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Vol 2. No. 2. May, 2019
TECH INNOVATION DRIVING STRUCTURED CABLING INDUSTRY
Chairman of the Board Viveck Goenka
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Sr. Vice President - BPD Neil Viegas Asst. Vice President - BPD Harit Mohanty Editor Srikanth RP* Sr. Associate Editor Sudipta Dev Assistant Editor Nivedan Prakash Delhi Mohd Ujaley Sandhya Michu Mumbai Abhishek Raval Mohit Rathod Salvi Mittal
Nivedan Prakash nivedan.prakash@expressindia.com
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 Aparna Tawde Praveen Soman Circulation Mohan Varadkar Scheduling Arvind Mane PRODUCTION General Manager B R Tipnis Production Co-ordinator Dhananjay Nidre
he ICT industry is buzzing with opportunities. Government and enterprise digitalisation initiatives are driving growth in both active as well as passive networking segment. If we talk specifically about the structured cabling domain, the rise in the adoption of intelligent technologies to implement scalable and modular IT infrastructure in several business operations is driving the growth of this market. Furthermore, increased emphasis on cost and time management, growing IoT data, need for automation of businesses, and increasing competition have significantly boosted demand for structured cabling systems. Besides, the growing adoption of digital services and increasing number of internet users will augment the data centre demand, which will further lead to a spurt in the demand of structured cabling solutions. The Union Budget for 2019 laid special emphasis on infrastructure development in the country and with a continued focus on setting up new data centres, office spaces, hotels, healthcare facilities and other commercial establishments in India, hence the market for
structured cabling solutions is expected to reap the benefits. All these present tremendous opportunities for ICT vendors and partners to grow in this domain. Moreover, it is also crucial to note that technology is constantly evolving with new innovations coming-in at regular interval. Vendor organisations are thriving on innovation and are constantly working towards bringing out products that are future ready. In terms of technology, while copper cable is currently more popular and much more predominant in structured cabling systems and networks, fibre is quickly gaining momentum. Fibre optic cable is favoured for applications that need high bandwidth, long distances, and complete immunity to electrical interference. Cat7 is the only cabling standard in copper that supports high-speed data transfers. But due to its limitation in connecting two end points, fibre is being preferred over Cat7. Channel partners believe that as floodgates of data are expected to open on various fronts, a new set of challenges and opportunities are bound to emerge. And 2019 may be the year for structured cabling players to strategise for the growth ahead.
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STRUCTURED CABLING: THE BACKBONE OF IT INFRASTRUCTURE The Indian structured cabling market is among the biggest beneficiaries of the country’s digitalisation drive. CRN India speaks to leading vendors and partners to get deeper insights of the market
Special Focus
Thought Leader 18 | Top 5 trends in structured cabling for channels to watch Mylaraiah J N, Director, Enterprise Sales, India & SAARC, CommScope)
20 | India channel business getting bigger for Dell Technologies Joyce Mullen, President of Global Channels, OEM & IoT Solutions, Dell Technologies Anil Sethi, VP, Channels, Dell EMC India
34 | Affordable & innovative financial solution for SMBs Priyanka Kanwar, Co-Founder and CEO, Kite 6 I COMPUTER RESELLER NEWS I MAY, 2019 I crn.in
The speed of ICT infrastructure with technological innovation is going to redefine the role of cable and connectivity providers to become a complete ICT designer, in order to capture promising business opportunities for both fibre and cable solutions
36 | Oracle brand has elevated NetSuite’s position in India to drive business Lee Thompson, Senior VP and GM, Asia Pacific & Japan, NetSuite
Channel Chief
CXO Speak 22 | ‘AI Becoming The Fastest Growing Workload In Data Centres’ Prakash Mallya, Vice President, MD - Sales, Marketing Group, Intel India
Startup Corner 19 | Collaborative Intelligence: In the business of partnerships Sangeeta Das, Co- Founder, Collaborative Intelligence
Structured cabling promises healthy growth for partners
26 | ‘Our philosophy is customer centric innovation’ Saurabh Saxena, Country Director, Micro Focus India
24 | ‘Partners can convince the board, only when they are supported by CIOs’ Raghuram Krishnan, Director – Partner Sales, Citrix India
32 | Veeam banks upon govt initiatives, enterprise modernisation to drive business Shaun McLagan, Senior VP– Asia Pacific & Japan, Veeam
28 | Cisco plans to tap newer geographies, penetrate further in existing markets B Raghavendran, MD, Partner Organisation, Cisco India & SAARC
Cover Story
STRUCTURED CABLING: THE BACKBONE OF IT INFRASTRUCTURE
Structured Cabling
The Indian structured cabling market is among the biggest beneficiaries of the country’s digitalisation drive. CRN India speaks to leading vendors and partners to get deeper insights of the market
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Mohit Rathod mohit.rathod@indianexpress.com
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he structured cabling market in India has been presenting burgeoning opportunites to companies in this domain. The growth of this line of business is being driven by multiple factors such as increasing demand for copper cables, growing data centre market, increasing number of product launch activities by the market players, and rising demand for bandwidth solutions. Now, with recent developments in 5G technology, the opportunites are only slated to grow. According to a recent report from ResearchAndMarkets, the Indian structured cabling market is projected to reach US$ 861.6 million by 2023. The report further states, on the basis of application, the Indian structured cabling market has been categorised into data centre and LAN. Data centre is expected to register faster growth in the market, during the forecast period, owing to growing demand for cloud computing and cloud storage. This demand is fulfilled by increasing number of data centres in the country.
Growth story Structured cabling offers an organised standards-based approach to managing and utilising data centre and building connectivity. It allows for flexibility, scalability and speed of migration to comply with industry standards redefining infrastructure in buildings and data centres for emerging bandwidth-intensive applications. Sharing his thoughts, Gavin MiltonWhite, Vice President – Enterprise, Asia Pacific, CommScope, says, “Trends like cloud computing, Internet of Things (IoT) and network convergence will require data centre and enterprise building networks to support the need for more bandwidth. Inevitably, the infrastructure will have to carry higher speeds to keep pace with not only today’s demands, but also cater for the future’s bandwidth demands. Structured cabling is poised to integrate a growing assortment of IoT-based sensors and devices.” Structured cabling has become the
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RECENTGOVERNMENT INITIATIVES LIKE NATIONAL OPTICALFIBER NETWORK (NOFN),BHARATBROADBAND NIGAM LIMITED (BBNL),HAVE BEEN ASSIGNED TO CONNECT 250,000 VILLAGE PANCHAYATS WITH HIGH-SPEED BROADBAND.THIS HAS LEAD TO AN INCREASE IN DIGITALISATION ATAFASTPACE, THUS GIVING ABOOSTTO THE DEMAND IN INDIA’S STRUCTURED CABLING MARKET SAMEER SAXENA, DIRECTOR- MARKETING,LEGRAND INDIA
most important and backbone of the enterprise networking infrastructure. Most of the enterprises prefer wired connectivity solutions in order to manage the rising demand for bandwidth requirements and to perform mission critical applications. Murugesan R, Senior Director, Sales – Private Networks at R&M India, feels that major factors for the growth include increase in demand for data centres due to the cloud storage and computing, government initiatives for smart infrastructures like smart cities, evolving digitisation demands from rural connectivity and automation, etc.
Moreover, availability of better technology infrastructure and reliable network connectivity across the country has encouraged the growth of the market. The growing trend of smart phones and the subsequent increase in the demand for Wi-Fi and computers has also lead to the increase in the demand for structured cabling. Proper cabling system acts as a critical backbone for higher performance and unified communication system, which provide a comprehensive telecommunication infrastructure and helps in seamless integration of latest technology. With the increasing demand of data centres, the need for world class infrastructure such as structured cabling is also on the rise. Sameer Saxena, Director- Marketing, Legrand India, points out, “The Indian government has taken steps toward Digital India and 100 smart cities. Recent government initiatives like National Optical Fiber Network (NOFN), Bharat Broadband Nigam Limited (BBNL), have been assigned to connect 250,000 village panchayats with high-speed broadband. This has lead to an increase in digitalisation at a fast pace thus giving a boost to the demand in India’s structured cabling market. Retail and trade sales have also seen an incremental rise benefiting the overall business.” Another important factor that is attributing to the rapid growth of structured cabling market is the proliferation of smart and intelligent buildings in the country – both in the commercial and residential space – that demands quality infrastructure for secured transmission, better connectivity, enhanced building performance and overall operational efficiency. Today, network connectivity is evaluated as a key component of the physical infrastructure of any building. Hariharan Balasubramaniam, Direct Channel Sales, Schneider Electric India, shares, “According to market reports, Southern India is projected to hold the largest revenue share of 41 per cent, by 2023, in the Indian structured cabling market, with cities like Bengaluru, Chennai, and Hyderabad that are few of the largest IT hubs in the country. Also,
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the eastern region of India is expected grow at the highest rate, buoyed by the rising IT hubs as well as government initiatives to increase connectivity in the North Eastern states. Fast developing states such as Odisha and Tripura in the Eastern region are expected to be major IT hubs in the country, in the coming years. Smart city projects in Patna, Muzaffarpur, Newtown, Guwahati, Imphal, Agartala, Kohima, Aizawl, Pasighat and Itanagar, Gangtok and Namchi are projected to drive the structured cabling market in Eastern region of India.” Echoing similar thoughts, Pradosh Nadkarni, Product Manager – SCS Division, Digisol Systems, says, “The industry is on the verge of a quantum leap due to greater demand in FTTX solutions coupled with the governments focus on 'Make in India' and 'Digital India' initiatives. The data hungry customer has already brought in the increased dive into 5G products and solutions that has led to developments of newer and faster products in this space. We see exciting times ahead for the structured cabling industry and we are geared for this growth phase.” Increased adoption of mobility, big data, and software designed networking by Indian enterprises, coupled with the proliferation of the internet and the government’s focus on digitisation have led to the growing need for data centres, hence there is a huge demand to build the network infrastructure in the country. Prakash Bheemashetty - Country Manager - Sales at AFL Hyperscale, India & SAARC (Strategic alliance with Citadel Intelligent Systems), shares, “Over a period, we have witnessed increasing numbers of innovative product launch activities in the market to support the network infrastructure. This market is witnessing a high adoption of the fiber networking technology moving from the copper cabling network.” Considering the growth drivers, Legrand India aims to grow by approximately 22 per cent year-onyear, with a focus on LAN projects as well as data centre verticals. Whereas, Digisol Systems is looking at
and favourable policy of the government. For over 25 years, Rosenberger HDCS has provided a range of data centre cabling solutions that provide high density, modularity, reliability, and performance. Rosenberger, as a pioneering of high-quality cloud infrastructure, has been working with key partners around the world to make technological innovations and continue to provide the most forward-looking and powerful support to key customers around the world.”
