Channelworld Magazine March 2013 Issue

FOCAL POINT: SDN isn’t ready for prime time yet. But this radical shift needs to be understood by IT executives. PAGE 43

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

MARAN NAGARAJAN CEO, Kaar Technologies, has a budget of Rs 50 lakh—aimed solely at online marketing activities in 2013.

Inside MARCH 2013 VOL. 6, ISSUE 12

News Analysis

CIOs say SIs do not engage with them effectively. SIs beg to differ. Is there a huge expectation mismatch between the two? PAGE 14

Grill

Maxim Mitrokhin, Director– Operations, Kaspersky Lab, APAC, talks about the company’s aspirations for the Indian market. PAGE 21

Case Study

Mumbai-based Crystal Solutions helps Walplast save a ton on cost with a scalable open source implementation. PAGE 34

Feature

Your peers are beginning to leverage online tools to drive business. Here’s how not to get left behind. >>> Page 26

Software piracy continues to be a menace. How can vendors and industry associations beat this problem? PAGE 37

Opinion

Focusing on how long your staffers stay in the office—instead of what they accomplish—could do you harm than good. PAGE 42

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n EDITOR’S NOTE

Vijay Ramachandran Stop Selling Storage!

H

OW OFTEN have you been told about over-

whelming data growth? And, that this is about video, social media, and mobility. Well, in the past few days I’ve had this dinned into me thrice complete with slide decks, jazzy graphics, maturity models, and quadrants. Conventional wisdom suggests that this is a no-brainer given the preponderance of YouTube videos of kittens performing cute antics, streaming porn, and torrents of pirated movies and sitcoms.

Tarry a while, because Martin Hilbert and Priscila Lopez from the University of Southern California beg to differ. They have spent the past five years pouring over 1,100 different sources across 60 analog and digital technologies, to estimate the world’s capacity to store, communicate and compute information between 1986 and 2010.

The result: A super paper in Significance (the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society), which challenges many assumptions.

Hilbert and Lopez discovered that “in the early 90s, video represented more than 80 percent of the world’s information stock (mainly stored in video cassettes) and audio almost 15 percent. By 2007, the share of video in the world’s storage devices had decreased to 60 percent and the share of audio to merely 5 percent, while text increased from less than 1 percent to a staggering 20 per2

cent (boosted by the vast amounts of alphanumerical content on Internet servers, hard disks, and databases).”

The researchers found that the “multimedia age” was in actual terms the “alphanumeric text age”.

Their research revealed that the fastest growing information operation was not the Internet or mobile phones or server farms or databases!

Instead, Hilbert and Lopez found that computation was the big driver.

Think about the millions on instructions that are executed within a computer’s architecture based on the algorithms that

n Big data solutions create multiple opportunities for solution providers to profit from.

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD M ARCH 2013

make it run—regardless of whether the computers are general-purpose (such as PCs, smartphones, servers, and videogame consoles) or application-specific computers (embedded into electronic devices and household appliances like washing machines or TVs).

So that probably explains why amidst all this “awesome data explosion”, and the sheer volumes of petabytes being consumed by enterprises, Indian storage sales have stayed static at about Rs 1,500 crore annually over the past few years.

And, that possibly clarifies why you aren’t profiting by merely selling more storage arrays or disks.

If anything, Hilbert and Lopez’s research, given the volume of data that needed to be crunched and its disparate sources, points the way forward for you as well—big data.

While I do not believe that big data is the cure for all enterprise ills,

there is no doubt in my mind that for companies, which have to deal with large volumes of data being created at a fast pace across multiple sources, this is the way forward.

Big data isnt always for the big boys. Often organizations that have a large customer base or a decided rural footprint have business cases that cry out for a big data solution. Think microfinance outfits and almost any organization into rural procurement or distribution—those are your ideal targets.

And, since big data is actually a gamut of solutions that address how information is stored, structured, archived, retrieved, secured, and analysed—I see multiple opportunities for solution providers to tap into.

Two that spring to mind, are polar opposites.

IDG research reveals that as high as 74 percent of mid-to-large-sized organizations have issues with data cleansing—issues so serious that they doom most efforts to derive any meaningful intelligence.

The other is about putting in place data scientists who can derive insight from analytical tools.

Both are areas where third-party skills are needed.

The question then is: Are you up to the challenge? n Vijay Ramachandran is the Editor-in-Chief of ChannelWorld. Contact him at vijay_ramachandran@idgindia.com

FOR BREAKING NEWS, GO TO CHANNELWORLD.IN

Inside INDIAN CHANNELWORLD ■ MARCH 2013

■ NEWS DIGEST

■ THE GRILL

07 Win 8: Will It Kill the PC? |

21 Maxim Mitrokhin, Director–

The success of Windows 8 will

Operations, Kaspersky Lab, APAC,

be critical not only for Microsoft’s future, but for the 40-year-old-andcounting concept of the personal computer, believe analysts.

07 Juniper’s Latest Buy |

Juniper Networks has acquired the assets of Webscreen Systems, a developer of DDoS mitigation products, from Accumuli.

12 VCE Remains Strong As Ever | The

VCE partnership involving EMC, its subsidiary VMware and Cisco will not change, even after Cisco expanded its partnership with EMC rival NetApp to sell preconfigured cloud architectures.

■ NEWS

ANALYSIS

14 Craving that Perfect Fit |

CIOs and SIs don’t seem to engage effectively. Is there a expectation mismatch between the two sides?

■ OPINION 02 Editorial: Vijay Ramachandran

believes that big data solutions create multiple opportunities for solution providers to profit from.

42 Rob Enderle: Focusing on

how long your staffers stay in the office—instead of what they actually accomplish—could do more harm than good.

Cover Design by UNNIKRISHNAN A.V

21 talks about the company’s aspirations for the Indian market.

■ FEATURE

37 Joint Effort Vendors and industry associations are fighting hard to keep the menace of software piracy out. How can they prevent perpetrators from causing more harm?

26

■ FAST TRACK

20 Narasimha Murthy, CEO,

Connectivity Solutions, says that the company’s internal workflow is process-driven, not person-driven.

■ COVER STORY

26 Websavvy.in

It’s a whole new world out there and the Web has become the first port of call for customers looking for partners to give their business to. But few partners leverage the Web to raise their company’s profiles—and drive sales. That’s changing slowly as the number of enterprise channel partners who realize what they are missing out on grows.

Here’s how some partners have leveraged popular online tools to establish and boost their credentials online and marketed their companies to a much wider audience.

■ CASE STUDY

34 Open Trust

Mumbai-based Crystal Solutions helps construction material manufacturer Walplast save a ton on cost with a scalable Open Source implementation.

FELIX BAUMGARTNER set the world record for skydiving from a capsule 39 kilometers above Earth.

FRIDAY, 3 MAY, 2013 HYATT REGENCY, MUMBAI

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Join The BOLD 100. Nominate yourself at www.premier100.in

Event by

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Inside

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD ■ MARCH 2013

36 Sumit Srivastava, Managing Director, Cygnus Information Solutions, has done well betting on government contracts and Dell. The primary goal, he says, is to ensure that the company touches Rs 50 crore by 2015.

CHANNELWORLD On the surface, their SDN strategies seem to have sharp contrasts if recent announcements are any indication. Yet analysts say there are really more similarities than differences in both strategies from the fierce rivals.

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

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

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Statement of ownership and other particulars about the magazine Indian Channel World, as required to be published under Section 19-D Subsection (b) of the Press and Registration of Books Act read with Rule 8 of the Registration of Newspapers (Central) Rules 1956.

PLACE OF PUBLICATION:

■ ON RECORD

18 Vikas Pradhan,

Country Director–India, CommVault, shares his unabashed take of the competition and the company’s India strategy.

■ FACE OFF

48 Lion’s Share: Between Citrix and F5 Networks, who will make giant strides in the ADC space?

■ FOCAL POINT

43 Making Sense of SDN

SDN: As is somewhat typical of emerging technologies, there isn’t a universally agreed to definition of what is meant by SDN. Over the last year or two, most of the definitions have focused on the decoupling of the network control plane from the network forwarding plane.

46 Are They Really That Different?

SDN: Juniper and Cisco may be SDN competitors,

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PERIODICITY OF PUBLICATION: Monthly PRINTER Name: Louis D’Mello Nationality: Indian Address: Geetha Building, 49, 3rd Cross, Mission Road, Bangalore 560 027 PUBLISHER Name: Louis D’Mello Nationality: Indian Address: Geetha Building, 49, 3rd Cross, Mission Road, Bangalore 560 027 EDITOR Name: Louis D’Mello Nationality: Indian Address: Geetha Building, 49, 3rd Cross, Mission Road, Bangalore 560 027 Names and addresses of individuals who own the magazine, and partners or shareholders holding more than one per cent of the total capital: International Data Group, 5, Speen Street, Framingham MA 01701, USA I, Louis D’Mello, hereby declare that the particulars given above are true to the best of my knowledge and belief.

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News

WHAT’S WITHIN

PAGE 10: GoI Will Splurge on IT Services PAGE 10: Intel Capital Invests in SDN PAGE 12: VCE Remains Strong as Ever

PAGE 14: CIO vs SIs: Craving that Perfect Fit F I N D M O R E A R T I C L E S AT CHANNELWORLD.IN

OPERATING SYSTEM

Win 8: Will It Kill the PC?

I

N ANOTHER illustration of the diminishing importance of the PC, a research firm said that more than a third of surveyed consumers who once used personal computers to access content said they had switched to tablets and smartphones.

But unlike others who, noting the same trends, have said it signals the death of the PC, John Buffone of the NPD Group argued that PCs aren’t going anywhere for the moment.

“There is a significant amount of functionality that is best conducted on comput-

ers,” said Buffone. That work, often collectively dubbed “content creation,” could remain the provenance of PCs for a long time to come.

“I’m not in the camp that thinks the PC is going by the wayside,” said Buffone in describing NPD’s research results. “There are just too many households that have computers.”

The top two activities that have most moved to mobile, said Buffone, are Internet browsing and using Facebook. Among tablet owners, 27 percent said they’re using their PCs less frequently for going online in general,

while 20 percent confirmed that they use their PCs less often for accessing Facebook.

Smartphone owners responded slightly differently, with 27 percent claiming that they use their PC less frequently for both Internet access and Facebook activities.

Until Windows 8 makes headway, Buffone saw little chance that consumers would dump their PCs in dusty back rooms or closets.

“Windows 8 on tablets could change that,” Buffone said, “but from the sales so far, it’s not going to be rapid.”

Microsoft has pitched Windows 8 as a dual threat on tablets and ultra-light, touch-enabled laptops, able to not only run hardware and support software traditionally found only in notebooks, but also agile enough to power tablets.

While other analysts haven’t placed their bets on Windows 8 to lead the change from PCs to more mobile tablets, they have predicted that hardware able to really handle both content creation and consumption are not far off.

The success of Windows 8, by Buffone’s take, will thus be critical not only for Microsoft’s future, but for the 40-year-old-andcounting concept of the personal computer.

MARCH 2013

—Gregg Keizer INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

7

ACQUISITION

Juniper’s Latest Buy Juniper Networks has acquired the assets of Webscreen Systems, a developer of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) mitigation products, from Accumuli.

Juniper announced the purchase in a blog post. It bought the technology for $10 million (about Rs 54 crore), according to Accumuli.

The technology will enhance Juniper’s datacenter security product line and enable

the company to offer an automated DDoS protection system for websites and Web applications, according to the blog post. Webscreen specializes in behaviorbased DDoS mitigation designed to protect against both high volume and advanced persistent threat (APT) attacks.

—Jim Duffy

-

IT SERVICES

GoI Will Splurge on IT Services

T

of this growth will be in of India (GoI) will enterprise network equipspend Rs 36,800 ment. Software is achieving crore on IT prodthe highest growth rate ucts and services in 2013, amongst the top level IT an increase of 10.5 percent spending categories—foreover 2012’s Rs 33,300 crore, cast to be 18 percent up in according to Gartner. This 2013, led by investments in forecast includes spending desktop software and infraby government organizastructure software. tions on internal The IT indusIT (including try is expected to personnel), indirectly benefit hardware, softfrom government The expected ware, external increase in IT product projects such as and services IT services, and the Unique Idenspending by the GoI telecommunicatification Authorover last year. tions. ity of India (UIDTelecommuAI), which will nications, which includes create an online database telecommunications and with biometric and identity networking equipment and details of Indian residents, services, will remain the the launch of the National largest overall spending Optical Fibre Network, category throughout the and the computerization of forecast period within the commercial taxes in states. government sector. It is ex“The Indian government pected to grow 6.8 percent is starting to leverage UID in 2013 to reach Rs 11,800 identities to authenticate crore in 2013, up from citizens for transferring 11,100 crore in 2012. Most welfare benefits directly HE GOVERNMENT

10.5%

SOURCE: GARTNER

to the recipient’s bank accounts, in the form of cash transfers, thereby creating a new system for welfare benefits,” said Anurag Gupta, research director at Gartner. “India goes to the national polls in 2014, and the GoI will aim to expand the UID operational infrastructure by speed tracking ‘financial inclusion’, allowing easy access to banking for the poor and encouraging micro ATMs. To expand the benefits of IT, GoI aims to invest more than Rs 20,000 crore in expanding broadband penetration. The electronic chip-making project, digitization of academic databases across all educational institutions, vehicle registrations, and driving license databases among others will be the major focus areas.”

Further information on insurance, and government and education sector IT spending is available in the Gartner report Forecast: Enterprise IT Spending by Vertical Industry Market, Worldwide, 20102016, 4Q12 Update.

—ChannelWorld Bureau

FUNDING

Intel Capital Invests In Software-defined Networking Intel Capital has invested in software-defined networking company Big Switch Networks, as it hopes to help the company change the way datacenters are networked.

Intel Capital is looking for companies that are creating the most disruptive datacenter products, and Big Switch Networks’ Open SoftwareDefined Networking suite fits 10

the bill, according to managing director Bryan Wolf.

Big Switch is a pioneer and driving force behind the use of the OpenFlow protocol, which co-founder and CEO Guido Appenzeller was instrumental in helping develop.

OpenFlow allows centralized controllers, which typically run on a standard server, to modify the behavior of

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD M ARCH 2013

FOR THE FUTURE: SDN will provide Intel significant gains.

hardware and software-based network devices through welldefined forwarding instructions, according to the Open Networking Foundation.

Big Switch’s product suite consists of the Big Network Controller, Big Virtual Switch

Short Takes HGST announced the appointment of Avnet Technology Solutions as a new authorized distributor for HGST storage products, expanding its reach in India and the sub-continent (SAARC). As part of this agreement, Avnet will distribute the company’s enterprise and mobile drives, and Touro external storage solutions.

Value InfoSolutions announced its appointment as a national value-added distributor for the entire range of A10 Network’s networking and security solutions. Sunil Pillai, its MD, said that they looked forward to working with select partners and the A10 team to maximize business opportunities.

Mahindra Satyam announced that it has appointed Manoj Chugh, as global head of business development. In the new role he will be supporting business expansion plans across accounts and geographies.

application and monitoring application Big Tap. For Intel its important to find new product segments for its chipsets, as the PC market is floundering and its push into the tablet and smartphone market has yet to yield any significant gains. Softwaredefined networking is one such segment. The investment in Big Switch isn’t the first time Intel has shown an interest; at Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in September it demonstrated a switch reference design codenamed Seacliff Trail.

—Mikael Ricknäs

PARTNERSHIPS

VCE Remains Strong As Ever

T

HE VCE partnership

involving EMC, its subsidiary VMware, and Cisco will not change, even after Cisco expanded its partnership with EMC rival NetApp to sell preconfigured cloud architectures.

“I feel the partnership is strong. Obviously, it’s a hyper competitive environment, so there’s a lot of speculation in the marketplace,” said VCE CEO Praveen Akkiraju.

Founded in 2009, VCE, is a joint venture among EMC, its VMware subsidiary, and Cisco Systems. VCE sells preconfigured and pretested cloud computing systems called VBlocks. VBlocks are made up by Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS) servers and networking switches, EMC’s storage arrays and VMware virtualization software.

Akkiraju said there are no plans to go outside of the partnership to thirdparty vendors for servers or switches or to offer an ala-carte style VCE because Akkiraju considers Cisco “best of breed.”

“More fundamentally, Cisco is one of our key investors, and we don’t envision a different strategy than what we have today,” he said.

“Because of the nature of VCE as a joint venture, we are tightly aligned in our go-to-market from a sales perspective, from a services perspective and the way we co-develop our road maps,” he said. “If anything, because of my deep experi-

ence with Cisco, we’re able to have very honest and open conversations.”

Even so, there was some speculation recently that the VCE partnership might splinter after Cisco and NetApp expanded their reseller partnership around NetApp’s preconfigured FlexPod architecture. FlexPod combines Cisco switches and servers with NetApp’s FAS storage systems.

However, it wouldn’t be the first time a strong partnership failed when cooperation turned into competition. Such was the case with EMC’s reseller partnership with Dell, which lasted a decade, but ultimately broke apart after Dell’s storage line

Around

TheWorld F5 to Acquire a Software Start-Up

F5 Networks plans to extend the reach of SDN to improve application performance by acquiring software startup LineRate Systems. The company didn’t disclose how much it will pay for LineRate.

It bought the privately held company for its technology, intellectual property and engineering talent and will incorporate those into its development efforts for software-defined data centers, F5 said in a press release.

—Stephen Lawson MARCH 2013

began competing more and more with EMC’s.

The VBlock platform is also expected to receive significant upgrades.

Without offering specifics, Akkiraju said customers have been vocal about needed upgrades, which spurred the changes that will offer more SaaS-like capabilities while also sup-

Ex-Symantec CEO Joins FireEye BoD

FireEye announced that Enrique T. Salem, former president and CEO of Symantec, has been appointed to the FireEye Board of Directors. This brings the number of FireEye board members to eight.

Salem said, “I am honored to be part of the FireEye board and am looking forward to working with the outstanding leadership team and board that has been assembled.” In addition to serving as president and CEO, during his tenure at Symantec, Salem also served as COO, group president of worldwide sales and marketing, and president of consumer products.

—ChannelWorld Bureau INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

12

porting VDI and BYOD corporate strategies.

“The next phase of what we’re about to embark on ... will establish the convergent infrastructure as a foundation and start to build an ecosystem around truly freeing up the CIO to be able to deliver the IT as a service,” Akkiraju said.

—Lucas Mearian

Oracle to Buy Acme Packet

Oracle has agreed to pay $1.7 billion (about Rs 9,200 crore) for Acme Packet, a network equipment vendor specializing in session delivery.

Oracle intends to integrate Acme’s offering with its own communications product portfolio, alongside other core network products such as its network application platform and tools to manage service availability.

—Peter Sayer and Chris Kanaracus

n NEWS ANALYSIS

Craving that Perfect Fit

CIOs say SIs do not engage with them effectively. SIs beg to differ.

Is there a huge expectation mismatch between the two?

By Shantheri Mallaya

14

C

IOs ARE an important community.

The customer is sacrosanct. The engagement is paramount.

Utopian? Yes. If you thought businesses and projects worked on these cardinal principles, then think again. When asked about how a business case for IT is presented to them by system integrators, one CIO said, “I wonder if many system integrators really know the meaning of the term.”

That disconnect can take various forms, some of them more serious than others. A vendor spokesperson recently admitted in an interview that they had to segregate their partner and customer summits af-

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD M ARCH 2013

ter a couple of unpleasant showdowns during joint sessions a few years ago.

It’s a trend hasn’t gone unnoticed among the analyst community. Forrester recently put out a report titled System Integrators are Failing to Meet the Expectations of Indian CIOs, which corroborates the growing concern in various CIO forums, blogs and media surveys that system integrators are taking customers for granted.

The report reads on a grim note. ‘Indian CIOs now expect an increased level of business maturity from system integrators, but most SIs are not adjusting their people, offerings, or engagement models sufficiently in response.

“I can’t share my business strategies with system integrators, because I have little faith in developing a long-term business partnership with them,” said a CIO from a large healthcare firm.’

The CIO Mid Year Review 2012, conducted

by CIO magazine (a sister publication to ChannelWorld) points out that for 24 percent of CIOs (of large and very large enterprises) one of the main obstacles they have to surmount in the path of organizational IT-business process integration was the availability of good system integrators.

There was also a perception that system integrators do not have sufficient know-how in emerging technologies such as big data and SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud computing).

Given the increasing need for partners and IT leaders to work together and the advent of global system integrators, one can’t turn a Nelson’s eye anymore to the growing reality of an expectation mismatch between CIOs and their SI partners.

Is it time for the SI fraternity to wake up?

RULES OF ENGAGEMENT Sunil Mehta, SVP & area systems director-Central Asia at JWT, one of India’s premier advertising and communications agencies, observes that the chasm is generally in the domain expertise. “Vendors or system integrators do possess skills, but their domain service does not match ours. Even if they eventually figure out the business of the customer, it is not more than a plug

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n NEWS ANALYSIS and play situation from their end,” he says.

There are other opinions, including that going purely

by SLAs is not the solution. SLAs are a given, and the operational teams can execute these very well.

The disconnect is possibly in delivering value-adds which customers expect

from an system integrators’ top management.

“There is a very different level of engagement that has to come from the top. A visit to the client every six months from the CEO of the SI or service provider organization would go a long way in showing their commit-

ment. Why is it that they come running to the client only when they need business or when their targets are not being met?” asks Mehta.

A lack of preparation is another issue. According to CIOs, the amount of homework and ground work done by SIs is dis-

Indian SIs Haven’t Moved Beyond the Silo Transaction

Vijay Sethi, VP and CIO, Hero MotoCorp, gives refreshing and blunt insights into the widening gap between CIO and SI engagements.

Do you feel SIs need to engage more effectively with CIOs and that they ought to arrive at better engagement and delivery models? What, in your opinion, is going wrong? Transactions and relationships between the two parties are becoming difficult in many cases.

What is going wrong is a combination of processes and also the structure of many SI organizations.

There are silos and verticals within SIs. Each of these silos (groups or verticals) carry their revenue targets. It turns murky when a CIO gets embroiled in the internal silos between vendors, their partners, and then gets conflicting advice by teams within the same vendors or SI. Meeting individual revenue targets 16

often takes precedence over customer interests.

This leads to CIOs losing trust not just in individuals, but the SI itself. Till they reach out to the customer as one entity, nothing much can be achieved.

As a customer, I do not claim that I know everything. It’s the duty of the SI to give a neutral and fair opinion keeping my business processes in mind. However, the level of technical know-how among SI teams vary. Often, SIs just come up with a standard line, “We will get back to you.” Some SIs do not have the bandwidth to deliver services–so they put rookies on the job. The customer organization is a guinea pig for the learnon-the-fly approach. It is not a happy situation for us. There is huge attrition in the SI space which further compounds the issue, as that impacts both engagement and delivery.

The classic ice-breaker that the SI chose to ask us was “What ERP and CRM system do you use?”

Then, we were asked by many senior people about the structure of our organization and the health of our industry.

With homework and preparation levels so fundamentally flawed, and that too from an SI of repute, I needn’t say more.

Sometimes, a large team comes in, which is entirely the SI’s call, but the bottomline is, I have to see a tangible outcome.

The quality of inputs during a case study presentation isn’t always great. All that is given to us in the name of a business case is a run-of-the-mill presentation of a ROI, which is possibly not relevant to the Indian scenario.

There are times I feel that SIs think that CIOs are in awe of their brand and they can take us for granted.

Do you recall of any instance of an effort or a proactive approach taken by an SI in understanding your business process? To answer your question, I must narrate an incident.

Three months ago, a top SI came all the way from another city to our office.

What is the way forward to an equitable solution? I expect vendors and SIs to become our long-term partners and for that I expect each interaction to be a professional one.

It has to be a relationship based on trust.

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD M ARCH 2013

—Shantheri Mallaya

mal. More often than not, clients become a training ground SIs, thus shooting up the costs of the project and also adversely affecting the quality of output.

The Forrester report points out that SI teams, including account managers and consultants, usually focus more on promoting products and services; they have very little knowledge of what CIOs and client organizations are looking for and don’t care to learn. That’s a view CIOs share. (Read interview with Vijay Sethi, VP and CIO, Hero MotoCorp).

“The gap is largely due to SIs wanting to ride the hype curve without looking at the real business problems that CIO may be grappling with. This tends to alienate the SI from the CIO as the discussions are at different planes,” says Arun Gupta, CIO at pharma giant Cipla.

The fault doesn’t rest entirely with SIs, say some CIOs. “Vendors are also partly to blame. They must enable service providers and partners with training and leadership programs. That would really make the difference,” says Mehta at JWT. In his experience with technology vendors such as Microsoft, Apple, Adobe and Autodesk, Mehta says that their levels of engagement vary in terms of dependence too.

Vijay Mohan, country manager, Miti Solutions agrees. “It is not that we, as SI partners, do not have the requisite skill sets. In fact we may possess the inclination as well as the bandwidth. But there are times when there is absolutely no assistance forthcoming from the vendors’

for any new technology offering.” Miti is a partner to security vendors like Symantec and McAfee.

Mohan laments the fact that he is compelled to down sell to customers (sometimes recommended by vendors themselves) in a given situation when he does not get the know-how on new concepts such as security information and event management (SIEM).

According to Mohan, there is very little online or offline support from any vendor to date for SIEM as far as APAC goes.

He adds, “Ultimately, we are the face to the customer. If we are unable to suggest something or execute something, we may have to cut a sorry figure for no mistake of ours; that is inevitable.”

CONSULTANCY CHARGES In their defense, SIs say that customers need to be willing to pay for value-adds. In their book, consultancy, for instance, need to be recognized as a separate offering—and need to be paid for.

That’s a view that big tier-1 companies, as well as relatively smaller SIs share. “It would be prudent for a customer to break the engagement into two parts—one for consultancy and the other, for implementation. He has to pay up for the consultancy. How else does one get the deliverables?” says Srikant Rao, founder and CEO of Bangalore-based Affordable Business Solutions (ABS). ABS consistently insists to all its customers that consultancy services, as a separate component, needs validation and acceptance in order to make an engage-

The gap is due largely to system integrators wanting to ride the hype curve without looking at the real business problems that a CIO may be grappling with.”

ARUN GUPTA, CIO, CIPLA

It would be prudent for a customer to break the engagement into two parts—one for consultancy and the other, for implementation. He has to pay up for the consultancy. How else does one get the deliverables?”

SRIKANT RAO, FOUNDER & CEO, AFFORDABLE BUSINESS SOLUTIONS

Why is it that they [service providers] come running to the client only when they need business or when their targets are not being met?”

SUNIL MEHTA, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT AND AREA SYSTEMS DIRECTOR-CENTRAL ASIA, JWT

ment a very serious affair with tangible outcomes attached to it.

Gupta of Cipla says, “CIOs will be willing to pay a premium if the SI brings credible practice to the table, if they can connect with the issues of the enterprise and the industry. When SIs come with a menu card, you know there will be a compromise in the expertise level or the delivery.”

