our partners to do business with us. Segmenting the markets to address their needs better by either creating high touch in case of high consulting needs to better alignment with partners for better delivery of solutions. We will leverage on the strength of partners to deliver the optimum solutions.

The third goal is to be the best place to work for collaboration industry professionals. We have among the most forward leaning work policies to create a positive environment to channelize the efforts. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a combination of flexibility, our own collaboration technologies besides an open and rewarding culture.

Photograph by KAPIL SHROFF

OPPORTUNITIES

AGENDA 2014 n

Minhaj Zia, MD-India and SAARC, Polycom, says that the adoption of video beyond the large enterprise will open up a huge market.

Businesswise, the emergence of video as a preferred communication medium and the increased adoption within the enterprise. Video is now being tied to business processes like HR, Project management, dealer management etc going beyond generic meeting and collaboration. Marketwise, the adoption of video beyond the large enterprise will open up a large market. This is a rapidly growing segment and with different grades of affordable solution, visual collaboration will find a place critical in the organization.

CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT We will focus on a consultative approach to help our customers choose the right technology architecture based on their business needs. Technology usage and adoption to solve specific customer problems rather than product features and specifications will also be a focus. This helps us draw a mid- and long-term visual collaboration roadmap that not only helps us deploy the right technologies but also create a better ROI model for the CIO. We are aligning our GTM model to address the customer needs of our customers across enterprise, public JANUARY 2014

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

49

-

n AGENDA 2014 | MINHAJ ZIA sector, mid-market, and SMB. Customers in each segment have a different fundamental need and expectation from visual collaboration. It could be as generic as creating VC rooms to avoid travel or to create architecture to involve business processes like HR or manufacturing or a highly enabled VC enterprise to promote high performance collaboration. Therefore aligning them with the right interface and partners becomes critical to meeting their expectations.

CHANNEL STRATEGY

Besides investing time and effort to create systems and processes for higher policy, we will ensure pricing, consistency, and world-class business practices.

50

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2014

To build stronger relationship with partners, increase our mindshare in the community and set them up for success.

We will enable the partners to translate our vision and proposition for higher consistency and success that includes marketing and training support to function independently and effectively. Create partners to fill-in the geo-gaps that exists and also to address new unexplored markets. Besides investing time and effort to create systems and processes for higher policy, we will ensure pricing consistency and world class business practice.

ADVICE TO CHANNELS A well-functioning enterprise channel is the key to deliver the right solutions for the customer and helps them to translate a technology solution into business benefit. l Create competencies to add enhanced value and create more business. Greater focus on customer needs. Stitch customised solutions.

Create value and create barrier by superior engagements.

Mega Trends  Mobility: End users demanding seamless connectivity anywhere, anytime across any device. Increasing availability of powerful mobile computing combined with ubiquity is driving an always connected world.  Video: Video is new the voice and users are demanding enhanced user experience and rich interaction combined with the ability to share content. This is helping organization to defy the time and distance barrier and improve productivity.  Cloud (Virtualization): In a dynamic business environment, IT needs to consolidate its assets and have the ability to scale up and down its resources to match business needs. Cloud offers this flexibility.  Social: Social networks build strong work communities, enhancing collaboration, information sharing, and productivity  Cyber Security: In a connected world the single biggest threat to the business is inadequate security.

l Expand to unchartered territories.

Explore new markets/customers.

Geo-expansion is the key to net more business. l Mine the current base for opportunity as technology has leapfrogged in the last 3 years. 

I

T IS now a critical and strategic factor in determining enterprise competitiveness. In 2014, we are capitalizing on the tectonic shift taking place in our industry—the transition to what we define as a “New Style of IT”. This we see possible by pursuing growth in four strategic areas: Cloud, mobility, big data, and security. The New Style of IT spans devices, infrastructure, software, and services to deliver on the promise that customers, partners, and employees expect.

CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT Innovation and invention are at the core of HP’s existence—it’s in our DNA. This unique qualification has always been the strength of the company, and over the last few years we have increased our investment in R&D. Some of our recent product launches are a result of extensive customer engagement and feedback. We are unique because we are equally strong across the portfolio—from hardware, software and services to security, cloud, and big data. With this, HP is positioned to help customers and partners navigate the New Style of IT and build enterprises that are future-ready.

Photograph by SUMEET SAHWNEY

OPPORTUNITIES

AGENDA 2014 n

Neelam Dhawan,

VP and GM, Enterprise Group and Country Managing Director, HP India, says innovation and invention are at the core of HP’s existence .

From a business standpoint, in FY 13, we emerged as a preferred technology partner for India and a market leader across our product portfolios. The New Style of IT promises opportunity to our customers that includes; lower cost, greater agility, simplicity, and speed. In FY 14, the economic uncertainty may have some impact on IT spends in the market, but we are working on several strategic initiatives like cloud, mobility, and big data to help overcome this.

CHANNEL STRATEGY Partners are part of our DNA and we at HP have more than 30 years of experience in developing profitable and growing channel partner relationships. As customer needs change to fit industry requirements, channel partners need an alternative solution that can contribute to their bottom line.

In India, as over 75 percent of HP EG business is done through channel partners, a strong alignment and on-going dialogue with partners is crucial and critical. HP is fully committed to help JANUARY 2014

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

51

-

n AGENDA 2014 | NEELAM DHAWAN partners succeed in their business and we continue to build on the momentum we have developed with the partner community. To ensure partner success, we have recently revamped the framework of our existing channel program— HP PartnerOne. One of the key benefits of the revamped program is that it allows partners to build their business more profitably with us. Further, our channel ecosystem has Platinum, Gold, Silver, or Business Partners, who are categorized based on competency levels, after going through certification exams under the HP ExpertOne framework.

FY 14 will see increased focus on enabling and certifying partners - help them maximize profitability by selling the entire HP portfolio (servers, storage, networking and services) and in the process, help them forge stronger relationships with customers.

ADVICE TO CHANNELS

In 2014, we are capitalizing on the tectonic shift taking place in our industry—the transition to what we define as a “New Style of IT”.

52

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2014

HP partners are the core of our customer acquisition and growth strategy. In FY14, partners can realize more business outcomes across three broad areas: l Partners can earn higher rebates, take the lead and drive customer engagement and business from Enterprises and SMBs with ‘as & when required’ support from HP. l Improve the competency levels and move towards Gold and Platinum partner membership which will help them get higher rebates under competency framework and also improve their business mix with value added services. l Focus on solution sales and new products like 3PAR SAN, HP StoreOnce D2D backup solutions, Moonshot servers, converged infrastructure & cloud offerings, and earn higher rebates under

Mega Trends  Cloud Computing: According to an

HP research, 75 percent of business and technology executives in India believe that cloud computing will be at least as disruptive to the technology landscape as the impact of client and server technology or the internet.

 Mobility: Organizations need help to align their mobile strategy and environment to their business goals so they can take advantage of the mobile opportunity to grow revenues through mobile channels.  Big Data: The sheer volume of data, and how enterprises collect, manage, secure, extract and apply meaningful insights will be the difference between being market leader or a laggard in the 21st century.  Security: This is a great time to enter this market with a compelling NGFW offering. Enterprise are vulnerable to online infiltration by attackers with BYOD and CYOD adoptions going high.  SDN: In 2014 enterprises will adopt SDN that will enable the enterprise and cloud providers to simplify and maximize agility for datacenter, campus and branch networks.

HP’s flexible programs. In this process partners get close to becoming VAR’s & SI’s with enhanced competencies required to drive converged solutions in the market. 

W

E LOOK forward to 2014

as the year of opportunity and collaborative growth.

Schneider Electric IT Business is uniquely positioned to deliver cutting edge, comprehensive IT infrastructure solutions and in association with our partner network we are able to serve enterprises (large, SMBs, SMEs and SOHOs) across the country.

We are focused on delivering solutions to our customers as a Critical Facility Management Expert. We launched our Services Bureau, a Center of Excellence that offers complete remote monitoring program of physical IT infrastructure to help customers reduce operational costs significantly, minimize risk, optimize energy costs and gain competitive advantage through data analytics.

And lastly, to augment our leadership position, we are delivering solutions that are crafted for the Indian market. Our acquisitions (APC, President, Uniflair and Gutor) give us a leverage of expertise and understanding of the unique nuances of this market.

P h o t o g r a p h b y D E LT R I M E D I A

OPPORTUNITIES

AGENDA 2014 n

Nikhil Pathak,

VP – IT Business, India & SAARC, Schneider Electric on company’s comprehensive IT infrastructure solutions will further benefit efficient data centres.

Our single biggest opportunity has been and remains our strong alliance with our channel partners as they increase their top line and bottom-line by leveraging our wide portfolio of enterprise solutions and in turn helping their customers. We work towards aligning our partner’s core competencies to our business requirements, and help partners differentiate themselves in the market place through product understanding and enablement.

CHANNEL STRATEGY We are working closely with our distributors to draw up an integrated national strategy to reach out to customers in 2014. We are organizing trainings, product launches and partner meets in over 20+ cities where we see growth potential.

Our enhanced partner program like the Multicity, Managed, Select, Elite and Premier, High Power and Secure Power Partner Programs will increase our effectiveness in the channel. High Power Partners specializes in 3 phase power distribution units and Secure Power Partners speJANUARY 2014

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

53

-

n AGENDA 2014 | NIKHIL PATHAK cialize in 3-phase power distribution units in the non-IT sector.

We also have an exclusive PRM strategy in addition to our POD central, up selling trainings, etc. We also have an SI Loyalty Program, which encompasses solutions from APC, Uniflair and other brands of Schneider Electric to help partners differentiate themselves in the market place. Eg. The Elite DC Program for highly specialized partners in small and medium data centers. We help our partners connect through web and other platforms to reach Schneider Electric easily.

We would upgrade our channel base to have access to the ISX for SMB IT tool to provide standard solutions with minimum supervision. They will have a larger share of wallet and will be trusted advisors to SMBs.

CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT

While virtualization and Cloud are shaping the new data center, IT virtualization can have significant consequences on the data center physical infrastructure.

