CRN India (Vol.2, No.12) March, 2020

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Vol 2. No. 12 March, 2020 Chairman of the Board Viveck Goenka

WESTERN DIGITAL: CREATING AN ENVIRONMENT FOR DATA TO THRIVE

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Sr. Vice President - BPD Neil Viegas Asst. Vice President - BPD Harit Mohanty Editor Srikanth RP* Sr. Associate Editor Sudipta Dev Sr. Assistant Editor Nivedan Prakash Delhi Sandhya Michu Vishwas Dass Mumbai Mohit Rathod Salvi Mittal Abhishek Raval

Nivedan Prakash nivedan.prakash@expressindia.com

Bengaluru Moumita Deb Choudhury DESIGN Asst. Art Director Pravin Temble Chief Designer Prasad Tate Senior Graphic Designer Rekha Bisht Layout Designer Vinayak Mestry Photo Editor Sandeep Patil DIGITALTEAM Head of Internet Viraj Mehta MARKETING Ravi Nair Prabhas Jha Durgaprasad Talithaya Debnarayan Dutta Ajanta Sengupta Deepak Patel Praveen Soman Vivek Thakur

he continued, unabated growth of data and its strategic value is driving a transformation of IT infrastructures as never before.

As the enterprises are undergoing digital transformation and, in the process, treating and leveraging data as a strategic capital asset, they are increasingly investing in new technologies to drive IT infrastructure modernisation.

The storage industry is facing a wave of transformation, stemming from cloud architectures, software-defined storage, the convergence of compute, and the growing adoption of flash.

As enterprises and service providers alike evolve their infrastructures to incorporate these new technologies, they will look to enterprise providers that bring specific expertise in integrating them into next-generation platform offerings.

This is where the data infrastructure company, Western Digital, has taken the lead by offering end-to-end storage solutions to address Big Data and Fast Data challenges of the enterprises. Post the integration of Sandisk and Hitachi Global Storage

Technology business, the company has further strengthened its portfolio that spans the entire gamut of storage, from solid state to rotating media.

As Western Digital is driving innovation that is needed to help customers capture, preserve, access and transform an ever-increasing diversity of data, it is also taking initiatives to drive future innovations that deliver the infinite possibilities of data. Moreover, it understands the relationship between cloud, core, and edge workloads and hence the company is constantly building on its storage products to deliver the future of data infrastructure.

For their route to market, there’s a heavy reliance on the partner ecosystem. From the consumer business perspective, WD already has a strong channel presence and they would like to replicate the same for enterprise business as well. The company is looking to deepen its engagement with enterprise storage channel partners.

In its endeavour to build the brand and create the demand for its product and solutions, the company’s big focus is on forging strong relationship with the channel ecosystem.

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Content

8 | Cover Story

18 | Channel Chief

CHANNEL,A STRATEGIC ASSET FOR WESTERN DIGITAL Data storage leader Western Digital, with its extensive channel network, has a focused strategy for stronger engagement with its partner community

News Makers 7 | Crayon Software Experts expands leadership team NetRack hosts pan-India distributors meet in Bengaluru Arcserve conducts training for 25 key SI partners in NCR iValue poised for $100mn to ` 1000cr growth in FY20 Trend Micro expands partner program for AMEA

Thought Leader 20 | RP tech India has ambitious enterprise business roadmap Rajesh Goenka, Director, Sales & Marketing, RP tech India

CXO Speak 22 | How Big Basket is leveraging emerging tech for streamlining delivery A perfect combination of focused strategy, market knowhow, customer centricity, and most importantly, the right technology, has led to Big Basket’s dominance in online grocery space

SAP reinventing partner synergies With an emphasis on the cloud, SAP is going aggressive in growth verticals like telecom, banking and insurance, and creating new synergies with its partners

24 | Future tech trends to fuel growth at Edelweiss General Insurance Shared mobility, smart vehicles, electric vehicles and a preventionbased approach to contribute significantly to sustainable growth at Edelweiss General Insurance, says Shanai Ghosh, ED and CEO, Edelweiss General Insurance

Partner Corner

26 | ‘Service providers will be one of the important channels for Cisco in this decade’ Sanjay Kaul, President, Asia Pacific & Japan, Service Provider Business, Cisco Systems

34 | Dell Technologies reinforces its commitment to the partner community ● Joyce Mullen, President, Global Channel, Embedded & Edge Solutions ● Bill Scannell, President, Global Sales ● Jay Snyder, SVP, Global AlliancesSolutions ● Darren Sullivan, SVP, Global Partner Strategy, Programs & Operations ● Ng Tian Beng, SVP, Channel Sales, APJ

28 | ‘We are a company obsessed with customer experience’ Harsha Kodnad, Director – Technology, Tally Solutions 32 | Augmenting business intelligence with conversational AI Ramendra Shukla, Co-founder & COO, Exponentia.ai, and Rohit Mathur, Founder and CEO, Exponentia.ai

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30 | ‘Solution partners are important to resell Atlassian solutions and services’ Archana Rao, CIO, Atlassian, and Robert Bannerman, GM - South Asia (Channel), Atlassian

Outlook 2020

Start-up Corner 38 | AI powered HR tech Using AI and transformative solutions in human capital space, HR tech startup SCIKEY is investing in building strong channel partnerships and cross-platform partnerships globally

News Makers

Crayon Software Experts expands leadership team

Wonderla Resorts in Bengaluru. The event helped the distribution channel to better understand the products and the market in order to keep up with the rising market demand as well as the need for customisation to pull ahead of competition.

Arcserve conducts training for 25 key SI partners in NCR

Rajesh Thadhani, Director of Strategic Services at Crayon

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rayon has announced two significant changes to its leadership team. Rajesh Thadhani, who was handling Crayon’s sales earlier, will be heading the newly formed ‘Services Transformation’ chapter. Likewise, Venkataraman Dhanapathy who was associated with Crayon on managing business relationships with leading cloud aggregators will now be taking care of account, licensing, and coverage chapter.

Arcserve recently conducted a product training session for its VAR and SI partners. This gathering brought together all the partners, technology experts and a team of trainers from Arcserve. The session was aimed to offer hands-on experience for the partners to help them understand the robustness, ease to implement and usage of Arcserve’s data protection and business continuity solutions.

Arcserve organised a productive and insightful training session for key partners. The session started with the partners and Arcserve team exchanging thoughts on the latest trends and developments driving the data protection and security market in India. The awareness session was followed by an educational, hands on technical session on Arcserve’s flagship products.

NetRack hosts pan-India distributors meet in Bengaluru

iValue poised for $100mn to ` 1000cr growth in FY20

NetRack recently organised a partner meet for its distributors across India in Bengaluru. The main objective of partner gathering was to establish a strong mind share and promote transparency to tackle the growing business needs as well as to explore new business opportunities.

Distributor partners who attended the event got insights into the new case locking initiative and the relevance of lead tracker to enhance clarity and openness in business leads. The event was followed by relationship building activities at

iValue InfoSolutions continues with its track record for growth in FY20 expected at 40 per cent. With a strong value proposition for digital transformation needs of corporate and enterprise customers, iValue continued to grow at 4x market growth rates armed with the recent private equity investment from Creador Advisors India LLP during Q1 of FY20. With its larger vision of delivering 4x growth in five years, its BFSI practice continues to spearhead growth for the current fiscal at 82 per cent. New initiatives such as

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enterprise practice and emerging enterprise contributed significantly at 101 per cent and 77 per cent YoY growth respectively. Tier 2 partner focus paid rich dividends, posting 122 per cent growth over previous year. West zone lead from the front with contributions from BFSI practice while South posted best YoY growth from Enterprise and BFSI practice wins.

Trend Micro expands partner program for AMEA Trend Micro has announced that it is launching a newly expanded and enhanced channel partner programme in Asia Pacific, Middle East, and Africa (AMEA). The major enhancements include: ◗

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Higher profitability and margins: Streamlined discount structures, based on deal registration; sales and marketing incentives across all partner tiers and distributors; and new rebate schemes for gold and platinum partners Customer-centric approach: Highly-subsidised and strategically curated not-for-sale (NFR) packages of Trend Micro's solutions for partners to better address real-world customer cybersecurity pain points Cybersecurity talent development: Complimentary training series delivered through the TRENDs Campus – Trend Micro’s new channel sales and technical enablement initiative designed to educate partners in the latest cybersecurity knowledge and trends, Trend Micro’s solutions, and the art of opportunity discovery Tighter collaboration: A set of enhanced business tools, including a refreshed partner portal, a new mobile app, and a business analytics dashboard, to drive joint field activities.

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Cover Story

CHANNEL, A STRATEGIC ASSET FOR WESTERN DIGITAL

VivekTyagi

Khalid Wani

Jaganathan Chelliah

Senior Director,Enterprise Sales, Western Digital India

Director - Channel Sales, Western Digital India

Marketing Director, Western Digital India

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Western Digital

Data storage leader Western Digital, with its extensive channel network, has a focused strategy for stronger engagement with its partner community

Moumita Deb Choudhury moumita.choudhury@expressindia.com

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he need for storage of digital data was ever eminent. The fact that going to the moon and coming back had stored data of 4KB then, speaks volumes about the significance of data storage, although, today this figure of storage is readily available at our fingertips, in our smartphones. However, with the World Wide Web, the magnitude of data and its storage saw new relevance and need. The volume, veracity and velocity of data is just the reason why storage is the requirement from every quarters; and storage company Western Digital (WDC) does just this the best - provide voluminous, veracious and velocious storage. With the acquisition of Sandisk and Hitachi Global Storage Technology, the company is setting new feats at every orbit.

“If you look at the fundamental ingredient for technology explosion today, it is due to data. Anything and everything that we do in our personal or business lives - we are invariably creating and consuming data. It is indeed the underlying building block. One estimate says that India in 2020 will see around 2.2 million petabytes of data. This indicates that the fundamental element for any experience that we are going to have, as a consumer, or a startup or an enterprise is through data. Western Digital is one of the leading players in the industry which has the capability and the vision to create an environment for this data to thrive,” says Jaganathan Chelliah, Marketing Director, Western Digital India.

The company aims to architect

data in a manner which will enable all forms of interesting initiatives, both, for consumers and businesses.

Now with that in context, data is no more the domain of the information technology industry. It is all pervasive; everybody is creating and consuming data. “Any startup that is getting into business today is building the business based on certain amount of analytics. Large enterprises, too, have large quantum of data and they are building on it,” explains Chelliah.

To this, Khalid Wani, Director Channel Sales, Western Digital India, adds, “It has been interesting for the past couple of years. The integration of Sandisk and Hitachi into the entire ecosystem of Western Digital was not easy. We had a lot of work to do, and I am glad that the way things have shaped up for us in India is overwhelming. Especially, in the last two to three years, we have been able to complete the integration and have started realising tremendous growth opportunity.”

Western Digital’s wave in the consumer space

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INDIATODAY IS IMPORTANT TO US NOTJUST FROM A BUSINESS PERSPECTIVE BUT ALSO AS A RESOURCE POOL. GLOBALLY,IT IS ONE OFTHE LARGEST R&D SITES FOR US KHALID WANI DIRECTOR - CHANNEL SALES, WESTERN DIGITAL INDIA

Western Digital today is well poised in the market with storage solutions for various niche segments.

“It is perphaps the only organisation which offers comprehensive end-toend portfolio. If you look at storage for personal use, most of it is revolving around mobile phones and personal computers. SanDisk offers mobile storage solutions, whereas, WDC offers portable storage solutions for PCs. Sandisk also has a portfolio of products which gets into cameras, drones and TV set-top boxes. Sandisk pretty much has a flash storage solution for everything around it. Also, today the most exciting thing in the IT space is the Solid State Drives and the market is growing rapidly. In India, Western Digital is the market leader in the segment as per the latest CMR study,” adds Chelliah.

From a data demand perspective, content in India has been aggressively growing over the past few years. “With that level of growth from content creation, the need and demand for storage consistently grows. Our focus in India is driven towards ensuring that we are engaging and optimising ourselves

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in every channel segment, to cater to that consumer content growth that is happening. Also, surveillance as a segment has been very important for us. The focus right now is not just from the central government, but the state governments, as well as from the consumer perspective. Thus, when surveillance is deployed, it is being deployed at different levels, from edge to core,” adds Wani.

