CRN India (Vol.2, No.8) November, 2019

Edit

NETAPP: DATA VISIONARY IN THE TRUE SENSE

Vol 2. No. 8 November, 2019 Chairman of the Board Viveck Goenka

T

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

Nivedan Prakash nivedan.prakash@expressindia.com

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

he very backbone of digital disruption lies with data. For organisations to be successful, they must fuel datadriven innovation by leveraging digital technologies and modernising their IT infrastructure. Data is the new everything in this digital world as almost everything is related to data and it is no more just a form ledger or record.

The last few years have seen a major explosion in how data is being utilised and interpreted. People have also witnessed more than 100 per cent to 200 per cent growth rate every year in terms of data consumption. This change has brought in renewed interest in storing, archiving and accessing data on demand economically.

As customers become more data driven, they are looking for products and strategies that help them in their digital transformation. This is where, tech giants like NetApp have taken a leap over others, helping businesses maximise the value of their data with an expanded portfolio of services.

NetApp, traditionally a storage vendor, has now to its true essence, transitioned into a data management company.

Its core competency lies in

data, ranging from data storage, data protection, data location, on premises, hybrid data to data compression, which also spirals out the company’s philosophy of data fabric.

Anil Valluri, President - India & SAARC for NetApp, rightly puts, “We see huge green pastures in India as the very presence of 1.3 billion people is a huge opportunity because data usage is high. Cloud has transformed into a big component for every enterprise, coupled with the entire digital transformation across all facets of industries, making data an asset for enterprise.”

This compelling story of NetApp is backed by a strong partner ecosystem in the country. Looking at the significant contribution of the channel in its success story, the company will continue to enable their growth so that they can ally with NetApp’s strategies and product lines.

“With the help of our partners, we plan to grow in the commercial segment, acquire new customers and expand growth in cities or markets where we are currently not present,” opines Kaushal Veluri, Channel Head of NetApp India & SAARC.

IMPORTANT

Circulation Mohan Varadkar

Whilst care is taken prior to acceptance of advertising copy, it is not possible to verify its contents. The Indian Express (P) Ltd. cannot be held responsible for such contents, nor for any loss or damages incurred as a result of transactions with companies, associations or individuals advertising in its newspapers or publications. We therefore recommend that readers make necessary inquiries before sending any monies or entering into any agreements with advertisers or otherwise acting on an advertisement in any manner whatsoever.

Scheduling Arvind Mane

Computer Reseller News® REGD. WITH RNI UNDER NO. MAHENG/75607/2018.

PRODUCTION General Manager B R Tipnis Production Co-ordinator Dhananjay Nidre

Printed and Published by Vaidehi Thakar on behalf of The Indian Express (P) Limited and Printed at Indigo Press (India) Pvt.Ltd., Plot No.1C/716, Off. Dadoji Konddeo Cross Road, Byculla (East), Mumbai 400027 and Published at 1st floor, Express Towers, Nariman Point, Mumbai 400021. Editor: Srikanth RP * * Responsible for selection of news under the PRB Act. (Editorial & Administrative Offices: Express Towers, 1st floor, Nariman Point, Mumbai 400021) Copyright © 2017. The Indian Express (P) Ltd. All rights reserved throughout the world. Reproduction in any manner, electronic or otherwise, in whole or in part, without prior written permission is prohibited.

COMPUTER RESELLER NEWS I NOVEMOBER, 2019 I crn.in I 3

Content

6 | Cover Story

14 | Special Focus

Partner ecosystem: The backbone of India’s digital economy

THE NETAPP, CHANNEL PARTNERS’GROWTH SAGA As one of the fastest growing economies in the world, India is an important part of NetApp's growth strategy, and the company's formidable partner ecosystem is enabling it to further buttress its market positioning

Channel Chief 22 | ‘At Oracle PartnerNetwork, we assure right benchmarking for our partners’ Chek Yang Ang, Head of Alliances & Channels, Technology & Cloud Platform, Asia for Oracle

CXO Speak 18 | ‘We have come together with an integrated value proposition’ Kiran Bhagwanani, CEO, India, NTT Ltd 30 | ESDS has a strategy for expansion in 16 countries in MEA region Piyush Somani, Founder, CMD & CEO, ESDS Software Solution 34 | SAS will continue to emphasise industry specific solutions relevant to India Kunal Aman, Head Marketing, SAS India

26 | Trust, Transparency and Teamwork: The three pillars of Yotta Infrastructure’s partner framework Bhavesh Adhia, Head of Alliance and Channel Partnership, Yotta Infrastructure

Thought Leader 24 | Nurturing business trust amidst India’s growing trust deficit Punit Kapoor, Director – Channels & Distribution, India & SAARC, Commvault

4 I COMPUTER RESELLER NEWS I NOVEMBER, 2019 I crn.in

A true IT modernisation-enabler, Nutanix works with state governments to get them future-ready for Digital India.

Being a 100 per cent channel-driven company, Nutanix’s partner ecosystem ably supports these initiatives

38 | Intelligence that redefines mission critical storage Rajesh Dhar, Senior Director – Hybrid IT, HPE India

Case Study 28 | The digital journey at Force Motors and group companies Abhijit Bhalerao, Head, IT, Force Motors Group

Startup Corner 32 | New benchmarks in predictive digital logistics Khushal Nahata, CEO & Co-founder, FarEye HEAD,IT,FORCE MOTORS GROUP

Event 36 | Pink City Jaipur bets big on digital transformation wave Face-to-face interactions with channel partners and SMB companies, set the platform for dynamic discussions on their digital transformation journey

Cover Story

Kaushal Veluri Director - Channels and Alliances, NetApp India and SAARC

Anil Valluri President - India & SAARC,NetApp

6 I COMPUTER RESELLER NEWS I NOVEMBER, 2019 I crn.in

NetApp

THE NETAPP, CHANNEL PARTNERS’ GROWTH SAGA As one of the fastest growing economies in the world, India is an important part of NetApp's growth strategy, and the company's formidable partner ecosystem is enabling it to further buttress its market positioning

Moumita Deb Choudhury moumita.choudhury@expressindia.com

L

eaders don’t need testimonials to back them, their work speaks a million words. How else would you justify a company which steps in India 12 years ago (although it has a legacy of 27 years), and now has a Centre of Excellence, Data Visionary Centre, R&D centre and a huge channel partner base under its belt, and is “helping customers change the world with data”, rings well the tagline of data management company NetApp. NetApp, traditionally a storage vendor, has now in its true essence transitioned into a data management company. Its core competency lies in data, ranging from data storage, data protection, data location, on premises, hybrid data to data compression, which also spirals out the company’s philosophy of data fabric.

“In the last 25 years, our focus has been compressing, encrypting and storage of data. We have also

witnessed cloud shaping in the last three to four years. Cloud has transformed into a big component for every enterprise coupled with the entire digital transformation across all facets of industries, making data an asset for enterprise,” says Anil Valluri,

President - India & SAARC, NetApp. In this digital world, almost everything is related to data and it is no more just a form ledger or record.

The last few years have seen a major explosion in how data has been utilised and how it has been

With digital transformation accelerating,Indian companies need a partner who can help them harness today's volume of data and apply it to create value across the entire organisation.This creates enormous opportunity for NetApp and our partners George Kurian,CEO,NetApp COMPUTER RESELLER NEWS I NOVEMBER, 2019 I crn.in I 7

Cover Story

STRONG GROWTH TRAJECTORY

K N Murali Director - Alliances and HR, NTT Ltd India

D

imension Data revealed a new identity in May 2019 wherein the talents and services of NTT Communications, Dimension Data, and NTT Security, as well as associated affiliates, were brought together to create a leading global technology services provider.

NTT India, which was called Dimension Data India, has been on a very strong growth trajectory over the last six to seven years.

We've had growth that is of the order of about 18 per cent compounded annual growth rate over a six-year period. We've grown across the board, but there have been specific areas that

interpreted. People have also witnessed more than 100 per cent to 200 per cent growth rate every year on how data is being consumed. This change has brought in renewed interest in storing, archiving and accessing data on demand economically.

“As one of the fastest growing economies in the world, India is an important part of our growth strategy.

NetApp has a strong foothold in the

we've done extremely well in, as a part of our growth strategy as well as part of the focus that we've tried to bring to certain areas of our business. We've seen growth happen; for example, in the midmarket segment. Until about four or five years ago, the mid-market segment was extremely new.

Today, it has grown so significantly, that it constitutes almost 15 per cent of our overall business in the country and reflects the new logos that we typically bring into the organisation. It is also one of those verticals which is constantly adding more and more accounts into the list.

We have been associated with NetApp for about 14 -15 years.

At least for the last seven or eight years, we've certainly seen the data centre business and the hybrid cloud business as a significant priority for us. We've been looking to grow that business and when it comes to data centres, NetApp is the prominent partner.

With the transition into offering a comprehensive portfolio for a fully cloud enabled cloud centric world, NetApp has become even better positioned.

NetApp was initially known as a storage solutions provider and the pioneer in All Flash. NetApp did significant work on the

market and are innovating locally at our R&D centre and showcasing our innovation at our Data Visionary Centre,” states George Kurian, CEO, NetApp. "With digital transformation accelerating, Indian companies need a partner who can help them harness today’s volume of data and apply it to create value across the entire organisation. This creates enormous opportunity for NetApp and our

8 I COMPUTER RESELLER NEWS I NOVEMBER, 2019 I crn.in

storage front. We believe that the whole world is shifting towards cloud, the transitions are already happening, and people are looking at cloud as a priority for organisations. Also equally importantly, it's no longer about storage, it has become passé. It's about how data is managed in a hybrid and multi cloud world. We genuinely think NetApp is the key partner in the hybrid multi cloud world where data movement, data migration and data portability and flexibility become important. So in a world, where we see digital transformation, where there's such proliferation of data; in a world which is cloud, managing the data and managing the cloud becomes important and NetApp becomes the most important partner for us to work with.

Most important to notice is that, NetApp is almost entirely a partner focused company and not into the services industry, which works well for us. They also support us in executing and services that we can provide to our clients. They have a lot of good programs around training and enablement for delivery as well as important business and marketing programs.

We've seen so many useful marketing programs that NetApp does, which allows us to generate opportunities and generate healthy pipeline.

partners. We are enabling customers to build data fabrics that seamlessly connect their on-premises and cloud environments and put data at the heart of their strategies. We deliver a rich set of technology combined with a simple customer experience so customers can consume and operate their IT on their terms. Partners are a critical part of the ecosystem and our simplified partner initiative helps align our partners with the dynamic

NetApp

market conditions and customer requirements," adds Kurian.

The company sees huge green pastures in India as the very presence of 1.3 billion people is a huge opportunity because data usage is high. “We are watching videos, making cell phone calls, interacting on WhatsApp messages, then there is social media, web presence, cloud companies, startup companies, all of which add to a huge consumption of data. So, India is a big target market for NetApp. The India market size is not big, but it is probably one of the fastest growing large economies in the world. Therefore, it is very strategic for us being a big believer in the Indian ecosystem in terms of the talent pool. So, we have over 2,000 people at our engineering centre based in Bangalore, wherein we do core engineering development. A lot of our products globally are made and created here. Therefore, we are leveraging not just the market, but also the talent in terms of capability and innovation that exists in India,” claims Valluri.

NetApp India may not be as big as Japan, China, Australia or other countries, but the growth is faster than others.

“For every vendor who operates in India, India is a smaller base, it is not as big as Germany, Japan or Australia, because these are all developed markets. However, India’s growth rate is probably the fastest; in the next three to four years, we will cross them as in these countries the growth rates are virtually zero, or one per cent. You are talking about economy growing at five per cent and the storage and data space has been growing at seven to eight per cent in terms of market, and we have a faster growing market, so obviously the growth rates are overtaking the absolute numbers at some point in time,” explains Valluri.

Focused partnership As an organisation, the company may look like one of those lean ones.

The reason being its strength is

BUILDING PARTNER COMPETENCIES

SS Dhingra Managing Director, Binary Global

B

inary Global started its journey in 2010, providing network infrastructure and data security solutions. We gradually entered the domain of data management and cloud. Today, our customers include large enterprises, public sector, financial institutions, service providers, mid-market and commercials customers.

Our areas of expertise include smart infrastructure, cyber defence, data management (private, public and hybrid), applications and managed services.

We have been associated with NetApp for almost five years,

manifested in its extended family, which is the channel ecosystem spread around the country.

“We heavily rely on our channel partners for engaging with our potential and already existing customers. We do not have a large workforce out there unlike some of our competitors, which are out in the marketplace meeting up with the customer and so on. The domino effect that the channel partners give us in the marketplace is something which is very critical and the

NetApp solutions blend in seamlessly with Binary Global's approach and offerings and has contributed immensely to our growth.

