Channelworld Magazine May 2013 Issue

FOCAL POINT: Contrary to popular belief, big data won’t spell the end of business intelligence. In fact, it enhances BI. PAGE 33

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

PAWAN KHURANA, CEO, QuantM Technologies, dropped two extremely large vendors because they lacked commitment.

Inside MAY 2013 VOL. 7, ISSUE 2

Principles of selecting Principals The vendors you partner with define your profitability. Here’s how to do it well. >>> Page 18

News Analysis

Amazon stands tall as a cloud service provider.

But, it has to keep an eye out: Salesforce is close on its heels. PAGE 08

Opinion

The cloud is not flawless— nor is it likely to be soon.

When a cloud provider goes down, it’s important to be ready. PAGE 11

Grill

Peter McQuade, VPAlliances and Partner Sales, QlikTech, on why the company isn’t a traditional BI vendor. PAGE 15

Case Study

How Digital Track Solutions won a deal to implement a wireless solution for Hetero Drugs in the face of certain defeat. PAGE 26

Feature

The cloud doesn’t fit all use cases. To reap its benefits, ensure that you don’t rush and give in to the hype. PAGE 29

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n EDITOR’S NOTE

Vijay Ramachandran

Forget the Tech

A

decade ago, I recall penning editorials that exhorted Indian channel players to look at solution sales and value adds as the path forward. I remember asking SIs to look at solution bundles spanning multiple technology domains for a cross-functional approach resulting in higher client value. Do these strategies still hold water? I don’t think so. I think they are outdated, obsolete, and outmoded. In fact, when the history of Indian enterprise IT is chronicled, the beginning of the economic slump in 2008-09 will emerge as the watershed year after which nothing ever was the same. Over these years your clients have done more and more projects with fewer and fewer people in shorter and shorter time cycles. Their need for partners, of you, has never been higher.

So why is it harder for you to get closure when you approach clients?

Do I hear that budgets are tougher to come by?

That organizations have frozen IT spends? That sales cycles have become longer and longer?

Why then are enterprises large and small doing three times the number of IT projects today than four years ago?

How are those projects getting funded?

You understand technology as well as sales and selling and I wouldn’t dare to counsel you on them. However, I do think there is a need to target your clients in a smarter manner than before.

2

I truly believe that you need to gain an appreciation that Indian organizations no longer invest in technology, rather they fund business outcomes.

In your clients’ minds IT’s about establishing a direct causal link between an IT investment ‘A’ and a derived business value ‘B’. I suspect that in your mind it is still about tapping into an organization’s IT spend.

If you want to prosper today—and I know this is hardly a question in your minds—then you have to

n Indian companies no longer invest in technology, rather they fund business outcomes. Forget the tech, focus on your clients’ business drivers.

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD M AY 2013

radically change how you go after clients.

What you are pushing at clients can’t be about big data or mobility or the cloud or analytics or ERP or any other enterpriseclass technology. Instead it has to be about revenue growth, about customer outreach, about helping them build the right product or service rather than making the product right, and about profitable growth (both yours and your clients).

How you tap into organizational and departmental budgets—both implicit and explicit—is a function of how well you know an organization, its business drivers and its competitive scenario.

The technology then is almost incidental.

The Holy Trinity for targeting clients has to be based on researching them, packaging your

solution with business relevance and, of course, ROI. Essentially, this is what has to guide what you pitch; when and how you pitch; and that clearly shows your client a tangible upside, in business terms. Get this right and you will thrive in what looks like a tough economic scenario.

Business strategy like innovation has an expiry date. When impermanence reigns, you are required to respond to what’s changed and continues to change in how Indian corporates look at the technology of information. The demand is for a superior understanding of what makes your clients tick, and for putting in place systems and processes on your end that are less people-dependent and more automated and thus more about reducing variance and ensuring quality.

Forget the tech, focus on your clients’ business drivers, change how you deal with them. That’s has to be your mantra this year.

You might not agree with my analysis. In that case, I’d really like to know how you are dealing with today’s scenario. Write in and let me know.

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 ■ MAY 2013

■ NEWS DIGEST 05 Wi-Fi’s Raising Dark Clouds |

A new report says that a real sustainability threat comes from the rising

14 Steven Vaughan-Nichols: Microsoft needs to make up its mind whether it wants to stay a software company or if it’s really serious about being a hardware powerhouse as well.

■ THE GRILL

15 Peter McQuade, Vice President-

Alliances and Partner Sales, QlikTech,

use of cellular and Wi-Fi networks to access cloud services.

06 2.4 bn Devices to be Shipped in 2013 | According

to Gartner, shipment of devices, worldwide, is exptected to total 2.4 billion units in 2013, a 9 percent increase from 2012.

07 Why Does Cisco Not Feature Here? | Has an EMC/VMware partnership with Avaya snubbed Cisco? If so, it could create problems for the VCE alliance between EMC, VMware, and Cisco.

■ NEWS ANALYSIS 08 Salesforce: In Hot Pursuit of Amazon | Amazon stands tall

as a cloud service provider.

But, it has to keep an eye out: Salesforce is close on its heels.

■ OPINION

Cover Design by UNNIKRISHNAN A.V

02 Editorial: Vijay Ramachandran

believes that you need to gain an appreciation that Indian organizations no longer invest in technology, rather they fund business outcomes.

11 Bart Perkins: The cloud is not

flawless—nor is it likely to be anytime soon. When a cloud provider goes down, it’s important to be ready. Here’s how.

15 on why the company isn’t a traditional business intelligence vendor.

18

■ FEATURE

29 Cloudy Math The cloud can help you cut costs.

But, to achieve that, companies need to exercise due-diligence before they embark on the journey.

■ COVER STORY

■ FAST TRACK

Selecting Principals

10 Punit Rastogi, MD, SISPL, says

that a continuous focus on excellence is what separates it from the rest.

18 Principles of

Channel partners are forever looking at ways to improve their track record, consolidate their business standing, and increase their profitability. To achieve this, solution providers must, first and foremost, master the art of picking and choosing the vendors they wish to align with.

In this issue, your peers talk about the critical aspects you should consider while deciding on the right set of vendors for your business.

■ CASE STUDY

26 Who Dares Wins

How Chennai-based Digital Track Solutions won a deal to implement a wireless solution for Hyderabad-based Hetero Drugs in the face of certain defeat.

FOR BREAKING NEWS, GO TO CHANNELWORLD.IN

Inside

CHANNELWORLD 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

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD ■ MAY 2013

28 Irvin Pinto,

CMD, Datasoft Network Solutions, says that he wants the company to be a Rs 100 crore entity by 2015. Their SMBfocused approach is expected to help achieve that traget.

■ ON RECORD

12 Navaneet Mishra, Vice President, Globalization Services, SAP Labs India, talks

■ EDITORIAL

33 make strategic, long-term business decisions. This can provide better clarity on how companies could effectively use valuable data.

35 In the Spotlight BI AND ANALYTICS: Combined, big data and cheap storage are bringing in-memory analytics to the fore.

Although in-memory has been around for a long time it’s only the availability of terabyte systems and massive parallel processing that makes in-memory more interesting. With such evolved levels of computing available through big data, analytics is set for the long run.

about how the company is leading the way in localizing offerings for the Indian market.

■ FACE OFF

40 An Eye in the Cloud: Who’s on the right

■ SALES

& MARKETING

President Sales & Marketing Sudhir Kamath VP Sales Parul Singh GM Marketing Siddharth Singh Manager Key Accounts Jaideep M., Runjhun Kulshrestha, Sakshee Bagri Senior Manager Projects Ajay Chakravarthy Manager-Sales Support Nadira Hyder Assistant Manager Products Dinesh P. Marketing Associates Anuradha Iyer, Benjamin Jeevanraj, Lavneetha Kunjappa Project Co-ordinator Rima Biswas, Saurabh Patil Lead Designers Jitesh C.C., Pradeep Gulur Designer Lalita Ramakrishna ■ EVENTS & AUDIENCE

track to create a differentiator in the burgeoning VSaaS space: Axis Communications or D-Link?

DEVELOPMENT

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

■ FOCAL POINT

33 Being a Big Help

■ FINANCE

BI AND ANALYTICS: Big data is extending

its support to bring BI and predictive analytics together. It is pushing a tool more commonly used for cohort and regression analysis into the hands of line-level managers, who can then use non-transactional data to

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

It will let businesses take advantage of performance metrics gleaned from production systems and turn those into KPIs they can do something about.

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News

WHAT’S WITHIN

PAGE 06: 2.4 Billion Devices Shipped in 2013 PAGE 06: Citrix Bequeaths Xen to the Linux Foundation PAGE 07: Why Does Cisco Not Feature Here?

PAGE 08: Salesforce: In Hot Pursuit of Amazon

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

CLOUD COMPUTING

Wi-Fi’s Raising Dark Clouds

C

LOUD SERVICE providers have previously drawn ire from environmentalists for not being transparent when it comes to the energy efficiency of their datacenters. However, a new report from the University of Melbourne says that the real sustainability threat comes not from the growing demand for datacenters to house cloudready infrastructure, but from the rising use of cellular and Wi-Fi networks to access cloud services.

A 2012 report produced

by Greenpeace titled, How Clean is Your Cloud?, argued that three of the biggest

businesses delivering cloudbased offerings—Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft—were “rapidly expanding without adequate regard to source of electricity, and rely heavily on dirty energy to power their clouds.”

It sounded a warning over the growing demand for datacenter space (and consequently energy consumption) driven by cloud adoption. The report cited an estimate that nearly $450 billion (about Rs 24 lakh crore) was being spent annually on new datacenter space and that datacenter demand was consuming 31 gigawatts of electricity, with a 19 percent

increase in 2012. However, by 2015, the energy used to run datacenters will be a “drop in the ocean”, compared to the wireless networks used to access cloud services, said Dr Kerry Hinton, deputy director of the Centre for EnergyEfficient Communications, the University of Melbournebased research center that produced the report.

“There is a significant emerging convergence between cloud computing and wireless communication, providing consumers with access to a vast array of cloud applications and services with the convenience of anywhere, anytime, any network functionality from the device of their choice,” states the report, The Power of Wireless Cloud.

This ‘emerging convergence’ has big implications for the energy consumption associated with cloud services, including SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. The report predicts that by 2015 energy consumption associated with ‘wireless clouds’ will reach 43 terawatt-hours, compared to 9.2 terawatt-hours in 2012.

“This is an increase in carbon footprint from 6 megatonnes of CO2 in 2012, up to 30 megatonnes of CO2 in 2015,” which is the equivalent of an additional 4.9 million cars on the road, the report states.

MAY 2013

—Rohan Pearce INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

5

NETWORKING

Support for SDN and BYOD Juniper Networks has launched a new range of more widely programmable switches and management tools that aim to address provider and enterprise needs for SDN and BYOD strategies.

The new EX9200 Core Switch, Virtual JunosV WLAN Controller and Junos Space Network Director products are aimed at datacenters and enterprise

campus customers who need greater network agility.

To prepare enterprise campuses and datacenters for new technologies and business requirements, the EX9200 is said to provide the programmability required for emerging applications and environments. The EX9200 prepares enterprises for emerging SDN protocols, allowing for network automation and interoperability without the need for additional hardware.

—Antony Savvas

-

PERSONAL COMPUTING

2.4 bn Devices to be Shipped in 2013

A

CCORDING TO Gartpresident at Gartner. “As ner, shipment of consumers shift their time devices worldwide away from their PC to tab(the combined lets and smartphones, they shipments of PCs, tablets, will no longer see their PC and mobile phones) is exas a device that they need to ptected to total 2.4 billion replace on a regular basis.” units in 2013, a 9 percent As a result, the traditional increase from 2012. Device PC market of notebooks shipments are forecast to and desk-based units is excontinue to grow, pected to decline reaching more 7.6 percent in than 2.9 billion 2013. This is not a units in 2017, but temporary trend the expected worldwide increase in the mix of these induced by a more device shipments devices will sigaustere economic in 2013 compared nificantly change environment; it to the last year. over the forecast is a reflection of a Source: Gartner period. long-term change The proliferation of lowin user behavior. Beginning er-priced tablets and their in 2013, ultramobiles will growing capability is accelhelp offset this decline, so erating the shift from PCs to that sales of traditional PCs tablets. “While there will be and ultramobiles combined some individuals who will show a 3.5 percent decline. retain both a PC and a tablet, Worldwide tablet shipespecially those who use ments are forecast to total either or both for work and 197 million units in 2013, a play, most will be satisfied 69.8 percent increase from with the experience they get 2012 shipments of 116 million from a tablet as their main units. “Lower prices, form computing device,” said Car- factor variety, cloud update olina Milanesi, research vice and consumers’ addiction to

9%

apps will be the key drivers in the tablet market,” said Ranjit Atwal, research director at Gartner. “Growth in the tablet segment will not be limited to mature markets alone. Users in emerging markets who are looking for a companion to their mobile phone will increasingly choose a tablet as their first computing device and not a PC.” In the shares of operating systems in device sales, the shift to mobile and the fight for the third ecosystem becomes more evident.

Android continues to be the dominant OS in the device market, buoyed by strong growth in the smartphone market . Competition for the second spot will be between Apple’s iOS/Mac OS and Microsoft Windows.

Tablets are not the only device type seeing aggressive price erosion. Smartphones are also becoming more affordable, driving adoption in emerging markets and the pre-pay segment in mature markets.

Of the 1.9 billion mobile phones to be sold in 2013, 1 billion units will be smartphones, compared with 675 million units in 2012.

—ChannelWorld Bureau

OPEN SOURCE

Citrix Bequeaths Xen to the Linux Foundation In an effort to attract a more diverse set of contributors, Citrix has donated its Xen hypervisor to the Linux Foundation.

Citrix announced the donation at the Linux Foundation’s Collaboration Summit.