54

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2014

We are seeing 4 focus areas that our customers are focusing on - New data center infrastructures, data center infrastructure operation and optimization services, server room infrastructures in the SMB/mid-market space and lastly automation tools for data center & server room infrastructure management and reporting.

ADVICE TO CHANNELS l Look at every deal and opportunity from a long term perspective rather than a single transaction. Providing an integrated solution to your customers, a sustainable alternative and savings in OPEX results in business continuity. l Broaden your scope and market. Opt for solutions that work on a sustainable strategy and with multi-vendor compatible single solutions.

Mega Trends  Virtualisation and Cloud computing: While virtualization and Cloud computing are shaping the new data center, IT virtualization, the engine behind cloud computing, can have significant consequences on DCPI.  BYOD: The efficiencies offered by a mobile work force are too great to pass up, but BYOD brings with its own challenges such as Governance & compliance, MDM complexities and security.  Modularity: The transition to modularity is a natural evolution for Data Centers because of the advantages it provides in efficiency, flexibility, and reliability.  Prefabricated DC Modules: Standardized, pre-assembled and integrated data center facility power and cooling modules are at least 60% faster to deploy and cost up to 30% less than traditional DC infrastructure.  Internet of Things: The Internet is expanding beyond PCs and mobile devices into enterprise assets such as field equipment, and consumer items such as cars and televisions.

l Work with our team to define your business plan as we provide the widest range of products and solutions from the entire Schneider Electric portfolio.

A bigger market play, a larger wallet share and a better strike rate with customers is what we can assure you. 

O

UR SIMPLE goal is to outperform the market growth again in 2014 and capitalize deployments in the key megatrend areas amongst Indian enterprises. Midmarket, government, and BFSI continue to be the priority verticals with a focus on building channel expertise and profitability and overall skills in the sector.

OPPORTUNITIES The single biggest opportunity remains helping enterprises build future proof and cost effective IT systems that leverage data to drive clear competitive business advantage and address needs of compliance and security. Leveraging IT through mature process is not only for the Fortune 500 companies but even smaller enterprises in order to protect intellectual property and reputation with customers, shareholders, and other public stakeholders.

From a business perspective, the single biggest challenge remains skilling the ecosystem and creating a larger pool of skilled professionals to address enterprise needs and tap larger growth opportunities that exist for Indian businesses.

Photograph by SUMEET SAHWNEY

CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT

AGENDA 2014 n

Rajesh Janey, President India and SAARC, EMC, says the big bets on cloud, big data, and trust will help the company outperform market growth.

We announced the launch of Pivotal, whose mission is to enable customers build a new class of applications, leverage big and fast data, and do all of this with the power of cloud-independence.

EMC also launched the Transformation Coach initiativeâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a mobile lounge which showcases solutions and demos focused on cloud, big data, and trust and travels to key customers in top seven cities over a six month period in India, bringing them closer to EMCâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s world-class technology leadership. The bus will travel to Mumbai, Pune, Ahmedabad, Kolkata, Chennai, Hyderabad, and Delhi.

Additionally our refreshed VNX portfolio (4X times faster and just as affordable) and VSPEX architecture accelerates the mid-market enterprise IT transformation journey to the virtualization and cloud environment.

CHANNEL STRATEGY EMC not only delivers unprecedented JANUARY 2014

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

55

-

n AGENDA 2014 | RAJESH JANEY

EMC keeps a sharp focus on all its partners based on a 3P philosophy —profitability, pipeline, and performance.

56

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2014

levels of performance and efficiency but it also provides the agility needed for customers to remain competitive.

The new and refreshed VSPEX solutions signal a continued commitment to providing solutions to the channel that deliver bigger opportunities, higher differentiation, and increased profitability. VSPEX continues to bring together broad and deep ecosystems on industry leading technology providers to enable channel partners to deliver best-of-breed solutions quickly to customers while giving the customer’s choice in their solution.

EMC keeps a sharp focus for all its partners based on a 3P philosophy —profitability, pipeline, and performance. It understands that the channel community is the key to build customer confidence. For EMC, channel enablement is the key to success and we work towards developing best practices and efficient models to create a competent channel workforce.

Therefore the strategy is simple.

We are committed towards empowering the channel with industry leading innovation in terms of product portfolio and providing them the necessary support and monetization opportunities to be able to address Indian enterprise needs around cloud, big data, and security.

ADVICE TO CHANNELS Enterprise channels means a sustainable outreach mechanism to address long-term customer IT transformation needs for larger profitable ecosystem growth. l Leverage the new closed distribution model for focused support and busi-

Mega Trends  Increased Adoption of Big Data: Today, less than half a percent of all digital information is analyzed while 36 percent would provide valuable insights.  Cloud Adoption: The gap between digital information generated and available storage capacity is a third.

This will drive more enterprises and applications to move towards cloud for affordable and scalable IT investment.  Software-Defined Datacenter: This will help our customers run IT-as-a-service, delivering the maximum efficiency and agility possible to the infrastructure.  Software-Defined Storage: It will provide virtualization, automation, and management capabilities necessary to create a single pool of virtual storage.  Security: India’s digital information is at the highest risk amongst all countries covered across the globe.

Hence, security will be of utmost importance than ever before.

ness credit to eventually tap a larger client portfolio in the marketplace. l Invest in skilling themselves in new technology innovations like software-defined datacenter, software-defined storage, and big data use case scenarios. l Retain talent in the long term. 

O

UR GOAL is clear: Focus on growing our business and taking share. We remain firmly committed to growing Juniper Networks organically as a pure-play in high-performance networking across our core businesses of routing, switching and security.

We will also continue to lead on innovation, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s in our DNA. We invest more in R&D as a percentage of revenue than industry peers, enabling us to introduce disruptive architectures, platforms, and solutions that add significant value for our customers. We believe the best way to create value for our customers and partners is by driving our business through innovation and delivering great products, as evidenced by a strong technology introduction cycle and continued market acceptance of our new products.

P h o t o g r a p h b y D E LT R I M E D I A

OPPORTUNITIES

AGENDA 2014 n

Ravi Chauhan,

Managing Director-India and SAARC, Juniper Networks, talks about the transition towards software-defined networks.

The networking industry is evolving and there are important considerations to make as you build out your networks. We are seeing an ever increasing need for bandwidth, a need for greater application awareness and the need to quickly provision, trouble shoot, and adapt the network to ensure application performance and availability. As a result we are seeing a transition to software defined networks.

Juniper Networks has a holistic strategy on SDN (Software Defined Networking) that represents the biggest change to the network in many years. What makes SDN interesting is the transformation that it can enable.

Businesses are looking for more control over their applications on the network.

Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s all about customer choice and flexibility and our recently launched virtual SDN solutions, Contrail and Open Contrail, are great examples.

CHANNEL STRATEGY In 2014, we will continue to leverage on the Partner Advantage Program to help our partners differentiate their brand, enablement and offer rewards for value and performance. We have designed the program to help our partners cultivate deep customer relationships and at the same time, effectively respond to the macro trends that are driving charge across the entire industry. Together, the JANUARY 2014

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

57

-

n AGENDA 2014 | RAVI CHAUHAN components of our Partner Advantage Program represent the next evolution of our partnership. We engage with customers on a deeper level and thereby help them respond to the massive shifts that are shaping the future of network architecture.

The Partner Advantage program is a tool for growing network architecture expertise, and differentiating partners based on the value they add. Bottom line, it’s about evolving the standards of industry education and resources to help our partners adapt to the architectural conversations they have with customers.

CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT

The only way you get to understand the fast changing tech landscape is through a much more direct touch with your customer.

From a Juniper Networks perspective, and for all companies that truly embrace their customers, you need to ensure that customers look at you not as a supplier or as a vendor, but as a partner. They have to bring you into their decision-making process. They have to trust you enough such that they are explain their problems as they see them.

They should be willing to share their company goals and objectives from an insider point of view and allowing you to have a seat at the table with them to help them solve problems.

The only way you get to understand the fast changing tech landscape is through a much more direct touch with your customer set. And that’s really a key for Juniper Networks —becoming that trusted advisor, becoming that true partner so that we can help solve business challenges, even if they don’t seem like they have anything to do with networking.

ADVICE TO CHANNELS We’re committed to raising the standards

58

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2014

Mega Trends  High Performance Networks: Legacy network and operations complexity combined with an insatiable demand for richer, higher and secure bandwidth experiences by users are leaving service provider customers with inverted cost structures and lost revenue opportunities.  Cloud Agility: To build new revenues, stay competitive and build deeper connections to their end users; our customers are rapidly consuming more cloud services and upgrading owned datacenters using cloud architectures and techniques.  Network Security: Security threats to a company’s critical data are ubiquitous, constant, and continuously evolving, with attacks targeting everything from the device to the datacenter. Costs are increasingly on the rise with efficacy in security solutions being questioned.

of partner performance and profitability by deepening relationships with our partners. l Invest in upcoming technology trends like cloud services, software defined networking, and mobility. l Build up expertise and know-how around fast growing verticals like healthcare, higher education, and hospitality. l Laser sharp focus on services and consulting to create customer loyalty and profitability. 

C

USTOMERS NOW want

an increasingly mobile, digital and engaging experience when working with organizations.

That means that the traditional supplier-driven model of CRM is no longer applicable.

It is our ultimate motive and my game plan to ensure we are able to fulfil customers’ needs by allowing them to focus on innovation and business growth, while we manage their IT machinery, which supports this growth model, completely. Customer experience, mobility, cloud, big data are going to change the game in the future.

P h o t o g r a p h b y D E LT R I M E D I A

OPPORTUNITIES There are many opportunities in the India market in 2014 and beyond.

That’s primarily because of the way the society and businesses have evolved especially over the past few years.

I see cloud as an untapped opportunity. Even though, it has been in existence for some years, Indian companies have only now started to believe in it and investing in it. Cloud computing has today given us an opportunity to re-imagine technology as an affordable, operational expense. Companies are realising that big data, analytics can help them make sense of the content deluge and use it to their advantage, in real-time.

I don’t consider the current marketplace being challenging– we are at a great time in the history of technology evolution and I see that seeding the platform for new businesses in the near future.

CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT

AGENDA 2014 n

Sandeep Mathur,

Managing Director, Oracle India, on why the traditional supplierdriven model of CRM is no longer applicable.

I am privileged to have a sales and support team that is obsessed with ensuring customer delight at each interaction throughout the transaction, right from pre-sales, implementation, and post-sales service and support..

As a company, we at Oracle have always strived to excel in ensuring our customers receive ultimate customer service. This is the prime reason that we have been able to have a long-standing relationships with our enterprise customers.

CHANNEL STRATEGY Our channel strategy is to empower JANUARY 2014

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

59

-

n AGENDA 2014 | SANDEEP MATHUR

Companies are realising that big data and analytics can help them make sense of the content deluge and use it to their advantage in real-time.

60

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2014

our partners on a continuous basis depending on the customer demands and changing technology landscape to help them stay relevant to their client base.

We have specific trainings for enterprise partners who want to explore and excel in different products and solutions from Oracle stack. We’ll train them, we’ll go to them, we’ll do webinars, we’ll do face-to-face, and we’ll get them certified. All this in a large way ensures Oracle to have the confidence that they (partners) can deliver the right solution to the customer, to the customer’s satisfaction.

Oracle wants to see the Oracle partner ecosystem, today at 25,000, to get bigger in the future. Looking back over the past year, globally, Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) experienced a 26 percent rise in renewals, welcomed 6,000 new partners and increased the number of specializations earned at partner organizations worldwide.

ADVICE TO CHANNELS Enterprise channels means partner nirvana, a partner that can go and sell a software application all the way down to the disk and sell everything in between i.e. middleware; he can sell the entire ‘red stack’ and make a successful business out of it. l Partners need to start building a specialization strategy for themselves and add more product certifications to their kitty to emerge as a value added channel to their customer.

Mega Trends  Customer Experience: The talk about customer experience (CX) will compel customers to increasingly focus on creating unforgettable digital experiences for their customers.  Fast Data: Big data will give way to Fast Data in 2014 i.e. instant processing of data in real-time for immediate action by the enterprises across their IT infrastructure.  Mobility: Companies will begin to modify and focus more on mobility strategies in their overall IT strategies.  Hybrid Cloud: This version of cloud model will change the role of IT by ensuring integration and interoperability.  Internet of Things: With the hype around Internet of Things, solutions like digital marketing to face the challenges of a highly connected world will see the light of day.

l They should not expect the OEM’s

to build the market for them, lead from the front with the customers and collaborate more with OEM’s to address customer’s business needs. l Expand horizons to register more business opportunities around fast emerging technologies like cloud, big data, etcetera 

O

NE OF the top priorities in 2014 is to accelerate desktop virtualization to become a mainstream across all the sectors. There is a well etched roadmap to establish Citrix as a preferred and dominant technology player in the mobility space. We will also generate success stories on mobility with our customers that will further evangelise the ‘mobility movement’ among Indian enterprises.

Another important goal this year is the enablement of channel partners.

We want to additionally empower our partners and further leverage their expertise and local reach to increase our business across the country.

Photograph by

KAPIL SHROFF

OPPORTUNITIES

AGENDA 2014 n

Sanjay Deshmukh,

Area Vice President, India Subcontinent, Citrix, expects mobility to go mainstream across enterprises.

The biggest opportunity is definitely around mobility and how enterprises can benefit by increasing productivity and improving efficiency across their IT infrastructure by mobilizing their business. This to a great extent helps the organizations to leap ahead in terms of fast ‘time to market’, quick response to their customer, and other advantages over their competition in the market.

The biggest challenge however remains in terms of the awareness levels amongst enterprise customers around the enormous potential of mobility to transform their business. Customers who often perceive mobility as another IT infrastructure project limit the business benefit of the solution. The other challenge is the user expectations from the mobility solutions from enterprise IT where the employees are expecting the simplicity and power that they experience in the consumer space. But the companies are more than often not ready to deliver the same kind of desired experience around mobility.

CHANNEL STRATEGY Enterprise channel partners are an extension of Citrix. They play a pivotal role in evangelising our technologies, assisting customers in their strategic infrastructure requirements, and also expanding Citrix mindshare and market share in a mutually beneficially manner.

For 2014, our enterprise channel strategy will focus on strengthening our partnership with large Indian JANUARY 2014

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

61

-

n AGENDA 2014 | SANJAY DESHMUKH and regional ‘systems integrator companies’ like Wipro, HCL, Dimension Data, and TCS. These Indian SI partners will help position and implement our mobility and virtualization solutions to our enterprise customers in an effective manner.

To help our enterprise customers become more successful, we have created ‘Citrix Validated Solutions’ with our global alliance partners like Cisco and NetApp. In 2014, we will promote the same to our enterprise customers as it improves predictability and success rate of the project.

CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT

The biggest opportunity is around mobility and how enterprises can benefit by increasing productivity and improving efficiency across their IT infrastructure.

62

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2014

To improve Citrix’s engagement with its enterprise customer base, we plan to undertake two specific initiatives this year. We will sign up new focused partners for mobility solutions across the country who will work closely with our enterprise customers to help them mobilize their business. Secondly, we would empower and further focus on promoting DAAS (Desktop-as-aService) partners of Citrix in India.

These partners will act as evangelists to help eliminate all the bottlenecks in the adoption of desktop virtualization at the customer-end.

Mega Trends  Mobility: Mobility emerged as one of the topmost priorities for the enterprise IT space and 2014 will witness an increasing adoption of enterprise mobility solutions by organizations to transform business and gain competitive advantage.  BYOD: Due to the proliferation of consumer IT devices at the workplace, BYOD will become more mainstream and more organizations will create their own mobile apps.  DAAS: Desktop virtualization will become more mainstream in the enterprise space. ‘Pay-as-you-use’ model such as DAAS (Desktop-asa-service) will become more popular as it will help enterprises to benefit from opex model.  Big Data and Analytics: Over the years, organizations have realized the potential of big data and analytics, and they will invest more in this technology in 2014.

ADVICE TO CHANNELS Channel partners need to differentiate themselves from other players in the market to improve their success rate and enhance profitability. l The best way to differentiate is to focus on cutting-edge solutions which help customers transform their business according to the new business needs and emerging tech-

nology landscape. l One big opportunity lies in mobility. If channel partners can learn the skills and gain experience to build a successful mobility practice they can set themselves apart from others.

This emerging space will help them register new opportunities and become more profitable. 

H

ISTORICALLY, EMERSON Network Power has been known globally for its chip-to-grid power solutions. With a wide array of recognitions over the past few years on our innovative technologies, we want to be perceived as a one-stop solution provider for businesses to protect and optimize their critical infrastructure. On the numbers front, we will be looking to continue our steady growth year-on-year.

Emerson intends to improve customer engagement with their enterprise base during the next year through regular city road-shows showcasing Emerson Network Powerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s new technologies and product launches. This will also educate the masses on complex technologies using simple graphics through our social channels.

Photograph by

KAPIL SHROFF

OPPORTUNITIES

AGENDA 2014 n

Sunil Khanna,

President and MD, Emerson Network Power India, says a full solutions-based approach will benefit partners and customers.

The IT sector has been evolving at a stupendous pace and it is getting more agile than ever before. Most businesses are churning out more and more data to aid their business growth and at the same time there is a huge consumption of data by employees and clients alike. This avalanche of data and information being shared or consumed across networks is a boon for players like Emerson Network Power as it helps businesses to align their IT infrastructure for efficient data storage.

On the challenge front, the Indian market remains price-sensitive. In addition, it is a challenge to explain customers a full solution-based approach, the support services, and ROI in longer run. Emerson Network Power provides all these features as compared to cheaper products available in market where the buck stops after the product is sold.

CHANNEL STRATEGY Partners have been working with Emerson Network Power for many years and the good part about being in business is the level of comfort you develop. This drives engagement across the channel with ease. Over the years, we have maintained a single interface and distribution model in India rather than multi-layer distribution approach. We believe such a business model has been beneficial to us and JANUARY 2014

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

63

-

n AGENDA 2014 | SUNIL KHANNA our channel ecosystem. And we will continue to observe that in the future too. This will allow fostering the trust levels between the community and us.

Interface at the grassroots is the pillar of our channel engagement strategy.

There will be a conscious effort to add personal touch to our regular meets and trainings and programs.

A constant exchange of ideas and feedback have been planned in 2014 to increase transparency between Emerson and its partner will allow fostering the trust levels between the community and us. Interface at the grassroots is the pillar of our channel engagement strategy.

CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT

The avalanche of information being consumed across networks is a boon as it helps businesses to align their IT infrastructure for efficient data storage.

64

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2014

We intend to improve customer engagement during the next year through regular city road shows that will showcase Emerson Network Power’s new technologies and product launches. We will also educate the masses on the complex and emerging technologies in the datacentre space and at enterprise end as we believe this will grow the market further for technology players like us. As well as we will educate them on complex technologies using simple graphics through our social channels.

Mega Trends  Management on Mobile Devices: With a growing number of devices, the dire need for ‘management on the move’, controlling everything from anywhere, will see widespread adoption in India.  Mobile Apps: With an estimated 67 million smartphone subscribers, India will use and demand richer and more comprehensive mobile apps to stay connected.  Hybrid Cloud: As Indian enterprises become receptive towards the public cloud, a hybrid model will be imperative due to its integration and customization abilities.  Internet of Things: Due to many internet connected devices, India will explore the possibilities of a much connected and expanded internet ecosystem.  Personal Cloud: Due to privacy and security issues of public cloud, personal cloud will be one of the megatrends among Indian masses.

ADVICE TO CHANNELS Enterprise channels mean a strategic business partner who helps us in delivering our product strategies and defines our business growth. They are not a salesforce but an extension of our business. l Channel partners should make sure that their approach is not product focussed but solutions focussed which

will create value for the customers and themselves in the long run. l Expanding their skill sets to build services around technologies that dominate the market as well as getting out-of-the-box pushing mould will help channel partners in registering more business and make more money in 2014. 

