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Vol 2. No. 11 February, 2020 Chairman of the Board Viveck Goenka
SEAGATE: REDEFINING DATA STORAGE INFRASTRUCTURE
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Sr. Vice President - BPD Neil Viegas Asst. Vice President - BPD Harit Mohanty Editor Srikanth RP* Sr. Associate Editor Sudipta Dev Sr. Assistant Editor Nivedan Prakash Delhi Sandhya Michu Vishwas Dass Mumbai Mohit Rathod Salvi Mittal Abhishek Raval
Nivedan Prakash nivedan.prakash@expressindia.com
Bengaluru Moumita Deb Choudhury DESIGN Asst. Art Director Pravin Temble Chief Designer Prasad Tate Senior Graphic Designer Rekha Bisht Layout Designer Vinayak Mestry Photo Editor Sandeep Patil DIGITALTEAM Head of Internet Viraj Mehta MARKETING Ravi Nair Prabhas Jha Durgaprasad Talithaya Debnarayan Dutta Ajanta Sengupta Deepak Patel Praveen Soman Vivek Thakur
ata is what drives business decisions today. For organisations, the ability to access their data quickly, efficiently, and predictably can provide a competitive edge in a crowded and disruptive marketplace. In fact, the leading industry experts believe that the growth of data and storage is going to be the biggest factor driving IT infrastructure change. One of the key initiators of the astounding growth rate of data today is the explosion of unstructured data. As a result, companies need a new generation of scale-out storage engineered to store and manage unstructured and file-based data at web scale. Unstructured data is also creating the need for scale-out storage such as highly scalable NAS solutions and softwaredefined storage. Forrester believes 2020 will be a key year for data strategy, leading to significant increases in spending on data storage and data management. According to the research firm, enterprises looking to push more into the cloud and exploit edge computing are also staring at a new reality where the transactional cost of data processing and movement will
outstrip storage. Advanced firms will understand the benefits of getting all of this right and will double or triple their data strategy budget to soar past competitors. Sensing these changing market landscape, the global data storage leader, Seagate, is offering the widest range of world-class product portfolio, from purpose-built drives for different usage scenarios to modular storage system components. As a leader in data storage solutions, Seagate continues to develop the industry’s broadest range of products to enable enterprises to select the right solution for their unique requirements, and to meet the ever-changing dynamics of IT. The company is also focusing on helping partners drive profitability by enabling them to embrace and monetise the new opportunities around edge computing and artificial intelligence. Seagate sees itself not just as a storage provider, but a business partner who can build best-inclass solutions together with its channel partners – from the first stage of projects to developing a solutions pipe line to provide consultation, establish systems and provide technical support.
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Content
5 | Cover Story
12 | Channel Chief
Avaya encourages partners to invest in customer experience, value-addition and new solutions
SEAGATE AND CHANNEL PARTNERS LEVERAGE THE DATA BOOM Seagate Technology is helping its channel partners drive profitability by monetising new opportunities driven by data growth
Channel Chief 14 | Hitachi Vantara’s focus is on how to drive solutions, not products Anupam Nagar, Senior Director, Channels & Alliance, Hitachi Vantara
CXO Speak 16 | India biggest growth market in APAC for Salesforce Charles Woodhall, VP, Partner Sales Industries and Strategic Alliances, APAC, Salesforce
Partners are key to Avaya’s marketplace, as the company focuses on providing higher value to customers and build stickiness with them. In an exclusive interaction, Vaibhav Kshatriya – Director, Channels & Services Sales, Avaya India, shares the company’s key focus areas and roadmap for 2020
24 | Forcepoint uses AI, ML, analytics to keep organisations unbugged by cyber threats Kevin Isaac, Chief Revenue Officer, Forcepoint
36 | Kolkata based Supertron enters VAD business V K Bhandari, CMD, Supertron
26 | The Indian market is a very promising economic entity Vinay Sinha, Managing Director, Sales, AMD India
31 | Progressive Infotech streamlines IT operations of Medanta Prateek Garg, Founder, Progressive Infotech
28 | Alibaba bets big on next generation relational database PolarDB Dr Feifei Li, VP of Alibaba Group, President & Senior Fellow of Database Systems, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence
Case Study
Startup Corner 34 | Making payments effortless and safe Anubhav Saxena, Founder, AS Technolutions
18 | Amplifier is Array’s first ‘Make in India’ initiative, outside US market Michael Zhao, President and CEO, Array Networks
Partner Corner