The Linux Foundation will support continued development and maintenance of Xen. As a Linux Foundation Collaborative

6

Project, the newly named Xen Project will get support infrastructure and guidance from the non-profit foundation.

Citrix is hoping that by donating the code to the Linux Foundation future Xen development will get input from a wider, more diverse group of contributors.

Companies such as Amazon Web Services, AMD, CA Technologies,

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD M AY 2013

PAY IT FORWARD: Citrix’s donation will attract more developers.

Cisco, Google, Intel, Oracle, and Samsung have pledged to support Xen Project.

Citrix’s move to place Xen in a more vendor-neutral environment

Short Takes Panasonic announced the elevation of Manish Sharma as managing director of Panasonic India. In this role Sharma will be responsible for the strategic planning, and sales and marketing of company’s consumer and enterprise divisions with immediate effect. Sharma has also been appointed to the Board of Directors of Panasonic India.

NASSCOM announced that the Executive Council has appointed Krishnakumar Natarajan, MD and CEO, Mindtree, as the Chairman of NASSCOM for 201314. He succeeds N. Chandrasekaran, CEO and MD of TCS. Sanovi Technologies announced the appointment of Vic Mahadevan and Dr A. L. Rao to its Advisory Board. Mahadevan, previously, was chief strategy officer at NetApp, and Dr. Rao was chief operating officer of Wipro Technologies.

resembles the company’s recent donation of another project, CloudStack, to the Apache Foundation. That software also is open source, and Citrix wanted to expand the contributors beyond its own ranks of engineers as well.

Xen is one of among a handful of x86 server-based hypervisors in wide use today, along with VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and the open source KVM. The software now has more than 10 million users, according to the Linux Foundation.

—Joab Jackson

UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS

Why Does Cisco Not Feature Here?

T

WO STALWARTS in

the enterprise IT market joined forces to release a unified communications stack that integrates hardware from EMC, virtualization technology from VMware, and communications apps from Avaya. Perhaps most interesting about the news, though, is a company that was not involved: Cisco.

EMC, VMware, and Cisco are longtime partners—the three businesses joined forces to create VCE, a spinout offering converged infrastructure hardware with baked-in Cisco networking gear. Cisco and Avaya compete on communications products, so the fact that EMC and VMware are partnering with Avaya and not Cisco, has some raising questions about the health of the EMC-Cisco relations.

The collaboration pods announced include Avaya’s flagship Aura communications applications, meant to be used to power internal communications services for medium and large businesses, or to be the back-end technology behind large contact center operations.

Avaya provides networking functions, including session border controls and an optional Aura messaging server. This combined hardware-software stack allows Avaya communications apps to run seamlessly on the pod, including voice with call control, presence, instant message, e-mail, video, along with recording and reporting features.

So is it a snub to Cisco?

Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research, doesn’t view it that way.

“This is really the next logical step for Avaya’s collaboration pod,” he says.

During the past year or so, Avaya has been working to ensure its Aura UC apps can run in virtualized environments. Cisco, meanwhile, Kerravala points out, has similar solutions for its communications platform to run on NetApp equipment, an EMC competitor.

EMC and Avaya executives played down any potential straining of relations between EMC and Cisco as well. “Absolutely not,” said Anton Prenneis, an OEM evangelist for EMC, who

notes that EMC is willing and looking to partner with a broad range of application providers to ensure their software runs smoothly on EMC hardware. Prenneis added that EMC and Cisco have a “very strong” partnership, pointing to the VCE venture, for example.

“We didn’t sit back and se-

Around

TheWorld Rackspace’s Global Cloud Network

Rackspace has announced plans to open its cloud services up to third-party service providers and telcos, aiming to create a global network of datacenters powered by its OpenStack systems.

It intends to provide its expertise to help simplify and accelerate the process for companies looking for a quick way to enter the cloud services market.

This will involve building and running clouds in return for a percentage of revenues, with access to Rackspace software buit MAY 2013

on OpenStack architecture.

Rackspace will offer operational services including patching, tuning and monitoring, with carrier grade SLAs, the company said.

—Matthew Finnegan

HP Chairman Steps Down

HP’s Ray Lane is giving up his role as chairman amid ongoing shareholder disapproval of HP’s troubled Autonomy acquisition.

Lane will remain on HP’s board as a director but has given up his position as chairman, HP said.

Director Ralph Whitworth will take over as chairman while the company finds a permanent replacement for Lane, HP said.

—James Niccolai INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

7

lect Avaya out of some strategic marketing campaign, we have a good relationship (with them),” he said. When asked if EMC and Cisco would work on a similar analogous pre-integrated package for Cisco UC offerings, Prenneis said he couldn’t comment.

—Brandon Butler

Protect Product Family Sold

To further its concentration on software-defined datacenters, hybrid clouds, and end-user computing, VMware has sold the Protect product family to LANDesk.

As part of its efforts to focus on those areas, VMware came to the conclusion that asset and patch management as a standalone offering would be best provided by a partner such as LANDesk, the company said in a blog post.

—Mikael Ricknäs

n NEWS ANALYSIS

Salesforce: In Hot Pursuit of Amazon

Amazon stands tall as a cloud service provider. But, it has to keep an eye out.

Salesforce is close on its heels.

By Brandon Butler

8

W

Amazon’s biggest competitor in the cloud?

The go-to answer for many may be companies like Rackspace with its OpenStack platform, perhaps Google with its Compute Engine, Microsoft Azure, VMware or one of the up-and-coming cloud computing companies like Joyent.

But Mikhail Malamud, founder of cloud consultancy startup CloudAware, says another cloud company could pose the biggest challenge to Amazon’s cloud plans: Salesforce.

These two companies, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Salesforce, are two of the leading cloud providers in their respective markets of IaaS for AWS and SaaS for Salesforce. But Malamud be-

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD M AY 2013

HO IS

lieves there is one reason why Salesforce could be a formidable foe for Amazon in the cloud moving forward: Data.

THE DATA STASH “Data is the kingmaker in the cloud,” says Malamud, whose firm, CloudAware, provides a platform to access AWS resources.

Salesforce has an enormous cache of customer data, and not just any data, but some of enterprises’ most valuable data—customer information. Salesforce has data about who its users’ customers are, what interactions they have with those customers, and increasingly it’s been attempting to collect even more data, from human resource management to social data.

And Salesforce is building an ecosystem of prod-

ucts and services around that data. While the company may be best known as a SaaS-based CRM application, it also has a robust platform that allows customers to build new applications on its cloud.

Force.com and Heroku, the latter of which Salesforce acquired in 2010, are PaaS tools allowing customers to leverage CRM data already in Salesforce’s cloud and build related applications that are customized to individual users’ needs. It’s where Malamud built his company’s app. A Salesforce CRM customer, for example, could build an application on Force. com that integrates with the CRM application to analyze the sales data. And Malamud says every new application that’s built in Salesforce’s environment is one less app that’s running in Amazon’s cloud.

WE HAVE DATA TOO Amazon is responding in turn, though. In the past year AWS has made a concerted effort to manage more of its customers’ data. Announcements like Red Shift—the company’s headline announcement at its first-annual users conference, named re: Invent—is a new data warehousing service, meant to be a low-cost alternative to expensive on-premises database storage systems.

Amazon Glacier is a “cold storage” service for storing a company’s long-term data, while Data Pipeline is a relatively new service that makes it easier to transfer all that data between various applications within Amazon’s cloud.

“They’re clearly trying to get as much of your data as possible,” Malamud says.

Malamud says Salesforce will be the place where next-generation apps will be built, providing a legitimate threat to Amazon moving forward.

“It’s a legitimate theory, but it’s more of a longerterm play,” says David Vellante, chief analyst at research firm The Wikibon Project, about the Salesforce-Amazon rivalry.

The two companies are not really direct competitors right now, he says. They’re both cloud-based, but AWS at its core is about providing fast, easy, and cheap access to virtual machines, storage, and hosted applications in its IaaS cloud.

Salesforce is a SaaS that is attempting to build up its accompanying PaaS. Amazon’s bigger nearterm competitors are the growing cavalry of IaaS providers looking to steal business from the company, he says. Google, Microsoft, and Rackspace (with its OpenStack platform), as well as VMware, HP, Dell, Joyent, Terremark, and Savvis, are just some of the whole range of IaaS providers looking to bite into Amazon’s market share that pose a more immediate threat to AWS. Robert Mahowald, research vice president at IDC who leads SaaS and cloud services practice, agrees with Vellante. “It’s not necessarily where the companies are today, but it’s certainly an aspiration of Salesforce,” he says. But

Top of the Charts Salesforce’s revenue from business-customers in 2012 was by far the highest—among top 10 public cloud service providers—with Amazon Web Services coming a distant second. $2.9 bn

Salesforce.com Amazon Web Services

$1.7 bn

Microsoft

$1 bn

IBM

$600 mn

Fujitsu SAP AG

$550 mn $500 mn

HP

$480 mn

Citrix

$450 mn

AT & T

$400 mn

Oracle

$350 mn

SOURCE: Technology Business Research, Inc.

he’s also on board with Malamud’s core premise of “follow the data.”

Applications that run in the cloud are fundamentally more important than the infrastructure they run on, so in that sense Salesforce has an advantage in being able to offer customers products, services, and platforms that leverage data already in its cloud.

But AWS is a heavyhitter in the cloud, too.

Through partnerships with big enterprise software giants like SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft, AWS allows customers to migrate their existing enterprise software licenses to Amazon’s

Data is the kingmaker in the cloud.

Salesforce has an enormous cache of customer data, and not just any data, but some of enterprises’ most valuable data—customer information.

cloud and let AWS worry about all the underlying infrastructure.

Salesforce has a different business model: The company isn’t pushing customers to migrate their SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft apps into its cloud; they want customers to be all-in with its own cloud. So far, the company has done an extraordinary job capturing the CRM market, but existing business apps aren’t being migrated into Salesforce’s cloud.

To Mahowald, that means the Amazon versus Salesforce debate comes down to a new versus existing apps debate.

Amazon has everything in place to give customers the opportunity to outsource their packaged software onto its cloud, something enterprises are becoming more and more comfortable with. Salesforce wants to be the place

where the enterprises’ next-generation business apps are built and stored.

The problem for AWS is that there are increasingly more and more competitors offering similar IaaS services. To date, Amazon has simply done it better than its competitors, Vellante says—it out-innovates competitors, has a broader range of services and continually lowers its prices.

It’s tough for competitors to keep up, but a crop of providers are trying.

Some providers are carving out niches in vertical markets, offering healthcare-, governmentor financial services-focused clouds, for example.

Others are banking on the hybrid cloud—which combines both on-premises and public cloud resources—as being the future the industry. VMware, sensing an opportunity in the market, recently announced plans to create a hybrid cloud offering.

Salesforce isn’t competing with those offerings, though, Vellante says.

Salesforce has found a niche in its ecosystem of customers and is nurturing and growing it. But Salesforce is not the be all and end all of cloud service providers now or the future. “If you’re running a big data app and you need a 10-node cluster spun up today to host your analytics app, you’re not going to Salesforce,” Vellante says.

“You’re going to Amazon or another IaaS.” It’s a different play for each of the providers, which is why Vellante says both of these companies—AWS and Salesforce—will be around for a long time, and they both likely will make a lot of money in the cloud. 

MAY 2013

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

9

n FAST TRACK

Snapshot

Solutions India Systems

Founded: 1997 Headquarters: Mumbai Employees: 150 Revenue 2010-11: Rs 25 crore Revenue 2011-12: Rs 35 crore Revenue 2012-13: Rs 50 crore Branches: Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata, New Delhi, Pune Key Executives: Mustafa Rampurawala, Projects Head; Nehal Akhter, National Business Head Key Technologies: Video conferencing, telepresence, boardroom integration and automation, digital signage solutions Key Principals: NEC, LifeSize, Polycom, Samsung, LG, Panasonic

A continuous focus on excellence is what separates SISPL from the rest, says MD Punit Rastogi.

T

HERE ARE plenty of entry barriers that keep Johnny-come-latelies out of the high-growth SI club, including deep pockets and deeper customer relationships. But one of hardest barriers to break through is the ability to consistently offer excellence.

That’s what’s made Mumbai-based Solutions India Systems (SISPL), a leading player in the audio-visual market. It’s what transformed a small company that sold projectors into a sizeable SI which offers an entire gamut of audiovisual communication solutions to over 5,000 customers.

“We put in a lot of pre-sales effort in understanding the unique requirements of a customer and then defining the functionalities of a solution. This helps us deliver a real life experience,” says Punit Rastogi, MD, SISPL, who believes it’s crucial to sell an experi-

ence to customers—not products. The company’s end-to-end approach starts from designing a solution, turnkey project implementation and execution, user training, after-sales support, and post-warranty services.

SISPL also invests continuously in getting its architects certified in a

REVENUE GROWTH Rs 50Rscr11 cr RsRs359crCr

Rs 25 cr

2010-11 SOURCE: SISPL

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2011-12

2012-13

Photograph by KAPIL SHROFF

Website: www.sispl.co.in number of design-level courses from associations like ICAI (International Communications Industries Association). “This policy of research, training and development is what sets us apart from our competitors,” says Rastogi.

The company’s dedication to excellence has paid off. It’s seen an impressive growth of over 40 percent in the last financial year alone. Some of its key clients include names like ICICI Prudential, BNP Paribas, CRISIL, TCS, and Infosys among others. But the implementation it is really proud of is the design and IT makeover of the boardroom of the chairman of Reliance Industries, reportedly the largest boardroom in the country.

It helps that the market was blossoming. “In the last five- to six years, we’ve seen many enterprises turning into matured buyers of technologies like VC and telepresence. As a result, we’ve witnessed a growth rate of close to 15 percent in our enterprise/ SMB business,” says Rastogi.