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OVER APERIOD,WE HAVE WITNESSED INCREASING NUMBERS OFINNOVATIVE PRODUCTLAUNCH ACTIVITIES IN THE MARKETTO SUPPORT THE NETWORK INFRASTRUCTURE.THIS MARKETIS WITNESSING A HIGH ADOPTION OFTHE FIBER NETWORKING TECHNOLOGY MOVING FROM THE COPPER CABLING NETWORK PRAKASH BHEEMASHETTY COUNTRYMANAGER - SALES ATAFL HYPERSCALE,INDIA& SAARC (STRATEGIC ALLIANCE WITH CITADEL INTELLIGENTSYSTEMS)
a CAGR of around 14 per cent for next five years and foresees that customers will have choices both, in terms of products, as well as solutions. In the structure cabling market, Citadel Intelligent Systems has seen around 12 per cent growth in fiber and three per cent in copper. Prasanta Kumar Rout, Director – Sales, Enterprise & Data Centre, India & Sri Lanka, Rosenberger, says, “Globally we are very much focused on the data centre segment which is much more profitable and growing at faster pace in India as well due to various initiatives
Innovations According to Milton-White, CommScope’s SYSTIMAX Structured Cabling Systems was the first in the market and the foundation on which the global structured cabling industry was built. He elaborates, “Today, our SYSTIMAX platform of advanced copper and fibre connectivity, with automated infrastructure management and highefficiency interfaces, is helping organisations to easily support multiple generations of applications while ensuring standards compliance. The innovation, together with key breakthroughs in the Cat 6/6a cabling solutions, has enabled CommScope to build its leadership position in the structured cabling market.” Digisol, as an organisation has an experience of more than three decades in the industry, and has been the first to introduce structured cabling as a solution in the Indian market, states Nadkarni. The company has focused not only on the customer, but also on the implementing partner. He stresses that integrators who execute the installation have to feel comfortable working with the products and Digisol has aimed to cater to that requirement. Nadkarni says, “Being the only organisation that has a dedicated manufacturing and assembling facility since inception, we have the best quality processes in place that ensure a defect-free product to the customer. Our product design is strong and we have been able to innovate through a lot of newer products in the market. We have recently launched a lot of patented products like Solder less Patch Panels, Tool-less Keystones and PoE+ ready
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solutions that cater to the growing demand of bandwidth as well as facilitate in the promotion of green initiatives. We do not use Lead Solder in our newer products and despite that have come up with innovative designs at the PCB level to retain the performance of the products.” Saxena believes that a well-defined structured cabling system can be compared to the veins and nerves running within a human body, carrying the all-important nutrients and messages to all the organs which carry out the functions of the body. If not for them, the entire system would come to a standstill. This is more or less the same with a cabling system. Legrand India operates in the area of designing and creating electrical and digital building infrastructure, is a leader in the field of structured cabling systems as well as smart home systems. It specialises in providing LCS3 comprising LCS3 copper, LCS3 fibre optic, LCS3 enclosures and audio-video solution. Saxena says, “The beauty of these systems is that they easily and seamlessly integrate into other solutions provided by the company such as cabling accessories, cabling management and trunking systems. Legrand has developed solutions which are ideal for individuals as well as businesses.” With the growing demand, Citadel Intelligent Systems has the understanding that innovative products will be highly accepted by the market. Bheemashetty comments, “We have the finest quality of high density fibre optic solutions which is smaller in diameter and that can be very helpful in saving space in larger data centres setup. We have a high-performance plug-and-go solutions for ease of management and quick installation. Our focus has always been more on providing customised solutions with speed to meet the need of the customers.” According to Schneider Electric, energy efficiency will always be a driving factor for businesses. Organisations are increasingly looking at solutions that will enable them to operate as efficiently as possible while delivering maximum uptime, ensuring operational continuity and reliability.
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R&D HAS BEEN ATOPPRIORITY FOR R&M SINCE 1964 AND WE ACTIVELYINVESTTO DEVELOP INNOVATIVE PRODUCTS THAT ARE TAILORED TO MEET CUSTOMERS’NEEDS,ENSURING NETWORKS ARE FUTURE-PROOF AND INVESTMENTS ARE SECURE FOR LONG TERM.WITH HIGH-LEVELSWISS STANDARDS, WE HAVE DEVELOPED BESTIN CLASS PRODUCTS MURUGESAN R, SENIOR DIRECTOR,SALES – PRIVATE NETWORKS,R&M INDIA
The structured cabling market is mainly driven by factors such as increasing demand for bandwidth, need for simpler cabling management structure, and emergence of internet of things (IoT). Balasubramaniam says, “Structured cabling allows higher bandwidth, which is required for the smooth operation of businesses using cloud computing. Thus, business organisations are modifying their IT infrastructure owing to the increasing usage of bandwidth-intensive applications, such as voice over IP, IPbased videoconferencing, and digital audio and video. Since structured cabling helps establish more efficient IT infrastructure, it is witnessing
increased demand from sectors requiring high bandwidth.” Speaking about his company Murugesan R, informs, “R&M always ensures delivery of high-level of product quality and forward-looking system design for high-end communication networks. R&D has been a top priority for R&M since 1964 and we actively invest to develop innovative products that are tailored to meet customers’ needs, ensuring networks are futureproof and investments are secure for long term. With high-level Swiss standards, we have developed best in class products, both in copper and fibre cabling systems.”
5G impetus The 5G technology is the next big thing in India. Indian telecom service providers are re-designing their network infrastructure to address the 5G boom. Fibre optics plays a key role in the 5G preparations in the country. In order to meet the 5G demands, R&M is investing a lot in fibre optic cables and key fibre accessories are getting manufactured in strategic locations across the world. “We spend close to four per cent of our revenue in our R&D for meeting the future-proof product ranges and requirements. This preparation will assist us in dealing with the 5G evolution requirements for Indian market,” states Murugesan R. Almost all major carriers have announced 5G rollouts or trials. The GSMA estimates that 5G could account for as many as 1.2 billion connections by 2025 – a profound impact on both the mobile industry and its customers. In response to these changes and more, the telco edge is emerging as the new frontier pushing technology and digital innovation forward. Balasubramaniam remarks, “Carriers delivering 5G service will require new software and more infrastructure, including small cells and multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) sites. 5G will also bring a wide range of devices that will have new radio capabilities. We are cognizant of this development and are working relentlessly alongside while leveraging our inherited strength in R&D.”
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Highlighting Legrand's preparedness to address the 5G boom, Saxena, says, “Legrand India has always been up-todate and future ready with all its product offerings. The company ensures that all its customers get the latest product offering with the latest technology. Legrand India is well prepared with Cat8 in Copper and latest 5G fiber technology.” With the advent of 5G, Digisol Systems is also looking at a scenario wherein the scope for fibre cables is going to undergo a dramatic change as the scope will not be limited to scale alone. There is going to be a requirement for the cables to be different in terms of higher bandwidth capabilities as well as withstanding higher temperature requirements. Nadkarni informs, “5G architecture is based on smaller and dense cell sites. This leads to an increase in the fiber cable quantity. We should also note that construction wise we might also have to be prepared for a change in specs due to requirements of higher bandwidth and high temperature sustainability as data would be powered by high frequency waves. Our product team is working on the same and we should be ready with the solution soon.” CommScope helps operators and service providers transition to fibre deep networks. For instance, its end-toend Radio Access Network (RAN) fibre solutions span fibre-to-the-antenna/ fronthaul and backhaul, which helps alleviate network bottlenecks and provide users with a transparent and satisfying wireless experience on the network. Milton-White further informs, “CommScope’s innovative capacity solutions for RF path provide pragmatic upgrades to 4G RAN Networks. These solutions allow operators to introduce 5G RAN seamlessly in RF Path in macro and micro networks, and for In-building wireless networks. While not new, densification, virtualization, optimisation and simplification of networks will continue to be at the forefront of operator goals and CommScope is focused on doing that.” 5G promises higher bandwidth, more data, faster speeds, greater availability and coverage and higher energy
efficiency. To fulfill this, Citadel Intelligent Systems foresees a huge demand of data centres, which requires high density optical fiber connectivity in lesser diameter. “AFL Hyperscale has solutions which offer 6912 fibers in one single cable with 44 mm diameter. This innovative technology will be very handy and helpful in space management, which is one of the important factors for all the data centers today. We are also equipped with the best in class testing equipment and splicing machine. Our new innovative splicing machines are one of the world’s best splicing machine which reduces splicing time by 12 times,” adds Bheemashetty.
Partner focus As the structured cabling market grows, it also opens up a plethora of new opportunites for the Indian IT channel ecosystem. However, in order to tap these opportunites, building up of skillsets around these technologies is essential; and vendor companies are actively invoved in these efforts through various initiatives and partner-focused programmes. CommScope's PartnerPRO Network consists of consultants, integrators, installers, distributors and alliance partners trained and certified by CommScope to deliver the company’s broad range of network solutions. CommScope helps its partners to be successful through tools and support to serve their customers. Milton-White explains, “For instance, we believe education should never stop and that is why we developed the CommScope Infrastructure Academy app for members of the PartnerPRO Network. The app allows students to access a large library of demonstration videos, interactive product demonstrations, instructional documents and other information. All this material is available on a student’s smartphone or tablet where ever they are and can even be saved to their devices so it can be accessed when offline.” Adding to the company's plans for its channel ecosystem, he says, “CommScope has never been more future-focused than we are today. We
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THE INDUSTRYIS ON THE VERGE OFAQUANTUM LEAP DUE TO GREATER DEMAND IN FTTXSOLUTIONS COUPLED WITH THE GOVERNMENT’S FOCUS ON 'MAKE IN INDIA' AND 'DIGITALINDIA' INITIATIVES. THE DATAHUNGRYCUSTOMER HAS ALREADYBROUGHTIN THE INCREASED DIVE INTO 5G PRODUCTS AND SOLUTIONS THATHAS LED TO DEVELOPMENTOFNEWER AND FASTER PRODUCTS PRADOSH NADKARNI, PRODUCTMANAGER – SCS DIVISION, DIGISOLSYSTEMS
live in a transformative time in the history of communications, and CommScope intends that our partners’ networks will grow and thrive in the year ahead—and far beyond. We will see greater collaboration from the partner ecosystem. While CommScope continues to lead the charge towards development of technologies around copper and fibre connectivity, the channel partners will play an integral role in the efficient delivery of these solutions. From design to delivery, we become faster and are able to service our customers better in an ever-growing
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market at a more rapid pace.” Digisol Systems has a regional distribution model; this set of distributors are spread across the country. Beside distributors and dealers, the company is working with large numbers of SIs and electrical contractors. Digisol puts major efforts on trainings and seminars, which helps the channel to understand the markets and be technically qualified for offering our solutions. Nadkarni informs, “We regularly conduct ‘Step UP' program across the country, which is a training program for SI engineers. We also have DCCI program (Digisol Certified Cabling Installer Training) for our structured cabling solution. Digisol invests considerably in training and empowering our channel partners to build their own technical expertise as well as enhance Digisol’s brand positioning and visibility in the industry. Sound market knowledge and in-depth understanding is helping us to emerge as a front runner in delivering end-toend products to customers, covering a broad spectrum in SOHOs and SMEs. We have a full-fledged sales team who are mapping the channel businesses
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and are aligning with channel partners. Beside this, we are reaching out to our SI partners with various activities such as our own events and training programs. This year we are engaging with channel and VARs in a stronger way than ever before.” For Legrand India, it is a project centric approach in structured cabling. Saxena says, “We have a channel-driven business specifically for our wall mounted series of racks. Our key partners are end users, consultants and leading SIs. We as an organisation have a clear vision for structured cabling to focus on end-to-end solutions and cater to Indian market in projects and this excites us to work with end users, consultants and leading SIs.” Speaking about his company, Rout shares, “We are engaged with most of the large SIs (MSI) who are targeting turnkey projects in infrastructure and data centres. Our plan is to enable the channels and connect them with our target segment where jointly we can drive a sizable revenue. We conduct regular certification training programs and technology day for the enablement of the channel partners. We are also having the plan to announce channel
incentive programs to drive the business from mid-market.” R&M believes that partners are crucial to its business and help the company in stepping into untapped verticals and regions. “Our partner ecosystem is well set with the presence of well-known national distributors and regional distributors to cater the demand across the country. We have more than 200 certified system integrators who provide the quality installation to the customers with our 25 years warranty program. We sell our products through our channels partners and their continued support is the key for the success of our business. We have a service named - R&M Academy consisting of series of comprehensive programs for R&M partners, associates and customers, designed to provide professional support for pre- and postsales activities as well as installation and maintenance. R&M Academy also provides the training for distributors, system integrators, consultants and end users on designing and installing LAN, DC and Intelligent cabling systems,” shares Murugesan R. Schneider Electric has a strong channel partner network in India. With
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over 100 EcoXperts, the EcoXpert Partner Program is a worldwide network of Schneider Electric trained and certified partner companies offering local expertise and support to resolve the challenges of shared customers. An extension of Schneider Electric, EcoXperts are competent in the fields of building control, power management and energy management. “The EcoXpert Partner Program has proved to be a successful business strategy for the company in reaching out to its customers in the country. Owing to the robustness of the program, that includes year-long learning initiatives and collaboration to stay abreast of the industry trends and technological developments, the partner community witnessed substantial growth in overall revenue generation,” says Balasubramaniam. Sharing more about Citadel Intelligent Systems’ channel business, Bheemashetty adds, “We have a strong channel partner network across the country to meet the growing demand of structure cabling product. Our regional distributors are present across the country to make sure the availability of the product. We have a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility and experience centre in Bangalore. We have various training programs designed and we do conduct periodic training for our channel partners on enterprise and data center products. We will be introducing channel partner scheme for our channel partners to keep them motivated to work with us.”