The last couple of years have witnessed a small shakedown of sorts in the SI space with the entry of global system integrators or GSIs. While the big four tier-1 SIs in India are GSIs in their own right, the presence of international

players in India is expected to change the standards of system integration.

“Customers can expect a value-added engagement with the entry of the GSI,” says Kumar Siddhartha, CEO, Greytrix, a Sage Software partner.

Forrester suggests that CIOs are also increasingly talking to strategic SIs and phasing out the nonstrategic ones from their discussions. Also, trends indicate that CIOs aspire to secure funds for initiatives through unrestrained budgets with the help of proactive SIs who will help build strong business cases.

Having said that, partnerships are a painstaking process. Gupta at

Cipla, observes in a blog, “Partnership is built over time and it’s a function of delivering to promise consistently across layers.

It takes effort to sustain it and requires investments and transparency from everyone. Everyone hates escalations which result due to lack of communication and assumptions.”

Gupta evidently knows what he is saying given his vast experience with thought leadership across roles in Shoppers Stop, Raheja Group and Philips Electronics. So, while the love-hate between the CIO and the system integrator continues, we will see interesting trends and solutions emerging. 

MARCH 2013

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products have stretched to a point where more re-engineering is not commercially viable.

We take into cognizance what they offer, and plug gaps through our Simpana architecture.”

ON RECORD n

Vikas Pradhan,

Country Director– India, CommVault, shares his unabashed take of the competition and the company’s India strategy.

By Yogesh Gupta

18

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD M ARCH 2013

How does CommVault stack up against the competition?

PRADHAN: Our Simpana platform competes with Symantec, IBM, HP, and EMC. As a new player, we consciously choose to fight these battles, and have been successful in displacing each one of our competitors from several enterprise accounts.

The four vendors have reasonably good products, and they were relevant to the ecosystem two decades ago. But there have been many changes in storage management, and the enterprise environment.

Earlier, issues like compliance were not as serious as the are today.

IM and e-mail were not a part of business communication few years ago. The competitions’

Why should customers choose Simpana over competing products?

PRADHAN: If an enterprise wants back up, archival (file or e-mail), de-duplication, or e-discovery, then they require five to six different storage products. In most scenarios, the products seldom talk to each other and there is a need for different admin heads (adding to overhead costs). CommVault took the bold decision of creating a single platform—Simpana— which contains individually licensable modules to analyze, replicate, protect, archive, and search data. The modules talk to one another effortlessly, making the platform an effective, organicallyintegrated data management solution.

Then there’s the fact that CIOs continue to spend on storage. Though it has become cheaper, it isn’t free. There’s a recurring cost associated with maintaining data as you need tools to execute de-dupe or archival to manage it. With Simpana, CIOs don’t have to worry about added costs associated with future storage growth. Today, when an enterprise’s back up window goes beyond 50 to 100 hours, CIOs want to compress data and get back up at the earliest. Therefore, CommVault becomes the automatic choice.

VIKAS PRADHAN | ON RECORD n What is the company’s sweet spot, from an enterprise size and vertical perspective?

PRADHAN: Our technology can operate across the stack, irrespective of the size of an enterprise.

However, the enterprise segment is our sweet spot as their pain points are much bigger due to the size of the data they manage. That said, we also have SME customers.

Simpana has a horizontal appeal, and we have had wins in the automotive, telecom, manufacturing, and healthcare verticals. For complex ERP scenarios, which are a reality in the financial and manufacturing verticals, we become relevant to

burner, but we will fuel it more next year.

What is your partner approach—and experience— been like?

PRADHAN: We have a 100 percent channel-driven model, and Inflow is our India distributor. We have OEM relationships with Dell and Hitachi, as they have, in a way, white labeled our products. We also work with large SIs like HCL, TCS, Wipro, and Infosys as they drive large government, PSU and private projects.

Till we came into play, tier-II partners were working with other storage vendors. Gradually, some of them cut back from selling competing

PRADHAN : The plan is not

to exceed 100 partners for India and Sri Lanka, as too many partners ends up commoditizing a product. The traditional IT consumption cities have expanded beyond the top nine to places like Nagpur, Pune, Nashik, Lucknow, and towns in Kerala and Orissa among others.

Hence, the roadmap is to have a geographic spread of partners.

Which revenue model is more popular with modern organizations: On-premise or the cloud?

PRADHAN: On-premise is popular as it follows traditional licensing according to infrastructure, servers, storage, etcetera.

model. We proactively introduced the MSP model few years ago when most competitors were far from doing so.

Fortunately, we have a technical edge over the competition in terms of how well the product works in a virtualized environment. We also have strong mobility solutions that work from desktops, laptops, and tablets to servers. CommVault puts together solution that works in the right manner at the customer end, across virtualized or mobile environments.

How do you intend to inculcate trust across the partner community and customers in India?

The competitions’ products have stretched to a point where more re-engineering is not commercially viable. We take into cognizance what they offer, and plug gaps through our Simpana architecture.” customers by providing a technology advantage.

Given the colossal amounts of data they produce, shouldn’t national and state e-Government projects be a focus area?

PRADHAN : We are consciously underplaying the government sector for now because sales cycles are too long. Those accounts require lot of effort, time and investment, and we do not have the bandwidth.

However, we do have wins in the space, including an elite set of organizations under CSIR (Council of Scientific and Industrial Research). We first need to build credibility and product visibility across the private segment. Right now government is on a slow

products or increased their engagement with us.

We are addressing this important community through our participation in various tech summits.

The most active vehicle is the tier-II channel. Last year, almost 70 percent of our Indian revenues were derived through this channel. To execute large a number of transactions and articulate value faster to customers, our dependency on tier-II channels is high. This route gives us a wide geographical reach, and the partners have long-term relationships with their top enterprise customers.

How many channel partners would suffice for a country like India?

The CLA (capacity license agreement) model introduced two years ago, priced by the size of data, is finding more acceptance. Customers choose a model depending on what makes business sense for them rather than what makes business sense to us.

The managed services provider (MSP) model has been our strength as RackSpace uses Simpana at the back end. MSPs charge a subscription to their customers and we charge MSPs. The consortium of HP partners—All Time IT Solutions—has CommVault as their storage partner. With the current drive towards the cloud, both SMBs and enterprises prefer the MSP

PRADHAN: We have three

teams in Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai. Each has a regional director, with sales executives supported by pre-sales persons. There is another team which is purely for tier-II channel partners, with sales and pre-sales executives.

We have a 300-plus team in the development center in Hyderabad, and have added another one in Bangalore. This gives customers confidence as many still believe in the ‘touch and feel’ approach. We also provide a technology roadmap to strategic customers. This demonstrates our commitment to the region, and that we are not a flyby-night operator. n

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n FAST TRACK

REVENUE GROWTH

Connectivity Solutions

Rscr11 cr Rs 28 Rs 9 Cr Rs 22 cr

Rs 12 cr

2009-10

2010-11

2011-12

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

SOURCE: CONNECTIVITY SOLUTIONS

Snapshot

C

ONNECTIVITY SOLUTIONS was set-up in

2003, a time when a large part of the Indian IT industry was recovering from the economic slowdown of the early 2000s, and was skeptical of new investments. But Narsimha Murthy, CEO of Connectivity Solutions, had a dream to make it big.

A business turnaround worked in its favor. Till then, Connectivity Solutions focused on renting business products. Murthy reworked the business model to include sales of Cisco products and providing networking solutions as key business segments.

The company’s change in approach, consequentially, led to the creation of a revamped team equipped with better technical competencies that included Cisco certifications. “The

Headquarters: Bangalore Founded: 2003

Revenue 2009-10: Rs 12 crore Revenue 2010-11: Rs 22 crore Revenue 2011-12: Rs 28 crore Key Principals: Cisco, HP, EMC, Tyco, Molex, NetApp Employees: 45 Key Business Activities: IT systems and network integration, server and storage computing Key Technologies: Structured cabling, datacenter, storage Website: www. connectivitysolutions.in transition helped us handle multiple client requirements with renewed confidence. In the last couple of years, we have successfully imple-

mented an internal workflow to ensure all our work is process-driven and not person-driven,” says Murthy.

This ISO 2001 certified SI has successfully managed to maintain a healthy growth rate. In the 10 months leading up to January 2013 it has already clocked Rs 34 crore— compared to the Rs 28 crore it made during the previous fiscal year.

“Our perseverance to build a large customer base, and repeat business has yielded results,” says Murthy. “It also moved our customer focus from small businesses to large corporates, especially in the telecom sector.”

The SI’s strong financial growth can also be attributed to its partnership with Cisco. A recent partnership with HP to deploy server-related solutions for a telecom giant has also helped. “Having multiple partnerships with market leaders in networking, servers, and storage has created more visibility for us and increased our customer base across India. Our relationship with these principals is extremely crucial in providing optimum solutions to our clients,” says Murthy.

Connectivity works in multiple verticals like telecom, BFSI, automobile, large SIs, IT/ITES, pharmaceutical and manufacturing.

Murthy plans to focus on executing a couple of major projects, along with expanding the company’s visibility across India by opening offices in new locations. n —Aritra Sarkhel

Our internal workflow is process-driven, not person-driven, says Narasimha Murthy, CEO, Connectivity Solutions.

20

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD M ARCH 2013

Dossier Name: Maxim Mitrokhin Designation: Director-Operations, Asia Pacific Company : Kaspersky Present Role: Since April 2008, Mitrokhin has been responsible for running the company’s operations in APAC. He joined Kaspersky in 2004 as regional manager responsible for providing KL China with backoffice and sales support.

Photograph by KAPIL SHROFF

Career Graph: Prior to Kaspersky, he worked for five years at APC as distribution account manager responsible for building relationships with all CIS distributors. Earlier, he was with the Russian computer assembling company, Compulink, as head of sales and marketing.

n THE GRILL

Maxim Mitrokhin,

Director-Operations, Kaspersky Lab, APAC, talks about the company’s aspirations for the Indian market.

Enterprise security is a crowded space with many well-entrenched vendors.

Don’r you think you’ve made a late entry?

We are definitely not late. Kapsersky started with a corporate (B2B) product. We sold much more in the B2B space in the early 2000’s. In 2005-06 we launched a good consumer product (KV and KS version 6) which boosted our B2C revenues. Our worldwide revenue split today is 70:30, in favor of B2C. In India, it stretches to 80:20. We

are not content with the B2B market share. Hence, the renewed focus on driving this segment.

How realistic is your GTM strategy in your bid to defeat companies like McAfee and Symantec? And, how soon will that happen? Despite the fact that we are comfortably placed in the B2C space, we never ignore the B2B market. We launched EP8 last October. It’s difficult to win the hearts of big corpora-

tions that have been working with other dominant vendors for a long time. We had to introduce something different.

‘Kaspersky Endpoint Security for Business’ is a breakthrough product with a revolutionary ‘One Platform, One Console, One Price’ approach.

The ‘One Platform’ concept has been talked about by the likes of McAfee for many years. I would not like to compare it with the others. The biggest challenge today that IT managers face is the complexity that stems from security solutions across different platforms. Previously, only malware was a major threat. Today, about 75 percent of cyber attacks happen due to vulnerabilities in third-party applications. Software companies constantly release updates and patches which makes prioritization difficult for IT administrators. Also, the proliferation of laptops and smartphones at work underscores the need for MDM. Addressing all these threats means that there is a need for four different consoles and corresponding policies.

There are tools in the market but they are all separate. To reduce this complexity, we introduced a single platform with one console. Many security vendors claim to offer one platform, but it is often built through some acMARCH 2013

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n THE GRILL | MAXIM MITROKHIN and protect all systems and endpoints in the network.

Our set of services is divided into four categories: Core is the foundation of workstation anti-malware protection and firewall. Select includes workstation and file server security, app control with dynamic whitelisting, device and Web control, and MDM. Advanced has features of Select, and also includes encryption and systems management tools. And Total has additional protection with the inclusion of infrastructurelevel protection for Web, mail, and collaboration servers.

Many vendors claim to offer one platform, but it’s often built through some acquisition. Our platform uses our own IP—it’s our biggest differentiator.

quisition. The ‘Endpoint Security for Business’ platform is our own IP—it is our biggest differentiator.

How does the ‘One Price’ solution work with respect to new-age security threats and limited IT budgets? IT managers buy security solutions from different vendors intermittently. But they need to convince their managements, and get budget approvals each time. The enterprise can buy our entire product with a one time budget approval. It also allows IT admins to see, control, 22

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD M ARCH 2013

Indian CIOs generally think of Kaspersky as a consumer brand. How do you intend to correct that perception? It isn’t the right perception. We have big organizations as our customers who consider us to be a serious enterprise player. We are shifting from being purely distributorfocused to working closely with tier-2 channels. Last year, through our Green Team Partner program, we doubled the base of registered resellers. We are investing resources to educate partners on sales and technical support. Through Kaspersky Engineers club, partners can provide good support to end-customers.

Hardware-centric vendors like Cisco, Juniper, niche security companies like Checkpoint, Websense, and some UTM vendors eat into the security software market.

Comment. We already have OEM agreements with some of the companies that you mentioned. Our claim of having world’s biggest installation base takes these partnerships into account too.

Everyone can have their share of the enterprise pie as security market is growing at a good pace.

Is the hardware appliances market something Kaspersky is interested in? In the past, and now, we have strong partnerships with established vendors. Losing focus on your core business can erode market share. We are not excluding the possibility of entering the hardware market in the future. Right now, software is our focus.

Customer loyalty is a big challenge for security vendors, isn’t it? Both replacement market and greenfield projects are crucial. Every project which is not a renewal of another security vendor becomes a potential green project for us.

Education and government are favorite verticals globally. We also have good wins across manufacturing, IT/ITES, and BFSI in India.

The cloud has not been a roller coaster ride in India. Traditional vendors are struggling against niche MDM vendors like MobileIron. What is your cloud and mobility story? The cloud option is in-built in our product. Some concepts appear to move fast but the actual adoption takes time.

For corporates, information is everything. They want to keep it close. Our customers, presently, are more comfortable with the on-premise model.

MDM is part of the new product, supporting various mobility platforms. The solution has a unique containerization feature, wherein one can store data in an encrypted form in separate folders.

How are you fueling your partner ecosystem in India? Our distributors for the enterprise business in India are Sea Infonet, Ecaps, Techmatrix and iValue.

We are not attacking the large enterprises as it becomes difficult for the CIO to part with one vendor and try a new one. Nevertheless, it will take time to dominate that segment.

Our potential customer-base would be mid-size organizations with 100 to 1500 users. The focus is on channels in tier-2 cities as we cater to partners in more than 56 locations in India, enabled by distributors and different teams (sales, pre-sales, and technical staff).

Why should an enterprise partner sell Kaspersky and not competing brands?

We are well known for our antimalware solutions. We introduced effective solutions around virtualization last year, and recently ‘End Point Security for Business’ for enterprises.

Resellers know how to solve the customer problems with the best available solution in their portfolio. We do not see shortage of attention from partners pitching our solutions appropriately across enterprises.  —Yogesh Gupta

AARON RALSTON severed his arm to free himself from a boulder that had pinned him down for five days and eight hours during a hiking accident, and lived to tell the tale.

FRIDAY, 3 MAY, 2013 HYATT REGENCY, MUMBAI

HOW BOLD BOLD means taking hard decisions It is really tough to let go of things one gets attached to, be it in life, or business.

ChannelWorld Premier 100 Awards will recognize IT channel partners who have taken hard decisions to stay afloat or grow their business. If you have had to bite the bullet in an endeavor to keep going, we are looking for you!

Join The BOLD 100. Nominate yourself at www.premier100.in

Event by

Hosted by

HOTLINE FEATURE

Automating Surveillance ASV, a new feature on some of D-Link’s switches, promises effortless IP surveillance deployment.

F

acility management, security, and IT personnel increasingly face a difficult choice when upgrading or deploying a modern surveillance system.

No longer are standard analog camera systems sufficient for professional security applications. IP surveillance systems have permanently altered the landscape by introducing multiple features that cement their superiority over legacy analog CCTV systems.

network,” says Sanjay Sehgal, VP-Enterprise and Project Business, D-Link (India).

Challenges Traditionally, adding a new IP surveillance system to existing network infrastructure has been daunting. The configuration tasks alone require many man-hours; this, apart from the time spent studying and configuring network switch settings. To set up an IP surveillance network manually

negatively affected during periods of traffic congestion. On networks with already heavy traffic loads, the approach has often been to create a separate IP network infrastructure explicitly dedicated to surveillance traffic. This approach, however, is expensive because of the need for additional hardware and cabling, along with the increase in operational and maintenance costs.

With new breakthrough technologies, many of

ASV ensures that surveillance traffic can continue to stream video smoothly and reliably, even during periods of heavy data traffic or disruptions.

Sanjay Sehgal, VP-Enterprise and Project Business, D-Link (India)

“In the past, an upgrade to the IP surveillance infrastructure might have resulted in increased hardware and energy costs, along with the added operational clutter of electrical and network cabling. However, innovative zero-configuration solutions combined with quality of service (QoS) and security features have all but eliminated these concerns, and simplified the process of deploying a reliable and secure IP surveillance

requires administrators to first create a virtual local area network (VLAN) for surveillance traffic. They must then determine the IP address for each network camera, and manually configure the camera to add it to the VLAN. In addition to these complex configuration tasks, administrators must also monitor and manage network traffic to ensure that video feeds from surveillance systems are not

the tiresome and tedious tasks involved in setting up or upgrading a network for surveillance can now be accomplished without hassle. Auto Surveillance VLAN (ASV), a feature found in select network switches from D-Link, is one such technology. Switches supporting ASV enhance existing infrastructure by automatically segmenting surveillance data from

general data. This results in an optimized hybrid network that is quick and easy to deploy, while capable of handling both data and surveillance traffic.

“ASV automatically detects attached surveillance equipment and intelligently segments surveillance traffic and gives it high priority by following QoS standards. In this way, surveillance traffic can continue to stream video smoothly and reliably, even during periods of heavy data traffic or disruptions caused by malicious viruses, worms and other threats,” says Sehgal.

Make the Right Choice Choosing an IP surveillance vendor can be challenging.

An ideal surveillance solution combines cameras, switches, storage, and software to form a fully integrated system.

D-Link has consistently proven itself capable of designing and delivering solutions addressing the varied aspects of networking and surveillance. D-Link’s Auto Surveillance VLAN feature was developed specifically to address the unique challenges businesses face when tackling IP surveillance. Whether it is for an analog conversion project, or to build IP surveillance capabilities into existing network infrastructure, ASV offers substantial time and cost savings.

CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP

PRODUCT SHOWCASE

DCS-6010L PARTNER PROFILE

A Partnership Based on Trust Ayan Mitra, Marketing Head, Omnitech InfoSolutions, reveals how the company has grown by engaging with D-Link.

DCS-6010L is a mydlink-enabled IP surveillance camera with the following features:

How has your experience of partnering with D-Link been over the years?

MITRA: We go to customers with a vendor-neutral platform. Offering best-ofbreed solutions at competitive cost points is a mandate for us. So, while we do not have any intentional preference towards any brand as such, we do believe that our relationship with D-Link is a trusted one which we intend to carry forward.

2 Megapixel Resolution Sensor

How has this association improved business?

MITRA: Being associated with D-Link for some years now, we understand that they have some interesting new technologies that can be

one another to achieve objectives. This is an end-to-end engagement not just from a product sales perspective, but also holistically.

showcased to the customer.

D-Link helps us engage with the customer not just from a sales or a marketing standpoint, but also from a technology solutions stand-point.

Our respective technology teams also work closely with

What do you believe is the way forward?

MITRA: Customers place trust in solution providers with the belief that we will give them a fair and neutral opinion. We cannot afford to belie the faith reposed in us. We are working in times when CIOs have high expectations.It is vital that technology providers such as D-Link and solution providers such as Omnitech innovate constantly to deliver the very best to the clientele.

D-Link has announced an exciting offer for partners through its Rewardz Club.

All that partners are required to do is garner maximum points by purchasing different D-Link products and win exciting gifts. The scheme is applicable to all national and local system integrators for purchases made through D-Link’s national and local business distributors.

This promotional activity has been thrown open till March 31, 2013.

Fisheye Camera

With a wide-angle field of view, the DCS6010L is able to capture 180-degree panoramic or 360-degree surround views without blind spots, effectively reducing the need for other cameras as well as physical maintenance.

Cloud Service-mydlink

The convenient mydlink zero-configuration setup gets you up and running in no time.

The service support can remote monitor your home or office over the Internet.

DGS-6600

D-Link’s DGS-6600 series chassis-based switches has the following features:

NEWS UPDATE

D-Link ‘Rewardz Club’ Offer for Partners

2 Megapixel 1600x1200 high-resolution image sensors ensure that you capture the details you need.

The scheme is applicable to the following D-Link products: DAP-2360 DES-1210-28 DES-1210-52 DWL-3200AP DES-1228ME DGS-1210-28

DES- 1210-08P DES-1210-28P DGS-1210- 52 DGS-1500-28 DGS-1210-28P DGS-1500-28P

Here are some of the gifts on offer: 42” 3D LED TV Tag Heuer watch iPhone 5 Samsung Galaxy Note 2

iPad 2 Bose headphones Samsonite travel bag Backpack

For details, contact: +91 22 2921 5705 E-mail: sales@dlink.co.in or log on to: dpartner.dlink-intl.com

Flexible Modular Design

The DGS-6600 series has a modular architecture that allows modules to be added gradually to meet network growth, and it can be easily swapped at anytime to fit network requirement changes.

Complete IPv6 Support

It addresses the requirements of emerging applications such as Internetenabled wireless devices, home and industrial appliances, Internet-connected transportation, integrated telephony services, and sensor networks.

Enterprise-wide Security The DGS-6600 series provides not only network access security but also protection against internal and external attacks. Access security is provided through comprehensive policy-based ACL, port security, IP-MAC-Port binding features, and Defeat IP Scan.

“Almost half a percent of our top line is allocated for online marketing activities.”

MARAN NAGARAJAN, CEO, KAAR TECHNOLOGIES

26

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COVER STORY n

Channel partners don’t effectively leverage the Web to raise their company’s profiles and drive business.

Here’s how to do it right.

By Aritra Sarkhel

I

T’S A whole new world out there and the

Web’s become the first port of call for customers looking for partners to give their business to. But how would you know? The sad truth is that most channel partners—bogged down by the daily grind— don’t really leverage the Web to raise their company’s profiles—and drive sales.

Channel partners who decide not to make the time to explore and leverage the Internet to grab more of their clients’ mindshare, have to be willing to pay a very real price. This can come in the form of lower brand recall, untapped opportunities, and less accurate leads—and the price associated with chasing them.

“It’s very critical for SI’s to have a positive image of their brand online or risk customers not considering them,” says Jagdeep Kapoor, CMD, Samsika Marketing Consultants, whose

client list includes names like Godrej, Kotak Mahindra, Aditya Birla Group, and D’damas.

The benefits of using the Web exist say analysts. “Today, online tools can help establish a partner organization’s knowledge credentials and market it to a much wider audience,” says Neha Jalan, senior associate at AMI-Partners, who believes the medium in under utilized by the partner community in India.

The good news is that there is a growing number of enterprise channel partners who realize what they are missing out on. One of them is K.V. Jagannath, MD and CEO of Hyderabad-based Choice Solutions. “The Web—and the wide repertoire of things it encompasses—is a powerful tool. I admit it’s been a weak area for us, but we are consolidating our work in this area. We plan to work on this ASAP because we’ve realized MARCH 2013

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n COVER STORY “We send newsletters containing information on new technologies, whitepapers, or links to case studies once every quarter.”

DEEPAK JADHAV, DIRECTOR, VDA INFOSOLUTIONS

the importance of online marketing campaigns,” he says.

Ayan Mitra, AVP marketing at Mumbai-based Omnitech InfoSolutions is another convert.

“The time has come. Our entire general marketing activities will be wholeheartedly focussed online.

It’s imperative that we reach our external stakeholders, and prospective customers, through different online tools and target them for our promotional activities,” he says.

There are other channel partners who have wised up to the potential of Web-based marketing earlier on. Take the case of Chennai-based Kaar Technologies, which under the leadership of CEO Maran Nagarajan has already put in a place a strategy to leverage the Web and all its marketing tools. Key pillars of that strategy include a budget 28

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of Rs 50 lakh—aimed solely at its online marketing activities for 2013—and a team of four dedicated to online promotions and associated tasks.

“Our organization has already gone through the evolution cycle. All these years, we have tried and tested various online tools and have focussed on what suits the organization. Almost half a percent of our top line is allocated for online marketing activities,” says Nagarajan.

Folks like Nagarajan say they have already begun to see the value of using the Web to sell their brands more intelligently. Omnitech InfoSolutions, for instance, increased the response rate to its marketing activities when it moved to new-age online promotions. Where its earlier, non-Web-based marketing campaigns resulted in a 1 percent response rate, its online ones gets it 12 percent.

For those who haven’t got onboard with the idea of Web-based marketing, it’s not too late. Channel partners like Nagarajan and Mitra offer five ways to maximize your chances.

GO VIDEO Consider the facts: 70 percent of B2B marketing done in 2012 used video— up from 52 percent in 2011. And over the next five years, a third of all online advertising spend will go into online video production, says Borrell Associates’, a research and consulting firm.

You get the picture: Video is big and it’s only going to get bigger.

Yet, there are many channel partners who don’t see it that way and haven’t bought wholeheartedly into video. “There is a lot of buzz around this,” says Ravi Verdes, MD, Frontier Business Systems, “and we might see

such things happening in the next financial year. But we are still in a trialand-error phase where we are trying to find out the best options for us.”

Others have grabbed the opportunity with both hands. At Kaar Technologies, Nagarajan has plenty of video plans already lined up. “We have already identified about 50 promotional activities we want to use videos for in 2014,” he says.

Much of Nagarajan’s enthusiasm stems from the real benefits Kaar Technologies has seen from using the medium. The company has had great success using video, especially among its clients in the Middle East. “We have done video promotions for SAP events directed at our customer base in the Middle East. And it’s helped create enormous visibility for our organization,” says Nagarajan.

One of the most important benefits of using video is its ability to allow customers to grasp key messaging much faster than any presentation. You know that thing they say about a picture being equal to a thousand words?

Video takes that idea to the next level.

Then partly because of its novelty value and partly because of the use of dynamic visuals, videos help create longer brand recall value in the mind of prospective customers, say channel partners. “Video promotions help build a perception about us for a longer period in the customer’s mind,” says Nagarajan.

Say what you might about branding, but over the long term it adds new accounts. That’s what Gaurav Mathur, MD and CEO at Filix Consulting believes video can do for channel partners. “Having an online video presence is not just for customer interaction; it also builds an overall brand and Web presence. It also helps gain prospective customers,” he says.

With that potential benefit, however, comes a real-world challenge. If your video is going to be the first point of reference for potential clients, then it’s important that it reflects the sophistication of your brand and your messaging. If your sales people make a pitch in a suit, then you’re videos better be just as dressed up.

That’s where the challenge of production values comes in. The inability to create good video is one of the rea-

sons channel partners say they stay away from it in the first place. Producing corporate videos requires developing a story board, having a script, adding animation, checking the quality of your sound, and having fairly slick post-production values.