There are many knowledge sharing sessions, webinars, classroom trainings to help us build our capabilities and competencies. There is also a lot of push internally within NetApp to build partner competencies.

Our company is NetApp Platinum Partner and also Professional Services Certified partner. From initially designing the solution to complete implementation, all is done by our team of certified NetApp professionals; this helps in proper solution delivery, better user experience, and adds to service revenue for our organisation.

In terms of use cases, the first and foremost use-case would be on all-flash datacenters. This improves efficiency and performance and lowers total cost of ownership for customers.

NetApp's AFF solutions fit right in and add immense value.

There are also use cases around next generation solutions like AI/ML, which have a matched offering in NetApp portfolio like ONTAP AI.

cornerstone of our growth in the country,” emphasises Kaushal Veluri, Director - Channels and Alliances, NetApp India and SAARC. “So if our revenues are shooting up by a good CAGR year-on-year, then the onus of that goes to our partner ecosystem as well. That’s the integral relationship that NetApp shares with its partner ecosystem.

We look at having an integrated partnership with our partners wherein we can work together in a

COMPUTER RESELLER NEWS I NOVEMBER, 2019 I crn.in I 9

Cover Story

FOCUS ON DRIVING GROWTH

A ROBUST PARTNERSHIP

Tarun Seth MD, Hitachi Systems Micro Clinic

O

ur ability to architect the right solution for the customer on NetApp technologies is next to none. We are the first to implement the NetApp AWS integrated DR on cloud. Our expertise across OCI, AFF, HCI and solution architecture including private cloud, availability security has been a compelling proposition for our customers.

Hitachi Systems Micro Clinic (HSMC) is focusing around mobility, security, cloud and collaborating with our group companies around analytics, IoT and applications. Hence, we are able to address the entire gamut of technology

synergetic manner because at the end of day, it is also about how you alluded to the overall revenue growth of the company,” he adds.

NetApp works with its partner ecosystem, focused on three aspects innovation, skills and revenue. These aspects form the cornerstones for having a mutually beneficial business relationship.

enablement and solutions around the digital space.

In terms of use cases, the customers wanted to have submillisecond access to production data, data backup for compliance at on-prem and longterm retention.

Solution: HISYS team worked with the customer and NetApp to create a robust, reliable and sustainable solution to address the mentioned use case. Our team designed a solution using NetApp AFF for production workload and Storage Grid with fabric pool to address compliance requirement.

For long term retention, NetApp CVO on AWS or Azure cloud was suggested. Our teams were successful in convincing the security, availability and consistency issues of the customers.

The NetApp team worked with us relentlessly to ensure all the queries of customer got resolved and we sold NetApp AFF with Fabric pool, Storage Grid and NetApp CVO to the customer.

This is a great story of how basis our relations and technology understanding, we were able to convert storage deal into a hybrid cloud solution.

NetApp’s core competencies Cloud: NetApp realised that as a company it has some solid strengths in the domain of cloud and noticed that cloud is becoming a big part of the entire way technology is consumed, resulting in a change of perspective and engaging more with cloud. “We thought, what if we could embrace

10 I COMPUTER RESELLER NEWS I NOVEMBER, 2019 I crn.in

Sundaresan K Vice President & Country General Manager, Tech Data India

A

s we evolve our business in anticipation of what’s next, our strategy evolves too. Our strategic focus is based on driving growth and enabling our channel partners to move to a higher value.

The four pillars of this strategy are: ◗ Investing in next-generation technologies: Hybrid cloud, data (analytics, IoT), security and services ◗ Strengthening our end-to-end portfolio: Enhancing our partner, vendor and solutions portfolio, and consumption models ◗ Transforming Tech Data digitally: Through process redesign, automation, advanced analytics and user interfaces

cloud and offer technologies, which enable customers to move to cloud and later benefit by storing data on the cloud, as we are providing technologies on the cloud side through Amazon through Azure through Google. Therefore we are actively promoting adoption of cloud,” says Valluri.

He affirms that this is one part of it, the second part is that they have seen

NetApp

KEY TO CUSTOMER SATISFACTION ◗

Optimising our global footprint: Driving services, support, and business optimisation This is made successful by the skills and talent of our great people.

From a number’s perspective, in fiscal year 2019, Tech Data’s worldwide sales grew 11 per cent to more than US$ 37.2 billion. In Asia Pacific, net sales were US$ 1.2 billion, an increase of 14 per cent compared to FY 2018.

Tech Data and NetApp joined forces in India in 2010 to create a strong partnership, blending NetApp’s excellence in management of enterprise data with Tech Data’s industry-leading solutions aggregation capabilities.

NetApp has been one of our key vendors and a contributor in our overall growth. NetApp’s channelcentric business model supports business growth and maximum profitability. NetApp is recognised throughout the industry for continually pushing the limits of today’s technology, enabling their customers to save money and acquire the capabilities they need to be successful.

NetApp’s Partner Program is a great platform that helps partners cultivate new business opportunities. With NetApp sales and technical enablement support, it offers value-added products to expand our partner base and drive profitability.

the customers who have not moved to the cloud and are using the model of cloud as a consumption model. “This same cloud behaviour is being mirrored in their own enterprises or in their own data centres. That’s what we call as the hybrid cloud. Private cloud is big as well and we are players in the hybrid cloud area, or the regular mega hyper cloud. And the third aspect is that we’ve seen lot

Krishnamachary Venkat Director, Data Management Availability, Digital Track

W

e started in 2004 with a two-member team and today our strength has increased to over 250 members. We started our business with networking infrastructure and security domain and slowly added other business domains like Data Management and Availability (DMA), Information Technology Infrastructure (ITI), cloud and Cisco Business. We have grown from strength by strength to become an end-to-end IT solutions provider.

We have been associated with NetApp for the last 10 years and we have been accredited as a “Platinum Partner”. Twelve per cent to 15 per cent of our topline revenue comes from NetApp.

of customers using traditional infrastructures and old equipment and old technologies. How do you modernise them and make them cloud ready? We picked three areas. One is look at customer legacy and move them to be cloud ready. Second is, how do your customers embrace private cloud and third is, who are already on the curve of sophistication, take them to a hybrid cloud

When it comes to use-cases, the first use case is of one of our leading enterprise MNC customers, who were looking for high performance storage solutions to make their large capacity size file sharing, for which the customer invited both NetApp and Dell-EMC vendors for the head-to-head POC with the same configuration. The customer did an in-depth performance testing for two months and finally concluded to proceed with NetApp due to the performance of the storage, its ruggedness, and its effective scalability options.

The second use case is one of the leading enterprise customers in India, looking for lower capacity storage but with enterprise class for all their branch offices (23+ locations) for doing real time replication to their central data centre. The customer invited the POC with all the leading storage OEMs, which included DELL-EMC, NetApp, HP, Hitachi storage, etc. The POC took six months to finally go with NetApp and its Real Time Replication Global Alliance partner. The size of the project was about US$ 50 million.

NetApp is helping us with good discounts and attractive backend rebates, with 100 per cent satisfactory solution to the customer.

environment, where they’re able to get the best of both worlds of the public cloud as well as the private cloud – what we call the hybrid cloud.

So that’s how we are positioned,” he adds.

Veluri points out, "A couple of years ago, a partner would come and say that a customer set is moving to the cloud so the storage box story is over and hence he would not be able to go

COMPUTER RESELLER NEWS I NOVEMBER, 2019 I crn.in I 11

Cover Story

BEST IN THE INDUSTRY PARTNER PROGRAM

Uttam Mazumdar Co-Founder & President, Locuz Enterprise Solutions Ltd

I

t will be two decades since we started with exclusive focus on core technology infrastructure keeping us in good stead with continuous innovation and in many ways improving value to our customers. We are the largest “High Performance Computing (HPC)” systems and services provider in India and the fact that HPC, cloud and big data are converging to provide great

back to the customer. Today we come back to them and say, the cloud story also has an attached story. Here, we have taken our storage operating system called ONTAP, and separate it from that of our hardware and would ask them to set it up in the cloud."

According to Veluri, the story that is very strong with NetApp is the entire data fabric story, or how does a customer manage data across disparate infrastructures. "As an organisation, any customer would have their data across hybrid infrastructure cloud, or on-premise.

But how are they managing the data is the question. In today’s world, it becomes an even more important point because you are talking about IoT, you are talking about connected

advantage to businesses going digital, we are uniquely positioned to deliver customer success. There is no other company of our size in the space that has engineered six products, delivering extreme value. ClouTor is among one of them enabling hybrid/multi cloud and is validated by NetApp for converged infrastructure.

Our partnership with NetApp is over 14 years long and it has remained the top strategic partner till date. There is no other company like NetApp when it comes to partnering for mutual growth. Some of the finest people work for NetApp, just the way some of the finest technologies always came from their backyard.

Each time we reinvented our business, NetApp has always been a part of our journey – be it private cloud with ClouTor which got its validation for converged infrastructure or now with our hybrid/multi cloud approach.

Currently, we see tremendous value in AI/DL data services. We are working along with NetApp and Nvidia to provide an

cars, you are talking about data existing in every single device. In such a scenario, how do you now manage data from the edge to the core, which is your datacentre, and to the cloud. That is the story that NetApp talks about,” he mentions.

DevOps: The other focus area of the company is DevOps, which is the new model of developing software. “You can do lot of inline development without rewriting the full code and redoing revisions and so on. It’s a new way of developing code which is nimble and agile. And you can release faster versions and enable bugs to be fixed faster. All of it is using NetApp technologies around snap

12 I COMPUTER RESELLER NEWS I NOVEMBER, 2019 I crn.in

integrated stack for data services for customers, writing and training their models for computer vision or NLP or even CNN (Convolutional Neural Networks).

Likewise, data management for hybrid/multi cloud with NetApp combined with our IP is as simple as drag and drop across environments; this is indeed another powerful way our customers are running DevSecOps. NetApp Partner Program is among the best in the industry from both profitability and managing growth perspective. For us, the most unique experience, among other partnerships is that, they take partner feedback seriously. They organise partner roundtables with their executive leadership, and they hear us out.

NetApp cares for investments we make in our business as partner and ensures we get accelerated returns. They provide us with continuous enablement for driving new services and solutions to everchanging customer needs.

technologies or DevOps. DevOps, artificial intelligence and cloud are the three applications we have our focus on. And for the cloud-first, mobile-first companies, these are essential. Their entire application model is based on DevOps. They use artificial intelligence to a great extent and are completely cloud based.

These are the areas NetApp is working on, globally and in India as well,” says Valluri.

With over 145 partners in the marketplace, the company is100 per cent partner driven.

Flash: Data fabric allows data to be seamlessly moved, stored, accessed, compressed, and secured anywhere.

NetApp

Cloud is one big part of it, second is flash, which it is a new way of doing things around storage. “There is no relevance in using discs and other media, as flash gives you the best performance. Also, it gives you savings in power in cooling space.

The status of data centre has dramatically shrunk because of the form factor reduction of flash. So, what used to be in multiples of racks and racks of data centres, now has become three-four racks in the data centre, which has led to huge savings in space, power, cooling, electricity, etc,” informs Valluri, reminding that this way flash reduces data centre sizes and leads to cost savings.

Core strength All of NetApp’s strategies involve partners at the core. The company helps enabling the partners or equipping them, or telling them how to provide a comprehensive solution or backing them up with professional services, or giving them tools such as pricing or configuration tools; all of that are open to partners.

The NetApp Labs, particularly the Centre of Excellence in AI and Centre of Excellence on data in Bangalore are available to partners to give to their customers and leverage it themselves.

“What differentiates NetApp from others is that we allow our partners to do services completely from their side, and we don’t encroach upon partners’ ability to do services, we don’t take away the services from partners which they give to customers. So, partners can not only add value with NetApp’s technologies, but they can build services on top of it, and offer their own services over it. We don’t say that all services should be built by NetApp. Most of the services are built by partners. So that’s the advantage,” indicates Valluri.

The company is coming up with new enablement. “How do we explain and upskill our partners to match up to the cutting-edging technologies and then educate the customers in alignment to our core

messaging is important. For this, we have a very strong enablement program that we have set up on a quarter-to-quarter basis. While regular interactions happen with the customers on a particular technology - typically what happens is that the team becomes myopic on that particular technology. But what about the menu board of technology that NetApp has to offer? Here we do something called Partner Academy Program on a quarter-to-quarter basis to educate the partners about various product lines that NetApp offers. This time, we are doing it in November again or the upcoming quarter and we will go across nine cities this time - Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Chennai, Bangalore, Kolkata, Dhaka and Colombo,” informs Veluri.