20 | Educational institutes looking at scaling-up their existing security and surveillance systems Sudhindra Holla, Director, Axis Communications, India & SAARC
30 | Clover Infotech leads in taking Oracle Cloud solution to BFSI customers Shrikant Navelkar, Director, Clover Infotech
22 | STPI looks at transforming India into a software product nation Dr Omkar Rai, Director General, Software Technology Parks of India
32 | Digital Track offers seamless 38 | ISODA to celebrate the 10th digital transformation to enterprises edition of TechSummit at Baku Jürgen Thiel, Head of Global Sales & Manasi Saha, President, Business Development, Paessler AG ISODA
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37 | Augmented and Virtual Reality tech for experiential training Vijay Karunakaran, CEO, TNQ InGage
Association News
SEAGATE AND CHANNEL PARTNERS LEVERAGE THE DATA BOOM
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Cover Story
Sameer Bhatia, Director of Asia Pacific Consumer Business Group & Country Manager,SAARC & India, Seagate Technology
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Seagate
With the advent of the fourth wave of industrial revolution within IT, Seagate Technology's focus is on helping partners drive profitability by enabling them to embrace and monetise the new opportunities around edge computing and artificial intelligence. Powered by IT 4.0 - where connected homes, connected cities, AI-powered factories, autonomous vehicles, and media and entertainment content drive explosive data growth, there is a great opportunity for the company and its channel partners
Moumita Deb Choudhury moumita.choudhury@expressindia.com
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he global storage company, Seagate Technology, incorporated in 1979, has many firsts to its credit. In 1980, Seagate launched the world’s first PC hard drive which
Take video analytics as an example.The continued adoption of 4K resolution cameras and the proliferation of IoTdevices are all contributing to the exponential growth in storage needs
was 5MB at a cost of US$ 1,500. In 2010, the company introduced the world’s first integrated solidstate hybrid drive, combining SSD-like speeds with HDD’s higher capacities and better
economies. In 2012, Seagate was the first to achieve storage density of one terabit (one trillion bits) per square inch, in a HAMR demonstration. Fast forward to present, where data is the new fuel, oil, currency - Seagate is in such a position where most of the blue chip companies of the world nestle Seagate’s storage in the core to breed their digital transformation further. Seagate is seeing enormous growth due to a surge globally in data creation and consumption. And in India too, over the past couple of years, Seagate is seeing a strong growth not only on the consumer side but also enterprise. While storage solutions catering to consumer needs – from everyday users and creative professionals to gamers comprise a larger chunk of our business here in India, the company is witnessing an increase in demand from and consequently, a shift towards enterprise. Businesses of all sizes and across sectors are beginning to capitalise the potential of data to create value, and hence, are investing in building robust data
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Cover Story
storage and management infrastructure. “Take video analytics as an example. The continued adoption of 4K resolution cameras and the proliferation of IoT devices are all contributing to the exponential growth in storage needs. We are seeing huge growth in video analytics as businesses realise its power to enable smart decision making and how it can return benefits to their customers. This trend is set to grow further over the next few years,” says Sameer Bhatia, Director of Asia Pacific Consumer Business Group and Country Manager for SAARC & India, Seagate Technology. Mirroring global data trends, the increased use of technologies like IoT and AI on the back of the advent of 5G will translate to an increased demand for real-time data processing, along with a need for data agility in India. “With nearly 30 per cent of the global datasphere being real-time by 2025, businesses in India are also poised to invest in robust infrastructure to support the ability to process more data at the Edge for faster and more efficient extraction of the value of data. As they increase their Edge investment, enterprises must have the right setup to withstand the huge increases in data volume and costs that are coming
As they increase their Edge investment,enterprises must have the right setup to withstand the huge increases in data volume and costs that are coming down the line down the line. The future will be about Edge and cloud working together to help businesses make smarter decisions instantly and drive up productivity, efficiency and customer satisfaction,” informs Bhatia.