“If promotional content is not articulate, potential customer could give it a miss,” says Kapoor.

“You need expertise to create industry standard videos and while internal staff can take care of certain things, it’s difficult for them to churn our professional video services,” says Nagarajan.

To get around that challenge, Nagarajan’s outfit outsources its video needs to a specialized agency. “The primary reason is that they produce industrystandard video and bring a certain as-

surance of quality to the table, which our internal team can’t be expected to furnish,” says Nagarajan.

Mathur from Filix Consulting, too, has adopted a similar approach. “The videos we promote require a professional agency because as a team we are not well-versed with the technicalities of these things and industrystandard camera work requires professionals,” he says.

Others like Allied Digital, however, have found a way to spin out videos using internal staff. “We have an inhouse team that shoots and produces videos, which makes the cost relatively lower,” says Dhara Shah, marketing manager, Allied Digital.

An added benefits of not outsourcing, says Shah, is speed of turnaround

Smart Ways to Make an Online Sale Having a great app or service doesn’t guarantee success. How do you get your software or digital offering in front of buyers? SaaS, traditional software sales and marketing pros share their suggestions for how you can improve your chances of making an online sale.

Use a reliable cloud hosting service: Why spend time and money on building and maintaining your infrastructure when you can host in the cloud? “In just a few hours, a hosting provider can provision dedicated servers and cloud servers for you, and your business will be up and running with limited cost and risk,” says Emil Sayegh, the CEO and president of Codero Hosting, a provider of dedicated, managed and cloud hosting services.

Offer a free trial. If you are “a small, unknown company, you need to provide something to help potential customers see that your product is not a scam, and it will work for them,” says Kelly Wilkerson, cofounder, Decipher Media. Testimonials help. Software safety badges help. But nothing helps as much as a free trial.

Consider a freemium model. “Another option is to offer freemium versions of your software—free access to basic features with the option to access premium features for an up-

grade cost,” says Michelle Nerlinger, director, Marketing, SafeNet, a data protection provider.

Include a video of how your product works. “Animation is great for a simple product breakdown, and a video of employees can give a human side to a technical service folks might not understand. It works great for us and engagement is high!” says Alex Capehart, vice president, Strategic Accounts, Media Temple.

Solicit independent third-party reviews. “Encouraging your customers to tell their story of why they selected your product and how it meets their challenge is the best way to get your message out and sell your product. You can capture these stories in case studies, an interactive online forum or blog postings.” says Jennifer Borun, senior marketing director, GoingOn Networks, Offer a money-back guarantee.

“Studies have shown that a trusted and well-presented money back guarantee can actually increase sales by up to 40 percent,” says Stephen Dodd, CEO of OfficeTime.net, a developer of time tracking software.

Use metrics. By regularly checking metrics, you know what’s working and what’s not and can adjust your campaigns and minimize losses.

—Jennifer Lonoff Schiff MARCH 2013

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n COVER STORY time. “The pre- and post-production of professional video services requires a lot of time; we normally need videos much quicker,” he says.

As tough as it may seem to create video, it certainly has its upsides. Take this one for example: Because videos are so much easier to digest than whitepapers, case studies or brochures, they increase the chances that a potential client checking up on a channel partner’s offerings and solutions portfolio before an actual physical meeting.

That, in turn, ensure that channel partners are getting their hands on more serious leads. Having video, in effect, can sift out false sales leads.

Using video has worked well for Mumbai-based Allied Digital. When the company received complaints from its customers that they weren’t aware of the breadth of Allied Digital’s portfolio of solutions, the SI decided to do something about it—using video.

“We made our customers aware of our

testimonials from customers talking about an SI’s project capabilities, for instance, can go a long way in ensuring you make it on to a CIO’s shortlist, as they scan dozens of other companies.

That’s what VDA Infosolutions has learnt. After the system integrator implemented V Blocks for a customer a couple of years ago, it ensured that it got customer testimonials on video and promoted it.

“We got a lot of enquiries from other customers regarding the cloud and V Blocks,” says Deepak Jadhav, director, VDA Infosolutions. “This major project got us a lot more deals from other new clients. We got good business value and added mileage to our brand,” he says.

For that project, VDA Infosolutions only got customer feedback post the project. But it helps, as the company learnt later on, to get the customer in front of a camera even before a project has started because it lends a sense of before and after.

dia sites get a large number of footfalls.

We have individuals who visit our pages regularly and take interest in the videos we promote there,” says Shah.

Video links can also be carried on an OEM’s site, just like VDA Infosolutions did. The company promoted some of its videos on an OEM’s site, its own homepage, and on the customer’s site. “It’s a three-way promotion which gives us added mileage and raises our brand image,” says Jadhav.

CREATE A MICROSITE Microsites aren’t new but they are relatively popular. A microsite (also called a minisite) is like a website within a website. A channel partner, for instance, could have a microsite of one of its principles on its website. Microsites are also great for short promotions, in which the microsite looks like a separate website, complete with its own URL and navigation bar.

Allied Digital is currently working

“It’s very critical for SI’s to have a positive image of their brand online or risk customers not considering them.”

JAGDEEP KAPOOR, CMD, SAMSIKA MARKETING CONSULTANTS.

strengths’ through videos. So now, even before our sales people meet prospective clients in person, they are already aware of our offerings through video customer testimonials’,” says Shah.

For channel partners who want to test the video waters, it helps to know that there are multiple content types that are possible to convey with video. These include case studies, testimonials, and videos that promote a channel partner’s products, solutions and capabilities.

Some, like video cases studies are harder to do, and the trick it to match what you want to get out of a video before you invest the time and money.

That applies pretty much for anything you decide to do online. “No matter what you do online, it’s important to understand what you’re doing and why you’re using a particular tool to promote yourself and what you intend to get out of it,” says Jalan at AMI-Partners.

For those starting out on video, among the easier content types to produce are video testimonials. Positive 30

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Immaterial of the type of video a system integrator decides to create, they all need to take care of a couple of important aspects. First, the length of any promotional video should not be more than two minutes. “Our target is 90 to 120 seconds,” says Nagrajan.

“This allows the audience to grasp the content without spending too much time on a video.”

Another best practice is to upload videos on a variety of sites including Youtube and Vimeo. “You have to be present where people expect you to be present. If a prospective employee or customer searches for us on Youtube and we’re not there—but our competitors are—we lose out,” says Mathur from Filix.

Finally, a well-produced video with quality content is of no use if it’s not equally well promoted. First, channel partners need to get those video links uploaded on their homepages. A good second step is to go down the social media route and promote videos on Facebook and LinkedIn. “Social me-

on a microsite with an OEM and plans to showcase the principal’s products and Allied’s solutions together. “We are jointly going to deliver the solution to the client and so we are promoting this objective together. We will promote the microsite using targeted e-mail campaigns and EDM’s, which will contain information and a link re-directing the customer to the microsite,” says Shah from Allied.

Allied Digital reports that it has been able to generate a lot of leads through such promotions and uses a dedicated internal team to create its microsites.

A microsite can be a single page, or multiple pages with add-ons including flash-based promotions or links to other case studies and whitepapers. Microsites generally fall into three types: The system integrator themselves build it using their own man power and investments. The other type deals with microsites built in joint collaboration with vendor and an SI. The third type of microsite is built in joint association between an outsourcing

SPECIAL REPORT n agency which handles the technical part of the sites’ design and the SI who provides the content.

Mumbai-based InfrasoftTech, too, had used microsites to promote wealth management solutions differently. It also used microsites successfully to market its move from a product company to a services-based organization. (Each new service it offered had its own microsite.) “We used our own money and without making physical contact with so many prospective customers, we were able to generate a lot of leads irrespective of location,” says Hanuman Tripathi, group MD, InfrasoftTech.

USE BLOGS Blogging and marketing is more or less the same thing. Both are required to circulate information to an audience. Channel partners in India have used this medium frequently—often ranging from twice a week to once a month. Omnitech InfoSolutions uses blogs to share information with employees. “We send out links to blogs twice or thrice a week to our database.

It generally contains information about the organization’s activities or news related to technologies we deal with,” says Mitra.

Blogs are mostly focussed on the client and market requirements. The belief is that original content in blogs increases brand awareness, improves SEO, enhances engagement with existing and potential clients, and referral partners. “Blogs are a way of establishing one’s professional credibility and allows value addition to my subscribers,” he says.

But all said and done, the flavour of each blog irrespective of its frequency has to be appealing to the targeted audience.

NEWSLETTERS AND EDMs Both newsletters and targeted electronic direct mailers (EDMs) are cost-effective options which SIs use extensively. The use of these tools is simple, but it’s important to promote the right content to the right customer base, says Kapoor. For the most part, they are used to promote customer case studies, events, and whitepapers.

While newsletters are only sent upto

“Having an online video presence is not just for customer interaction; it also aids build an overall brand and Web presence.”

GAURAV MATHUR, MD AND CEO, FILIX CONSULTING

three times a month, targeted mailers are shot out twice a week on average.

The success rate of targeted EDMs is far higher than mass mailers. Mass mailers are sent to an entire database, irrespective of geography and vertical,

but as has been observed, it is often ignored by the targeted audience.

“Other e-mail marketing campaigns tanked and hardly generated a percentage response. But when we sent targeted EDMs and mailers to a select audiMARCH 2013

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n COVER STORY “We used our own money [to build microsites] and without making physical contact with prospective customers, we were able to generate a lot of leads irrespective of location.”

HANUMAN TRIPATHI, GROUP MD, INFRASOFTTECH

ence, we saw good response at around 12 percent, which is huge for event marketing,” says Mitra at Omnitech.

It’s important to break down your database by geography, vertical, and technology before sending out newsletters and EDMs. “We send newsletters which contain information on new technologies, white papers, or links to case studies only once every quarter. It’s worth the exercise,” says Jadhav at VDA Infosolutions.

They’d be better served if they ensure greater frequency. That’s according to Kapoor at Samsika Marketing Consultants. “System integrators should choose a tool they can competently manage so that they can update it regularly. It’s important for SIs to make interactions a regular phenomenon,” he says.

TRY OUT SOCIAL MEDIA Social media is a much abused word.

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Over the past couple of years channel partners have not done much in this arena except for ensuring a basic presence on sites like Facebook and LinkedIn. SIs use their pages to promote microsite-related links, case studies available on their websites, and videos from Youtube. For many, it remains a trial-and-error proposition.

Many organizations are attempting to adapt social media into their business sensibilities by extracting suitable bits from their popular personal-networking avatar. “We have experimented with these media, but the next financial year will see us using it in a comprehensive manner.

We will try and execute more campaigns on LinkedIn, and hope to get more leads and clients from it,” says Verdes at Frontier Business Systems.

SIs can create a group or commu-

nity through which they can build their brand image on the platform or airbrush an existing image. It’s also a cost-effective way to remain in the limelight unless one is willing to pay for ads or profiles to reach out to a select audience. Shah from Allied re-asserts the importance of paid ads.“In terms of leads, if we have a paid page on LinkedIn, we can get more business deals. We need to scale up our LinkedIn account with banner or display ads on the homepage of the company’s LinkedIn account.”

It is evident that narrowing down the tools to just a few will not help an organization. Success can be achieved only by utilizing a dedicated combination of tools and platforms that can widen their corridor of reach. n

Legendary American daredevil, EVEL KNIEVEL, attempted to jump 13 buses in front of 90,000 people at the Wembley Stadium in Britain.

FRIDAY, 3 MAY, 2013 HYATT REGENCY, MUMBAI

HOW BOLD BOLD means taking risks With great risks come great rewards, be it personal or business risks.

ChannelWorld Premier 100 Awards will recognize IT channel partners who have bet big when they believed in what they were doing. If you have taken calculated risks in your business that paid off, we are looking for you!

Join The BOLD 100. Nominate yourself at www.premier100.in

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Photograph by KAPIL SHROFF

Vasant Bhanushali (L), Director, Crystal Solutions, offered a cost-effective solution to Sunil Nair, Manager-IT, Walplast.

OPEN TRUST Mumbai-based Crystal Solutions helps Walplast save a ton on cost with a scalable open source implementation.

By Yogesh Gupta

I

the largest manufacturers of wall putty in India, but Maharashtra-based Walplast wasn’t going to rest until it consolidated its business and expand operations to South and Central India.

But a geographic expansion meant increased production and more product lines. And that meant incurring a massive renewal cost on its IT architecture. Also, for an SME like Walplast, which runs on a relatively small budget, a need to execute the

34

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project immediate would create a large amount of pressure on its IT team.

CRACKS APPEAR “License management was confusing, and an overall Microsoft management takes time. The main issue was the renewal cost that we would incur on the operating system and MS Office for hundreds of PCs across our offices,” says Sunil Nair, manager-IT, Walplast.

“With expansion plans scheduled,” he says, “the management wanted

to look at options to bring down investment costs. We wanted to cut cost, yet, not lag behind on technology.”

A tall order.

Crystal Solutions had deployed a UTM/firewall solution for Walplast a few years ago. And, in September last year, during a routine sales visit, the team sensed that Walplast’s management was facing problems with Microsoft’s licenses. “The huge cost of licensing desktops was a cause for concern for the management,” says Vasant Bhanushali, director, Crystal Solutions.

The company wanted to continue adopting technology, but were unable to find an alternative to the licensing issue, says Bhanushali. Crystal Solutions presented an open source

CASE STUDY  alternative that would save Walplast plenty in licensing costs. “We suggested CentOS Linux .The plan was to migrate the OS, and then install open office on them,” says Bhanushali.

“Our management and two or three big vendors using open source thought about this option. In fact, I too was looking at an open source solution,” says Nair.

The discussion went on for a month. In November last year, Crystal Solutions was given the goahead for its suggested combination of Centos and Propalms.

“The primary reason for an open source platform, apart from savings is that it can accommodate a number of applications [critical and noncritical] on it,” says Nair.

Walplast was initially apprehensive as Crystal did not have a previous implemetation in India. “We have worked on CentOS and Propalms, but on different projects. They put their trust in our technical expertise,” says Santosh Dolas, senior technical consultant of Crystal Solutions.

Snapshot Key Parties: Walplast, Crystal Solutions

Location: Navi Mumbai Project Cost: About Rs 12 lakh Implementation Time: One month Main Vendors: CentOS , Propalms Key People Involved: Sunil Nair, Manager–IT, Walplast; Vasant Bhanushali, Director, Crystal Solutions; Santosh Dolas, Senior Technical Consultant, Crystal Solutions Key Technologies: Migration from proprietary to an open source architecture, VDI, integration of virtual desktops and enterprise applications

Post Implementation ROI: Huge savings on licensing costs, scalable and virtual IT infrastructure, secure architecture

THE RIGHT MIX Walplast tested all open source desktop applications including Ubuntu and Fedora to check which suited their environment best. They decided to use CentOS as it was a server-class desktop client which was more stable than Ubuntu and Fedora.

“It was slightly challenging as Propalms had some issues with licensing limitations. But their team helped us resolve it,” says Dolas.

Walplast had been using SAP Business One ERP and was concerned about the applications which needed to be virtualized.

Rather than using Citrix for VDI, Crystal suggested a more economical option of using Propalms.

“The SAP team suggested Citrix too, as the two were compatible.

However, the Citrix option was too expensive and we decided shelve that plan. With Propalms, not only was the price a winning factor but the solution too was at par with Citrix,” says Nair. Although there were teething troubles like application portability, they managed to surmount the challenge.

It took almost a month for Crystal to migrate from proprietary to open source and then virtualize the SAP applications. “Although we were well versed with CentOS, we did not have much knowledge about SAP. The team at Walplast knew the nuances and helped us,” says Dolas.

The initial migration at Walplast was done across 100 systems mainly at the company’s corporate office in Navi Mumbai, says Bhanushali.

Today, they have done much more.

“We have shifted half of the systems in the head office and all factory systems to open source,” says Nair.

THE PERFECT SOLUTION A Microsoft renewal would have cost Walplast almost Rs 25,000 per machine. “For 100 machines that would be a mammoth investment for a SME like us,” says Nair.

According to him, the migration from the existing technology to a new one saved them from incurring huge costs on the licensing front.

Also, Propalms vis-à-vis Citrix is

almost 40 percent less expensive, which saved Walplast an additional Rs 8 lakh.

Bhanushali adds that he sensed the opportunity of becoming a reliable consultant for a fast-growing company like Walplast.

“Crystal, as a consultant, had good knowledge of the solution, which was quite compelling. I was not aware of Propalms until they introduced it to us,” says Nair.

“CentOS and Propalms was a winning combination from their point of view as it saved them almost Rs 30 lakh against what other existing vendors were providing,” says Bhanushali.

BUILT FOR THE FUTURE Walplast will run these 100-odd PCs (with migrated infrastructure) for another quarter before deciding on the next set of machines that are to be sent down the open source route.

The company is expected to close at about Rs 375 crore this fiscal.

“Huge savings is the biggest benefit from the project,” says Nair. “From a security aspect, Linux is quite secure and is a robust platform.

There was no need to install an anti-virus after the migration from proprietary architecture.”

“We suggested a viable solution, and they believed in us, and gave us an opportunity to prove our worth,” says Bhanushali.

As Linux is a relatively light software and is compatible with old systems, it has allowed Walplast to utilize its old desktops and avoid a hardware recycle.

Nair is expecting more support with the latest version of SAP open source.

“I will then shift a major part of the system to open source, which will include critical applications too,” he says.

Crystal Solutions added virtualization later. They sensed that after moving to open source, Walplast would need to extract the benefits of virtualization as it grew in terms of operations and locations.

“Apart from the value addition to their IT architecture from this project, the management at Walplast will be able to show savings on IT this fiscal,” says Bhanushali.  MARCH 2013

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n FAST TRACK

Cygnus Information Solutions

VERTICAL SPLIT 40%

Government/ PSU

60%

SMB and Corporate

P H OTO by FOTO C O R P

SOURCE: CYGNUS INFORMATION SOLUTIONS

Snapshot Sumit Srivastava (L), Managing Director and Rajesh Mishra, Director-Marketing

F

Founded: 2000 Headquarters: Mumbai Revenue 2010-11: Rs 10 crore Revenue 2011-12: Rs 11 crore

OR MUMBAI-BASED Cygnus

Information Solutions, 2009 brought about a turnaround. Not only did it outline an aggressive expansion plan, it also came up with a strategy to leverage its experience and its existing partnerships. The result? A more than five-fold jump in top lines and improved profits.

A decade-worth of experience of working with the government sector, coupled with a strategic partnership with Dell facilitated this exceptional growth. Today, the SI is a preferred implementation partner for many government departments, based on Dell’s Directorate General of Supplies and Disposals (DGS&D) rate

Revenue 2012-13 (expected): Rs 15 crore Key Executives: Rajesh Mishra, Director-Marketing; Sushant Dixit, Director-Finance Key Principals: Dell, HP, Acer, Microsoft, Oracle, APC Key Technologies: Servers, storage, networking, security Website: www.cygnussolutions.co.in contracts. In the process of promoting only Dell solutions to its customers, Cygnus has ensured constant business for its key principal. Its clientele includes public sector behemoths like Indian railways, Indian Oil Corpora-

tion, ONGC, and the Shipping Corporation of India among others.

Sumit Srivastava, MD of Cygnus believes that part of this successful relationship with Dell is due to its strong background in the government sector. Government has always been a prime focus for Cygnus right from its inception in 2000.

“Our experience has proven that the government is a completely relationship-driven business. We have consciously developed a strong rapport with many such customers over time. We have developed a successful model, wherein both profitability and time are not compromised,” says Srivastava.

At the same time, Cygnus has a strong focus on corporates and the SMB sectors. Dell remains the sole partner for Cygnus even in these markets. “We don’t believe in being opportunistic. If the customer insists on a competing brand, we usually step out of the deal,” says Srivastava. Dell’s broadened portfolio gives enough opportunities for the SI to grow, he adds.

Cygnus’ recent partnership with Oracle is something that Srivastava is looking forward to. Apart from a basic infrastructure offering, Cygnus is planning to venture into solutions selling this year. The SI will also explore new markets by opening offices in Bangalore, New Delhi, and Allahabad. Its primary goal is to be a Rs 50 crore company by 2015. n —Radhika Nallayam

Sumit Srivastava, MD, Cygnus Information Solutions, has done well betting on government contracts and Dell.

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join effort Software piracy continues to be a menace. How can vendors and industry associations beat this problem?

By Yogesh Gupta

A

CCORDING TO the 2011 Global

Software Piracy Study by BSA, India’s software piracy rate registered a one point decline in 2011 compared to the previous year, but the value of pirated software sold in the country increased to Rs 13,783 crore. In fact, 43 percent of computer users in India admitted in the survey to acquiring pirated software, says Gouri Thounaojam, manager, Programs-India, BSA | The Software Alliance. BSA is a nonprofit trade association created to advance the goals of the software industry and its hardware partners. Its mission is to promote a long-term legislative and legal environment for its members around the world.

The statistics presented by BSA point to the fact that software piracy

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has not died down in India. The following cases only reinforce that fact. n In January this year, the Delhi Police arrested two resellers with pirated software worth Rs 1.5 crore. More than 2,000 pirated components of Microsoft—mainly Windows 7 Professional Media and Microsoft Office Home and Business—were seized. n Microsoft filed a civil case in the Delhi High Court against KK Software Solutions in December 2012 and claimed Rs 5.7 crore as damages for alleged software piracy in 2008-09.

CREATING AWARENESS To fight the menace, BSA has been working closely with the Government, large enterprises, and SMEs in India to raise awareness about software.“We

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

SOFTWARE PIRACY | FEATURE n

are witnessing high involvement from the Department of Information Technology, Government of India. In fact, the Government is leading by example by managing its own software, and taking this best practice directly to private enterprises,” says Thounaojam.

Vendors, IT associations, industry organizations, and channel partners are playing their part to fight the problem. However, it will take a well coordinated effort by independent organizations to decrease and ultimately eliminate pirated software from the Indian market.

Microsoft has been raising awareness among customers and resellers about the risks of counterfeit and pirated software. This, it believes, will enable partners to better protect themselves, and ensure that their software licensing is in order.

“Our strategy is focused on educating and creating awareness among partners and customers on the perils of pirated software. We have devised both offline and online methods to reach out to partners and customers,” says Sumeet Khanna, director, Genuine Software Initiative, Microsoft India.

Adobe, too, has been taking the fight to the streets. “We have a highly experienced legal team and are always prepared to answer product and policy questions. We have a case support system which is experienced at helping build and prosecute piracy

n FEATURE | SOFTWARE PIRACY

We are working with trade bodies and associations to encourage members to adopt genuine licenses by offering them an attractive value proposition.”

The cheapest and most readily available software programs are pirated as much as the most expensive programs. The only solution lies in cultivating respect for IP rights.”

Software publishers must work closely with channel partners to ensure that their staff is educated on the licensing terms and conditions of software products.”

VINEET SOOD, DIRECTOR-CHANNELS AND STRATEGIC ALLIANCES, ADOBE SOUTH ASIA

SUMEET KHANNA, DIRECTOR, GENUINE SOFTWARE INITIATIVE, MICROSOFT INDIA

GOURI THOUNAOJAM, MANAGER,

cases. From identifying targets to maintaining evidence, Adobe is ready to provide organizations with the support they need,” says Vineet Sood, director-Channels and Strategic Alliances, Adobe South Asia.

BSA aims at increasing public

awareness about using legal software and encourages the procurement of legal software both in private and public sectors. Capacity building initiatives have been hosted for Government officers in partnership with the Department of Electronics & IT (DIETY ),

Government of India.

For the enterprise community, BSA offers an industry certification on software asset management (SAM) called certified in standards-based SAM or CSS (O). This helps companies implement and maintain effective SAM processes, which enable them to improve IT and business efficiencies, reduce the risk of being audited, control costs, and ensure software compliance and license optimization, says Thounaojam.

It launched the CSS (O) certification in India in 2011.

Adobe also invests in training and is ready to assist law enforcement to identify counterfeit products. “We can offer customized training to various organizations. With Adobe Genuine Software, one can receive technical support, important updates, and future upgrades,” says Sood.

Microsoft Store’s online presence in India is a one-stop shop for a host of products from Microsoft ranging from Windows, Office, and Xbox to Microsoft books, Windows Phones, Windows PCs (including net books and webcams). “‘Dial-a-Software is an initiative with key aggregators in the top eight cities, where customers can call-in and get FPP (retail packs) delivered to their homes and offices. Through SAM, Microsoft encourages customers to assess and audit their IT environment through independent third parties,” says Khanna at Microsoft.

ASIRT Has Pledged to Promote Genuine Software ASIRT (Association of Systems Integrators & Retailer), an IT association for systems integrators, focuses on serving business interests of system builders, integrators and retailers.

With over 100 members, mostly in Western India, ASIRT is now expanding its membership across India to address partner issues. Chetan Shah, Chairman of ASIRT, talks about using genuine software to eliminate the risks of piracy.

What initiatives has ASIRT undertaken lately to curb software piracy? ASIRT has laid a strong emphasis on educating its members about the need to sell only genuine software. We have a couple of initiatives that focus on this issue; one of which is on educating our members about the USA AntiCompetition act.

This was a eye opener and has helped them in advising their own 38

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customers in a better manner.

In response to ASIRT’s Techday in November 2012, ASIRT members have unanimously pledged that they would promote only legal software. This will promote a healthy channel environment and boost profitability.

Do you work with software vendors and industry associations? So far, ASIRT has taken these initiatives on its own. However, we are in talks with major software vendors to promote similar programs in the future.

Any suggestions to the partner community on software piracy related activities? Our stand on this issue is very clear: Selling genuine software means higher revenues and more opportunities and lowers support calls to a great extent. Therefore, it is important that our members promote genuine software. ASIRT advises all partners to desist from offering pirated software and stay within the law. This will also boost their business interests.

—Yogesh Gupta

PROGRAMS-INDIA, BSA | THE SOFTWARE ALLIANCE

A BIGGER CONSORTIUM Various IT associations and trade bodies like NASSCOM and FICCI

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n FEATURE | SOFTWARE PIRACY Trust Is Vital For Business: BSA A lack of awareness about the dangers of piracy is a major challenge because it makes consumers and businesses prone to breach of intellectual property rights (IPR) laws in the country, says Gouri Thounaojam, manager, Programs-India, BSA | The Software Alliance. It is vital to understand the importance of software as an asset and that the use of pirated software introduces all types of security risks—malware, viruses and intrusions– that could hurt productivity within the enterprise.

The channel is the first point of contact for most customers, so it is extremely important for the channel partners to be educated on the importance of IPR protection, she says. “The disadvantages of using unlicensed software are huge, and we would like to reinforce the message that selling original software brings trust and respect from the customer. Trust is vital for business; everybody wants to work with trustworthy vendors. Issues around the use of unlicensed software can have major implications,” says Thounaojam.

—Yogesh Gupta play a vital role in the crusade against software piracy. ISODA (Infotech Software Dealers Association) advises all its members on ways of curbing software piracy at the customer-level by educating them, says Devesh Aggarwal, vice president, ISODA. “To achieve this, ISODA has joined hands with BSA, and formed an ISODA–BSA alliance,” adds Aggarwal.