Digital transformation Valluri believes that India has still a long way to go in terms of using technology for citizen services. He says, “For instance in terms of healthcare, we have not yet evolved in terms of using technology, particularly IT and data around healthcare for unified patient records and medicines. Ayushman Bharat is trying to change that.”

He points out, “Similarly, if you look at various other citizen services, whether it is properties, land records, income tax, your daily areas of interaction of life whether it is smart

cities, we still have a long way to go.

We are not completely digital yet.

And I am not saying that we should compare ourselves to the West. It is not digital as well, but look at countries like Japan, China, Singapore and Korea who have extremely evolved.”

For India, using digital is the best way to bridge the rich and poor divide.

“For the education sector as well, how much can we deliver through schools and teachers and so on. We have lack of skill as well as quality. So digital would mean reaching the last mile as well as getting the quality.

Healthcare, education, government these are all big areas for us to reach out and make an impact. We are a huge country, we are probably just nibbling at that edge, and if all goes well, the way the government is planning, we will see a sea change in how technology is being used by the government in delivering services. In my mind, UPI, UIDAI, and all of that will be core to the transformation,” states Valluri.

“India already has some robust reference points including UIDAI, and so on, and the new health ID that is going to come up. Then the country will really blossom out and we will really be able to showcase in terms of how IT is being used, how technology is being used to touch 1.3 billion people in several areas,” he concludes.

COMPUTER RESELLER NEWS I NOVEMBER, 2019 I crn.in I 13

Special Focus

Partner ecosystem: The backbone of India's digital economy 14 I COMPUTER RESELLER NEWS I NOVEMBER, 2019 I crn.in

A true IT modernisation-enabler, Nutanix works with state governments to get them future-ready for Digital India. Being a 100 per cent channel-driven company, Nutanix’s partner ecosystem ably supports these initiatives

By Salvi Mittal

Nutanix

E

nterprises are embarking on their digital journey for better customer experience, acquiring new customers, which obviously leads to an incremental revenue stream. And to acquire customers at a lower cost, enterprises need to have nimble IT. So what are the options in the market for nimble IT today?

Modernising the data centre “Many enterprises are still running on the legacy 3-tier architecture. This architecture won't deliver the customer’s expectations or business results they want. These organisations are looking to modernise their data centre as the first step in their journey towards digitalisation,” says Anantharaman Balakrishnan (Bala), Vice President & Managing Director, Nutanix India.

The first step towards achieving modernisation is to create a system and processes that are driven by business outcomes. Next comes automation driven via new technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

Hybrid cloud journey The customer should have a seamless experience in moving the workload to any cloud provider and bring it down when required. “First and foremost, Nutanix pioneered the HCI platform, which is about virtualising the data centre. Hyperconverged infrastructure is the basis for building a private cloud. Virtualising all of the elements of conventional IT hardware systems into software-defined infrastructure eliminates inefficiencies and reduces the total cost of ownership for data centres. Our journey is now transitioning from virtualising the data centre to virtualising in the cloud, enabling app mobility and cloud interoperability,” states Bala.

Enterprises, especially newer ones, adopted public cloud services because they were easy and relatively affordable. But as they grew, so did the costs of being on a public cloud.

Bringing back their apps or workloads from public cloud to on-prem is a

gigantic task. It requires massive amounts of investment as well as rearchitecture and sometimes folks get locked-in.

“One of the most compelling opportunities for HCI is in DC consolidation. Nutanix is a harbinger in the HCI space and we have helped customers who had three data centres consolidate into one. Nutanix solution portfolio enabled consolidation of servers, storages and networks, without compromising on identity and multi-tenancy requirements” says Rajan Bhandari, CEO, Hitachi Systems Micro Clinic. “Nutanix offers hyperconverged solutions (HCI), allowing to reduce the rack space requirement by converging servers, storages and Networks together, thus it reduces DC footprint and also helps in Green IT initiatives. USP of Nutanix solutions is zero-touch upgrade, the upgrade doesn’t require any downtime,” adds Bhandari.

Nutanix offers freedom of choice where the customers are able to modernise their infrastructure to make it more cloud-like while keeping it onpremises. “We offer true cloud interoperability without any vendor lock-in. Nutanix Calm, Flow, Era and Files as examples of tools that help companies operate hybrid cloud services on premise,” he mentions.

In a digital era, the traditional 3 tier architecture is with hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI). Ajay Sawant, MD, Orient Technologies points out,

“Nutanix has its own virtualising product called Acropolis and which differentiates them from the other competitors, in the HCI world. The customers want to build the entire ecosystem for public or private or hybrid cloud, which becomes easier for us Nutanix because they have products like Calm, which helps the customer build a private cloud. Similarly, Beam, which optimises the public usage of the cloud.”

India, a hotbed of innovation Current trends are prevailing in the HCI domain, so we are looking at the 1.75 billion addressable market. “We're probably scraping the tip of the iceberg.

The government has big bang plans for the Digital India program. And we can help in modernising the infrastructure, there's a lot of legacy infrastructure in

MANY ENTERPRISES ARE STILL RUNNING ON THE LEGACY 3-TIER ARCHITECTURE.THIS ARCHITECTURE WON'T DELIVER THE CUSTOMER’S EXPECTATIONS OR BUSINESS RESULTS THEYWANT.THESE ORGANISATIONS ARE LOOKING TO MODERNISE THEIR DATA CENTRE AS THE FIRST STEP IN THEIR JOURNEYTOWARDS DIGITALISATION Anantharaman Balakrishnan (Bala), Vice President & Managing Director, Nutanix India

COMPUTER RESELLER NEWS I NOVEMBER, 2019 I crn.in I 15

Special Focus

Nutanix has its own virtualising product called Acropolis and which differentiates them from the other competitors,in the HCI world.The customers want to build the entire ecosystem for public or private or hybrid cloud,which becomes easier for us Nutanix because they have products like Calm,which helps the customer build a private cloud.Similarly,Beam, which optimises the public usage of the cloud Ajay Sawant, MD, Orient Technologies

The readiness of the customer depends on skills availability from a partner perspective, and the partner's ability to add value to the requirements

the government. And in my opinion, the government and defense hold 34 per cent of that 1.75 billion spending,” states Bala.

Working with state governments, such as the Rajasthan government and Uttarakhand government, Bala believes that Nutanix is a true IT modernisationenabler to the government to get them future-ready for Digital India. “We're looking at the startups essentially to partner with them on providing a platform for new application development. We are working with service providers like NetMagic, CTRL S, SIFY, etc, in order to work with service providers to provide a platform as a service to say, internet-scale startups and offer them an option of a platform of a development platform, which may not be as expensive as the public,” informs Bala, adding that since the government considers a lower-cost model, they prefer the best technology at the lowest possible cost. “Our virtualisation layer or hypervisor comes free as we believe hypervisor is a commodity. It’s best in class and so, we believe it will be of significant appeal to the government,” he affirms.

Readiness of customer for hybrid cloud The readiness of the customer depends on skills availability from a partner perspective, and the partner’s ability to add value to the requirements.

“As we get down to a hybrid cloud, we have solutions like cloud orchestration called Calm. Calm is the cloud application lifecycle management. Then we have Flow, which is the security-based microsegmentation and works with Beam. For database automation management, we have Era,” says Bala. Enterprises are extremely heavy on databases and then they face challenges in managing the data.

Nutanix is already working with large enterprises like banks to ensure Era is integrated with their existing database management.

“The management becomes easier in HCI environment and it's all single touch operations. The customers don’t require costly resources like database administrators sandboxing, hence saves on the managing cost. Therefore, overall the customer gets more than 30 per cent benefit from HCI,” adds Sawant.

16 I COMPUTER RESELLER NEWS I NOVEMBER, 2019 I crn.in

The next step is aligning with the partners, who can take these services to the marketplace.

As the customer goes on to their hybrid cloud journey, they will start getting into building the cloud native applications. The moment they build cloud native applications, they will also need containers. Nutanix has its own container offering, called Carbon. Hence, Carbon, Flow, Calm, these are all integrated to form an orchestration layer for the customer - if he ever wants to build new applications, he builds it in a cloud-native containerised manner. Today those skills are not available in the enterprise, they are available in digital-native companies, startup economy sites, and internet economies.

Bala mentions, “We believe that our partners with their skills available for implementation of these solutions will help the customers on that cloud-native readiness platform. So partners will bridge the gap for customers in database automation and building a hybrid cloud.”

Embedding security and compliance Flow is essentially around micro segmenting virtual machines (VM), providing an additional layer of security for organisations to ensure that there are no data leaks. With Beam they have induced a compliance layer, integrating Flow and Beam. It addresses security and compliance in the four layers.

The first layer is the network security, second VM security. Third is the data layer and fourth is access and identity. All these four elements are addressed from an app perspective, the way an application is been managed from a network perspective. Further adding AI and ML, hence it becomes an autonomous model.

Progressing with the partner ecosystem Lot of digitisation is happening at the edge, acquiring new customers and getting the data from the customer and doing analytics and so on. “As we see the customers adopting those edge pieces, we are making some nimble applications. We witness partners oriented to build those applications,” remarks Bala.

Nutanix Channel Charter focuses on engagement instead of revenue targets, it gives partners a greater incentive to focus

Nutanix

on building market knowledge and skills and look for ways to deliver maximum value to customers. This puts the customer first and helps the partner succeed.

Partners begin their journey with Nutanix by being a Pioneer Partner, then move on to a Scaler level and finally Master level.“Our ‘Channel Charter’, is essentially to empower the partners. And enabling them to exactly have a customer-centric approach,” Bala says.

The program emphasis building skills and getting new customers on board. “The delight which customers will get from a partner and the delight which a partner will get from us, those are the two pillars of our business. We are focusing on rebate programs highlighting the number of certifications to get unique skill sets to implement digital technologies and the number of opportunities,” Bala asserts.

Third pillar: HPE partnership “The third area when we are focused upon is our new alliance with HPE. We have a new product out in the marketplace, named as ‘DX appliance’, which is essentially a combination of our partnership with HPE,” says Bala.

It comes in two models, the first model is the appliance itself which is sold by the Nutanix team. Then there is an asset service module, which is tied up with HPE’s GreenLake. GreenLake is the HPE’s consumption model.

“We will need a plethora of HPE partners to embrace both these platforms.

So the third engagement we're doing for the channel community is essential to embrace all these HP resellers and large partners, platinum partners so that they become Nutanix partners,” he explains.

Their presence is significant across the board, small and medium segment; they are present in the larger enterprises and manufacturing. “So if I were to take just three incremental areas where they are big, definitely we would like to embrace a lot of partners and build an independent incremental income in the SMB space carried through the distribution channel,” states Bala.

Hence Nutanix is in the process of hiring a distribution manager who can work with its OEM person and ensure that HPE’s partners are signed up and give Nutanix an incremental revenue, and opportunities

in tier two and tier three cities.

Incentive programs The rebate programs are designed around new customer acquisitions.

Nutanix is still a young company. “So we are really looking at new customer acquisitions. And a new partner who gets us new customer acquisition additional incentives. We are also having rebates for accelerating our HPE go to market,” Bala adds. There are incentives for partners to move up the ladder so that they can get more of this leverage.

Partner enablement Nutanix partner program allows partners to invest in DEMO equipment to conduct POVs, the way to demonstrate and meet customer’s business requirements before purchase. Partner program also ensures enablement through webinars, tech workshops, orientation and training on new offerings, new features and functionalities. The program not only looks at enablement but also on the profitability of the organisation.

Learning and earning are the two key aspects of any partnership. “Nutanix conducts hands-on training sessions to build implementation and support capabilities. They also conduct pre-sales boot camps to train Pre-sales/Solution Architects to design solutions for addressing customer business requirements,” says Rajan Bhandari, adding, “They have a very tough certification process to ensure certified resources are the experts on their solutions. It helps partner organisations to build capabilities and competencies.”

Nutanix is 100 per cent channel-driven, which means every order to them is through the channel. The company is highly depend on its partners who can take Nutanix to every nook and corner, and the HPE partnership will add value to its current portfolio.

“We are enhancing our presence in the tier 1 space, where we have large partners like Wipro, TCS, L&T, etc, and other partners play in the government space, Smart City space. A lot of skill implementation is required to give a delightful experience for the customer, so there's a lot of focus on skills and certifications,” concludes Bala.