In the coming quarters, SISPL is planning to look at new areas like unified communications. It has aggressive plans to go after verticals like healthcare and retail where it sees strong adoption. n —Radhika Nallayam

n OPINION

BART PERKINS

Cloudburst Ready The cloud is not flawless— nor is it likely to be anytime soon. When a cloud provider goes down, it’s important to be ready.

Here’s how.

Bart Perkins is managing partner at Louisville, Kentucky-based Leverage Partners, which helps organizations invest well in IT. Contact him at BartPerkins@ LeveragePartners.com.

M

OVING TO the cloud may reduce infrastruc-

ture costs and headaches, but clouds have their shortcomings. When they rain, millions can quickly become drenched. In the past year, Amazon, Microsoft, Google and other providers experienced problems, from minor disruptions to major outages.

A June 2012 headline captured the fallout: Modern life halted as Netflix, Pinterest, Instagram go down.

The service interruptions experienced by those companies and others disappointed countless consumers, but it was worse than a disappointment for the businesses themselves. They had come to depend heavily on cloud reliability; when the cloud services they had put their trust in failed, it was as if they had ceased to exist. All the outages were temporary, of course, but revenues were lost during the downtime, and afterwards customers wrote blog posts expressing everything from disappointment to anger, with some proclaiming that they would take their business elsewhere.

Organizations that depend on cloud services need to manage four areas to help ensure that their dependence isn’t a liability: n Providers. Ideally, a cloud provider should be managed, monitored, and measured like other critical IT suppliers. It is naive to take an “out of sight, out of mind” approach with cloud providers. Begin by setting clear performance goals with well-defined metrics.

Assign staff to monitor performance and manage the supplier relationship. n Resiliency. All cloud providers suffer periodic service degradation and occasional full outages. Unfortunately, restoration of normal service may not be fast enough to meet your business needs. Your enterprise architecture must also be designed for resiliency. Typical approaches involve spreading business functions, data and other assets across the cloud world. Most

enterprises separate entities geographically within a single provider’s cloud. The truly paranoid may want to spread their assets across multiple cloud providers. n Executive expectations. IT professionals tend to be realistic about the reliability that is possible in the cloud, but a lot of executives on the business side expect wellknown cloud providers to offer flawless service. They want “dial-tone” reliability, like the service provided by the old Bell system.

But that’s a standard that cloud suppliers can’t meet now and are unlikely to fulfill anytime soon. And even if cloud vendors do one day offer dial-tone reliability, it would likely carry a premium price tag. n Customer relations. Customers may become angry when their favorite services or phone apps are slow or temporarily unavailable. Your customer service staff’s response must be sympathetic, informative, and timely. When outages occur or service levels are significantly hampered, acknowledge the issue, apologize profusely, post status updates regularly, and share preventative measures as they are developed.

When IT comes under attack for flawed cloud service, remind executives what prompted the move to the cloud: The difference between costs incurred with a cloud provider and those required to build and operate an enterprise infrastructure.

Most good bargains require some level of trade-off, and clouds are no exception. n MAY 2013

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specific legal compliance and business process needs. There is an SAP vanilla offering, which we realized, cannot be sold on an as-is-where-is basis in this market. A vanilla solution, even with a bit of topping, would not work.

We also have a mandate that the cost of implementation has to come down, or else it isn’t practical for partners. We moved away from taking a vanilla solution and localizing it to creating localized solutions. We can proudly claim that we are a first-of-its-kind company to venture and invest into localization on this scale with complete thought process and execution by an Indian team for the Indian market.

ON RECORD n

Navaneet Mishra,

Vice President, Globalization Services, SAP Labs India, talks about how the company is leading the way in localizing offerings for the Indian market.

By Shantheri Mallaya

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At a time when many ERP vendors are still figuring out their localization strategy, SAP, through SAP Labs, has gone that extra mile to completely localize and standardize its offerings.

What was the genesis of this thought process?

MISHRA: The thought process for localization has evolved over the years.

The moment you come to a market like India, you see that there are typical processes and business practices one to encounters, which are unique to this geography. So, the first unit from SAP Labs India to get institutionalized to localize solutions was the globalization services, which has been an integral part of SAP business suite software since its inception in 1996-97. It has been providing global businesses with India

Obviously there is a very clear mandate for SAP Labs—to work closely with SAP India. Aren’t you very close to becoming a profit center?

MISHRA: While there are tangible market and business outcomes attached to the development of relevant products that come out of SAP Labs, we are not a profit center. Globalization services is taking the first step forward in ensuring that we know customer requirements; we are now becoming an integral part of business discussions. This is a development that SAP Labs is keen to take forward. We work closely with the sales organization to develop best-in-class solutions. Usage is critical component here, and not revenue. If our solutions find maximum usage, then the success of the solution can be guaranteed.

NAVANEET MISHRA | ON RECORD n What was the key agenda at the recent SAP Localization Summit 2013 for customers? Why weren’t SAP partners a part of this?

MISHRA: This year, 500odd customers were a part of the SAP Localization Summit, which seeks to create a platform for dialogue with customers to help them understand our solutions.

The summit provides us an opportunity to closely interact with customers, understand their painpoints, and also drive the messaging about how we are on the same page in localizing and tailoring our solutions to their needs. As far as partners are concerned, we have separate forums and

industries. How successful are you going to be in selling LCM modules to government departments?

MISHRA: LCM is, again, a module thought out and developed completely in India. Government officials in India are not trained IT personnel. Our LCM functionalities have been built keeping these factors in mind.

We have, in the last few months, sold our LCM modules to over 20 non-government customers. We have also done a POC for a government department.

When it comes to the government, it is all about their understanding of the domain. We base our offering on that. Once we

ferentiators and why will customers pay a premium for SAP? MISHRA: Our competitors, be it Tata Technologies, National Informatics Center (NIC), or anybody else, do have and would have offerings in this space. But, we see clear differentiators. Our solutions have an edge in the number of files that can be uploaded and opened seamlessly, random searches that can be made, scanning, seamless archiving of files, amongst numerous other functionalities and capabilities. Our collaborations and relentless discussions with policy makers have resulted in state-of-the-

Diwas—we announced a Hindi ERP. We now have a strategic partnership with Olifant, to increase the momentum. We will look at other strategic partnerships to help us find solutions for other languages as well.

Localization of solutions limits the know-how to a few people. So, how does SAP bridge the gap between customer requirements and a shortage of partner skill-sets?

MISHRA: Yes, that’s true.

When we say a solution is localized the knowledge to implement that is again in the hands of limited people—global SIs and a small set of other partners.

There is a huge partner

We moved away from taking a vanilla solution and localizing it, to creating localized solutions. We can proudly claim that we are a firstof-its-kind to venture and invest into localization on this scale. events for them since the dialogue with the partner community would be different. We do not want to dilute the impact of that.

We would like to devote our energy to the two communities optimally.

During the summit, we announced three new products—file lifecycle management, policy management framework, and address data cleansing.

These modules would primarily find huge demand with government departments.

The concept of life cycle management (LCM) is critical to many industries, and ERP players have attempted LCM offerings across manufacturing and other capital intensive

crack one big customer, that becomes a reference point. We are talking to a government department in Kerala. It’s a matter of time before we make significant inroads across the board.

Goods and services tax (GST) is another broad discussion that is afoot, and one that took some time and mindshare in the summit. We hope to concretize our efforts for GST keeping in mind its implications on various departments once the legislation comes.

There are numerous ISVs and ERP players emerging as key competitors with cost-effective vanilla offerings to the government.

What will be your key dif-

art, compliant products that will definitely be far superior. Eventually, these small nuances will add up noticeably and customers will be ready to pay a premium for SAP value-adds.

We also work closely with ISVs to top up our solutions and take them to customers.

So the relationship is complementary and not competitive. For the rest, it is an open market and the best-in-class should win.

Local language ERP has assumed priority—SAP made announcements to this effect last year. What’s on your radar now?

MISHRA: On September 14 last year—Hindi

community that has to be educated and enabled.

We are bridging the gap by organizing partner summits and webinars on focused topics of interest for technical personnel in partner organizations.

These are ongoing efforts and will show results over a period of time.

Will localized solutions from SAP Labs go to other markets as well?

MISHRA: Yes, it has already started happening. We have a German customer who has bought a localized business suite which it plans to implement back there. This is one of the first instances, and will become the norm in the future. n

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n OPINION

STEVEN VAUGHAN-NICHOLS

In a Tight Spot

W

HY WOULD it be a tough decision for MicroMicrosoft needs soft to introduce versions of its Office proto make up its ductivity suite for iOS and Android? Accordmind whether ing to Bob O’Donnell of IDC, “ The day they it wants to stay introduce Office for iOS and Android, they’ll start printing a software money.” And he added this cautionary note: “If they wait too company or long, they risk people finding alternatives, or workarounds.” if it’s really serious on-board office suites out there are OfThe thing that has turned Microsoft, fice2HD, Quickoffice Pro HD, and even prince of Redmond, into a vacillating about being Apple’s new updated iWork suite.

Hamlet is the thought that an Office a hardware But while these are all very good altersuite for iPads and Android tablets might natives, a lot of iPad and Android tablet well tank already anemic sales of the powerhouse users would welcome an Office suite with Surface RT and keep the Surface Pro as well. open arms. The various components of from taking off.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has been writing about technology and the business of technology since CP/M-80 was cutting-edge and 300bit/ sec. was a fast Internet connection—and we liked it! He can be reached at sjvn@vna1.com.

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Its hesitation is understandable. Office on iOS and Android would kill Microsoft’s Surface tablets. That means that the choice Microsoft is facing is huge: Whether to continue its foray into being a hardware vendor or go back and shore up its software roots.

When pushed on the Office question, Steve Ballmer danced around the point: “We do have a way for people to get to Office through the browser, which is very important. And we’ll see what we see in the future.” I say he avoided the point because the newly released Office 365 just doesn’t work that well on the iPad. And in any event, if you do subscribe to the full Office 365 Home Premium package, you get some, but not all, of the Office 365 apps.

Of course, you can also use Office Web Apps on your iPad via the Safari browser, but it’s not very pretty either.

So when IDC’s O’Donnell talks about alternatives, he probably isn’t referring to Microsoft’s Web-based Office tools.

Other choices are better. Google Docs, especially with GoDocs for Google Docs works just fine. And the superior

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Office remain the default for many users.

And that fact is at the heart of Microsoft’s dilemma, because that preference for Office could be leveraged to the advantage of Microsoft’s own tablets. The company could probably sell a lot more of them if Surface constituted the only route to a full-featured Office suite on a tablet.

If, however, Microsoft makes Office available for those more popular tablets as well, Surface will never catch up.

Microsoft must know that it’s looking at the possibility of Surface joining the ranks of Zune.

So that’s the billion-dollar question Microsoft is facing. Does it put all its eggs in the software basket, as it has done for the most part during all its existence, or does it continue to seek a foothold as a hardware vendor? If Office for iOS and Android does come along, it has decided to forgo its dreams of hardware riches.

As Hamlet might sum it all up: Thus sales do make cowards of us all; and enterprises of great pith and moment, with this regard their marketing turns awry, and lose the name of action. n

Photographs by KAPIL SHROFF

n THE GRILL

Peter McQuade

VP-Alliances and Partner Sales, QlikTech, on why the company isn’t a traditional BI vendor.

QlikTech claims to be a leader in business discovery which is user-driven business intelligence. Isn’t it BI and analytics repackaged, or is there more to it? Business discovery is a highly interactive way of working with data—as opposed to the old method of working with static data in a BI solution.

It can be placed under the umbrella of analytics. It’s a result of the evolution in analytics. With the amount of information expected to double by 2015, data has never been more strategic than it is now. But the information supply chain needs to transfer data across various sources as information that’s

readable and meaningful, and which is seamless and easy to handle. This information was historically controlled by the IT department. But their role has changed from being gatekeepers to enablers. Users outside IT departments are clearly driving self-service analytics to a greater degree than before.

Visualization or spread-sheets might look pretty, but if one cannot use the data to discover new things, then it’s not useful. QlikTech pioneered the self-service BI category which provides agility by allowing users to explore information freely rather than being confined to a predefined set of questions.

Dossier Name: Peter McQuade Designation: Vice President, Alliances and Partner Sales Company : QlikTech Present Role: Since joining QlikTech, McQuade has played a key role in the development and growth of QlikTech’s partner channels.

Career Graph: McQuade joined the IT industry over 30 years ago as a legal counsel at IBM. He has held a number of senior leadership roles in sales, compliance, and channels and alliances at several major corporations like IBM, ComputerLand, Oracle, and MatrixOne. He has conducted business in over 70 countries across six continents.

n THE GRILL | PETER MCQUADE mile service where businesses can get their hands around such issues.

Most of them [vendors] address the back-end problems while trying to assemble large amounts of data.

That’s where we branch off. We see ourselves play the last mile in the big data chain.

For any tech company there is general partner conflict, but at QlikView this conflict is comparatively less.”

Plenty of data flows through enterprises.

With every other big vendor pitching a big data story, how different is your vision?

Big data is a significant trend in the BI space. It’s not just the amount of data, but also the data philosophy and data type. Telcos and Internet providers transport data around the world, but to reach businesses and homes, one needs to overcome infrastructure challenges.

Sometimes, there is a loss of revenue from the supplier’s side and utility from the customer’s. We want to provide last 16

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QlikTech has been featured in Gartner’s BI and analytics magic quadrant for three consecutive years. But, how much of the market share have you snatched from SAP (BO/Sybase), SAS, and IBM (Cognos)? Our market share is growing consistently. It’s pace is dependent on which part of the globe we function in. One of the great reference points is that when we talk to people from these companies we know that big companies respect and consider us to a serious competitor.

While launching new products and training initiatives we always look at the partner dimension. For any tech company there is general partner conflict, but at QlikView this conflict is comparatively less. This has helped us retain and add more partners over the years.