Adding to the perspective, Chelliah says, “Any infrastructure project requires smart video solution.

All smart cities today have an extremely strong surveillance solution backbone requirement. Not just that, individual homes may also look out at simple CCTV solution, while apartments look at wireless cameras; whereas, offices have their own requirements. For a smart cities solution, at the back end, data needs to be stored, and sometimes stored for several years. In that case, significant storage is required.”

“In terms of surveillance as a segment now, we realise the amount of work that we have to do in order to make sure that we are putting the right infrastructure to cater to this demand. Now in this segment, the channel that is engaged in delivering those solutions or products to the customer is dedicated and unique which includes thousands of surveillance system integrators,” adds Wani.

He further points out, “Look at what is happening in the media and entertainment space. We, as a brand, have a product called G-Technology, which specifically caters to this segment. These are the products which are used by media and entertainment companies to ensure that the content that they create is properly secured. Each film costs crores of Rupees, so for the filmmakers, data is very precious, and their data is created and stored in different levels including preproduction, production, and postproduction. For this, they require faster and reliable products. GTechnology is a product especially built for this purpose. Our focus and

commitment to the market is such that we decided to open a store in Mumbai just a couple of months ago.

Mumbai's Andheri area happens to be the film production hub for India.

We opened a store through one of our partners in Andheri, which was conceptualised predominantly, because we wanted to showcase our G-Technology products to the production industry, and it was warmly welcomed by the entire production fraternity, so we as a brand continue to work on such initiatives and look at segmentised approach whenever there are opportunities and deploy and execute our strategies.”

WDC’s Big Enterprise Drive Western Digital’s enterprise journey in India started in 2016. The

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ONE IMPORTANTASPECT THAT NEEDS TO BE PUT ACROSS TO THE CHANNEL COMMUNITY IS HOWTHEY CAN INTEGRATE OUR TECHNOLOGY INTO THEIR BUSINESS JAGANATHAN CHELLIAH MARKETING DIRECTOR,WESTERN DIGITAL INDIA

company has registeretd sigficiant growth so far, although it is in the early stages. With this expansion now, and the rising demand, WDC realises that a lot of work needs to be done, especially on the channel front.

“However, when we started, we had to build some compelling success stories with large enterprises to build on a strong testimony. In the initial two, three years, we focused more on large customers directly before we go to channel. We wanted the channel to see our value proposition,” informs Vivek Tyagi, Senior Director, Enterprise Sales, Western Digital India.

“Enterprises look for two types of data. One is big data, which they store and retrieve for analytics whenever required, and the other is fast data, which is something that they keep using often. We have SSDs for these requirements. We also have large storage solutions in the form of JBODs, which is a collection of drives. The advantage of these large boxes is realised with softwaredefined storage. Thus, this is the play that Western Digital has. There is a complete end-to-end solution from the three major brands that are addressing all segments,” adds Chelliah.

This year, in the next few months, the company is conducting a threecity channel event targeting enterprise storage channel partners.

“In these events, we are planning interesting scheme for the channel.

We look forward to engage with the channel on the enterprise front now.

Although from a consumer perspective, the channel has been very strong, now we are building on a large channel presence for enterprise products and solutions as well,” says Tyagi.

He further informs that WDC’s enterprise division started with a small team and had to essentially focus on one or two verticals. “The one vertical that we chose was ecommerce as an industry. It is growing very rapidly, generating a

Western Digital

Western Digital’s Channel Partner Programs in India Name

Description

SanDisk League of Heroes (SLH)

SLH recognises and rewards the best performing channel partners in the consumer segment. It will run for the whole year (2020). Each quarter represents a mission consisting of a number of stars that can earn the partners attractive rewards. The SLH program consists of rewards, booster rewards, and medallions that can earn exciting prizes.

Western Digital Elite Partner Promo

This program is for enterprise SIs and VARs who provide complete storage solutions to the customers. It is an annualised rewards program with quarterly rewards based on performance for the channel partners who sell Western Digital Ultrastar HDDs, SSDs and storage platforms and server portfolio that includes our JBOD, JBOFs, Ultrastar Serv24-A, and Ultrastar Serv60+8.

myWD Partner Program

myWD Partner Program is a highly successful rewards program that engages with partners within the IT channel and surveillance channel.

The partners can participate in time bound rewards programs every quarter and get trained on select WD-branded products. There is also a certification program for partners specialised in CCTV solutions.

myWD Connect Program

myWD Connect Program is a WhatsApp based training and partner interaction platform, wherein partners learn about the latest tech trends, product benefits through a gamified program, using weekly and monthly quiz contests, quarterly promos and new product updates.

TechTalk App

TechTalk App is one-of-its-kind app based on-the-go training tool.

This platform offers short videos on new products, educating retailers on the product benefits. About 1,300 mobile and camera retail partners are enrolled in this program. We impart training on the key selling points of the focus products and also keep the channel updated with contests, rewards and continuous communication about the host device ecosystem.

WD Purple Storage Calculator App

Nifty app from Western Digital helps partners in estimating the storage requirements for video surveillance.How much storage does your smart CCTV security system need? This is dependent on several factors including the number of days to be stored. The WD Purple Storage Calculator app takes your input and calculates the ideal capacity for your application. It calculates card life based on usage patterns that the customer enters and also recommends storage requirements based on usage patterns that the customer enters.

huge amount of customer data. Ecommerce companies need large quantities of storage as well. We had excellent success story with ecommerce customers. The other area was our engagement with cloud service providers. Public cloud is growing manifold and looking at WDC's success story in North America and China, we initiated discussions with some of the India-

based cloud service providers. If Indian cloud service providers must compete with the global ones, they need to rope in customers by offering them lower cost that they might have incurred on on-premise infrastructure. Thus, service providers were more interested in talking to us as a new player and if we are willing to work with them to lower their cost of infrastructure. We

have been were quite successful there. Also, cloud service providers bring new customers every month.

This way, these two verticals worked very well for us.”

After the success with the two verticals, WDC has been looking at other industries that have massive amount of data. “That is when we figured out that telecom and BFSI are the next set of verticals which have

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large customer data and because of government regulations, they need to store it for seven to ten years' period. We picked the telecom segment six months ago. Right now, there are only three telcos in India and we are already engaged with two of these three. BFSI is next industry we are looking at, as part of our 2020 goal,” informs Tyagi.

Channel strategy According to Chelliah, WDC’s major goal is firstly to build the brand. Second is to create demand and the third, and most important, is to build a strong relationship with the partners.

“One important aspect that needs to be put across to the channel community is how they can integrate our technology into their business, and how they can ensure that they provide the right value to their customers. Towards this attempt, we are taking up several initiatives. We have created sales tools to educate them, and train them on how they can upgrade a hard disk to an SSD and provide them strong training initiatives. We have built communities to provide them constant information in terms of the latest that is coming in the storage space. It can also be looked at as one integrated initiative, wherein some parts include talking to the consumer to create demand for the channel, and talking directly to the channel partners, so that they can understand how they should integrate this product,” says Chelliah.

Channel is a strategic asset for WDC, and the company has one of the most comprehensive channel networks and channel marketing initiatives to facilitate this network.

Different verticals have different types of channel operating in this space. The consumer channel has two types of partners in the retail network. While a bulk of the consumer business goes through the mobile phone retail network, the other part goes through the camera retail network; whereas, there is

some which goes through, what we call, large format retail and gadget retail stores. WDC has built a direct engagement with approximately 7,000 mobile retailers across 100 cities. It not only engages with the distribution channel, but also with the retail channel, which has a direct connect with the consumer.

The other part of the consumer business is on the IT channel front.

With both these channels, WDC has a strong engagement. It has a threepronged strategy for engaging with the channel partners. First is constant communication, the second is consistent training, and the third is to reward their performance.

Referring to constant communication, WDC builds multiple channels to interact with them on a regular basis.

It undertakes face-to-face training as

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LOOKING ATWDC'S SUCCESS STORY OF NORTH AMERICA AND CHINA MARKET,WE STARTED TALKING TO SOME OFTHE INDIA-BASED CLOUD SERVICE PROVIDERS VIVEKTYAGI SENIOR DIRECTOR,ENTERPRISE SALES,WESTERN DIGITAL INDIA

well, but it is one of the few companies in the technology industry which looks at how the channel is behaving, what they are comfortable with and then introduce technology for training programmes. For the mobile retail channel, WDC has a specific training programme through an app called ‘Tech Talks’. It is an app-based training module, which can be availed in Hindi, English and Tamil. Approximately 2,000 retailers get trained on it every quarter.

WDC also has a rewards programme for sub-distributors. A new programme called 'Sandisk League of Heroes' has been launched. There are about top 65 partners which help them cover the retailers who do redistribution.

“WDC also runs consumer programmes and promotions. On the commercial side, there is a slightly different model. The IT channel partners and the surveillance channel partners are spread across the country. The surveillance channel partner ecosystem in this country, depending on whom you talk to, will give us a number between 15,000 to 25,000. That’s the level at which they are spread across the country. People who are deploying surveillance solution; we call them surveillance system integrators,” adds Chelliah.

“It could be the system integrator for big projects, but there are several small projects, because India is a land of small businesses. Here the onus is on us to engage with them directly and give them the right proposition. Why is it important?

Let’s say someone is deploying surveillance solution for office use.

They may buy the best cameras, the best DVR, but the most important aspect is going to be surveillance storage. You can't get away with a regular hard disk. You need to put a surveillance hard disk and it is also important to consider whether the right amount of storage is in place, otherwise incident history may not be retrieved. You would have lost the data. Thus, it is important to understand and recommend the right

Western Digital

PARTNER SPEAK the consumer space is digital photographs and videos. Even SMBs have local backup requirements due to risk of losing data. The government has also mandated its offices to keep minimum data as local backup.

These factors are driving the growth of the storage business.

Kapal Pansari, Director, RP tech India

Tell us about your growth story as a leading solutions provider in the country, and your areas of expertise?

India’s demand for storage continues to grow due to continuous digitisation. Earlier it was due to the growth in the surveillance market, which continues even today. Now the shift from traditional HDD to the fast-paced solid-state technology (SSD) is driving the growth of the storage business in India. At RP tech India, we have worked closely with Western Digital in identifying the growing business opportunity. We also work with them for market development, resulting in the leadership position for both Western Digital and RP tech India.

What efforts are being put to stay relevant in this digital disruption era?

While everything is getting digitised and a lot of data is moving on cloud, yet there is no safe alternative to physical storage.

Therefore, digitisation is a boon in disguise, which is creating more demand for physical storage.

Another big driver for storage in

How long have you been associated with Western Digital, and what has been Western Digital's contribution in your growth?

We have been a strong distribution partner of Western Digital for over five years. Though we were a late entrant to the WDC world, our cohesive way of working, our expertise in understanding the changing needs of technology and our robust infrastructure of 50 branches, service centres and warehouses spread across India, has helped us scale the numbers in the storage business. Fortunately, Western Digital, after the acquisition of SanDisk, went through a distribution consolidation phase and as a result, only the best of the best distributors were retained, which gave us a wider business opportunity. We appreciate this strategy and Western Digital India team for the faith they put on RP tech. Accordingly, we have also invested in manpower and infrastructure to drive the optimum output and growth.

Please share some use-cases which highlight how you, in collaboration with Western Digital, have been able to offer an enhanced solution for the end customers RP tech India is betting big on enterprise business and we are the leading partner for promoting non-MNC servers. In one of the

large government projects, we worked with Western Digital’s pre-sales team and quoted along with our servers. There was good cohesion between the two teams.

Apart from this, we have been working with the WDC team to fulfill the demand of high-end storage solutions in government land record department, wherein digitisation is on full swing. We are also working with Western Digital for Smart City projects.

Further, we have many success stories in corporates for their storage needs.

How is the Western Digital Partner Program benefiting you in addressing customer requirements?

The Western Digital Partner Program is one of the most unique programmes in our industry, which encompasses training, technical updates and rewards. This is one of the most sought after programmes, which enables partners to improve their RoI and thereby give preference to us. If I have to mention a few I would mention their linearity programme, T3 schemes and foreign trip scheme.

What kind of support do you receive from Western Digital in terms of building capabilities and competencies?

Western Digital has a strong technical and post-sales team.