One of the most compelling opportunities for HCI is in DC consolidation.Nutanix is a harbinger in the HCI space and we have helped customers who had three datacentres consolidate into one.Nutanix solution portfolio enabled consolidation of servers, storages and networks,without compromising on identity and multi-tenancy requirements Rajan Bhandari, CEO, Hitachi Systems Micro Clinic

Nutanix offers freedom of choice where the customers are able to modernise their infrastructure to make it more cloud-like while keeping it on-premises

COMPUTER RESELLER NEWS I NOVEMBER, 2019 I crn.in I 17

CXO Speak

‘We have come together with an integrated value proposition’ NTT Ltd has recently announced that Dimension Data, NTT Communications, Netmagic Solutions, NTT Security and Arkadin will be among the 28 companies and brands from over 70 countries worldwide to become NTT as part of NTT Ltd, the global US $11 billion company. Kiran Bhagwanani, CEO, India, NTT Ltd, shares the company’s enhanced capabilities, GTM strategy and roadmap

By Nivedan Prakash & Mohit Rathod

Please elaborate more on the impact of the integration of companies into NTT Ltd NTT Ltd is really the coming together of 28 different companies under the NTT umbrella into one organisation. Primarily, it comprises of three businesses of NTT – Dimension Data, NTT Communications and NTT

Security, followed by various affiliate companies owned by these brands. We can now take a much more widened business portfolio to our clients. As Dimension Data, we’ve had a fairly wide infrastructure services portfolio, but we believe that as NTT Ltd., we are able to further augment that with public cloud services, data centre

18 I COMPUTER RESELLER NEWS I NOVEMBER, 2019 I crn.in

hosting services, with other managed services and NTT Security portfolio. All in all, we have become a one-stop-shop for our clients. As everything is becoming software-defined and clients are looking at digital transformation, they’re looking at one partner who has the ability to span the entire ICT stack.

NTT Ltd

What can Indian customers expect from this integration?

The impact of this integration will be the most felt in our client community, partner community as well as our employee base. From a client perspective, our priority in the short term, would be to make sure there’s zero impact on our clients in terms of continuity of business. From a medium to long-term perspective, the impact that we want to see on our clients is extremely positive. We have a comprehensive portfolio as NTT Ltd which should help the clients accelerate their digital transformation journey. From a people perspective, we have been part of a great brand.

Dimension Data as a brand has been respected in the country and outside as a company that delivers everything that it says and, therefore, to that extent, there has been phenomenal brand equity and credibility in the market of the Dimension Data brand. Our employees will feel much more secure and stable as part of even bigger mothership. The ability to learn new technologies, to be able to talk about new technologies, to be able to integrate the technology stack is something which will be of tremendous value to our people as well.

The company was extremely conscious to ensure the impact should only be positive and nobody should feel any downside of this transition. We created Integration Management Office about almost one year ago. The IMO had almost 27 different work streams looking at different aspects like client servicing, branding, go-to-market and systems integration. The IMO had a crucial role to play in ensuring that the business processes between these 28 companies are so streamlined that any transition of client contracts or accountability in terms of service levels should cause zero disruption for clients.

But more importantly, we also set up something known as Business Chain Champions, wherein each brand, each company had to nominate Business Chain Champions who would talk about the change and what it means for our people and what it means for our clients. This also helped to create a

phenomenal amount of buy-in among the employee community of these 28 companies.

Although as different brands, we have been going to the market together with a integrated value proposition and depending upon which brand has had the closest proximity with the client that brand has been leading the conversation. There are multiple wins we have already had as One NTT. A leading financial institution in the country wanted to embark on a move to hybrid cloud, transitioning all their workloads onto a hybrid cloud model, some on private cloud, some on a hyperscaler public cloud. We were able to win the confidence of the client as NTT without yet being One NTT.

Following the integration, which capabilities will differentiate you from other ICT players?

“

WE HAVE COMPELLING VALUE PROPOSITIONS FOR ATRULY DIGITAL INDIA IN TERMS OFTHE INVESTMENTS WE CAN MAKE IN SOME OFTHE SECTORS SUCH AS SMART CITIES, SMART HEALTHCARE AND SMART AGRICULTURE. TRADITIONALLY,WE HAVE NOT BEEN A DOMINANT PLAYER IN THE GOVERNMENT SPACE, BUT THERE IS A SIGNIFICANT VALUE THAT NTT CAN BRING INTO THE COUNTRYWITH MANY OFTHESE PROPOSITIONS

We perhaps have the industry’s most comprehensive ICT portfolio for our clients. Traditionally, the world of infrastructure has been in a model where the clients own the assets. The responsibility of ownership, management is with the client. Clients are looking for companies that can help them deploy, operate and manage it over a period of time. However, now clients are looking at business outcomes and the strategy, architecture, and investment. The other considerations are in terms of overall manageability, scalability and the move towards software defined. Having a partner who has the combined ability to deliver the business outcomes without getting stuck in silos of handling pieces of the portfolio – that becomes crucial.

As NTT, given the brand equity we have built up over time, it will give us a unique capability to service clients. In terms of sectors, nearly 30 per cent of our revenues in India is derived from financial services.

Furthermore, the consolidation of banks presents another massive opportunity of a transformation that these banks will have to undertake as they go about integrating, modernising and refreshing the technology investments. Similarly, in the manufacturing sector, the move to

COMPUTER RESELLER NEWS I NOVEMBER, 2019 I crn.in I 19

CXO Speak

HANA is a big factor. We’re looking at IT, OT, plant automation in a very big way.

The mid market business has been a big growth engine for us over the last three or four years. This business was practically negligible about four years ago and now it forms about 15 per cent of our revenue. The mid market is much more agile in terms of new tech adoption like cloud or having a multicloud environment.

As NTT, we also see a few opportunities that are apart from the traditional ones. One of the initiatives under the NTT umbrella is the Smart World initiative, an umbrella offering that covers smart cities, smart healthcare, smart mobility and smart agriculture. Another area of opportunities is the Japanese industry in India. There are about 1300 registered Japanese companies in the country. If we can take the combined might of the NTT value proposition to Japanese multinationals, that would become a potent area of growth for us.

Through the Smart World initiative, is NTT going to increase its footprint in the government sector?

We have compelling value propositions for a truly Digital India in terms of the investments we can make in some of the sectors such as smart cities, smart healthcare and smart agriculture. Traditionally, we have not been a dominant player in the government space, but there is a significant value that NTT can bring into the country with many of these propositions. We will love to work with like-minded agencies in the government, which believe that this technology can be of value into the country and certainly we would like to see some of these through some pilots or projects that we do along with the government.

Will the company also increase investments in R&D and strengthening the managed services platform?

NTT has an investment of US$ 3.6 billion annually in R&D. The R&D

NTT Ltd

AS NTT, GIVEN THE BRAND EQUITY WE HAVE BUILT UP OVER TIME, IT WILL GIVE US A UNIQUE CAPABILITY TO SERVICE CLIENTS. IN TERMS OF SECTORS, NEARLY 30 PER CENT OF OUR REVENUES IN INDIA IS DERIVED FROM FINANCIAL SERVICES investments continue; the go-to-market strategy has got more refreshed and simpler to execute. India is the hub of managed services for the new NTT Ltd. We have a large operational centre in Bangalore from where we render remote management services for our clients using the latest autonomics and tools, people, processes to be able to do that in the most effective way we can for our clients with backup centre in Prague.

How much revenue boost is expected following the integration?

Globally NTT Ltd is a US$ 11 billion company which places us in the top 11 IT services companies in the world. We have come together with an integrated value proposition, and the growth should only be faster than what we have seen in the past. India has been one of the fastest growing and one of the most consistent and formidable businesses within the Dimension Data family. We have grown over the last eight years at a CAGR of about 18 per cent, and we have also been seen as one of the most consistent contributors to Dimension Data.

Amidst the emergence of local players, along with the presence of other global companies, what’s your GTM strategy?

The change that we want to bring in our GTM motion first starts with ourselves – understanding the integrated value proposition of NTT Ltd. We have it well-degined and are being able to internalise it and being

20 I COMPUTER RESELLER NEWS I NOVEMBER, 2019 I crn.in

able to articulate it for the client so that we can be relevant. Our focus is also on ensuring that the entire transition is seamless for our clients. We are also looking at pockets of new businesses such as the Japanese MNCs in India.

Hence, some kind of a go-to-market motion will be required for that.

The 28 companies, combined, have a partner strength of 45. As Dimension Data, we’re working with about 14 partners and we want to ensure that there’s no overlap. Some of our tradional partners are strong in their domain. However, for new age businesses, these partnerships alone may not take us where we want to go.

We will continue to work with them, but in the world of IoT and cyber security, there are many niche areas such as blockchain and AI. So there are ample opportunities for new-age partners to help us in completing the story in front of our clients.

How are you looking to bolster the growth of cybersecurity business?

Cybersecurity has been an important growth area for us. There would be almost 10-fold growth in the business in the past six years. I see equal opportunity in hybrid cloud as well.

Cybersecurity, of course, becomes very important because security is no longer just restricted to just infrastructure services. We are looking at security encompassing all the elements of infrastructure, device and applications.

With the cloud management platform of NTT, it gives us a unique position to talk to our clients about our value proposition. Furthermore, there is tremendous potential in areas like blockchain, AI/ML and RPA.

What’s your new mandate and roadmap for the company?

For the last nine years, from 2010, when NTT acquired Dimension Data, we have been a part of NTT. It’s just that we have now become NTT and the value proposition changes, because now we have a bigger story, more relevant conversation that we can have with clients. What does not change, however, is our values, principles and beliefs.

Channel Chief

‘At Oracle PartnerNetwork, we assure right benchmarking for our partners’ At the recently concluded Oracle India Summit 2019 in Mumbai, Chek Yang Ang, Head of Alliances & Channels, Technology & Cloud Platform, Asia for Oracle put the spotlight on new innovation in cloud, adding intelligent capabilities (AI/ML) to SaaS models, and being more customer-centric in approach. In an interaction with CRN India, Ang speaks about the key takeaways of the summit and directions for the channel in India

By Nivedan Prakash and Sandhya Michu For past three years, what has been the growth of the channel business for Oracle?

Looking at the channel break up- 70 per cent cloud services implementation has been done by channel partners, across Asia Pacific.

Today, 80 per cent of our tech business or tech license business is managed by our partners consistently, wherein our system business is with the channel partners. Overall our dependency on the channel ecosystem is very high. I think initially in the traditional world, a lot of stuff is resourced through partners, more and more we are seeing that it’s the services economy that the partners play an important role in moving forward. However, there are still countries, especially in the Asia Pacific, where there is financing, and value-added services that they do to keep the relationship strong. These are all quite necessary for business in some of these countries. However, in a mature country like India, the majority of the play by partners are from the services or IP build angle. There’s a lot of focus on domain expertise because in an experiential economy, we go

THE THREE MAIN CATEGORIES WHERE ORACLE DOES BEST: MANAGEABILITY OF DATA, SECURITY, AND ANALYTICS deep, and the customers demand that the partners who work with them understand the business more deeply because it’s all about pain points and business outcomes. Using innovations in the cloud allows them to scale to actually be able to distill out all the data and that brings me to a very important point.

Oracle is repositioning the company from database leader to cloud. So far, how compelling is your cloud story for partners and how are partners gaining confidence in selling Oracle's cloud ?

I think for SaaS specifically it was a different scenario about three years back. Our partners found this a compelling proposition. As you can

22 I COMPUTER RESELLER NEWS I NOVEMBER, 2019 I crn.in

see, a lot of our global award winners are the Indian partners that believed in this. And you can see that half the time, especially in countries like India, where the partners understand, they have a breadth of services and products that they are well trained in.

The expansion and the cross-sell/upsell opportunities happen every 45 days. That’s what we already know for quite some time so that is probably the answer to where we get the confidence from.

Can you talk about the much discussed Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) 2020 from a channel perspective? How do you see the channel business align with the set target?

I would say that the whole transformation, is completely dedicated to our own cloud journey, in line with what our customers are seeking as well to future-proof their business. The team is built and excel at service. We think of it as keeping it very simple and in the cloud, we have to be very simple and we want our partners to think how they want to

Oracle

work in India’s economy. We believe our ISVs, service and traditional hardware channel are trying to develop consultation and collaboration capabilities to take on the new business opportunities. Partners want a partner program that assures them of having the right benchmark. Moving to OPN 2020, we came up with a simple model or tracks– build, sell and services tracks.

cloud-specific companies. So, these are the trends that we see in the market.

Oracle has been pushing a multicloud economy with Microsoft Azure, and VMware. How do see the preparedness of your partners to tap into new opportunities?

Having understood this we have announced alliances with Microsoft Azure, and VMware. All these signify the maturity of a multi-cloud economy.

Even the vendors have come together and decided to leverage each other’s’ synergies, keeping enterprise customers’ best interests in mind first. I think partners realise that they need this coexistence, to be able to bring out the best of every technology and they wish to help the customer and the endpoint is that if we don’t win the customer, we all lose it.