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TRENDS LIKE CLOUD COMPUTING,INTERNETOF THINGS (IOT) AND NETWORK CONVERGENCE WILLREQUIRE DATACENTRE AND ENTERPRISE BUILDING NETWORKS TO SUPPORTTHE NEED FOR MORE BANDWIDTH.INEVITABLY,THE INFRASTRUCTURE WILLHAVE TO CARRYHIGHER SPEEDS TO KEEP PACE WITH NOTONLY TODAY’S DEMANDS,BUTALSO CATER FOR FUTURE’S BANDWIDTH DEMANDS GAVIN MILTON-WHITE, VICE PRESIDENT– ENTERPRISE, ASIAPACIFIC,COMMSCOPE
What’s ahead Citadel Intelligent Systems is currently doubling its manufacturing capacity to cater to customer demands. Covering channel partners in various geographical locations, the company is also expanding its reseller, regional distributor network to cover all the key geographical locations including Sri Lanka. Rout informs, “One of our major expansion plans is to localise most of the products at our manufacturing facility in Goa. In past a few years we have started the OFC production line, copper cabling components and fibre
optic assembly lines, and more products are being planned in the future. It will help us on quick delivery with lower cost while maintaining the same German quality. We are increasing our reach by adding more resources at major locations as well as engaging with more and more channel partners for better penetration. From 2005-2012, the structured cabling market has seen many mergers, as well as few OEMs, took an exit from India market. After the mergers and exit of some brands in Indian market, we have seen there are space available for a
good quality brand with strong local presence who the customer can trust as their long-term partner.” With the proliferation of mobility, cloud, IoT, virtual augmentation, and other factors, the world is becoming more connected and CommScope sees an opportunity to become a bigger force in helping its customers transform their networks to support a connected lifestyle. Milton-White shares, “We are doing this by helping them solve problems, such as building more network for less money and doing it much faster. We continue to create value for our customers and partners through providing simple, elegant and efficient solutions that help our customers to quickly build, optimise, and operate their networks. Through the completion of ARRIS transaction, CommScope has expanded its product offerings and R&D capabilities, with the combined company having approximately 15,000 patents and patent applications globally, and approximately US$ 800 million in average annualised R&D spending.” Whereas, Legrand is looking at making its products more accessible to end consumers through direct marketing and awareness program – moving from a B2B spectrum alone to a B2C spectrum too. “IoT and interoperability are going to be big trends in the years to come. Having devices which speak to each other and are compatible with products from various brands is going to be the next milestone in the switches and electrical infrastructure space,” comments Saxena. Last year, R&M inaugurated its manufacturing facility in Bengaluru and is now planning to further expand it by increasing the capacity of assembly units as well as man hours. "Our sales team is spread across in all major cities in India and we are adding man power to represent geographical coverage to serve better our partners and customers. We have very ambitious target and plans to grow the business by 30 per cent over 2018. Our company has made some strategic investments in APAC and US to increase our product portfolio offerings,” says Murugesan R.
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STRUCTURED CABLING PROMISES HEALTHY GROWTH FOR PARTNERS The speed of ICT infrastructure with technological innovation is going to redefine the role of cable and connectivity providers to become a complete ICT designer, in order to capture promising business opportunities for both fibre and cable solutions
Sandhya Michu sandhya.michu@expressindia.com
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oday, data network is becoming the backbone of every business from SMB to enterprise and as customers are becoming increasingly intolerable towards downtime, every organisation is aspiring to have a zero downtime
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platform. They are ready to make investments and deploy a solution that would reduce downtime. As long as companies continue to add more cabling to support wireless access points (APs) in their offices, it’s good news for cable and connectivity providers. There are promising business opportunities for both fibre and cable solution providers.
Holistically, system integrators form an indispensable part of the structured cabling business, which constitutes roughly five per cent of the total network infrastructure and promises to offer decent margins and repeat orders from customers. On the hindsight, proper installation and integration of ICT cabling infrastructure is one of the core areas where most of the cabling
Structured Cabling
vendors are working closely with a specialised set of SIs. The basic premise of structured cabling solution (SCS) is that it’s a lifeline for the entire IT network, that comes with 25 years of performance warranty. It is the foundation on which all other business activities depend. A properly designed, installed, and administered cabling system reduces costs through each phase of its lifecycle, covering installation, movement, addition, changes, maintenance and administration, which are the primary areas where standards compliant cabling SIs come into the force. On the segmentation of structured cabling providers, Ninad Desai, District Chair, BICSI India shares, “The industry must accept the fact that it would be realised not in the active electronics segment, which has a typical life-span of three to five years; but in the plain passive elements of the ICT network cables and components that stay for a lifetime of the building. These passive components include network cables, connectors and accessories. More importantly, what matters is the vision that the ICT designer has for the future and the knowledge and credentials he possesses in the field of ICT passive infrastructure design.” Nevertheless, demand from the market from across verticals – like IT, ITeS, manufacturing, hospitality, healthcare, retail and LFR, PSUs, government and R&D establishments – is fuelling the growth of structured cabling business.
The smart and non volatile business With the cabling market growing 20 to 30 per cent every year, the dynamics of the system integration business is fast changing. Traditionally, this market has been split into two sets of partners – distribution and mid to large turnkey system integrators. With the massive industrial growth and rapid infrastructure expansion, added with the maturity in customers' understanding of structured cabling advantages, one can envisage a huge potential in India.
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WE WORK 70 PER CENTWITH DESIGNERS AND 30 PER CENT OFOUR BUSINESS COMES DIRECTLYFROM CUSTOMERS. SLOWLY,WE ARE SEEING THE LATER PARTOFTHE BUSINESS IS MORE PRODUCTIVE DHANANJAYCOLLUR, MANAGING DIRECTOR, COMPUTER FACTORYINDIA
One of the Bengaluru-based and oldest SIs turned distributor, B Ananda Rao, CEO, Par Data Systems, reminisces, “While the structured cabling business dates back mid-1980s, we are associated with it since 1994. We share the space of distribution in SCS market/industry and we find this business more enterprising and nonvolatile, compared to most of the other traditional verticals of IT hardware. Since we have been present for over 2.5 decades in this business, we have thorough understanding of market dynamics, the demands of SIs with whom we work with, managing huge product line, logistics, pricing and product positioning. This business sees a minimum of 15 per cent year-on-year growth, despite increasing competition, since the industry also is growing.” Par Data Systems is a regional distributor for CommScope that is specialised in both SYSTIMAX and Netconnect range of solutions in copper
and fibre. It caters to the enterprise segment for LAN, data centre and FTTX segments. Similarly, Delhi based Spark Technologies – a regional distributor for CommScope and D-link – claims to mark a healthy growth of 15-20 per cent in last FY. “Despite of the sluggish market, we continue to see the momentum in distributorship,” adds Spark Technologies’ Managing Director, S Nautiyal. Typically, a large section of integrators work closely with large oversees contractors or interior designers who pass on the deployment and integration task to local SIs. However, the market does have a challenge from small-time computer networking and electricians, who manage small scale deployments. “We work 70 per cent with designers and 30 per cent of our business comes directly from customers. Slowly, we are seeing the later part of the business is more productive,” says Dhananjay Collur, Managing Director, Computer Factory India, a Bengaluru-based SI. The company has recently completed deployment of Xiaomi’s technology facility in the city and has been working with India Builder Corporation and various overseas contractors for managing global accounts and repeat customer orders. Collur adds, “It is a known trend that customers opt for a single vendor for civil, electrical and networking front. Most electrical vendors may or may not provide installation according to market standards. In structured cabling, the stickiness of the customers is higher than any business. We get a large amount of repeat customer business. While interacting with customers, we tell them to choose networking as part of their IT and they should evaluate vendors who have sufficient experience and knowledge of IT services.”
Copper vs fibre demand Giving the perspective of uptake of copper over fibre cabling in the channel community, Delhi based Nishant Gupta, MD of Radiant Info Solution (which recently started distribution for R&M cabling solution for Delhi region),
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Cover Story
states, “Although copper cable is currently more popular and much more predominant in structured cabling systems and networks, fibre is quickly gaining momentum. Fiber-optic cable is favoured for applications that need high bandwidth, long distances, and complete immunity to electrical interference. Fibre is ideal for high datarate systems such as Gigabit Ethernet, FDDI, multimedia, ATM, SONET, fibre channel, or any other network that require the transfer of large, bandwidth-consuming data files, particularly over long distances. Cat7 is the only cabling standard in copper that supports high-speed data transfers. But there is one limitation in Cat 7 over fibre. With fibre, you can connect two end-points within a distance of 45 km, but while using copper you can go only up to 100 metres. So, if you are planning to build a MAN, then there is no option other than going for fibre.” Overall, telecom, IT, ITeS, and government sectors are expected to be the major contributors to the growth of structured cabling business during the next 12 months. “The underlying IT of enterprises is also changing and so are the IT delivery models. There has been a growing focus on concepts like cloud computing, IP-based networks, virtualisation, and software-defined networking. All this is driving the need to have more intelligent and responsive network infrastructure and structured cabling solutions would be expected to keep pace,” says Rao. “We now see that applications and computing devices are demanding greater performance. I think we are on the edge of a frontier for copper and a transition to fibre, which is really exciting. More and more wireless technologies are demanding higher performance in the underlying backhaul network, in many cases demanding more power. We are excited about delivery of power over Ethernet (PoE), the high-quality controls and the high bandwidth that those technologies require. I think it does demand a lot more in the sophistication of modern wiring technologies for supporting the move to wireless,” says Gupta.
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WE ARE EXCITED ABOUT DELIVERYOFPOWER OVER ETHERNET(POE),THE HIGHQUALITYCONTROLS AND THE HIGH BANDWIDTH THATTHOSE TECHNOLOGIES REQUIRE NISHANTGUPTA, MD,RADIANTINFO SOLUTION
New avenues In terms of technology, the Indian cabling market trends are at par with the global market and may, in some cases, even surpass international trends. More and more ITeS installations, knowledge centres, BPOs with a high number of MACs, and their need for tracking IT in real time, huge deployment of intelligent cabling or physical layer management (PLM), are leading to a sizeable growth in the adoption of this technology. Although it is still small in terms of the number of deployments, intelligent cabling is finding wider acceptance. On the government front, the National Optical Fiber Network (NOFN) initiative, for which Bharat Broadband Nigam (BBNL), has been assigned to connect 2,50,000 village panchayats with high-speed broadband, could lead a range of direct as well as indirect business for the structured cabling players. The upcoming roll-out of new 5G network will also contribute to the
growth, as will the commissioning of new data centre projects. “Intelligent cabling is an attractive proposition for us, as it promises to reduce the cost of network ownership by solving issues like unplanned downtime, inefficient manual moves, adds and changes, redundant ports, inaccurate records, etc. It increases network management efficiency and network security considerably. Today, both fibre and copper have major advances in bandwidth capability to support the next generation of LANs at 10G,” informs Gupta. “As floodgates of data are expected to open on various fronts, a new set of challenges and opportunities are bound to emerge. 2019 may be the year for structured cabling players to strategise for the growth ahead,” points out Nautiyal.