BI and analytics is often perceived as a high investment domain by partners.

Also, it’s not high on a CIO’s priority list when compared to domains like security, storage, etcetera. Your thoughts. I can’t remember a partner or prospective partner telling me that “I will not become a partner because of the high investment requirements.” Of course, there is a need for investment, like any other technology. There is a significant demand for BI. As for the CIO’s priority, it must be understood that we are not a traditional analytics company. The organizations that need our solutions should not align with us believing that we are a BI vendor in the classical sense.

Shorter time-to-market and quicker ROI is a concern for CIOs. Are you good at delivering both of these aspects? The feedback is that we deliver shortimplementation times and better ROI. Unlike traditional vendors, who set up massive infrastructure or invite customers to visit their lab, we execute projects at customers sites.

We install software on a customer’s

laptop or desktop with a 30-day evaluation copy.

ROI depends on the application and the type of industry. At a broader level, we can say that workers need better and faster access to data and hence our solutions drive efficiency.

The mid-market has been a sweet-spot for QlikTech. Do you have a separate army of partners to help take large strides in the enterprise sector? We have moved beyond the early adopter stage by adding more than 27,000 customers globally across a broad spectrum of verticals. We work on a balanced business model for enterprises, mid-market, and SMBs. For enterprises, we have incorporated more security features into products and also ability to integrate with other systems.

We do not have a separate partner set implementing solutions for SMBs and enterprises. It’s not only the tier -1 partners that execute big projects, we have tier-2 partners, too, who have implemented our solutions.

We expect most partners to execute service business. Partners develop applications hence they provide first line support which ensures greater engagement with customers. This is a different model compared to other BI vendors.

According to Gartner every major BI platform vendor will present a cloud offering by 2013. But this will account for just 3 percent of total BI revenue. So, are partners riding on BYOD, social media, and cloud which form an important part of the analytics portfolio? Partners are working on social media, and the great thing about our products is that it’s built to the work across different devices and new-age platforms.

QlikView on mobile delivers a complete business discovery experience including interactive analysis, rich visualization, and associative search. Qliktech products can work on the cloud. We have one group of OEM partners who have embedded solutions on the QlikView platform and offer a SaaS model. We are evaluating the cloud opportunity as it is a growing interest area.  —Yogesh Gupta

n COVER STORY | VENDOR MANAGEMENT

Principles of

Selecting Principals Being picky about which vendors to partner with has Here are the best ways of working

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i o

s

T

HREE YEARS ago, Sudarsan

Ranganathan made a decision that some would have called, let’s say, far out.

The founder and CEO of Chennaibased Veeras Infotek decided to shrink the number of vendors the company worked with—hoping it would make his cash registers ring faster. It’s a fairly counter-intuitive strategy in an industry that applauds the idea of having plenty of vendor alliances. The more vendors in your portfolio, the logic goes, the healthier your business.

Instead of plummeting, Veeras Infotek’s bottomline jumped 90 percent year-on-year and over a sixyear period the strategy helped the company net a CAGR 350 percent.

“We are better off today because of a selective vendor alliance approach,” says Ranganathan.

As solution providers look for new ways to tweak their businesses, vendor portfolio management could be just the thing they need. Less, they might find like Ranganathan, equals more. But is there a magic number of vendors you should work with? Who

do you choose to work with? How do you rate your current set of partners?

Which relationships should you kill?

Your peers give you the answers to those questions.

1

Figure Out Your Magic Number

There was a time, during the era of product sales, when more meant better and having a long list of sign-ups was the norm. Solution providers, irrespective of their size, swore by this

increased the profitability and credibility of your peers. out an effective strategy. By Shantheri Mallaya MAY 2013

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n COVER STORY | VENDOR MANAGEMENT

We will only get in a vendor relationship if there’s a semblance of trust and authority.”

PAWAN KHURANA, CEO, QUANTM TECHNOLOGIES

mantra. But as the Rs 70-crore Veeras Infotek shows, a lengthy list of vendor alliances doesn’t mean squat when it comes to the bottomline.

Veeras Infotek had about 24 active vendor alliances before a spate of acquisitions among vendors—and the threatening moves by one of its vendor-partners—made Ranganathan decide it was time to do some spring cleaning.

At that time, Ranganathan remembers that HP had bought out Fortify, Mercury, ArcSight, and Tipping Point. Then Dell acquired SonicWall, and Websense had picked up SurfControl. At around the same time, Veeras Infotek lost a longstanding customer to the SI arm of a vendor and a competitor of sorts for Veeras Infotek. The vendor, recalls Ranganathan, sold a Cisco-Ironport 20

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solution and Cisco went ahead and backed the vendor in question—a move that set alarm bells ringing at Veeras Infotek’s headquarters.

“With this deal, we realized we had to clean up our vendor portfolio to safeguard our interests against large vendor opportunism,” says Ranganathan, whose list of partnerships now has 10 names.

Is 10 the magic number of vendor alliances to have? “Of course not,” says Mekalai, CEO

of Chennai’s Chain-Sys Systems. “Each business derives its own number.”

Chain-Sys Systems’ number is one. An Oracle Platinum partner, Chain-Sys Systems does not feel the compelling need to have multiple vendor alliances. With 90 percent of its business coming from one vendor, this SI-cum-consultant is happy not to venture into more partnerships.

Chain-Sys Systems, says Mekalai, sees itself competing with the likes of PwC and KPMG, and wants to emerge as a key consultant for Oracle implementations. Through Oracle, the company has white labeled SCM (eChain) and e-business (appLoad) suites, and has made inroads into multiple verticals. Chain-Sys Systems believes that the 50-60 percent year-on-year growth of its bottomline is proof that its philosophy works.

Manish Tandon, director of Questa Software in Mumbai, is vociferously against dependence on a single vendor.

Questa Software, which used to sell a lot of Sun, realized how dicey it was to adopt a single-vendor policy when Sun was acquired by Oracle. Questa Software, says Tandon, saw uncertainty and continuity issues loom large and quickly changed tracks.

Currently, Questa Software works with other vendors such as IBM, HP, and Symantec, among others.

The solution provider is also keen to revamp its Xerox MPS portfolio and might phase out a couple of other vendors from its portfolio, for profitability reasons, reports Tandon.

These alliances form part of a strategy, says Tandon, that will protect the company when the cloud kicks off in a big way and software is ousted.

At the other end of the number spectrum, there’s Bangalore-based Dhanush Infosol, which works in the networking space. CEO Anil Kumar

The Other View It’s important for vendors to be in the ‘top 5 list’ of partners—and vice-versa; only then do you have a mutually-beneficial relationship.”

GANESAN ARUMUGAM, DIRECTOR-PARTNER SALES, VMWARE

T.V. says that the company has 25 active vendor relationships and as many as 60 inactive ones.

“We never kill relationships.

There are so many opportunistic, once-in-a-while kind of transactions that we retain the inactive ones as well,” says Kumar.

One of challenges of having too many vendor relationships is managing them. It’s similar to the question of how many direct reports a CEO should have before the strategy of delegation become counter-productive. The number, called span of control, depends on the kind of business you run and the type people reporting to you. Research into span numbers indicate that between five and seven is the sweet spot.

How then does Dhanush manage 25 vendor relationships? “It’s simple,” says Kumar. The idea is to have between two and four working, active, and profitable vendor alliances in each domain. It’s a compartmentalization strategy that seems to work if Dhanush’s 30 percent year-on-year profitability is any indicator.

2

Choose Vendors with Vision

Being in the vendorsign-up race has more downsides than just mere management. Some partners, in their fervor to dabble in multiple relationships in the hope of seeing big money, overlook the fact that a vendor with an unclear roadmap or a fuzzy vision could hurt a partner’s business.

“We can’t encourage fly-by-night operators,” says Vishal Bindra, CEO of ACPL, headquartered in New Delhi. “If a vendor isn’t clear about its commitment to the India market, then it is a firm no.”

Bindra has reason to feel strongly.

Recently, he says, ACPL received a curt e-mail from the Indian representative of a vendor informing him that the vendor’s India operations were being shut down. The note, recounts Bindra, said he could deal with the inventory as he “deemed fit”.

ACPL went ahead and sold the orphaned stock bravely, but the episode was an eye opener. ACPL’s

always been choosy about who it works with, and it’s more selective now. Bindra says it’s become extremely particular about checking up on their vendors, beyond their technology, market share, and pricing strategies, says Bindra. This includes a vendor’s global track record, its India commitment and vision, most importantly its partner programs and the resources it plans to allocate to enable partners, training and certification. If these aren’t in place, then there is no question of tying up, says Bindra. Today, ACPL has six key vendor relationships that contribute to about 70 percent of its bottom line.

Pawan Khurana, CEO of QuantM Technologies in New Delhi agrees with Bindra’s approach. Khurana, who recently signed up to be an exclusive distributor for a messaging intelligence company, TrustSphere, says, “We will only get in if there’s a semblance of trust and authority.”

forced to do business with the grey market. “Until the vendor works out its pricing policies, this is what most partners are going to resort to,” says Khurana.

On the other hand, QuantM Technologies appreciates the way IBM, HP, and NetApp run their partner relationships. And the company has reciprocated by investing in skills to drive sales of these vendors. These three vendors contribute to about 60 percent of the company’s top line and help keep its profitability up. He especially likes NetApp’s commission policy on every bill of material.

Policies around pricing and commission often end up being a bone of contention between partners and their vendors with the latter normally allowing a standard overriding commission of 5 percent on disty, dollar, joint, or individual deals. “If I am not going to get my fair share why would I want

The Other View Vendors and partners should build a symbiotic relationship based on return on investment.”

KAUSHAL VELURI, DIRECTOR – CHANNELS AND ALLIANCES, INDIA SUBCONTINENT

QuantM Technologies, says Khurana, is extremely clear about not hobnobbing with vendors they perceive as lacking in commitment to their partners. It’s one of the reasons QuantM Technologies works less with vendors known to push volumes, says Khurana. These companies, he says, will insist their partners drive volumes even to the detriment of the relationship between the partner and the vendor.

Khurana also singles out a networking vendor, which, he says, needs to fix its pricing policy, an important indicator of a vendor’s vision.

The problem, he says, is that the vendor’s official disty price is higher than that of the grey market by between 5 and 15 percent. As a result, many partners are sometimes

to work a specific vendor?” asks a partner who doesn’t want to be named.

“We don’t care for top lines. Profitability is what matters; it’s the bottomline that counts,” says Ranganathan from Veeras Infotek.

A key, if obvious, aspect of vendor vision that partners should evaluate is a vendor’s technology. Take the example of Mumbai-based Wysetek Technologies which entered into a tie-up with VMTurbo, a virtualization management company.

The company’s technology, says Rajesh Mathkar, director of Wysetek Technologies, was solid. But unfortunately that wasn’t enough. “The solution was good and we tried to get something going. But eventually we figured out that the market just wasn’t ready for VMTurbo,” he says.

Mathkar appreciates the way IBM works its relationships. Wysetek MAY 2013

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n COVER STORY | VENDOR MANAGEMENT Technologies, he says, makes 60 percent of its revenues from IBM and that business is managed by an IBM specialist. Wysetek Technologies, which also has key relationships with EMC, VMware, and Citrix (they contribute 40 percent to its revenues), assess its vendor portfolio often. “Commitment from both parties is a key factor,” says Mathkar. “There is no room for casual flirting.”

3

Never Kill Relationships

Any partner undergoing the process of vendor portfolio management must, at some point, ask the question: What do you do with vendor alliances that don’t make the cut? Do you kill them?

You don’t, say the majority of partners we spoke to, unless the situation

The Other View Our focus is on having the right channel partners who can provide the right experience to the customer.”

VIPIN TUTEJA, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, TECHNOLOGY, CHANNELS AND INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS, XEROX INDIA

demands a formal signoff, but that’s an extreme step. Most vendor relationships that don’t square well with a partner’s business needs are allowed to remain on its portfolio, and even show up on a partner’s website. Often, say partners, these relationships are left to languish and die a natural death.

There are times, though, when a partner has to pull the trigger. Leon

We are better off today because of a selective vendor alliance approach.”

SUDARSAN RANGANATHAN, CEO, VEERAS INFOTEK 22

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD M AY 2013

Computers has such a moment in 2007. “Some bitter run-ins with vendors such as HP made us rethink where we were headed,” says Rahul Meher, CEO of the Pune-based solution provider.

HP’s constant pressure on margins made day-to day life difficult for Leon Computers, says Meher. In the end, Meher made a decisive call and officially ended the relationship. Today, Leon carefully handpicks its alliances.

EMC, Commvault, IBM, and VMware contribute to about 60 percent or more of its revenues as well as its profitability. The company has about 10 key relationships. Meher says that he plans to limit the number of new relationships, but is looking at solutions and services as a driving force, a strategy that’s helped it crack some significant multinational accounts.

There are times when the nonconfrontational strategy suggested by partners can get tricky—especially if one of your less-active vendor alliances gets in the way of a more profitable one. But managing competitive and conflicting vendor relationships is a tightrope walk channel partners are not averse to taking if it makes business sense.

Take for example of Ahmedabadbased SEPL. The company works with Cisco for switches and routers, a relationship that it entered into during the initial stages of the business. SEPL has been a Cisco reseller for some time. Then Cisco’s rival, Juniper, forayed into switching, and SEPL made a strategic call and signed up with Juniper.

Founder and MD, Pratik Patel says SEPL only pitches Juniper to new customers with greenfield projects.

With customers that have legacy Cis-

co infrastructure, it drives Cisco so as not to disturb the client’s existing set up. SEPL has also set up a Juniper studio/POC lab, besides being an MSP (for Juniper’s cloud ready datacenter) providing the whole range of services from Juniper.