While creating a channel program, what are the key imperatives that Oracle looks into and why?

Building the new partner program is no longer very simplistic like previous times, where I say, okay let’s give you 10 per cent rebates, and funds and margins. It is no longer like that, and it’s not going to be a larger size. But giving them this view, I think we have accumulated enough feedback and learnings from the last five years. This program was specifically catered to customer’s needs. The new cloud economy is no longer the same as traditional rebates and the kind of incentive-based programs because they are not participating in huge cash flow kind of things and it is all by size and to them, it’s not so interesting.

However, getting them the ability to become recognised for being a top service partner globally, brings them a confidence boost, and approval from us and also the customer. Because in order for them to actually cross that certification for being a service partner, they require what is known as CEI (Certificate of Excellence), and these are all being surveyed at the end by the end-user/customers. This ties in very well with the customer success matrix and our customer success tracking system.

In this changing market dynamics, new age partners are outspacing established channel company. Do you think, that this is going to be the way the market is going to operate and is it true only for India, or are you seeing similar trends in other parts of the region?

Since we are at the end of 2019,please briefly explain the roadmap for 2020, and what your partners can expect from Oracle and from the cloud domain?

I told you about some of our very good partners, they are not acquired by the big firms, the reason is simple, that the big firms have a built-in mechanism for customer success. That is something that is very costly, and you do not see the RoI immediately. It is an ongoing piece, and in order to sustain it, you need to scale. So in mom and pops shops with two or three people the consolidation happens.

For example, the three main categories where Oracle does best: manageability of data, security, and analytics. So, you see partners actually crowding around these very clear pillars where customers require. So, analytics partners will blend in together with EPM partners, where we are doing the planning for companies, and that’s a natural fit. You do see the front office once, where the marketing agencies are merging with some of the

Starting from December 1, 2019 this is going to kick off big time, big announcement, we have already announced at Oracle OpenWorld San Francisco 2019. Even before that we have lined up all our key partners, there is a roadmap for them to start migrating to start from where we are.

They are not starting from Zero, because two years back when we started CEI, there was a very good step for them to start their consultation on that platform of certification.

From December 1 onwards, our top partners will be migrated into the OPN 2020 track. Whereby it’s going to be very clear for the customers when they go in, they would know that these are the partners that they are very familiar, and they migrated and they are making full use of the technical and domain support from Oracle, and endorsed by us. So that’s where we are, very exciting times ahead.

COMPUTER RESELLER NEWS I NOVEMBER, 2019 I crn.in I 23

Thought Leader

Nurturing business trust amidst India’s growing trust deficit In a digital economy, factors like privacy, data security and surveillance are impacting businesses and the prevailing atmosphere of mistrust is stunting the growth of the economy, believes Punit Kapoor

T

he world is suffering from a growing trust deficit disorder. It has afflicted all social strata individuals, businesses, vendors, partners, governments, nations, and international organisations. And, the gaps are widening with the novelty of challenges posed by the pervasive digital disruptions all around us.

India, the world’s third-largest economy by purchasing power parity (PPP), is no stranger to this emerging trust deficit. From regulation, airlines to healthcare – the whole economy is bearing the brunt of the growing thrust deficit and vendors are just wonderingwhich way they can go from here?

Recent onset of GDPR and data protection bill has only added fuel to the fire, giving rise to privacy fears and shaking the confidence levels even further.

Business leaders are also worried that heightened concerns about privacy, data security and surveillance are affecting their reputations and their ability to do business in a digital economy driven by the friction-less exchange of data. What’s most worrying is that this prevailing atmosphere of mistrust is putting the economy on a setback and stunting the growth.

In the world where change is the new constant, businesses are failing to understand that the secret sauce behind any success is still rooted in symbiotic relationships, based on mutual respect and trust. Human factor

“

THE ULTIMATE PROOF OFA SUCCESSFULVENDOR AND PARTNER RELATIONSHIP IS WHEN ONE CAN TREATTHE OTHER AS PART OFTHE RESPECTIVE TEAMS

As India moves ahead with its grand goal of becoming a US$ 5 trillion economy by 2024, trust will play a key role in this transformation propelling the nation into a thriving digital-first economy. Trust between individuals, institutions private and public entities forms the crux of building an inclusive, trustworthy and sustainable data driven society. For sure, trust is the ultimate currency of a thriving economy and offers a solid foundation for driving growth, fostering rapid innovations, and strengthening the nation’s journey into an inclusive future.

The entire ecosystem must work together and embrace open collaboration, rooted in trust, to achieve a purpose-led digital growth. The way we infuse trust into our relationship will determine the magnitude of benefits we can realise. In the face of changing macro-economic and technology factors, it’s also imperative for vendors and distributors to reimagine not just their product and service offering, but the ‘relationship’ itself, which can make, or break, a strong business relationship in this lucrative economy.

Start with a compelling offering is core to the success of any business.

More so, as businesses are not just business but all about ‘relationship and rapport’ that defines return on investment. Through regular, meaningful dialogue, businesses can seed that trust and in turn foster goodwill and support.

24 I COMPUTER RESELLER NEWS I NOVEMBER, 2019 I crn.in

For vendors, the first component for success is a robust product or service that can be easily delivered to partners.

Great functionality and unique selling points (USPs), offered at a competitive price point, gives partners a compelling reason to invest in a long-term relationship with the vendor, ultimately

Commvault

passing on the benefits to customers.

It’s also important to be cognisant of changing customer needs in the country and adapt products and services accordingly. It’s very clear that the way customers are consuming services is changing. Cheap internet accessibility and rising internet penetration, especially in rural areas of India, is leading to an increase in data production. So adapting a data strategy that helps to tune in to needs of end users and tailoring your offering so that partners can meet consumers’ needs, shows an understanding of the market and its constant evolution. This will immediately build trust and goodwill between vendor and partner.

Follow through with strong delivery The product establishes the relationship, but great support gives it longevity. Sharing expertise around unique features and benefits will empower a partner to succinctly pass this knowledge onto customers, showcasing how they apply specifically to them. This flow of information from vendor, to partner to customer, benefits everyone.

Whether that is ongoing support from a maintenance point of view or pre-sales technical support and

assistance within the sales cycle itself, vendors should offer support at every stage. An excellent product with dreadful service or an average product with great service are both doomed to fail. The key is to look at the entire picture and identify how a good product that solves a real need is combined with great service to maximise adoption.

Keep it simple Technology is intended to simplify our lives, but more often than not, it does the exact opposite. The same can apply to the relationship between vendor and partner. Cumbersome help desk services or complicated product and service manuals can quickly be the undoing of any trust that has been carefully nurtured.

Vendors who address queries and problem-solving through a central point of access, like the Commvault Partner Service Desk (which prioritises speed of response and accuracy to enquiries), make it very easy for partners to help their end-users. It should never have to be a matter of ‘who you know’ in order to get the information that’s needed.

Vendors who keep support processes as easy and streamlined as possible automatically inspire trust and collaboration.

In it for the long-haul The digital evolution in India is giving rise to a deluge of business opportunities. Considering that the choice in vendors with who to partner is ever expanding, trust is at an alltime premium. Vendors committed to learning about what makes their partners tick, their challenges, buying policies, culture and regulatory constraints, will be far ahead of the curve. This will enable them to invest in mutually beneficial partnerships that operate on competence, reliability, integrity and continuous dialogue.

The ultimate proof of a successful vendor and partner relationship is when one can treat the other as part of the respective teams, giving them time and space to solve issues, and showing an interest in one another’s success. Such relationships are always at their best, when vendor and partner are both pushing in the same direction, supported by a solid foundation of trust which can inspire collaboration, decision-making, execution, accountability and performance.

(Punit Kapoor is Director – Channels & Distribution, India & SAARC, Commvault)

COMPUTER RESELLER NEWS I NOVEMBER, 2019 I crn.in I 25

Channel Chief

Trust, Transparency and Teamwork: The three pillars of Yotta Infrastructure’s partner framework Hiranandani Group's newly formed data centre arm, Yotta Infrastructure, is confident of offering a distinct value proposition to its partners and the end costomers. In an exclusive interaction with CRN India, Bhavesh Adhia, Head of Alliance and Channel Partnership, Yotta Infrastructure, explains the company's focus on the partner ecosystem and business strategies

By Nivedan Prakash Please provide an overview of Yotta Infrastructure's partner ecosystem?

Our plan is to have over 75 per cent of business through partners. This is something that we are committed to from day one. In today's business parlance, ‘cloud first’ is the term which every CIO, CTO uses. Further enhancements have been to mobile first, or mobility first. Similarly, it's ‘partner first’ for us. As part of our entire partner ecosystem, we are trying to create simple effective frameworks for all partners, built around 3Ts – Trust, Transparency and Teamwork.

We have classified our partner ecosystem into four categories. We have the Alliance Partner Framework, a simple transfer price based model for large system integrators. Yotta would provide services on transfer price to the partners and then partners will top-up and add their own services and bundle our services as part of their offerings.

We bill the partner and the partner bills the end customer. The Technology Partner Framework is created clearly for

technology partners – OEMs/ISVs/SaaS partners or any partner – who are having a specific technology offering and would work with us and bundle our services as part of their core services.

The Consulting Partner Framework focuses on partners who would like to understand more about Yotta and its differentiators. Lastly, we have the Reseller Partner Framework.

We have structured an effective reseller framework around our 3T model which will provide them: ◗ Recurring commission payouts for the entire duration of the customer contract without having the fear of losing control over their customer. That signifies the trust part. ◗ Recurring commission payout which is flat for the entire duration of the customer contract. Our partners enjoy the same commission percentage for services for entire duration of the customer contract. ◗ We have also extended complete transparency by providing partner commission based on Actual Billed

26 I COMPUTER RESELLER NEWS I NOVEMBER, 2019 I crn.in

Value (ABV) and not only on Actual Contract Value (ACV) or purchase order (PO) value. With this, the partner gets complete commission payout for all the variable service components like bandwidth, compute, storage, etc. ◗ Additional to the Reseller Partner Organisation Commission, we are also extending an additional percentage payout to the sales representatives of the partner organisation. This will be paid directly to the partner sales representatives for every deal closed by them. For us, the partner sales representative is an extended sales team member of Yotta and in this way we treat the partner sales representative the same way as we treat our own internal sales teams. ◗ We believe in complete teamwork with our partners and hence there will be only a single lead in the Yotta System, whether it comes from partner or directly to us. This will provide a seamless transaction experience for the customer and no-conflict scenario in our case as our sales teams and partner sales team work on the same

Yotta Infrastructure

segment as well? How tough is the market from Yotta's perspective, and how compelling will be your proposition?

opportunity as a unified team. ◗ Lastly, we are also introducing a Onetime Referral Commission based on Total Contract Value (TCV) for partners who would just like to refer a lead and not engage actively as part of the deal cycle.

As part of our framework, the partner has complete liberty to decide as to, what services of Yotta does he want us to work with. This can be discussed by them for every opportunity and Yotta will only work in areas where partners want us to work and not interfere with the services which they are offering to his customer.

We are onboarding partners on a continuous basis. Currently, across all the four categories, we already have 18 to 20 partners onboarded. We are in discussion with atleast another 12 to 15 partners.

As a new entrant, what is your pitch for partners?

We discussed and and took feedbacks from the existing partner community before drafting our policy framework. There is always scope for improvement and we will keep doing that as we get partner feedback on a continuous basis.

We are a new entrant, but the value proposition that we are bringing on table is tremendous, both for the partner and their end customers. We have an excellent cost savings proposition which the partner can straight away extend to their existing and new customers. Additionally, the big difference for us is that we will be only building Tier IV data centres and at the same time, provide economies of scale to our customers because of our land ownership, building ownership, our own construction, along with power generation and distribution, and the data centre domain knowledge.

What are your efforts in terms of partner enablement?

As part of our Reseller Framework, we have a standard accelerator payout, which is on top of the standard recurring commission. This will be paid to partners based on the annual business generated on a financial year

basis. Also, we are not differentiating with partners in terms of the size of the partner. The accelerator program applicable for any partner. We are providing an equal opportunity for all of them to grow with us.

Enablement is part of our partner program. When we onboard partners, there is an enablement program as part of the partner onboarding where we would go through the entire cycle of enabling them on our services. Along with data centre co-location, we will also have Yotta cloud services. We will be offering partners a complete white label reseller portal, which will provide them a single orchestration layer to sell Yotta Cloud, or third-party cloud services. Apart from this, we will also provide our partner portal for partners as self service – registration of new lead, updating opportunities, online training, commission payout statements, etc. Currently, we are on boarding our entire partner team. They would be on board by the time we go live.