Fibre is the future Fibre optic is the dominant type of cable for connecting separate buildings on campuses and connecting floor distributors to building distributors. Because of its high cost on the LAN equipment side, it has been limited to the backbone. If we compare the cost of a fibre port on the active equipment and that of gigabit copper port on the active equipment, fibre is almost six times higher. Although, a large section of integrators agree to this viewpoint that structured cabling will continue to contribute 10-15 per cent y-o-y growth, the emergence of wireless technologies into the mainstream may bring some negative impact on the cabling industry. Structured cabling and connectivity vendors see wireless as a logical adjunct to the wired network, and many have expanded their product offerings with end-to-end wireless systems. A significant market trend in India is that providers of wiring infrastructure have expanded their offerings as widespread wireless LAN deployment appears inevitable. Many are starting out with distributed wireless systems that are likely to evolve as technology continues to evolve. “On one hand, the market seems to be shrinking, particularly for copper SCS due to technological revolutions
Structured Cabling
like cloud, data centre, hyper data centre and 5G revolution, etc; at the same time, the industry is offering offset for growth. Fibre is going to be the big future of this industry,” opines Rao. However, the path to fibre for SIs is not a cakewalk. Optical fibre is more expensive to install, and requires a greater understanding than copper wiring, but it can pay for itself by creating opportunities to cut other costs, ensuring better connections, and future-proofing the structured cabling system. “Accommodating new convergent technologies is an everyday challenge for SIs and network cabling companies. Whether you have an analog system or a top-of-the-line optical fibre network, it’s important to understand the science behind the technology,” highlights Collur, one of the veterans in structured cabling business. “Larger enterprises are investing and adapting fibre solutions due to new-age and bandwidth-hungry applications. These specialised links across main switches and specialised servers or SANs cannot be sufficed by copper solutions. We have enough competition with vendors selling cable
connectors and jacks. When we speak about intelligence solutions and data centre efficiency, we hold the edge,” Gupta emphasises.
Skills for handling next-gen networks It is becoming a widely known fact in the ICT cabling industry that an end-toend infrastructure solution is the right way forward. However historically, many still focus only on cable performance when making infrastructure decisions. Clients and their solution providers today are more interested in the category of cabling that’s going to be put in place. However, the importance of installation practices and implementation of the right test procedures as significant contributors to the end-to-end infrastructure performance still finds few takers. The proper installation and integration of ICT cabling infrastructure is required, more to support the ever demanding needs of the enterprise cabling infrastructure of today and beyond. Hence, it becomes a more daunting task than ever before and more, so due to the work culture of giving adherence to standards and industry
best practices taking a back seat. “It is not only the challenge of the complexity of infrastructure, but the paucity of quality installers that ensures the implementation of industry best practices. The need, therefore, is to have quality ICT designers, managers and installers who understand and practice, rather than just keep doing the traditional way. The ICT industry, therefore, needs programs that aim to address these challenges and equip professionals with the right tools in terms of knowledge about the ICT cabling technology," suggests Desai. There is a new way of thinking for smaller players to emerge. It’s no longer about boxes, but about ports and software. Players are looking more and more at providing customised end-toend cabling solutions. With 10G over UTP, PoE and intelligent cabling technologies gaining acceptance, cabling installations are becoming more skill-based. Following the right installation practices and adherence to standards is important when it comes to new applications that require higher data rate transfers. In order to stay ahead in the race, the industry has given priority to staff retention and training.
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Thought Leader
Top 5 Trends
TOP 5 TRENDS IN STRUCTURED CABLING FOR CHANNELS TO WATCH By 2022, 28.5 billion fixed and mobile personal devices and connections will help drive global IP traffic to reach 4.7 zettabytes annually By Mylaraiah J N Trend 4: High-density fiber connectivity supports continuing trend toward 200/400G backbone
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he expanding edge computing environment featuring greater processing power, storage and other advanced capabilities will establish robust communications back to centralised services. These trends are intensely reliant on broadband fibre, copper and wireless as well as powered connectivity. I see the following trends to significantly impact enterprise infrastructure cabling strategies in 2019 and beyond.
Trend 1: Edge, fog and serverless computing redefines cloud computing and increases the criticality of always-on connectivity As more compute services and data are moved to the edge of the network, businesses will expand via cloud and co-location services, even more so with escalating real estate cost in urban hubs. Efficient structured cabling with high-performance copper and fibre connectivity is required to accommodate the huge data flows that will be generated at the edge.
Trend 2: Power over Ethernet (PoE) becoming powering strategy for wider array of higher-wattage devices and IoT applications Supporting devices that deliver faster network speeds or more power require the right cabling and network design. Given the higher wattage of 4PPoE technology, potential overheating issues affecting transmission
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Early implementations of 400G uplinks and backbones may happen by 2020. Enterprises will pursue 400GbEready network densification strategies to pack more capacity into less space as server densities and processor capabilities increased. Advances in technology now allow the specification of 400 Gbps physical layer types to increase in multimode fiber capacity.
Trend 5: Wi-Fi 6 or 802.11ax making its way into new installations performance and safety of structured cabling systems are important considerations to support next generation PoE applications in different real-world installation conditions and sustainable green initiatives.
Trend 3: Business use cases for Single-Pair Ethernet is emerging Extending beyond use cases in the automotive industry and in several industrial applications, Single Pair Ethernet offers a cost-effective transport for power, connectivity and security to the billions of IoT edge devices that will be deployed over the next decade. Because the bulk of IoT devices being deployed do not require as much bandwidth and power as a typical application using traditional 4pair cabling, single-pair Ethernet promises to provide a more compact and economical solution.
Wi-Fi 6 is designed to allow for wireless data rates up to 10 Gbps and to operate in today’s increasingly congested radio environments, such as airports, stadiums, hotels, apartment and commercial buildings and entertainment venues. Wi-Fi 6’s support of multi-user, multiple-input, multiple-output (MU-MIMO) technology enables any compatible access point to handle traffic from up to eight users simultaneously at the same speed. Still, enterprises can only realise Wi-Fi 6’s true benefits with the right cabling infrastructure out to the WAP. To deliver the bandwidth needed, the TSB-162-A standard recommends running two Category 6A cabling to each service outlet supporting a WAP. (The author is the Director, Enterprise Sales, India & SAARC, CommScope)
Startup Corner
Collaborative Intelligence
COLLABORATIVE INTELLIGENCE: IN THE BUSINESS OF PARTNERSHIPS Collaborative Intelligence is a tech startup that drives creative disruption through innovation and design thinking, building cutting-edge technology and transformational solutions with a mission to encourage indigenisation Sudipta Dev sudipta.dev@expressindian.com
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ith a strong global presence, Collaborative Intelligence (CI) is one of the first private R&D centres with a network of in-house and partner labs across India, USA, Israel, Germany and Brazil specialising in the robotics and AI space. Sangeeta Das, Co- Founder, Collaborative Intelligence says that CI’s products are not only recognised in India but also in the Asia and ME region. The company’s product range includes robotics, AI and cybersecurity, and the solution is defined by fusing high-end autonomous mobility solutions with human and signals intelligence. Highlighting the channel marketing strategy of the company, Das states, “Considering, we are a research and development company; our focus is to identify and build technology that is innovative and cutting edge and disrupts the core functioning of our industries. It is imperative for us to have a strong marketing and manufacturing channel in our kind of business. For us to drive speed to market, we have ensure a strong and robust channel marketing and sales partner network. We have three of the top global marketing and manufacturing companies as partners.” Just as sales is critical, manufacturing is equally important to get a high quality durable world-class product with a capability to produce large numbers. “The company understands that speed to market is of essence and to meet this
CI has invested in building a network that not only supports India as a market but internationally,” she says. According to Das it is imperative for startups to have a network to effectively support sales. “Most of the tech startups should focus on innovation and value creation; a channel partner network only encourages commercialisation and product manufacturing. Some of immediate sales are critical to keep the startup motivated. Whilst industry pilots are important, sales differentiates ones product versus the industry and strengthens and positions the product,” she remarks, pointing out that for any startup, the process involves five levels, starting with demonstration, trials, pilots, and commercial application and finally sales. “For any startup to survive this process requires patience and a strong network of sales. Technology is ever evolving, there are brilliant ideas in the concept and lab stages, however to get it out into market for commercial
application is essentially the toughest in our view. It is therefor important to identify the channel partners and work on an arrangement that focuses on sales and not merely retainer ship,” adds Das. The company has taken steps to introduce its products globally. “Considering our business model, it works on collaboration and therefore by design, we have a global advantage. We are currently working with IIT, Delhi, ORT Braude and Tel Aviv University and a niche US engineering center. Our own labs in Israel and India are actively engaged in R&D and we are in the process of starting our second Mechatronics lab in India and other inhouse labs in Brazil and Germany,” states Das, adding that as they start to expand their footprint, such affiliates are imperative. The business model encourages commercialisation of patents through industry application and therefore CI’s focus before product development completion is to identify dealers and affiliates where they see a clear win-win situation. “We can therefore clearly state that we need a multi-industry, multicountry and multi-dealer strategy to drive sales for our startups today,” asserts Das. While the technology offered by CI is industry agnostics, it is largely applicable in Defence and Homeland Security, oil & gas, railways and financial services. In addition, the product can be effectively utilised in national disaster and relief, mining and agriculture, and airports.
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Special Focus
INDIA CHANNEL BUSINESS GETTING BIGGER FOR DELL TECHNOLOGIES Joyce Mullen, President of Global Channels, OEM & IoT Solutions at Dell Technologies highlights the channel contribution and sets the ball rolling for Dell Technologies World 2019
Joyce Mullen, President of Global Channels, OEM & IoT Solutions, Dell Technologies Sandhya Michu sandhya.michu@expressindian.com
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head of the Dell Technologies World 2019, in Las Vegas, Joyce Mullen, President of Global Channels, OEM & IoT Solutions at Dell Technologies, along with Tian Beng, Dell EMC’s Senior Vice President and General Manager, Channels, APJ, visited India and highlighted the major contribution made by the channel business globally as well as in India. So far, in the APJ region, Dell’s channel business has grown faster than the global average. Not to one’s surprise, the India region has emerged as one of the largest channel regions for Dell Technologies. The domestic market has
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Anil Sethi, VP, Channels, Dell EMC India
also gained the highest score in the net promoter score. After all of the changes at Dell Technologies over the past couple of years, with the merger of EMC and privatisation of ownership, it is interesting to note that over half of the business (51 per cent) now flows through the indirect channel. Leading this monumental change, Mullen informs, “It has added over US$ 11 billion in revenue on the top line and has boosted channel revenue in 2018 to represent more than 50 per cent of Dell Technologies’ overall sales. The vision of being simple, predictable, and profitable has gone well with the partners. In all the conversations I have had with partners this year, I was
amazed by their commitment and active participation. We treat their feedback seriously as it helps in setting our priorities, raise the bar and leap beyond the status quo.” The three strategic initiatives that the company laid out last year for partners remain unchanged. The infrastructure giant will continue to work deeper towards making partners work easily, transact and engage across the family of businesses of Dell Technologies – including Dell, Dell EMC, VMware, SecureWorks, Pivotal, RSA and Virtustream among others. The company is also helping partners embrace and monetise new technologies. “We are starting to see significant interest in AI, machine learning, augmented reality and
Dell Technologies
IoT; and we will be working with partners across the spectrum of these emerging technologies. Nevertheless, the traditional PC, servers and storage segment continued to see healthy growth in the channel business,” says Mullen. Providing a perspective on what works for the local region and its channel, Anil Sethi, Vice President – Channels, Dell EMC India, states, “We have been consistent with our channel strategies, which are very critical for the partner’s success. We are seeing our partners engage in more meaningful end-to-end conversations. The fact that we differentiate with the breadth of our portfolio, from the edge to the core, and to the cloud, is resonating very well with the channel ecosystem. Today, we work with all major partners in India and we see that trust and comfort of partners growing every year.” In the last fiscal, channel programs saw major refinements which worked well with the channels. For instance, improvement in rebate programs has resulted in strong uptake in storage, servers, and data protection business. The newly launched ‘Partners Preferred Program’ has helped the company bring incremental level of predictability into partner engagement. “We manage our partners in a very individualised manner and each one of our partners works with the account manager. We are focusing more on bringing capabilities and understanding the workloads in data centres, operating in multi-cloud environments, and building niche capabilities for AI, digital cities, manufacturing, and telecom,” Mullen puts in. Moving forward, Dell Technologies will set the ball rolling for its partners. The upcoming mega channel event will set new directions for both traditional as well as born-in-cloud partners. The journey to digital transformation in delivering transformational solutions and navigating unchartered territories will continue to be a focus area. Application, security, cloud, and data centre workloads will see more thrust from the company. The ultimate goal of the new framework is to allow partners
REFINEMENTS IN 2019 PARTNER PROGRAMS ◗ Most of the changes concern the requirements that partners need to gain to move up the tiers of the Dell partner programe and the simplifying of rebate processes ◗ The benefits of the program would remain consistent, but the company has chosen to make enhancements based on feedback ◗ The vendor has Gold, Platinum and Titanium tiers which channel partners can reach by gaining revenue, training and services targets ◗ The more significant refinements include a further simplified market development funds (MDF) process, the addition of more products to the company’s rebate programs, and a reduction in the number of trained employees need to achieve Gold status ◗ Revenue requirements have been simplified to a single path, and the requirement to sell multiple lines of business has been removed ◗ The company is extending its tier credit multipliers throughout the year ◗ Each dollar of storage and data protection revenue will count three times toward tier credit, and hyperconverged infrastructure revenue will count one-and-a-half times. With these multipliers in place for a full year, partners can accelerate their status in the program ◗ Dell EMC has now gone further, reducing the number of staff that needed to have been trained by half for those going for Gold. That now means only one sales and system engineer has to get trained up to hit the requirements ◗ In order to enable partners, especially smaller ones, to reap benefits of the partner program incentives faster, Dell EMC is reducing the number of individuals needed to complete the training to reach the Gold tier, the level above Authorized ◗ The company also introduced a Data Analytics Solutions Competency through its Partner Academy training program ◗ To make it easier for partners to do business with the company, Dell EMC is adding more self-service and automation for process improvements ◗ The company’s five partner experience improvement themes for 2019: simplification of the end-to-end process; differentiated support, or finding the right people to help them navigate through the processes and systems; investments in the online experience, particularly in quoting; predictability of engagements; and making it easier to do business across the Dell Technologies companies ◗ Other new features in the partner program include adding Dell EMC’s new PowerVault ME4 storage solution to its 2 per cent Midrange Storage Tech Refresh and 8 per cent Competitive Swap rebate program; extending its 3X Storage/Data Protection and 1.5X Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Tier multiplier incentive programs through the entire fiscal year; and providing Dell EMC Test Drive, an in-person session with a hands-on lab for potential clients, for PowerMax, Unity and Integrated Data Protection Appliance DP4400.