S

TRENGTHENING THE

partner ecosystem is a key priority. As the entire business ecosystem is experiencing a sea of change, IT leaders are now focusing on agile technologies to reduce the overall IT capex. The trends of cloud, BYOD, and big data will compel CIOs to rethink their IT strategy.

One of the key goals would be to accelerate the growth around the new solutions from CA Technologies: DevOps (Lisa, Nolio) and Mobile Device Management. There is more focus on SaaS solutions with SMBs as the key growth driver for these solutions, as they look for faster deployment and enhanced cost effectiveness.

Photograph by

KAPIL SHROFF

OPPORTUNITIES

AGENDA 2014 n

Sunil Manglore,

Managing Director, CA Technologies (India), foresees big opportunities around cloud, mobility, and DevOps.

Our big opportunities are around cloud, mobility, and DevOps. We are transforming the company to serve customers as they adopt cloud and SaaS and move from on-premise to hybrid, to cloud environments. We have built out the right strategy to meeting current and future market needsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and we truly understand what those needs are.

Although cloud is experiencing growth and changing business models, there are also a lot of concerns over data security and privacy that are keeping organizations from adopting it. Also, enterprise mobility and BYOD are at center of the mind for IT leaders.

The gap between enterprise and personal IT is diminishing day-byday. As a result, security remains the key challenge for IT leaders.

While economic slowdown may be perceived as a challenge by many, I feel it provides opportunities for growth.

CHANNEL STRATEGY The enterprise channels community are partners in our progress. These are the partners who exploit huge potential that the Indian market has to offer. This community is critical for our business and we hope that our partnership helps achieve respective vision and goals. We will continue to strengthen our partner ecosystem.

JANUARY 2014

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

65

-

n AGENDA 2014 | SUNIL MANGLORE We have thus undertaken several initiatives for partners. For instance, CA Technologies is investing resources on training and offering opportunities to presales executives from partner organizations to upsell and cross-sell our solutions to enterprises and enable growth for partner organizations.

Today, the customer scope is going beyond metros towards tier-1 and -2 markets. Hence, we are further involving the presales executives from tier-2 partner organizations to enable comprehensive product architecture and mapping it to address business challenges of their customers.

CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT

As the entire business ecosystem is experiencing a sea of change, IT leaders are now focusing on agile technologies to reduce the overall IT capex.

66

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2014

There is an added emphasis on customer satisfaction by focusing on their needs to maximise and optimise value of products sold to them. CA Technologies intends to improve customer engagement through partnerships and programs which will deeply engage customers. We have value programs to maximize the usage of our products and ensure that the products are fully utilized and the value is delivered.

ADVICE TO PARTNERS Our partner ecosystem has been just like an extended family and has played a significant role in driving growth for CA Technologies in India.

We suggest that partners: l Get closer to the customer and develop deeper relationships with them. l Align with the customer needs at all times to understand their busi-

Mega Trends  DevOps: DevOps will help accelerate innovation by enabling two powerful and strategic business qualities—business agility and IT alignment.  BYOD: With the mobile workforce growing and employees getting comfortable in bringing in their own devices for work, BYOD programs are the need of the hour and will drive mobile investments this year.  SaaS: Shrinking IT budgets and investment focus moving from capex to opex will make SaaS one of the top priorities for businesses.  Big Data: Big data with analytics and analyses is where the potential is and will drive innovation and segmentation of markets and will help organizations predict trends.  Security: Concerns over data security and privacy are keeping organizations away from adopting the cloud.Security around enterprise mobility is a concern for IT leaders.

ness better. l Deliver on commitments at the customer-end to emerge as a reliable and competent partner 

W

E RECENTLY unveiled

the latest version of Websense TRITON solution in the marketplace which combines the industry’s leading Web, e-mail, and data loss prevention (DLP) security technologies into a single, unified information security system.

This protects organizations across the seven stages of the advanced threat kill chain or commonly referred as Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs).

New technologies like cloud, mobility, social media, and big data are transforming the way organizations leverage IT for business optimization.

Our aim is to help organizations adopt the right defenses so that they are able to stop an attack across any of the seven stages of the “kill chain”. Our enterprise channels will play a key role in fulfilling this goal as we reach out to our existing and new customers across Indian organizations.

OPPORTUNITIES

AGENDA 2014 n

Surendra Singh,

Regional Director, India and SAARC, Websense, on why companies can no longer put their trust into traditional security solutions.

Security is no more a subject restricted only to IT teams at the enterprise end.

There is an opportunity to create awareness at senior management / board level of organizations about the impact of cybercrime on the organization’s brand, revenue, and customers. As cybercrime continues to hit the headlines, hackers are deploying sophisticated techniques to gain entry into organizations to steal sensitive data or remain in the network to launch bigger attacks on other organizations. Websense is the only security company that continues to protect organizations from targeted attacks and APTs across the entire advanced threat kill chain.

With a challenging economy, companies need to ensure that they are focusing their resources on securing their most important and critical data.

They can no longer put their trust in traditional security solutions that cannot protect against today’s sophisticated Web threats.

CHANNEL STRATEGY Our aim is to partner with our enterprise channels and educate them with the latest technologies which will help them to become ‘trusted advisors’ of our enterprise customers. We look to enable them to become more knowlJANUARY 2014

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

67

-

n AGENDA 2014 | SURENDRA SINGH edgeable around APTs as these threats have become a major concern for IT security professionals in India. We will aid them to further increase their consultative sales expertise which will help them in increasing business revenues and more importantly bottomlines.

We are also enabling our channel partners to deliver value to customers by offering them Websense TRITON which is the most advanced integrated security solution in the market.

Enterprise channels are trusted partners who can advise and demonstrate the security effectiveness measures needed for organizations to secure their data and protect themselves across the entire kill chain.

CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT

With a challenging economy, companies need to ensure that they are focusing their resources on securing their most important and critical data.

68

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2014

We continue to engage with our enterprise customer set through many educational materials, events, and blogs to keep them updated on fast changing security landscape and how Websense has been always relevant as a niche security vendor.

Websense focuses on providing global threat intelligence through the Websense Security Labs that collects and processes a great deal of information on current cyber threats, offering our customers and the security community breaking threat information.

ADVICE FOR CHANNELS Channel partners are the direct link between the vendor company and a buyer of enterprise IT. They can capitalize on their industry knowledge and better understanding of the customer environment by ensuring: l The channel educates markets

Mega Trends  Cloud Aggregators: With a growing acceptance of cloud, there will be an increasing need for cloud service aggregators who not only aggregate various cloud applications but also integrate them with existing on-premise applications.  Hybrid Cloud Services : The primary benefit being improved security coverage and flexibility of deployment for small offices, remote, and mobile users.  Integrated Systems and Unified Security: The variety of hardware, software environments and now BYOD, has made hackers exploit security gaps, necessitating unified security.  Data Destruction Attack: Ransomware whereby criminals make financial demands will play a part in this trend and move the market upscale.  Offensive Security: Mistakes are likely to be made in ‘offensive security’ resulting in an innocent organization being caught in the crossfire.

about the importance of DLP and how to protect their most critical and sensitive data. l Expansion of security offerings by educating customers on how they can strengthen their security posture. l The channel looks at expanding sales coverage beyond their existing customer base. 

T

HE INDIAN market is still vastly untapped for us and this still remains an opportunity.

We are putting our energies behind increasing the awareness and for our solutions and the benefits they deliver for the business. While we continue to see growth across all segments and sectors, the SMB segment will continue to be a key area of focus as well as emerging sectors such as the government and defence segments.

Our partners are vital for our success especially since 100 percent of our business is driven through them in India. We will continue to strengthen our relationships with our partners to ensure that VMware is one amongst the top 5 portfolios for every partner we engage with.

OPPORTUNITIES

P h o t o g r a p h b y D E LT R I M E D I A

The Indian market is still vastly untapped for us and this still remains a big opportunity for our business. The trends of virtualization, cloud, and end-user mobility will continue to drive innovation in India in 2014. The macro economic conditions that influence our customersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; investment decisions will however remain a challenge.

This impacted the industry in a big way in the year gone by.

AGENDA 2014 n

T. Srinivasan,

Managing Director, VMware India and SAARC, is confident about SDDC emerging as the next big opportunity for channels.

CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT We will continue to host many events and seminars to help educate customers on our solutions, and how they can help their organization become more agile and responsive to the dynamic business environment.

We have seen a phenomenal response to our vForum and VSS events held across the country in the last quarter of 2013 that saw close to 7,000 in attendance.

CHANNEL STRATEGY Over the next few months, we plan to ramp up our channel strategy around software-defined data centres (SDDC) as we are seeing good momentum around it.

In 2014, we will be strongly focussing on the government and defence sectors in India, and will be working closely with our system integrator and OEM partners. We are also aggressiveJANUARY 2014

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

69

-

n AGENDA 2014 | T. SRINIVASAN

We will continue to strengthen our relationships with partners to ensure that VMware is among the top-five principals for every partner we engage with.

70

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2014

ly pursuing the virtualization opportunity in the SMB segment and recently created a SMB unit in India to drive our channel-led go-to-market strategy.

We have added several new features to our partner rebate program.

Earlier, we offered partner rebates on deals above $10,000 (about Rs 6.3 lakh), now we have lowered the threshold to deals as low as $6,000 (about Rs 3.8 lakh). We have also added incentives for new accounts signed-up by partners. VMware has also increased rebates for select products such as vSphere with Operations Management (SOM) from 10 to 15 percent.

Another strategy we adopting is to address more partners through our OEM relationships.

To further strengthen VMware Virtual Service Provider program (VSPP), we appointed Ingram Micro along with Kryptos for usage-based licensing business. The program has been uniquely designed to help service providers develop, promote, and sell their cloud products, services and solutions.

Premier events like our Partner Exchange on Tour, Partner Leadership Summit, Solution Trainings, among others will help enable our partners and their teams to build their business with us. As partners deepen their VMware expertise, they benefit more, and so do customers.

ADVICE TO CHANNEL PARTNERS Helping our partners grow their business is a priority for us and we create and run many programs to support this.