As part of your enterprise business, are you focusing on large corporates or the SMB

For us, it's not about the entire spectrum of customers – SMB, midmarket, enterprise, etc. India’s data centre industry is witnessing entry of new players in the market; this is driven by many positive factors such as the government’s push towards digitisation, data localisation, cloud adoption among enterprises and increased consumption and creation of online content. This gives enough room to all data centre providers to leverage their strengths and exist in the market.

Yotta is a managed data centre service provider that designs, builds and will operate large-scale hyper density Uptime Institute Certified Tier 4 data centres. We have been able to create massive economies of scale with the help of our group companies owning the land, construction capabilities, power generation, and distribution to build highly cost effective propositions for our clients.

Our first building at Panvel’s data centre park will go live in January next year; that campus will have five buildings and 30,000 rack capacity. The first building will have 7,200 racks, which is almost 45 per cent more than any data centre in the country today.

We have a plan to build 11 data centres across Mumbai, Navi Mumbai and Chennai over the next six to seven years.

What's your broader message for your existing and prospective partners?

As Yotta, we are going to offer partners the 3T based complete framework. Partners need not worry about losing control of their customers.

Once they are on-boarded to us, they still retain the current customer control.

They would get complete lifecycle payouts for a customer opportunity also, which is flat payout, throughout the cycle. We are here to grow along with the partners. We are happy to on board all and anyone that believes in our story.

COMPUTER RESELLER NEWS I NOVEMBER, 2019 I crn.in I 27

Case Study

The digital journey at Force Motors and group companies The IT team of Force Motors did detailed analysis of vendors, their products, key differentiators, and evaluated different solutions from leading OEMs on the basis of critical parameters before arriving at the final deployment architecture

O

ne of India’s leading Fortune 500 companies, Force Motors has witnessed remarkable success since its inception in 1958.

Since the last few years, the group is on an expansion spree with path-breaking new products, JVs, and being the sole supplier for engines and axles for big names like Mercedes and BMW. The expansion outpaced the existing IT infrastructure necessitating significant enhancements. The group realised that a total infrastructure and applications revamp was essential to support its aggressive plans. The company needed an IT infrastructure that could become the foundation for all current and future group applications, thereby allowing the company’s business to continue steadily on its development path.

Business growth drives the need for change Force Motors Limited, the flagship company of the Dr. Abhay Firodia Group, has achieved new milestones reflecting growth in both organic and inorganic mode. These upgrades concurrently demanded reengineering of the business processes, necessitating infrastructure and application scalability to boost the organisation’s analytical capabilities that are extremely crucial in today’s data-driven economy. To understand how Jaya Hind Industries and Force Motors overcame this scenario, let’s take a closer look at its business.

Jaya Hind Industries (part of Dr. Abhay Firodia Group) is among India’s largest and most trusted, end-to-end solution provider for critical aluminum castings to the global OEMs. The

FORCE MOTORS WILL NOW HAVE A FUTURE-PROOF IT INFRASTRUCTURE TO BOAST OF, WHICH IS HOSTED & MANAGED IN ITS IN-HOUSE DATA CENTRE company has a wide manufacturing portfolio of critical components ranging from 5 gm upto 30 kg, serving a variety of industries in automotive as well as non-automotive OEMs. Jaya Hind Industries has one of India’s largest in-house tool design and manufacturing capability and largest die-casting capacity.

Force Motors is a leading supplier of utilitarian, low cost, mass transport vehicles like vans, trucks and buses for over 60 years. As a part of its ongoing growth plan, Force Motors has also become a leading supplier of powertrains to BMW and Mercedes. The group has also recently acquired Volkswagen’s MAN Trucks manufacturing plant in Madhya Pradesh, India, and signed a joint venture agreement with Rolls-Royce Power Systems AG to manufacture highpowered diesel engines. The company has achieved new milestones with several launches of new vehicles, designed and developed indigenously as well as with support of Global Design Houses.

The expansions had stretched the group’s IT infrastructure to its limits, hindering its ambitious business initiatives. Multiple SAP landscapes,

28 I COMPUTER RESELLER NEWS I NOVEMBER, 2019 I crn.in

dispersed Infra, necessity of faster dashboarding and analytics with drill downs to Nth KPI/Document, administrative complications, technology advancements were some of the complexities and key technical challenges on hand.

Strong business growth at Force Motors made their existing solutions inadequate in coping with the latest technological and business needs. The need for a robust, dependable and agile system thus became imperative for the planned large-scale IT transformations in the group. The program in the first year included an IT infrastructure consolidation and upgrade, S/4 HANA Conversion for 3 SAP ECC Landscapes, revamp of the Dealer Management System and implementation of HR solutions suite, Business Intelligence, etc., for the group.

IT infra solution – key parameters With a clear vision to upgrade and consolidate the group’s IT infrastructure for the applications to support the diverse business portfolio of the group, the IT leadership took charge of the situation and created a project roadmap with well-defined milestones. A SAP sizing report was created and used to study, analyse and deliberate on the requirements. Detailed analysis of onpremise vs cloud infrastructure options and thorough assessment of appliance vs SAP HANA Tailored Datacenter Integration (TDI) approach for HANA from business context were carried out before settling down on on-premise HANA Certified Appliance models.

Every miniscule technical detail was deliberated including CPU architecture

Force Motors

(Intel Skylake or Broadwell) and Memory DIMM combinations considering the size of HANA database, as SAP HANA was part of the roadmap.

Key business requirements were considered while putting together a comprehensive RFP document.

Scalability was one significant driver the solution had to be scalable enough to meet the growing business demands of the group. SAP certification was another basic parameter to ensure predictable and reliable performance of the solution. A few other crucial parameters like supported software, OS, middleware, TCO, support services and leveraging of existing investments were also vital for Force Motors.

Quality is a way of life at Force Motors. It’s ingrained in everything – culture, products and people.Technology could not be an exception to this mantra. For several months, the IT team carried out a detailed analysis of vendors and their products and key differentiators respectively. The team evaluated different solutions from leading OEMs on the basis of these critical parameters before arriving at the final deployment architecture. According to Abhijit Bhalerao, who heads the group’s IT and is an expert having led many HANA consulting projects in the past, “Many factors contributed to our decision on final Infra deployment architecture, primarily scalability, SAP certified appliances, futuristic infra, cost, relevant credentials and the fact that it allowed us maximum reutilisation of our existing investments in products that were still under support.”

Evolution towards transformative thinking A complete revamp of the IT infrastructure and business applications is a long journey, which is best taken in stages. While part deployment of infrastructure has taken place at Force Motors, the rest is in the works and moving as planned. The group has deployed SAP S/4 HANA for both Force Motors and its parent company, Jaya Hind Industries. Earlier, each business was running separate production clients on the same instance

OUR DIGITAL STRATEGY IS AN EVOLVING JOURNEYWOVEN WITH NUMEROUS SUCH THREADS TO ACHIEVE PROCESS IMPROVEMENTS, AUTOMATIONS,ENHANCED CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE BEARING IN MIND THE TECHNOLOGY DISRUPTIONS, CHANGING PRODUCT ROADMAPS,AND INDUSTRY 4.0 EXPECTATIONS

Primary Node to Secondary Node The company further plans to use SAP Fiori and SAP Core Data Services (CDS) platform to generate insights from HANA’s embedded analytics, augmented with SAP’s data warehousing with BW on HANA and Business Objects solutions. “Our digital strategy is an evolving journey woven with numerous such threads to achieve process improvements, automations, enhanced customer experience bearing in mind the technology disruptions, changing product roadmaps, and industry 4.0 expectations. New solutions like S/4 HANA, Business Intelligence, new HR solution suite, upgraded Dealer Management System and several others to be hosted on state-of-the-art infrastructure are an essential part of this digital expedition we have embarked upon,” says Bhalerao.

Force Dealer Management System (FDMS), the other major businesscritical application would be upgraded on latest technology platforms (hardware + OS + database) to give dealers a superior experience while eliminating performance bottlenecks like complex reports, browser incompatibility, etc. The new dealer management system would be hosted on Composable Infrastructure providing single pane management, templatised provisioning of resources and industry leading SAN Storage supporting True Active-Active Controller Architecture and 3-way DR.

ABHIJIT BHALERAO HEAD,IT,FORCE MOTORS GROUP

Future roadmap

“

of SAP. Now, it was decided to host two different SAP S/4 HANA landscapes in a multi-tenant deployment on SAP Certified appliances. The recent JV in power systems too has a separate green-field S/4 HANA landscape.

System downtime and data loss can be a nightmare for any organisation, which is why Force Motors needed a water-tight high availability solution.

For this, the company procured an Automated High Availability Solution to ensure smooth unattended failover from

Force Motors will now have a futureproof IT infrastructure to boast of which is hosted & managed in its in-house data centre. The new scalable architecture would lay the necessary foundation to ensure that Force Motors can sprint ahead on its ambitious plans especially with large transformations on Industry 4.0, Manufacturing Execution System (MES) & Group-wide Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) already under discussion. IT will no longer be an obstacle to growth but would be an enabler during this journey. longer be an obstacle to growth but would be an enabler during this journey.

COMPUTER RESELLER NEWS I NOVEMBER, 2019 I crn.in I 29

CXO Speak

ESDS has a strategy for expansion in 16 countries in MEA region In an exclusive interaction with CRN India, Piyush Somani, Founder, CMD & CEO, ESDS Software Solution, speaks about the company's market positioning, differentiating factors, innovations and future roadmap

By Mohit Rathod Please share your observation on recent trends in the data centre market in India Adoption of cloud and digital transformation initiatives taken by Indian enterprises and government has fueled the growth of commercial data centres in India. Though the data centre business is growing around 10 per cent CAGR, the cloud business – especially the SaaS and PaaS component of it – is growing at 40 per cent CAGR, and this will touch 50 per cent in next two years.

As the data centre simply provides power and space for the Hyper Scalers, the overall revenue of data centre companies would appear much smaller compared to the cloud service providers (CSPs) offering SaaS, PaaS and IaaS by 2024. High-quality data centres will continue to remain in demand as cloud service providers will continue to consume the majority of the space of data centres in Mumbai and Bangaluru.

Though there are data centres coming up in other cities, for some reason, the first choice of Hyper Scalers and other large banks and enterprises for their data location still remains to be Mumbai and Bengaluru.

What have been some of the key milestones for ESDS in the past few years?

Acceptance of our ‘made in India’ cloud technology by Indian enterprises, banks and government organisations

DATA CENTRE BUSINESS BECAME COMMODITISED FEW YEARS AGO, BUT CLOUD ADOPTION IS FUELLING THE GROWTH OF SAAS, PAAS AND IAAS SERVICES. CLOUD IS GROWING AT 40 PER CENT CAGR, AND IT CANNOT BE CALLED A COMMODITY BUSINESS has been a significant game-changer for ESDS. Our patented cloud technology with real-time vertical autoscaling has helped us to play a crucial role in enhancing the quality of life of 32 per cent Indian population, as they get connected to our cloud through some or the other government initiative or through the 310 banks hosted with us.

Our technology has helped us to make digital transformation affordable for our customers, and their trust in our cloud technology has enabled us to multiply our bottom line every year for the last five years. An ethical business model with high growth potential guarantees many benefits to its customers, and that’s what ESDS is doing for the nation.

30 I COMPUTER RESELLER NEWS I NOVEMBER, 2019 I crn.in

Any key trends among the customer base that you are observing? Please elaborate At this point of time, it is the banks, government, mid-size manufacturing companies and the large MNCs who are focusing on automation and digital transformation. Our offerings revolve around customers who fit in these four categories, and we are amongst top three cloud service providers in India for these verticals. Other CSPs have got a lot of start-ups and new generation innovators on their cloud, that are doing a lot of innovation compared to startups of most of the Western countries.

Lack of funding from investors and comparatively high cost of cloud technology is forcing these Caterpillars to end their journey long before they transform into Butterflies of the future.

Hopefully, the funding situation will get better for start-ups in a year or two, and cloud prices of the MNC cloud players will come down to the level of Indian CSPs.

With the government’s push on digital initiatives and ESDS being already involved in several public sector projects, what opportunities do you further see?

ESDS has an aspiration to transform the lives of one billion people through its cloud-enabled technologies. The Central Government of India and various State Governments have shown

ESDS

their faith in ESDS, and we host more than 100 different government organisations on our cloud today. So far, we have been successful in touching the lives of the 380 million Indian population, and we hope to see this number touch one billion in the next five years. World’s largest IoT project is going live on our cloud, and most of the Smart Cities in India are either having their primary or secondary workloads running on our cloud.