Today, Juniper contributes to about 60 percent of SEPL’s top line and bottomline. “We have made a conscious choice to strike a balance between volume and value,” says Patel, implicitly referring to is the fact that Cisco is more topline focused company and Juniper is more bottomline focused. But Patel underlines the fact that although the company has “decided to win or lose with Juniper,” Cisco will always remain a partner. Incidentally, SEPL is looking at a couple of strategic vendor alliances this fiscal, with whom it is reportedly closing talks.

4

Get Organized

For channel businesses that are serious about ensuring they have the most productive bunch vendors in their portfolio, it’s important to create more formal and process-driven approaches to evaluating their partners.

Larger players like QuantM Technologies have taken baby steps in this direction. As part of its business restructuring plan, the company has set up separate operational teams to manage its portfolio. The key ones, which contribute to 90 percent of QuantM Technologies’ OEM-SI relationships, come under a head of sales and a product manager.

QuantM Technologies says its ‘formula’ to assess its vendor portfolio includes a mix of indicators. These

Commitment from both parties is a key factor. There is no room for casual flirting.”

RAJESH MATHKAR, DIRECTOR, WYSETEK TECHNOLOGIES

include the health of the relationship, how much a vendor contributes to the business’ top line and bottomline, and the number of clients a vendor’s technology is used in. QuantM Technologies’ team does a profitability analysis of each vendor’s business. The health of the relationship is not necessarily dictated by profitability, but a host of other variables such as interactions, experiences, and the vendor roadmap for the partner. Khurana

The Other View Our core philosophy is not just about toplines, but also about ensuring that partners make decent operating margins.”

SANTOSH PANDEY, COUNTRY MANAGER, DELL WYSE INDIA

says these evaluations take place every quarter.

There are others, too, who believe that portfolio assessments should be a part of quarterly business reviews. Jiten Mehta, director of Magnamious Systems, for instance, advocates this. He has managers to oversee Citrix, Microsoft, and IBM, but monitors Dell, a key contributor to the business, himself.

“Portfolio management is a matter of strategy, prior experience, and also how much a vendor contributes to us,” he says.

Others like Wysetek Technologies believe that a thorough review should take place at the beginning of a fiscal year.

Few, however, go to the extent of using tools, such as business intelligence to monitor the performance of their vendor portfolios. But that, say partners, is only a matter of when, not if. n MAY 2013

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

23

Raunaq Singh,

Director, Targus Technologies, talks

about how his investment in Juniper Networks has paid-off.

Targus Technologies is amongst the Top Elite Partners of Juniper Networks. .

Targus Technologies is among the few Elite partners of Juniper Networks in India. How does this status help you as a solution provider?

Being an Elite status with Juniper has been a great advantage for us. The Elite status allows us to buy directly from Juniper as we are a tier-1 partner. So, we have an end-toend focus when it comes to Juniper’s portfolio as well as target vertical markets. We have to fulfill minimum business and skillset commitments to be an Elite partner of Juniper’s. That is the reason we keep investing in Juniper’s offering. Our sales, presales, and post-sales teams are certified on all Juniper technologies so that we can effectively sell and deploy their products.

A WIN-WIN FORMULA

Does this give you a competitive advantage in the market?

Absolutely. One of our recent customer wins—one of the top four IT/ITES companies in India—is a good case-in-point. We deployed a Wi-Fi campus network for the company’s new facility in Gurgaon. This was an important deal for us as, traditionally, this company has been one of the largest customers for Cisco in India.

Let’s Build the Best showcases stories of channel partners that have benefited from their relationship with Juniper.

The solution we proposed, of course, had all the functionalities that the customer was looking for—privilege management, single sign-on for guests, authorization, and access control. It is the first solution in India to have deployed the Juniper SmartPass and RingMaster. At the same time, we were able to quote a better price to the customer, by virtue of the fact that we were an Elite partner of our OEM. That was the deal clincher.

You seem to be getting off to a good start with Juniper here.

Yes. This IT/ITES behemoth is a customer with whom Cisco does millions of dollars worth of business every year. Targus and Juniper jointly are targeting at least onefourth of that home business from Cisco.

We are already doing a lot of work around this and are investing quite a bit of time and effort for this particular customer.

It’s pretty evident that a lot of customers are now open to alternatives, rather than simply going ahead with brands that have been dominating the market for a long time.

More than plain vanilla networking solutions, Juniper has a strong focus on a lot of enterprise solutions, especially around security. Have you had any recent wins in security?

Yes, we have done some very interesting government implementations recently, one of which was for a government’s R&D organization. In the wake of a recent cyber-attack on one of its websites, it wanted to spruce up its security measures. Quite naturally, we had to face strong competition from leading players like Fortinet and Cisco for this deal. All the bidders gave a POC to the customer. The customer was really impressed with the results of our POC using the Juniper solution. The Juniper MAG6610 gateway we proposed had all the functionalities that organization was looking for—network access control, scalable SSL VPN, single point access, application acceleration, and even duallevel authentication. The Juniper solution

“Targus Technologies is one of our key partners in the commercial space and through our collaboration, we have been able to deliver costeffective, fast, comprehensive yet simplified solutions to our customers. We’ve already had several wins across North India, and we look forward to more joint achievements in years to come.”

— Jitendra Gupta, Director-Channels, Juniper Networks India and SAARC

was able to provide the customer multiple features that were missing in competitors products. The customer did not want anything else other than Juniper, probably because no other vendor could meet the specifications demanded.

How important is this win for you?

This government project was a very important security win for us. As an R&D set up, security is paramount. If such a customer has trusted us with security, it benchmarks Targus.

We are currently working on many of its projects. We are now trying to map this customer end-to-end. Now that we are into their security and network infrastructure, we believe that the organization will trust us with more of its IT infrastructure. If someone trusts us with security, then they will trust us with everything else. That is a very important aspect for us in terms of cross-selling.

Much like consulting and implementation services, POC also seems to be an important factor in solution selling.

Our recent project for an online portal is a good example. The customer was looking at scaling up its infrastructure as the number of users increased. As it grew, it wanted to upscale security to protect itself from hackers and also cater to higher volume of users.

Security and uptime were its top concerns.

Five vendors, including us and the customer’s existing vendor, pitched for the deal. The customer also wanted to see a POC from all the five vendors. There were strong competitors like Cisco and Fortinet.

We spent a number of days on the POC for the customer. Even after that, the company was not fully satisfied. Its biggest concern was the probability of downtime while migrating from the existing platform to the proposed Juniper platform. The migration from Checkpoint to Juniper is usually very tricky and downtime would mean that we would have to roll back the migration. It wanted to retain all its existing policies while migrating to the Juniper platform. We had proposed the SRX 3400 services gateway, a very highend chassis based appliance.

The customer wanted to see reports of third-party vendors and also see an exact replica of its environment. The usual POC can’t give an exact idea about the throughput capacity until the system goes live. So we did a similar migration in the Juniper lab, in a fully stretched environment and shared the results. The customer was convinced and decided to implement the Juniper solution. It was using Checkpoint for security and Cisco for switching and routing. Despite being an existing customer of these two OEMs, it still chose to go for Juniper. It would have been a very easy win for Cisco, in fact, considering the customer could have then got a single vendor for both its security and core networking requirements. You can imagine how strong a case it must have been.

Authorized Distributor

CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP

n FAST TRACK

Datasoft Network Solutions

Snapshot Founded: 1990 Headquarters: Mumbai Employees: 85 Revenue 2010-11: Rs 40 crore Revenue 2011-12: Rs 42 crore Revenue 2012-13: Rs 46 crore Branches : Ahmedabad, Pune Key Executives: Blossom Nandi, Director–Operations; Mayur Trivedi, VP–Sales Key Business Activities: Systems integration Key Principals: IBM, HP, Dell, Lenovo, Cisco, Microsoft, Gajshield, Kaspersky, D-Link, VMware, CA Technologies Key Verticals: BFSI, IT/ITES, hospitality, education, logistics, government Website: www.datasoft.co.in

We want be a Rs 100 crore entity by 2015, says Irvin Pinto, CMD, Datasoft Network Solutions.

S

MBs HAVE been a prime focus

area for Datasoft Network Solutions for a while now.

Thats because getting orders, and importantly, keeping business rolling is never a challenge whilst working with SMBs. This ease in functioning prompted Irvin Pinto, the company’s CMD to say, “My aim’s to ensure that our company is a Rs 100 crore entity with a pan-India network by 2015.” Presently, SMBs and midmarket contribute over 60 percent of the company’s revenues. SMEs remain the main contributor to Pinto’s aspirations. “The growth path was very clear from the start—to focus on SMBs. This way we do not lose out on bottom lines,” he says.

Datasoft services SMB customers by addressing individual pain areas like cost and expansion related issues,

28

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD M AY 2013

as many of these companies are on a rapid growth path. “Our team inspects their pain-points and helps chart an IT roadmap wherein the customer can grow and minimize their IT spend,” says Pinto.

TECHNOLOGY SPLIT 5%

Services

35%

1%

Others

Enterprise Applications

10%

Networking

15%

17%

Storage

17% PCs

SOURCE: DATASOFT NETWORK SOLUTIONS

Security

It’s also making inroads into the enterprise segment. “Large orders will not provide much to the bottom lines, so top lines are important too,” he adds. Almost one fourth of its revenues come from enterprise accounts.

Datasoft’s strategy was different a decade ago. The company worked only in the BFSI sector. But with a slowdown in the sector, it was decided that the organization needed to spread across a variegated set of verticals.

This strategy has paid off.

The company, over the years, has lost few opportunities with enterprise customers due to a lack of presence in certain cities. But often there is very little that could have been done, says Pinto. “If the branch office does not contribute in terms of costs, and sustain itself, then it makes little sense to have presence in some areas. We will stabilize existing branches in western region before we expand any further,” he says. In terms of technology, Pinto says that the cloud is relatively slow but virtualization is picking up. “SMBs with three to four applications are adopting virtualization. Also, they are shifting to open source solutions.

Technologies like networking, security (UTM/Firewall), and enterprise applications continue to be in demand and will do so in the future,” he says. n -Yogesh Gupta

How Digital

Track Solutions won a deal to implement a wireless solution for Hyderabadbased Hetero Drugs in the face of certain defeat.

By Aritra Sarkhel

Venkat (R), VP-Sales, Digital Track Solutions, offered a seamless solution to Niranjan Bakre, Head-IT, Hetero Drugs.

Who

Dares Wins 26

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD M AY 2013

Photo by R. CHANDROO

S

OMEONE SHOULD have told

Venkat to run hard and fast, and not look back. Not that he would have listened.

It’s certainly what normal people would have done in his place. As the vice president of sales of Digital Track Solutions, Venkat wanted to close a deal to implement a wireless solution for an existing client.

The challenge was that a competitor—126,500,000,000 times the size of Digital Track Solutions—wanted it too.

Worse, the company Venkat worked for didn’t really have any experience with implementing the technology.

None of that, however, was going to stop Venkat from making a pitch. If the cards he was dealt with forced a David vs. Goliath kind of stand-off, he would play his part and take a swing.

THE CLIENT It was a June morning in 2012 and Venkat had just walked into Hetero Drugs’ plush headquarters in Hyderabad’s industrial estate.

Outside, the summer heat beat down heavily on the company’s wellwatered lawns causing little drops of water to sparkle. As Venkat took in the view, he prepared mentally for the meeting with Niranjan Bakre, Hetero’s head of IT and a client for about a year.

Venkat remembers them discussing a solution for the company’s

CASE STUDY  headquarters. “It was a routine customer-partner meet and we were talking about the pros and cons of the particular solution,” says Venkat.

That’s when Bakre shared a problem Hetero had been facing for sometime. Two years ago, the Hyderabadbased pharmaceutical had installed a 2-MBps lease line from BSNL’s to link 14 of its branches across the city. But over time, Bakre said, the company began facing bandwidth and connectivity challenges.

“Sometimes, our employees at other locations could not even access SAP during the day. We also faced multiple link failures every week,” Bakre says during a recent interview.

It’s unclear whether Venkat knew that Bakre’s team had already began scouting for a solution to solve its connectivity challenges—it had reached out to industry bigwigs including the $46 billion Cisco and Motorola Solutions—but Venkat saw an opportunity and jumped.

He proposed using a Ruckus Wireless solution. Digital Track had previously worked with Ruckus Wireless and was aware of their portfolio of solutions.

He quickly turned down.

“We were already evaluating solutions from other vendors in this vertical,” says Bakre. “During the very first stage of discussion, we did not agree on Digital Track doing this implementation for us.”

TRIAL BY FIRE Back at Digital Track’s headquarters in Chennai, Venkat chewed on the problem of convincing Hetero to give Digital Track the deal. Over the next few weeks, he had multiple meetings with Bakre using persuasion and presentation to make his case.

Bakre, however, wasn’t budging. And in the meanwhile, his team’s quest for a technology provider marched on relentlessly, pushing Venkat further from his goal with each passing day. Hetero’s IT team had expanded the search to include Aircel, Airtel, and Reliance.

They were also vetting other solution providers in Hyderabad. “Digital Track is not the only SI we work with,” says Bakre. “It’s always good to evaluate various options.”

Ranged against such intense competition, Venkat decided to play to

Snapshot Key Parties: Hetero Drugs, Digital Track Solutions

Location: Hyderabad Implementation Time: 2 months Project Cost: About Rs 21 lakh Main Vendors: Ruckus Wireless Key People Involved: S.T. Muneer Ahamed, MD; Venkat, VP-Sales; Sameer, Project Manager; Raghu and team (All from Digital Track Solutions); Niranjan Bakre, Head-IT, Hetero Drugs Key Technologies: Ruckus end-to-end wireless solutions

Key Challenges: Competition from vendors and other system integrators, inexperience in implementing a similar solution Post-implementation ROI: Seamless connectivity, lower cost, better throughput and uptime

his strengths: He would let the solution speak for itself. He knew that the Ruckus Wireless solution would meet Hetero’s needs and give its users the great throughput they were looking for and decided to ask Bakre to allow him to do a proof-of-concept (POC).