Partners are encouraged to: l Build competencies to differentiate themselves in the market. l Own the entire sales process with

Mega Trends  Software-Defined Datacenter: It represents a prescriptive model that brings the benefits of virtualization to the rest of the datacenter. We expect to see the move towards a SDDC accelerate in 2014.  Network Virtualization: It is becoming a game shifter and will provide an important building block for delivering the SDDC.  Software-Defined Storage: SDS will unlock a new tier of converged infrastructure that brings data closer to applications and enables granular scaling of compute and storage resources.  Management: A key focus area as customers will be increasingly looking at efficiently managing, optimizing, and protecting their virtual and cloud environments.  Workforce Mobility: The ability to manage the desktop and device will continue to be a hot topic for enterprises as employees are on the move with their devices all the time.

customers. This will benefit them as they will have more control over the sale. We will continue to focus on enabling them with the skills and knowhow to sell our solutions. l Remain focused on cultivating strong customer relationships as they will continue to see success even with any changes in the technology landscape. 

W

HILE WE continue to record stupendous growth in the current year, the way forward is certainly more ambitious. The goals for 2014 will be multipronged in nature. As we aim to achieve both business as well as strategic goals.

The key focus will be to keep up the growth momentum in the coming year and at the same time consolidate our market share. We will also be preparing ourselves strategically in line with the changing trends in technologies for both SMB and enterprises which will help us carve a growth path for next three to five years.

Ph o t o g r a p h by FOTO C O R P

OPPORTUNITIES

AGENDA 2014 n

Tushar Sighat,

CEO, D-Link (India), underscores the companyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s renewed portfolio and robust roadmap to address large enterprises and datacenters.

The biggest opportunity we foresee is the cloud and mobile. As a result D-Link has already made investments in cloud platform and plans to incorporate it optimally in our products. The objective is to present the user with a unique experience and offer best product value to our customers.

We will continue with our endeavour to offer products based on cloud platform. The biggest challenge is to understand the customer user patterns so as to deliver the right mix at the right time. Similarly with so many technology trends cropping at the same time, it will be interesting to analyse the progress and incorporate these changes in the product to best suite the customer requirements.

CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT We intend to improve our customer interaction with incorporating more and more use of cloud and cloud applications. Going forward we will develop a seamless feedback mechanism using the cloud platform to stay connected to our customers, deliver the latest information, and also provide them best of service on our products and solutions.

CHANNEL STRATEGY Channel partners are technology leaders and natural consultants for their customers and form the most important part of the delivery infrastructure of the ICT industry.

With distinct focus on large enterprise domain for the couple of years, D-Link has enhanced its engagement JANUARY 2014

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

71

-

n AGENDA 2014 | TUSHAR SIGHAT

Our alliance with Ruijie will help address the datacenter and large enterprise domain which will enhance IT applications across enterprise customers in India.

72

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2014

with system integrators and also realigned its strategy. Last year D-Link introduced 5S networking solution (switching, structured cabling, surveillance and storage, security, and software) for large enterprise that offers streamlined integration, centralized management, simplified trouble shooting, guaranteed interoperability, and ease of use.

D-Link’s association with Ruijie is another step in this direction, as the company is committed towards addressing the datacenter and large enterprise domain. This alliance will add value to enterprise customers in India and also enhance the IT applications for the enterprises.

With its large basket of solution offerings, ‘Ruijie powered by D-Link’ will introduce 40G / 100G unified switching solutions to address the high performance computing need of large enterprises.

Also ‘Ruijie powered by D-Link’ plans to take IT infrastructure management to next level with its Real Time Intelligent RIIL solutions.

The alliance entity will focus on all industries in India, including education, hospitality, manufacturing, BFSI, IT and ITES, government and telecom carriers. This partnership will pave the way for both companies to collaborate and reach a broader set of enterprise customers.

ADVICE TO CHANNELS Enterprise channels are an integral part of our business eco-system. l Innovative business approach to the customer and closely following the technology trends are key

Mega Trends  Big Data and Analytics: Analytics companies will be setup which plan to sell the intelligence of data as products will open up a new Industry.  Cloud: Apart from hosting the Enterprise applications on the cloud for the opex reasons, the need to connect with smart customers is also the driver for cloud.  Mobile: We see another five years of mobile revolution ruling the India space. Many enterprises will use the mobile revolution to communicate with their customers in real time.  Social Media: With the high rate of mobile penetration, businesses shall continue to leverage through social media engagements in 2014 and beyond.  Real-Time Intelligent Networks: Enterprises will see and feel their entire IT in one place with all the control and alarm mechanisms - for the application usages or temperature alarms in their datacentres.

to success. l Extract the real value of a product by creating solutions best suited the customers’ business applications. l They should work towards upgrading their business and technical skill set to meet any future challenges. 

W

E WILL continue to empower our customers to innovate with Hitachi information technologies. We want to be recognized as the best place where customers can partner with us in order to win. The unique capabilities offered by us will allow customers to gain greater utilization out of their existing assets and thus reduce expenditures.

We expect government spending to grow and have a cascading effect on other forms of infrastructure spend positively impacting the India storage market. We aim to grow along with these developments. We are targeting to make our hold even stronger in critical verticals like telecommunications, BFSI, ITES, manufacturing, and government.

Photograph by R. CHANDROO SHARP IMAGE

OPPORTUNITIES

AGENDA 2014 n

Vivekanand Venugopal, VP and GM, Hitachi Data Systems, India, talks about creating economically superior solutions that align with market realities.

The biggest opportunity lies in aligning customer priorities around cost control, IT infrastructure optimization, IT efficiency, and business analytics and outcomes. We can do this with our innovative information technologies and economically superior architecture.

Companies are being cautious about their spends. Organizations must evaluate potential technology purchases not only on their technology merits but on their economic merits as well. At HDS, we encourage customers to save 20 to 30 percent on their storage spend through storage virtualization which enables customers to reclaim, utilize, and optimize.

CHANNEL STRATEGY Our alliance partners engage together to create economically superior solutions that align with market realities. Solutions like converged platforms, big data, cloud, and mobility deliver high value in the form of superior cost savings, performance, robust interoperability, and industry leading scalability. Our focus is to ensure we provide customers with purpose built solutions that increase their operational efficiencies, drive financial gains and help them meet their growth objectives.

HDS is building from a very solid foundation of traditional partners and regional systems integrators, and will continue to invest with them to grow into information technologies and solu-

JANUARY 2014

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

73

-

n AGENDA 2014 | VIVEKANAND VENUGOPAL tions. We continue to invest in enabling services with our strategic partners through SSP (Services Specialization Program) which allows them to acquire storage technologies IP as well as emerging technologies and capabilities in the area of converged platforms, cloud, mobility, and analytics.

There are new programs to make our partners relevant to customers and evolving market opportunities including the rollout of the Hitachi Cloud Services Connection Program, offering “x” as a services – converged platforms, compute, storage, backup, DR, and desktop-as-a-service by partner community to SMEs on a revenue and profit sharing business model . In addition Hitachi Cloud Partner program provides a partner framework covering the cloud service provider, cloud builder, and cloud reseller business models.

CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT

The biggest opportunity lies in aligning customer priorities around cost control, IT infrastructure optimization, IT efficiency, business analytics and outcomes.

74

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2014

We want to build an adaptive business culture focussed on collaboration, flexibility, and reliance on insight. With a focus on long-term performance, the aim is to have elevated customer support to ensure customer excellence and loyalty. HDS customer community is a forum about customer and partner experiences, insights, and innovations to share knowledge and expertise to create advantage and enrich relationships.

ADVICE TO CHANNELS We can address partner challenges that are focussed on revenues, profitability, and building a sustainable path to future success. l Cost-effective services using RIM delivery models can be white labelled and revenue or profit sharing cloud

Mega Trends  Virtualization and Automation: It will pave the way for an IT environment that is easier to manage, without the need to have specialist IT skills in-house.  Cloud: With virtual private cloud deployments of IaaS set to grow significantly, many organizations will deploy on-premise private clouds to host traditional enterprise workloads.  Converged Infrastructure Solutions: Converged or pre-validated solutions will be more compelling for organizations to support compared to the “build-your-own” approach.  Enterprise Flash Over Commodity SSD: Delivering a quantum improvement in performance, it will also support the storage and computation demands of real-time analytics and predictive modelling.  Intelligent Object Storage and Content Platforms: Object stores will enable organizations to extract greater insights from their existing data stores.

delivery models can drive significant profitability and address new market opportunities. l Fifty percent of our revenues come from software and services. A partnership with HDS can help transform a partner’s business into growth areas and increase the relevance with your customers. 

n STRATEGIC DIRECTIONS | GARTNER

Linda Price

New Skills for a New Era

L

AST MONTH I talked about how digitization contin-

ues to drive change in the business landscape and the impact this was having on IT, including potential for the IT budget to move to other departments within the organization. Another significant change being wrought by the advent of digitization is the need to reassess the skills required

by IT and by the organization. We need to adapt our talent attraction, development and retention programs accordingly.

One enjoyable requirement of my job is to travel extensively through Asia Pacific and meet CIOs and IT leaders. Despite the differences in economic and employment conditions, CIOs across the region bemoan the fact that, although there are ample numbers of applicants for any open positions, the specific skill sets required to leverage the opportunities presented by the current digitization of the front office are very scarce. They also point to the fact that we are operating in a truly global market now. Any applicants with an attractive skill set are being approached by global organizations and this is pushing the cost for scarce skills to new levels. The impetus for this change in IT skills is that IT itself is changing—from being primarily about service delivery to being required to design and implement

technology-enabled, information-rich transformed business processes. Expertise in this area requires a new type of IT professional.

Traditionally, the CIO has relied on external sourcing to identify talent for open roles. This method will no longer return the benefit previously enjoyed. This is because the typical IT organization currently devotes approximately 70 percent of its resources to running operations, 25 percent to designing and building applications required by

n A new talent strategy is required— one that is a key part of the evolving IT strategy and one that focuses on a blend of business and modern IT skills.

the business and only 5 percent to innovation. Over time this will significantly change. This is the cause of the talent dilemma currently facing CIOs right across the region. Gartner predicts that by 2020, only 35 percent of resources will be required to maintain operations, 50 percent will be dedicated to designing and building, and 15 percent will be required to continually foster and support innovation if the enterprise is to continue to compete.