make more money by selling multiple lines of business and penetrating deeper into customer environments through a one-stop-shop IT provider. “The goal for partners in 2019 is to go broader and deeper in the portfolio and build relationship with their customers. Partners who sell three lines
of business grew 20 times faster than partners who sell just one with us – that’s huge. Dell Technologies has set its sights on breaking through the US$ 70 billion revenue barrier with the channel after enjoying strong growth with partners in 2018,” concludes Mullen.
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CXO Speak
‘AI BECOMING THE FASTEST GROWING WORKLOAD IN DATA CENTRES’ Prakash Mallya, Vice President and Managing Director - Sales and Marketing Group, Intel India, explains how the new offerings will boost up the computing performance that will pave way for emerging technologies like AI, ML, 5G, and cloud Sandhya Michu sandhya.michu@expressindian.com
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n line with the global launch of the second generation of Xeon processor in San Francisco. Chip maker Intel has introduced one of the widest range of innovations in its datacentric portfolio in the history of Intel Corp. The legacy of Xeon has been existing over the last decades for Intel, however, after a gap of four years, the company has launched its 2ndgeneration Intel Xeon Scalable processor. It claims to have made significant improvements over first generation processor, along with computing, memory and networking slew of products. Speaking on the sidelines of the product launch in Bengaluru, Prakash Mallya, Vice President, and Managing Director, Sales and Marketing Group, Intel India, explains how the new offerings will boost up the computing performance that will pave way for emerging technologies like AI, ML, 5G, and cloud. Some edited excerpts…
Intel has refreshed its data centre offerings in sync with digital transformation. Can you tell us what were the broad trends that pushed Intel to launch these products? My association with Intel is over the last 19 years old and we have
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never seen this width and breadth of portfolio until today. From the India point of view, globally by next year, every human being on earth will create 1.7 megabytes of data every second and 200 billion connected devices. Seeing the proliferation of data, the data centre needs to be highly scalable and agile to meet the growing demand for data. Moreover, with the democratisation of AI in the last few years, a lot of contribution has been made by large data-led companies. At Intel, our endeavour is to increase the benefits of AI to large as well as small companies. Another driving force is the rollout of 5G. It will create an impact on the intelligent edge, it will force operators to create a network which is agile, scalable and has more computing power and performance. Intelligent Edge is critical for 5G. The last trend is cloud, it is the most matured one, out of the three. Today, cloud has transformed to enterprise, to network, to edge truly becoming widely accepted service delivery model. When you look at these trends and see the opportunities ahead from a data centre point of view, you have to re-imagine the entire infrastructure. It helps our organisation to move data faster, store more data and process it quickly. From data movement standpoint, network traffic is accelerating within a rack and across the data centre.
Please shed light on the major enhancement Intel has made to second generation Xeon processor? Is there a change in its positioning and business model? The biggest enhancement from the first generation to the second generation is making of specific workloads optimised for our platform. For instance, the second generation Xeon, with deep learning, boosts performance 14x. It will cater to the growing need of AI, since AI is the fastest growing workload in the data centre. In network functions, the transformation of networks is happening from proprietary to opensource based on x86. Through optimisation, we have been able to make specific workloads grow faster. Storage innovations in the second generation Xeon platforms, along with Intel Optane DC persistent memory, is game-changing in terms of big data analytics, in-memory computing in real time for management. Any use case requires high capacity and high performing memory. Until now, it was not feasible economically to deploy. The DC memory is estimated to be 50 per cent of the cost of DRAM. Lastly, we are exposing our customers and partners to bring out more innovations in products and solutions. Going by the adoption of the first generation Xeon, we are confident to see more appetite from our partners and customers in India. The market needs will push the ball forward in that
Intel India
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INTEL HAS WORKED EXTENSIVELY WITH ECOSYSTEM PARTNERS TO OPTIMISE FRAMEWORKS AND APPLICATIONS THATTAKE FULL ADVANTAGE OF INTEL DL BOOST TECHNOLOGY.CUSTOMERS CAN CHOOSE ENHANCED TOOLS LIKE OPENVINO TO EASE DEPLOYMENT
direction, as customers and partners want to innovate and disrupt themselves as well as the industry.
How do you see the evolution of AI in India, with the introduction of Intel’s 2nd-Generation Xeon Scalable processor? AI is not an application, it will be embedded in the applications. AI inferences get embedded in the
application which will accelerate the optimisation with Intel DL Boost technology. It impacts the performance significantly and makes it flexible to deploy as well. We would see deployment become faster; our partners and customers can have more AI driven opportunities. Overall I see only two per cent of created data is being analysed as it requires more compute performance. Now, AI inference
workloads like image-recognition, object-detection, and imagesegmentation within a data centre, enterprise, and intelligent-edge computing environment. Intel has worked extensively with ecosystem partners to optimise frameworks and applications that take full advantage of Intel DL Boost technology. Customers can choose enhanced tools like OpenVINO to ease deployment.
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Channel Chief
‘PARTNERS CAN CONVINCE THE BOARD, ONLY WHEN THEY ARE SUPPORTED BY CIOS’ From a growth perspective, one of the key strategies for Citrix this year is geo-expansion in Tier 3 and Tier 4 cities. In an exclusive interaction with CRN India, Raghuram Krishnan, Director – Partner Sales, Citrix India, highlights the company’s GTM strategy, expansion plans and more By Mohit Rathod How has been the business for Citrix recently? In the past, Citrix was known for virtualisation. Now, we have added networking to our portfolio. This year, our total addressable market (TAM) has expanded significantly, because of our new offerings such as the General Purpose Workspace, with which, we have increased the TAM. Cross-selling and up-selling is one of the drivers of growth. The other two drivers of growth include new accounts and both. This year onwards, because of the above factors, there will be exponential growth for Citrix and its partners. Any business in IT is CapEx based, but now every customer may be invest; this is where cloud steps in. Our customers can choose from our perpetual model or subscription model. With cloud coming in, we are now able to cater to the small enterprises in the SMB segment, allowing us to penetrate deeper in the market. For our partners as well, it creates an expanded market. Further, with partnerships with Microsoft and Google cloud, there has been an enriching experience for Citrix and its partners.
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IN ORDER TO BETTER ADDRESS CUSTOMER REQUIREMENTS, WE HAVE GONE ONE STEP AHEAD BY TRAINING OUR DISTRIBUTORS. THEY ARE GETTING TO THE LEVEL WHICH ENABLES THEM TO MAKE END-CUSTOMER CALLS ALONG WITH THEIR PARTNERS Our focus, earlier, was more on medium-sized businesses in the SMB segment. The key is to make it easier for customers to consume technology, which doesn’t impact their working capital. This is the advantage that cloud brings to SMBs. Cloud is not restricted to certain set of partners; it is an already-established technology and is growing. Many partners have also created a cloud division within their organisations, because they realise that cloud is the future.
To cater to this segment, have you aligned with new set of partners or trained the existing ones? We are doing both, and this should be followed on a regular basis. It’s not just about selling cloud; it’s about making customers realise the importance of Citrix’s offerings for them. In line with this, we are investing heavily on training and enablement of our partners in the marketplace – and we are not doing this just for select partners. Our training mechanism is different; it includes live demos, not mere presentations.
In 2017, Citrix’s partner programs underwent significant changes. Is the company planning similar exercise this year as well? Two years ago, we underwent a massive change in terms of partner programs. We have laid the foundation of our program last year, we haven’t made drastic changes this year. With cloud coming in, the measurement criteria changes; for instance, the amount of consumption and the number of new customers. The idea behind the program is to encourage more partners to associate with us, and increase their value for their customers, with our
Citrix India
With changing dynamics of the security market, how are you building skill sets among partners?
offerings. With cloud and the perpetual model, we are able to do this. The number of partners transacting with us, has increased exponentially.
Security is a highly fragmented market. This is one of the reasons why system integrators generate more demand in the security marketplace. Customers are now more dependent on SIs and consultants to seek guidance on security. Security is embedded in Citrix products, so training partners on the security aspect of our products is much easier. Customers are now also looking at products with embedded security features.
While customers across industries have embarked on the digital transformation journey, how is Citrix and its partners further accelerating their journey? In order to better address customer requirements, we have gone one step ahead by training our distributors. They are getting to the level which enables them to make end-customer calls along with their partners. We want to enable our partners to conduct business with customers, with minimal involvement of Citrix’s team. As part of this, we maintain regular communication with our partners, so we can guide them wherever they need our support. The distribution business has also evolved in the last two-three years. They no longer run their business on box-selling – except a small section – they are now becoming value-added distributors (VADs). They are the existing distributors, but their go-tomarket (GTM) strategies have changed completely.
To cater to the SMB market, are you re-looking at your CSP strategy? From a growth perspective, one of the key strategies this year is geoexpansion in Tier 3 and Tier 4 cities. Most of our existing distributors are also signing up as our cloud distributors. We also have distributors that have niche focus on cloud. This helps us in taking our offerings to the under-represented markets. We are looking at cities like Coimbatore, Nashik, cities where new IT parks are opening-up, and areas with industrial presence. We will also build our focus on Sri Lanka and Bangladesh; we will have strategies which are best-suited for these markets. Having identified the markets we want to target, we are leveraging our distributors’ market knowledge. The contribution of our commercial and SMB business is growing, but not at the cost of our enterprise business.