It was a smart move because he knew that the project would mean a significant investment for Hetero, a fact that would make them lean towards using a proven brand name, instead of an unknown player like Digital Track. It’s a de-risking strategy many enterprises use, one that’s summed up nicely with the saying “no one ever got fired for buying IBM.” Bakre agreed and gave Venkat and his team a month to show him results.

The POC would need to link three branch office in a 10 kilometer radius of Hetero’s headquarters.

Venkat had a foot in the door, but delivering the POC would be a challenge.

IN THE END ZONE Until now, Venkat’s battle was getting Bakre to see Digital Track as a real candidate for the implementation. With that challenge behind him, Venkat began to focus on putting together a

solution that met Hetero’s expectations.

There was only one problem: Digital Track had never actually done a project like this before.

“There was a fear that we wouldn’t be able to pull off a project like this,” says Venkat. The project would require setting up outdoor wireless access points between two Hetero branches and checking for line of site, among other challenges.

But with no way but forward, Digital Track’s team put their shoulder to the boulder. They quickly reached out to Ruckus Wireless’ R&D team. Venkat says Ruckus Wireless’ team collaborated with Digital Track and helped them understand how to implement a pointto-point wireless solution between three different locations. The joint collaboration, says Venkat, helped demystify the technology behind the solution.

Thanks to Ruckus Wireless’ help and Digital Track’s teamwork, the POC was ready in a month. The results, says Bakre, left Hetero’s IT team ecstatic.

Compared to the 2MBps throughput the company was getting from the line provided by BSNL, Hetero was now getting 90 MBps with Ruckus’ end-to-end wireless solution. “We were elated at the difference in the results and the kind of seamless connectivity provided by the Ruckus Wireless solution,” says Bakre.

In the meanwhile, Bakre’s team had been unable to find any other player who could move as fast as Digital Track.

Bakre says the other system integrators did not even have spare devices to showcase a new concept like this. At the end of one month, Digital Track was the only SI that was able to present a POC. “The SI was very flexible and met our deadlines,” says Bakre. “Most of the other bigger SIs didn’t even have a POC to show us. There was no point in going ahead with them,” says Bakre, who had decided to go with Digital Track with the remaining 11 branches.

Bakre’s decision also made sense financially. In terms of cost, Hetero would end up paying Rs 1.5 lakh as a one time investment to link two locations and 15 percent on the AMC subscription from the subsequent year onwards, compared to Rs 2 lakh a year with the BSNL line.

That’s the thing about being small; it allows you to be faster, cheaper, and more agile.  MAY 2013

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

27

CLOUD ROI | FEATURE n

The cloud can help you cut costs. But, to achieve that, companies need to exercise due-diligence before they embark on the journey.

By Nancy Gohring

T

HE KEY to earning a positive ROI when adopting cloud services—including SaaS and IaaS—is carefully studying costs and benefits to ensure that such a shift will pay off.

Sounds like many of the other IT projects you’ve shepherded, right? But it turns out it’s incredibly complex to determine whether a move to the

cloud will pay off for a given application. When done in haste, that analysis can lead companies to adopt the cloud for the wrong reasons, leaving them with higher costs or an inferior product when compared to an onpremises installation.

The good news is that despite all the hype around the cloud, it appears that many businesses recognize the

dangers and are proceeding with caution. “It is significant that the enterprise market is really moving to the public cloud at quite a glacial pace, and I think it’s because they know ROI is much more complex than just the avoidance of hardware and software costs,” says Marc Brien, vice president of research for Domicity, a consulting and IT analysis firm.

There aren’t comprehensive estimates for how many enterprises are using cloud services. Amazon Web Services (AWS), the most popular IaaS offering on the market, doesn’t reveal such detailed stats. However, Cloudyn, a company that monitors AWS usage for customers, says that just 11 percent of AWS customer base around the world has more than 1,000 employees.

SaaS offerings from certain providers like Salesforce are much more popular in enterprises, with niche or legacy app cloud services a mixed bag in terms of enterprise adoption, Brien said.

Among those businesses that are using cloud services, there are plenty of success stories showing that the cloud can significantly cut costs. Nucleus Research examined 70 case studies of companies adopting SaaS and found that the services offered 1.7 times greater ROI than on-premises apps, largely due to their ability to offer increasing benefits over time without a proportional increase in costs.

But there are also some businesses that are adopting cloud services and regretting it. Nucleus Research found in a survey that 52 percent of cloud CRM customers were willing to consider switching vendors within six months. “What we saw was that companies had often been sold aggressively and they spent less time on due diligence and planning,” says Rebecca Wettemann, an analyst at Nucleus, which offers IT research and advisory services.

The cloud doesn’t fit all use cases.

“It’s not a silver bullet. It’s not the right answer for every situation,” says Casey Coleman, chief information officer for the General Services Administration.

ONLY FOOLS RUSH IN As the first federal government agency in the US to deploy a cloud-based e-mail service agency-wide, the GSA didn’t MAY 2013

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

29

n FEATURE | CLOUD ROI have a road map to follow, says Coleman.

So beginning in May 2009 it thoroughly examined its current costs as well as projections for the cloud service.

“It is the case that it has to be well thought out and methodical. This is an IT project like any other. You have to plan for change management, promote user awareness, ensure cyber security in contractual terms, like with any IT project. If you don’t approach it in that manner, you might have a different experience,” Coleman says. “The promise of cloud computing has been borne out in our experience.”

When the GSA adopted Google Apps for e-mail in July 2011, it was able to realize added cost savings by also transitioning non-e-mail systems that were attached to its legacy e-mail system. The agency had been using Lotus Notes for e-mail, plus Domino for workflow apps. As part of its review of adopting Apps for e-mail, the GSA took a hard look at the Domino apps. “We ended up reviewing those apps and eliminating most of them,” she says.

The GSA had 2,000 apps in Domino, ranging from small databases to more substantial workflows. It got rid of all but 500 of those apps, with many consolidated and reworked in Force.com.

Cutting so many apps meant that the GSA could then turn off 300 in-house

servers, Coleman says.

Those savings plus others meant the GSA projected that it would save $16 million (about Rs 86 crore) over five years by moving to Google Apps for e-mail—and to date that estimate is proving to be accurate, Coleman says.

Not every transition to the cloud will save that kind of money, but closely examining costs and benefits may reveal that the cloud makes sense even if it doesn’t impact the bottom line.

In 2009 when Northern Kentucky University switched from on-premises Exchange for student e-mail to Microsoft’s hosted offering, known then as Live@edu, it didn’t save money over its existing implementation. But the university gained value because the service allowed for easy integration with smartphones and online storage with SkyDrve. “So even though the costs were flat, it provided more services to students,” says Tim Ferguson, CIO for the university.

The hosted service also allowed the university to boost the size of student inboxes. “What we were able to offer to students when we hosted e-mail on site was minimal at best,” he said. “With the move to the cloud-based e-mail, students now have enough e-mail storage to meet their needs.”

Building a Cloud Roadmap Computer Discount Warehouse’s (CDW) recommendations on building your cloud roadmap: l Tap a cross-section of your stakeholders for a thoughtful analysis of benefits and costs,

and then select a cloud strategy consistent with your IT service fulfillment model. l Launch first with services that don’t pose unacceptable risks to your organization, aren’t

business critical and where complexity of implementation is low (storage, unified communications and office productivity apps, for example). l Leverage your user’s familiarity with consumer cloud offerings to maximize the success

of cloud adoption. l Independent software vendors will bring new features to market faster with cloud ap-

plications, so follow those changes closely. l Start planning today; understand your internal “cost to serve” per application, which will

help determine ROI for public cloud solutions. l When working with cloud providers, look for contracts that establish and enforce service

levels and security standards. l Work with a software licensing expert to clarify and resolve issues affecting applications

your organization wants to move to the cloud.

—Thor Olavsrud 30

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD M AY 2013

Ferguson studied what it would have cost to adopt the latest version of Exchange and upgrade storage capacity to match what was offered with the hosted Exchange, and he estimated the additional annual cost would have reached $100,000 (about Rs 53 lakh).

Instead, by moving to the hosted version, his costs remained flat, while gaining functionality.

JUST SAY NO—EVEN TEMPORARILY Northern Kentucky University is in the midst of a transition to using virtual desktops rather than physical computer labs and has been turning down vendor offers that just don’t make sense economically, with hopes that still-to-come products and pricing models will eventually meet its needs.

The university decided to approach the project in “baby steps,” by running the virtual desktop software on-premises with the idea of transitioning it to a public cloud later, says Ferguson.

Around 18 months ago, the university did trials of the virtual desktop software from a few vendors, all hosted in-house. The software’s performance didn’t meet expectations and neither did the price, so the university declined to implement any of the vendors’ offers. “They were surprised.

We said, ‘Here it is in black and white.

You’ll cost us more money. The ROI is not good enough. Come back to me when you can solve it,’” Ferguson says.

Since then, the university has deployed VMware’s View virtual desktop software in-house and is about to start trials running the software on Dell’s public cloud, and possibly others. Ferguson expects to have deployed all of the university’s labs as virtual desktops hosted in a public cloud by 2014 or 2015, and to be saving around 30 percent over current costs.

The university closely tracks costs in order to be able to present current expenditures to vendors. For the virtual desktop project, Ferguson knows how many staff members support the current implementation, what the hardware costs, and how much work it takes dealing with software patches. He also knows usage peaks and valleys, an important issue for a university and one that could help it save money by moving to a public cloud.

This data is extremely important when working with potential vendors, he says. “If I clearly articulate what it costs today, if they can’t save me money, why do it?” he says. “If you can’t articulate that, it’s kind of hard to ask a vendor to do something for you.”

One way that Northern Kentucky is making sure cloud services save costs is by pushing its vendors to offer true usage-based costing. Many vendors of SaaS services that Ferguson has looked at are trying to charge on a per-seat basis. But for a university, with its slow times during the summer and holidays, that pricing model doesn’t make sense. At peak usage, the pricing would save money for Ferguson but on average, because of the valleys, the per-seat model ends up costing him more than keeping many apps in house.

That’s a particularly important issue for Northern Kentucky’s ERP system, which supports class registration. The system peaks when students are registering for class and then “flatlines,” he says. While his group spends a lot of time managing the on-premises SAP implementation, “if I have to pay for the peak for an entire year, that’s not very interesting,” he says.

Also, the SAP system is one that the university can’t take risks with because the software has to be totally available when students want to register for class. That means Ferguson is going to move that system to the cloud only when he’s totally confident it won’t fail. “We’re going to accept less risk when it comes to those bread and butter systems,” he says.

THE CALCULATION To try to figure out the ROI of any of its proposed cloud projects, Northern Kentucky starts with an ROI calculator and research from Gartner, adapting it for the university’s own special needs.

For instance, Ferguson has strict privacy requirements since many cloud services used by the university handle students’ information including Social Security numbers and other personally identifying data.

NKU includes privacy in its ROI

How Cloud Computing Helps Cut Costs, Boost Profits

T

HE decision over whether to move your organization’s IT to the cloud can be a daunting one. After all, it means a wholesale change in the sourcing and delivery of IT products and services.

However, many companies are making the leap, at least for select capabilities—a recent study by CDW found that more than half of organizations are moving a variety of capabilities to the cloud. And a majority of them are recognizing cost savings and increased profits, according to another study by Rackspace Hosting.

“The findings were pretty telling in terms of the adoption of cloud computing and the benefits of cloud computing,” says John Engates, CTO of Rackspace Hosting.

“The bottom line is cloud saves companies money and increases their profits.”

The study found that 88 percent of cloud users pointed to cost savings and 56 percent of respondents agreed that cloud services have helped them boost profits. Additionally, 60 percent of respondents said cloud computing has reduced the need for their IT team to maintain infrastructure, giving them more time to focus on strategy and innovation.

And indeed, 62 percent of the companies that have saved money are reinvesting those savings back into the business to increase headcount, boost wages and drive product innovation.

calculation by subtracting value when considering a vendor that doesn’t seem to grasp the university’s privacy requirements, he says.

The value of various factors will vary based on the organization.

Security may be more important at one business than another; the speed at which you can add more capacity might be most important for another; and liability could be critical to others. “That question of value is complicated,” Domicity’s Brien says.

Valuing redundancy is one factor that many businesses struggle with when transitioning to the cloud.

There are two camps that don’t build in redundancy when using

“The study shows just what an important impact cloud computing is having on UK and US businesses,” Engates says. “It’s particularly interesting that, despite the ongoing economic backdrop, half of businesses on both sides of “the pond” are actually increasing profits and growing their business through the use of the cloud. This includes investing in headcount and wages as well as driving further innovation.”

When you set out to calculate your cloud ROI, Paul Croteau, an enterprise solution engineer at Rackspace, says you’ll need to consider factors that are relevant to your enterprise application portfolio and specific computing needs.

Croteau says, your ROI analysis should take into account broad considerations like cost per unit of computing power, the tradeoff of the amount of labor necessary to redesign applications that need to operate in a cloud environment and intangibles like time.

“Moving to the cloud also adds new factors into the ROI equation that require thinking beyond the realm of items like capital acquisition, licensing of software and depreciation,” Croteau says. “Cloud computing can create a significant return on investment, affording energy, licensing and administrative costs, and it frees up capital and personnel to innovate on new ideas quickly,” he adds.

—Thor Olavsrud

cloud services like IaaS, says Mark Eisenberg, who formerly worked on the Azure team at Microsoft and now is a director at IT consulting company Fino Consulting. The first are businesses that simply don’t know that, for instance, when moving a workload to AWS they must balance it across regions if they want to avert the repercussions of a regional outage. AWS has been good about releasing white papers and other advice on how to properly do this, Eisenberg says.