CIOs need to seriously consider how they are going to support the new service delivery model of lighter-weight technologies via the cloud, social computing, and the need for technology-driven innovation. A new talent strategy is required—one that is a key part of the evolving IT strategy and one that focuses on a blend business and modern IT skills. CIOs should look to JANUARY 2014

buy from the market in the short term and contribute to the market in the intermediate term by building internal capabilities through continuing education and reskilling They should also influence the market in the long-term by working with educators/academic communities and suppliers.

The practice of working closely with academic institutions to provide for future requirements is maturing well in India in particular.

As parts of IT become commoditized, a new, lighter IT is emerging.

Most CIOs will need to develop the ability to operate effectively by providing quality infrastructure and application services, and business operations support and look to design and build IT services that meet business demands to accomplish more with technology. They should also create business solutions with innovations that exploit new technologies.

Taking a proactive approach to the provision of the right talent will establish a platform from which you can leverage all the opportunity digitization will provide. n Linda Price is the group vice president of service delivery with Gartner Executive Programs in Asia/Pacific. She is a senior IT executive with 20 years’ experience in media, manufacturing, distribution and service organizations.

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

75

n STRATEGIC DIRECTIONS | ERNST&YOUNG

Samiron Ghoshal

The Rise and

Growth of Big Data

Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?

The Cheshire Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.

Alice: I don’t much care where.

The Cheshire Cat: Then it doesn’t much matter which way you go.

Alice: ...So long as I get somewhere.

The Cheshire Cat: Oh, you’re sure to do that, if only you walk long enough.”

T

HIS EXERPT from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Won-

derland probably best explains the predicament of Indian business faced with the four large forces in technology—cloud, mobile and social media, and big data. So far, the response of leading Indian businesses to big data ranges from rank indifference to quivering excitement and all hues in-between. What will, in all likelihood, change the playing field for the Indian enterprise is the rapid convergence of the big four forces leading to an explosion in data volumes. By our estimates by 2015 India will represent a $1 billion market for big data of the $17 billion worldwide market even as our data grows from 40,000 petabytes to over 2.3 million petabytes over the next decade.

Smart devices like phones and tablets, major government sponsorship in programs like UIDAI and the National Knowledge Network, proliferation of wireless broadband and the bludgeoning increase in online commerce particularly in retail, travel, and banking, are all responsible for the expo76

nential growth in data.

Rapid cost reduction in deployment of technologies like Hadoop, in-memory processing, in-database analytics, and MPP techniques are responsible for the pushing their use into the realm of business.

While the benefits of creating such infrastructure is evident, the business case is still being made. In a lot of cases, the culprit is the lack

n Leading organizations are reaping rich rewards on their investment in big data even as competition struggles to keep pace.

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2014

of data-centric approach of most Indian organizations and the custom built approach of big data projects as yet. For big data to become mainstream the skills will need to become more ubiquitous and the technology more packaged and commoditised. As per a market research exercise conducted by EY, big data presents an opportunity in areas of consumer product marketing and innovation, supply chain optimization, smart infrastructure and sustainability management, security and healthcare delivery. India has observed a major shift in banking operations in last two decades. Private sector players and resurgent foreign banks have adopted tech-

nology to reach out to customers and in the process have skewed the playing field. We expect bank CIOs to embrace big data technologies incrementally in various areas. In telecommunications, the use cases are likely to center around network mapping, locationbased and customer-churn analytics, and customer profile monetisation as the new subscriber growth stalls and bandwidth becomes more expensive.

The government has become a large buyer technology over the years and we expect the trend to continue in big data which is likely to be used in areas of situational analysis, realtime cyber security, and defence applications. As we go across sectors, the potential and the possibility for big data looms large as a game changing technology. Indeed, leading organizations the world over are reaping rich rewards on their investment in this area even as competition struggles to keep pace.

As we approach this Lewis Carrollesque world of new technologies organisations must take the words of The Queen in Alice in Wonderland to heart: “My dear, here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you wish to go anywhere you must run twice as fast as that.” n Samiron Ghoshal is partner/ leader IT Advisory Practice, India and Talent Hub Leader for global IT advisory practice at Ernst & Young.

n STRATEGIC DIRECTIONS | PRICEWATERHOUSECOOPERS

Sivarama Krishnan

Better Safe Than Sorry

I

NDIA IS uniquely positioned to be a global leader in in-

formation security with its vast talent pool of skilled technology resources; deep understanding of global best practices, a strong jurisprudence framework guiding technology, and associated security issues. Considering the size of our economy, the socio-political environment in the country, and the size of our information technology and ITES industry, organizations in India need to have continued rigour and focus in the area of information security.

A recent survey on the state of information security in India conducted

by PwC provides some very interesting insights.

Organizations in India are very confident about their security posture. Eighty nine percent of the respondents in the survey claimed to have best in class security infrastructure and practices in place; but on detailed analysis only 38 percent qualify as true security leaders. Over 90 percent respondents claim that their security policies and security spending are aligned with business objectives, on the other hand, there is a sharp increase in the number of security incidents and financial losses from these incidents. This contradicts the notion that organizations are becoming more adept at detect-

ing intrusions. In fact, it suggests that old security models in use may be broken or ineffective.

The number of incidents detected in the past 12 months has increased by 98 percent, perhaps an indication of todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s elevated threat environment. It is troubling that organizations are increasingly learning of security incidents from external sources, such as customers or managed service providers. This may be due to continued investments

n A proactive information security approach instead of a reactive one is the key agenda today and will be an imperative tomorrow.

in traditional information security products or safeguards rather than focusing on emerging ones.

Insider threats are on the increase. Insiders, particularly current or former employees, are cited as a source of security incidents by almost 75 percent of the respondents. Lack of solutions around behavioral profiling and event management adds up to the problem. Yet many organizations do not have plans for responding to insider threats. Even today, justification for information security spending is more focused on external factors, such as client and regulatory requirements.

Enterprise mobility and cloud services are gaining greater traction with organizations in India. In fact India is amongst the top JANUARY 2014

five countries globally to embrace enterprise mobility. Yet information security for mobile devices and cloud services lags behind adoption rates. Less than 50 percent of the respondents claim that their organizations have fundamental information security controls for mobile security and even less than 20 percent have policies addressing use of mobile phones.

A proactive approach instead of reactive one is the key agenda today and will be an imperative tomorrow.

Given the rising complexity and volume of threats, organizations need to have an information security approach that adapts to rapidly changing threats and technology, and also to changes in regulations and standards. The approach should be holistic and consider technology, processes and people as well as provide competitive advantage. Organizations should create a culture of security that starts with commitment of top executives and cascades to all employees and third parties. Organizations should view security risks as organizational threats. It is critical to anticipate these threats, know vulnerabilities, and be able to identify and manage the associated risks n Sivarama Krishnan is executive director in PwCâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Consulting Practice.

With over 18 years of experience, Sivaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s focuses on financial services, e-governance, IT security, and telecom.

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

77

n STRATEGIC DIRECTIONS | FORRESTER

Sudhanshu Bhandari

Software-Defined Infrastructure

T

IME, ORGANIC growth, and old technology man-

agement paradigms have resulted in complex, rigid, and slow services that don’t match up to the reality of today’s needs. Changes are brewing that make infrastructure an enabler of business demand for engagement.

These include: End-user computing. Client virtualization will be important for access to legacy applications. Desktops are giving way to mobile devices as the computing form factor of choice. The need to manage the coming plethora of devices will drive much of the infrastructure change.

Sensor and remote computing. The various and extreme workloads that sensor and device data demand will create further infrastructure evolution.

Process data management. Advance analytic workloads and complex processes that involve both customer touchpoints and diverse on- and off-premises components are major needs that next-generation technology infrastructure must support.

Infrastructure and application platforms. Datacenter infrastructure management software will evolve to embrace the SDCC model, and software-defined networks (SDN) and OpenFlow will mature to provide the final component in a fully virtualized compute 78

stack. Converged infrastructure opens the path to real SDCC implementation, new IAM models will protect information assets with security approaches designed from the ground up, and mobile device management and unified communication advances leverage the cloud for more agility, manageability, and capability.

As a result, the end-user computing pressure is leading to transformation, and infrastructure pros’ wellintended drive for efficiency is running up against autonomous users employing multiple devices, including ones

n Firms must invest in transforming infrastructure to eradicate complex infrastructure to keep pace with business needs.

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2014

they own, and multiple apps, including ones that IT can’t control, to complete work.

By 2016, Forrester predicts that the SDDC will be the organizing metaphor for virtual infrastructure.

Leaders will demonstrate substantial opex and capex savings, and this will attract crowds and create a lot of confusion and hype. SDDC will also act as a bridge between legacy systems of engagement and new systems of record, because SDDC flexibility will allow firms to run both types of systems on common physical hardware. Leading infrastructure organizations will demonstrate their value to user experience delivery by designing for workloads, not apps. As firms learn from cloud and mobile, the breaking apart of applications into individual components that can run on the appropriate infrastructure

will allow design to focus on the characteristics of component workloads. This will create a lot of agility for firms that are able to embrace the concept. Supplyside thinking will give way to customer advocacy for end-user computing. IT pros who continue to limit end-users in the technology they need, thinking about supply-side efficiency and control, will find themselves looking for work.

Emerging technologies that unify workforce computing experiences will find enormous success, and create a customer advocacy culture in the infrastructure support organization.

SDN will potentially enable datacenter to improve the network provisioning time, while reducing costs.

Cisco and HP will lead the networking innovations that will help organizations to consolidate and virtualize their network equipment.

IBM will face significant challenges with softwareonly approach for SDN. There will be a skills gap in the APAC region in 2014 to roll out VMware NSX product offering for network virtualization.