They conduct periodic online and in-person training programmes.

Also, they have a 24x7 support system, which enables consumers and partners like us to access technical requirements seamlessly. Apart from this, they have strong systems and processes for stock allocation, which helps us to plan the stocks appropriately.

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PARTNER SPEAK architects and specialists for our customers' needs, so they can expect to work with a single point of contact and receive a consistently high level of attention. Additionally, we leverage Tech Data’s full suite of resources including access to credit lines, our supply chain, guided pricing, sales support and industry perspective to fully support our partners throughout the sales cycle.

Mohit Jain, Vice President, GCC – APAC , Tech Data

Tell us about your growth story as a leading solutions provider in the country, and what are your areas of expertise?

For over 15 years, our dedicated team of experts has been developing computing solutions in the Indian IT channel market, focused primarily around routes to market that include data centre, MSPs, and system integrators, wherein we hold a leading position in terms of market share.

In 2016, we established ourselves as Tech Data’s Global Computing Components (GCC), a specialty business unit within Tech Data that is consultative in nature and global in scale. Our focus in India has been to draw upon our deep bench of resources and expertise to craft personalised, complete solutions that meet customers' distinct needs, which has led to significant growth and expansion.

We operate as a centralised solutions factory, bringing together the right solution

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What efforts are being put to stay relevant in this digital disruption era?

By transforming Tech Data digitally and investing in nextgeneration technologies, we continue to make great strides in amplifying value for our customers. In recent months, we have enhanced our e-commerce website with strategically designed and custom-built offerings for valued solution providers in India and across the globe. We launched our cloud marketplace, StreamOne, to simplify and speed up cloud transactions. We are also making inroads into global IT projects that will consolidate and streamline digital platforms to support automation.

Emerging technologies like AI and IoT are leading us to evolve the way we support our IT partners and continuously satisfy the world’s ever-evolving demand for technology.

How long have you been associated with Western Digital, and what has been Western Digital's contribution to your growth?

Given its broad portfolio of data

storage technologies, products and services, Western Digital has been a highly strategic partner for us over the past decade, playing a significant role within the enterprise customer segments in media and entertainment, financial, hyperscaler, smart city and surveillance sectors in India.

Please share some use-cases that highlight how you, in collaboration with Western Digital, have been able to offer enhanced solutions for end customers Tech Data is working with leading Indian service providers on back-up use case, using WDC Platform storage to improve the TCO for customers.

How is the Western Digital Partner Program benefiting you in addressing customer requirements?

Tech Data along with WDC is working on implementing a new partner programme which will rolled out by WDC in March 2020.

Western Digital understands the critical need of ongoing enablement and education for its partners, and offers a suite of options to expand Tech Data’s WD support and awareness; from a technical team that provides support in defining storage solutions in specific infrastructure, to understanding product requirements, receiving proper sales and technical training, and marketing support, Western Digital continuously provides the right level of support we need to create joint go-to-market plans that drive growth in India.

Western Digital

PARTNER SPEAK What efforts are being put to stay relevant in this digital disruption era?

S Ramani, Managing Director, India, Avnet

Tell us about your growth story as a leading solutions provider in the country, and your areas of expertise Avnet has transformed into a technology solution provider with an extensive ecosystem delivering product design, demand creation, marketing and supply chain expertise for customers at every stage of the product lifecycle.

Our business spans across various industries, including automotive, aerospace and defence, industrial, telecommunications, and data centres.

IoT is one of the most important growth areas for Avnet. While there is vast value in IoT projects, most organisations struggle to get their projects off the ground due to the complexity of such implementations. Avnet simplifies the complexity of IoT by bringing everything together for our customers – offering an extensive ecosystem as well as both hardware and software expertise to provide our customers with rapid design, development and deployment capabilities to bring IoT to life.

Avnet has created a new ecosystem for its customers. This ecosystem enables us to help professional engineers, entrepreneurs and start-ups take their technology projects from idea to design and from prototype to production. We continue to develop and acquire the capabilities we need to extend our reach beyond our traditional customer segments to businesses in need of IoT. We can now manage customers' IoT data on our platform and provide them with analytics capabilities. We also have a new partner program that brings together a network of experts, tools and resources to give our customers what they need to bring their products to market. We can now help customers put the required pieces of IoT together: the device, the gateway, the network, the cloud, the applications and the artificial intelligence that brings them the insights from all of the connected devices.

Avnet has also recently launched an IoT Partner Program designed to provide developers with a place to build complete IoT solutions, enabling them to scale their business in a quick and costeffective manner. Using Avnet’s IoT Connect platform, developers can seamlessly connect devices that address both the software and hardware needs of IoT solutions.

How long have you been associated with Western Digital, and what has been Western Digital's contribution to your growth?

Avnet India has been working closely with Western Digital OEM

and enterprise team for many years now. The business from WDC products in India has been consistently increasing YoY at high CAGR.

Please share some use-cases that highlight how you, in collaboration with Western Digital, have been able to offer enhanced solutions for end customers The success in enterprise segment has been collective efforts in pursuing opportunities with appropriate storage solution.

Positioning of new products, evaluation and validation have helped us to increase nontraditional customers across India in market segments such as cloud service providers, telecom service providers, enterprise customers, ecommerce and leading system integrators. The major success to highlight is in telecom service providers and PSU, positioning technically advanced solution along with various financial models.

What kind of support do you receive from Western Digital in terms of building capabilities and competencies?

Western Digital schedules regular training programmes for sales teams across India to equip them with knowledge on new products and technologies to position across customers. Avnet is enabled with various online resources, tools to provide first level support. The Western Digital R&D facility in Bengaluru has state-of-the-art laboratory which has helped us in aligning focused support to customers on appropriate storage opportunities.

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Cover Story

PARTNER SPEAK disruption era?

Devinder Singh Director – APAC, ADI

Tell us about your growth story as a leading solutions provider in the country, and your areas of expertise ADI is a leading di stributor of security, AV and low-voltage products. In more than 25 years in the business, we have become a multi-billion-dollar distributor with more than 200 locations in 19 countries in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and AsiaPacific. ADI began operations in India in 2006 with just one branch location supporting two cities.

Since then, we have grown our operations and carry 70 brands at more than 18 branches and 26 additional stocking locations, and we have a sales footprint in over 40 cities across the country. We carry thousands of products that are available for prompt delivery or fast pickup in the following categories: Access control, AV, pro-AV, communications, enterprise connectivity, fire, intrusion and smart home, networking, power, structured wiring and video surveillance.

What efforts are being put to stay relevant in this digital

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We understand that having a digital platform is imperative and organisations can no longer limit themselves to a conventional way of doing business. That’s why ADI was one of the first organisations in the low voltage security industry to offer e-commerce capabilities. We have been benefited immensely from this initiative, and continue to invest in our digital experience for customers.

At the same time, we are also focused on delivering our expert advice every day on products and specific individual project needs.

Our project registration programme helps our customers win more bids and assists with systems design for installations and large projects. We also host seminars and training events year-round, including the ADI Expos Series.

For how long have you been associated with Western Digital, and what has been Western Digital's contribution to your growth?

Western Digital has been a key storage solutions supplier for ADI for the past four years. Western Digital’s customer centric approach and channel strategy aligns with ADI, and this relationship has created significant value for our customers and team members. Western Digital offers an expansive range of technologies, storage devices, systems and solutions for business and consumers alike, which complements ADI’s portfolio. With the end-to-end solution offering available at ADI, from cameras, cables, switches, routers, digital/network video recorders and more, WDC’s storage portfolio provides an edge to ADI and its

customer base to provide an optimised, cost effective and stateof-the-art solution. This has helped ADI drive growth with new and existing customers.

Please share some use-cases that highlight how you, in collaboration with Western Digital, have been able to offer enhanced solutions for end customers With the current trend of AI based recording products (DVR/ NVR) in the global and Indian market, WDC’s AI supported Purple Surveillance Hard Disk allows customers to store their critical security videos with high efficiency. Customers can use these features to decrease storage requirements and help drive savings in installations. Also, these features allow customers to retain videos at high quality over long periods of time without worry.

How is Western Digital Partner Program benefiting you in addressing the customer requirements?

Western Digital offers a comprehensive partner programme and has provided a great benefit to ADI’s customer base. The mobile application, as well the web portal, are easy to access and contain complete information on products and activities with WDC. Our customers utilise the social media chatting platform that provides access to WDC team in real time.

This helps get information on the latest trends, sale opportunities, programmes, trainings and to raise queries to get immediate responses. The partner programme has helped put WDC in the forefront of being a channel centric company in India.

Western Digital

PARTNER SPEAK What are your efforts to stay relevant in the digital disruption era?

Akhil Singh, Director, Avook Global

Tell us about your growth story as a leading solution provider and your area of expertise My father had started this business in 1991 and since then, it has been in operation for the last 29 years. Since the inception, we have been purely in the storage business and were one of the first partners in the hardware industry of India. I've been actively looking at the business for almost 13 years now and associated with Western Digital. Our core domain of businesses is storage, except flash products. Since the time I have joined, we have almost grown 10-15 times in terms of revenue.

product, but not many system integrators do it effectively. To address this, WDC has created an app to enable its partners calculate to the storage requirement. This app is available for both, Android and iOS platforms,” says Chelliah.

Traditionally most companies used emails for communication, but WDC realised that it is not going to work in a market like India. For My

We are upgrading ourselves in terms of infrastructure, systems and knowledge. In terms of product addition, as the industry is churning, we are also shifting our product focus. For instance, the transition from desktop to SSD drives. We are ensuring that we keep them in stocks, at high capacity. The transition is happening at an unpredictable pace. We will soon be carrying 1TB of storage in our smartphones. In the cloud space, which is also gaining attention, we are currently working on how we can utilise the cloud era. Since it is more technically relevant, we are still working on how we can utilise storage expertise in cloud.

in the country. It has been more than 13 years of our association with Western Digital.

How has Western Digital contributed to your growth?

Western Digital has played a major role our company's growth.

Close to 50 per cent of our business revenue comes from Western Digital. We had collaborated with Western Digital for Amity Tech Fest, Gaming Fest Dreamland and Photo Marathon.

How are Western Digital's partner programmes benefitting your business?

What is your market observation on Western Digital 1TB MicroSD card?

We have been getting training via person, online and videos, where we are informed about the products. We have been receiving product manuals via mail and videos for the same. One such creative video example was of Western Digital's campaign on importance of data.

It will change the storage space completely, with more and more technological advancements and the content transforming from HD to 4K and 8K.

What sort of support are you receiving from Western Digital in building your capability and competencies?

How long you have been associated with Western Digital?

We have been associated with Western Digital since the time the company was gaining momentum

WD program, WDC enabled partner communication using the WhatsApp Business platform. The company has also created a similar one for the IT channel focused on SSDs. “India is important to us not just from a business perspective, but also as a resource pool. Globally, it is one of the largest R&D sites for us. We have close to 2,700 employees based out of India of which almost 90 per

We are getting complete support in the form of programmes, schemes, updated information, product lines, team engagement and quick replacement services.

All these factors motivate us to do business with Western Digital.

cent of the employees are involved in technical R&D. Thus, India has been instrumental to roll out some of break-through products. WDC’s offering of one terabyte on the USB is conceptualised out of India. The 512 gigabyte micro SD card is also conceptualised and designed out of India, so India adds a lot of value to us from every perspective,” concludes Wani.

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Channel Chief

SAP reinventing partner synergies With an emphasis on the cloud, SAP is going aggressive in growth verticals like telecom, banking and insurance, and creating new synergies with its partners Moumita Deb Choudhury moumita.choudhury@expressindia.com

G

erman software major, SAP is going through a transformation where one of the key elements of the SAP strategy, includes the partners. The company aims to deliver the Intelligent Enterprise to its customers and as a part of this, collaboration with partners is significant. The other component is that, it is moving towards cloud solutions and developing new products.

With this emphasis on the cloud, SAP is now moving into new paradigm with its partner. The company is going aggressive in growth verticals like for telecom, banking and insurance. “We are mobilising our partners to take all the IP that we are developing for the other verticals and reapply it to cloud. It is a call for action for all the partners to package its IP, which they have been acquiring over so many years on premise and then call for SAP to develop this IP for the cloud environment. “We are very aggressively driving this as you will see this year.