“BSA recently partnered with Trade Association of Information & Technology (TAIT) and ISODA to address IT compliance as part of its Advantage Channels initiative that aims to bring together software distributors, publishers and industry bodies,” confirms Thounaojam.

An IT dealers and reseller association, Computer & Media Dealers’ Association (CMDA) Pune, has worked with companies like Microsoft, and has held meetings with dealers to educate them on the benefits of using legal and licensed software, says its president, Jayant Shete.

Chetan Shah, Chairman of Association of Systems Integrators & Retailers (ASIRT), says that his association is taking steps to fight the menace, and is in talks with vendors to push the cause forward. (See ASIRT Has Pledged To Promote Genuine Software).

Some vendors have also sought alliances to protect their business interests. Adobe has a partnership with BSA and the anti-piracy division of Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), which has helped in curbing the distribution and the use of pirated software.

40

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD M ARCH 2013

“We work closely with IT associations across the country to identify and ensure that strict action is taken against partners who are engaged in selling pirated software,” says Sood at Adobe.

Microsoft too, has been actively working with various channel associations across the country to drive awareness on the perils of piracy. “We are committed to protecting IP and fostering an environment where innovation is rewarded and the local software industry can flourish. In order to achieve this, we work together with the software industry to address the problem of piracy. Since piracy is an industry issue we are working with bodies like NASSCOM, BSA, and FICCI,” says Khanna.

BSA has run several SAM seminars since 2008 with the State Govern-

The Bitter Truth l The commercial value of unlicensed

software put into the market in 2011 totaled $63.4 billion (about Rs 35,000 crore)—and the global software piracy is at 42 percent. l 57 percent of the world’s personal com-

puter users admit they pirate software. l Business decision makers who admit

they frequently pirate software are more than twice as likely as other computer users to say they buy software for one computer, but then install it on additional machines in their offices.

SOURCE: Ninth Annual BSA & IDC Global Software Piracy Study

ments of Karnataka, Maharashtra, and Andhra Pradesh targeted at SMEs. “To ensure the effective management of software within the SME segment, BSA, in 2012, introduced an industrysupported portal called license management registry 360 (LMR60). It allows SMEs to maintain, manage, and monitor their software inventory for multiple publishers at a single location,” says Thounaojam.

THE VENDOR–CHANNEL EQUATION Can software companies help channels resist the piracy route? According to Thounaojam, India’s software industry needs to move up the value chain and enter the niche area of product development. But there are challenges in copyright and IP protection which deter software developers in investing in development of new products in India.

Adobe partners with major associations which act as industry watchdogs to identify and prosecute offenders, create legislation to protect software manufacturers, provide tools to identify unlicensed software, and offer useful information to help organizations stay compliant, says Sood.

While BSA has been playing a significant role in supporting rights holders in the region through its wide range of initiatives, there is a need for increased governmental involvement, end-user education and specific piracy law formulation believes Thounaojam. “Software publishers must work closely with channel partners to ensure that their staff is educated on the licensing terms and conditions of software products,” says Thounaojam.

At the same time, vendors have to reduce the price of software and make it more affordable, believes Shete at CMDA. But, Khanna says that the cheapest and most readily available software programs are pirated as much as the most expensive programs. “Prices also incorporate a component for intellectual property. “The only solution to the problem” he says, “lies in cultivating respect for intellectual property rights by educating all those involved.” n

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n OPINION

ROB ENDERLE

The Cuckoo Clock Focusing on how long your staffers stay in the office— instead of what they actually accomplish— could do more harm than good.

Rob Enderle is president and principal analyst of the Enderle Group.

He writes on emerging technology, security and Linux for a variety of publications and appears on national news TV shows that include CNBC, FOX, Bloomberg and NPR. 42

A

TELEVISION SHOW I saw earlier did a story on

what companies were doing to stop cyber-slackers.

It seems—and this should hardly surprise any of us—that folks often use their company PCs and Internet connection to do things like shop at work. Shame on them, the story said, encouraging efforts to stamp out these horrid practices and make sure people are working properly.

Hang on. Many of these same people work from home on their own time, and one of the reasons they have to do things like shop online at the office is because they no longer have the personal time to get things done. Stopping the activity in those cases could actually reduce productivity, lowering their after-hours contributions or creating bigger personal issues they’ll still have to deal with at work.

Take what happened at Intel for instance. When it went through some difficult times in the 1990s, management noticed that a lot of employees came in late and left early. Executives would sit in their cubes and watch folks enter and leave at all times. The conclusion: People were slacking off.

A new policy followed. Managers logged their employees in at 8 a.m. and out at 5 p.m.—and productivity fell off a cliff. The Intel employees showing up late often worked from home until the early hours of the morning, and those going home early often came in very early or worked through the night on a project.

As a result, the folks who had been working all those extra hours collectively said “the heck with it” and started working regular hours, and the folks who had been taking advantage of the flexibility came in but slacked off. It was quite literally one of the stupidest things I’ve ever seen a company do. Thankfully, some smart people ran Intel, and the policy was reversed once management saw the results.

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD M ARCH 2013

My grandfather, the CEO of a large petrochemical company, liked to tell me a story when I was growing up. A big steel CEO hired an efficiency expert to study the steel plant and look for potential improvements. The expert found a guy just sitting around and drawing, and he recommended that the plant get rid of this seemingly useless guy. The CEO fired the efficiency expert, explaining that the guy’s doodles had saved millions and made him one of the company’s most valuable employees.

If employee metrics focus on what is important to the firm—that is, what people actually accomplish—then everything works itself out. On the other hand, if metrics focus on how long someone is in the office or what he does while on company property, particularly when he may actually be most productive at home, the resulting policies could do more harm than good.

In today’s connected world, the only thing that’s really important is whether and how employee is worth what he or she is being paid, and behaving within the ethical construct the company and industry requires. Some employee monitoring is necessary, of course, as some activities clearly can’t be allowed on company grounds.

However, getting too invasive will break the productivity advantages you’re likely taking for granted and drive away those who are the most productive. Since IT is often the first budget to be cut in a downturn, preventing a decision that would drive a downturn is in your best interest. n

Focal Point EVERYTHING ABOUT SDN

Making

Sense of SDN SDNs aren’t ready for prime time yet. But this radical shift needs to be understood by IT execs. By Jim Metzler

A

S IS somewhat

typical of emerging technologies, there isn’t a universally agreed to definition of what is meant by software defined networking (SDN). Over the

last year or two, most of the definitions have focused on the decoupling of the network control plane from the network forwarding plane.

Decoupling of the network control and forward-

ing planes isn’t a new concept. It’s a key feature of MPLS and it is also a characteristic of many contemporary WiFi networks. However, if SDN is looked at strictly as the decoupling of the network control plane from the network forwarding plane, then its value is limited to features like reducing network latency.

The definition of SDN that is currently emerging focuses somewhat less on decoupling and more on providing programmatic interfaces into network equipment, whether or not there is a separation of the control and forwarding planes. A minor reason for this shift in focus is because Cisco recently announced that as part of its SDN offerings, it will provide APIs into multiple platforms that they provide.

This is not a Cisco-only approach, as other vendors; including Arista, Extreme and Juniper currently provide direct access to their products. One advantage of this approach is that it enables very detailed access into, and control over, network elements. This approach, however, doesn’t provide a central point of control and is vendor specific. While some network service providers may adopt this approach in the near term, it is unlikely to gain much traction in the enterprise market for the foreseeable future.

A more powerful reason for the shift in focus of the definition of SDN is that if SDN is looked at as providing programmatic interfaces into network equipment, then its value is much broader. Looked at this way, SDN allows IT organizations to replace a manual interface into net-

working equipment with a programmatic interface that can enable the automation of tasks such as configuration and policy management and can also enable the network to dynamically respond to application requirements.

With the more common definition of an SDN, global control of the network is achieved by the logical centralization of the control plane function, and the network operations organization can deal with a pool of network devices as a single entity. With an SDN, network flows are controlled at the level of the global network abstraction, rather than at the level of the individual devices, usually, but not always, with the aid of the OpenFlow protocol.

SDN ARCHITECTURE The group most associated with the development of standards based SDN is the Open Networking Foundation (ONF). The ONF was launched in 2011 and has as its vision to make OpenFlow-based SDN the new norm for networks.

To help achieve that vision, the ONF has taken on the responsibility to drive the standardization of the OpenFlow protocol.

The breadth of the SDN ecosystem is reflected in the fact that the ONF currently has over 70 members of varying types including vendors that provide the enabling silicon as well as the switches, network appliances, controllers, test equipment, telecommunications services, hyperscale datacenter services and smartphones.

A layered architecture for an SDN is shown (see page 44). In that architecture, the control plane func-

MARCH 2013

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

43

n FOCAL POINT | SDN

App

44

App

Most modern Ethernet switches and routers contain flow-tables (typically supported by Ternary Content Addressable Memory) that run at line-rate and are used to perform forwarding functions based on Layer 2, 3, and 4 packet headers.

While each vendor’s flowtable is different, there is a common set of functions

App

OPENFLOW

SDN Architecture

App

tionality is centralized in the SDN controller’s software. Most of the time that SDN is being discussed, the OpenFlow protocol is used to program the forwarding behavior of the switch. There are, however alternatives to the use of OpenFlow, including the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), the Network Configuration Protocol (Netcong) and OpenStack from Rackspace and NASA. In this model, applications are written to a set of APIs that are provided by the SDN controller. Unfortunately, these APIs are not standardized, so an application that runs on a given SDN controller would have to be modified to run on another SDN controller.

The SDN controller supports a number of drivers that control the behavior of the underlying network elements, so that the network will provide the desired network services.

The controller provides management plane functionality such as performance and fault management via SNMP and other standard protocols, and it typically handles configuration management of OpenFlow compliant devices in order to provide network topology, forwarding, QoS, and link management.

NORTHBOUND API

SDN Controller Platform SOUTH BOUND API

Switch

Switch vSwitch

vSwitch

supported by a wide variety of switches and routers.

This common set of functions is leveraged by OpenFlow, which is an open protocol between a central OpenFlow controller and an OpenFlow switch and which, as noted, can be used to program the forwarding behavior of the switch.

With OpenFlow, a single central controller can program all the physical and virtual switches in a network. While it is possible to implement SDN with a single controller, vendors such as Big Switch and NEC have announced either a production high availability cluster, or their intention to implement such a cluster of controllers. It is likely that IBM will follow suit.

The OpenFlow protocol was developed at Stanford, with v1.0 published at the end of 2009 and v1.1 at the beginning of 2011. In March of 2011, the ONF was created and the intellectual property rights of Open-

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD M ARCH 2013

Flow were transitioned to it. Part of the ONF charter is to control and commercialize OpenFlow. With that goal in mind, the ONF recently released OpenFlow v1.3 and in March 2012 the ONF sponsored an interoperability event that was open to all of the members of the ONF. A total of 14 companies and two research institutions participated in the event which focused on the OpenFlow v1.0 standard.

In an OpenFlow-only switch, all of the control functions of a traditional switch (e.g. the routing protocols that are used to build forwarding information bases [FIB]) are run in the central OpenFlow controller. An OpenFlow-enabled switch (dubbed an OpenFlowhybrid switch in v1.1) supports both OpenFlow flow forwarding and traditional Ethernet switch bridging and routing. Hybrid switches allow OpenFlow and

traditional bridge/routing to share the same Ethernet infrastructure.

Many existing high functionality Layer 2/3 switches can be converted to be OpenFlow-hybrid switches by the relatively simple addition of an OpenFlow agent in firmware supported by the native switch Network Operating System (NOS).

Alternatively, once the semiconductor vendors have produced chips that effectively process the OpenFlow protocol, an OpenFlow-only switch would be extremely simple and inexpensive to build because it would have very little resident software and would not require a powerful CPU or large memory to support the extensive control functionality typically packaged in a traditional NOS. There are a number of possible ways that the centralization of control, the programmability, and the flow forwarding characteris-

tics of OpenFlow can be leveraged to provide value to IT organizations. For example, one of the primary benefits of OpenFlow is the centralized nature of the FIB. Centralization allows optimum routes to be calculated deterministically for each flow, leveraging a complete model of the end-to-end topology of the network. Based on an understanding of the service levels required for each type of flow, the centralized OpenFlow controller can apply traffic engineering principles to ensure each flow is properly serviced.

One advantage of this capability is that it enables the network to dynamically respond to application requirements. It also enables notably better utilization of

the network without sacrificing service quality.

Another benefit is that OpenFlow switches can filter packets as they enter the network, and hence these switches can act as simple firewalls at the edge of the network. With OpenFlow switches that support the modification of packet headers, an optional feature in OpenFlow v1.0, the OpenFlow controller will also be able to have the switch redirect certain suspicious traffic flows to higher-layer security controls, such as IDS/IPS systems, application firewalls, and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) devices.

OpenFlow switches that support the modification of packet headers will also be able to function as a

simple, cost-effective loadbalancing device. With modification functionality, a new flow can result in a new flow table entry that is directed to a server selected by the OpenFlow controller’s load balancing policies. In order to create load-balancing policies based on server load, the OpenFlow controller would have to monitor the pool of servers as they report current load levels.

CALL TO ACTION There is no doubt that SDN can potentially provide very significant value to IT organizations. There is also no doubt that in the current environment SDN is only appropriate for early adopters.

Given the immaturity of the

The SDN Opportunity for the Channel

S

OFTWARE-DEFINED networking (SDN) is an emerging field, subject to some confusion and very much an early-adopter exercise at the moment.

That represents an opportunity for channel partners.

Channel partners-resellers, systems integrators and consultancies often carve niches in such immature fields, providing advice and deployment help to customers who lack sufficient in-house knowledge. That tendency is beginning to play out in SDN. Technology vendors in the US, for example, have already started recruiting integrators and other channel allies. Companies that seek to populate the SDN channel say they;re studying the technology to be in a position to assist customers.

General enterprise adopters are likely seek the help of SDN advisors and implementers, ac-

cording to industry executives.

They believe the channel will become a key conduit for SDN in the enterprise. “Enterprises are technology deployers, not developers,” says Eric Johnson, chairman and chief executive officer of ADARA Networks, which makes SDN software.

“It is absolutely expected…and a certainty that SDN should be adopted through the channel.”

ADARA, is just one of t a host of other vendors targeting a market poised to rapidly expand.

IDC projects that the worldwide SDN market will surge from $360 million (about Rs 1,980 crore) in 2013 to $3.7 billion (about Rs 20,350 crore) by 2016. Such lofty expectations are based on SDN’s potential to revitalize network architecture.

SDN provides a software layer that lets administrators centrally program switches and other network devices.

Dave Butler, VP of sales at Big Switch, an SDN vendor, says most, if not all, SDN projects will eventually involve an integrator. “It’s going from zero to 100 percent. Right now, we have just picked a very few [integrators] and they are tightly coupled to what we do.”

Big Switch plans, over time, to build a certification process for its partners, Butler adds.

Channel players pursuing SDN as a niche should, however, be prepared to encounter a high level of self-sufficiency among early adopters. Cloud services providers, hosting firms and colocation companies stand at the vanguard of SDN deployment. Those companies, for which the network is the core business as opposed to a support function, generally maintain considerable technical resources.

—John Moore

current products, standards and APIs, any IT organization that is looking to implement SDN in the near term should only do so in a somewhat limited manner, such as implementing SDN for a very specific use case. In addition, given the embryonic state of the market, the interoperability of products that claim to support the same SDN related standards cannot be assumed so IT organizations should only work with vendors that have demonstrated a high level of interoperability. However, given the combination of the huge investments that vendors are making, combined with the ongoing spate of acquisitions, the SDN landscape will likely change notably over the next 12 to 18 months. IT organizations can expect an ongoing series of announcements both in terms of new products, new or enhanced protocols and further proof of interoperability.

IT organizations can also expect that the basic building blocks of an SDN, such as the enabling protocols and APIs, will stabilize. Assuming that all of that happens, there are two events that have to occur in order for SDN to go from being strictly for early adopters to being ready for the mainstream market. One is the availability of functionality that enables IT organizations to effectively manage this new form of networking. The second is the availability of a wide range of applications that leverage the centralized control inherent in most forms of an SDN and which answer the question that all senior IT managers will ask: “Why should we spend our resources on SDN? What exactly are the benefits?” n

MARCH JANUARY 2013 1, 2009 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

45

n FOCAL POINT | SDN

Are They Really That Different?

Juniper and Cisco may be SDN competitors, but their approach isn’t exactly like chalk and cheese.

By Jim Duffy

O

N THE surface, Cisco and Juniper’s SDN strategies seem to have sharp contrasts if recent announcements are any indication. For example: n Juniper places much more emphasis on the software angle of SDN, even ushering in a new software licensing business model; Cisco’s attempts to make hardware as much, and perhaps even more, relevant than software. n Cisco is attacking five markets at once—datacenter, enterprise, service provider, cloud, academia —with its strategy, while Juniper is focusing initially on datacenters. n Juniper views SDNs as much more disruptive, potentially allowing it to significantly increase share; Cisco has thus far made no such dramatic 46

market impact statements regarding SDNs. n As part of its hardware focus on SDN, Cisco is funding a separate spin-in company— Insieme Networks —which is believed to be building big programmable switches and controller(s); Juniper has no such hardware investments, but did buy Contrail for $176 million (about Rs 948 crore), again emphasizing the software aspect of SDNs. n Cisco has a timeline of 2013 deliverables; Juniper’s timeline pushes a controller and SDN service “chaining” capability out into 2014, and the new software business model into 2015.

Yet analysts say there are really more similarities than differences in both strategies from the fierce rivals.

“I think there are some similarities,” says Brad Casemore of IDC. “Both Juniper and Cisco are em-

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD M ARCH 2013 CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 1, 2009

phasizing ASICs, and therefore hardware, in their SDN strategies. Both companies also see network and security services—Layer 4-7—as virtualized applications in a programmable network.

They each have controllers, but they also will promote hybrid control planes—decoupled and distributed.

Juniper is positioning for a software-licensing business model, true, but it’s relatively early along in that process.”

“It’s a different packaging strategy but both seem equally focused on the value of software in SDN,” says Mike Fratto of Current Analysis. “Key points being modular, flexible, and exposing APIs for integration.”

Juniper recently divulged its SDN strategy after months of silence—seven months after Cisco announced its Cisco ONE plan.

Salient points of Juniper’s plan include separating networking software into four planes—management, services, control and forwarding—to optimize each plane within the network; creating network and security service virtual machines by extracting service software from hardware and housing it on x86 servers; using a centralized controller that enables service chaining in software, or the ability to connect services across devices according to business need; and the new software-based licensing model, which allows the transfer of software licenses between Juniper devices and industry-standard x86 servers, and is designed to allow customers to scale purchases based on actual usage.

Cisco’s ONE, or Open Networking Environment strategy, includes an API platform to instill programmability into its three core operating systems: IOS, IOS

XR and NX-OS. It’s focused on five key markets and also includes new programmable ASICs, like the UADP chip unveiled with the new Catalyst 3850 enterprise switch; and a software-based controller for datacenters that runs on x86 servers. New ASICs are also expected to be front-and-center when the Cisco-funded Insieme Networks start-up unveils what’s expected to be a highperformance programmable switch and controller line.

Juniper’s strategy initially targets datacenters, and its new software licensing model is based on enterprise practices. The company will expand its traditional carrier and service provider customers from there.

Among the first markets addressed in Cisco’s ONE strategy are enterprise customers, datacenters and cloud providers.

“Juniper ultimately sees SDN at all layers of the network, spanning not only the datacenter—edge/access and core—but also the WAN, campus and branch,” says IDC’s Casemore. “Juniper’s SDN road map initially targets the SP edge and datacenter, but it does plan to follow SDN into other areas.”

“Cisco sees datacenter and cloud as near-term markets, and its positioning to play across the board as SDN—and its outcomes, network virtualization and network programmability —extends its reach,” Casemore says. “Again, there are many similarities.”

In terms of market disruption, Fratto says both companies see SDN as perhaps equally disruptive even though one has been much more vocal about that impact than the other.

“I think the two companies view SDN as disruptive

What’s Driving SDN?

F

IVE trends are driving the transition to software defined networking and programmability. They are: User, device and application mobility, cloud computing and service, consumerization of IT, changing traffic patterns within datacenters, and agile service delivery.

According to Cisco, enterprises need network programmability to automate the operation of private cloud deployments. These deployments include virtual workloads, virtual desktop infrastructures, and the orchestration of security profiles across them. And within the enterprise datacenter, traffic patterns have changed from the “northsouth” directions of client/server to “east-west,” in which applications access different databases and servers before delivering data back to the client.

The Open Networking Foundation says this, as well as the increasing use of personal devices to access corporate data—the BYOD phenomenon—and the deployment of private, public and hybrid cloud infrastructures and services is also changing traffic patterns, requiring the automation, rapid reconfigurability and simplified extendability SDNs provide.

Other SDN/programmability/network virtualization players say SDNs and the applications they enable can relieve VLAN exhaustion, facilitate datacenter interconnect and disaster recovery, allow for granular, policy-based security, network isolation, service interposition, deterministic application performance and customization, among others.

Service providers need SDNs for agile service delivery, proponents say. SDNs and network programmability can enable policy-based control and analytical data capture to help optimize and monetize service delivery, they say.

but they are approaching it very differently,” he says.

“Juniper tends to be more conservative in bringing new products to market, particularly with Junos. They have a quarterly software update cycle and they march to that drum. I think they have a strong preference for stability in the platform and based on their consistent messaging on that topic.

“I think for Cisco, the disruption is there but the

Companies can use OpenFlow and SDNs to reroute traffic, balance traffic loads, provide bandwidth on demand for peak requirements, execute policies to scale and segregate the networks of different datacenter or cloud tenants, and connect subscribers to content and services. Cloud providers in particular require programmability to support scalable multi-tenant environments through automated provisioning and virtualization overlays that abstract complicated and distributed physical infrastructures from function. From an IT perspective, deployment of and access to cloud services can be facilitated by SDNs that enable “elastic scaling” of compute, storage and network resources using a common suite of tools from a common viewpoint, according to the ONF. This is important as organizations stress increased security, compliance, and auditing in cloud environments, or when abrupt changes emerge as businesses reorganize, consolidate or merge.

Massively scalable datacenters are said by Cisco to require network flow management enabled through customization using programmatic APIs to provide deep insight into network traffic.

And academia and research require network “slicing,” or partitioning to separate experimental network use from production networks.

Big data plays a key role in requiring SDNs or network programmability. SDNs can help steer traffic between thousands of servers processing massive datasets in parallel; and can help datacenter networks scale more efficiently while maintaining server-to-server, server-to-storage, and server/storage-to-network connectivity.

—Jim Duffy

recent announcements tell a lot about its direction going forward,” Fratto continues. “I think it signals ... wanting to be vendor and protocol agnostic vs. promoting their own technology over others. The ONE controller, for example, is modular and will support OnePK and OpenFlow out of the gate, but there is no reason other than development that it can’t support other protocols.”

Casemore sees both companies reacting to SDN developments, rather than driving them.

“Neither has led the charge toward SDN. Both are measuring their responses, trying to find a balance between supporting their customers today while preparing for potentially disruptive shifts.”

And Casemore sees both equally emphasizing

hardware, despite Juniper’s software-intensive strategy.

“Juniper has a lot of existing hardware, and hardware customers, that it will attempt to fold into its SDN strategy,” he says. “We will see hardware and software from both Cisco and Juniper, as their common ASIC strategies suggest.”

And even though the timelines for deliverables differ, they are in keeping with each company’s traditions.

“That’s Juniper’s way, right?” Fratto says. “Produce a road map and then deliver over a longer timeline like 12 to 24 months.”

Where the strategies diverge will be in partner ecosystems for SDN-enabled services, he says.

“In both cases, they will need to attract partners into their respective ecosystems.

The market for services has a ton of players—think (application delivery controllers), firewalls, WAN optimization. For those services to be chained, they have to be integrated with Juniper’s stuff. Same for Cisco. That’s going to be the attractor.”

Casemore sees differences in initial target markets too.

“I look at Juniper’s strategy as being more attuned to the SP/carrier community than the enterprise—their service chaining concept is very close to network functions virtualization— whereas the strategy and technologies Cisco has rolled out thus far are more enterprise oriented,” he says. “That’s not to say that Juniper won’t develop more of an enterprise orientation or that Cisco won’t push its SDN strategy into carriers—both will happen. But that’s how I see them now at this particular snapshot in time.” n

MARCH JANUARY 2013 1, 2009 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

47

n FACE OFF

Citrix Vs. F5 Networks

NILESH GORADIA,

Head-Pre-sales—India Subcontinent, Citrix

SATISH NAIR,

Senior Manager Systems Engineering, F5 Networks India, SAARC

Lion’s Share

Between Citrix and F5 Networks, who will make giant strides in the ADC space?

C pinned to four factors. First, traditional networking ITRIX’S SUPERIORITY in the ADC market is under-

solutions cannot compete with the breadth and depth of the capabilities that Citrix’s NetScaler product—with its TriScale technology—delivers. The technology enables organizations to scale and secure cloud services, achieving 100 percent network utilization. It allows IT teams to build enterprise cloud networks that can scale up performance 5x, scale out capacity 32x, and scale in consolidation by running up to 40 appliances on a single platform.

Second, we have expanded our strategic partnership with Cisco and leverage its leadership in datacenter networking with the cloud services delivery strength of Citrix. Together, the two companies are helping enterprises and service providers deliver a true cloud network, leveraging deep network and application-level intelligence. To this effect, Cisco is recommending Citrix’s NetScaler application delivery controller solutions to its customers building next-generation datacenter networks, and Cisco will integrate NetScaler into it’s cloud network services architecture.

We have institutionalized a number of knowledge transfer initiatives whereby we are training our channel partners to migrate from Cisco ACE to NetScaler MPX. This has empowered partners with the wherewithal and the technical capabilities to migrate from a Cisco ACE environment to a NetScaler one.

Today, we have more than 800 NetScaler customers in India across verticals like BFSI, travel, stock market, Internet portals, and Internet banking sites. Therefore, we believe that we have outnumbered our competitors and will continue to strengthen our leadership 2013.

48

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD M ARCH 2013

T optimization. Seamless performance and user expeHIS YEAR could see the convergence of security and

rience have never had a higher premium. Applications need more security and no one can argue that adding in-line security—such as a Web-application firewall— won’t increase latency and decrease page load time.

Optimization may come to the rescue by offsetting the added latency with performance gains at a lower level, such as TCP or WAN optimizations. Security in a common platform will increasingly play a role in acquiring ADC. Where traditional firewalls have failed due to the workload DDoS’s generate, ADCs have been used to adequately handle the same DDoS attacks, and even route some or all packets to forensics services. Security will remain a key component of any technology implementation, especially in the cloud to ensure the protection of key systems, data integrity, and internal staff from the constant barrage of Web-based application attacks.