Many other G2C initiatives of states are also running on our cloud, and we are proud to see such a positive transformation happening across the country in the last few years. If India has to surpass GDP of Japan in next 6-7 years, then there’s a lot of work that needs to be done on all fronts and ESDS will play a crucial role in digital transformation of the country. Adoption of all the digital initiatives from the citizens will decide if we are able to become the third largest economy in the world in next 6-7 years. Marketing of all the digital initiatives to our people is going to be the biggest challenge in front of all of us.

The data centre market getting commoditised. How is ESDS positioning itself differently in the market?

Data centre business became commoditised few years ago, but cloud adoption is fuelling the growth of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS services. Cloud is growing at 40 per cent CAGR, and it cannot be called a commodity business.

There’s a lot of innovation continuously happening on SaaS, PaaS and IaaS offerings, and it will continue to occur for the next couple of years. IaaS may become a commodity sooner, but SaaS and PaaS will touch triple-digit growth at one point of time. All the next generation innovations like AI, ML, IoT, blockchain and analytics, are happening on cloud and eventually, a lot of SaaS and PaaS offerings will be launched by CSPs or their ISV partners to cater to the needs of the industry.

Technology adoption in India happened a little late compared to the developed economies, but late adoption has also given an opportunity to us to

infrastructure requirement by upto 70 per cent, resulting in huge cost savings for our customers. Our digital transformation initiative is for those customers who are not able to move to cloud or who don’t want to consider cloud to cost of cloud phobia.

What is your future roadmap in terms of offerings and business scaling?

“

WHILE WE ARE GROWING ATA BRISK PACE IN INDIA,WE ARE ALSO EXPANDING OUTSIDE THE COUNTRY.WE HAVE A STRATEGY IN PLACE FOR EXPANSION IN 16 OTHER COUNTRIES AND WE HAVE ALREADY OPENED OUR OFFICES IN FOUR OTHER COUNTRIES.WE HAVE GOTAN OPPORTUNITYTO DIGITALLY TRANSFORM SOME OFTHE COUNTRIES IN MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA

do it right or do it in a much better way than the developed economies. The Indian banking sector is a good example, as our banks are far more secure compared to the banks outside.

ESDS is the only CSP in India which can run all types of legacy applications on its cloud due to its patented vertical auto-scaling technology. Our eNlight Cloud Technology helps to cut down

At ESDS, we now talk about digital transformation, and we are giving the same message in the market. Cloud is going to be the foundation of every digital transformation initiative, so there is no doubt in customer’s mind about cloud. The biggest challenge in cloud adoption continues to be the legacy technologies or the enterprise applications which could not be moved on cloud. We know that organisations would not survive in future without digital transformation, but due to lack of a right DX partner, organisations are reluctant of taking any decisions. A lot of organisations are standing on this side of the river, scared of the unknown threats below the stream and waiting for a partner to help them cross. We are proactively reaching out to such customers and taking full ownership of platform migration, upgradation, application support, database support, and managed services along with security on all layers. We don’t call ourselves a CSP anymore, because what we are doing for our customers is far more than providing cloud services.

We are their digital transformation partner, helping them to stay relevant in their business.

While we are growing at a brisk pace in India, we are also expanding outside the country. We have a strategy in place for expansion in 16 other countries and we have already opened our offices in four other countries. We have got an opportunity to digitally transform some of the countries in Middle East and Africa.

We have seen India’s journey and we know what has made India successful, so we will be replicating best practices of India to positively transform the lives of people in the Middle East, Africa and the BIMSEC partners of India.

COMPUTER RESELLER NEWS I NOVEMBER, 2019 I crn.in I 31

Startup Corner

New benchmarks in predictive digital logistics One of India’s fastest growing startups with a 280 per cent increase in ARR year on year, FarEye is enabling predictability and real-time visibility with its digital logistics platform

By Sudipta Dev

F

arEye is a global predictive logistics platform that focuses on solving the complicated lastmile delivery issues on a mobile platform. The startup was founded in 2013 by three engineering graduates – Kushal Nahata, Gautam Kumar and Gaurav Srivastava, while they were experimenting with a few technological solutions solving everyday challenges; they identified a gap in the e-commerce industry.

“The consumers had an excellent experience till the time they were shopping online, but when it came to delivery of those orders, it becomes pathetic. They had no information when their order would arrive and in what condition. This led the team to work on a solution that enabled logistics organisations to manage the orders in an efficient and transparent manner.

After talking to several e-commerce players, FarEye tied up with Jabong to help its then logistics arm GoJavas with product delivery,” says Khushal Nahata, CEO & Co-founder, FarEye, adding that FarEye started with automating the entire process and making it digitalised so that the rider and the parcel were traceable real-time.

Everyone involved in the process – delivery boys, logistics company, ecommerce player and the customer could see immediate value in the solution, and it was an instant hit.

Starting as a bootstrapped venture, FarEye raised the first round of funding within two years and which was successfully followed by two other rounds. In November 2018, FarEye acquired Dipper Technologies, an IoT

platform that provides visibility and predictability in freight movement; reinforcing the organisation’s plans to solve challenges by having cutting edge technology for carriers and shippers in moving goods. With the acquisition, FarEye diversified its product portfolio with three offerings: FarEye Delivery, FarEye Fulfillment and FarEye Transportation.

“Today FarEye, is one of India’s fastest growing startups with a 280 per cent increase in ARR year on year. As enablers of logistics excellence, FarEye facilitates over 10 million transactions per day, enabling more than 150 enterprises across 20+ countries to achieve superior delivery experience using mobility, data analytics and automation. Over the last financial year, the company also grew its employee

32 I COMPUTER RESELLER NEWS I AUGUST, 2019 I crn.in

strength to over 300, received more than 30 awards and was recognised by Gartner eight times for its real-time visibility and vehicle routing technologies,” mentions Nahata.

Innovation focus Enabling predictability and real-time visibility of goods movements, FarEye is constantly bringing innovations to market with products like elastic logistics, food logistics, delivery happiness score and powerful analytics module, et al.

“We empower global leaders with predictive visibility to gain advanced insights and operational KPIs across all legs, modes, stakeholders, to achieve on-time deliveries at reduced costs,” says Nahata. Working and scaling with multiple clients like DHL, Blue Dart,

FarEye

Amway, FSC, Maruti Suzuki, Godrej and many others in the coming years, have helped the company realise that a tracking solution is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to solving the many problems that the logistics industry was facing.

There was a huge scope in optimising the entire process and making it much more efficient.

“Delivery is the first actual touchpoint with the end-customer for a brand in an e-commerce landscape, making it so much more important.

With the right processes in place, deliveries could be converted from just an executional task to a brand differentiator. There is a great potential for businesses to generate new revenue streams from the logistics operations and provide delightful delivery experiences to end-customers,” states Nahata, pointing out that this further led the team to build a workflow engine- a first in the industry that enables enterprises to reduce time to build new delivery processes from a quarter(s) to week(s) including testing and scaling.

Customer segments FarEye works with enterprises globally with offices in India, Singapore, Dubai, London and Chicago. Customers include industries like automotive, manufacturing, metals and mining, cement, e-commerce, retail and LSPs with solutions for all logistics legs, modes and models- dedicated fleet, outsourced and hybrid. “With our predictive visibility platform, we helped Tata Steel reduce pilferage and theft by 57 per cent, increased ‘ontime in full’ deliveries for Hilti by 6 per cent, and increased the ‘delivery-infirst-attempt’ success rate for Blue Dart by 22 per cent,” says Nahata, informing that while DHL eCommerce increased courier productivity by 15 per cent, the world’s largest pizza chain reduced delivery TAT by 27 per cent with FarEye’s gamification technology.

Explaining how FarEye is on a mission to revolutionise the logistics

IoT ecosystems ◗ Platform capabilities: A process orchestration and automation platform with DIY logistics libraries to create custom workflows as per business and regional needs ◗ Tech capabilities: Machine learning based engine to get actionable insights, to boost perfect delivery outcomes and gain predictive visibility

Future plans

“

WHETHER IT IS AN ARTIFICIAL LIMB REACHING A HOSPITAL OR AUTO PARTS REACHING A MANUFACTURING UNIT OR SIMPLY GROCERIES,THE IMPORTANCE OF DELIVERIES BEING MADE ON TIME AND IN THE RIGHT CONDITION CANNOT BE IGNORED

industry, he adds that they address key inefficiencies in processes and making them transparent. “In the face of dynamic change across all industries, no one solution fits all. We understand this and that is why we have figured out innovative solutions to the most complex of problems in the supply chain,” states Nahata.

According to him, the company stands out from the competition because of its : ◗ Integration capabilities: Pre-existing networks and seamless integration with heterogeneous IT systems like CMS, ERP, WMS, TMS &

The company is focused on removing the unpredictability from B2B & B2C deliveries and add a layer of real time visibility and predictive intelligence in freight movement. “At FarEye we aim to make a difference to how deliveries are made- making them more accurate, on-time and at a reduced cost to the shipper. Whether it is an artificial limb reaching a hospital or auto parts reaching a manufacturing unit or simply groceries, the importance of deliveries being made on time and in the right condition cannot be ignored,” says Nahata.

Clocking triple-digit revenue growth since the past three years, Nahata and his team is now targeting a 325 per cent growth in revenue this fiscal. “With three new articulated product lines and leadership position in India, Middle East and South East Asia we are now aiming for massive growth from US & Europe markets,” he remarks. The unique offering of workflow based platform coupled with data and intelligence enables enterprises to invest not just for today but also for future needs in the supply chain.

India is currently the fastest growing market for FarEye. Here the company envisions further growth opportunity, specifically on the transportation side. Nahata believes that a lot of manufacturers are now looking at reducing their transportation cost. This is inspired from the ecommerce wave; that if ecommerce organisations can move goods in one day or two days, the same timelines can be expected in heavy goods movements as well.

COMPUTER RESELLER NEWS I AUGUST, 2019 I crn.in I 33

CXO Speak

SAS will continue to emphasise industry specific solutions relevant to India With increasing focus on adoption of emerging technologies and Industry 4.0, the Indian manufacturing sector presents numerous opportunities for SAS. Kunal Aman, Head Marketing, SAS India, shares how the company is helping manufacturing organisations in digital transformation and how SAS is further planning to leverage opportunities

By Mohit Rathod What’s your observation on the adoption of new-age technologies in the manufacturing sector?

Historically, manufacturing has been quite conservative in adoption of technology. There has been considerable hype built up around digital transformation and Industry 4.0 in the past few years, but most manufacturers in India are yet to realise the dream, with many of them struggling to even get started.

However, with the world clearly moving towards Industry 4.0, and the industry aiming to boost the contribution of the manufacturing sector from 15 per cent to 25 per cent of GDP, India will have no choice, but to take the leap and move along.

Even the government recognises the need for an impetus to push towards India’s vision of becoming a manufacturing hub. AI, IoT, big data, VR and 3D printing are central to the themes of factory automation, PLM and the digital enterprise which form the pillars of Industry 4.0. Similarly, the use of robotics and automation is streamlining the supply chain.

The need of the hour is clearly to push-up the levels of tech maturity in the industry – but making this happen

calls for a mindset shift and the intent to integrate these technologies across not only within their supply chains, but also into the hearts of their businesses.

How is analytics being a critical component of the digital transformation journey in the manufacturing sector?

In today’s world, data is the lifeblood of every organisation and the premise of digital transformation only accentuates the importance of analytics in leveraging the potential of this data.

The emergence of new types of transactions and IoT data means organisations are dealing with data flowing at sub-second latency. This data can be leveraged in various ways to support business outcomes.

Demand management is another area where the use of analytics can be vital to ensure supply plans are aligned and inventory is optimised to match fluctuating customer needs in near real time. Analytics can be effectively leveraged to translate demand signals – like seasonality, price and promotions into a more effective, market-driven response.

With the rise of connected factories, to benefit from the promise of IIoT

34 I COMPUTER RESELLER NEWS I NOVEMBER, 2019 I crn.in

(Industrial internet of things), data, manufacturers can now shift from batch analyses in traditional data centers to real-time analytics embedded in the stream of data itself.

Similarly, smart cars and connected vehicles are gaining traction. The fusion of analytics with sensor data is allowing manufacturers to bring new digitally delivered services and conveniences to consumers, while enabling unprecedented levels of vehicle quality and reliability.

How is SAS constantly innovating to cater to the industry’s needs?

Please elaborate on some of your key offerings.

With over 40 years of analytics innovation, SAS is a trusted analytics powerhouse for organisations seeking immediate value from their data. We regularly invest over 25 per cent of our revenues back into R&D to ensure our technologies stay ahead of the curve.