We have ‘Solution Centres’, in every country- there is one in India, and these solution centres actually help our partners package the IP and build those packaged solutions for cloud in different industries,” says Karl Fahrbach, Chief Partner Officer - Global Partner Organisation, SAP.

Moving ahead SAP has recently launched an initiative called Next Generation Partnering. “That is basically modernising all our partner models to make sure that our partners are

TODAY THE CHANNEL PARTNER IS LOOKED UPON TO DO BEYOND JUST SELLING AND IMPLEMENTING. IT SHOULD BE CAPABLE OF BUILDING IPS TO BUILD ON FUTURE INNOVATION AND CREATE THE VALUE ADDITION equipped with tools and methodologies to be ready for the cloud. It is to make sure that SAP helps the partners to move from an on-premise environment, to an environment where cloud is the key. It been driving this initiative since last year to encourage the partners more and give them more importance," states Fahrbach.

The company's emphasis is on three key pillars to make the partners ready for the cloud. The first is what is called 'Partner Innovation' where the partners are helped to innovate with SAP and monetise. Looking at the cloud solutions, partners are always required to extend, augment and cater to the specific market needs. The other pillar is economics, whereby the need to maintain the margin and profitability of the partners is realised. The focus is to bring down the cost of partnership, by lowering the cost of their testing and development licenses, and enable learning by giving them more access, etc. As a part of this economics pillar, there is a huge emphasis also on the quality of the partners. The third pillar is partnering experience, whereby engagements between SAP and the

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partners in cloud and SAP are being modernised.

“In order to do that, we are looking at the experience. We are constantly asking partners to give us feedback on how they feel being a part of SAP ecosystem, especially with the recent acquisition of Qualtrics which enables us to understand the sentiments of the partners. Apart from physical feedback through surveys and feedback with the help of technology, we have several local, regional and global councils to provide feedback and discuss the approach. We not only tell the partners what we are doing, but also ask them for feedback, and we involve them as a part of the decisions that we make from a partner perspective. Furthermore, as part of this experience pillar, we are looking at improving the overall experience in the cloud to make it easier for the partners to do business with SAP,” says Fahrbach.

Along the lines of cloud, SAP is running Cloud Transformation Roadshows. It starts at the CEO level and graduates down to the delivery centre, the sales and development level and to the services level to visualise how the companies' transformation to the cloud would look like.

Evolving role of channel partners The silos of just being a service provider, distributor, system integrator or a run partner are collapsing. “It is a global phenomenon, and very much evident in India. For example, our partnership program is structured around sales, service, build and run.

This program itself might undergo some changes where we probably

SAP

bring down some silos, but rarely, you will find a partner who is only doing one off. Most of them are doing all four.

All of them at least are doing the two or three. While you may want to still call it channel, now even the channel partners being vast, they are hosting, building on top and running SAP solutions, because they want to do a value-added reselling. They are building IP, either to act as an accelerator, or as a differentiator, so all of them are getting into IP,” says Nandagopal Prasad, SVP Head of Partner Innovation Lifecycle Services, SAP. Today the channel partner is looked upon to do beyond just selling and implementing. It should be capable of building IPs to build on future innovation and create the value addition. It should maintain long-term relation with the customers and add constant value and renew the contracts. The expectation is of a whole new role from the partners.

“In the past, we were putting those partners in boxes. We were putting the SAP glasses, and we were calling them an SI or a VAR and, or an ISD. That is gone, because all those partner categories do more than they were doing before. Probably in the past, an ISV would just be an ISV, and a reseller partner would just do reselling. Now these lines are blurring, and they have started to do everything from selling to building IP, from services to looking at the entire customer life cycles. That is why, from an SAP perspective we are reacting to this as well. This year we are going to be launching a new program- an evolution of a partner edge program which we have today.

You are not the SI or ISV anymore, you are going to be a partner of SAP, and we are going to recognise the full value of you as a partner of SAP,” says Fahrbach.

Emerging tech Innovation and understanding of cutting-edge technologies is imperative. “What I see in India, as well as globally is that, to survive in the future, the partners will have to invest in innovation. They need to embrace

“

“

WE ARE CONSTANTLYASKING PARTNERS TO GIVE US FEEDBACK ON HOWTHEY FEEL BEING A PART OF SAP ECOSYSTEM,ESPECIALLY WITH THE RECENT ACQUISITION OF QUALTRICS

WHILE YOU MAYWANTTO STILL CALL IT CHANNEL,NOW EVEN THE CHANNEL PARTNERS BEING VAST,THEY ARE HOSTING,BUILDING ON TOPAND RUNNING SAP SOLUTIONS

KARL FAHRBACH, CHIEF PARTNER OFFICER - GLOBAL PARTNER ORGANISATION,SAP

NANDAGOPAL PRASAD SVP HEAD OF PARTNER INNOVATION LIFECYCLE SERVICES,SAP

the emerging technologies. Hence, we are working with analyst firms like IDC and Gartner to understand the future trends and analyse the profit and loss. If they want to maintain the levels of profitability and increase margins in the future, they need to invest in big innovation. This is going to be one of the key components that we are going to launch in the next few years to help those channel partners to understand that it is not only about selling/ providing services anymore, it is about having innovation, sales and services to complete the picture and be successful,” says Fahrbach.

“We have partners in India who

work across all the industries and line of business that SAP works on. The common tying thread is building on the SAP cloud platform. It is the platform of choice. Also, the newer technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain are delivered as a part of the cloud platform. We are all the time co-innovating with partners who are already using these technologies.

We just finished an agriculture based project that used machine learning. We are currently working on cross company reconciliation which is using blockchain. The partners in India are already thinking and using these new technologies,” informs Prasad.

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Thought Leader

RP tech India has ambitious enterprise business roadmap RP tech India has firmly planted its footing in the enterprise and cloud computing space and and will spearhead the efforts of improving adoption of the technology in the foreseeable future via its partner channels

By Rajesh Goenka, Director, Sales & Marketing, RP tech India

I

t is said that the change is only constant and we at RP tech India firmly believe in transformation and adaptability according to the changing business scenario. For the last two decades, RP tech India has been the leader in component, peripherals and networking business.

However, as we head for the next level of growth, we have decided to explore the tremendous business potential in

the enterprise vertical. We set up a task force, which would engage in pre-sales and technology selling to customers in various industry verticals.

We are focused on High-Performance Computing (HPC), cloud computing, artificial intelligence, deep learning, virtualisation, enterprise storage, animation/VFX, rendering and long distance point to point networking. Our

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key focused verticals are higher education and research, data centres, media and broadcasting, pharmacy and healthcare, BFSI, government, telecom, oil and gas and manufacturing. We are going by a vertical approach with a dedicated team and strategy as explained below. Here our robust infrastructure of 50 branches, 50 service centers and warehouses play a pivotal role.

RP tech India

High-Performance Computing (HPC)

relatively low management/ maintenance costs, scalable, robust technology, much more secure etc. RP tech now offers by way of affordable pay-as-you-go (PAYG) model a full range of cloud offerings under three broader flavours: ◗ Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering includes virtual private servers, bare metal servers, content delivery network, storage, IoT, etc ◗ Software as a Service (SaaS) offering includes emails, security software, back-up software ◗ Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering includes environment to build, manage software applications

We are helping channel partners design the complete HPC solutions for their customers. We do site visits along with the partner to suggest them proper BOM sizing. This makes our HPC offering optimum. Furthermore, we help partners in installation, if needed.

Artificial intelligence (AI) AI start-ups and investment in AI is growing every year. There has been a steady increase in the deployment of AI in new technologies. We at RP tech India are targeting start-ups, higher education and research, and the customers, who are adopting AI technologies. Large scale implementations are happening in the space of education, data analytics and surveillance analytics. We have been able to install solutions in more than 100 top institutes in India. We also educate our customers on the benefits of AI through various digital awareness campaigns.

RAJESH GOENKA, DIRECTOR,SALES & MARKETING, RPTECH INDIA

RP tech India offers this wide range of cloud computing products by working with vendors like Microsoft, AWS, Alibaba Cloud, Acronis, etc. We have firmly planted its footing in the cloud computing space and will spearhead the efforts of improving adoption of the technology in the foreseeable future via its partner channels.

been able to get success in education, city surveillance, and telecom industry.

With our wide range of products including access points, routers, switches, cameras, we are targeting to reach newer enterprise verticals.

Thin clients Rendering Our focus is GPU based rendering, specifically in media and entertainment, research and development and pharmaceutical industry. We have various solutions like workstations and servers, which offer GPU based rendering. We also help in GPU virtualisation solutions for resource optimisation and IP security.

We are quite aware that thin clients have acceptance in the categories like banking, educational, healthcare, manufacturing, call centres, co-working spaces, and hospitality sectors. We are working with enterprise partners handin-hand to cover these enterprise customers and support them with roadshows/training programmes.

Cloud computing Enterprise storage We have complete solutions for enterprise storage including NAS, SAN, unified storage, software-defined storage and backup solution with complete end-to-end service and support. In this category, we target media and entertainment industry for archival storage, all-flash storage for DC and DR with an unparalleled solution with benefits like low footprint per TB/PB and throughput, etc. Our brands are well known in the HPC domain covering very high market share.

Networking We have a dual strategy of enterprise networking and SOHO. So far, we have

With the awareness and adoption of cloud computing gradually starting to see an upward trend amongst the Indian businesses, it was important for RP tech India to lead this adoption from the forefront. Since the well-talked about the acquisition of ZNet Technologies last year, RP tech India has made huge strides in the last 12 months in this space. ZNet brings in the expertise built over several years and RP tech brings in the reach with its 50 branch offices and over 100 dedicated manpower selling cloud computing solutions across India. This was a very natural synergy. Cloud computing brings its benefits of no huge upfront capital investments in infrastructure,

Enterprise channel strategy On the channel development front, we have a two-pronged strategy, first is to engage and develop the channel partners/SIs/OEM ecosystem and second is to develop enterprises endusers. As a part of this dual strategy, we have a dedicated end-user vertical, which works in conjunction with channel partners to generate leads. At the same time, we continuously strive to develop our channel ecosystem by conducting regular training programmes. This brings the real value to our channel partners and off course to our vendors.

We are already seeing real value add coming from our end along with good business growth. We will continue to invest in this business model for the next three years. The advantage of associating with RP tech India is that apart from separate presales team, BDMs and verticals experts, we also have team, which supports on-site and off-site warranty services, thus, provides complete relief to channel partners and customers in their journey with us.

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CXO Speak

How Big Basket is leveraging emerging tech for streamlining delivery A perfect combination of focused strategy, market knowhow, customer centricity, and most importantly, the right technology, has led to Big Basket's dominance in online grocery space Moumita Deb Choudhury

ability to scale up and down based on the demand; hence cloud is the better option. For autoscaling, running Kubernetes is a key part of the strategy.

Using Kubernetes helps scale seamlessly and all the microservices run on kubernetes,” he adds.

moumita.choudhury@expressindia.com

T

ough competition and difficult market conditions have led many orgaisations to downsize their business, then how is a 2011 established firm winning the market ?

Big Basket's prowess is the right strategy; market knowhow; customer centricity and yet another significant facet, “the right technology” points out Rakshit Daga, Vice President & CTO, Big Basket. “We have to understand that the market is absolutely massive and the overall Indian grocery market is 500 billion dollars, of which a couple of billion dollars are online right now.

There is a huge room for the market to grow in the online domain. And today the challenge is not really to grow the market, but doing it in a way which creates a sustainable business,” he adds.

Data centre Storage essentially being an important part of the businesses is well leveraged. And referring to storage does not only mean the over 1800 varieties of products which Big Basket sells but also intelligent data, which is as valuable.

“We are completely running on a public cloud. It is working well as we do have to worry about the hardware,” says Daga. “In our business, scaling up and down is very important; the required capacity during peak time can be 10 times the average capacity. Most of our infrastructure is based on our

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A big tech basket

“

WE HAVE TO UNDERSTAND THAT THE MARKET IS ABSOLUTELY MASSIVE AND THE OVERALL INDIAN GROCERY MARKET IS 500 BILLION DOLLARS,OFWHICH A COUPLE OF BILLION DOLLARS ARE ONLINE RIGHT NOW RAKSHIT DAGA , VICE PRESIDENT & CTO,BIG BASKET

Algorithms and advanced analytics are manoeuvred well in the company for seamless operational efficiency. “We are re-architecting the whole supply chain and the platform for scale by leveraging some of the cutting-edge technologies.