In fact, after an outage about a year and a half ago, AWS wasn’t particularly sympathetic toward customers that suffered, Eisenberg MAY 2013

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n FEATURE | CLOUD ROI says. AWS essentially reminded customers that it recommends they build in redundancy.

The second group of customers makes a conscious business decision not to shoulder the cost involved with building in redundancy. “It depends on what they stand to lose,” Eisenberg says.

The costs of building in redundancy can be daunting. Take data storage.

It costs twice as much to fully replicate data. But there are also architectural decisions to consider. Having two data stores separated by a long distance introduces latency when synching the stores. For many applications, that latency might not matter. But for some types of applications it could create problems.

Cost is a factor for compute redundancy too. Businesses that can tolerate the delay involved with spinning up new cloud-based servers—usually around five minutes—can wait until a problem occurs before they fire up backup instances, Fino Consulting’s Eisenberg says. Others may run half as many additional servers instead, because they can tolerate some latency with their apps better than they can handle a complete outage for a few minutes.

THE SCALE ISSUES Architecting scale also is a challenge that comes with cost repercussions.

“Just as in the on-premises world where capacity is kind of an art more than a science, it’s the same in the cloud,” Eisenberg says. “It’s easy to say ‘I’ll just have more capacity than I need,’ until you find out the high costs associated with doing that.”

SaaS deployments come with their own set of potential cost overruns.

SaaS providers often offer their best deals to customers that sign on to multi-year contracts. “So now you have this three-year contract. Maybe you outgrow it or maybe you find another app that does a similar thing but better,” explains Connor Sullivan, an analyst at IDC who follows cloud computing. Businesses then feel trapped with an app that’s not the best fit or they end up “double dipping”—signing up for a new service for additional cost, he says.

Businesses also should thoughtfully 32

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD M AY 2013

consider costs over time. It turns out that the price for SaaS apps in general aren’t coming down the way that many people once predicted. Historically, the thinking was that with more users of cloud services, economies of scale would reduce costs for users, Sullivan says.

Some providers like Salesforce have true multitenant cloud services and are benefitting from scale. While Salesforce is passing those savings on to customers, it is also continually adding new features, which cost extra for users. “People want those new functionalities and so the cost to the end user hasn’t gone down,” Sullivan says.

“The message we’ve been drumming is it’s all about scale,” Fino Consulting’s Eisenberg says. “If your business problem is not about scale, cloud is in all likelihood not your ideal solution.”

a perfect candidate for the cloud, where the customer paid only for the time its app ran.

IF THE SHOE FITS The type of workload an organization hopes to move to the cloud will also determine whether the transition makes sense economically. “We have paid close attention to what sort of circumstances make for a successful cloud deployment,” the GSA’s Coleman says.

For instance, legacy apps that run on unique hardware platforms, apps that are highly transactional so can’t tolerate latency and apps with very complex business processes that are specific to an organization may not be appropriate for the cloud, she says. This doesn’t necessary exclude all these apps from the cloud, “but it’s something to consider very carefully,” she explains. In some cases, careful engineering might make shifting these types of workloads

The type of workload an organization hopes to move to the cloud will also determine whether the transition makes sense economically.

But even the scale issue depends on the company. “You get all these Netflix, Web 2.0 apps that are going onto the cloud not just because it makes sense but because their investors aren’t willing to fund the capital expenditure for computer equipment,” says Domicity’s Brien.

Just as in the on-premises world where capacity is kind of an art more than a science, it’s the same in the cloud. Mark Eisenberg, Director, Fino Consulting. Large companies, on the other hand, may already have their own datacenters—and all the fixed costs that implies. “If you aren’t going to turn off your servers and lay off people, you may not save any money by going to the cloud,” Eisenberg says.

That is, unless a new workload is so variable or short-lived that expanding a datacenter doesn’t make sense. He remembers a case study Microsoft did about a customer that needed 4,000 servers for just six hours a day for a few days each week. That workload was

to the cloud make sense, she says. But ultimately the performance might not match an in-house installation or the cost could be prohibitive. Underlying the decision factors is the pressure on IT managers from their bosses, “who are looking at the success of Amazon and saying, ‘why can’t you take 10 percent off your budget?’” Domicity’s Brien says.

At the same time, those IT people don’t want to rush into using a cloud service for the wrong reason only to see it cost more or impact their service levels.

All those pressures mean that enterprises are taking it slowly. Larger businesses are still at the stage of “primarily playing around” with the cloud, Brien says, in the process of trying to decide which of their apps make sense there.

“They’re just moving slowly, doing it bit by bit,” he says.

“It’s really early days, even though all you ever read about is the cloud,” he says.

“The overall economics of the cloud are that it will ultimately absorb most machine cycles, but it will not happen as fast as people tend to think it will.” n

Focal Point

B

eing a igHelp

I l l u s t r a t i o n s by U N N I K R I S H N A N AV

EVERYTHING ABOUT BI AND ANALYTICS

Big data is extending its support to bring BI and predictive analytics together.

By Allen Bernard

F

OR AS long as anyone can remember, the world of predictive analytics has been the exclusive realm of ivorytower statisticians and data

scientists who sit far away from the everyday line of the business decision maker. Big data is about to change that.

As more data streams come online and are in-

tegrated into existing BI, CRM, ERP, and other mission-critical business systems, the ever-elusive single view of the customer may finally come into focus. While most customer service and field sales representatives have yet to feel the impact, companies such as IBM and MicroStrategy are working to see that they do soon.

Imagine a world in which a CSR sitting at her console can make an independent decision on whether a problem customer is worth keeping or upgrading.

Imagine, too, that a field salesman can change a retailer’s wine rack on the fly based on the preferences that partiers attending the jazz festival next weekend have contributed on Facebook and Twitter.

Big data is pushing a tool more commonly used for cohort and regression analysis into the hands of line-level managers, who can then use nontransactional data to make strategic, long-term business decisions about, for example, what to put on store shelves and when to put it there.

However, big data is not about to supplant traditional BI tools, says Rita Sallam, Gartner’s BI analyst. If anything, big data will make BI more valuable and useful to the business. “We’re always going to need to look at the past...and when you have big data, you are going to need to do that even more.

BI doesn’t go away. It gets enhanced by big data.”

How else will you know if what you are seeing in the initial phases of discovery will indeed bear out over time. For example, do red purses really sell better

than blue ones in the MidWest [US]? An initial pass through the data may suggest so—more red purses sold last quarter than ever before, therefore, red purses sell better.

But this is a correlation, not a cause. If you look more closely, using historical transaction data gleaned from your BI tools, you may find, say, that it is actually your latest merchandise-positioningcampaign that’s paying dividends because the retailers are now putting red purses at eye level.

That’s why IBM’s Director of Emerging Technologies, David Barnes, is actually more inclined to refer to the resulting output from big data technologies such as Hadoop, map reduce, and R as “insights.”

You wouldn’t want to make mission-critical business decisions based on sentiment analysis of a Twitter stream, for example.

SOCIAL MEDIA REWARDS There is value in social media, though. What if you learn, as the buyer for a retailer, that Justin Bieber fans really loved the jacket he was wearing at the concert last night-and, oh, by the way, someone tweeted he got it from one of your stores? You could then make a snap decision to stock up on that jacket just in that city since you know it’s about to become a very hot item, albeit for a very limited time.

Without a predictive analytics (PA) package looking for patterns in the Twittersphere that correlate your brand with geographic location and factors such as the number of mentions, you could miss out on a great but small window of opportunity to move merchandise.

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n FOCAL POINT | BI AND ANALYTICS “In the past, we would have based [our decisions] on historical data, and by the time we did it, that trend may have already passed us,” says Barnes. “So that’s PA on steroids, at warp speed.”

How this is accomplished is a marriage of open source technologies, Moore’s Law, commodity hardware, the cloud, and the ability to capture and store huge volumes of non-transactional data that was once discarded because no one knew what to do with it.

Unstructured data such as video and e-mail, often cited as a driving force behind big data, barely plays a part in this. Scour blog posts and user forums, though, then correlate that information with geographic data, couple it with flat files of your existing structured customer data and bring in streams from new sources such as the MicroStrategy Wisdom engine, which tracks what some 14 million Facebook users are saying about your brand, and now you’ve got a new and powerful tool.

R.K. Paleru, director of industry marketing for BI vendor MicroStrategy, says two things have happened with big data. “You’re able to bring in more variety of data from different sources, but [you] can also take all that data and...micro-optimize. [For example,] how can you transform behavior using tools like the iPad or smartphones at the point where this tactical business decision has to be made?”

FASTER RESPONSE One big advantage to this type of analytics is the shortening of the “time to answer” (TTA), according to Paul Barth, founder and managing partner of 34

How will BI and Big Data Fare this Year?

A

NALYSTS predict a strong uptake of in-memory technologies and cloud BI, new use cases for big data applications and more business collaboration in 2013.

IDC head of research Matthew Oostveen predicted an increase in the uptake of in-memory analytics and processing technologies to enable organisations to churn out information more quickly.

“We’re seeing a lot of in-memory technologies that are coming out into the market place and we’ll see [that] adopted in 2013. In fact, we’re going to see 2013 as a year where there’s going to be very strong uptake of these types of systems,” he said.

Telsyte senior analyst Rodney Gedda said more CIOs will look to the cloud to deliver BI strategies more efficiently as SaaS models for BI have matured.“The challenge in 2013 will be getting a unified view of the business with more cloud services in use and more options for data extraction from devices. BI delivered as SaaS is also one to watch now the technology to make it happen has matured,” he said.

With the growth in mobile technologies and the ever-increasing amount data, Gedda said more enterprises will start to identify new use cases for big data applications, offering a higher level of BI. Gartner’s Global Manager of analytics and BI and Head of research for Asia Pacific, Ian Bertram, predicted half of analytical applications on the market in 2013 will have embedded big data capabilities.“By the end of next year, you’ll start to see the whole concept of big data just start to become the norm,” he said.

He added that business processes will naturally improve as a result of organisations having a better understanding of how to use big data to their advantage.

“The successful organisations and entities in the ‘big data race’, if you will, in 2013 will be the ones that can stand and have the permission to stand before the CEO, before the CFO, before the CMO, and, more importantly, before the board of directors. What we are talking about here are concepts and notions that are far bigger than simply IT. —Rebecca Merrett

New Vantage Partners, a boutique information management and analytics consulting firm. The queries, or models, that used to take data scientists months to build in order to answer forward looking business questions about supply chain or production schedules can now be done, in some instances, in hours, and in bulk.

This happens because big data technologies allow information to be worked with before it is optimized or rationalized or relational-ized. This, coupled with

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD M AY 2013

advanced analytics, lets line of business managers ask and answer questions in very short cycles.

“These folks are using big data to automate machine-learning, turn-thecrank processes,” Barth says. Doing so can generate upwards of 20,000 data models for each product line, in each market around the world, letting users look up to 18 months forward. “That’s a big change.

The reason they can do that is because big data technology can automate a lot of the modeling steps

and execute it in a lightsout fashion.”

Not long ago, this would have been nearly impossible. It took statistical analysts weeks or even months to build a single model. If you sold 100 products, you really couldn’t move beyond 1,000 models for your entire product line, which means the information these models returned wasn’t nearly as accurate, or as timely, as the big data models available today.

“Big data is as much as about big analytics as it is about big data,” Barth says. “This is what data scientist’s love. They can iterate and iterate and iterate while they are learning the data and getting some initial insights during discovery.”

Gigabits of I/O and the ability to work with data in business analytics sandboxes outside of production environments, power these thought-exercises in what Barth calls a kind of “Agile analytics” approach to asking questions and solving problems.

While all of this is promising and exciting for business users—if they even know about it, which they don’t— hooking big data analytics into a natural language processing engine and a Siri-like Q&A interface is some ways off. Hadoop, while powerful, is still by all accounts a “primitive” tool for tackling massive datasets.

Think very carefully about the usefulness of these insights, too. Are 100 million opinions really worth more than 100,000, Barth asks—or even a highly qualified and influential 1,000?

In the Spotlight

tage of the in-memory buzz, even if some of these offerings are mere bolt-ons to their existing product suite, says Gary Nakamura, general manager of in-memory database player Terracotta, a SoftwareAG company.

“They’re saying, ‘Hey, we’re putting 10 gigs of memory into our product capability because that’s all it can handle, but were calling it an in-memory solution,’” Nakamura says.

The question, he adds, is whether they can scale to handle real-world problems and data flows.

Combined, big data and cheap storage are bringing in-memory analytics to the fore. By Allen Bernard

REMOVING LATENCY

I

F YOU’RE paying attention to big data, lately you’ve probably heard terms such as in-memory analytics or in-memory technologies.

Like many tech trends that appear new only because their histories are obscured by newer and sexier tech, or because time has yet to catch up with them—server virtualization and the cloud are just reinventions from the mainframe days, after all—in-memory is a term being resurrected by two current trends: Big data and

cheap, fast commodity storage, particularly DRAM. “In-memory has been around a long, long time,” says Dave Smith, vice president of marketing for Revolution Analytics, a commercial provider of software, services, and support for R, the open source programming language underpinning much of the predictive analytics landscape. “Now that we have big data, it’s only the availability of terabyte (TB) systems and massive parallel processing [that makes] inmemory more interesting.”

If you haven’t already, you’ll start to see offerings, including SAP HANA and Oracle Exalytics, which aim to bring big data and analytics together on the same box. Or you can also get HANA as a platform supported in the cloud by Amazon Web Services or SAP’s NetWeaver platform, which includes Java and some middleware.

Meanwhile, analytics providers from SAS, Cognos, Pentaho, Tableau, and Jaspersoft have all rolled out offerings to take advan-

In-memory analytics technology lets businesses take advantage of performance metrics gleaned from production systems and turn those into KPIs they can do something about.