Due to the heightened demands and complexities brought by mobile devices, cloud services, and application environments, enterprises are demanding more comprehensive solutions for Web performance optimization. An increasing number of enterprise apps require improved user experience if they are to meet the expectations of external users and employees. We apply front-end, network, and datacenter optimizations in concert to improve overall application performance and enhance the user experience.

F5 remains focused on offering the most capable physical and virtual ADCs to meet the growing needs of organizations, regardless of which IT and datacenter architectures they choose to pursue.

—As told to Shantheri Mallaya

n EDITOR’S NOTE

Vijay Ramachandran Stop Selling Storage!

H

OW OFTEN have you been told about over-

whelming data growth? And, that this is about video, social media, and mobility. Well, in the past few days I’ve had this dinned into me thrice complete with slide decks, jazzy graphics, maturity models, and quadrants. Conventional wisdom suggests that this is a no-brainer given the preponderance of YouTube videos of kittens performing cute antics, streaming porn, and torrents of pirated movies and sitcoms.

Tarry a while, because Martin Hilbert and Priscila Lopez from the University of Southern California beg to differ. They have spent the past five years pouring over 1,100 different sources across 60 analog and digital technologies, to estimate the world’s capacity to store, communicate and compute information between 1986 and 2010.

The result: A super paper in Significance (the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society), which challenges many assumptions.

Hilbert and Lopez discovered that “in the early 90s, video represented more than 80 percent of the world’s information stock (mainly stored in video cassettes) and audio almost 15 percent. By 2007, the share of video in the world’s storage devices had decreased to 60 percent and the share of audio to merely 5 percent, while text increased from less than 1 percent to a staggering 20 per2

cent (boosted by the vast amounts of alphanumerical content on Internet servers, hard disks, and databases).”

The researchers found that the “multimedia age” was in actual terms the “alphanumeric text age”.

Their research revealed that the fastest growing information operation was not the Internet or mobile phones or server farms or databases!

Instead, Hilbert and Lopez found that computation was the big driver.

Think about the millions on instructions that are executed within a computer’s architecture based on the algorithms that

n Big data solutions create multiple opportunities for solution providers to profit from.

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD M ARCH 2013

make it run—regardless of whether the computers are general-purpose (such as PCs, smartphones, servers, and videogame consoles) or application-specific computers (embedded into electronic devices and household appliances like washing machines or TVs).

So that probably explains why amidst all this “awesome data explosion”, and the sheer volumes of petabytes being consumed by enterprises, Indian storage sales have stayed static at about Rs 1,500 crore annually over the past few years.

And, that possibly clarifies why you aren’t profiting by merely selling more storage arrays or disks.

If anything, Hilbert and Lopez’s research, given the volume of data that needed to be crunched and its disparate sources, points the way forward for you as well—big data.

While I do not believe that big data is the cure for all enterprise ills,

there is no doubt in my mind that for companies, which have to deal with large volumes of data being created at a fast pace across multiple sources, this is the way forward.

Big data isnt always for the big boys. Often organizations that have a large customer base or a decided rural footprint have business cases that cry out for a big data solution. Think microfinance outfits and almost any organization into rural procurement or distribution—those are your ideal targets.

And, since big data is actually a gamut of solutions that address how information is stored, structured, archived, retrieved, secured, and analysed—I see multiple opportunities for solution providers to tap into.

Two that spring to mind, are polar opposites.

IDG research reveals that as high as 74 percent of mid-to-large-sized organizations have issues with data cleansing—issues so serious that they doom most efforts to derive any meaningful intelligence.

The other is about putting in place data scientists who can derive insight from analytical tools.

Both are areas where third-party skills are needed.

The question then is: Are you up to the challenge? n Vijay Ramachandran is the Editor-in-Chief of ChannelWorld. Contact him at vijay_ramachandran@idgindia.com

FOR BREAKING NEWS, GO TO CHANNELWORLD.IN

Inside INDIAN CHANNELWORLD ■ MARCH 2013

■ NEWS DIGEST

■ THE GRILL

07 Win 8: Will It Kill the PC? |

21 Maxim Mitrokhin, Director–

The success of Windows 8 will

Operations, Kaspersky Lab, APAC,

be critical not only for Microsoft’s future, but for the 40-year-old-andcounting concept of the personal computer, believe analysts.

07 Juniper’s Latest Buy |

Juniper Networks has acquired the assets of Webscreen Systems, a developer of DDoS mitigation products, from Accumuli.

12 VCE Remains Strong As Ever | The

VCE partnership involving EMC, its subsidiary VMware and Cisco will not change, even after Cisco expanded its partnership with EMC rival NetApp to sell preconfigured cloud architectures.

■ NEWS

ANALYSIS

14 Craving that Perfect Fit |

CIOs and SIs don’t seem to engage effectively. Is there a expectation mismatch between the two sides?

■ OPINION 02 Editorial: Vijay Ramachandran

believes that big data solutions create multiple opportunities for solution providers to profit from.

42 Rob Enderle: Focusing on

how long your staffers stay in the office—instead of what they actually accomplish—could do more harm than good.

Cover Design by UNNIKRISHNAN A.V

21 talks about the company’s aspirations for the Indian market.

■ FEATURE

37 Joint Effort Vendors and industry associations are fighting hard to keep the menace of software piracy out. How can they prevent perpetrators from causing more harm?

26

■ FAST TRACK

20 Narasimha Murthy, CEO,

Connectivity Solutions, says that the company’s internal workflow is process-driven, not person-driven.

■ COVER STORY

26 Websavvy.in

It’s a whole new world out there and the Web has become the first port of call for customers looking for partners to give their business to. But few partners leverage the Web to raise their company’s profiles—and drive sales. That’s changing slowly as the number of enterprise channel partners who realize what they are missing out on grows.

Here’s how some partners have leveraged popular online tools to establish and boost their credentials online and marketed their companies to a much wider audience.

■ CASE STUDY

34 Open Trust

Mumbai-based Crystal Solutions helps construction material manufacturer Walplast save a ton on cost with a scalable Open Source implementation.

FELIX BAUMGARTNER set the world record for skydiving from a capsule 39 kilometers above Earth.

FRIDAY, 3 MAY, 2013 HYATT REGENCY, MUMBAI

HOW BOLD BOLD means setting new benchmarks It is exhilarating to set a record be it personal, or in business. ChannelWorld Premier 100 Awards will recognize IT channel partners who have demonstrated extraordinary resolve to set new benchmarks. If you have successfully set new milestones in your business, we are looking for you!

Join The BOLD 100. Nominate yourself at www.premier100.in

Event by

Hosted by

FOR BREAKING NEWS, GO TO CHANNELWORLD.IN

Inside

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD ■ MARCH 2013

36 Sumit Srivastava, Managing Director, Cygnus Information Solutions, has done well betting on government contracts and Dell. The primary goal, he says, is to ensure that the company touches Rs 50 crore by 2015.

CHANNELWORLD On the surface, their SDN strategies seem to have sharp contrasts if recent announcements are any indication. Yet analysts say there are really more similarities than differences in both strategies from the fierce rivals.

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

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

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Statement of ownership and other particulars about the magazine Indian Channel World, as required to be published under Section 19-D Subsection (b) of the Press and Registration of Books Act read with Rule 8 of the Registration of Newspapers (Central) Rules 1956.

PLACE OF PUBLICATION:

■ ON RECORD

18 Vikas Pradhan,

Country Director–India, CommVault, shares his unabashed take of the competition and the company’s India strategy.

■ FACE OFF

48 Lion’s Share: Between Citrix and F5 Networks, who will make giant strides in the ADC space?

■ FOCAL POINT

43 Making Sense of SDN

SDN: As is somewhat typical of emerging technologies, there isn’t a universally agreed to definition of what is meant by SDN. Over the last year or two, most of the definitions have focused on the decoupling of the network control plane from the network forwarding plane.

46 Are They Really That Different?

SDN: Juniper and Cisco may be SDN competitors,

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PERIODICITY OF PUBLICATION: Monthly PRINTER Name: Louis D’Mello Nationality: Indian Address: Geetha Building, 49, 3rd Cross, Mission Road, Bangalore 560 027 PUBLISHER Name: Louis D’Mello Nationality: Indian Address: Geetha Building, 49, 3rd Cross, Mission Road, Bangalore 560 027 EDITOR Name: Louis D’Mello Nationality: Indian Address: Geetha Building, 49, 3rd Cross, Mission Road, Bangalore 560 027 Names and addresses of individuals who own the magazine, and partners or shareholders holding more than one per cent of the total capital: International Data Group, 5, Speen Street, Framingham MA 01701, USA I, Louis D’Mello, hereby declare that the particulars given above are true to the best of my knowledge and belief.

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News

WHAT’S WITHIN

PAGE 10: GoI Will Splurge on IT Services PAGE 10: Intel Capital Invests in SDN PAGE 12: VCE Remains Strong as Ever

PAGE 14: CIO vs SIs: Craving that Perfect Fit F I N D M O R E A R T I C L E S AT CHANNELWORLD.IN

OPERATING SYSTEM

Win 8: Will It Kill the PC?

I

N ANOTHER illustration of the diminishing importance of the PC, a research firm said that more than a third of surveyed consumers who once used personal computers to access content said they had switched to tablets and smartphones.

But unlike others who, noting the same trends, have said it signals the death of the PC, John Buffone of the NPD Group argued that PCs aren’t going anywhere for the moment.

“There is a significant amount of functionality that is best conducted on comput-

ers,” said Buffone. That work, often collectively dubbed “content creation,” could remain the provenance of PCs for a long time to come.

“I’m not in the camp that thinks the PC is going by the wayside,” said Buffone in describing NPD’s research results. “There are just too many households that have computers.”

The top two activities that have most moved to mobile, said Buffone, are Internet browsing and using Facebook. Among tablet owners, 27 percent said they’re using their PCs less frequently for going online in general,

while 20 percent confirmed that they use their PCs less often for accessing Facebook.

Smartphone owners responded slightly differently, with 27 percent claiming that they use their PC less frequently for both Internet access and Facebook activities.

Until Windows 8 makes headway, Buffone saw little chance that consumers would dump their PCs in dusty back rooms or closets.

“Windows 8 on tablets could change that,” Buffone said, “but from the sales so far, it’s not going to be rapid.”

Microsoft has pitched Windows 8 as a dual threat on tablets and ultra-light, touch-enabled laptops, able to not only run hardware and support software traditionally found only in notebooks, but also agile enough to power tablets.

While other analysts haven’t placed their bets on Windows 8 to lead the change from PCs to more mobile tablets, they have predicted that hardware able to really handle both content creation and consumption are not far off.

The success of Windows 8, by Buffone’s take, will thus be critical not only for Microsoft’s future, but for the 40-year-old-andcounting concept of the personal computer.

MARCH 2013

—Gregg Keizer INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

7

ACQUISITION

Juniper’s Latest Buy Juniper Networks has acquired the assets of Webscreen Systems, a developer of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) mitigation products, from Accumuli.

Juniper announced the purchase in a blog post. It bought the technology for $10 million (about Rs 54 crore), according to Accumuli.

The technology will enhance Juniper’s datacenter security product line and enable

the company to offer an automated DDoS protection system for websites and Web applications, according to the blog post. Webscreen specializes in behaviorbased DDoS mitigation designed to protect against both high volume and advanced persistent threat (APT) attacks.

—Jim Duffy

-

IT SERVICES

GoI Will Splurge on IT Services

T

of this growth will be in of India (GoI) will enterprise network equipspend Rs 36,800 ment. Software is achieving crore on IT prodthe highest growth rate ucts and services in 2013, amongst the top level IT an increase of 10.5 percent spending categories—foreover 2012’s Rs 33,300 crore, cast to be 18 percent up in according to Gartner. This 2013, led by investments in forecast includes spending desktop software and infraby government organizastructure software. tions on internal The IT indusIT (including try is expected to personnel), indirectly benefit hardware, softfrom government The expected ware, external increase in IT product projects such as and services IT services, and the Unique Idenspending by the GoI telecommunicatification Authorover last year. tions. ity of India (UIDTelecommuAI), which will nications, which includes create an online database telecommunications and with biometric and identity networking equipment and details of Indian residents, services, will remain the the launch of the National largest overall spending Optical Fibre Network, category throughout the and the computerization of forecast period within the commercial taxes in states. government sector. It is ex“The Indian government pected to grow 6.8 percent is starting to leverage UID in 2013 to reach Rs 11,800 identities to authenticate crore in 2013, up from citizens for transferring 11,100 crore in 2012. Most welfare benefits directly HE GOVERNMENT

10.5%

SOURCE: GARTNER

to the recipient’s bank accounts, in the form of cash transfers, thereby creating a new system for welfare benefits,” said Anurag Gupta, research director at Gartner. “India goes to the national polls in 2014, and the GoI will aim to expand the UID operational infrastructure by speed tracking ‘financial inclusion’, allowing easy access to banking for the poor and encouraging micro ATMs. To expand the benefits of IT, GoI aims to invest more than Rs 20,000 crore in expanding broadband penetration. The electronic chip-making project, digitization of academic databases across all educational institutions, vehicle registrations, and driving license databases among others will be the major focus areas.”

Further information on insurance, and government and education sector IT spending is available in the Gartner report Forecast: Enterprise IT Spending by Vertical Industry Market, Worldwide, 20102016, 4Q12 Update.

—ChannelWorld Bureau

FUNDING

Intel Capital Invests In Software-defined Networking Intel Capital has invested in software-defined networking company Big Switch Networks, as it hopes to help the company change the way datacenters are networked.

Intel Capital is looking for companies that are creating the most disruptive datacenter products, and Big Switch Networks’ Open SoftwareDefined Networking suite fits 10

the bill, according to managing director Bryan Wolf.

Big Switch is a pioneer and driving force behind the use of the OpenFlow protocol, which co-founder and CEO Guido Appenzeller was instrumental in helping develop.

OpenFlow allows centralized controllers, which typically run on a standard server, to modify the behavior of

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD M ARCH 2013

FOR THE FUTURE: SDN will provide Intel significant gains.

hardware and software-based network devices through welldefined forwarding instructions, according to the Open Networking Foundation.

Big Switch’s product suite consists of the Big Network Controller, Big Virtual Switch

Short Takes HGST announced the appointment of Avnet Technology Solutions as a new authorized distributor for HGST storage products, expanding its reach in India and the sub-continent (SAARC). As part of this agreement, Avnet will distribute the company’s enterprise and mobile drives, and Touro external storage solutions.

Value InfoSolutions announced its appointment as a national value-added distributor for the entire range of A10 Network’s networking and security solutions. Sunil Pillai, its MD, said that they looked forward to working with select partners and the A10 team to maximize business opportunities.

Mahindra Satyam announced that it has appointed Manoj Chugh, as global head of business development. In the new role he will be supporting business expansion plans across accounts and geographies.

application and monitoring application Big Tap. For Intel its important to find new product segments for its chipsets, as the PC market is floundering and its push into the tablet and smartphone market has yet to yield any significant gains. Softwaredefined networking is one such segment. The investment in Big Switch isn’t the first time Intel has shown an interest; at Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in September it demonstrated a switch reference design codenamed Seacliff Trail.

—Mikael Ricknäs

PARTNERSHIPS

VCE Remains Strong As Ever

T

HE VCE partnership

involving EMC, its subsidiary VMware, and Cisco will not change, even after Cisco expanded its partnership with EMC rival NetApp to sell preconfigured cloud architectures.

“I feel the partnership is strong. Obviously, it’s a hyper competitive environment, so there’s a lot of speculation in the marketplace,” said VCE CEO Praveen Akkiraju.

Founded in 2009, VCE, is a joint venture among EMC, its VMware subsidiary, and Cisco Systems. VCE sells preconfigured and pretested cloud computing systems called VBlocks. VBlocks are made up by Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS) servers and networking switches, EMC’s storage arrays and VMware virtualization software.

Akkiraju said there are no plans to go outside of the partnership to thirdparty vendors for servers or switches or to offer an ala-carte style VCE because Akkiraju considers Cisco “best of breed.”

“More fundamentally, Cisco is one of our key investors, and we don’t envision a different strategy than what we have today,” he said.

“Because of the nature of VCE as a joint venture, we are tightly aligned in our go-to-market from a sales perspective, from a services perspective and the way we co-develop our road maps,” he said. “If anything, because of my deep experi-

ence with Cisco, we’re able to have very honest and open conversations.”

Even so, there was some speculation recently that the VCE partnership might splinter after Cisco and NetApp expanded their reseller partnership around NetApp’s preconfigured FlexPod architecture. FlexPod combines Cisco switches and servers with NetApp’s FAS storage systems.

However, it wouldn’t be the first time a strong partnership failed when cooperation turned into competition. Such was the case with EMC’s reseller partnership with Dell, which lasted a decade, but ultimately broke apart after Dell’s storage line

Around

TheWorld F5 to Acquire a Software Start-Up

F5 Networks plans to extend the reach of SDN to improve application performance by acquiring software startup LineRate Systems. The company didn’t disclose how much it will pay for LineRate.

It bought the privately held company for its technology, intellectual property and engineering talent and will incorporate those into its development efforts for software-defined data centers, F5 said in a press release.

—Stephen Lawson MARCH 2013

began competing more and more with EMC’s.

The VBlock platform is also expected to receive significant upgrades.

Without offering specifics, Akkiraju said customers have been vocal about needed upgrades, which spurred the changes that will offer more SaaS-like capabilities while also sup-

Ex-Symantec CEO Joins FireEye BoD

FireEye announced that Enrique T. Salem, former president and CEO of Symantec, has been appointed to the FireEye Board of Directors. This brings the number of FireEye board members to eight.

Salem said, “I am honored to be part of the FireEye board and am looking forward to working with the outstanding leadership team and board that has been assembled.” In addition to serving as president and CEO, during his tenure at Symantec, Salem also served as COO, group president of worldwide sales and marketing, and president of consumer products.

—ChannelWorld Bureau INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

12

porting VDI and BYOD corporate strategies.

“The next phase of what we’re about to embark on ... will establish the convergent infrastructure as a foundation and start to build an ecosystem around truly freeing up the CIO to be able to deliver the IT as a service,” Akkiraju said.

—Lucas Mearian

Oracle to Buy Acme Packet

Oracle has agreed to pay $1.7 billion (about Rs 9,200 crore) for Acme Packet, a network equipment vendor specializing in session delivery.

Oracle intends to integrate Acme’s offering with its own communications product portfolio, alongside other core network products such as its network application platform and tools to manage service availability.

—Peter Sayer and Chris Kanaracus

n NEWS ANALYSIS

Craving that Perfect Fit

CIOs say SIs do not engage with them effectively. SIs beg to differ.

Is there a huge expectation mismatch between the two?

By Shantheri Mallaya

14

C

IOs ARE an important community.

The customer is sacrosanct. The engagement is paramount.

Utopian? Yes. If you thought businesses and projects worked on these cardinal principles, then think again. When asked about how a business case for IT is presented to them by system integrators, one CIO said, “I wonder if many system integrators really know the meaning of the term.”

That disconnect can take various forms, some of them more serious than others. A vendor spokesperson recently admitted in an interview that they had to segregate their partner and customer summits af-

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD M ARCH 2013

ter a couple of unpleasant showdowns during joint sessions a few years ago.

It’s a trend hasn’t gone unnoticed among the analyst community. Forrester recently put out a report titled System Integrators are Failing to Meet the Expectations of Indian CIOs, which corroborates the growing concern in various CIO forums, blogs and media surveys that system integrators are taking customers for granted.

The report reads on a grim note. ‘Indian CIOs now expect an increased level of business maturity from system integrators, but most SIs are not adjusting their people, offerings, or engagement models sufficiently in response.

“I can’t share my business strategies with system integrators, because I have little faith in developing a long-term business partnership with them,” said a CIO from a large healthcare firm.’

The CIO Mid Year Review 2012, conducted

by CIO magazine (a sister publication to ChannelWorld) points out that for 24 percent of CIOs (of large and very large enterprises) one of the main obstacles they have to surmount in the path of organizational IT-business process integration was the availability of good system integrators.

There was also a perception that system integrators do not have sufficient know-how in emerging technologies such as big data and SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud computing).

Given the increasing need for partners and IT leaders to work together and the advent of global system integrators, one can’t turn a Nelson’s eye anymore to the growing reality of an expectation mismatch between CIOs and their SI partners.

Is it time for the SI fraternity to wake up?

RULES OF ENGAGEMENT Sunil Mehta, SVP & area systems director-Central Asia at JWT, one of India’s premier advertising and communications agencies, observes that the chasm is generally in the domain expertise. “Vendors or system integrators do possess skills, but their domain service does not match ours. Even if they eventually figure out the business of the customer, it is not more than a plug

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n NEWS ANALYSIS and play situation from their end,” he says.

There are other opinions, including that going purely

by SLAs is not the solution. SLAs are a given, and the operational teams can execute these very well.

The disconnect is possibly in delivering value-adds which customers expect

from an system integrators’ top management.

“There is a very different level of engagement that has to come from the top. A visit to the client every six months from the CEO of the SI or service provider organization would go a long way in showing their commit-

ment. Why is it that they come running to the client only when they need business or when their targets are not being met?” asks Mehta.

A lack of preparation is another issue. According to CIOs, the amount of homework and ground work done by SIs is dis-

Indian SIs Haven’t Moved Beyond the Silo Transaction

Vijay Sethi, VP and CIO, Hero MotoCorp, gives refreshing and blunt insights into the widening gap between CIO and SI engagements.

Do you feel SIs need to engage more effectively with CIOs and that they ought to arrive at better engagement and delivery models? What, in your opinion, is going wrong? Transactions and relationships between the two parties are becoming difficult in many cases.

What is going wrong is a combination of processes and also the structure of many SI organizations.

There are silos and verticals within SIs. Each of these silos (groups or verticals) carry their revenue targets. It turns murky when a CIO gets embroiled in the internal silos between vendors, their partners, and then gets conflicting advice by teams within the same vendors or SI. Meeting individual revenue targets 16

often takes precedence over customer interests.

This leads to CIOs losing trust not just in individuals, but the SI itself. Till they reach out to the customer as one entity, nothing much can be achieved.

As a customer, I do not claim that I know everything. It’s the duty of the SI to give a neutral and fair opinion keeping my business processes in mind. However, the level of technical know-how among SI teams vary. Often, SIs just come up with a standard line, “We will get back to you.” Some SIs do not have the bandwidth to deliver services–so they put rookies on the job. The customer organization is a guinea pig for the learnon-the-fly approach. It is not a happy situation for us. There is huge attrition in the SI space which further compounds the issue, as that impacts both engagement and delivery.

The classic ice-breaker that the SI chose to ask us was “What ERP and CRM system do you use?”

Then, we were asked by many senior people about the structure of our organization and the health of our industry.

With homework and preparation levels so fundamentally flawed, and that too from an SI of repute, I needn’t say more.

Sometimes, a large team comes in, which is entirely the SI’s call, but the bottomline is, I have to see a tangible outcome.

The quality of inputs during a case study presentation isn’t always great. All that is given to us in the name of a business case is a run-of-the-mill presentation of a ROI, which is possibly not relevant to the Indian scenario.

There are times I feel that SIs think that CIOs are in awe of their brand and they can take us for granted.

Do you recall of any instance of an effort or a proactive approach taken by an SI in understanding your business process? To answer your question, I must narrate an incident.

Three months ago, a top SI came all the way from another city to our office.

What is the way forward to an equitable solution? I expect vendors and SIs to become our long-term partners and for that I expect each interaction to be a professional one.

It has to be a relationship based on trust.

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD M ARCH 2013

—Shantheri Mallaya

mal. More often than not, clients become a training ground SIs, thus shooting up the costs of the project and also adversely affecting the quality of output.

The Forrester report points out that SI teams, including account managers and consultants, usually focus more on promoting products and services; they have very little knowledge of what CIOs and client organizations are looking for and don’t care to learn. That’s a view CIOs share. (Read interview with Vijay Sethi, VP and CIO, Hero MotoCorp).

“The gap is largely due to SIs wanting to ride the hype curve without looking at the real business problems that CIO may be grappling with. This tends to alienate the SI from the CIO as the discussions are at different planes,” says Arun Gupta, CIO at pharma giant Cipla.

The fault doesn’t rest entirely with SIs, say some CIOs. “Vendors are also partly to blame. They must enable service providers and partners with training and leadership programs. That would really make the difference,” says Mehta at JWT. In his experience with technology vendors such as Microsoft, Apple, Adobe and Autodesk, Mehta says that their levels of engagement vary in terms of dependence too.

Vijay Mohan, country manager, Miti Solutions agrees. “It is not that we, as SI partners, do not have the requisite skill sets. In fact we may possess the inclination as well as the bandwidth. But there are times when there is absolutely no assistance forthcoming from the vendors’

for any new technology offering.” Miti is a partner to security vendors like Symantec and McAfee.

Mohan laments the fact that he is compelled to down sell to customers (sometimes recommended by vendors themselves) in a given situation when he does not get the know-how on new concepts such as security information and event management (SIEM).

According to Mohan, there is very little online or offline support from any vendor to date for SIEM as far as APAC goes.

He adds, “Ultimately, we are the face to the customer. If we are unable to suggest something or execute something, we may have to cut a sorry figure for no mistake of ours; that is inevitable.”

CONSULTANCY CHARGES In their defense, SIs say that customers need to be willing to pay for value-adds. In their book, consultancy, for instance, need to be recognized as a separate offering—and need to be paid for.

That’s a view that big tier-1 companies, as well as relatively smaller SIs share. “It would be prudent for a customer to break the engagement into two parts—one for consultancy and the other, for implementation. He has to pay up for the consultancy. How else does one get the deliverables?” says Srikant Rao, founder and CEO of Bangalore-based Affordable Business Solutions (ABS). ABS consistently insists to all its customers that consultancy services, as a separate component, needs validation and acceptance in order to make an engage-

The gap is due largely to system integrators wanting to ride the hype curve without looking at the real business problems that a CIO may be grappling with.”

ARUN GUPTA, CIO, CIPLA

It would be prudent for a customer to break the engagement into two parts—one for consultancy and the other, for implementation. He has to pay up for the consultancy. How else does one get the deliverables?”

SRIKANT RAO, FOUNDER & CEO, AFFORDABLE BUSINESS SOLUTIONS

Why is it that they [service providers] come running to the client only when they need business or when their targets are not being met?”

SUNIL MEHTA, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT AND AREA SYSTEMS DIRECTOR-CENTRAL ASIA, JWT

ment a very serious affair with tangible outcomes attached to it.

Gupta of Cipla says, “CIOs will be willing to pay a premium if the SI brings credible practice to the table, if they can connect with the issues of the enterprise and the industry. When SIs come with a menu card, you know there will be a compromise in the expertise level or the delivery.”

The last couple of years have witnessed a small shakedown of sorts in the SI space with the entry of global system integrators or GSIs. While the big four tier-1 SIs in India are GSIs in their own right, the presence of international

players in India is expected to change the standards of system integration.

“Customers can expect a value-added engagement with the entry of the GSI,” says Kumar Siddhartha, CEO, Greytrix, a Sage Software partner.