We have a deep bench of analytics solutions and broad industry knowledge that we put to work for our clients.

The SAS Platform enables our customers to orchestrate their entire analytics journey – from data to

SAS India

tangible results. SAS Viya, which is part of the SAS Platform, enables everyone – data scientists, business analysts, developers and executives alike – to collaborate and realise innovative results faster. It is a scalable, cloud-ready and open platform that supports programming not only in SAS, but also in other languages like Python, R, Java and Lua which has been a big shift for us.

We have flexible licensing and pricing options to accommodate our customers’ current and future needs. A lot on the cloud front is changing; we are bringing in a comprehensive range of cloud offerings and deployment patterns in public or private clouds. We also work with major cloud providers such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google and others today to streamline SAS deployments in public clouds.

We recently announced that we would be investing US$ 1 billion in artificial intelligence in the next three years. This commitment builds on our already strong AI foundation, which includes advanced analytics, machine learning, deep learning, NLP and computer vision.

We are seeing a strong uptake on our solutions for IoT – our edge to enterprise platform manages diverse data – whether it is in motion, on the edge or at rest. Connecting with customers through IoT mean new opportunities and service offerings – whether it is early warning signals, service parts optimisation, suspicious claims or warranty analytics.

How do you see the Indian manufacturing market, as compared to the global market?

Do you see any similarities or differences?

While the Indian manufacturing sector has been improving steadily, along with the government push with initiatives such as Make in India have strengthened our position as a global manufacturing leader in recent years, the fact remains that Indian manufacturers still lag their global peers by a big margin. The gap remains across infrastructure, automation, technology adoption and most

the right product available just when the customer needs it, and transforming demand strategy at Asian Paints to reshape its consumer focus.

The key objective at Asian Paints was to leverage forecasting and optimisation analytics to enhance its processes and achieve greater accuracy in demand planning. Honda uses SAS Analytics to turn service repair data into cost savings, and the company has improved warranty claims and forecast usage for parts and services. The objective here was twofold: To develop stronger bonds with customers by ensuring dealers have indemand parts available for customer repairs as well as enable the claims group and field personnel with the ability to quickly and accurately identify claims that were incomplete, inaccurate or non-compliant.

Lockheed Martin is revolutionising aircraft maintenance with the SAS Platform. The company uses AI, IoT and advanced analytics to predict when parts will fail, keeping more aircraft airborne for vital missions worldwide.

“

SAS INDIA IS UNIQUELY POSITIONED TO HELP ORGANISATIONS TURN LARGE AMOUNTS OF DATA THEYARE CHURNING OUT INTO KNOWLEDGE THEY CAN USE

How do you plan to further leverage the opportunities in India?

importantly in mind-sets.

Our large number of small manufacturing firms also create hurdles to productivity as enterprises are unable to raise capital to invest in much needed machinery. Similarly, upgrading skills and know-how is difficult for such firms. These are some of the reasons, among many, India’s annual manufacturing labour productivity stands at US$ 6,000 per employee, while China’s is over US$ 60,000. So at this point, it’s probably easier to point differences than similarities.

Could you share some of your customer success stories?

Asian Paints is using SAS to make

With digitisation finding a place, both on the government as well as corporate agendas, the rate at which data is getting generated is just exponential. All this data is a potential goldmine for organisations and government agencies alike. In addition, with mobility becoming all pervasive, India’s AI and analytics market presents an interesting opportunity for organisations. Consequently, we see a strong market potential in India.

SAS India is uniquely positioned to help organisations turn large amounts of data they are churning out into knowledge they can use. SAS will continue to emphasise industryspecific solutions relevant to India, building on SAS’ strong foundation of AI, analytics and data management technologies. For example, helping supply chain optimisation, asset performance, omni-channel marketing, quality analytics or demand forecasting in manufacturing.

COMPUTER RESELLER NEWS I NOVEMBER, 2019 I crn.in I 35

Event

Pink City Jaipur bets big on digital transformation wave Face-to-face interactions with channel partners and SMB companies, set the platform for dynamic discussions on their digital transformation journey

By Sandhya Michu

A

head of the festival celebrations, CRN recently held its fourth edition of Explore Bharat campaign in state capital of Rajasthan, Jaipur. The event witnessed the participation of over 100 SMBs and IT companies at Hotel Clarks Amer, Jaipur. The event was presented by key sponsors including Samsung Enterprise mobility, Schneider Electric, Netmagic and ESDS Software Solutions on October 10-11, 2019. Explore Bharat, is a unique platform which brings vendors, SMBs and partners together, aiming to create a knowledge sharing platform.

Interestingly, the SMB sector of Jaipur has been exploring and embracing emerging technologies to gain a competitive edge. Today, most of the SMB companies are digitally connected and making an effort to improve the best delivery of customer services .

On October 10, 2019 CRN's Explore Bharat Series was for channel was supported by the state IT associationRajasthan Computer Traders Association (RCTA). The event kickstarted with the welcome address followed by a special address made by Mihir Sharma, President, RCTA. In his address he informed the IT channel of Jaipur about digital opportunities for channels. He touched upon the potential of technology in SMB sector and pointed out that the growing base of startups in Jaipur can bring more lucrative opportunities for IT channel who are

otherwise facing stiff competition from ecommerce companies.

The next speaker was Abhishek Srivastav, Deputy General Manager, Channel Sales, Samsung Enterprise Business who shared the enterprise mobility solution from the house of Samsung. He highlighted the scope and new avenues for partners by integrating KNOX solution for better delivery of customer services. His

presentation was descriptive and comprehensive for the channel.

After Samsung, the next speaker in line was from Schneider Electric, Ankit Gaur, Assistant Sales Manage-North, who spoke about the energy efficient UPS solutions and how these are meeting the need of hyper connected workplaces with zero downtime.

Following the Schneider Electric presentation, Prince Dhawan, Assistant General Manager, Sales and Business Develpment, Netmagic, a NTT Communication group, took to the stage and shared the reach and wide portfolio of data centres. He spoke about the channel's road map and benefits of becoming a partner of

36 I COMPUTER RESELLER NEWS I NOVEMBER, 2019 I crn.in

Netmagic before the large gathering of IT channel.

Soon after the technology sessions, a power packed panel discussion took place where the leading and IT veterans of Jaipur joined the session. Kailash Gupta of ETSC Computers,Praveen Jain of Elegant Computech, Ashim Bhasin from BB Professionals Marketing, Dhiraj Vijayvargia of Priyam Infosystems and Bhupender Kumar, Chief Technology Officer from ZNet Technologies were among the panelists. They were of the collective view for building a collaborative ecosystem for each other and looking out for an innovative ways to disrupt their traditional businesses.

The session was moderated by Sandhya Michu, Principal Correspondent, CRN and Express Computer.

On the second day of Explore Bharat series, a conference for SMB companies was organised. The SMB event was well supported by Federation of Rajasthan Trade and Industry (FORTI), and close to 80 small and mid sized companies participated covering food, handloom, healthcare, pharma,textiles and many others fields. The SMB track was sponsored by Samsung Enterprise mobility, Schneider Electric and ESDS Software Solution.

Arvind Agarwal, Advisory Board, FORTI and President, Arya Group of Colleges was the keynote speaker at the event. In his delivery, he highlighted the role of FORTI and how the federation is pushing its members to go digital. He delved into the

CRN Explore Bharat: Jaipur

Mihir Sharma, President, RCTA

Abhishek Srivastav, Deputy General Manager, Channel Sales, Samsung Enterprise Business

Ankur Mishra, Sr Manager Sales, ESDS Software Solution

Prince Dhawan, AGM-Channel, Netmagic Solutions

Esteemed panelists discuss the future of IT channel

Prateek Pareek, Chief Manager, Enterprise Sales, Samsung Enterprise Business

Panelists: Vinay Joshi, MD, Wish Empire, Abhrajit De, Sr. VP, Genus, Arvind Agarwal, Advisory Board Forti & President, Arya Group of Colleges (From R-L) . The session was moderated by Sandhya Michu of CRN

Ankit Gaur, Assistant Sales Manager-North, Schneider Electric

emerging technologies like AI, automation, cloud, blockchain and data analytics and how technology can enables SMBs companies to become the upcoming large enterprises of India.

Prateek Pareek, Chief Manager, Enterprise Sales from Samsung Enterprise Business, who is located in Jaipur showcased before the SMBs, the spread and reach of his company's mobility solutions and offerings for SMBs and how these products are improving the overall productivity and driving excellent results in the SMB space and others.

Pareek spoke about the power of Samsung Knox mobile security platform making Samsung smartphones, tablets and wearable among the most reliable

SMB track concluded with an interactive panel discussion. The distinguished panelists were Vinay Joshi, MD, Wish Empire; Abhrajit De, Sr VP, IT, Genus and Arvind Agarwal, Advisory Board, FORTI and President, Arya Group of Colleges.

Each panelist shared their digital journey covering the challenges and business benefits that technology has provided to their business expansions.

Panelists were of the collective view that digital transformation is a reality and SMBs are looking for ways to transform their offline business into online. Both SMB and partner panel discussions were moderated by Sandhya Michu, Principal Correspondent, CRN.

mobile devices available.

Following this, Ankit Gaur, Assistant Sales Manage-North, Schneider Electric took over the stage and showcased the energy efficient and connected offerings suited to SMB customers. In the descriptive presentation he spoke about the changing need of data centre and energy-efficient solutions, which are cost-effective for SMBs. Next in line was a joint presentation

by Mahavir Goel, Regional Head, Enterprise (North), ESDS Software Solution and Ankur Mishra, Sr. Sales Manager. The presenters spoke about ESDS' journey in India as a growing cloud player and highlighted the wide range of solutions for SMBs. After the technology sessions, the

COMPUTER RESELLER NEWS I NOVEMBER, 2019 I crn.in I 37

Thought Leader

HPE India

Intelligence that redefines mission critical storage IT teams in financial services industry, who were bogged down by laborious and error prone semi-manual processes, can now manage an entire technology stack through software, says Rajesh Dhar, Senior Director – Hybrid IT, HPE India

I

n today’s digital age, financial organisations are producing and processing ever-growing volumes of sensitive customer and client data.

Hence, it is essential they find new ways to manage their infrastructure operations and data storage. If not, they will be unable to speed up mission critical applications, unlock digital innovation, stay ahead of the competition and mitigate risk.

IT teams in financial institutions are finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with the demands of both new and existing mission critical workloads, for which traditional models of storage are no longer fit for purpose. Confined and consumed with provisioning, troubleshooting and supporting infrastructure, financial IT systems currently sacrifice agility for reliability.

While there are storage solutions that may be fast and reliable, but they can fall short when it comes to agility and simplicity. Hence, financial organisations require a new approach in high-end storage.

Traditionally, issues with availability arise from systems that sit above the data storage function, such as the network, server and virtualisation.

Nowadays, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) can allow businesses to bypass these barriers, look beyond them, and at the same time, predict and prevent any disruptions that might occur in the infrastructure stack. This reduces the amount of time that IT teams spend on bog-standard maintenance, thereby freeing up their time to focus on more value-add activities.

“

TRADITIONALLY, ISSUES WITH AVAILABILITYARISE FROM SYSTEMS THAT SIT ABOVE THE DATA STORAGE FUNCTION, SUCH AS THE NETWORK, SERVER AND VIRTUALISATION

Moreover, when the intelligence from AI and ML is coupled with data mobility it brings a new level of functionality, so data can move across primary, secondary, and private/public cloud tiers seamlessly, securely, and

38 I COMPUTER RESELLER NEWS I NOVEMBER, 2019 I crn.in

cost-effectively. This enables simple cloud-based archive or disaster recovery while continuing to use onpremises infrastructure for fast, reliable operational recovery and test/dev. Such high-end storage software can also be set up in minutes, thereby streamlining workflows.

Historically, the financial services industry has dealt with laborious and error prone semi-manual processes with scripts, but now, it’s possible to automate this. It’s done by employing infrastructure-as-code, which means it’s possible to manage an entire technology stack through software. A technology like HPE’s Primera delivers instant access to data with storage that can be set up in minutes, upgrades transparently, and is distributed as-a-service. It also offers an ondemand experience which gives users the agility of the cloud. In conjunction with HPE Infosight, the industry’s most advanced AI platform for operations, it delivers significant breakthroughs and reduces time spent deploying, managing and scaling storage by up to 93 per cent. It also brings simplicity to any mission critical apps.

For the financial services industry, having this intelligent high-end storage technology means that a naturally risk adverse industry can move forward without the worries of downtime and data outages that have been an issue for years. The level of intelligence and efficiency will ultimately be passed onto the customers who now expect the speeds from their financial service providers as they do from other industries.

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