40 minute read
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
Crayon Software Experts expands leadership team
Rajesh Thadhani, Director of Strategic Services at Crayon
Crayon 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.
NetRack hosts pan-India distributors meet in Bengaluru
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 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
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.
iValue poised for $100mn to ` 1000cr growth in FY20
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 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:
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.
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
Moumita Deb Choudhury moumita.choudhury@expressindia.com T 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.
“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
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
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
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
“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
10 I COMPUTER RESELLER NEWS I MARCH, 2020 I crn.in 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
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
myWD Partner Program
myWD Connect Program
TechTalk App
WD Purple Storage Calculator App
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 IndiaThis 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 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 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 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.
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.
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
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
“LOOKING ATWDC'S SUCCESS STORY OF NORTH AMERICA AND CHINA MARKET,WE STARTED TALKING TO SOME OFTHE INDIA-BASED CLOUD SERVICE PROVIDERS
VIVEK TYAGI SENIOR DIRECTOR, ENTERPRISE SALES,WESTERN DIGITAL INDIA
12 I COMPUTER RESELLER NEWS I MARCH, 2020 I crn.in 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
PARTNER SPEAK
Kapal Pansari, Director, RP tech India
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
PARTNER SPEAK
Mohit Jain, Vice President, GCC – APAC , Tech Data
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 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.
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
14 I COMPUTER RESELLER NEWS I MARCH, 2020 I crn.in 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.
Tech Data is working with leading Indian service providers on back-up use case, using WDC Platform storage to improve the TCO for customers.
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.
PARTNER SPEAK
S Ramani, Managing Director, India, Avnet
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.
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.
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.
PARTNER SPEAK
Devinder Singh Director – APAC, ADI
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.
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.
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
16 I COMPUTER RESELLER NEWS I MARCH, 2020 I crn.in customer base to provide an optimised, cost effective and stateof-the-art solution. This has helped ADI drive growth with new and existing 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.
PARTNER SPEAK
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
What are your efforts to stay relevant in the digital disruption era?
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.
What is your market observation on Western Digital 1TB MicroSD card?
It will change the storage space completely, with more and more technological advancements and the content transforming from HD to 4K and 8K.
We have been associated with Western Digital since the time the company was gaining momentum 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?
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.
What sort of support are you receiving from Western Digital in building your capability and competencies? 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.
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 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.
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
German 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
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 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
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
KARL FAHRBACH, CHIEF PARTNER OFFICER - GLOBAL PARTNER ORGANISATION, SAP
“WHILE YOU MAYWANTTO STILL CALL IT CHANNEL, NOW EVEN THE CHANNEL PARTNERS BEING VAST,THEY ARE HOSTING, BUILDING ON TOP AND RUNNING SAP SOLUTIONS
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.