Focused strategy “As Henry Ford rightly said, 'If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself.' We believe in a win-win relationship for the channel partners and distributors. We always work towards profitability to maintain a right RoI for their business. So as a company we will keep working to grow our channel partners and enable and equip them
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to have a healthy business growth and be successful,” stresses Bhatia. “In engaging with customers, ensuring we have a good understanding of their strategy and future plans, enables us to more effectively assess their needs and deliver the solutions and technology that they need to succeed in a business environment that is more competitive than ever. In order to do so, we are continuously innovating to help our customers meet the changing infrastructure and data management needs that this explosive data growth demands. Our focus is to deliver the industry’s best performing drives that not offer higher capacity and unparalleled reliability, while maintaining a high degree of data integrity,” he adds. “One such innovation is Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology, which enables us to deliver higher capacity in the industry’s standard form factor, thereby providing customers with the best-cost-per-TB. To meet customer demand, our advanced engineering team is delivering the future of highcapacity hard drives now. Using HAMR technology, we recently built and tested the world’s first formatted and fully functioning 16TB enterprise hard drive platform in a standard 3.5inch form factor — the highest capacity hard drives ever produced, and we are currently on-track to grow beyond 20TB per drive by 2020,” points out Bhatia. According to him, the value potential of data is inhibited if the ability to rapidly access data does not keep pace with all that capacity, which is why there must also be increased performance alongside higher capacity. “Our answer to this is our Multi Actuator technology (MACH.2), which can double the data performance of future generation hard drives. That means customers with data-intensive applications will be able to continue to enjoy the highest levels of hard drive performance, while simultaneously keeping up with the need to manage vast, ever-increasing quantities of data,” he adds.
Seagate
PARTNER SPEAK end-to-end solutions we offer. In addition, our entry in to new business segments like gaming solutions and becoming a vendor for large e-commerce players fortifies our presence in today’s times of digital disruption. The introduction and implementation of efficient processes and in-depth client experience have been crucial in providing us with an edge over our peers,” emphasises Bhandari.
Growing together
VK Bhandari, CMD, Supertron Electronics
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T product distribution and services company, Supertron Electronics has created a niche for itself in the market through its product and solution offerings over the years. “We also drive through value-added approach based on the business requirements. We act as the extended arms of vendors and believe in creating business opportunities for brands we get associated with by reaching out to Tier 2 and Tier 3 locations and geographies. We have increased our coverage of urban and semiurban locations in India on one hand and grew our trade partners on the other,” says VK Bhandari, CMD, Supertron Electronics. “We have also strengthened our indirect reach, assisting the secondary sale of partners through the appointment of executives who help grow the business, supplementing the role played by trade partners whose focus is often scattered across a number of products, thus, playing a steroidal role. Our expertise is our reach and robust logistics system,” adds Bhandari.
Value addition In this highly competitive environment, an organisation needs to develop differentiation in order to break the clutter and stand out as preferred partners to its customers. “One of the key differentiators is our penetration and reach. We are not only the logistic partner for our vendors, but
We have been receiving endless support and cooperation from Seagate, in every possible way we add value in distribution by creating a market for brands. We work very closely with our vendors based on their specific needs and their roles as national distributors or regional distributors. Our services and support have enabled partners to work with Supertron comfortably and benefit from
Bhandari points out, “It has been almost two decades since we are a Seagate partner – over 15 years as a national distributor, and about five years prior to that as a sub-distributor. The tie-up with Seagate was the turning point of our entire business. We started growing fast and spread our wings across India. With a strengthened partnership with Seagate, we are in a win-win relationship, achieving new heights of ROI success and business profitability.” “Seagate Insider program for partners has given us a remarkable opportunity to grow and expand our business as it provides product knowledge, marketing materials, service support tools, and technical training - these resources help educate partners on the vast product line of Seagate. It is beneficial in helping us grow with Seagate and deepen the partner relationships,” Bhandari informs. “We have been receiving endless support and cooperation from Seagate, in every possible way - from main distribution frame to claim settlements, schemes to purchase price, purchase order, sales invoice, after-sales services, and many more. Seagate’s regional heads are equally supportive to drive the business, its development and growth,” stresses Bhandari.