Forrester suggests that CIOs are also increasingly talking to strategic SIs and phasing out the nonstrategic ones from their discussions. Also, trends indicate that CIOs aspire to secure funds for initiatives through unrestrained budgets with the help of proactive SIs who will help build strong business cases.

Having said that, partnerships are a painstaking process. Gupta at

Cipla, observes in a blog, “Partnership is built over time and it’s a function of delivering to promise consistently across layers.

It takes effort to sustain it and requires investments and transparency from everyone. Everyone hates escalations which result due to lack of communication and assumptions.”

Gupta evidently knows what he is saying given his vast experience with thought leadership across roles in Shoppers Stop, Raheja Group and Philips Electronics. So, while the love-hate between the CIO and the system integrator continues, we will see interesting trends and solutions emerging. 

MARCH 2013

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products have stretched to a point where more re-engineering is not commercially viable.

We take into cognizance what they offer, and plug gaps through our Simpana architecture.”

ON RECORD n

Vikas Pradhan,

Country Director– India, CommVault, shares his unabashed take of the competition and the company’s India strategy.

By Yogesh Gupta

18

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD M ARCH 2013

How does CommVault stack up against the competition?

PRADHAN: Our Simpana platform competes with Symantec, IBM, HP, and EMC. As a new player, we consciously choose to fight these battles, and have been successful in displacing each one of our competitors from several enterprise accounts.

The four vendors have reasonably good products, and they were relevant to the ecosystem two decades ago. But there have been many changes in storage management, and the enterprise environment.

Earlier, issues like compliance were not as serious as the are today.

IM and e-mail were not a part of business communication few years ago. The competitions’

Why should customers choose Simpana over competing products?

PRADHAN: If an enterprise wants back up, archival (file or e-mail), de-duplication, or e-discovery, then they require five to six different storage products. In most scenarios, the products seldom talk to each other and there is a need for different admin heads (adding to overhead costs). CommVault took the bold decision of creating a single platform—Simpana— which contains individually licensable modules to analyze, replicate, protect, archive, and search data. The modules talk to one another effortlessly, making the platform an effective, organicallyintegrated data management solution.

Then there’s the fact that CIOs continue to spend on storage. Though it has become cheaper, it isn’t free. There’s a recurring cost associated with maintaining data as you need tools to execute de-dupe or archival to manage it. With Simpana, CIOs don’t have to worry about added costs associated with future storage growth. Today, when an enterprise’s back up window goes beyond 50 to 100 hours, CIOs want to compress data and get back up at the earliest. Therefore, CommVault becomes the automatic choice.

VIKAS PRADHAN | ON RECORD n What is the company’s sweet spot, from an enterprise size and vertical perspective?

PRADHAN: Our technology can operate across the stack, irrespective of the size of an enterprise.

However, the enterprise segment is our sweet spot as their pain points are much bigger due to the size of the data they manage. That said, we also have SME customers.

Simpana has a horizontal appeal, and we have had wins in the automotive, telecom, manufacturing, and healthcare verticals. For complex ERP scenarios, which are a reality in the financial and manufacturing verticals, we become relevant to

burner, but we will fuel it more next year.

What is your partner approach—and experience— been like?

PRADHAN: We have a 100 percent channel-driven model, and Inflow is our India distributor. We have OEM relationships with Dell and Hitachi, as they have, in a way, white labeled our products. We also work with large SIs like HCL, TCS, Wipro, and Infosys as they drive large government, PSU and private projects.

Till we came into play, tier-II partners were working with other storage vendors. Gradually, some of them cut back from selling competing

PRADHAN : The plan is not

to exceed 100 partners for India and Sri Lanka, as too many partners ends up commoditizing a product. The traditional IT consumption cities have expanded beyond the top nine to places like Nagpur, Pune, Nashik, Lucknow, and towns in Kerala and Orissa among others.

Hence, the roadmap is to have a geographic spread of partners.

Which revenue model is more popular with modern organizations: On-premise or the cloud?

PRADHAN: On-premise is popular as it follows traditional licensing according to infrastructure, servers, storage, etcetera.

model. We proactively introduced the MSP model few years ago when most competitors were far from doing so.

Fortunately, we have a technical edge over the competition in terms of how well the product works in a virtualized environment. We also have strong mobility solutions that work from desktops, laptops, and tablets to servers. CommVault puts together solution that works in the right manner at the customer end, across virtualized or mobile environments.

How do you intend to inculcate trust across the partner community and customers in India?

The competitions’ products have stretched to a point where more re-engineering is not commercially viable. We take into cognizance what they offer, and plug gaps through our Simpana architecture.” customers by providing a technology advantage.

Given the colossal amounts of data they produce, shouldn’t national and state e-Government projects be a focus area?

PRADHAN : We are consciously underplaying the government sector for now because sales cycles are too long. Those accounts require lot of effort, time and investment, and we do not have the bandwidth.

However, we do have wins in the space, including an elite set of organizations under CSIR (Council of Scientific and Industrial Research). We first need to build credibility and product visibility across the private segment. Right now government is on a slow

products or increased their engagement with us.

We are addressing this important community through our participation in various tech summits.

The most active vehicle is the tier-II channel. Last year, almost 70 percent of our Indian revenues were derived through this channel. To execute large a number of transactions and articulate value faster to customers, our dependency on tier-II channels is high. This route gives us a wide geographical reach, and the partners have long-term relationships with their top enterprise customers.

How many channel partners would suffice for a country like India?

The CLA (capacity license agreement) model introduced two years ago, priced by the size of data, is finding more acceptance. Customers choose a model depending on what makes business sense for them rather than what makes business sense to us.

The managed services provider (MSP) model has been our strength as RackSpace uses Simpana at the back end. MSPs charge a subscription to their customers and we charge MSPs. The consortium of HP partners—All Time IT Solutions—has CommVault as their storage partner. With the current drive towards the cloud, both SMBs and enterprises prefer the MSP

PRADHAN: We have three

teams in Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai. Each has a regional director, with sales executives supported by pre-sales persons. There is another team which is purely for tier-II channel partners, with sales and pre-sales executives.

We have a 300-plus team in the development center in Hyderabad, and have added another one in Bangalore. This gives customers confidence as many still believe in the ‘touch and feel’ approach. We also provide a technology roadmap to strategic customers. This demonstrates our commitment to the region, and that we are not a flyby-night operator. n

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n FAST TRACK

REVENUE GROWTH

Connectivity Solutions

Rscr11 cr Rs 28 Rs 9 Cr Rs 22 cr

Rs 12 cr

2009-10

2010-11

2011-12

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

SOURCE: CONNECTIVITY SOLUTIONS

Snapshot

C

ONNECTIVITY SOLUTIONS was set-up in

2003, a time when a large part of the Indian IT industry was recovering from the economic slowdown of the early 2000s, and was skeptical of new investments. But Narsimha Murthy, CEO of Connectivity Solutions, had a dream to make it big.

A business turnaround worked in its favor. Till then, Connectivity Solutions focused on renting business products. Murthy reworked the business model to include sales of Cisco products and providing networking solutions as key business segments.

The company’s change in approach, consequentially, led to the creation of a revamped team equipped with better technical competencies that included Cisco certifications. “The

Headquarters: Bangalore Founded: 2003

Revenue 2009-10: Rs 12 crore Revenue 2010-11: Rs 22 crore Revenue 2011-12: Rs 28 crore Key Principals: Cisco, HP, EMC, Tyco, Molex, NetApp Employees: 45 Key Business Activities: IT systems and network integration, server and storage computing Key Technologies: Structured cabling, datacenter, storage Website: www. connectivitysolutions.in transition helped us handle multiple client requirements with renewed confidence. In the last couple of years, we have successfully imple-

mented an internal workflow to ensure all our work is process-driven and not person-driven,” says Murthy.

This ISO 2001 certified SI has successfully managed to maintain a healthy growth rate. In the 10 months leading up to January 2013 it has already clocked Rs 34 crore— compared to the Rs 28 crore it made during the previous fiscal year.

“Our perseverance to build a large customer base, and repeat business has yielded results,” says Murthy. “It also moved our customer focus from small businesses to large corporates, especially in the telecom sector.”

The SI’s strong financial growth can also be attributed to its partnership with Cisco. A recent partnership with HP to deploy server-related solutions for a telecom giant has also helped. “Having multiple partnerships with market leaders in networking, servers, and storage has created more visibility for us and increased our customer base across India. Our relationship with these principals is extremely crucial in providing optimum solutions to our clients,” says Murthy.

Connectivity works in multiple verticals like telecom, BFSI, automobile, large SIs, IT/ITES, pharmaceutical and manufacturing.

Murthy plans to focus on executing a couple of major projects, along with expanding the company’s visibility across India by opening offices in new locations. n —Aritra Sarkhel

Our internal workflow is process-driven, not person-driven, says Narasimha Murthy, CEO, Connectivity Solutions.

20

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD M ARCH 2013

Dossier Name: Maxim Mitrokhin Designation: Director-Operations, Asia Pacific Company : Kaspersky Present Role: Since April 2008, Mitrokhin has been responsible for running the company’s operations in APAC. He joined Kaspersky in 2004 as regional manager responsible for providing KL China with backoffice and sales support.

Photograph by KAPIL SHROFF

Career Graph: Prior to Kaspersky, he worked for five years at APC as distribution account manager responsible for building relationships with all CIS distributors. Earlier, he was with the Russian computer assembling company, Compulink, as head of sales and marketing.

n THE GRILL

Maxim Mitrokhin,

Director-Operations, Kaspersky Lab, APAC, talks about the company’s aspirations for the Indian market.

Enterprise security is a crowded space with many well-entrenched vendors.

Don’r you think you’ve made a late entry?

We are definitely not late. Kapsersky started with a corporate (B2B) product. We sold much more in the B2B space in the early 2000’s. In 2005-06 we launched a good consumer product (KV and KS version 6) which boosted our B2C revenues. Our worldwide revenue split today is 70:30, in favor of B2C. In India, it stretches to 80:20. We

are not content with the B2B market share. Hence, the renewed focus on driving this segment.

How realistic is your GTM strategy in your bid to defeat companies like McAfee and Symantec? And, how soon will that happen? Despite the fact that we are comfortably placed in the B2C space, we never ignore the B2B market. We launched EP8 last October. It’s difficult to win the hearts of big corpora-

tions that have been working with other dominant vendors for a long time. We had to introduce something different.

‘Kaspersky Endpoint Security for Business’ is a breakthrough product with a revolutionary ‘One Platform, One Console, One Price’ approach.

The ‘One Platform’ concept has been talked about by the likes of McAfee for many years. I would not like to compare it with the others. The biggest challenge today that IT managers face is the complexity that stems from security solutions across different platforms. Previously, only malware was a major threat. Today, about 75 percent of cyber attacks happen due to vulnerabilities in third-party applications. Software companies constantly release updates and patches which makes prioritization difficult for IT administrators. Also, the proliferation of laptops and smartphones at work underscores the need for MDM. Addressing all these threats means that there is a need for four different consoles and corresponding policies.

There are tools in the market but they are all separate. To reduce this complexity, we introduced a single platform with one console. Many security vendors claim to offer one platform, but it is often built through some acMARCH 2013

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n THE GRILL | MAXIM MITROKHIN and protect all systems and endpoints in the network.

Our set of services is divided into four categories: Core is the foundation of workstation anti-malware protection and firewall. Select includes workstation and file server security, app control with dynamic whitelisting, device and Web control, and MDM. Advanced has features of Select, and also includes encryption and systems management tools. And Total has additional protection with the inclusion of infrastructurelevel protection for Web, mail, and collaboration servers.

Many vendors claim to offer one platform, but it’s often built through some acquisition. Our platform uses our own IP—it’s our biggest differentiator.

quisition. The ‘Endpoint Security for Business’ platform is our own IP—it is our biggest differentiator.

How does the ‘One Price’ solution work with respect to new-age security threats and limited IT budgets? IT managers buy security solutions from different vendors intermittently. But they need to convince their managements, and get budget approvals each time. The enterprise can buy our entire product with a one time budget approval. It also allows IT admins to see, control, 22

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD M ARCH 2013

Indian CIOs generally think of Kaspersky as a consumer brand. How do you intend to correct that perception? It isn’t the right perception. We have big organizations as our customers who consider us to be a serious enterprise player. We are shifting from being purely distributorfocused to working closely with tier-2 channels. Last year, through our Green Team Partner program, we doubled the base of registered resellers. We are investing resources to educate partners on sales and technical support. Through Kaspersky Engineers club, partners can provide good support to end-customers.

Hardware-centric vendors like Cisco, Juniper, niche security companies like Checkpoint, Websense, and some UTM vendors eat into the security software market.

Comment. We already have OEM agreements with some of the companies that you mentioned. Our claim of having world’s biggest installation base takes these partnerships into account too.

Everyone can have their share of the enterprise pie as security market is growing at a good pace.

Is the hardware appliances market something Kaspersky is interested in? In the past, and now, we have strong partnerships with established vendors. Losing focus on your core business can erode market share. We are not excluding the possibility of entering the hardware market in the future. Right now, software is our focus.

Customer loyalty is a big challenge for security vendors, isn’t it? Both replacement market and greenfield projects are crucial. Every project which is not a renewal of another security vendor becomes a potential green project for us.

Education and government are favorite verticals globally. We also have good wins across manufacturing, IT/ITES, and BFSI in India.

The cloud has not been a roller coaster ride in India. Traditional vendors are struggling against niche MDM vendors like MobileIron. What is your cloud and mobility story? The cloud option is in-built in our product. Some concepts appear to move fast but the actual adoption takes time.

For corporates, information is everything. They want to keep it close. Our customers, presently, are more comfortable with the on-premise model.

MDM is part of the new product, supporting various mobility platforms. The solution has a unique containerization feature, wherein one can store data in an encrypted form in separate folders.

How are you fueling your partner ecosystem in India? Our distributors for the enterprise business in India are Sea Infonet, Ecaps, Techmatrix and iValue.

We are not attacking the large enterprises as it becomes difficult for the CIO to part with one vendor and try a new one. Nevertheless, it will take time to dominate that segment.

Our potential customer-base would be mid-size organizations with 100 to 1500 users. The focus is on channels in tier-2 cities as we cater to partners in more than 56 locations in India, enabled by distributors and different teams (sales, pre-sales, and technical staff).

Why should an enterprise partner sell Kaspersky and not competing brands?

We are well known for our antimalware solutions. We introduced effective solutions around virtualization last year, and recently ‘End Point Security for Business’ for enterprises.

Resellers know how to solve the customer problems with the best available solution in their portfolio. We do not see shortage of attention from partners pitching our solutions appropriately across enterprises.  —Yogesh Gupta

AARON RALSTON severed his arm to free himself from a boulder that had pinned him down for five days and eight hours during a hiking accident, and lived to tell the tale.

FRIDAY, 3 MAY, 2013 HYATT REGENCY, MUMBAI

HOW BOLD BOLD means taking hard decisions It is really tough to let go of things one gets attached to, be it in life, or business.

ChannelWorld Premier 100 Awards will recognize IT channel partners who have taken hard decisions to stay afloat or grow their business. If you have had to bite the bullet in an endeavor to keep going, we are looking for you!

Join The BOLD 100. Nominate yourself at www.premier100.in

Event by

Hosted by

HOTLINE FEATURE

Automating Surveillance ASV, a new feature on some of D-Link’s switches, promises effortless IP surveillance deployment.

F

acility management, security, and IT personnel increasingly face a difficult choice when upgrading or deploying a modern surveillance system.

No longer are standard analog camera systems sufficient for professional security applications. IP surveillance systems have permanently altered the landscape by introducing multiple features that cement their superiority over legacy analog CCTV systems.

network,” says Sanjay Sehgal, VP-Enterprise and Project Business, D-Link (India).

Challenges Traditionally, adding a new IP surveillance system to existing network infrastructure has been daunting. The configuration tasks alone require many man-hours; this, apart from the time spent studying and configuring network switch settings. To set up an IP surveillance network manually

negatively affected during periods of traffic congestion. On networks with already heavy traffic loads, the approach has often been to create a separate IP network infrastructure explicitly dedicated to surveillance traffic. This approach, however, is expensive because of the need for additional hardware and cabling, along with the increase in operational and maintenance costs.

With new breakthrough technologies, many of

ASV ensures that surveillance traffic can continue to stream video smoothly and reliably, even during periods of heavy data traffic or disruptions.

Sanjay Sehgal, VP-Enterprise and Project Business, D-Link (India)

“In the past, an upgrade to the IP surveillance infrastructure might have resulted in increased hardware and energy costs, along with the added operational clutter of electrical and network cabling. However, innovative zero-configuration solutions combined with quality of service (QoS) and security features have all but eliminated these concerns, and simplified the process of deploying a reliable and secure IP surveillance

requires administrators to first create a virtual local area network (VLAN) for surveillance traffic. They must then determine the IP address for each network camera, and manually configure the camera to add it to the VLAN. In addition to these complex configuration tasks, administrators must also monitor and manage network traffic to ensure that video feeds from surveillance systems are not

the tiresome and tedious tasks involved in setting up or upgrading a network for surveillance can now be accomplished without hassle. Auto Surveillance VLAN (ASV), a feature found in select network switches from D-Link, is one such technology. Switches supporting ASV enhance existing infrastructure by automatically segmenting surveillance data from

general data. This results in an optimized hybrid network that is quick and easy to deploy, while capable of handling both data and surveillance traffic.

“ASV automatically detects attached surveillance equipment and intelligently segments surveillance traffic and gives it high priority by following QoS standards. In this way, surveillance traffic can continue to stream video smoothly and reliably, even during periods of heavy data traffic or disruptions caused by malicious viruses, worms and other threats,” says Sehgal.

Make the Right Choice Choosing an IP surveillance vendor can be challenging.

An ideal surveillance solution combines cameras, switches, storage, and software to form a fully integrated system.

D-Link has consistently proven itself capable of designing and delivering solutions addressing the varied aspects of networking and surveillance. D-Link’s Auto Surveillance VLAN feature was developed specifically to address the unique challenges businesses face when tackling IP surveillance. Whether it is for an analog conversion project, or to build IP surveillance capabilities into existing network infrastructure, ASV offers substantial time and cost savings.

CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP

PRODUCT SHOWCASE

DCS-6010L PARTNER PROFILE

A Partnership Based on Trust Ayan Mitra, Marketing Head, Omnitech InfoSolutions, reveals how the company has grown by engaging with D-Link.

DCS-6010L is a mydlink-enabled IP surveillance camera with the following features:

How has your experience of partnering with D-Link been over the years?

MITRA: We go to customers with a vendor-neutral platform. Offering best-ofbreed solutions at competitive cost points is a mandate for us. So, while we do not have any intentional preference towards any brand as such, we do believe that our relationship with D-Link is a trusted one which we intend to carry forward.

2 Megapixel Resolution Sensor

How has this association improved business?

MITRA: Being associated with D-Link for some years now, we understand that they have some interesting new technologies that can be

one another to achieve objectives. This is an end-to-end engagement not just from a product sales perspective, but also holistically.

showcased to the customer.

D-Link helps us engage with the customer not just from a sales or a marketing standpoint, but also from a technology solutions stand-point.

Our respective technology teams also work closely with

What do you believe is the way forward?

MITRA: Customers place trust in solution providers with the belief that we will give them a fair and neutral opinion. We cannot afford to belie the faith reposed in us. We are working in times when CIOs have high expectations.It is vital that technology providers such as D-Link and solution providers such as Omnitech innovate constantly to deliver the very best to the clientele.

D-Link has announced an exciting offer for partners through its Rewardz Club.

All that partners are required to do is garner maximum points by purchasing different D-Link products and win exciting gifts. The scheme is applicable to all national and local system integrators for purchases made through D-Link’s national and local business distributors.

This promotional activity has been thrown open till March 31, 2013.

Fisheye Camera

With a wide-angle field of view, the DCS6010L is able to capture 180-degree panoramic or 360-degree surround views without blind spots, effectively reducing the need for other cameras as well as physical maintenance.

Cloud Service-mydlink

The convenient mydlink zero-configuration setup gets you up and running in no time.

The service support can remote monitor your home or office over the Internet.

DGS-6600

D-Link’s DGS-6600 series chassis-based switches has the following features:

NEWS UPDATE

D-Link ‘Rewardz Club’ Offer for Partners

2 Megapixel 1600x1200 high-resolution image sensors ensure that you capture the details you need.

The scheme is applicable to the following D-Link products: DAP-2360 DES-1210-28 DES-1210-52 DWL-3200AP DES-1228ME DGS-1210-28

DES- 1210-08P DES-1210-28P DGS-1210- 52 DGS-1500-28 DGS-1210-28P DGS-1500-28P

Here are some of the gifts on offer: 42” 3D LED TV Tag Heuer watch iPhone 5 Samsung Galaxy Note 2

iPad 2 Bose headphones Samsonite travel bag Backpack

For details, contact: +91 22 2921 5705 E-mail: sales@dlink.co.in or log on to: dpartner.dlink-intl.com

Flexible Modular Design

The DGS-6600 series has a modular architecture that allows modules to be added gradually to meet network growth, and it can be easily swapped at anytime to fit network requirement changes.

Complete IPv6 Support

It addresses the requirements of emerging applications such as Internetenabled wireless devices, home and industrial appliances, Internet-connected transportation, integrated telephony services, and sensor networks.

Enterprise-wide Security The DGS-6600 series provides not only network access security but also protection against internal and external attacks. Access security is provided through comprehensive policy-based ACL, port security, IP-MAC-Port binding features, and Defeat IP Scan.

“Almost half a percent of our top line is allocated for online marketing activities.”

MARAN NAGARAJAN, CEO, KAAR TECHNOLOGIES

26

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COVER STORY n

Channel partners don’t effectively leverage the Web to raise their company’s profiles and drive business.

Here’s how to do it right.

By Aritra Sarkhel

I

T’S A whole new world out there and the

Web’s become the first port of call for customers looking for partners to give their business to. But how would you know? The sad truth is that most channel partners—bogged down by the daily grind— don’t really leverage the Web to raise their company’s profiles—and drive sales.

Channel partners who decide not to make the time to explore and leverage the Internet to grab more of their clients’ mindshare, have to be willing to pay a very real price. This can come in the form of lower brand recall, untapped opportunities, and less accurate leads—and the price associated with chasing them.

“It’s very critical for SI’s to have a positive image of their brand online or risk customers not considering them,” says Jagdeep Kapoor, CMD, Samsika Marketing Consultants, whose

client list includes names like Godrej, Kotak Mahindra, Aditya Birla Group, and D’damas.

The benefits of using the Web exist say analysts. “Today, online tools can help establish a partner organization’s knowledge credentials and market it to a much wider audience,” says Neha Jalan, senior associate at AMI-Partners, who believes the medium in under utilized by the partner community in India.

The good news is that there is a growing number of enterprise channel partners who realize what they are missing out on. One of them is K.V. Jagannath, MD and CEO of Hyderabad-based Choice Solutions. “The Web—and the wide repertoire of things it encompasses—is a powerful tool. I admit it’s been a weak area for us, but we are consolidating our work in this area. We plan to work on this ASAP because we’ve realized MARCH 2013

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n COVER STORY “We send newsletters containing information on new technologies, whitepapers, or links to case studies once every quarter.”

DEEPAK JADHAV, DIRECTOR, VDA INFOSOLUTIONS

the importance of online marketing campaigns,” he says.

Ayan Mitra, AVP marketing at Mumbai-based Omnitech InfoSolutions is another convert.

“The time has come. Our entire general marketing activities will be wholeheartedly focussed online.

It’s imperative that we reach our external stakeholders, and prospective customers, through different online tools and target them for our promotional activities,” he says.

There are other channel partners who have wised up to the potential of Web-based marketing earlier on. Take the case of Chennai-based Kaar Technologies, which under the leadership of CEO Maran Nagarajan has already put in a place a strategy to leverage the Web and all its marketing tools. Key pillars of that strategy include a budget 28

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of Rs 50 lakh—aimed solely at its online marketing activities for 2013—and a team of four dedicated to online promotions and associated tasks.

“Our organization has already gone through the evolution cycle. All these years, we have tried and tested various online tools and have focussed on what suits the organization. Almost half a percent of our top line is allocated for online marketing activities,” says Nagarajan.

Folks like Nagarajan say they have already begun to see the value of using the Web to sell their brands more intelligently. Omnitech InfoSolutions, for instance, increased the response rate to its marketing activities when it moved to new-age online promotions. Where its earlier, non-Web-based marketing campaigns resulted in a 1 percent response rate, its online ones gets it 12 percent.

For those who haven’t got onboard with the idea of Web-based marketing, it’s not too late. Channel partners like Nagarajan and Mitra offer five ways to maximize your chances.

GO VIDEO Consider the facts: 70 percent of B2B marketing done in 2012 used video— up from 52 percent in 2011. And over the next five years, a third of all online advertising spend will go into online video production, says Borrell Associates’, a research and consulting firm.

You get the picture: Video is big and it’s only going to get bigger.

Yet, there are many channel partners who don’t see it that way and haven’t bought wholeheartedly into video. “There is a lot of buzz around this,” says Ravi Verdes, MD, Frontier Business Systems, “and we might see

such things happening in the next financial year. But we are still in a trialand-error phase where we are trying to find out the best options for us.”

Others have grabbed the opportunity with both hands. At Kaar Technologies, Nagarajan has plenty of video plans already lined up. “We have already identified about 50 promotional activities we want to use videos for in 2014,” he says.

Much of Nagarajan’s enthusiasm stems from the real benefits Kaar Technologies has seen from using the medium. The company has had great success using video, especially among its clients in the Middle East. “We have done video promotions for SAP events directed at our customer base in the Middle East. And it’s helped create enormous visibility for our organization,” says Nagarajan.

One of the most important benefits of using video is its ability to allow customers to grasp key messaging much faster than any presentation. You know that thing they say about a picture being equal to a thousand words?

Video takes that idea to the next level.

Then partly because of its novelty value and partly because of the use of dynamic visuals, videos help create longer brand recall value in the mind of prospective customers, say channel partners. “Video promotions help build a perception about us for a longer period in the customer’s mind,” says Nagarajan.

Say what you might about branding, but over the long term it adds new accounts. That’s what Gaurav Mathur, MD and CEO at Filix Consulting believes video can do for channel partners. “Having an online video presence is not just for customer interaction; it also builds an overall brand and Web presence. It also helps gain prospective customers,” he says.

With that potential benefit, however, comes a real-world challenge. If your video is going to be the first point of reference for potential clients, then it’s important that it reflects the sophistication of your brand and your messaging. If your sales people make a pitch in a suit, then you’re videos better be just as dressed up.

That’s where the challenge of production values comes in. The inability to create good video is one of the rea-

sons channel partners say they stay away from it in the first place. Producing corporate videos requires developing a story board, having a script, adding animation, checking the quality of your sound, and having fairly slick post-production values.

“If promotional content is not articulate, potential customer could give it a miss,” says Kapoor.

“You need expertise to create industry standard videos and while internal staff can take care of certain things, it’s difficult for them to churn our professional video services,” says Nagarajan.