There is a conscious call to make a platform that is plug and play in nature.

The emphasis is on the ability to experiment with different algorithms,” informs Daga.

At Big Basket, hefty investments are made to build solutions which allow possibilities like changing the routes for the delivery fleets. “A cart of the customer consists of various categories of products including high value, low value, or perishable products which are stored at different warehouses in a city or sometimes different cities altogether.

The right way to assemble the cart is a combination of technology plus the individual worker on the ground who is actually putting the order together,” explains Daga.

In addition to this, there are investments on AI and ML, which are used aggressively for exercises like determining what should be recommended to the customers. “The technology helps to ensure that the

Big Basket

quality of the recommendations is good and the potential of conversion with respect to the customers is better,” he says. “It also helps to understand how a delivery executive gets the best timings for a certain route, are done well with the aid of AI. However, even for AI and ML there is no one right answer, there are multiple possibilities and several new technologies keep emerging from time to time. So the best approach is to create a platform where you are able to rapidly explore all the possibilities to arrive at a conclusion on one solution that works best for the ecosystem,” Daga adds.

Hyper-personalisation helps to trace the buying pattern. It lends the ability to offer management right at the individual level. The company’s Smart Basket feature uses AI and algorithms to understand the customer’s likeliness towards purchasing certain products and this accelerates the overall buying experience of the customer.

“With Internet of Things, we track delivery of certain products such as ice-cream, whereby it is important to have the right temperature at the point of delivery. There are devices to server communication like location tracking in all the delivery routing that we do. There are pressure sensors deployed in vending machine which helps in estimating which products are sold and in what quantity,” he mentions.

monolithic architecture and we realised that we need to invest in an architecture which breaks up the various components of the technology platform into independent pieces. Thus, we did put in a lot of investments on the micro services stack. We also realised that as we grew to become the largest online grocery provider, we should invest in an asynchronous programming technology which allows processing more request but at the same hardware cost,” he emphasises. Daga concludes by saying, “There is a major emphasis on creating an ecosystem that is keen to contribute to the industry forums and also bring back the leanings home.”

realised that this is one business where change and experimentation is a constant. So the technology platform has to really enable this. And then business as usual is a large part of the whole exercise, how do you keep running the platform in a stable and a scalable way as the business grows and as this problem is solved this helps in speeding up new feature roll outs, so all of this goes hand in hand,” he stresses.

Challenges A big challenge was that as the company scaled up rapidly, the technology platform was not competent. “It was the so called

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Big business outcomes “With the right technology deployment or the proper supply chain algorithm, the best outcomes is that every time you want to experiment with the supply chain model, you do not have to actually write a new code or create a new technology. If you have a platform that is flexible and scalable you will be able to experiment with different supply chain models,” he says.

The platform that Daga and his team is envisioning would allow for faster go to market for different business needs, easier maintenance and lower cost of change. “This is of paramount importance since we have

AND Shareholders holding more than One per cent of the total capital

Express Towers, 1st Floor Nariman Point, Mumbai-400 Monthly Ms. Vaidehi Thakar Yes Express Towers, 1st Floor Nariman Point, Mumbai-400 Ms. Vaidehi Thakar Yes Express Towers, 1st Floor Nariman Point, Mumbai-400 Srikanth RP Yes Express Towers, 1st Floor Nariman Point, Mumbai-400 The Indian Express (P) Ltd Express Towers, 1st Floor Nariman Point, Mumbai 400021

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Date : 1/3/2020

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CXO Speak

Future tech trends to fuel growth at Edelweiss General Insurance Shared mobility, smart vehicles, electric vehicles and a prevention-based approach to contribute significantly to sustainable growth at Edelweiss General Insurance, says Shanai Ghosh, ED and CEO, Edelweiss General Insurance

Abhishek Raval abhishek.raval@expressindia.com

E

delweiss General Insurance (EGI) has built a sustainable and customer-centric technology architecture that enables seamless integrations with multiple solutions and is highly scalable. As the first cloud native insurer in India, EGI is a complete micro-services and API driven platform. “We have worked on getting our technology foundation right. While most companies adopt an outside-in

approach – the front-end applications followed by the backend, we opted to do the reverse. This has helped us build a robust foundation, adaptable for scaling up faster,” says Shanai Ghosh, ED and CEO, Edelweiss General Insurance. The company is one of the first in India to have implemented an integrated application portfolio across the entire lifecycle of the customer when it comes to insurance. It provides a holistic view of data, while parallelly enabling an integrated view of the customer lifecycle.

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EGI has also adopted the entire SAP suite and is probably the only company in South Asia to host it over a virtual private cloud. This is the kind of futureready technology architecture built by the company. “It gives us agility, flexibility, scalability and cost efficiency. Cloud offers many other applications like analytics, API and programming capabilities, which are most suitable for a new age insurer like us,” says Ghosh.

The general insurer is also looking at voice-based UI as a platform, because it

Edelweiss General Insurance

is a very natural way to communicate.

Companies today are looking to adapt to ever-evolving customer needs and are adopting all forms of communication channels. In that context, voice stands out as a natural form of interaction, enabling a frictionless experience. The digital platform at EGI, allows customers to buy insurance policies on the fly, based on what and how much they remember and not on the compulsion of referring to documents.

through the digital-only channel. “On a monthly basis, over 20 per cent of our customers are acquired through digital channels. This includes acquisition through web aggregators, as well,” says Ghosh. The rest of the business is also conducted on a digital platform, where the intermediary acquires and services the customers through the online channel.

‘Prevention’ - a key aspect of tech powered insurance products

Digital provides efficiencies in operating models In the insurance sector, the competitive environment in India, has matured. While there are companies who are online-only, most of them operate on a hybrid model comprising online and offline stakeholders like agents, brokers, banca channels, etc.

The competition drives all companies to bring their best game to the table.

EGI has an operating model which is completely digital, even for the interactions with ecosystem players like agents, brokers, advisors, etc.

There is no paper involved. “While digital-only is still just over five per cent of the market, we have decided to have a digital operating model with distributors over and above the digitalonly mode. EGI has digitally empowered other stakeholders to garner and service more customers through the digital medium,” says Ghosh.

For EGI, there are many markets under the general insurance space and even sub-markets under individual markets. For example, private cars are a sub-market under the motor category and the company will heavily use analytics for creating many such submarkets that are likely to grow over time and as yet remain unidentified by competitors. “Our focus in the first three-four years is to build a strong technology platform which is intelligent enough to give us insights into multiple markets thus far untapped in the area of general insurance,” informs Ghosh.

The company has been able to gather pace in acquiring customers

“

WE HAVE WORKED ON GETTING OUR TECHNOLOGY FOUNDATION RIGHT.WHILE MOST COMPANIES ADOPT AN OUTSIDE-IN APPROACH – THE FRONT-END APPLICATIONS FOLLOWED BYTHE BACKEND,WE OPTED TO DO THE REVERSE. THIS HAS HELPED US BUILD A ROBUST FOUNDATION, ADAPTABLE FOR SCALING UP FASTER SHANAI GHOSH, ED AND CEO, EDELWEISS GENERAL INSURANCE

Data proves that better driving behaviour leads to lower accidents and living a healthy lifestyle and associated wellness activities, can result in lower long-term health claims. Both themes are preventive in nature and the company has already taken the first steps in having insurance products in this direction.

“We had filed an app-based telematics product in the area of motor insurance for which we have received the requisite IRDAI approvals recently.

The basic construct of this product, stems from the fact that customers need not buy any OD product for a car or a two-wheeler, etc., and mandatory liability product buying, will fulfil all necessary motor insurance requirements. It will cover all the vehicles driven by the customer. It is a multi-vehicle policy, based on users, usage, etc. with several benefits packed together. The policy itself is an app and hence there is no need to buy multiple policies for multiple vehicles.

This is an apt product for the shared mobility era that is emerging. Even if the owner rents the vehicle, he can do it on a single insurance policy. These are the kind of innovative products we are aiming to develop that will effectively cater to future trends such as shared mobility, smart vehicles and electric vehicles,” shares Ghosh. EGI has collaborated with Revolt - an app-based bike as well.

EGI’s future pipeline also includes products which will relate with stakeholders in the healthcare space and comprises health insurance that will be based on incentivising and collaborating with customers based on their health and wellness activities.

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CXO Speak

‘Service providers will be one of the important channels for Cisco in this decade’ With enterprises undergoing digitalisation and getting prepared for future-ready network platforms, networking major Cisco believes that India needs fiberisation for congestion-free transport networks. A healthy service provider industry is the bedrock of the whole digital vision. In conversation with Sandhya Michu of CRN India, Sanjay Kaul, President, Asia Pacific & Japan, Service Provider Business, Cisco Systems Inc shares how the company is reinventing service providers for tapping new business opportunities The story of the Indian telecom industry is under consolidation.

How do you view this consolidation from the lens of a major telecom network provider?

Right now we have a problem in the service provider industry because it is under stress. But I think we are at the end of this misery. Consolidation has happened, now it is four players. That is the right structure for the industry. Four partners and over 1.3 billion people, they all can be healthy and can make good business. The last decade was the lost decade. When we enter 2020, we are entering a digital era where there will be new normals, there will be new entrants and participants. But there will be new revenue opportunities and new business models.

The new opportunities are that when you move into 4.5G or Wi-Fi 6 and5G, features like low latency and slicing, give you ability as an operator to use your network that I was talking about as a platform, so you can extend it to an enterprise vertical. Let us say that the enterprise vertical is a factory making cars. So if a car manufacturer’s cost of production today is 100 rupees, I believe by bringing this platform to them and

automating the entire factory, we can reduce that cost by at least 40 per cent.

With the high rate of digitisation in enterprises, how does Cisco look at the digital wave unfolding and the challenges ahead?

I think we thrive with big customers.

However, the thing that still needs to be developed is fiberisation, because as consumers our consumption has increased multifold in recent years.

Today, I think the consumption is at least 20 GB. The average consumption in India is approximately 14 GB, and right now, we are still using standard video and HD video. I was in Japan recently on a tech forum there. They were displaying an 18K video. So, a one-minute clip that you watch on standard video, if the same was 18K, the data consumption would be 120 times more, which means that if you consume1 GB to watch a movie, then you need 128 GB to watch the same movie.

Hence, making sure that we have networks that are end-to-end secure, that security is on the termina, how do we turn the business into cloud services. India has 60 million microbusinesses, micro SMEs. These are companies ranging from two-three

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employees to 100 employees. There are 60 million of them, and they all want to get digitised. And if you offer them monolithic services, they will never take them. So, you have got to give them a plug and play kind of offering. I need offering, which is coming to me in a box, I plug it in, itself-configures, and I’m in business. For that, these three broader things need to be sorted for India to thrive in this digital era. SPs are the foundation for digitisation, and we need a healthy service provider industry because they become the bedrock of the whole digital vision.

Having said that, we need fiberisation; we need congestion-free transport networks. That is a challenge for India because we are still only 35-40 per cent fiberised. A lot has happened in the last couple of years. Jio is playing fibre now, Bharti and Vodafone to an extent. There are some new players emerging in the market, but there is still a long way to go. Hence, I believe more than 5G, I think getting the transport networks right is a priority for India.

How is Cisco helping service providers to reduce the business complexities and challenges that

Cisco Systems

you have mentioned above?

Cisco’s enterprise portfolio includes intuitive networking, collaboration, mobility, cloud and end-to-end security.

We are basically doing security preattack, during attack and after attack.

There is an organisation called TALOS, the world’s biggest threat agency, owned by Cisco, which monitors every bit that flows on the internet. We have a 60 per cent market share in routers, so it hits our routers somewhere. We are capturing more than a million threats a day. Fundamentally, Cisco takes care of this end-to-end.

With data becoming the main business and video becoming the main business, and all of it is happening at the edge of the network, we need to solve for this end-to-end. From an Indian perspective, operators have started that journey, but they are not there yet. The issue is we talk about 5G, it is a buzz word now, but 5G takes care of the low latency, but if the data has to travel through this long journey, then zero or low latency has no meaning. You have to first fix the back-end before you fix the frontend. The second thing is, it is very expensive, the spectrum is costly, so there is no point bringing this data back to the central repository. Use it, extract value out of it and get rid of it where it gets created. If you look at the bigger web players, they have really used AI, ML and deep analytics to build their businesses.