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Cover Story
Data dividends Data is the bedrock of India’s Digital Economy. “As governments and businesses in India accelerate on their journey to digital transformation, there will inevitably be a data deluge. A solid digital strategy will be key for success in the data age for organisations, with data technologies becoming central for productivity expansion, data monetisation, value creation and data security," he says. There will also be rapid growth in real-time and embedded data, with the country’s Smart Cities program and the National Institution for Transforming India’s (NITI Aayog) AI policy utilising more IoT and AI applications. In addition to that, more and more businesses are looking into turning unstructured data into business intelligence. “To withstand the rigours of such market needs, Seagate offers the widest range of world-class product portfolio, from purpose-built drives for different usage scenarios to modular storage system components,” claims Bhatia. Accordingly, there is an increased demand for real-time dataprocessing, as well as a need for data agility. Low-latency will be required in the type of digital storage used to manage data. Organisations will also need to build on their central cloud computing architecture and develop
the ability to process – and, equally importantly, securely store – more data at the Edge.
Data driven digital disruption “IoT real-time data will make up a large portion of this, with more than 150 billion devices that will be connected across the global datasphere. Data is also the lifeblood behind AI applications. Increased AI adoption will naturally lead to growth in data volumes, with organisations across industries stepping up the frequency, flexibility and immediacy of data analysis to drive strategic decisions and actions,” he adds. With unprecedented data growth, enterprises today need to develop a robust data storage, management and capitalisation strategy to be
As a leader in data storage solutions,Seagate continues to develop the industry’s broadest range of products to enable enterprises to select the right solution for their unique requirements
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successful. Importantly, organisations also need to have data agility – the ability to extract the value of data fast and efficiently. Not all data is created equal, and having data agility determines an organisations’ success through how well they can react to customers’ requirements, and market changes. “As a leader in data storage solutions, Seagate continues to develop the industry’s broadest range of products to enable enterprises to select the right solution for their unique requirements, and to meet the ever-changing dynamics of IT,” he says.
Commitment towards enabling partners “With the advent of the fourth wave of industrial revolution within IT, our focus is on helping partners drive profitability by enabling them to embrace and monetise the new opportunities around edge computing and artificial intelligence. Powered by IT 4.0 - where connected homes, connected cities, AI-powered factories, autonomous vehicles, and media and entertainment content drive explosive data growth, there lies a tremendous opportunity for us and our channel partners, as businesses in India are beginning to invest in robust infrastructure to support the ability to process more data at the Edge for
Seagate
faster and more efficient extraction of the value of data,” points out Bhatia. Seagate’s partners play a vital role in its overall business. “We connect with our customers and partners in the markets through the Seagate Insider partner program. Seagate has been continuously building a robust partner base through this program, providing comprehensive training sessions and seminars as well as working on co-marketing initiatives. Seagate also continuously provides training for partners to better understand evolving opportunities in addition to regular products and technology trainings,” he says. “As a brand we believe in growing the partner ecosystem and right set of partnerships. A lot of our focus is on being close to the reseller partners, understand their needs and enable them with right set of knowledge and tools, so that they can keep pace with the latest products and offerings and serve their customers with right products. Our number of partners has definitely been increasing, and we are growing rapidly with the right partnerships. Backed by our robust partner and reseller network, we continue to bring to market innovative solutions that will meet evolving business and consumer needs, deliver solutions that enterprises need in a business environment that is more competitive than ever,” he further adds. Exponential growth of data volumes translates to demand for storage capacity. Seagate is focused on developing the enhanced drives and storage solutions to solve our customers’ most critical business problems as their storage workload gets heavier than ever before. “Navigating to find and build the right data management infrastructure requires experience, expertise and wisdom. It’s about knowing what is needed, understanding why it is needed and implementing the optimal solution. That is why the channels and Seagate’s partners play a vital role,” says Bhatia. According to Bhatia, Seagate has been a leader in the storage space