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SECURITY IS A HIGHLY FRAGMENTED MARKET.THIS IS ONE OFTHE REASONS WHY SYSTEM INTEGRATORS GENERATE MORE DEMAND IN THE SECURITY MARKETPLACE.CUSTOMERS ARE NOW MORE DEPENDENT ON SIS AND CONSULTANTS TO SEEK GUIDANCE ON SECURITY.SECURITY IS EMBEDDED IN CITRIX PRODUCTS,SO TRAINING PARTNERS ON THE SECURITYASPECT OF OUR PRODUCTS IS MUCH EASIER. CUSTOMERS ARE NOWALSO LOOKING AT PRODUCTS WITH EMBEDDED SECURITY FEATURES RAGHURAM KRISHNAN, DIRECTOR – PARTNER SALES, CITRIXINDIA
IT is being discussed at the board level today. How are you ensuring that partners are able to adapt to this shift, in terms of interaction with customers? You can hold a CFO’s attention, if you should be able to talk IT in the language of business. Partners are not able to do this across the platforms of their customers. For instance, out of 100 customers, even if partners are able to talk this language with 20 customers, it will be significant; because 20 per cent of your customers can give 80 per cent of your business. It is critical how we impart training to a pre-sales person, sales person, and CEO of a partner organisation. Partners can convince the board, only when they are supported by the CIOs. You need to have the knowledge of talking to a person in the language he understands – CFO understands numbers, CEO understands strategies.
What will be you key thrust areas for 2019 and beyond? One of the primary focus areas will include SIs. We will try to ensure that our story starts to resonate with theirs. Secondly, we will continue to focus on our work with Citrix managed partners. In terms of our distributor-managed partners, we will invest along with the distributors for geo-expansion. Another focus will be on our alliance partners with Google and Microsoft. We will combine our expertise around solution with their expertise, and take it to a larger bandwidth of the market.
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CXO Speak
‘OUR PHILOSOPHY IS CUSTOMER CENTRIC INNOVATION’ In an exclusive interaction with CRN India, Saurabh Saxena, Country Director, Micro Focus India, discusses the company’s strategy for this market, and highlights the key products By Salvi Mittal Please provide us an overview of Micro Focus Digital transformation has various aspects. From Micro Focus’ perspective, which is a pureplay software company in building, operating, securing and analysing multiple elements for customers. Application is the key and they need to run on a piece of infrastructure. The infrastructure can be legacy. Large banks and insurance organisations are still running on the legacy mainframes or there are contemporary companies looking at not only running stuff on their on-premise data centres, but they are now moving to cloud – private or public. Workload is being moved to cloud and they are highly virtualised. These applications are hosted on the complex hybrid IT ecosystem and generates a lot of information. We work with organisations and help them run and transform, and innovate with minimum risks. We are closely working with the enterprise DevOps, in order to streamline the entire development lifecycle, with enhanced and faster software and wrap it up with the umbrella of security. Micro Focus offers a secured DevOps for complete application lifecycle management, automating, testing, virtualisation, etc. We provide a layer of hybrid IT management which offers the visualisation and at the same time manage the entire hybrid IT infrastructure – also includes hybrid cloud management, which can be
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INDIA IS A KEY MARKET FOR MICRO FOCUS, BECAUSE 18-20 PER CENT OF ITS WORKFORCE IS BASED OUT OF INDIA. A LOT OF GLOBAL SUPPORT IS BASED OUT OF INDIA, WHEREIN THE COMPANY SUPPORTS THE ENTIRE ECOSYSTEM on-premise, private or public cloud. And also manage the data generated from these technologies – whether it is archiving or content management or securing or backing up of data. Hence, we are focusing on these three IT standpoints or digitisation standpoint to any customer, applications, infrastructure and data or information, and work with them in enterprise DevOps, hybrid IT management, information management and governance. Organisations need to have a cybersecurity framework that encompasses and covers all these three areas – application, infrastructure and data. In the area of infrastructure, we have SIEM (Security Infrastructure and Event Management) and application vulnerability assessment using our fortified solutions during coding as well as when the applications are put in production. The infrastructure layer has the capability to collect and collate logs
and it notifies the fishy activities. With Micro Focus’ identity and access management solutions, the customer can easily manage and protect identities. We help encrypt data with our voltage solutions, which is a format preserving encryption. We have customers who are running COBOL on mainframe applications and want to transform to the latest infrastructure, but they don’t want to have too much of disruption. We help them migrate from a mainframe COBOL based application to a Linux based COBOL using visual COBOL. We help them run, transform and provide innovations.
Please highlight some of the key offerings from Micro Focus Enterprise DevOps has the capability to support the entire enterprise ecosystem; in this area, we have the application lifecycle management solutions. We offer agile ecosystem and help enterprises create a governance layer through application lifecycle management. We also help customers with solutions around testing. We are automating most of the testing through quality assurance with functional testing, performance testing and networks testing. In the area of hybrid IT management, we look at server management, network management and all the infrastructural elements. We have the abilities to automate the manual task. Whereas, in predictive analytics, we understand the application behaviour.
Micro Focus India
Understanding the behaviour of the application and trends, we are able to identify critical areas and provide relevant alerts.
includes access to all products across the Micro Focus portfolio on a global scale. In conjunction with the new program, a new partner portal has been introduced that streamlines and simplifies the ways partners engage with Micro Focus and customers. Micro Focus’ new partner program is built on a single platform with simple, globally consistent membership requirements across three partner tiers: Authorised, Gold and Platinum. The portal provides access to marketing resources, enablement and training. Key benefits include: enhanced deal registration, improved SaaS offerings, upgraded MDF program and increased speed.
How are you placing Micro Focus in the market; what's your GTM strategy? We have five-six business unit products and about 14,000 employees across the globe. We have 4,000 partners and over 40,000 customers and 300 promotional products. We go to market directly as well as with the partner ecosystem. We engage with customers directly through our sales and business teams, pre-sales solutions and consulting teams. Apart from delivering professional services on our tools, we also work with partners and SIs and service providers. We engage with key enterprise verticals – be it in government or public sectors, telecom service providers, BFSI, IT/ITes, e-commerce or retail. Our philosophy is based on customer-centric innovations. We intend to bring in a lot of agility into how we engage with our customers and partners to drive innovation as demanded by customers and partners.
How is the company tapping the Smart Cities' opportunities? The Government has already announced 100 smart cities and a number of them are already in their execution phase. Micro Focus is working closely with most of the MSIs who are executing the project by providing solutions in various areas. This is where the core infrastructure and the application resides. Our hybrid IT management and security solutions help them manage and run the command control centres. We are also working around other initiatives like Digital India for emergency response, surveillance and many other projects happening across various ministries.
How does Micro Focus view the Indian market, in terms of business and growth? Almost 30 per cent of our product engineering happens in India. India is a key market for Micro Focus, because 18-
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WE HAVE A HUGE BASE OF 40,000 CUSTOMERS ACROSS THE GLOBE.WE ARE MOVING THEM FORWARD IN THEIR TRANSFORMATION JOURNEY, AND SIMULTANEOUSLYWE ARE WORKING WITH NEW CUSTOMERS.WE WORK WITH PUBLIC SECTOR ORGANISATIONS - BOTH CENTRAL & STATE GOVERNMENTS, INCLUDING PROJECTS LIKE DIGITAL INDIA
20 per cent of our workforce is based out of this country. A lot of global support is based out of India, wherein we support the entire ecosystem. We are increasing our investments in India, in terms of moving more headcounts to here. As part of its efforts on the channel front, Micro Focus has recently announced the launch of its new, unified partner program, which
Last year US$8.8 billion deal was announced to spin-off and merge HPE’s software business with Micro Focus. Please share some insights on those fronts Software assets of both companies have a long heritage. The merger combines the heritage portfolio of HPE software and Micro Focus and covers the entire spectrum for us. Enabling us to streamline the customer's digital journey across the hybrid ecosystems. Together, we are able to address the digital challenges. It's been 1.5 years now since the merger had happened and the portfolio is solid – the breadth and depth have become very rich. As a consequence, we have a huge customer base of 40,000 customers across the globe. We are moving them forward in their transformation journey, and simultaneously we are working with new customers. We work with government public sector organisations - both central and state governments, including projects like Digital India. We are working with the largest state-run banks, public sector banks, telecom, banking finance insurance companies, manufacturers, retail companies, etc. A large bank here uses our DevOps tools, Hybrid IT Management tools, analytics tools for retail banking and COBOL and security solutions as well.
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Channel Chief
CISCO PLANS TO TAP NEWER GEOGRAPHIES, PENETRATE FURTHER IN EXISTING MARKETS Digital transformation across industry verticals has been paving the way for Cisco and its partner ecosystem, in terms of business opportunities and growth. In an exclusive interaction with CRN India, B Raghavendran, Managing Director, Partner Organisation, Cisco India & SAARC, shares Cisco’s expansion plans in this market By Nivedan Prakash How has been the recent journey of Cisco, amidst digital transformation taking place across industries? Be it any sector, digitisation is playing a big role. Every organisation is looking at digitisation the way it makes sense to them. Some are thinking in terms of how can it help them drive competitive advantage, how it can drive them new revenue as well as how can it help them go into newer markets. While the government is thinking on how do they make citizens’ lives better and safe. That’s where partners play a big role, because partners need to change their strategy; they need to now become solution providers. It becomes more imperative for them to understand what is it that the customer is trying to accomplish. From Cisco standpoint, we are moving from a hardware centric focus towards software and automation, driving more intelligence into every architecture and network that we are driving. We are focusing towards software subscription, recurring revenue and automation. Cisco is going through a transformation too, so it becomes imperative that we work with our partners and help them through this
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THE BUSINESS IS MOVING TOWARDS SOFTWARE AUTOMATION, ANNUITY AND SUBSCRIPTION, AND WE WANT OUR PARTNERS TO MOVE TOWARDS THAT. PARTNERS CAN PLAY A BIG ROLE USING THEIR SERVICES AND SKILL SETS TO DRIVE ADOPTION, EXPANSION AND REVENUE. THAT IS WHERE THE FOCUS IS transformation, because finally for us partners are our primary route to market. If we go in a transition and we are not enabling them, we will not be able to exhibit our value proposition to the customer and deliver the technology the way we want it to be delivered. In the area of partner enablement, we have rolled out the ‘Black Belt’ program, wherein we look at every aspect of a partner; right from pre-sales, implementation to post sales. The skillset that one requires in each of this is different. When the needs are different, the training needs to be
different. We are certifying partner individuals in each of these areas and there are levels of certification that partners go through. At the end, partners get the Black Belt certification, in that particular architecture. Today in India, we have almost 200 partners registered in this program. We have close to 950 individuals who are certified. Close to 2000 were registered into this whole program. In terms of each and every architecture, we have more than 100 certified engineers in these architectures. We are incentivising partners to certify their individuals. Apart from going through the enablement process, we are giving them incentives to put people through this program. Cisco Value Incentive Program (VIP) is about how to focus more towards the lifecycle of a customer. Rather than just selling the technology, it focuses on ensuring that you sold the technology, helped them to adopt the technology, then you expand and renew the entire lifecycle of the product. As we move forward into the year, the program will focus more on the lifecycle and the annuity part. The latest VIP program focuses more towards software annuity and subscription based businesses. The
Cisco India
partners go ahead and build as practices, so that they talk to the customers more about the software subscription. This is where automation steps in, because our product portfolio is also enhancing. We now have a whole new range of CAT 9K’s which is around simplifying automation, and software. From system integrators and resellers, our partner base has expanded to add ISVs to our whole ecosystem. We have large master system integrators, who look at large nation building projects; and we are partnering with them. Now we are looking at fueling our SPS channel. Today, most of the service providers are focusing on the enterprise market. We were trying to evaluate how do they monetise the infrastructural services that they have built for the SMBs and the enterprises. We are seeing how do we work along with that, to build managed services offerings along with them, along with their offerings and services. We have programs that support the partners to build their practices and a more profitable business. Recently we announced the ecosystem partner program, which looks at the whole ISV ecosystem. These are partners who can influence resell of our products or create a stack along with the application that they have and provide a complete solution to the customer. But implementation happens through our system integrators. In this age of digitisation, some of the scenarios are so complex that it is no more about just one organisation providing a solution. It is about a consortium of partners coming together and providing a solution to the customer. Our endeavour is to build that ecosystem of partnerships. The business is moving towards software automation, annuity and subscription, and we want our partners to move towards that. Partners can play a big role using their services and skill sets to drive adoption, expansion and revenue. That is where the focus is. The programs are getting announced in these areas so that the partners can quickly adopt some of these skillsets that they need. They can build some of the skillsets within their organisation,
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CISCO IS GOING THROUGH ATRANSFORMATION TOO,SO IT BECOMES IMPERATIVE THATWE WORK WITH OUR PARTNERS AND HELPTHEM THROUGH THIS TRANSFORMATION,BECAUSE FINALLY FOR US PARTNERS ARE OUR PRIMARY ROUTE TO MARKET.IFWE GO IN A TRANSITION AND WE ARE NOT ENABLING THEM,WE WILL NOT BE ABLE TO EXHIBIT OUR VALUE PROPOSITION TO THE CUSTOMER AND DELIVER THE TECHNOLOGYTHE WAYWE WANT ITTO BE DELIVERED
be hand-in-glove with Cisco when we go to market.