To get around that challenge, Nagarajan’s outfit outsources its video needs to a specialized agency. “The primary reason is that they produce industrystandard video and bring a certain as-

surance of quality to the table, which our internal team can’t be expected to furnish,” says Nagarajan.

Mathur from Filix Consulting, too, has adopted a similar approach. “The videos we promote require a professional agency because as a team we are not well-versed with the technicalities of these things and industrystandard camera work requires professionals,” he says.

Others like Allied Digital, however, have found a way to spin out videos using internal staff. “We have an inhouse team that shoots and produces videos, which makes the cost relatively lower,” says Dhara Shah, marketing manager, Allied Digital.

An added benefits of not outsourcing, says Shah, is speed of turnaround

Smart Ways to Make an Online Sale Having a great app or service doesn’t guarantee success. How do you get your software or digital offering in front of buyers? SaaS, traditional software sales and marketing pros share their suggestions for how you can improve your chances of making an online sale.

Use a reliable cloud hosting service: Why spend time and money on building and maintaining your infrastructure when you can host in the cloud? “In just a few hours, a hosting provider can provision dedicated servers and cloud servers for you, and your business will be up and running with limited cost and risk,” says Emil Sayegh, the CEO and president of Codero Hosting, a provider of dedicated, managed and cloud hosting services.

Offer a free trial. If you are “a small, unknown company, you need to provide something to help potential customers see that your product is not a scam, and it will work for them,” says Kelly Wilkerson, cofounder, Decipher Media. Testimonials help. Software safety badges help. But nothing helps as much as a free trial.

Consider a freemium model. “Another option is to offer freemium versions of your software—free access to basic features with the option to access premium features for an up-

grade cost,” says Michelle Nerlinger, director, Marketing, SafeNet, a data protection provider.

Include a video of how your product works. “Animation is great for a simple product breakdown, and a video of employees can give a human side to a technical service folks might not understand. It works great for us and engagement is high!” says Alex Capehart, vice president, Strategic Accounts, Media Temple.

Solicit independent third-party reviews. “Encouraging your customers to tell their story of why they selected your product and how it meets their challenge is the best way to get your message out and sell your product. You can capture these stories in case studies, an interactive online forum or blog postings.” says Jennifer Borun, senior marketing director, GoingOn Networks, Offer a money-back guarantee.

“Studies have shown that a trusted and well-presented money back guarantee can actually increase sales by up to 40 percent,” says Stephen Dodd, CEO of OfficeTime.net, a developer of time tracking software.

Use metrics. By regularly checking metrics, you know what’s working and what’s not and can adjust your campaigns and minimize losses.

—Jennifer Lonoff Schiff MARCH 2013

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n COVER STORY time. “The pre- and post-production of professional video services requires a lot of time; we normally need videos much quicker,” he says.

As tough as it may seem to create video, it certainly has its upsides. Take this one for example: Because videos are so much easier to digest than whitepapers, case studies or brochures, they increase the chances that a potential client checking up on a channel partner’s offerings and solutions portfolio before an actual physical meeting.

That, in turn, ensure that channel partners are getting their hands on more serious leads. Having video, in effect, can sift out false sales leads.

Using video has worked well for Mumbai-based Allied Digital. When the company received complaints from its customers that they weren’t aware of the breadth of Allied Digital’s portfolio of solutions, the SI decided to do something about it—using video.

“We made our customers aware of our

testimonials from customers talking about an SI’s project capabilities, for instance, can go a long way in ensuring you make it on to a CIO’s shortlist, as they scan dozens of other companies.

That’s what VDA Infosolutions has learnt. After the system integrator implemented V Blocks for a customer a couple of years ago, it ensured that it got customer testimonials on video and promoted it.

“We got a lot of enquiries from other customers regarding the cloud and V Blocks,” says Deepak Jadhav, director, VDA Infosolutions. “This major project got us a lot more deals from other new clients. We got good business value and added mileage to our brand,” he says.

For that project, VDA Infosolutions only got customer feedback post the project. But it helps, as the company learnt later on, to get the customer in front of a camera even before a project has started because it lends a sense of before and after.

dia sites get a large number of footfalls.

We have individuals who visit our pages regularly and take interest in the videos we promote there,” says Shah.

Video links can also be carried on an OEM’s site, just like VDA Infosolutions did. The company promoted some of its videos on an OEM’s site, its own homepage, and on the customer’s site. “It’s a three-way promotion which gives us added mileage and raises our brand image,” says Jadhav.

CREATE A MICROSITE Microsites aren’t new but they are relatively popular. A microsite (also called a minisite) is like a website within a website. A channel partner, for instance, could have a microsite of one of its principles on its website. Microsites are also great for short promotions, in which the microsite looks like a separate website, complete with its own URL and navigation bar.

Allied Digital is currently working

“It’s very critical for SI’s to have a positive image of their brand online or risk customers not considering them.”

JAGDEEP KAPOOR, CMD, SAMSIKA MARKETING CONSULTANTS.

strengths’ through videos. So now, even before our sales people meet prospective clients in person, they are already aware of our offerings through video customer testimonials’,” says Shah.

For channel partners who want to test the video waters, it helps to know that there are multiple content types that are possible to convey with video. These include case studies, testimonials, and videos that promote a channel partner’s products, solutions and capabilities.

Some, like video cases studies are harder to do, and the trick it to match what you want to get out of a video before you invest the time and money.

That applies pretty much for anything you decide to do online. “No matter what you do online, it’s important to understand what you’re doing and why you’re using a particular tool to promote yourself and what you intend to get out of it,” says Jalan at AMI-Partners.

For those starting out on video, among the easier content types to produce are video testimonials. Positive 30

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Immaterial of the type of video a system integrator decides to create, they all need to take care of a couple of important aspects. First, the length of any promotional video should not be more than two minutes. “Our target is 90 to 120 seconds,” says Nagrajan.

“This allows the audience to grasp the content without spending too much time on a video.”

Another best practice is to upload videos on a variety of sites including Youtube and Vimeo. “You have to be present where people expect you to be present. If a prospective employee or customer searches for us on Youtube and we’re not there—but our competitors are—we lose out,” says Mathur from Filix.

Finally, a well-produced video with quality content is of no use if it’s not equally well promoted. First, channel partners need to get those video links uploaded on their homepages. A good second step is to go down the social media route and promote videos on Facebook and LinkedIn. “Social me-

on a microsite with an OEM and plans to showcase the principal’s products and Allied’s solutions together. “We are jointly going to deliver the solution to the client and so we are promoting this objective together. We will promote the microsite using targeted e-mail campaigns and EDM’s, which will contain information and a link re-directing the customer to the microsite,” says Shah from Allied.

Allied Digital reports that it has been able to generate a lot of leads through such promotions and uses a dedicated internal team to create its microsites.

A microsite can be a single page, or multiple pages with add-ons including flash-based promotions or links to other case studies and whitepapers. Microsites generally fall into three types: The system integrator themselves build it using their own man power and investments. The other type deals with microsites built in joint collaboration with vendor and an SI. The third type of microsite is built in joint association between an outsourcing

SPECIAL REPORT n agency which handles the technical part of the sites’ design and the SI who provides the content.

Mumbai-based InfrasoftTech, too, had used microsites to promote wealth management solutions differently. It also used microsites successfully to market its move from a product company to a services-based organization. (Each new service it offered had its own microsite.) “We used our own money and without making physical contact with so many prospective customers, we were able to generate a lot of leads irrespective of location,” says Hanuman Tripathi, group MD, InfrasoftTech.

USE BLOGS Blogging and marketing is more or less the same thing. Both are required to circulate information to an audience. Channel partners in India have used this medium frequently—often ranging from twice a week to once a month. Omnitech InfoSolutions uses blogs to share information with employees. “We send out links to blogs twice or thrice a week to our database.

It generally contains information about the organization’s activities or news related to technologies we deal with,” says Mitra.

Blogs are mostly focussed on the client and market requirements. The belief is that original content in blogs increases brand awareness, improves SEO, enhances engagement with existing and potential clients, and referral partners. “Blogs are a way of establishing one’s professional credibility and allows value addition to my subscribers,” he says.

But all said and done, the flavour of each blog irrespective of its frequency has to be appealing to the targeted audience.

NEWSLETTERS AND EDMs Both newsletters and targeted electronic direct mailers (EDMs) are cost-effective options which SIs use extensively. The use of these tools is simple, but it’s important to promote the right content to the right customer base, says Kapoor. For the most part, they are used to promote customer case studies, events, and whitepapers.

While newsletters are only sent upto

“Having an online video presence is not just for customer interaction; it also aids build an overall brand and Web presence.”

GAURAV MATHUR, MD AND CEO, FILIX CONSULTING

three times a month, targeted mailers are shot out twice a week on average.

The success rate of targeted EDMs is far higher than mass mailers. Mass mailers are sent to an entire database, irrespective of geography and vertical,

but as has been observed, it is often ignored by the targeted audience.

“Other e-mail marketing campaigns tanked and hardly generated a percentage response. But when we sent targeted EDMs and mailers to a select audiMARCH 2013

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n COVER STORY “We used our own money [to build microsites] and without making physical contact with prospective customers, we were able to generate a lot of leads irrespective of location.”

HANUMAN TRIPATHI, GROUP MD, INFRASOFTTECH

ence, we saw good response at around 12 percent, which is huge for event marketing,” says Mitra at Omnitech.

It’s important to break down your database by geography, vertical, and technology before sending out newsletters and EDMs. “We send newsletters which contain information on new technologies, white papers, or links to case studies only once every quarter. It’s worth the exercise,” says Jadhav at VDA Infosolutions.

They’d be better served if they ensure greater frequency. That’s according to Kapoor at Samsika Marketing Consultants. “System integrators should choose a tool they can competently manage so that they can update it regularly. It’s important for SIs to make interactions a regular phenomenon,” he says.

TRY OUT SOCIAL MEDIA Social media is a much abused word.

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Over the past couple of years channel partners have not done much in this arena except for ensuring a basic presence on sites like Facebook and LinkedIn. SIs use their pages to promote microsite-related links, case studies available on their websites, and videos from Youtube. For many, it remains a trial-and-error proposition.

Many organizations are attempting to adapt social media into their business sensibilities by extracting suitable bits from their popular personal-networking avatar. “We have experimented with these media, but the next financial year will see us using it in a comprehensive manner.

We will try and execute more campaigns on LinkedIn, and hope to get more leads and clients from it,” says Verdes at Frontier Business Systems.

SIs can create a group or commu-

nity through which they can build their brand image on the platform or airbrush an existing image. It’s also a cost-effective way to remain in the limelight unless one is willing to pay for ads or profiles to reach out to a select audience. Shah from Allied re-asserts the importance of paid ads.“In terms of leads, if we have a paid page on LinkedIn, we can get more business deals. We need to scale up our LinkedIn account with banner or display ads on the homepage of the company’s LinkedIn account.”

It is evident that narrowing down the tools to just a few will not help an organization. Success can be achieved only by utilizing a dedicated combination of tools and platforms that can widen their corridor of reach. n

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Photograph by KAPIL SHROFF

Vasant Bhanushali (L), Director, Crystal Solutions, offered a cost-effective solution to Sunil Nair, Manager-IT, Walplast.

OPEN TRUST Mumbai-based Crystal Solutions helps Walplast save a ton on cost with a scalable open source implementation.

By Yogesh Gupta

I

the largest manufacturers of wall putty in India, but Maharashtra-based Walplast wasn’t going to rest until it consolidated its business and expand operations to South and Central India.

But a geographic expansion meant increased production and more product lines. And that meant incurring a massive renewal cost on its IT architecture. Also, for an SME like Walplast, which runs on a relatively small budget, a need to execute the

34

T’S ONE of

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD M ARCH 2013

project immediate would create a large amount of pressure on its IT team.

CRACKS APPEAR “License management was confusing, and an overall Microsoft management takes time. The main issue was the renewal cost that we would incur on the operating system and MS Office for hundreds of PCs across our offices,” says Sunil Nair, manager-IT, Walplast.

“With expansion plans scheduled,” he says, “the management wanted

to look at options to bring down investment costs. We wanted to cut cost, yet, not lag behind on technology.”

A tall order.

Crystal Solutions had deployed a UTM/firewall solution for Walplast a few years ago. And, in September last year, during a routine sales visit, the team sensed that Walplast’s management was facing problems with Microsoft’s licenses. “The huge cost of licensing desktops was a cause for concern for the management,” says Vasant Bhanushali, director, Crystal Solutions.

The company wanted to continue adopting technology, but were unable to find an alternative to the licensing issue, says Bhanushali. Crystal Solutions presented an open source

CASE STUDY  alternative that would save Walplast plenty in licensing costs. “We suggested CentOS Linux .The plan was to migrate the OS, and then install open office on them,” says Bhanushali.

“Our management and two or three big vendors using open source thought about this option. In fact, I too was looking at an open source solution,” says Nair.

The discussion went on for a month. In November last year, Crystal Solutions was given the goahead for its suggested combination of Centos and Propalms.

“The primary reason for an open source platform, apart from savings is that it can accommodate a number of applications [critical and noncritical] on it,” says Nair.

Walplast was initially apprehensive as Crystal did not have a previous implemetation in India. “We have worked on CentOS and Propalms, but on different projects. They put their trust in our technical expertise,” says Santosh Dolas, senior technical consultant of Crystal Solutions.

Snapshot Key Parties: Walplast, Crystal Solutions

Location: Navi Mumbai Project Cost: About Rs 12 lakh Implementation Time: One month Main Vendors: CentOS , Propalms Key People Involved: Sunil Nair, Manager–IT, Walplast; Vasant Bhanushali, Director, Crystal Solutions; Santosh Dolas, Senior Technical Consultant, Crystal Solutions Key Technologies: Migration from proprietary to an open source architecture, VDI, integration of virtual desktops and enterprise applications

Post Implementation ROI: Huge savings on licensing costs, scalable and virtual IT infrastructure, secure architecture

THE RIGHT MIX Walplast tested all open source desktop applications including Ubuntu and Fedora to check which suited their environment best. They decided to use CentOS as it was a server-class desktop client which was more stable than Ubuntu and Fedora.

“It was slightly challenging as Propalms had some issues with licensing limitations. But their team helped us resolve it,” says Dolas.

Walplast had been using SAP Business One ERP and was concerned about the applications which needed to be virtualized.

Rather than using Citrix for VDI, Crystal suggested a more economical option of using Propalms.

“The SAP team suggested Citrix too, as the two were compatible.

However, the Citrix option was too expensive and we decided shelve that plan. With Propalms, not only was the price a winning factor but the solution too was at par with Citrix,” says Nair. Although there were teething troubles like application portability, they managed to surmount the challenge.

It took almost a month for Crystal to migrate from proprietary to open source and then virtualize the SAP applications. “Although we were well versed with CentOS, we did not have much knowledge about SAP. The team at Walplast knew the nuances and helped us,” says Dolas.

The initial migration at Walplast was done across 100 systems mainly at the company’s corporate office in Navi Mumbai, says Bhanushali.

Today, they have done much more.

“We have shifted half of the systems in the head office and all factory systems to open source,” says Nair.

THE PERFECT SOLUTION A Microsoft renewal would have cost Walplast almost Rs 25,000 per machine. “For 100 machines that would be a mammoth investment for a SME like us,” says Nair.

According to him, the migration from the existing technology to a new one saved them from incurring huge costs on the licensing front.

Also, Propalms vis-à-vis Citrix is

almost 40 percent less expensive, which saved Walplast an additional Rs 8 lakh.

Bhanushali adds that he sensed the opportunity of becoming a reliable consultant for a fast-growing company like Walplast.

“Crystal, as a consultant, had good knowledge of the solution, which was quite compelling. I was not aware of Propalms until they introduced it to us,” says Nair.

“CentOS and Propalms was a winning combination from their point of view as it saved them almost Rs 30 lakh against what other existing vendors were providing,” says Bhanushali.

BUILT FOR THE FUTURE Walplast will run these 100-odd PCs (with migrated infrastructure) for another quarter before deciding on the next set of machines that are to be sent down the open source route.

The company is expected to close at about Rs 375 crore this fiscal.

“Huge savings is the biggest benefit from the project,” says Nair. “From a security aspect, Linux is quite secure and is a robust platform.

There was no need to install an anti-virus after the migration from proprietary architecture.”

“We suggested a viable solution, and they believed in us, and gave us an opportunity to prove our worth,” says Bhanushali.

As Linux is a relatively light software and is compatible with old systems, it has allowed Walplast to utilize its old desktops and avoid a hardware recycle.

Nair is expecting more support with the latest version of SAP open source.

“I will then shift a major part of the system to open source, which will include critical applications too,” he says.

Crystal Solutions added virtualization later. They sensed that after moving to open source, Walplast would need to extract the benefits of virtualization as it grew in terms of operations and locations.

“Apart from the value addition to their IT architecture from this project, the management at Walplast will be able to show savings on IT this fiscal,” says Bhanushali.  MARCH 2013

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n FAST TRACK

Cygnus Information Solutions

VERTICAL SPLIT 40%

Government/ PSU

60%

SMB and Corporate

P H OTO by FOTO C O R P

SOURCE: CYGNUS INFORMATION SOLUTIONS

Snapshot Sumit Srivastava (L), Managing Director and Rajesh Mishra, Director-Marketing

F

Founded: 2000 Headquarters: Mumbai Revenue 2010-11: Rs 10 crore Revenue 2011-12: Rs 11 crore

OR MUMBAI-BASED Cygnus

Information Solutions, 2009 brought about a turnaround. Not only did it outline an aggressive expansion plan, it also came up with a strategy to leverage its experience and its existing partnerships. The result? A more than five-fold jump in top lines and improved profits.

A decade-worth of experience of working with the government sector, coupled with a strategic partnership with Dell facilitated this exceptional growth. Today, the SI is a preferred implementation partner for many government departments, based on Dell’s Directorate General of Supplies and Disposals (DGS&D) rate

Revenue 2012-13 (expected): Rs 15 crore Key Executives: Rajesh Mishra, Director-Marketing; Sushant Dixit, Director-Finance Key Principals: Dell, HP, Acer, Microsoft, Oracle, APC Key Technologies: Servers, storage, networking, security Website: www.cygnussolutions.co.in contracts. In the process of promoting only Dell solutions to its customers, Cygnus has ensured constant business for its key principal. Its clientele includes public sector behemoths like Indian railways, Indian Oil Corpora-

tion, ONGC, and the Shipping Corporation of India among others.

Sumit Srivastava, MD of Cygnus believes that part of this successful relationship with Dell is due to its strong background in the government sector. Government has always been a prime focus for Cygnus right from its inception in 2000.

“Our experience has proven that the government is a completely relationship-driven business. We have consciously developed a strong rapport with many such customers over time. We have developed a successful model, wherein both profitability and time are not compromised,” says Srivastava.

At the same time, Cygnus has a strong focus on corporates and the SMB sectors. Dell remains the sole partner for Cygnus even in these markets. “We don’t believe in being opportunistic. If the customer insists on a competing brand, we usually step out of the deal,” says Srivastava. Dell’s broadened portfolio gives enough opportunities for the SI to grow, he adds.

Cygnus’ recent partnership with Oracle is something that Srivastava is looking forward to. Apart from a basic infrastructure offering, Cygnus is planning to venture into solutions selling this year. The SI will also explore new markets by opening offices in Bangalore, New Delhi, and Allahabad. Its primary goal is to be a Rs 50 crore company by 2015. n —Radhika Nallayam

Sumit Srivastava, MD, Cygnus Information Solutions, has done well betting on government contracts and Dell.

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join effort Software piracy continues to be a menace. How can vendors and industry associations beat this problem?

By Yogesh Gupta

A

CCORDING TO the 2011 Global

Software Piracy Study by BSA, India’s software piracy rate registered a one point decline in 2011 compared to the previous year, but the value of pirated software sold in the country increased to Rs 13,783 crore. In fact, 43 percent of computer users in India admitted in the survey to acquiring pirated software, says Gouri Thounaojam, manager, Programs-India, BSA | The Software Alliance. BSA is a nonprofit trade association created to advance the goals of the software industry and its hardware partners. Its mission is to promote a long-term legislative and legal environment for its members around the world.

The statistics presented by BSA point to the fact that software piracy

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has not died down in India. The following cases only reinforce that fact. n In January this year, the Delhi Police arrested two resellers with pirated software worth Rs 1.5 crore. More than 2,000 pirated components of Microsoft—mainly Windows 7 Professional Media and Microsoft Office Home and Business—were seized. n Microsoft filed a civil case in the Delhi High Court against KK Software Solutions in December 2012 and claimed Rs 5.7 crore as damages for alleged software piracy in 2008-09.

CREATING AWARENESS To fight the menace, BSA has been working closely with the Government, large enterprises, and SMEs in India to raise awareness about software.“We

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

SOFTWARE PIRACY | FEATURE n

are witnessing high involvement from the Department of Information Technology, Government of India. In fact, the Government is leading by example by managing its own software, and taking this best practice directly to private enterprises,” says Thounaojam.

Vendors, IT associations, industry organizations, and channel partners are playing their part to fight the problem. However, it will take a well coordinated effort by independent organizations to decrease and ultimately eliminate pirated software from the Indian market.

Microsoft has been raising awareness among customers and resellers about the risks of counterfeit and pirated software. This, it believes, will enable partners to better protect themselves, and ensure that their software licensing is in order.

“Our strategy is focused on educating and creating awareness among partners and customers on the perils of pirated software. We have devised both offline and online methods to reach out to partners and customers,” says Sumeet Khanna, director, Genuine Software Initiative, Microsoft India.

Adobe, too, has been taking the fight to the streets. “We have a highly experienced legal team and are always prepared to answer product and policy questions. We have a case support system which is experienced at helping build and prosecute piracy

n FEATURE | SOFTWARE PIRACY

We are working with trade bodies and associations to encourage members to adopt genuine licenses by offering them an attractive value proposition.”

The cheapest and most readily available software programs are pirated as much as the most expensive programs. The only solution lies in cultivating respect for IP rights.”

Software publishers must work closely with channel partners to ensure that their staff is educated on the licensing terms and conditions of software products.”

VINEET SOOD, DIRECTOR-CHANNELS AND STRATEGIC ALLIANCES, ADOBE SOUTH ASIA

SUMEET KHANNA, DIRECTOR, GENUINE SOFTWARE INITIATIVE, MICROSOFT INDIA

GOURI THOUNAOJAM, MANAGER,

cases. From identifying targets to maintaining evidence, Adobe is ready to provide organizations with the support they need,” says Vineet Sood, director-Channels and Strategic Alliances, Adobe South Asia.

BSA aims at increasing public

awareness about using legal software and encourages the procurement of legal software both in private and public sectors. Capacity building initiatives have been hosted for Government officers in partnership with the Department of Electronics & IT (DIETY ),

Government of India.

For the enterprise community, BSA offers an industry certification on software asset management (SAM) called certified in standards-based SAM or CSS (O). This helps companies implement and maintain effective SAM processes, which enable them to improve IT and business efficiencies, reduce the risk of being audited, control costs, and ensure software compliance and license optimization, says Thounaojam.

It launched the CSS (O) certification in India in 2011.

Adobe also invests in training and is ready to assist law enforcement to identify counterfeit products. “We can offer customized training to various organizations. With Adobe Genuine Software, one can receive technical support, important updates, and future upgrades,” says Sood.

Microsoft Store’s online presence in India is a one-stop shop for a host of products from Microsoft ranging from Windows, Office, and Xbox to Microsoft books, Windows Phones, Windows PCs (including net books and webcams). “‘Dial-a-Software is an initiative with key aggregators in the top eight cities, where customers can call-in and get FPP (retail packs) delivered to their homes and offices. Through SAM, Microsoft encourages customers to assess and audit their IT environment through independent third parties,” says Khanna at Microsoft.

ASIRT Has Pledged to Promote Genuine Software ASIRT (Association of Systems Integrators & Retailer), an IT association for systems integrators, focuses on serving business interests of system builders, integrators and retailers.

With over 100 members, mostly in Western India, ASIRT is now expanding its membership across India to address partner issues. Chetan Shah, Chairman of ASIRT, talks about using genuine software to eliminate the risks of piracy.

What initiatives has ASIRT undertaken lately to curb software piracy? ASIRT has laid a strong emphasis on educating its members about the need to sell only genuine software. We have a couple of initiatives that focus on this issue; one of which is on educating our members about the USA AntiCompetition act.

This was a eye opener and has helped them in advising their own 38

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD M ARCH 2013

customers in a better manner.

In response to ASIRT’s Techday in November 2012, ASIRT members have unanimously pledged that they would promote only legal software. This will promote a healthy channel environment and boost profitability.

Do you work with software vendors and industry associations? So far, ASIRT has taken these initiatives on its own. However, we are in talks with major software vendors to promote similar programs in the future.

Any suggestions to the partner community on software piracy related activities? Our stand on this issue is very clear: Selling genuine software means higher revenues and more opportunities and lowers support calls to a great extent. Therefore, it is important that our members promote genuine software. ASIRT advises all partners to desist from offering pirated software and stay within the law. This will also boost their business interests.

—Yogesh Gupta

PROGRAMS-INDIA, BSA | THE SOFTWARE ALLIANCE

A BIGGER CONSORTIUM Various IT associations and trade bodies like NASSCOM and FICCI

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n FEATURE | SOFTWARE PIRACY Trust Is Vital For Business: BSA A lack of awareness about the dangers of piracy is a major challenge because it makes consumers and businesses prone to breach of intellectual property rights (IPR) laws in the country, says Gouri Thounaojam, manager, Programs-India, BSA | The Software Alliance. It is vital to understand the importance of software as an asset and that the use of pirated software introduces all types of security risks—malware, viruses and intrusions– that could hurt productivity within the enterprise.

The channel is the first point of contact for most customers, so it is extremely important for the channel partners to be educated on the importance of IPR protection, she says. “The disadvantages of using unlicensed software are huge, and we would like to reinforce the message that selling original software brings trust and respect from the customer. Trust is vital for business; everybody wants to work with trustworthy vendors. Issues around the use of unlicensed software can have major implications,” says Thounaojam.

—Yogesh Gupta play a vital role in the crusade against software piracy. ISODA (Infotech Software Dealers Association) advises all its members on ways of curbing software piracy at the customer-level by educating them, says Devesh Aggarwal, vice president, ISODA. “To achieve this, ISODA has joined hands with BSA, and formed an ISODA–BSA alliance,” adds Aggarwal.

“BSA recently partnered with Trade Association of Information & Technology (TAIT) and ISODA to address IT compliance as part of its Advantage Channels initiative that aims to bring together software distributors, publishers and industry bodies,” confirms Thounaojam.

An IT dealers and reseller association, Computer & Media Dealers’ Association (CMDA) Pune, has worked with companies like Microsoft, and has held meetings with dealers to educate them on the benefits of using legal and licensed software, says its president, Jayant Shete.

Chetan Shah, Chairman of Association of Systems Integrators & Retailers (ASIRT), says that his association is taking steps to fight the menace, and is in talks with vendors to push the cause forward. (See ASIRT Has Pledged To Promote Genuine Software).