Striving to make business a win-win for our partners at all times,we see ourselves as not just a storage provider,but a business partner who can build best-in-class solutions together with our channel partners with its latest product and innovation. In India, Seagate commands this leadership position this would not have been possible without our distributors and channel partners. “Striving to make business a win-win for our partners at all times, we see ourselves as not just a storage provider, but a business partner who can build best-in-class solutions together with our channel partners – from the first stage of projects to developing a solutions pipeline to provide consultation, establish systems and provide technical support. Working towards their business success across all the cities in India is one of the key focus areas for us at Seagate each day,” he adds. Bhatia further informs, “Through our distributors, we offer lots of programs to our channel partners to achieve the above objectives, which are in line with the IT industry and channel practices in India. Some of the programs to name are Seagate Regional Meets and Seagate Surveillance Weeks, as well as participation in trade shows such as IFSEC International, SecuTech, and Broadcast India to address the right audience, customers, CIO roundtables, events sponsorships, sales staff trainings and certifications for our partner staff.” “Seagate’s SkyHawk Partner App is a great example of how we empower our partners and customers. Designed specifically for India, the SkyHawk Partner App enables
partners to calculate the storage needs and investment required on the spot. It provides online warranty service booking and tracking, and provides instant connectivity to SeaCare centres. Our aim is to support our partners in maximising their results by offering the best and most optimal storage solutions and services. This app has reached 10,000 downloads,” he adds. All the above activities helps the channel partners to understand the products and services better and offer the right set of products to end users based on their specific needs and requirement. Emphasising the importance of the channel partners Bhatia stresses, “Our channel partners are critical to our growth here in India and act as extension of our business since they help us reach business segments that we want to expand into. Our partners’ success translates to our success and hence, we are committed to driving channel growth and development by value addition,” Pointing out that the market in India is on an upward trajectory, with widespread digital deployments and a remarkable demand for storing, analysing and managing large quantities of data efficiently, Bhatia says, “Owing to rising adoption of AI and proliferation of IoT, consumers and enterprises are generating and aggregating data in humongous volumes. To cater to these opportunities, our partners play a critical role in marketing Seagate’s innovative solutions that will meet evolving enterprise and consumer needs. At the same time, we learn from our partners’ data challenges and develop solutions together. On the other hand, partners benefit from their association with Seagate with access to industry’s best performing drives as well as necessary know-how and tools to serve their customers with right products. They are empowered by ready access to solutions, playbooks, and technical experts that enable them to solve problems for their customers in the best possible manner.”
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Channel Chief
Avaya encourages partners to invest in customer experience, value-addition and new solutions Partners are key to Avaya’s marketplace, as the company focuses on providing higher value to customers and build stickiness with them. In an exclusive interaction, Vaibhav Kshatriya, Director, Channels & Services Sales, Avaya India, shares the company’s key focus areas and roadmap for 2020 By Nivedan Prakash What’s your vision for the organisation and how partners can become major contributors towards the success of Avaya? I was given the charter of spearheading Avaya’s channel business about six months ago, and since then, my focus has been on doing new things. We have partners who have been with us for a long time, so they understand Avaya well. But we have been also continuing to innovate, and work with large system integrators – getting them on board, and knowing their expectations. Our overall focus is on new products, solutions, and deployment strategies. I believe that partners are our first customers, and partners’ profitability is our responsibility as well. In terms of partner interactions, our focus has been on value-addition and building soft skills among them. We also train, interact, and work with the partners to pass on that value to the end customers. We are insisting partners to embrace new solutions and deployment models, as customers are embarking on a digital
disruption journey. We have been able to address the customer base, not just through innovation, but also with our partner ecosystem and the Avaya & Friends initiative. The market has changed and if we don’t insist our partners to embrace new solutions and deployment models, we would lose a chunk of the market that needs to be addressed. However, this doesn’t affect our traditional business as well as relationship with the partners addressing this segment.
Avaya already has a significant number of partners in India. Are you looking at a different set of opportunities which will be serviced by these mega-sized partners? The mega-sized partners are the ones that are involved in large projects such as smart cities, and emergency-dial projects. They are the ones who have created broad-based solution sets. Some of the names include the likes of Honeywell and
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L&T Infotech among others. Our experience in this space has been really good. Our wins last year have almost doubled. There are few RFPs that we are fighting, and our win has been decent in the government segment as well. We have more than 50 per cent market share in the large business segment. For the next one to two years, the business will largely be driven from this segment.