With the market transitioning to software-defined, AI and ML, will the reseller partners become less relevant? Different solutions go to different sets of the marketplace. We have a whole pyramid of marketplace. We have large customers at the top, followed by mid-market customers, commercial customers. When you talk of becoming software defined as well as moving towards driving more automation, it is important to enable some of these partners to make the transition, because every reseller wants to move up the value chain. It
becomes our responsibility to identify their capabilities and where they want their businesses to go. If the partner also feels that his capability is around reselling products, there is a segment of the marketplace for that as well. We will ensure that we focus on these partners and build their skillsets. From an APJ and India perspective, we went through a process wherein we looked at partner transformation, under which we are looking at some of the larger partners who want to drive business transformation. They want to move towards software, driving automation, and building offers for customers. Using our products and their skillsets, we are working along with them on building those offers. We are
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Channel Chief
doing the whole business transformation exercise with them. There are still a lot of partners who are focused on the data centre space or on the collaboration space; and want to keep focusing on these areas and build skillsets. We are doing practice development workshops with them, so that we can build more skillsets and create offers in that architecture – it is not about one-size-fits-all. Looking at the segmentation of the market and partners, we ensure that we give the right kind of enablement, support and transformation that we want them to go through so that we can work with them and help them move up the value chain. Resellers will still play a big role for us. Today, when we look at the whole commercial strategy, where we want to expand our customer base, our reseller channel will play a big role to drive the reach that we need across the country. Our partners will be our primary route to the market. Even in India – barring one or two segments – we have almost over 90 per cent of business going through our partners. In certain segments of our marketplace like the commercial segment, 100 per cent of our business is done through them. We are a partner centric organisation.
With changes in market dynamics, do you expect partners to take on a consultant’s role, or they should play a developer’s role? The expectation is in line with what
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they aspire. Partners need to see what is the value add that they bring on top of Cisco’s portfolio, so that they can differentiate themselves in the marketplace. It could be through services, consulting or through development. Our DevNet program allows us to build APIs on top of it, so that partners can build customisation for their customers. We want to ensure that partners build more developer skills, because the world is more towards the software side.
Amidst aggressive focus on software defined networking, cloud applications, central infrastructure, has there been some realignment in Cisco’s GTM strategy? In terms of our GTM strategy, we identify partners who have the capabilities for software defined architecture and software defined networking. We are investing in them to build these capabilities. When we looked at our partner landscape, we looked at the partners who have these capabilities already built up. We work with them to build certain programs that they can take those to the marketplace. We have also identified a set of partners who aspire to be there, so we invest in them, build their capabilities and take them to the marketplace. Like any other architecture that comes in, we started with our networking
portfolio, added collaboration, followed by addition of data centre and security. In each of these areas, there were certain set of partners who have built capabilities across all these architectures. Similarly, when we came out with software-defined, we had discussions with other partners who want to build skill sets around our offerings.
Since Cisco already has a strong channel ecosystem, will there be further addition of partners as the company continues to grow? In 2008, we didn’t have the ISV ecosystem and national SI partners. However, we did have the service provider partners. Over the years, we built that; 10 years ago, we just had two distributors, however, today we have four. Addition of new partners depends on whether we see a segment of the marketplace bringing in certain capabilities. If we have partners who can provide that capability to that marketplace, we will surely consider building that with our existing partner base as well. For instance, when we entered the IoT space, we saw a different set of partners. Hence, we built those partners further and brought them into the overall portfolio of our partnership. Partner addition is an evolution, which includes considerations such as how we want to grow a market, certain new areas that we want to get into,
Cisco India
certain new geographies that we want to get into or certain new technology areas. If there are niche partners who are quite successful in that space and can drive the differentiation for themselves and us in the marketplace, we would surely partner with them. We keep adding partners to drive our reach which could be in terms of geographies, newer markets, newer verticals or newer technologies.
What does the future hold for the traditional channel? Some of our IoT partners or SI partners are focused in the areas of their expertise, but there is still a traditional technology involved there. Some of the partners are focused on IoT, and will continue to focus on that. But when it comes to traditional technology, they will partner with somebody else. We try to build this linkage too, with our existing partners as well as the new set of partners. We have grown our business through our existing partners. However, we are talking to new partners in newer markets. Along with this, we are also expanding in the existing markets. When we go deeper into the enterprise space and driving automation, intelligence and augmenting their infrastructure for digitisation, our partners are the last players who step in and carry out the work. When we are looking at growing business in the commercial space, and geting into newer geographies or newer markets, these are the partners or resellers who do business with us. Our existing partners are helping us increase the breadth of our portfolio. They are also helping the customers move up the value chain from a digitisation standpoint. Our new sets of partners are helping to grow a business in the newer markets. We also explore if a consortium can come into play in these markets. Our traditional market continues to grow and there are opportunities wherein we are expanding our portfolio. Traditional partners are also evolving their business models. As they evolve their business models, we see if those models help them to move into the newer markets. Some of our traditional partners have
IN TERMS OF ITS GTM STRATEGY, CISCO IDENTIFIES PARTNERS WHO HAVE THE CAPABILITIES FOR SOFTWARE DEFINED ARCHITECTURE AND SOFTWARE DEFINED NETWORKING. THE COMPANY IS INVESTING IN THEM TO BUILD THESE CAPABILITIES expanded their portfolios, with collaboration, data centre, security, software and IoT. These partners are also stepping into automation, building their IPs on top of our overall offerings. Some of them are working with the ecosystem to put their applications onto the stack and integrating the whole thing and giving it to the customer. Every partner plays a key role; and looking at the opportunity in the Indian and SAARC marketplace, we feel that there is an opportunity to join forces with every new partner, as well as the existing partners.
Being present in India for a long time, do you think there are still untapped geographies in the country? In terms of new geographies, we look at newer cities. In some of these cities, we may already have a presence, but not adequately. In order to grow business in these cities, partners play a critical role. Earlier the large part of the business would come from Mumbai and Pune, but today it is also emerging from Nagpur, Nasik, and Kolhapur. We need to see how we can further penetrate into these cities through our partners. From our commercial strategy, we have clearly marked out how we want to expand. We are in the process evaluating how do we work with our distributors to drive those programs. We started our digital acceleration program around 10 years ago, with just three categories. Today, we have almost seven types of partners. Under this program, we see how we can work with our distributors to onboard new partners. Initially, when we undertook this program, we had
almost close to 600 registered partners, which has now expanded to almost 3,500. All these efforts are made along with our distributors. Our commercial team and the channel’s partner organisation work with our distributors to drive the business in those cities.
Has the company identified specific focus verticals in the India market? Some of the prominent areas include the entire textile industry. This is followed by the auto ancillary industry in the Western region. Whereas, in the Northern region, the sports industry presents significant opportunities. Education, as a vertical, is prevalent across India. Having observed that, we have put up a strategy to see how do we go ahead and address the education vertical. We are looking at ecosystem partners who provide content and have been doing business with educational institutes. Manufacturing is one more focus area for us. In terms of our strategy our strategy going forward, we see manufacturing and education as newer verticals which are under-penetrated from Cisco standpoint.
What are the key thrust areas for Cisco in 2019 and ahead? Our endeavour with the partners is to enable them through this transformation. We will be working closely with them to build the capabilities and skillsets, so that they can address business transformation or the digitisation that is happening in the marketplace. We will invest in them so that they can build capabilities around software subscription and recurring offers. Most importantly, we will be looking at working with them, so that we can identify new areas of growth for us and drive business in the marketplace and differentiate ourselves in those marketplaces. The focus is around seeing that how do we help them transform and build in more capabilities, so that they can address business outcomes and business challenges. We want to help them build vertical capabilities and horizontal capabilities, for them to provide a solution to the customer.
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CXO Speak
VEEAM BANKS UPON GOVT INITIATIVES, ENTERPRISE MODERNISATION TO DRIVE BUSINESS With organisations looking to modernise their IT infrastructure, Veeam has identified an array of business opportunies in India with its strength in virtualisation and HyperConvergence. Veeam is also bullish in the government space Mohit Rathod mohit.rathod@indianexpress.com
HyperConverged – the strength areas for Veeam,” states McLagan.
I
Channel focus
n the Asia Pacific and Japan market, India is one of the fastest growing regions for Veeam, having grown by 148 per cent year-on-year in Q1 2019. In APJ region overall, last year the company marked 36 per cent growth; whereas, in Q1 this year, Veeam has grown by 42 per cent year-on-year, According to Shaun McLagan, Senior Vice President – Asia Pacific & Japan, Veeam, huge appetite for technology is an enabler for government for projects and differentiation for the BFSI sector in India. To tap these emerging opportunies, Veeam has also grown its India team three-fold in the last few months. Speaking on the opportunities created by several government initiatives such as the Smart City project and Digital India, McLagan says, “We are working strongly with governments. Factors like Smart Cities, advent of 5G technology, increase in velocity of data movement are good differentiators for our company. As we are a pure-play independent software company, which partners with infrastructure providers and cloud providers, we see great opportunity in this market. As India continues to proliferate data across the country, there is a good opportunity for Veeam to
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protect that data, move it around and keep services available.” Veeam categorises its business into SMB, commercial and enterprise segments, wherein the company looks for vertical strengths. Every quarter, Veeam has been seeing growth across different verticals. “Based on our interaction with companies across verticals such as BFSI, construction, BFSI, etc, we have observed that many enterprises struggle with modernisation of infrastructure, which is a key in today's hybrid cloud and highly data focused world. All organisations, today, understand the value of data. They are looking to drive operational costs out of legacy systems; they are looking at technologies such as virtualisation and
Veeam's partner ecosystem in India consists of more than 375 partners. The company has a partner program named Veeam ProPartner, which is designed to help Veeam’s partners take advantage of opportunities presented by the needs of an Available Enterprise, to grow their business quicker and make it more profitable. Veeam equips its partners with exclusive access to extensive sales and marketing resources that will drive both license and service business, close deals faster and gain a long-term competitive advantage in their VMware and Hyper-V virtualisation practice. With this focus, Veeam can enable and empower its ProPartners across all market segments – from SMBs to the enterprise companies. McLagan informs, “As we expand our ecosystem, adding new channel partners and forming alliances, we have the best chance to become a leader in the cloud data management space. In terms of channel expansion, we are also looking at onboarding partners from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities in India. Given the opportunies formed by intitiatives such as the Smart City mission, it will be essential for us to find expertise in these areas. We are a 100 per cent channel-driven company and
Veeam
CUSTOMER STORIES TBEA Energy India TBEA Energy India is an advanced manufacturing business, and is the India arm of TBEA, an enterprise group accredited by Chinese government. TBEA works globally around external assistance projects in four industrial fields: transmission, transformation, new energy and advanced materials. TBEA Energy has 12 industrial gardens in China, as well as 27 overseas offices all around the world, including in USA, Russia, India and Brazil. Challenge: TBEA Energy needed an availability solution that preserves their data security while providing availability and the instant recoverability of data should it be needed. Because all the products made for each customer are highly customised, 100 per cent data availability is required for the manufacturing to continue; the business is entirely dependent on the data results. Results: Over 88 per cent time savings on daily backup maintenance; 93 per cent man-hour savings in data recovery. Costeffective and easy-to-manage availability solution for critical business data.
management. Results: Delivers data protection, visibility and control of VMware environment. Provides fast, frequent backup to meet RPOs and quick recovery to meet RTOs. Offers comprehensive management of the virtual and backup infrastructures.