How do you really look at 5G? Earlier, there was thrust on 5G and now it is a trillion dollar opportunity. How do you really see the trend going?

5G is a piece of technology. It has become a very good reason to fix what we needed to fix for years. It is not only for India but for the rest of the countries as well. Our network got built-in multiple years. You need to make it simple and flat. The network needs to have automation embedded in it so that it becomes self-healing. We have been working with Jio for almost three years. They have elements of their network which are automated. We are also working with Bharti. They have started the journey, but it takes a while. Our belief is, in the 5G world, 70-

How are you leveraging the digital transformation at enterprises?

CISCO’S ENTERPRISE PORTFOLIO INCLUDES INTUITIVE NETWORKING,COLLABORATION, MOBILITY,CLOUD AND END-TO-END SECURITY

Globally, we have almost 60 per cent of the market share. We are dominant and we are anyway helping enterprises. Now bringing solution providers in the mix is making them further efficient. Enterprises that can afford it, can do it. But what if there is a service provider platform that can solve for all these needs? See how efficient we can make that.

SPs will be one of the important channels for Cisco in this decade because service providers have reach and coverage. If we give them cloud services, we can digitise India. But a foundational platform, which includes a robust network, with fiberisation and free congestion, is needed to do that will be able to help telcos monetise their services as the company manages almost 70 per cent of the internal network of most enterprises.

SANJAY KAUL, PRESIDENT,ASIA PACIFIC & JAPAN,SERVICE PROVIDER BUSINESS,CISCO SYSTEMS

What are the key areas where Cisco is investing ?

“

75 per cent of the revenue will come from enterprises. By bringing in this capability to enterprises, you will save costs for them, and part of that value creation will be shared by the operator.

Hence, the monetisation, because we as consumers who would love speeds, feeds, will be able to do 4Ks and 8Ks. The more data we are consuming on a daily basis, we love it, but we still will not have to pay too much more. But enterprise is a different story because the enterprise is a huge cost connected to ICT. If you help them reduce that to the tune of 30-40 per cent, you are talking about a substantial proportion of their opex. If they are willing to share 20-30 per cent with you (operators), and that is a big sum. We have two calculators - one is called VNI, Visual Networking Index, a report we publish every year. Another one is called Monetisation Index. Our analysis tells us that by 2030, digitisation could mean about 20 per cent of India’s GDP. That is a trillion-dollar opportunity, should we execute on it.

Today, if you look at Cisco, we are a great technology company, but we are more than a technology company. We work on making the society a better place, we put a lot of investment in CDA – Country Digitization Acceleration program. It’s about who bells the cat – who will put up the first proof of concept.

From a technology perspective, there are a few areas where we are investing – the first is making this mass scale networking happen, where you can easily get to the scale of terabytes, and you can handle this high bandwidth networks. Mass scale networking is first.

The second is, we are creating a distributed data centre, which allows you to capture data when it gets produced at the edge. We are building immersive experiences through our collaboration tools, and video endpoints.

The fourth area is security. When I say security, it is end-to-end security. It is the network, the data centre, the terminal and so on. The fifth area is mobility, which includes 5G, Wi-Fi 6, packet core networks. And the last one is automation and SDN, converged SDN. Automate whatever you can automate in the hierarchy of the networks.

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CXO Speak

‘We are a company obsessed with customer experience’ Tally Solutions is undoubtedly the leading GST accounting software company in the Indian market. In an interaction with CRN, Harsha Kodnad, Director – Technology, Tally Solutions, speaks about the various aspects of product development and the company’s increased focus on R&D and innovation

By Nivedan Prakash Can you highlight the technology trends prevailing in the industry, which is going to lay the foundation for future product development at Tally Solutions?

While technology as it emerges definitely plays a crucial role in continuously laying the foundation for our product development, it is always identifying ‘user problem(s)’ unsolved or not solved well. This is pivotal for our roadmap and lays the foundation for future products.

With our purpose of engineering to solve these user problems exceptionally well, which is useful, delightful and flawless, we need to identify the right experience that will make this. This uncompromisable experience is what influences us to create (or sometimes adopt) the right technology.

The point is that, the technology is an enabler having the potential of solving every problem and hence a trend created on that hype. For us, the technology comes after the experience i.e. the architecture and associated technology choice are after the product design.

For instance, while moving to browser-based applications is a technology trend, we believe that having a thick application on the device will always be better from a responsiveness and offline working perspective.

BE IT INTERFACE, INTERACTION EXPERIENCE OR INFORMATION DESIGN, WE GIVE GREAT IMPORTANCE TO NFRS (NON-FUNCTIONAL REQUIREMENTS SUCH AS SPEED, FLEXIBILITY, SIMPLICITY, RELIABILITY) And while moving the application and compute on the cloud, which has the potential to bring down capital cost and provide anytime anywhere access, it has the tendency to increase the regular operational cost, impacting the privacy and security of the customer data, and needing a always-on internet making it difficult to run businesses.

Hence, we believe in pushing more compute to the customer’s device; thus reducing the operational cost of using cloud, as well as provide an exceptional responsiveness of application, leaving the control of the data in the user’s hands, while still make it available anytime-anywhere.

As enterprises are digitally transforming their businesses, how are you fuelling innovation in your product offerings?

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The goal of the enterprise is not to digitally transform their business but to become more effective, efficient and attain exponential growth. The digital transformation is an aid in making that happen. We have continuously believed in the growth of our customers. Each of our product offering and continuous evolution of our product adding various features, experience and simplification is pivoted on this objective.

Tell us about the various facets of your product development - be it design or architecture among other areas? How these are weaved in to create a master product?

We are a company obsessed with customer experience. For us, it is about solving a customer problem exceptionally well. This requires a lot of discovery/research mode working to find the right problem. An open problem with enough diversity, various exceptions that can break the adoption.

Be it interface, interaction experience or information design, we give great importance to NFRs (Nonfunctional requirements such as Speed, Flexibility, Simplicity, Reliability), and hence, we put immense efforts in making a design that first gives us the visualisation of these outcomes.

Our product development is more

Tally

about design followed by the architecture, which is identifying the technology and things to make the design a reality. Both these jobs involve a lot of upfront thinking and iteration to reach a significant detailing that gives us the confidence of reaching millions of small and medium businesses.

Then, we follow this with the construction, which involves writing specification, doing code design, testing, validation, acceptance and so on. So largely, we don’t follow agile methodology, but our methodology ensures that our products have high agility when it comes to the size and diversity of our customer base and continuously evolving technology and domain model.

We don’t build solutions on an available technology stack; we build exceptional experiences for a solution by building the required technology stack as well. This helps us deliver products that are useful, delightful and flawless.

How much of your time and effort goes into R&D in order to come up with better solutions every time?

To be honest, most of my time goes into this. I participate in the design stage deliberating the experiences, in architecture stage to architect, review and few times even in construction by participating in writing some piece of code with engineers.

My participation also involves keeping a close eye towards validating against various non-functional aspects such as durability, flexibility, reliability, etc.

There is also another organisational aspect of people development, where we expect to build mastery or expertise in every aspect we touch (be it functional domain, user experiential aspects or technology). Hence, a good amount of my time also goes into these mentoring, coaching and cultural transformation-oriented sessions. These are more oriented towards building an exceptional engineering organisation in line with our organisational value – ‘Continuous Pursuit of Excellence’.

Here, we discuss about building mastery, getting into fundamentals,

“

WE DON’T BUILD SOLUTIONS ON AN AVAILABLE TECHNOLOGY STACK; WE BUILD EXCEPTIONAL EXPERIENCES FOR A SOLUTION BY BUILDING THE REQUIRED TECHNOLOGY STACKAS WELL.THIS HELPS US DELIVER PRODUCTS THATARE USEFUL,DELIGHTFULAND FLAWLESS HARSHA KODNAD,DIRECTOR – TECHNOLOGY,TALLY SOLUTIONS

having a better collaborative culture and so on, involving intellectual and emotional deliberations.

Can we expect more advancements being introduced in TDL? Has the successful creation of this programming language prompted to develop similar innovations?

To give a context on this, the TDL (Tally Definition Language) is an Application Specific Language. While a significant portion of the code is written as a platform which ensures the various NFRs, the TDL as a language provides us an ability to handle the diversity of the domain and users in a rapid way.

Each evolution of the product and its release will involve advancement to our technology stack (platform) and hence to the TDL, followed by the application which will use these advancements to deliver required experience and functionality. With its flexibility and simplicity, it has also allowed us to do various niche customisations of the product, integrate product with the customer’s other systems and software and provide certain extension to the product. And, the focus is to continuously enrich our tech and the TDL language to make our products useful for more and more businesses, while also ensuring that it can be customised and integrated with digital ecosystem at large.

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Partner Corner

‘Solution partners are important to resell Atlassian solutions and services’ Atlassian Corporation, a leading provider of team collaboration and productivity software and the maker of Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket and Trello products, has announced a commitment to delivering on its advanced cloud offerings for the Indian market. Cloud has been the key driver of Atlassian’s growth and innovation, with overall subscription revenue, which is primarily cloud driven, growing at 50 per cent year-over-year. The company has plans to invest aggressively over the next 12 months to grow its cloud business in India.

In a conversation with Sandhya Michu, Archana Rao, CIO, Atlassian gives the investment plan and Robert Bannerman, General Manager - South Asia (Channel), Atlassian shares company’s channel roadmap and investment plans for the channel business Can you talk about Atlassian's journey in India?

Archana Rao: With India witnessing a huge uptake in cloud adoption, and with the cloud market expected to grow approximately three-fold to US$ 7.1 billion by 2022, according to Nasscom, we are building products to cater to this demand, while also providing our Indian customers access to its innovative new cloud offerings. Our customers in India include Ola Cabs, Reliance, Walmart Labs, and Flipkart, among others.

To achieve this goal, we are aiming to double number of Indian employees, working to add 300 more local employees to help support the growth of the our R&D centre which opened in Bengaluru in 2018. We have surpassed US$ 1 billion in lifetime revenue on the Atlassian Marketplace, and posted total revenue of approximately US$ 409 million for Q2’20, up 37 per cent yearover-year, achieving record profitability. With cloud security being

INDIAN COMPANIES ARE AT THE FOREFRONT OF CLOUD ADOPTION AND WE ARE OPTIMISTIC ABOUT OUR GROWTH IN THIS SPACE IN INDIA. WE EXPECT MIGRATIONS FROM OUR SELF-HOSTED PRODUCTS TO OUR CLOUD OFFERINGS WILL CONTINUE TO GROW, AND NEW CUSTOMERS WILL ALSO CONTINUE TO THINK CLOUD-FIRST a major focus for cloud customers, Atlassian has also announced enterprise-grade controls and security features, with data privacy upgrades to its underlying cloud platform.

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How do you see the growth of your cloud services picking up in India? Can you share some of the key milestones achieved so far?

Robert Bannerman: Indian companies are at the forefront of cloud adoption and we are optimistic about our growth in this space in India. We expect migrations from our self-hosted products to our cloud offerings will continue to grow, and we expect new customers will also continue to think cloud-first. Currently, more than 90 per cent of new Atlassian customers start with one of our cloud-hosted products.

One of the key milestones driving growth in our cloud services include the introduction of our new cloud plans.

These plans offer customers the level of service that suits their organisation. For example, our Premium plan provides enterprises with everything they need to confidently scale with advanced features, a 99.9 per cent uptime SLA, unlimited storage and access to premium security tools. We also

Atlassian Corporation

launched Forge last year. Forge is our new cloud app development platform that helps developers in our ecosystem to build cloud apps more easily and securely. We will continue to build products to service the Indian market and we’re focused on giving customers here access to our innovative new cloud offerings as early adopters.

With respect to your cloud services, what sort of customer base does Atlassian have in India?

Bannerman: While I can’t share specific figures, Atlassian has more than 164,000 customers globally, across large and small organisations including General Motors, Walmart Labs, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Lyft, Verizon, Spotify and NASA. In India, our customers include Ola Cabs, Reliance, Walmart Labs and Flipkart.