“What it comes down to,” says Shawn Blevins, executive vice president of sales and general manager at Opera Solutions, is that each product has “an actual layer where we can stage the data model itself, not just the data—and they exist in the same platform and the same box in flash memory.”

From a business point of view, this is really what matters. In-memory technology gets complicated quickly. If you want to understand how all the bits and bytes line up, then it’s probably best to call down to your IT guys for another rousing round of “What’s that part do again?” However, if you want to understand why in-memory is becoming the buzzword du jour, that’s a little easier: It provides business insights that lead to better business outcomes in real-time.

Essentially, in-memory analytics technology lets businesses take advantage of performance metrics gleaned from production systems and turn those into KPIs they can do something about. A company such as Terracotta can give away 32

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n FOCAL POINT | BI AND ANALYTICS In-Memory Computing Race Towards Mainstream

I

N-MEMORY computing is “racing towards mainstream adoption,” according to Gartner.

Gartner believes that the “rapid maturation of application infrastructure technologies” and a continued “dramatic decline in the cost of semiconductor technologies” are paving the way for mainstream use of in-memory computing (IMC).

IMC enables organizations to develop applications that run advanced queries or perform complex transactions on very large datasets much faster than when using conventional architectures.

It achieves this by storing application data in a computer’s main DRAM, rather than on electromagnetic disks, and without compromising the availability, consistency, and integrity of that data.

IMC provides opportunities to change the way in which organizations support business requirements. It completes batch processes that would otherwise take hours, in minutes or even seconds, said Gartner, enabling processes to be

GB of capacity because inmemory analytics doesn’t require the entire fire hose of data that a traditional BI app needs in order to produce useful results.

“The deal with in-memory analytics is the analysis process is all about search,” says Paul Barth, co-founder of data consulting firm NewVantage Partners.

You’re trying to see how many different combina36

delivered to clients, suppliers, citizens or patients as realtime cloud services.

IMC can also be used to quickly detect correlations and patterns to help pinpoint emerging opportunities and threats as things happen, across millions of events.

A rapid penetration of IMC is likely to lead to it being adopted by at least 35 percent of mid-size and large organizations by 2015, said Gartner.

Gartner said that although the in-memory data grid (IMDG) market—a key IMC segment—is small, it is likely to grow fast and to reach $1 billion (about Rs 5,500 crore) by 2016.

“The relentless declines in DRAM and NAND flash memory prices, the advent of solid-state drive technology and the maturation of specific software platforms have enabled IMC to become more affordable and impactful for IT organizations,” said Gartner Analyst Massimo Pezzini.

Until recently, said Gartner, only the “most technologically savvy organizations”, like those in financial trading, telecommunications, military

tions of things, such as blue car owners and ZIP code, are correlated, he adds.

For every one of those correlations, it takes time to pull the data, cluster it, notice the dependencies are, and see how strongly one variable is affected by the others. Every time you pivot that table to find something new or get some clarity, data moves and gets reorganized. That intro-

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD M AY 2013

and defence, online entertainment and logistics, could cope with the high cost and complexity of adopting IMC. But IMC technology is now more affordable and more proven, said Gartner. “Organizations that do not consider adopting in-memory application infrastructure technologies risk being out-innovated by competitors that are early mainstream users of these capabilities,” said Pezzini.

Gartner said in-memoryenabling application infrastructure technologies consist of in-memory database management systems, in-memory data grids, highperformance messaging infrastructures, complexevent processing platforms, in-memory analytics, and inmemory application servers.

However, several issues, such as a lack of standards, the scarcity of skills, relative architectural complexity, security concerns, and monitoring and management challenges, will need to be addressed for IMC to achieve mainstream adoption, the analyst house said.

—Antony Savvas

duces latency—which is the problem in-memory analytics is precisely designed to defeat.

NUMBER CRUNCHING At this stage of the game, big data analytics is really about discovery.

Running iterations to see correlations between data points doesn’t happen without milliseconds of latency, multiplied by

millions (or billions) of iterations. Working in memory is at three orders of magnitude faster than going to disk, Barth says.

“Speed matters in this business.”

Ever wonder how Facebook can tag you in a photo as soon as it goes live on the site? A photo is a big file, and Facebook has Exabytes of photos on file. Facebook runs an algorithm against every photo to find faces and reduce those faces to a few data points, says Revolution’s Smith. This reduces a 40 MB photo down to about 40 bytes of data. The data then goes into a “black box,” which determines whose face it is, tags it, searches for that person’s account and all the accounts associated with person, and sends everyone a message.

That’s big data at work.

But it’s also how in-memory analytics makes big data work. Currently, most people don’t put more than 100 MB into an in-memory cache at any one time because of Java’s limitations.

The more data that’s put into memory, Nakamura says, the more you have to tune the Java virtual machine. “It gets slower, not faster, and that is problematic when you are a performance-at-scale play.”

For now, in-memory analytics is well-suited to high-frequency, lowcomputation number crunching. Of course, when you have Terabytes of data available to run real-time analytics, that behavior will change. In this case, the technology needs to catch up to the need, not the other way around. The need exists, the data exists.

No chicken and egg here.

Clocking BI Jaspersoft’s one of the first to offer business intelligence software by the hour, in the cloud. By Allen Bernard

O

PEN SOURCE busi-

ness intelligence company Jaspersoft is one of the first to offer its analytics software from the cloud on a pay-by-the-hour rate, according to the company and one independent analyst.

Starting at $0.53 per hour, customers can spin up Jaspersoft’s services in Amazon Web Services’

(AWS) cloud and be analyzing data within 10 minutes, the company says. “A lot of vendors are offering cloud-based BI services,” says Claudia Imhoff, president of Intelligent Solutions, who tracks the BI market. Most of them are pay by the user or by the bit of data though; Jaspersoft is the first she’s seen with a pay-by-the-hour model.

“It’s seems pretty simple,” she says. “That’s how the cloud works.”

Jaspersoft’s services are also available as software that can be run on customer premises, but the cloudbased version is meant for data that’s in AWS’s cloud, specifically the company relational database service (RDS), or its newly announced data warehouse,

Jaspersoft’s services are available as software that can be run on customer premises, but the cloud-based version is meant for data that’s in AWS’s cloud, specifically the company relational database service, or its newly announced data warehouse, Redshift.

Redshift. Jaspersoft can be used with a variety of data, but CRM, marketing, and e-commerce are popular use cases. BI tools like Jaspersoft help customers recognize trends in the data—for example which items customers are purchasing on an e-commerce website, which other items they viewed, what they’ve purchased in the past or which products sell best during which time of the year. “The possibilities are really limitless in the data you can get from these tools,” Imhoff says.

Jaspersoft is not alone in providing BI tools; in fact it’s a hot market, Imhoff says. Major players include IBM with its Cognos software, Oracle, and SAS. Jaspersoft represents one of the smaller start ups in the market, along with companies like TIBCO’s SpotFire. While the cloud does seem like a natural place to do BI analysis, Imhoff notes there could be downsides.

One of the promises of BI tools is that they aggregate data from multiple disparate sources into one platform. Some customers could have concerns about proverbially putting all their eggs in one basket in the public cloud, and there can be concerns around the “stickiness” of the data once it is uploaded to the cloud, and how it can be brought back on to a company’s premises.

“There are many good aspects,” to using cloudbased BI tools, Imhoff says, “but some concerns too,” she notes. Having a pay-bythe-hour service could help smaller organizations that do not have access to hardware resources, or IT expertise though try the tools out. n

JANUARY MAY 2013 1, 2009 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

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DELL EVENT REPORT

BETTER TOGETHER

To strengthen its engagement with Indian enterprise channel partners, Dell organized regional partner summits across four cities, giving channel partners a chance to engage with Dell’s leadership and learn more about its commitment to partner community.

By Gopal Kishore

Building on the success of its first national partner summit, Dell India recently conducted region-specific partner summits in four cities, Bangalore, New Delhi, Hyderabad and Mumbai, to strengthen its engagement with channel partners. The summit brought together over 200 partners from different regions to discuss Dell’s channel strategy in the future. The summit saw a representation of partners across verticals such as government, healthcare, and education, and industry sizes like and large enterprise and the mid-market.

QUICK BYTES The series of summits organized for channel partners was put in motion in an effort to keep up with Dell’s channel strategy summed in its partner motto: Better Together. It aimed at providing channel partners a platform to engage with Dell’s leadership and share GCC (global commercial channel) business updates, and solution and product specific updates.

Earlier this month, Dell also organized the Dell India Partner Summit in Bangalore to felicitate and bring together Dell’s top-performing channel partners.

According to Ajay Kaul, director and general manager, Global Commercial Channel, during the last year, Dell’s GCC division has taken several initiatives to empower its large partner base including the launch of Dell’s Engineer’s Club in January 2013, and the recently-launched Enterprise Master Tool for its partners. Dell’s GCC currently retains close to 2,000 commercial relationships in India and overlooks programs and policies related to its channel covering public large and medium-sized enterprise.

Nagesh Sistla, regional sales manager for Dell’s Global Commercial Channels for the south, said that with more than 2,000 registered partners in India, about 25 percent of Dell’s commercial business revenue is driven by the channel business.

Stressing on the need to grow together, Rohit Oberoi, regional sales manager for Dell’s Global Commercial Channels, for the north and east of India, said that partners and Dell should innovate to provide different solutions, acquire new customers, target growth markets, expand their footprint, and deliver endto-end customer experience.

According to Sanjeev Kumar, regional sales manager for Dell’s Global Commercial Channels for the west, Dell has remained a stable partner and is committed to the channel. “We have increased our investments every year and are focusing on increasing resources, training, incentives, rebates and tools to put at the disposal of partners,” he said.

Bimal Cyriac, enterprise lead, Global Commercial Channel at Dell, spoke about Dell’s end-to-end products line-up for small, medium and large enterprises. “Dell has acquired more than 20 companies across different functions including system management, networking, server, storage, IT operations, data management and end-user computing,” he said.

Santhosh Pandey, India sales manager for Dell, spoke about how channel partners can use the move toward cloud computing to their advantage. “When IT leaders reach an inflection point and begin thinking about delivering workloads rather than managing hardware, the time is appropriate to consider making the move to a cloud computing platform,” he said.

“Our channel partners have played a key role in the success of Dell India and have helped us work ‘Better Together’ in bringing the GCC to where it is today.”

AJAY KAUL, DIRECTOR AND GM, GLOBAL COMMERCIAL CHANNEL, DELL INDIA

“Dell has remained a stable partner that is committed to the channel, and is constantly working with our partners to evolve our PartnerDirect program.”

NAGESH SISTLA, REGIONAL SALES MANAGER, GCC SOUTH, DELL INDIA

“We have increased our investments every year and are focusing on increasing resources, incentives, rebates, and tools to put at the disposal of partners.”

SANJEEV KUMAR, REGIONAL SALES MANAGER, GCC WEST, DELL INDIA

“Partners and Dell should innovate to provide different solutions, acquire new customers, and target growth markets to drive profits.”

ROHIT OBEROI, REGIONAL SALES MANAGER, GCC N&E, DELL INDIA

This event report is brought to you by IDG Events Team in association with

n FACE OFF

Axis Communications Vs. D-Link

SUDHINDRA HOLLA,

Country Manager, Axis Communications India

SANJAY SEHGAL,

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

An Eye in the Cloud Who’s on the right track to create a differentiator in the burgeoning video surveillance-as-a-service space?

T cess to information from anywhere to video streams T huge, since surveillance has evolved into a necessity HE BENEFITS of

VSaaS are multiple. It provides ac-

and comes with a storage device, enabling increased user interface. Today, even though we witness interest and demand for such a service, VSaaS is yet to gain momentum in the Indian market. In the next three to five years we will see a shift in adoption of VSaaS to some extent, but it will take another five to seven years to establish itself.

Axis is preparing to address this potential market. Our products and solutions focus on digital video surveillance. We operate only in the IP network camera space which offer enhanced image quality, flexibility, and adaptability to integrate and consolidate software.

Axis video hosting system allows end customers using a video hosting solution to view an area and access the system from anywhere, anytime, as long as an Internet connection is available. Our network cameras and encoders are compatible with hosted video and a global network of service providers.

Axis video encoders allow users to leverage the existing analog investment. It helps turn the system into a hosted IP solution, that provides the benefits of network video, and allows the user to move to a future-proof and easily scalable solution.

As a company, educating and retraining our existing partners has been a top priority. This ensures that they are up-to-date on Axis technology.

We also have a partner program which provides a platform for our partners to be abreast of latest technologies, product offerings, and bring the advantages of the best in network video to a vast majority of users.

40

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD M AY 2013

HE GROWTH potential for VSaaS in Indian context is

rather than luxury. Keeping in view the current trends in IP surveillance, D-Link has been in the forefront, and is the first to offer video surveillance on the cloud platform with its mydlink cloud service. mydlink platform is a secure, cloud-based solution that records and presents images, footage, and information from remotely connected cameras to connected devices that can be monitored by customers from anywhere using Internet enabled devices. Also, the flexibility of the cloud especially with SaaS model has opened new avenues in cloud computing, and VSaaS has helped in taking videomonitoring to the cloud.

Sometimes referred to as hosted or managed video services, video from customer IP cameras or Webcams is transmitted to the service provider’s secure cloud infrastructure with D-Link IP video surveillance solution.

D-Link is the only organization which is well equipped to cater to this requirement of the customer using its bouquet of products. D-Link has also partnered with leading Internet service providers to take mydlink VSaaS platform to a larger audience. The next step through mydlink will be storage facilities on the mydlink cloud.

D-Link’s IP video surveillance solutions offer distinct advantages for security requirements and differentiates it from other manufacturers present in the market.

Further, basic customer objective and requirement like motion-based recording, alerts over SMS and e-mail, local and centralized recording are met with D-Link video surveillance solution.

—As told to Radhika Nallayam

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