What sort of efforts is Avaya putting in building stickiness with customers? We listen to the customers and keep innovating solution sets, while aligning to their requirements. When a customer buys a product in a traditional market, they buy product as well as maintenance. The customer’s next cycle of purchase gets decided by the value that we provide. It is not just about the solutions, but the idea is also about serviceability. We focus on making these services easier for partners, and for the customers to be able to work with us. Ease of doing business with us
Avaya
and our partners is an important facet, followed by technology. This builds stickiness with the customers.
How is the company further going to accelerate the cloud growth journey? We have partnerships with IBM and Microsoft, wherein we offer solutions for our end customers. We understand that different customers will require different solutions, because cloud is customer-centric in nature. Our strategy goes across public, private and on-premise. Other players have started talking about it now, but we have been active in private cloud solutions for 12 years now. For instance, we have deployed this solution for Bharati Airtel. We have already rolled out the IBM data centre solutions in Europe, some part of APAC, and in the US. Whereas, we will make further announcements with Microsoft soon. Multi-cloud has become the new norm, because customers are increasingly talking about being able to focus on the core business and being light-footed – the infrastructure footprint has to be lesser for them. The new-age companies, especially, are talking more on these lines.
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MULTI-CLOUD HAS BECOME THE NEW NORM,BECAUSE CUSTOMERS ARE INCREASINGLYTALKING ABOUT BEING ABLE TO FOCUS ON THE CORE BUSINESS AND BEING LIGHT-FOOTED – THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOOTPRINT HAS TO BE LESSER FOR THEM VAIBHAV KSHATRIYA, DIRECTOR,CHANNELS & SERVICES SALES,AVAYA INDIA
How has been the reponse to the Avaya & Friends initiative? Are you also looking at onboarding new partners?
How are you ensuring a win-win market environment for traditional and new-age partners?
What is Avaya’s roadmap for 2020, especially from partner perspective?
Especially in the India market, the initiative has made a decent impact. We have been able to create an end-toend solution set and bring value for customer – not just monetary value, but also in terms of the impact of the business. The initiative has been fruitful and continues to make an impact for us. We have invested in onboarding and working with the ISV partners. There is also a development team that works with partners that we bring in. We are definitely looking at on-boarding new partners and going to the market with them. These will include ISV partners, and new startups. We are also just not looking at solutions; we want to ensure that partners remain with the customer for a longer cycle.
The new-age partners are not competing our existing channel in the marketplace. They are instead supporting our channel ecosystem. We conduct many training activities for our partners. Our GTM strategy is based completely on partners. Only some key global customers are serviced directly by Avaya. Our products business is conducted entirely through partners. In terms of maximising the partner play, we are encouraging them to do more; and we are reinventing the wheel of our partner ecosystem – in terms of program and investment. We are also encouraging partners to invest in customer experience and demos, because customer experience is an on-going investment.
We are doing several things for increasing the wallet share for our partners. We have broad-based our solution sets and we have brought a larger solution set for partners. We are focusing on providing higher value to customers. With the training and partner readiness, the solutions are not just limited to infrastructure; they extend to cloud as well. With the Avaya & Friends initiative, the amount of offerings has become much larger for the partners. Furthermore, the Avaya Edge Program is helping them from people perspective as well. The program also ensures that profitability is aligned to market needs and feedback. The trust factor is equally important; all our partners have been long-term partners. We are also looking at the mid-market segment, offering a flexible cloud solution set.