Jira Software is Atlassian’s flagship product and it continues to be our most popular. Together with Confluence, our collaboration software, these two products drive two-thirds of Atlassian’s global revenue.

With cloud becoming an integral part of enterprise business, how do you see the momentum of your services gaining grounds? Please give a few examples.

Bannerman: We know from speaking with enterprises around the world that they see their future in the cloud. We already support 83 per cent of the Fortune 500 including Costco, Delta Airlines, Office Depot, and Visa and every one of those customers uses at least one of our cloud products. More than 90 per cent of new Atlassian customers start with one of our cloudhosted products and we believe adoption of our cloud solutions will continue to grow.

In terms of your go-to-market strategy, can you share your direct and indirect model mix ?

Bannerman: Having a presence in India with our Bengaluru office means we are close to our customers here and can understand their particular pain points and deliver products to delight them. While we don’t disclose the mix

“

WE ARE AIMING TO DOUBLE NUMBER OF INDIAN EMPLOYEES,WORKING TO ADD 300 MORE LOCAL EMPLOYEES TO HELP SUPPORTTHE GROWTH OFTHE OUR R&D CENTRE IN BENGALURU ARCHANA RAO CIO,ATLASSIAN

between direct and indirect channels, we work directly with enterprise customers and solution partners in India. Solution partners are important to us as they also have the ability to resell Atlassian solutions and services.

What has been the growth in your channel business? Can you share your existing base of the channel in India?

Bannerman: We currently have 14 partners in India and we are growing fast, both in terms of our partners and the number of customers in the region.

We are hiring aggressively in our Bengaluru office to keep up with the Indian market’s demand for our cloud Atlassian works with solution partners of all sizes across India. Some solution partners include Amrut Software, Addteq, CRG Solutions, CSS Corp,

“

WE CURRENTLY HAVE 14 PARTNERS IN INDIAAND WE ARE GROWING FAST,BOTH IN TERMS OF OUR PARTNERS AND THE NUMBER OF CUSTOMERS IN THE REGION ROBERT BANNERMAN GENERAL MANAGER - SOUTH ASIA (CHANNEL),ATLASSIAN

Nagarro, and Infosys.

Any expansion plans for strengthening your channel in 2020?

Bannerman: We plan to grow our channel both in India and abroad in 2020. We are recruiting solution partners with Cloud, DevOps, Agile, and ITSM professional services capabilities, particularly in Delhi and Hyderabad. In addition to growing our channel, we are also working with solution partners to enhance their capabilities and certify consultants.

We are investing in new online training courses, Mastery Camps for in-person training, joint sales and mentoring, internal use products, joint demand generation and market development activities, lead sharing and referrals.

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CXO Speak

Augmenting business intelligence with conversational AI Founded in 2014, Exponentia.ai established itself as a niche solution provider to the BFSI industry. With focus on business intelligence and its flagship conversational AI platform, the company is well placed for future growth. In an interaction, Rohit Mathur, Founder and CEO and Ramendra Shukla, Co-founder and COO, share more insights

By Mohit Rathod Please explain the journey of Exponentia.ai and its focus areas Remandra Shukla: We are an AI technology company, working across different domains – from conversational AI to RPA. We work with augmented intelligence and emerging technologies that enable us to build products and services for increasing efficiency in organisations. Prior to the company's formation in 2014, Rohit and I were working in different roles with our engineering background. We identified the immense opportunities in the intelligent aspect of technology, but organisations were not able to approach it effectively. After building significant skills within our team, we partnered with Qlik in 2015. During our business journey, we started adopting more and more technologies, allowing our offerings to become more scalable. In the last few years, AI technology has also matured, enabling us to create more production-grade systems.

Our core industry focus is the BFSI sector. We are working with some of the leading banks and insurance companies such as HDFC Life, SBI Life, ICICI Prudential, Kotak Mahindra Bank, IDFC Bank, Fino Payments Bank and several NBFC companies. The BFSI industry constitutes 70 per cent of our clientele.

Apart from this, FMCG and retail are among the other key business contributors.

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“

INDIA IS OUR PRIMARY MARKET,BUTWE ARE ALSO PRESENT IN SINGAPORE,THE UKAND THE MIDDLE EAST. IN THE FUTURE,WE ARE LOOKING AT EXPANDING WITHIN OUR CURRENT FOCUS AREAS AND ALSO GEOGRAPHICAL GROWTH ROHIT MATHUR, FOUNDER & CEO , EXPONENTIA.AI

Rohit Mathur: Our first customer was EPS, an ATM outsourcing company, which stills continues to be our customer. Most of the analytical systems at EPS are taken care of by us.

One of our key abilities is to work with large enterprise platforms. Our systems are enterprise-grade and able to scale up to growing number of people and locations. We bring in significant proprietary domain expertise in our offerings. This proposition helps us deploy the solutions faster and bring in the required business impact and RoI. India is our primary market, but we are also present in Singapore, the UK and the Middle East. In the future, we are looking at expanding within our current focus areas and also geographical growth.

What differentiates Exponentia.ai from other players in the market?

Rohit Mathur: Being focused on a particular domain and end-to-end set of machine learning technologies, gives us an advantage in being able to provide more comprehensive solutions. Our ability to deliver on large scale projects and our proven track record of successfully working with our customers further helps us gain trust of potential customers.

Since our inception, systems have become more complex and more channels have been added. Over the years,

Exponentia.ai

organisations have become more focused on technologies. Their willingness to adopt new technologies is higher today.

Customers understand technologies and they already have a roadmap in place for technology adoption.

capabilities, online platforms, etc. Qlik also has a comprehensive platform, which caters to many modern and futuristic use cases.

How important is business intelligence for organisations?

What is your observation on industry-wide adoption of AI? Most of the large organisations have adopted AI in some way. However, organisations are at different maturity levels in terms of implementation. Our conversational AI platform is deployed by many top enterprises with user base of around 20,000. AI is part of the digital transformatiod journey.

What is your strategy for winning new customers?

Ramendra Shukla: From a strategy standpoint, we focus on stable, scalable, production-grade solutions, as larger organisations require scalable systems. Currently, our focus is not on end-to-end digital transformation journey, we focus on conversational AI platform, which can be deployed across different areas in an organisation. We are a niche player in the digital transformation domain, and we are strong in the areas wherein we operate.

Tell us more about Exponentia.ai's conversational AI platform Rohit Mathur: The platform doesn't just ensure customer support; it also generates great user experience.

Conversations offer opportunities to engage with customers, and our platform is build around this. BFSI industry forms the DNA of our platform, having intelligence capabilities relevant to this industry. However, the platform can also be trained in accordance with other industries' requirements. It is an open platform, allowing enterprises to connect with numerous systems. It is scalable from both, data and functionality aspects.

How has been your partnership journey with Qlik?

Ramendra Shukla: Qlik created its Qlik Sense solution to cater to the modern requirements, wherein our expertise can be largely utilised. This

Business intelligence plays a critical role in decision-making at different levels in an organisation. The workforce must be well equipped with capable tools to make decisions. The power of BI platforms is growing, leading to more power in the hands of decision makers. With increase in channels and data growth, BI is gaining significant importance in handling of large data sets. Feeding this data into the BI platform is a process; that's where we have an endto-end capability.

“

DURING OUR BUSINESS JOURNEY,WE STARTED ADOPTING MORE AND MORE TECHNOLOGIES,ALLOWING OUR OFFERINGS TO BECOME MORE SCALABLE.IN THE LAST FEWYEARS,AI TECHNOLOGY HAS ALSO MATURED,ENABLING US TO CREATE MORE PRODUCTION-GRADE SYSTEMS

Being a startup, what are the advantages that you enjoy in the market?

As a startup, we have the advantage of briging emerging technologies for customers and doing things faster.

Today, the world is more open to startups if they can prove their capabilities. This is the best time for startups to exist, from customer acceptance and funding perspectives.

As the entire startup ecosystem flourishes, it will be a good period for us as well.

RAMENDRA SHUKLA, CO-FOUNDER & COO,EXPONENTIA.AI

is where AI and embedded analytics played a pivotal role in democratisation of data. Qlik's focus resonated well with ours. We have built products on Qlik platforms, which makes us their value-added partner. We have run one of Qlik's biggest modernisation programmes for a leading insurance company in India. This project included a user base of 12,000 and around 120 applications. In partnership with Qlik, we also dived into some of the new areas, such as embedded analytics.

Helping product companies include analytics into their product platform became a key focus areas for us.

Qlik has a mature partnership model, which enables partners in multiple ways – GTM approach, technical

Are you also looking at the midmarket and SMB business?

Our platform offers features that are relevant to SMBs as well. With subscription based models, the technologies are available to SMBs at an economical value. Adoption of technologies is faster in startup customers.

What's Exponentia.ai's growth roadmap for the future?

We don't want to increase our partner base, but we want to deepen the depth of our relationship with them. We are primarily working on AI and tools that cater to data; this will continue to be our focus.We want to build solutions and add more value to our platforms. We are currently working with five partners.

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Outlook 2020

Dell Technologies reinforces its commitment to the partner community Having recorded tremendous performance in last fiscal, Dell Technologies’ business is strongly supported by its global partner ecosystem. The technology giant continues to strengthen its partners, with renewed focus and ample growth opportunities. The leadership team of Dell Technologies provide a detailed outlook for 2020

JOYCE MULLEN, PRESIDENT,GLOBAL CHANNEL,EMBEDDED & EDGE SOLUTIONS ◗ Dell Technologies recorded US$ 52 billion in orders over the past year. Our opportunity is enormous, our momentum is strong and our partnerships are more solid than ever.

This is our year to help customers turn data into one of their most valuable assets, and it starts right now. ◗ We recently announced our social impact plan for this decade with specific goals around advancing sustainability, cultivating inclusion, transforming lives and upholding ethics

and privacy. Together we get to aid the visually impaired through initiatives like ‘The Unseen Ballet’, protect our planet by eliminating ocean plastics and provide education to the underserved kids around the world with environmental friendly, Solar Learning Labs. We know that this is the decade of data, the decade of 5G, multicloud, artificial intelligence and, we wouldn’t argue, the decade of Dell Technologies. ◗ In this decade, our customers will learn how to put their data to work.

They will make their processes even more efficient. Create safer and more environmentally friendly factories.

They’ll improve their customers’ experiences, protect privacy even more diligently and they will unlock the power of their data in ways we never imagined. ◗ Customers need partners to help them build the foundation. They need partners who are technically proficient, partners who understand their businesses and what they are trying to accomplish. They need partners they trust, partners who have their back and partners who can offer the world’s best solutions to deliver the results they are looking for. Together, we’re doing this.

Together, we’re bringing it. Solutions that enable customers, skills that

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simplify the complex and capabilities that encourage innovation. ◗ We’re investing US$4.5 billion annually on R&D, more than many of our competitors combined. The collaboration we have across the industry is second to none. We are bringing innovative solutions to the markets that simplify our customers’ digital futures. Some of the solutions that we launched last year were Power One, Dell Technologies Cloud, new versions of VX Rail, Unity, Data Protection Solutions and awardwinning personal devices, etc. Partners can bank on our portfolio and with Dell Technologies On-Demand platform, customers can buy these solutions anytime. ◗ We at Dell Technologies also have the industry’s best partner community.

While we can’t talk about Q4 results yet, we can say that our partners delivered solid performance through Q3 with: ● Eight per cent order revenue growth ● Nine per cent distribution growth ● Eleven per cent storage growth ● Seven per cent server growth ● Over 52,000 new and reactivated customers As we head into 2020, our commitment to partners remains strong

Dell Technologies

and steady. We are continuing to raise our bar on our promise of simple, predictable, profitable. This starts with our simplified go-to-market structure.

In December, we announced that our commercial and enterprise organisations are being combined under Bill Scannell, who will lead a new, global, unified Sales and Partner organisation team. ◗ Dell Technologies is introducing solutions like Power One and the Dell Technologies Cloud that incorporates IP for many of the Dell Technologies companies, it’s all about making it easier for partners to embrace and use those solutions to help solve customer problems. ◗ We are making sure that if a partner takes training with VMware on their cloud module for example, that counts towards the Dell Technology cloud certification and competencies.

eliminate the complexity which equals to scale. ◗ We have an incredible portfolio wrapped around an incredible strategy.