Firms must invest in transforming infrastructure to eradicate rigid and complex infrastructure that cannot keep up with the new pace of business n Sudhanshu Bhandari is Senior Analyst, Infrastructure and Operations (I&O), Forrester Research. He delivers research and consulting services on topics related to datacenter and IT operations.

n STRATEGIC DIRECTIONS | IDC

Venu Reddy

Driving IT to Make an Impact

N

EED OF the hour for business today is its surviv-

al and its longevity for which they need to invest in IT that can support these objectives. Due to this reason, IT is being increasingly viewed as something which would help drive revenue rather than just another cost line-item. Businesses want IT to deliver measurable business value; they want agility in business processes through technology systems and industry specific solutions in support of these business processes.

When organizations are putting these “value lenses”, it is also impacting how they should look at their IT investments.

This means that they are starting to look at various applications and infrastructure and prioritizing them based on the business value.

The days of organizations buying best-of-breed technology and using it for applications that have the heaviest requirement are coming to an end.

Vendors are introducing infrastructure that is tuned for specific solutions. This means that organizations will be able to get greater efficiencies from customized solutions without having to invest in expensive services from their SI partner. Increasing numbers

of organizations are starting look at investments tied to specific solution/ business process rater than an “IT budget allocated once a year”. This movement not only puts focus on delivering business value but will also help the CIO understand the level of priority and business impact of the process on the business.

This does not mean that organizations should start moving IT into silos and align them to business and ignore all the

n IT should not end-up being another “overhead” but become a key ingredient to the success of a business.

benefits of leverage IT. It just means that during IT investments, allocation of resources, and designing the SLAs, the CIO will have a clear picture of what should be aligned to the solution/process.

Despite this, it is important to note that maturity of IT in India is still in a nascent stage in majority of verticals but the need of IT adoption based on business impact is being increasingly sought after.

Going forward we expect that Indian organization will think sensibly and makes IT decisions based on business outcomes.

Slowing growth and increasing competition have made innovation the top priority for both the business as well as IT decision makers. Increasingly, IT decision makJANUARY 2014

ing process is involving CMOs, CFOs, or CEOs, as most of the transformational activities. Due to this reason IT has become an integral part of every business function, thus CIO cannot afford to take decisions in isolation. The simple fact that business value is best assessed by the business or marketing managers means that the decision making process is going to increasingly involve the business/marketing heads.

Despite the fact that we are only in the early stages of the movement, the direction of movement is inevitably moving towards “business value based IT investments”.

So it is important for organizations to start changing their mindset and decision making process so that IT does not end-up being another “over-head” but becomes a key ingredient to the success of the business.

Increasing number of organizations are looking at new investments like mobility from the lenses of employee efficiency or customer satisfaction or new product design. IDC believes that this new trend will continue gaining steam in 2014 and will start becoming a norm in the market in the very near future n Venu Reddy is a research director at IDC India and is responsible to manage and orchestrate the research across all of the ICT technology areas in India.

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

79

Focal Point EVERYTHING ABOUT BYOD

an e-mail to a personal cloud storage service, shoot off untraceable text messages, and other violations of the eighth of The 10 Commandments.

With BYOD, you don’t even have to employ multiple devices or stealthily use a thumb drive like the techies in the geek cult classic “Office Space,” or stupidly create an electronic paper trail by forwarding corporate email to a personal e-mail account. Rather, you can do all your pillaging from the safety and comfort of your cubicle with little chance of getting caught.

COPE OFFERS MIDDLE GROUND

‘COPE’ing

with Mobile Devices COPE can help regain control of data shared by employees. By Tom Kaneshige

L

you’re a thief. At some point in your life, you swiped something from a previous employer— business contacts, source code, staplers—and used it for personal gain, perhaps as a sacrificial, competitive offering to your next employer or to help kick-start your own business. Fact

80

ET’S FACE it,

remains, the stuff wasn’t yours.

But it’s so simple, you say, especially in these early days of BYOD. It’s easier than ever to whip out your smartphone and record a strategic meeting, take a screen shot of a document or photo of a whiteboard, copy and paste company information contained in

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2014

Companies, though, are smartening up. While they know they can’t stop the powerful current of consumer gadgets flooding the enterprise, they can slow down BYOD. They’re regaining control with an emerging computing model and bigtime contender to BYOD called company-owned-personally-enabled devices, or COPE. It’s a hybrid that sits between free-for-all BYOD and traditional companyowned computers that forbade personal use and held zero expectations of privacy for employees.

“We have seen several large companies moving to the company-owned-personally-enabled-model primarily to give the employer greater access to mobile devices without creating privacy snafus,” says Larry Ponemon, founder of research firm Ponemon Institute. “This approach appears to be acceptable to data protection authorities and other privacy regulators, including those in high-risk countries such as Germany, France, and other EU nations.”

BYOD’s meteoric rise is starting to slow down because of security concerns, thus opening the doors to COPE. Ponemon Institute surveyed 895 IT and security specialists and found that 60 percent are unsatisfied with current BYOD solutions, mostly due to cost and inadequate security.

WARY OF BYOD A Workshare survey found that the number of employees adopting BYOD decreased from 80 percent to 62 percent, largely due to the increase in IT security and in the awareness of the dangers of BYOD. Protecting intellectual property in the age of BYOD has become paramount for companies big and small, in every industry. Consider this startling statistic from a Symantec survey earlier this year: Half of employees who left or lost their jobs in the last 12 months kept confidential corporate data, and 40 percent plan to use it in their new jobs.

The majority of the offenders don’t believe this is wrong, either. Sixty-two percent of employees say it is acceptable to transfer work documents to personal devices or online file sharing apps. On the tech front, 42 percent believe a software developer has some ownership of his work and do not think it’s a crime for him to reuse the source code, without permission, in projects for other companies.

It’s no surprise that companies feel a need to rein in BYOD, given its supporting role as the getaway driver in intellectual property theft.

“Corporations will side step from BYOD in 2014

BYOD | FOCAL POINT n to the more practical use of COPE,” says Bob Janssen, CTO of RES Software.

“With COPE devices, organizations will have greater control and security over the devices used by employees.

The device will then have the ability to be used personally and professionally, and will be able to switch between the two contexts.”

COPE devices have some enormous advantages when it comes to data security, says attorney Paul Starkman, who heads the labor employment group at law firm Pedersen & Houpt in Chicago. For starters, he says, COPE acts as a deterrent—that is, employees are less inclined to steal using a corporate-owned device.

Many companies also get cyber-risk insurance to protect against lost or stolen devices with sensitive information on them, such as social security numbers or customer health information, but those policies don’t cover personallyowned devices. When a legal dispute arises, law enforcement will often help get the device back if it’s company property, not personal property.

HOW MUCH PRIVACY DOES COPE IMPLY? COPE’s biggest advantage might be in the judge’s mind. An employer needs to have authorization or consent to pull data from a device, Starkman says, and it’s much easier to establish that the employee has no expectation of privacy when using a corporate-owned device than a personal one. This allows companies to search a device for evidence of intellectual-property theft.

“It’s a much easier sell to a judge to say, ‘This is

BYOD Will Happen: Gartner

B

YOD should be a design principle that provides businesses with a vendor neutral applications portfolio and a flexible futureproof architecture. That’s according to a Gartner report examining mobile applications and strategies. Its anlaysts say BYOD is not just a purchasing policy and needs to be approached more broadly with the applications and strategies designed for today’s world. While most enterprises are increasingly feeling the need to embrace mobility, many don’t know where to begin.

Garner analysts say the key decision about BYOD is one of applications architecture and solutions design. “Designing your applications to meet the demands of BYOD is not the same as setting usage policies or having strategic sourcing plans that mandate a particular platform,” Gartner analyst, Darryl Carlton, said.

a company-owned device, and while we let them use it for personal use, we told them that whatever they do with it, they need to understand that personal activity is open to scrutiny and may be monitored,’” Starkman says.

On the other hand, COPE’s greatest danger is giving a false sense of security to IT. While there may be no expectation of privacy for employees, Starkman advises companies not to go snooping into personal stuff. “You don’t want to cross into password-protected personal accounts and Websites and social media,” he says. “COPE is not a full-proof plan.”

In the case of Borchers v. Franciscan Tertiary Province of the Sacred Heart, Diane Borchers, a food service director, was issued a computer with a written policy permitting “occasional personal use.”

In 2007, she reported to human resources that she was being sexual harassed by her supervisor, Michael

“We are no longer developing applications for deployment to an exclusive user base over which we exert standards and control.” This development is leading to the need for IT to look into the techniques and practices of what Gartner calls “global class” computing—an approach to designing systems and architectures that extends computing processes outside the enterprise and into the cultures of the consumer, mobile worker and business partners. Carlton warned CIOs who considered BYOD activities as a temporary problem generated by a few disaffected employee as a tragic mistake.

“Reasserting control is not an appropriate response. This is a permanent and irreversible shift in the way that IT is procured and implemented to support the organisation, suppliers, and customers.”

—Brian Karlovsky

Frigo. (The follow-up internal investigation found no evidence.)

After Borchers left, Frigo directed his administrative assistant to check Borchers’ computer for businessrelated information—and found Borchers’ personal AOL account. Borchers’ e-mails contained everything from spiteful feelings toward co-workers to intensions to take advantage of disability benefits. Upon realizing that Frigo had seen her e-mails, Borchers promptly withdrew her sexual harassment claim.

Then Borchers sued in state court, alleging violations under the federal Stored Communications Act. A state judge granted summary judgment to the employer, claiming that the administrative assistant did not act with wrongful intent. But the Illinois Appellate Court revived the privacy lawsuit, citing that the administrative assistant printed out more than 30

personal e-mails. “The question is, if the device is company-issued, does that somehow raise the likelihood that the employee has no expectation of privacy? That may not be the case,” says Heather Egan Sussman, co-head of the global privacy group at law firm McDermott Will & Emery. “It may be that the employee, because they’re allowed to do some personal activity, retained some sort of an expectation of privacy.”

More and more cases concerning employee privacy and intellectualproperty theft on computers and mobile devices are bubbling to the surface.

Whether it’s employees claiming privacy violations or employers arguing theft, companies would be in a better position with COPE rather than BYOD. But, as the Borchers case illustrates, COPE alone doesn’t keep companies out of hot water.