VST Tillers Tractors VST Tillers Tractors is a leading farm equipment manufacturer in India. Established in 1967, the company produces tillers, tractors and diesel engines for thousands of customers. Challenge: VST Tillers Tractors has served the agricultural market for more than half a century. The company is renown for unparalleled products and service, resulting in a loyal customer base. When slow backup and recovery threatened service level agreements with customers, the company wasted no time finding a superior solution. Results: Delivers 24/7 x 365 Availability of critical IT systems; preserves customer loyalty by meeting service level agreements; decreases downtime by 99 per cent (seven hours to three minutes).
Tata Global Beverages is the world’s second-largest manufacturer and distributor of tea and a major producer of coffee and water. Challenge: The company’s modern data centre required comprehensive data protection and VMware
we don’t compete with our channel ecosystem.”
Key thrust areas All customers, regardless of the industry or the organisation's size, are looking to modernise. This is where technologies like hybrid cloud,
Hughes Systique Corporation (HSC)
QuEST Global Engineering is a niche engineering services company, serving product development and production engineering needs of technology companies in sectors such as aerospace and defense, medical devices, transportation and power, oil and gas.
HSC provides IT consulting and software design, development and testing services to original equipment manufacturers and service providers in the telecom, broadband, wireless and satellite sectors. Challenge: Slow backup and recovery combined with limited monitoring, reporting, capacity planning and visibility in the virtual environment impacted the IT team’s ability to respond to HSC’s needs fast enough, exposing the business to risk. Results: Improves response time to the business and mitigates risk. Reduces RTO by 88 per cent and RPO by 50 per cent. Delivers additional value to the business by saving US$ 100,000 per year.
HyperConverged play a key role for Veeam, allowing the company to cater to these demands. “In the next nine months, we will be further setting up ourselves in the market. We are investing to win; in the APAC market, we have hired over 100 people. Whereas, in the SAARC and India
market, we have tripled our team. We also onboarded US$500 million investment in the company. Our focus is on winning new customers and ensure that they look to us, as they move on their cloud journey. Globally, we add 4000 net new customers a month,” he says.
QuEST Global Tata Global Beverages
Challenge: Legacy backup presented three challenges. Backup windows were so long that employees faced performance degradation in accessing critical systems. Recovery was slow, making RTOs hard to meet. And, separate software was required for backup, replication and compression/deduplication. The IT team was forced to use several consoles, which was timeconsuming. Results: Reduces backup windows, giving employees faster access to key systems. Increases recovery speed by 40 per cent, making RTOs easier to meet. Migrates VMs between data centres with continuous application availability.
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Startup Corner
AFFORDABLE & INNOVATIVE FINANCIAL SOLUTION FOR SMBS Delhi based fintech startup, Kite, is focused on creating an ecosystem of financial services for businesses. Priyanka Kanwar, Co-Founder and CEO, Kite on why a strong channel partner strategy is one of the most powerful and cost effective ways for a young startup to scale across India Sudipta Dev sudipta.dev@expressindian.com
F
intech startup Kite was founded by Priyanka Kanwar and Prabhtej Bhatia, who shared a common mission of expanding access to modern finance to everyone. Believing in the power of BFSI to create large-scale impact, they realised that although regulations and India’s payments infrastructure were changing fast, the country’s 50 million odd SMBs that form the backbone of the economy needed a stronger last mile to truly become part of the new digital economy. Kanwar and Bhatia founded Kite in 2017 to specifically build a viable, affordable, and innovative solution to solve the lack of financial support and payment tools these SMBs desperately need to form a solid foundation for their businesses. “Since its founding, Kite has partnered with some of India’s oldest and largest banks that have given them access to both their infrastructure and the trust they’ve built over decades. In these partnerships, Kite is bringing its focus on creating native products for the Indian market and its scalable distribution model to help businesses switch to digital payments, file GST claims on time, save on leakages, provide employee benefits, and more,” says Kanwar, adding that Kite strives to create an entire ecosystem of financial services for these businesses and their young workforce –
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a platform that will enable a more equitable digital economy. Kite has processed over 2 million transactions worth over `500 crores, serving 120,000-plus users from over 1500 cities. The company caters to businesses of all sizes – from startups to companies with an annual turnover of more than `2,500 crore. “But our target segment is mid-sized businesses with up to 750-1000 employees in rapidly growing and operations-intensive industries, such as FMCG, retail, logistics, and pharma,” states Kanwar, pointing out that Kite’s holistic solution includes an entire toolkit to help businesses automate processes on a day-to-day basis and to thrive in the long-term with affordable, modern financial services. Kite’s flagship product, Kite Tab, is an expense tracking and reimbursements solution featuring fully-customisable corporate cards, powered by Mastercard and RuPay. These cards offer full control to employers—according to region, time, merchant category, spend limit, and more. Kanwar explains that through Kite Tab’s web interface, clients gain access to features such as automated GST filing and advanced analytics. In addition to this, Kite Tab offers an end-to-end travel solution that passes corporate deals to startups and SMBs through the company’s partnerships with top travel companies. Bundled with Kite Tab is Mastercard-powered Kite Grub, a physical meal card that can be used at
any food outlet that accepts a debit card. Through the tax-free food allowance, Kite Grub can save employees up to `12,500 in tax per year. According to Kanwar, both Kite Tab & Kite Grub directly impact these businesses’ bottom lines by saving them lakhs on leakages, reducing approval cycles, improving cash flow, saving GST on expenses, freeing up liquidity, and saving taxes. In the background, Kite is also constantly helping these users, be it micro-entrepreneurs or family-run enterprises, create digital identities for the first time and begin responsibly using modern credit to rapidly move up the economic ladder.
Channel partner strategy Kanwar believes that a strong channel partner strategy is one of the most powerful and cost effective ways for a young startup to scale across India, acknowledging that with India being a country built on personal relationships, online sales still contribute to less than 5 per cent of deals. This means a SaaS startup needs a robust sales force, which for an early-stage company is extremely difficult to build rapidly, considering the high cost of onboarding full-time employees. “This is where the channel partner network comes into the picture – you have passionate individuals selling your products in person to clients they already have existing relationships with, and you only pay based on conversions and
Kite
retention. With the success of networks like Tally’s and SAP’s, the potential channel partner network for SaaS companies has grown rapidly in India, which translates into new opportunities even in the highly underpenetrated TierII and Tier-III cities,” she explains. It is also imperative for tech startups to ensure that their channel partner network in no way dilutes the quality of product delivery or messaging for the client. “It is important to pick your target segments and geographical regions in order to efficiently onboard the right partners early on, rather than having a spray and pray approach. Double down on what’s working best for conversions and de-prioritise the segments of partners that are not contributing to your sales goals,” she affirms. Kite has already expanded its footprint to more than 10 cities in India in its first couple of quarters of sales via an effective network of channel partners. By 2020, the company is targeting 1000+ channel partners in 30+ Indian cities and industrial clusters, both metros and Tier-II. “We’re excited about bringing these partners on board, not merely to expand our geographical reach, but to also enrich our financial ecosystem and product suite for SMBs with their experience and expertise,” points out Kanwar.
Focus on innovation In keeping with the mission of the company, all of its offerings are centered on its primary principle and focus, which is innovation. “We’re obsessed with ensuring we’re building native products that specifically cater to the pain points of Indian businesses. Our distribution model is designed to reach every pin code in India and our business model ensures our solutions are affordable for any business size,” mentions Kanwar. The unique aspect about the product is that SaaS solutions are built integrated with payments and the financial ecosystem. This provides a more seamless experience for users, multiplies the impact on their bottom line, and truly bridges the gap for them to access even more powerful financial solutions.
“All our efforts in the next few years will be directed towards creating longterm, measurable impact for our users, be it businesses or individuals. In keeping with this, we will be launching more innovative solutions and hope to serve one million SMBs and 10 million employees in five years,” shares Kanwar. The company has since the beginning been focused on building the right ecosystem of channel partners for sales and marketing. “This means our channel partners not only understand our mission, but also share similar values in how they build their own products or interact with their clients. Some of our channel partners include new-age accounting firms run by millennials, boutique law firms for startups, coworking spaces in metros
and tier-II cities, and other modern fintech and HR tech companies,” says Kanwar, reminding that this ensures that everyone pitching Kite is truly a product evangelist, which helps make the communication of proposition and values a lot more consistent, and as a result, helps with stronger conversion rates. “Not to mention, it also helps us improve our product suite with immensely valuable feedback, both from the highly involved channel partners and their clients,” she remarks. Key milestones of the company include big wins on the customer front. Kite has been delivering smarter finance to startups and established businesses across India such as Future Supply Chains, Radisson Blu, Simba Beer, V2 Retail, IB Group, Delhi Public School, Indiano, and more.
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CXO Speak
NetSuite
ORACLE BRAND HAS ELEVATED NETSUITE’S POSITION IN INDIA Oracle has given NetSuite a brand, access to finance and market. This has helped the company elevate its position in the market. Lee Thompson, Senior VP and GM, Asia Pacific & Japan, NetSuite shares more details By Mohd Ujaley How has been NetSuite’s transition as an Oracle company? Since I have closely seen some of the Oracle’s acquisition in the past, we were keen to understand their strategy and we were happy to know that they wanted to continue investing in NetSuite and let it work freely. The intention was to give NetSuite the best of Oracle, without slowing it down. Oracle has been nothing but supportive. They have given us a brand, access to finance and market. Frankly, we did not have a brand in India, but Oracle’s brand is so recognisable in India, it has elevated our market position. Similarly, two years ago, we did not have a physical presence in India. We had a channel representation through which we were selling NetSuite in India, but with Oracle’s support, we have beefed them up without our own resources. Transition to Oracle has helped us in investing more in product innovation, additional resources and accelerate our presence and growth in India.
Among regions, how is APAC positioned for NetSuite? Perhaps, four years ago, APAC was treated as a big amorphous territory. We established three hubs with the view to retain the best of NetSuite, but enable each of the hubs to localise. For years, we had Sydney as the hub for
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sure that we have customers who speak positively about their NetSuite experience. In the end, every organisation has two things in common – they want to increase their revenue and decrease their cost and that is what NetSuite enables.
What are the key verticals that early adopters of NetSuite products?
Lee Thompson, Senior VP and GM, Asia Pacific & Japan, NetSuite JAPAC, Singapore as the hub for Asia and Tokyo as the hub for Japan. Oracle investment allowed us to open up two more hubs. Now we have Bengaluru as the hub for India and Shanghai as the hub for China. We bring out programs and initiatives from the headquarters, but these hubs allow us to make them more localised and relevant. India is a highly price sensitive and channelcentric market. We have to be mindful that our initiatives are respectful of the market.
Within APAC region, how is India performing? All the hubs are doing exceptionally well, including India. My expectation of India is about referenceability, making
We have the benefit of cloud computing and have the ability to sell to SMBs and large organisations. We are strongly positioned across industries, but our sweet spots are distribution, manufacturing, services and retail. We are measured in our approach in terms of GTM strategy.
Are you looking at any specific GTM strategy and investment in India? Historically, the risk has been that when you put people in geography, they lose their way. It is important that you bring together as a community and individual. That is why we are passionate that we set up a hub in Bengaluru, so that we learn our craft and we become a truly customerfocused organisation. When we think of the way ahead, we probably would set up spokes which will be in cities like Delhi, Mumbai or Pune. Within the next 12 to 24 months, we may look at establishing some of those spokes.
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