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Channel Chief
Hitachi Vantara’s focus is on how to drive solutions, not products The new program for the channel partners is based on how to drive solutions, not products at Hitachi Vantara. Anupam Nagar, Senior Director, Channels & Alliance, Hitachi Vantara says that the joint business planning process focuses on core initiatives, solutions, a route to market and where the partners want to go By Abhishek Raval What is the GTM and channel strategy of Hitachi Vantara? At Hitachi Vantara we are extremely proud of our close alignment with our key partners to bring our data operations advantage to our customers. We have a strong and growing ecosystem of partners in India who can take our solutions, integrate them with their IP and services and accelerate the rollout of IT and oT solutions locally and support our government’s vision of digitally empowered citizens. Hitachi Vantara’s market focus is helping customers to improve their business outcomes with innovative technology solutions that will not only change the way companies operate, but also how the world works. The company’s mission is that its customers begin to “own” their data and learn how to maximise their analytical capabilities to improve their business models. Hitachi-Vantara’s solutions give customers the keys to unlocking the value of what’s happening within their enterprise. We have highly structured academyled training courses and certification levels in Hitachi Certified Professional Program for our partners. The channel strategy is aimed at arming our partners to demonstrate incremental value to our customers via Data Stairway to Value.
The Data Stairway to Value aligns the investments to deliver the return our customers are looking for from our products and solutions. It reinforces the integrated nature of all the investments, and it is a system that pays off at each level. This framework function in four steps: Store, Enrich, Activate and Monetise. ◗ Store: Store and protect the data at the lowest cost and right service levels across traditional and private/public/multi/hybrid cloud solutions. With an agile data infrastructure that optimises information asset storage, management and protection while optimising service standards, innovation can be enabled throughout the company. ◗ Enrich: Use metadata and analytic insights to generate new “context” that makes data more intelligent. Our customers can link this data to discover conceptual relationships that are otherwise invisible and apply those insights to support the innovations that drive value for the business. ◗ Activate: Integrate and orchestrate data assets and use analytics to generate actionable insights for every interaction. In this step, our customers can discover, integrate and orchestrate data to drive business value, either by boosting productivity or creating new revenue opportunities. Activating their
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data enables them to apply advanced analytics that generates actionable insights for every enterprise interaction and application. ◗ Monetise: Deliver outcomes that capture the economic value of all data inside company/enterprise and beyond. Monetising data is about taking its latent value and connecting that value to an entirely new business opportunity and generate new sources of revenue and allow mature businesses to diversify for growth. With the continued development of Hitachi Vantara, which helps clients optimise their information quality, the company has made substantial investments in its partner sector as a critical part of its expansion. We provide our partners with the best-inclass certification program, which strengthens their professional capabilities to meet market needs and reach their business goals. We conduct periodical training for partners and regularly update them on our products and solutions through regular webinars. Also, we organise annual partner events for our partners to interact with our executives face-toface and discuss the latest industry trends and the ever-changing market needs. The last India CIO & Partner Summit was successfully held in Sri Lanka in February.
Hitachi Vantara
Which are the recent developments and initiatives in Hitachi Vantara’s channel partner program? One of our unique propositions is the adoption of value co-creation approach with our partners with a single objective of helping our customers in their journey of Digital Transformation. The new program is based on how to drive solutions, not products. Everything that has been built now is about the solution and the joint business planning process that focuses on core initiatives, solutions, a route to market and where our partners want to go. The new Cisco and Hitachi Adaptive Solutions for Converged Infrastructure build on our global Cisco partnership, paving the way for expanding our collaboration into new areas and the new Cisco and Hitachi Adaptive Solutions for Converged Infrastructure is a Cisco Validated Design (CVD) that combines the companies’ technologies including Hitachi’s storage and Cisco’s compute and networking. Hitachi VSP PRO, which was launched in September 2018, is a prime example of the company’s dedication to simplifying and improving delivery cycles for its partners. Hitachi VSP PRO solutions are specifically developed for the partner community. They enable partners to quickly and easily quote small, medium, large and extra-large systems using an automatic, selfservice model, which reduces the process from hours to minutes. The key differentiator would be Hitachi Vantara’s innovative models of selling to customers via these focused partners. We will continue to collaborate with our partners to penetrate new markets and increase our market share.