Some vendors have also sought alliances to protect their business interests. Adobe has a partnership with BSA and the anti-piracy division of Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), which has helped in curbing the distribution and the use of pirated software.

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INDIAN CHANNELWORLD M ARCH 2013

“We work closely with IT associations across the country to identify and ensure that strict action is taken against partners who are engaged in selling pirated software,” says Sood at Adobe.

Microsoft too, has been actively working with various channel associations across the country to drive awareness on the perils of piracy. “We are committed to protecting IP and fostering an environment where innovation is rewarded and the local software industry can flourish. In order to achieve this, we work together with the software industry to address the problem of piracy. Since piracy is an industry issue we are working with bodies like NASSCOM, BSA, and FICCI,” says Khanna.

BSA has run several SAM seminars since 2008 with the State Govern-

The Bitter Truth l The commercial value of unlicensed

software put into the market in 2011 totaled $63.4 billion (about Rs 35,000 crore)—and the global software piracy is at 42 percent. l 57 percent of the world’s personal com-

puter users admit they pirate software. l Business decision makers who admit

they frequently pirate software are more than twice as likely as other computer users to say they buy software for one computer, but then install it on additional machines in their offices.

SOURCE: Ninth Annual BSA & IDC Global Software Piracy Study

ments of Karnataka, Maharashtra, and Andhra Pradesh targeted at SMEs. “To ensure the effective management of software within the SME segment, BSA, in 2012, introduced an industrysupported portal called license management registry 360 (LMR60). It allows SMEs to maintain, manage, and monitor their software inventory for multiple publishers at a single location,” says Thounaojam.

THE VENDOR–CHANNEL EQUATION Can software companies help channels resist the piracy route? According to Thounaojam, India’s software industry needs to move up the value chain and enter the niche area of product development. But there are challenges in copyright and IP protection which deter software developers in investing in development of new products in India.

Adobe partners with major associations which act as industry watchdogs to identify and prosecute offenders, create legislation to protect software manufacturers, provide tools to identify unlicensed software, and offer useful information to help organizations stay compliant, says Sood.

While BSA has been playing a significant role in supporting rights holders in the region through its wide range of initiatives, there is a need for increased governmental involvement, end-user education and specific piracy law formulation believes Thounaojam. “Software publishers must work closely with channel partners to ensure that their staff is educated on the licensing terms and conditions of software products,” says Thounaojam.

At the same time, vendors have to reduce the price of software and make it more affordable, believes Shete at CMDA. But, Khanna says that the cheapest and most readily available software programs are pirated as much as the most expensive programs. “Prices also incorporate a component for intellectual property. “The only solution to the problem” he says, “lies in cultivating respect for intellectual property rights by educating all those involved.” n

NEIL ARMSTRONG, the first man on the moon, gave new meaning to ‘going places’.

FRIDAY, 3 MAY, 2013 HYATT REGENCY, MUMBAI

HOW BOLD BOLD means exploring new boundaries No place is ‘out of bounds’ for travel, or business. ChannelWorld Premier 100 Awards will recognize IT channel partners who have stretched the boundaries of conventional thinking and taken their business places. If you have successfully expanded the reach or scope of your business, then we are looking for you!

Join The BOLD 100. Nominate yourself at www.premier100.in

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n OPINION

ROB ENDERLE

The Cuckoo Clock Focusing on how long your staffers stay in the office— instead of what they actually accomplish— could do more harm than good.

Rob Enderle is president and principal analyst of the Enderle Group.

He writes on emerging technology, security and Linux for a variety of publications and appears on national news TV shows that include CNBC, FOX, Bloomberg and NPR. 42

A

TELEVISION SHOW I saw earlier did a story on

what companies were doing to stop cyber-slackers.

It seems—and this should hardly surprise any of us—that folks often use their company PCs and Internet connection to do things like shop at work. Shame on them, the story said, encouraging efforts to stamp out these horrid practices and make sure people are working properly.

Hang on. Many of these same people work from home on their own time, and one of the reasons they have to do things like shop online at the office is because they no longer have the personal time to get things done. Stopping the activity in those cases could actually reduce productivity, lowering their after-hours contributions or creating bigger personal issues they’ll still have to deal with at work.

Take what happened at Intel for instance. When it went through some difficult times in the 1990s, management noticed that a lot of employees came in late and left early. Executives would sit in their cubes and watch folks enter and leave at all times. The conclusion: People were slacking off.

A new policy followed. Managers logged their employees in at 8 a.m. and out at 5 p.m.—and productivity fell off a cliff. The Intel employees showing up late often worked from home until the early hours of the morning, and those going home early often came in very early or worked through the night on a project.

As a result, the folks who had been working all those extra hours collectively said “the heck with it” and started working regular hours, and the folks who had been taking advantage of the flexibility came in but slacked off. It was quite literally one of the stupidest things I’ve ever seen a company do. Thankfully, some smart people ran Intel, and the policy was reversed once management saw the results.

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD M ARCH 2013

My grandfather, the CEO of a large petrochemical company, liked to tell me a story when I was growing up. A big steel CEO hired an efficiency expert to study the steel plant and look for potential improvements. The expert found a guy just sitting around and drawing, and he recommended that the plant get rid of this seemingly useless guy. The CEO fired the efficiency expert, explaining that the guy’s doodles had saved millions and made him one of the company’s most valuable employees.

If employee metrics focus on what is important to the firm—that is, what people actually accomplish—then everything works itself out. On the other hand, if metrics focus on how long someone is in the office or what he does while on company property, particularly when he may actually be most productive at home, the resulting policies could do more harm than good.

In today’s connected world, the only thing that’s really important is whether and how employee is worth what he or she is being paid, and behaving within the ethical construct the company and industry requires. Some employee monitoring is necessary, of course, as some activities clearly can’t be allowed on company grounds.

However, getting too invasive will break the productivity advantages you’re likely taking for granted and drive away those who are the most productive. Since IT is often the first budget to be cut in a downturn, preventing a decision that would drive a downturn is in your best interest. n

Focal Point EVERYTHING ABOUT SDN

Making

Sense of SDN SDNs aren’t ready for prime time yet. But this radical shift needs to be understood by IT execs. By Jim Metzler

A

S IS somewhat

typical of emerging technologies, there isn’t a universally agreed to definition of what is meant by software defined networking (SDN). Over the

last year or two, most of the definitions have focused on the decoupling of the network control plane from the network forwarding plane.

Decoupling of the network control and forward-

ing planes isn’t a new concept. It’s a key feature of MPLS and it is also a characteristic of many contemporary WiFi networks. However, if SDN is looked at strictly as the decoupling of the network control plane from the network forwarding plane, then its value is limited to features like reducing network latency.

The definition of SDN that is currently emerging focuses somewhat less on decoupling and more on providing programmatic interfaces into network equipment, whether or not there is a separation of the control and forwarding planes. A minor reason for this shift in focus is because Cisco recently announced that as part of its SDN offerings, it will provide APIs into multiple platforms that they provide.

This is not a Cisco-only approach, as other vendors; including Arista, Extreme and Juniper currently provide direct access to their products. One advantage of this approach is that it enables very detailed access into, and control over, network elements. This approach, however, doesn’t provide a central point of control and is vendor specific. While some network service providers may adopt this approach in the near term, it is unlikely to gain much traction in the enterprise market for the foreseeable future.

A more powerful reason for the shift in focus of the definition of SDN is that if SDN is looked at as providing programmatic interfaces into network equipment, then its value is much broader. Looked at this way, SDN allows IT organizations to replace a manual interface into net-

working equipment with a programmatic interface that can enable the automation of tasks such as configuration and policy management and can also enable the network to dynamically respond to application requirements.

With the more common definition of an SDN, global control of the network is achieved by the logical centralization of the control plane function, and the network operations organization can deal with a pool of network devices as a single entity. With an SDN, network flows are controlled at the level of the global network abstraction, rather than at the level of the individual devices, usually, but not always, with the aid of the OpenFlow protocol.

SDN ARCHITECTURE The group most associated with the development of standards based SDN is the Open Networking Foundation (ONF). The ONF was launched in 2011 and has as its vision to make OpenFlow-based SDN the new norm for networks.

To help achieve that vision, the ONF has taken on the responsibility to drive the standardization of the OpenFlow protocol.

The breadth of the SDN ecosystem is reflected in the fact that the ONF currently has over 70 members of varying types including vendors that provide the enabling silicon as well as the switches, network appliances, controllers, test equipment, telecommunications services, hyperscale datacenter services and smartphones.

A layered architecture for an SDN is shown (see page 44). In that architecture, the control plane func-

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n FOCAL POINT | SDN

App

44

App

Most modern Ethernet switches and routers contain flow-tables (typically supported by Ternary Content Addressable Memory) that run at line-rate and are used to perform forwarding functions based on Layer 2, 3, and 4 packet headers.

While each vendor’s flowtable is different, there is a common set of functions

App

OPENFLOW

SDN Architecture

App

tionality is centralized in the SDN controller’s software. Most of the time that SDN is being discussed, the OpenFlow protocol is used to program the forwarding behavior of the switch. There are, however alternatives to the use of OpenFlow, including the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), the Network Configuration Protocol (Netcong) and OpenStack from Rackspace and NASA. In this model, applications are written to a set of APIs that are provided by the SDN controller. Unfortunately, these APIs are not standardized, so an application that runs on a given SDN controller would have to be modified to run on another SDN controller.

The SDN controller supports a number of drivers that control the behavior of the underlying network elements, so that the network will provide the desired network services.

The controller provides management plane functionality such as performance and fault management via SNMP and other standard protocols, and it typically handles configuration management of OpenFlow compliant devices in order to provide network topology, forwarding, QoS, and link management.

NORTHBOUND API

SDN Controller Platform SOUTH BOUND API

Switch

Switch vSwitch

vSwitch

supported by a wide variety of switches and routers.

This common set of functions is leveraged by OpenFlow, which is an open protocol between a central OpenFlow controller and an OpenFlow switch and which, as noted, can be used to program the forwarding behavior of the switch.

With OpenFlow, a single central controller can program all the physical and virtual switches in a network. While it is possible to implement SDN with a single controller, vendors such as Big Switch and NEC have announced either a production high availability cluster, or their intention to implement such a cluster of controllers. It is likely that IBM will follow suit.

The OpenFlow protocol was developed at Stanford, with v1.0 published at the end of 2009 and v1.1 at the beginning of 2011. In March of 2011, the ONF was created and the intellectual property rights of Open-

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD M ARCH 2013

Flow were transitioned to it. Part of the ONF charter is to control and commercialize OpenFlow. With that goal in mind, the ONF recently released OpenFlow v1.3 and in March 2012 the ONF sponsored an interoperability event that was open to all of the members of the ONF. A total of 14 companies and two research institutions participated in the event which focused on the OpenFlow v1.0 standard.

In an OpenFlow-only switch, all of the control functions of a traditional switch (e.g. the routing protocols that are used to build forwarding information bases [FIB]) are run in the central OpenFlow controller. An OpenFlow-enabled switch (dubbed an OpenFlowhybrid switch in v1.1) supports both OpenFlow flow forwarding and traditional Ethernet switch bridging and routing. Hybrid switches allow OpenFlow and

traditional bridge/routing to share the same Ethernet infrastructure.

Many existing high functionality Layer 2/3 switches can be converted to be OpenFlow-hybrid switches by the relatively simple addition of an OpenFlow agent in firmware supported by the native switch Network Operating System (NOS).

Alternatively, once the semiconductor vendors have produced chips that effectively process the OpenFlow protocol, an OpenFlow-only switch would be extremely simple and inexpensive to build because it would have very little resident software and would not require a powerful CPU or large memory to support the extensive control functionality typically packaged in a traditional NOS. There are a number of possible ways that the centralization of control, the programmability, and the flow forwarding characteris-

tics of OpenFlow can be leveraged to provide value to IT organizations. For example, one of the primary benefits of OpenFlow is the centralized nature of the FIB. Centralization allows optimum routes to be calculated deterministically for each flow, leveraging a complete model of the end-to-end topology of the network. Based on an understanding of the service levels required for each type of flow, the centralized OpenFlow controller can apply traffic engineering principles to ensure each flow is properly serviced.

One advantage of this capability is that it enables the network to dynamically respond to application requirements. It also enables notably better utilization of

the network without sacrificing service quality.

Another benefit is that OpenFlow switches can filter packets as they enter the network, and hence these switches can act as simple firewalls at the edge of the network. With OpenFlow switches that support the modification of packet headers, an optional feature in OpenFlow v1.0, the OpenFlow controller will also be able to have the switch redirect certain suspicious traffic flows to higher-layer security controls, such as IDS/IPS systems, application firewalls, and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) devices.

OpenFlow switches that support the modification of packet headers will also be able to function as a

simple, cost-effective loadbalancing device. With modification functionality, a new flow can result in a new flow table entry that is directed to a server selected by the OpenFlow controller’s load balancing policies. In order to create load-balancing policies based on server load, the OpenFlow controller would have to monitor the pool of servers as they report current load levels.

CALL TO ACTION There is no doubt that SDN can potentially provide very significant value to IT organizations. There is also no doubt that in the current environment SDN is only appropriate for early adopters.

Given the immaturity of the

The SDN Opportunity for the Channel

S

OFTWARE-DEFINED networking (SDN) is an emerging field, subject to some confusion and very much an early-adopter exercise at the moment.

That represents an opportunity for channel partners.

Channel partners-resellers, systems integrators and consultancies often carve niches in such immature fields, providing advice and deployment help to customers who lack sufficient in-house knowledge. That tendency is beginning to play out in SDN. Technology vendors in the US, for example, have already started recruiting integrators and other channel allies. Companies that seek to populate the SDN channel say they;re studying the technology to be in a position to assist customers.

General enterprise adopters are likely seek the help of SDN advisors and implementers, ac-

cording to industry executives.

They believe the channel will become a key conduit for SDN in the enterprise. “Enterprises are technology deployers, not developers,” says Eric Johnson, chairman and chief executive officer of ADARA Networks, which makes SDN software.

“It is absolutely expected…and a certainty that SDN should be adopted through the channel.”

ADARA, is just one of t a host of other vendors targeting a market poised to rapidly expand.

IDC projects that the worldwide SDN market will surge from $360 million (about Rs 1,980 crore) in 2013 to $3.7 billion (about Rs 20,350 crore) by 2016. Such lofty expectations are based on SDN’s potential to revitalize network architecture.

SDN provides a software layer that lets administrators centrally program switches and other network devices.

Dave Butler, VP of sales at Big Switch, an SDN vendor, says most, if not all, SDN projects will eventually involve an integrator. “It’s going from zero to 100 percent. Right now, we have just picked a very few [integrators] and they are tightly coupled to what we do.”

Big Switch plans, over time, to build a certification process for its partners, Butler adds.

Channel players pursuing SDN as a niche should, however, be prepared to encounter a high level of self-sufficiency among early adopters. Cloud services providers, hosting firms and colocation companies stand at the vanguard of SDN deployment. Those companies, for which the network is the core business as opposed to a support function, generally maintain considerable technical resources.

—John Moore

current products, standards and APIs, any IT organization that is looking to implement SDN in the near term should only do so in a somewhat limited manner, such as implementing SDN for a very specific use case. In addition, given the embryonic state of the market, the interoperability of products that claim to support the same SDN related standards cannot be assumed so IT organizations should only work with vendors that have demonstrated a high level of interoperability. However, given the combination of the huge investments that vendors are making, combined with the ongoing spate of acquisitions, the SDN landscape will likely change notably over the next 12 to 18 months. IT organizations can expect an ongoing series of announcements both in terms of new products, new or enhanced protocols and further proof of interoperability.

IT organizations can also expect that the basic building blocks of an SDN, such as the enabling protocols and APIs, will stabilize. Assuming that all of that happens, there are two events that have to occur in order for SDN to go from being strictly for early adopters to being ready for the mainstream market. One is the availability of functionality that enables IT organizations to effectively manage this new form of networking. The second is the availability of a wide range of applications that leverage the centralized control inherent in most forms of an SDN and which answer the question that all senior IT managers will ask: “Why should we spend our resources on SDN? What exactly are the benefits?” n

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n FOCAL POINT | SDN

Are They Really That Different?

Juniper and Cisco may be SDN competitors, but their approach isn’t exactly like chalk and cheese.

By Jim Duffy

O

N THE surface, Cisco and Juniper’s SDN strategies seem to have sharp contrasts if recent announcements are any indication. For example: n Juniper places much more emphasis on the software angle of SDN, even ushering in a new software licensing business model; Cisco’s attempts to make hardware as much, and perhaps even more, relevant than software. n Cisco is attacking five markets at once—datacenter, enterprise, service provider, cloud, academia —with its strategy, while Juniper is focusing initially on datacenters. n Juniper views SDNs as much more disruptive, potentially allowing it to significantly increase share; Cisco has thus far made no such dramatic 46

market impact statements regarding SDNs. n As part of its hardware focus on SDN, Cisco is funding a separate spin-in company— Insieme Networks —which is believed to be building big programmable switches and controller(s); Juniper has no such hardware investments, but did buy Contrail for $176 million (about Rs 948 crore), again emphasizing the software aspect of SDNs. n Cisco has a timeline of 2013 deliverables; Juniper’s timeline pushes a controller and SDN service “chaining” capability out into 2014, and the new software business model into 2015.

Yet analysts say there are really more similarities than differences in both strategies from the fierce rivals.

“I think there are some similarities,” says Brad Casemore of IDC. “Both Juniper and Cisco are em-

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD M ARCH 2013 CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 1, 2009

phasizing ASICs, and therefore hardware, in their SDN strategies. Both companies also see network and security services—Layer 4-7—as virtualized applications in a programmable network.

They each have controllers, but they also will promote hybrid control planes—decoupled and distributed.

Juniper is positioning for a software-licensing business model, true, but it’s relatively early along in that process.”

“It’s a different packaging strategy but both seem equally focused on the value of software in SDN,” says Mike Fratto of Current Analysis. “Key points being modular, flexible, and exposing APIs for integration.”

Juniper recently divulged its SDN strategy after months of silence—seven months after Cisco announced its Cisco ONE plan.

Salient points of Juniper’s plan include separating networking software into four planes—management, services, control and forwarding—to optimize each plane within the network; creating network and security service virtual machines by extracting service software from hardware and housing it on x86 servers; using a centralized controller that enables service chaining in software, or the ability to connect services across devices according to business need; and the new software-based licensing model, which allows the transfer of software licenses between Juniper devices and industry-standard x86 servers, and is designed to allow customers to scale purchases based on actual usage.

Cisco’s ONE, or Open Networking Environment strategy, includes an API platform to instill programmability into its three core operating systems: IOS, IOS

XR and NX-OS. It’s focused on five key markets and also includes new programmable ASICs, like the UADP chip unveiled with the new Catalyst 3850 enterprise switch; and a software-based controller for datacenters that runs on x86 servers. New ASICs are also expected to be front-and-center when the Cisco-funded Insieme Networks start-up unveils what’s expected to be a highperformance programmable switch and controller line.

Juniper’s strategy initially targets datacenters, and its new software licensing model is based on enterprise practices. The company will expand its traditional carrier and service provider customers from there.

Among the first markets addressed in Cisco’s ONE strategy are enterprise customers, datacenters and cloud providers.

“Juniper ultimately sees SDN at all layers of the network, spanning not only the datacenter—edge/access and core—but also the WAN, campus and branch,” says IDC’s Casemore. “Juniper’s SDN road map initially targets the SP edge and datacenter, but it does plan to follow SDN into other areas.”

“Cisco sees datacenter and cloud as near-term markets, and its positioning to play across the board as SDN—and its outcomes, network virtualization and network programmability —extends its reach,” Casemore says. “Again, there are many similarities.”

In terms of market disruption, Fratto says both companies see SDN as perhaps equally disruptive even though one has been much more vocal about that impact than the other.

“I think the two companies view SDN as disruptive

What’s Driving SDN?

F

IVE trends are driving the transition to software defined networking and programmability. They are: User, device and application mobility, cloud computing and service, consumerization of IT, changing traffic patterns within datacenters, and agile service delivery.

According to Cisco, enterprises need network programmability to automate the operation of private cloud deployments. These deployments include virtual workloads, virtual desktop infrastructures, and the orchestration of security profiles across them. And within the enterprise datacenter, traffic patterns have changed from the “northsouth” directions of client/server to “east-west,” in which applications access different databases and servers before delivering data back to the client.

The Open Networking Foundation says this, as well as the increasing use of personal devices to access corporate data—the BYOD phenomenon—and the deployment of private, public and hybrid cloud infrastructures and services is also changing traffic patterns, requiring the automation, rapid reconfigurability and simplified extendability SDNs provide.

Other SDN/programmability/network virtualization players say SDNs and the applications they enable can relieve VLAN exhaustion, facilitate datacenter interconnect and disaster recovery, allow for granular, policy-based security, network isolation, service interposition, deterministic application performance and customization, among others.

Service providers need SDNs for agile service delivery, proponents say. SDNs and network programmability can enable policy-based control and analytical data capture to help optimize and monetize service delivery, they say.

but they are approaching it very differently,” he says.

“Juniper tends to be more conservative in bringing new products to market, particularly with Junos. They have a quarterly software update cycle and they march to that drum. I think they have a strong preference for stability in the platform and based on their consistent messaging on that topic.

“I think for Cisco, the disruption is there but the

Companies can use OpenFlow and SDNs to reroute traffic, balance traffic loads, provide bandwidth on demand for peak requirements, execute policies to scale and segregate the networks of different datacenter or cloud tenants, and connect subscribers to content and services. Cloud providers in particular require programmability to support scalable multi-tenant environments through automated provisioning and virtualization overlays that abstract complicated and distributed physical infrastructures from function. From an IT perspective, deployment of and access to cloud services can be facilitated by SDNs that enable “elastic scaling” of compute, storage and network resources using a common suite of tools from a common viewpoint, according to the ONF. This is important as organizations stress increased security, compliance, and auditing in cloud environments, or when abrupt changes emerge as businesses reorganize, consolidate or merge.

Massively scalable datacenters are said by Cisco to require network flow management enabled through customization using programmatic APIs to provide deep insight into network traffic.

And academia and research require network “slicing,” or partitioning to separate experimental network use from production networks.

Big data plays a key role in requiring SDNs or network programmability. SDNs can help steer traffic between thousands of servers processing massive datasets in parallel; and can help datacenter networks scale more efficiently while maintaining server-to-server, server-to-storage, and server/storage-to-network connectivity.

—Jim Duffy

recent announcements tell a lot about its direction going forward,” Fratto continues. “I think it signals ... wanting to be vendor and protocol agnostic vs. promoting their own technology over others. The ONE controller, for example, is modular and will support OnePK and OpenFlow out of the gate, but there is no reason other than development that it can’t support other protocols.”

Casemore sees both companies reacting to SDN developments, rather than driving them.

“Neither has led the charge toward SDN. Both are measuring their responses, trying to find a balance between supporting their customers today while preparing for potentially disruptive shifts.”

And Casemore sees both equally emphasizing

hardware, despite Juniper’s software-intensive strategy.

“Juniper has a lot of existing hardware, and hardware customers, that it will attempt to fold into its SDN strategy,” he says. “We will see hardware and software from both Cisco and Juniper, as their common ASIC strategies suggest.”

And even though the timelines for deliverables differ, they are in keeping with each company’s traditions.

“That’s Juniper’s way, right?” Fratto says. “Produce a road map and then deliver over a longer timeline like 12 to 24 months.”

Where the strategies diverge will be in partner ecosystems for SDN-enabled services, he says.

“In both cases, they will need to attract partners into their respective ecosystems.

The market for services has a ton of players—think (application delivery controllers), firewalls, WAN optimization. For those services to be chained, they have to be integrated with Juniper’s stuff. Same for Cisco. That’s going to be the attractor.”

Casemore sees differences in initial target markets too.

“I look at Juniper’s strategy as being more attuned to the SP/carrier community than the enterprise—their service chaining concept is very close to network functions virtualization— whereas the strategy and technologies Cisco has rolled out thus far are more enterprise oriented,” he says. “That’s not to say that Juniper won’t develop more of an enterprise orientation or that Cisco won’t push its SDN strategy into carriers—both will happen. But that’s how I see them now at this particular snapshot in time.” n

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n FACE OFF

Citrix Vs. F5 Networks

NILESH GORADIA,

Head-Pre-sales—India Subcontinent, Citrix

SATISH NAIR,

Senior Manager Systems Engineering, F5 Networks India, SAARC

Lion’s Share

Between Citrix and F5 Networks, who will make giant strides in the ADC space?

C pinned to four factors. First, traditional networking ITRIX’S SUPERIORITY in the ADC market is under-

solutions cannot compete with the breadth and depth of the capabilities that Citrix’s NetScaler product—with its TriScale technology—delivers. The technology enables organizations to scale and secure cloud services, achieving 100 percent network utilization. It allows IT teams to build enterprise cloud networks that can scale up performance 5x, scale out capacity 32x, and scale in consolidation by running up to 40 appliances on a single platform.

Second, we have expanded our strategic partnership with Cisco and leverage its leadership in datacenter networking with the cloud services delivery strength of Citrix. Together, the two companies are helping enterprises and service providers deliver a true cloud network, leveraging deep network and application-level intelligence. To this effect, Cisco is recommending Citrix’s NetScaler application delivery controller solutions to its customers building next-generation datacenter networks, and Cisco will integrate NetScaler into it’s cloud network services architecture.

We have institutionalized a number of knowledge transfer initiatives whereby we are training our channel partners to migrate from Cisco ACE to NetScaler MPX. This has empowered partners with the wherewithal and the technical capabilities to migrate from a Cisco ACE environment to a NetScaler one.

Today, we have more than 800 NetScaler customers in India across verticals like BFSI, travel, stock market, Internet portals, and Internet banking sites. Therefore, we believe that we have outnumbered our competitors and will continue to strengthen our leadership 2013.

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T optimization. Seamless performance and user expeHIS YEAR could see the convergence of security and

rience have never had a higher premium. Applications need more security and no one can argue that adding in-line security—such as a Web-application firewall— won’t increase latency and decrease page load time.

Optimization may come to the rescue by offsetting the added latency with performance gains at a lower level, such as TCP or WAN optimizations. Security in a common platform will increasingly play a role in acquiring ADC. Where traditional firewalls have failed due to the workload DDoS’s generate, ADCs have been used to adequately handle the same DDoS attacks, and even route some or all packets to forensics services. Security will remain a key component of any technology implementation, especially in the cloud to ensure the protection of key systems, data integrity, and internal staff from the constant barrage of Web-based application attacks.

Due to the heightened demands and complexities brought by mobile devices, cloud services, and application environments, enterprises are demanding more comprehensive solutions for Web performance optimization. An increasing number of enterprise apps require improved user experience if they are to meet the expectations of external users and employees. We apply front-end, network, and datacenter optimizations in concert to improve overall application performance and enhance the user experience.

F5 remains focused on offering the most capable physical and virtual ADCs to meet the growing needs of organizations, regardless of which IT and datacenter architectures they choose to pursue.

—As told to Shantheri Mallaya