Our customers are saying they want to go the cloud, but they don’t know what that means. We need to explain that cloud isn’t a place, it’s a way of doing IT. So when our partners get on-board with our strategy and work closely with us it’s a winning hand.

JAY SNYDER, SVP,GLOBALALLIANCESSOLUTIONS

BILL SCANNELL, PRESIDENT, GLOBAL SALES ◗ Dell Technologies has the portfolio strength, we have the team and we have partners to go and take massive share in FY21. We really want to take our partnerships to new heights. ◗ The changes we announced last quarter were really around our go-tomarket. Our new combined team simplifies how our partners work with us and offer a much greater degree of consistency in how they deal with us in the field. We take simplicity and

◗ We are also planning our Global Partners Summit to coincide with Dell Technology World, so there will be tons of exciting content for our partners of all sizes and different business models. ◗ We used to focus on healthcare, energy and video security initially. In the past year, we’ve added retail, media entertainment, and are in the process of adding financial services. We’re investing in SME’s and developing solutions geared toward customers across all of these industries. Our business has more than doubled in the last five years. ◗ I can’t wait to share more details with you at GPS (Global Partner Summit). Dell Technologies’ continues to modify the Cloud Service Providers, CSP program tracks feedback from partners, with a focus on profitability. One of the biggest pieces of feedback we’ve heard is around revenue tier requirements. ◗ Dell Technologies has recognised

that a global revenue requirement may not work in all countries and has adjusted the program revenue requirements needed for tier promotions for partners that primarily operate in smaller markets. These different revenue requirements will help provide more attainable tier advancement opportunities and benefits for these partners in smaller markets. ◗ Along with revenue requirements, Dell has also adjusted the rebates.

However, overall program rebate percentages for platinum and titanium CSP’s remains the same, but the rebate accelerators have been removed. ◗ We’re also expanding the program benefits for sell-out compensation to now include deals with our authorised CSP’s.

This means we’ll now be compensating our core Sales Reps on deals that involve our authorised partners, which increases collaboration with sales instead of creating competition. ◗ We are hoping this change will get us closer to the 50 per cent mark with regards to number of sales teams that leverage Dell Alliances in 2020, which is currently up to 30 per cent. We’ve also simplified the program in a couple of areas including, the programs point-ofsale report requirement. Instead of requiring our partners to submit a pointof-sale report each month, we’re going to send our partners an end-user validation report each month, asking them to verify the information we’ve provided. ◗ We also continue to focus on expanding our training offerings for Cloud Service Providers, making it easier to meet training-hour requirements. This year, CSPs will have the option to earn a CSP Dell Technologies Cloud competency, which counts towards training-hour requirements and provides our Sales Reps with visibility to your specific business as a competency option for Dell Technologies Cloud Service provider opportunities. These partners will also receive a 2x accelerator on their rebates for qualified VxRail purchases. ◗ One of the big announcements from Dell Technologies in 2019 was the

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Outlook 2020

announcement of Dell Technologies Cloud and Dell Technologies on Demand. You can activate Dell Technologies On-Demand through our flexible payment solutions: Pay As You Grow, Flex on Demand and Datacentre Utility. ◗ At Dell Technologies, we’re committed to innovate and deliver incredible value to our customers. I can assure you Dell Global Alliances will be a key enabler of this. “Dell is an enabler, but partners will bring the transformation of our collective customers to life” ◗ We want to see 50 per cent of the Dell Technologies sales teams leverage what partners have to offer and I expect we will also continue to grow double digits. These goals go hand in hand. It is all about the people and cultivating innovation, which is why we believe in the Dell Technologies’ Progress Made Real 2030 plan we announced a few months ago at Dell Technologies Summit 2019. Our plan establishes ambitious moonshot goals designed to turn a vision into reality: ● By 2030, 50 per cent of our global workforce and 40 per cent of our Global people leaders will be women and 25 per cent of our US workforce, and 15 per cent of our US people leaders will be black AfricanAmerican, Hispanic- Latino minorities ●

We will advance health, education and economic opportunities to deliver enduring results for over a billion people ● We’ll reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50 per cent, and we will source 75 per cent of our electricity from renewable sources at our facilities. Our product portfolio will reduce its energy intensity by 80 per cent ◗ We have committed to do all of this and more by the year 2030 and we want our partners to be a part of it. This year the Alliances Team will continue to hold give – back programs and social responsibility events in each region and we would like to invite our partners to join us.

◗

DARREN SULLIVAN, SVP,GLOBAL PARTNER STRATEGY, PROGRAMS & OPERATIONS

◗

At Dell Technologies, we strive to deliver the best Partner Program in the industry based on our core tenets of Simple, Predictable and Profitable. These three tenets, along with our partners direct feedback from Partner Advisory Boards, Partner Summits and Satisfaction surveys, guide the evolution of the Dell Technologies Partner Program.

Our 2020 Dell Technologies Partner Program for Solution Providers will provide an even more compelling business proposition through three main focus areas: ● Increased opportunity and profitability for new customer and line of business acquisition ● A simplified structure, making it more predictable and easier to manage your Dell business ● An improved end-to-end experience accelerating the time to get to a winning price and improving the predictability of partner’s overall incentives ◗ For increasing opportunity and profitability, we’re investing in new business acquisition with partners, expanding our Partner Preferred Program by adding new target customers for server acquisition to the existing storage accounts. We’ve seen great momentum with this program driven by the collaboration of Dell Technologies core sales and our partners.

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Dell Technologies’ combined go-tomarket structure will make engagement with partners easier and more effective.

In addition to normal back-end rebates Dell Technologies also provide incremental discounting on the front end. When partners receive Deal Registration approval for server or storage opportunities with an applicable Partner Preferred account, they receive an increased discount. This advantaged pricing allows the the discretion to price with greater profitability. ◗ In addition, we’re continuing our New Business Incentive as a reward for bringing new customers and new lines of business to Dell. Also for storage, we’re continuing the Competitive Swap rebate for opportunities in which you’re displacing a competitive product in an account that isn’t included on our named NBI list. ◗ The bottom line: Focus on the right new business targets which maximises profitability, both through increased upfront discounts and backend rebates in the Dell Technologies Partner Program. ◗ Dell Technologies is consolidating product rebate structure from seven lines of business and two or three subcategories within each line of business to three lines of business: Client, Server and Storage. We’ve also introduced base rebate multipliers on particular products to reward targeted behaviour. In addition, we’re making partners rebate attainment much more predictable. ◗ Starting in Q1, Dell Technologies plans to eliminate the quarterly target process as well as increasing program automation to make partner’s inquarter earnings easier to forecast and reduce the number of adjustments required after quarter-end. For partners operating in smaller countries in EMEA, Latin America and Asia Pacific, we’re introducing five global program zones to help make tier revenue requirements more realistic and attainable. ◗ Our last focus area is an improved end-to-end experience. Over the past two years, we’ve made significant IT investments aimed at driving an improved online partner experience. This year, these investments will really come to life. One of the biggest project is the

Dell Technologies

delivery of an Integrated Quoting Platform. Our Solutions Configurator Platform will accelerate partner’s journey to provide them with integrated quoting for Dell Technologies’ Storage, Server and Networking portfolio this year.

NG TIAN BENG, SVP,CHANNEL SALES APJ

◗

We have simplified the partner program by consolidating our product rebate structure to just three lines of business; Client, Server and Storage.

We have removed quarterly targets to improve predictability while automating other processes to make it easier to forecast partner’s quarterly earnings.

Our investments are in projects that will improve the end-to-end partner experience. We will further optimise quoting tools to help our partners better calculate their potential gross margin position for each product, with a fast, seamless and intuitive online experience. ◗ Furthermore, we have just launched a Deal Registration dashboard to distributors that make it easier to view and use opportunities directly in a partner portal. We are rolling out two more phases so that partners with Dual Registration capability will have access to this dash board as well.

Complimenting predictability and

simplicity, our base rebate multipliers will be on focused products to reward targeted behaviour.

These multipliers will cover specific products such as Precision Workstation, Rugged Notebooks, Client Peripherals, Displays, 7 and 9 series laptops for Client category and Power Edge 4-socket and Blade Servers for server category.

Our focus this financial year is to provide partners with incremental benefits that will drive their pursuit of new business and reward their continued and growing engagement with us.

Basis the improved NPS calls, the top three areas of improvement are: ● Our marketing materials and customer-facing information ● Online training and cost variety and benefits for certified partners finding margins ● Opportunity for financial incentives.

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Startup Corner

SCIKEY

AI powered HR tech Using AI and transformative solutions in human capital space, HR tech startup SCIKEY is investing in building strong channel partnerships and cross-platform partnerships globally Sudipta Dev sudipta.dev@expressindia.com

P

une headquartered enterprisetech (HR) startup, SCIKEY, is focused on delivering transformative results in the human capital space. SCIKEY is the abbreviation for “Scientific keys to a person’s mind”, and SCIKEY MindMatch algorithm is being used to match the behavioural part of job fitment of any individual and in Talent Alignment platform, it is the core engine. “SCIKEY runs an end-to-end online platform that caters to the talent needs of businesses to hire, align and engage talent for best productivity and a happier workforce harnessing the power of SCIKEY MindMatch algorithm that helps read the mindset of individuals and predicts their behaviour in a professional setup,” says Shriram Viswanathan, Cofounder, SCIKEY. He adds that the platform today has 1.5 million plus listed job-seekers and contractors, 3000 plus active jobs or work assignments, 1400 plus virtual recruiters and talent supply partners across India, Malaysia and Finland; along with a growing base of clients.

“Our ideal target audience is the businesses who truly believe that their “people or talent” is their biggest strength as well as their business advantage and hence they don’t shy away from investing in modern upcoming 21s century talent solutions; doesn’t matter what size they are or industry they operate in. Our platform is totally industry agnostic and services clients from airlines, banking and insurance, media and entertainment, logistics, software technology products and services, global MNCs, funded startups etc,” explains Viswanathan.

He points out that they were fortunate to get an opportunity to present SCIKEY at the United Nations (Geneva) twice as well as in a few other leading industry events; and got their first few clients from the references that they built there. “A few of the common benefits cited by the users of our product are – significant reduction in the cost-per-hire, improved pace of talent acquisition (for hiring and contracting both), highly elevated experience for the hiring managers, etc. Our Talent Alignment solution, on the other hand, utilises the human mindset data to help solve other bigger problems like succession planning, attrition prediction and management, change management, etc., for the businesses of various sizes and shapes,” mentions Viswanathan.

The company is currently focused on creating a large virtual network of “talent supply” companies on its platform and organisations in allied businesses like payroll management, learning and development providers, training firms, HR consulting firms, resellers of other software products, specialist providers in the digital and HR transformation space, etc.

“We have a strong belief in collaboration and therefore we are investing to build very strong channel partnerships as well as cross-platform

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partnerships globally. We already have more than 1000 virtual business partners in our talent supply marketplace and this number is growing significantly month-onmonth,” he affirms, adding that they are also testing some cross-platform partnerships with other fast-growing tech startups, that could be of mutual benefit.

Speaking about how startups can leverage the channel partner network, he says, “With the business environment undergoing rapid changes, ever increasing cost of doing business and most importantly the dearth of the “right talent” and the limited ability of the startups to attract that talent, makes it a good case for leveraging the channel partner network for sales across India, without really committing to very large expenses to the balance-sheet.

However, it is important for the startups to identify and work with partners that are a logical fit to their business and vice-versa. It is of significance for the parties to complement each other’s business for the partnership to really work and one way of identifying this is to see if there is a logical scope for forward or backward integration. Once the channel partners are identified it is of paramount importance to train and equip them with enough knowledge and content about your product/ service that makes them comfortable carrying it to the market on your behalf,” says Viswanathan, adding that finally, the most important aspect of a successful channel strategy is the relationship element. The better the relationship between the startup and its channel partners, the better will be the outcomes for both the parties and also this will improve the C-SAT score for the end customers.

REGD.NO.MCS/220/2018-20, PUBLISHED ON 7TH OF EVERY MONTH & POSTED AT MUMBAI PATRIKA CHANNEL SORTING OFFICE, DUE DATE 8TH, 9TH & 10TH OF EVERY MONTH, REGD. WITH RNI UNDER NO. MAHENG/75607/2018.