“If you allow personal use, then you’re blurring the lines,” Starkman says.

JANUARY JANUARY 2014 INDIAN 1, 2009CHANNELWORLD CHANNELWORLD81 81

n FOCAL POINT | BYOD mation is either stored or accessible through our mobile devices, it is very important to keep these devices secure. The good news is that it’s really not that hard to do. Below we have identified a few simple steps that will help you protect your personal and company-confidential information from being accessed and exploited by strangers.

Let’s go through some of the security issues with BYOD, and learn the simple actions we can take to help protect our devices from harm.

Raise Awareness Against Mobile Risks Here are some simple actions that can be taken to protect your devices from harm. By Steve Ragan

A

National Cyber Security Awareness Month, Rapid7 published a series of easily e-mailed awareness tips. The topic is BYOD and mobile risk.

“There has been an exponential growth in mobile malware these past few years, as smartphone and tablet adoption takes off,” said Saj Sahay, the director of mobile security at Rapid7.

“Cybercriminals are increasingly targeting mobile devices, not only because of the growing use, but because with the hundreds of device choices available it’s a herculean task for

82

S PART of

most organizations to understand their risks. User involvement in keeping their devices secure is the best way to mitigate mobile device risk.”

What follows is a brief primer of BYOD and mobile risk, which can be easily copied and freely shared within the organization.

WHAT IS BYOD? These days the majority of people in the workplace own either a smartphone (like an iPhone, Android phone, Windows mobile) or a tablet device, or in many cases, both.

Frequently these mobile

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2014

devices are used for all aspects of your personal and professional life, for example if you have your company e-mail on your mobile phone, or take notes during meetings on your tablet. This is BYOD: Mobile devices that you bought for your own use, through which you also access work-related data.

It’s easy to take this for granted and not consider the confidential nature of the information you’re accessing on these devices, but even seemingly insignificant information may provide an attacker with an opportunity. Given that so much company infor-

Threat #1: Lost or Stolen Mobile Devices More than 1 in 3 mobile devices are either stolen or lost by their original owner. In fact, stealing smartphones is the #1 crime in New York City! Not only does the smartphone have resell value, but the value of the data accessible from the device can sometimes exceed the resell value of the device. Just think how valuable your banking information and account passwords stored on the device can be to a thief!

How Can You Protect Yourself?: First, make sure to password lock your device! Unfortunately, less that 40 percent of users enable the passwords on their mobile devices, and they say the biggest reason is that it’s too much of a hassle, but it’s actually very quick and easy to do and makes a huge difference in terms of protecting your device. The whole point of a password is to keep untrustworthy people out of your device. To enable a password, go to the Settings in your phone. If you can’t easily figure out how

to do it, your IT team will probably be happy to help!

Second, enable the “Find Your Device” feature available on most of the major Operating Systems, like Apple’s Find My iPhone.

If your device is ever misplaced, you can sign into Apple’s iCloud and see exactly where your device is. You can also wipe the device remotely if it’s in a location that you don’t recognize or trust, so your confidential information is not compromised.

Threat #2: Untrustworthy Apps With more than 100 billion mobile apps downloaded since 2008, its no wonder that 4 out every 5 minutes we spend on mobile devices is on an app. Criminals who aim to steal your data are not unaware of this trend. For example, 97 percent of malware (malicious software) on Android smartphones is from apps that were downloaded from untrusted app stores.

These apps can look perfectly legitimate, but are usually loaded with malicious functions and once downloaded, expose the device owner to severe risk, sometimes even leading to the complete loss of control of the device to the attacker. A good example is Bad Pigs, which was a malware-laden app found earlier this year masquerading as the popular “Bad Piggies” game. Could you tell them apart in the link provided?

How Can You Protect Yourself? Only download apps from trusted marketplaces, like Apple’s iTunes and Android’s Google Play stores. The qualification and filtration processes for apps to be included

Advanced Persistent Threats are Hitting Mobile Devices

S

MARTPHONES, tablets and other mobile devices have become the target of malware and are even getting hit by highly targeted attacks known as “advanced persistent threats” that intended to steal sensitive data, according to a survey of 676 IT and security professionals.

About two-thirds of the respondents said the mobile endpoints used in their organizations had been hit by malware and 40 percent also said these endpoints were the entry point for an APT-style attack aimed at specific individuals to gain access to corporate information.

The Ponemon Institute’s survey, titled 2014 State of Endpoint Risk, states that on average 63 percent of an organization’s employees are now using mobile devices, with IT managers anticipating the number of devices

on these officially sanctioned marketplaces will significantly minimize any chance of your device being infected by malware.

There are more than 2 million apps available between Apple’s, Google’s, and Microsoft’s app stores, so you’ll never have to worry about finding the ones that suit your needs!

Threat #3: Unpatched Mobile Devices No software is perfect, and the stuff on your phone is no exception. The problem is that the flaws can often create opportunities for attackers to exploit and take over your device.

This is why the software makers often release multiple versions in quick

that have to be actively managed will rise from 5,000 on average to 7,000 in the next three years.

“Just when many IT security practitioners were hoping to get their endpoint security risks under control, the exploding growth of mobility platforms and public cloud resources has turned these dreams into a security nightmare,” the survey report asserts. The respondents perceive “mobile devices such as smartphones” to be the greatest potential IT security risk in the IT environment, more than PC desktops and laptops.

The survey indicates that over half of the IT security experts learned of APT attacks against endpoints when they found anomalous exfiltration traffic on the network. About a quarter said the endpoint security technology they use alerted them to a possible breach and 21

succession (as with the recent iOS 7, iOS 7.01 and iOS 7.02 releases).

This is called “Patching” and the responsibility for doing it on your mobile devices lies primarily with you. Less than 20 percent of devices in the US are updated at any time, resulting in 49 percent of Android and 18 percent of iOS devices containing at least one high severity vulnerability that is waiting to be exploited.

How Can You Protect Yourself? It is crucial that you update the software on your phone whenever new versions are released.

You can check by going to the Settings menu for your device, and looking up if there are any systems JANUARY 2014

percent were notified by law enforcement directly. As far as the applications considered to have the highest IT risk, the top three choices were: Adobe; Google Docs; and Microsoft OS/applications. Just over half of the survey’s respondents say they have a BYOD plan that lets employees use their own mobile devices for work purposes, and slightly over half of them are relying on “voluntarily installing the endpoint protection agent” for BYOD. The types of technologies the survey’s respondent expect to invest in over the next year include application control, dataloss prevention, MDM, device control, and “big data analytics.”

The most important capabilities considered for MDM by the respondents are malware detection and prevention, provisioning, and access management.

—Ellen Messmer

updates available. This simple step is by far the best way to eliminate mobile device risk, but so few people actually complete updates on a timely manner. Once the updated is completed, you can be sure that hackers cannot exploit older vulnerabilities on your device to gain access to your confidential information!

All the recommended actions are simple in nature, and don’t take too much time to execute.

By completing these actions, you will be able to rest comfortably knowing that you have minimized the risk of your mobile device being compromised by someone wanting to do you harm. n INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

83

n PLAINSPEAK

YOGESH GUPTA

New Year, New Hope January is a great starting point as resolutions— personal and professional— get drawn out.

Hope is the common thread that motivates us to strategise the vision that is ambitious, practical and achievable.

Yogesh Gupta is associate editor at ChannelWorld. He is a computer engineer from Mumbai University. You can contact him at yogesh_ gupta@idgindia.com 84

I

AM OFTEN flummoxed to hear technology channel

partners grumble about delayed payments, subdued IT spend and fast changing business models. Most key stakeholders at large technology companies agree that 2013 has been a challenging year for India’s IT business. You’d think that the channel’s only reflecting the downcast market sentiment, so what’s there to be baffled about? Take the results of ChannelWorld’s ‘State of the Market’ Survey 2014 (Page 24).

They surprisingly reflect a sanguine viewpoint by the channel community. Almost 75 percent of your peers in the enterprise

channel expect their company’s overall revenue to grow in 2014, and, more than 17 percent expect an increase in net profit.

Of course, going for growth in a tough market is never as easy a journey as it seems.

January is a great starting point as resolutions—personal and professional—get drawn out. Hope is the common thread that motivates us to strategise the vision that is ambitious, practical and achievable.

A proficient partner organisation, I believe, will need to wear multiple hats to stay afloat in 2014—hats that all reflect H.O.P.E. Hunter: The era of ‘sweet spots’ or ‘it’s myterritory’ is over. Be an agile hunter with aneagle eye to spot the next big thing equippedwith latest cutting-edge tools (tech know-how and skilled manpower) to stay ahead. Stir from your comfort zone and explore new technologies, unconventional verticals, and non-traditional business models.

The technology vendors we spoke to for this special issue sound extremely bullish about Big Data, the Cloud, the Internet of Things, Mobility and Software-Defined Everything (SDx), apart from the overlaying layer of nextgen security solutions.

If you are not yet in tune with these megatrends, you need to commence ASAP. These new avenues will help your increase income (read bottom-line as the ‘services model’ accelerates) keep you relevant to customer needs. Pertinently, survey respondents

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 2014

expect a third of revenues from net new business in 2014. And, these emerging technologies will be the catalysts to attain those numbers.

Optimist: Technology is incidental for most organization today. The game is all about solving a businesses pain points. Opportunities do knock more than once in the evolving tech landscape and challenging customer environment. Give them a ‘future ready’ technology roadmap to stay optimistic about your company’s growth.

People Person: The colossal challenge to retain ‘trained and certified’ employees is compounded by the exit of senior executives of different vendor companies. The ‘vendor-channel’ bond needs a revisit more often. Look both internally and externally to gain an unblurred vision about people management.

Evangelist: Technology companies incessantly create the market awareness around emerging (often hyped) technologies to gain a place on a CIO’s priority list. The real onus however lies with the channel partners to become the ‘evangelists of technology’ with the IT team at the customer end.

The market is right. The opportunity is abundant. The IT spend is happening.

What are you waiting for? Get out there and fulfil your HOPE. Wishing you and your team a happy and profitable 2014! n