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ONE OF OUR UNIQUE PROPOSITIONS IS THE ADOPTION OFVALUE CO-CREATION APPROACH WITH OUR PARTNERS WITH A SINGLE OBJECTIVE OF HELPING OUR CUSTOMERS IN THEIR JOURNEY OF DIGITALTRANSFORMATION ANUPAM NAGAR, SENIOR DIRECTOR,CHANNELS & ALLIANCE,HITACHI VANTARA
outlining clear expectations. The increased storage, analytics, smart spaces solutions and cloudmigration demand from segments like public sector, technical services, and BFSI has driven the growth of all our solutions in India. Customers in these segments as well as all other segments where technology refresh, capacity expansion, modernisation initiatives and investments in emerging technologies continuously drive the incremental growth in data are customers that our partners can address to augment their business.
Which verticals and technologies should channel partners focus on, to grow their business?
Can you share the initiatives taken by Hitachi Vantara to upskill and reskill the employees working for the partner community?
Our vision is to create a selfsustaining, value selling and profitable ecosystem of partners which forms the crux of our channel strategy in India. One of our key objectives is to bring about more clarity on partner roles by
Our partner ecosystem is highly critical to our success. As we look to broaden our ecosystem expertise and deepen our cloud, analytics, and IoT services and offerings, we will continue to expand our solution-capable partner
ecosystem to accelerate co-creation and innovation and to help our customers fully leverage their data to drive extraordinary outcomes. To ensure this we invest significantly in our Partner Enablement initiatives – these initiatives provide the partner with technical and solution knowledge of all our products and solutions as well as guides them through various sales plays on how to solve their customers problems. The knowledge sharing sessions happen across several different mediums – via Webinars / face-to-face sessions / hands-on lab sessions. We encourage all our partners resources attending these trainings and enablement sessions to get certified on sales and services of our products and solutions, and provide them scholarships to accelerate this process. As a part of partner program, we also align attractive rebates to reward our partners who have required certified resources aligned to their business plan.
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CXO Speak
India biggest growth market in APAC for Salesforce Global CRM firm Salesforce is bullish on its growth in India. Charles Woodhall, Vice President, Partner Sales Industries and Strategic Alliances, APAC, Salesforce talks to CRN India and sheds light on the company's recent endeavours and developments and how it is moving hand-in-hand with the channel partners to accomplish the larger goals By Srikanth RP and Moumita Deb Choudhury
Can you please shed light on channel enablement and strategies for the coming year? The amount of investments which the partner ecosystem is making into India as a domestic market is unprecedented. And I realise this while conversing with partners like Cognizant, Capgemini, Accenture, Deloitte and others. The opportunities domestically as opposed to typically where the larger companies were looking at the modern outsourcing facility has changed dramatically. We
have had over 4,000 net new certifications in India in the last twelve months and the majority of those are now looking at how they can serve the local market. That is actually a very different story to what was happening over the last couple of years. And a primary reason for this is that the amount of digital transformation which customers are embarking on now in is at a level which we did not witness in the past two or three years. And so the partner opportunity is to capture that within the marketplace itself.
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Will this phenomenon increase in the coming days? Dramatically. We have seen that across the region there has been over 80 per cent increase in net new partners and certifications and around 30 per cent year-on-year increase in certain locations. So it has been phenomenal.
Is India contributing to the numbers significantly? Yes, the numbers are relatively reflective of the India marketplace as well. Although its difficult to give
Salesforce
Do you have digital scorecards or digital maturity framework for the partners?
exact number since the partners here can be playing in both domestic and international market. But we have seen around 4,000 new certifications or certified individuals and a 20 per cent increase.
We have a very scripted out enablement structure where our partners actually become subject matter experts. They go through trainings and get the certification. Recently, we have announced a new area which is architecture specialists, so there are now four new architect programs where partners can become a subject matter architect with certification. Our focus is not just the growth in the organisation, but growth of partners and customers as well, and that has been a big driver for the ecosystem. So, the small cards which we put in place to measure successive partners is focused not just on growth, but on the end-to-end customer success. That is going to be a change for us.
From a product segment perspective, which products are leading when it comes to partner adoptions and what partners prefer in terms of implementation and deployment? Are there any specific trends you see? There is a huge amount of headroom and opportunity in both sales and service. We are seeing some transition in areas such as CPQ and there is a considerable amount of interest around that. With the acquisition of MuleSoft, we are really looking forward to the next 12 months and expecting a larger presence within the domestic market place. That is where we are seeing many trends this year.
What are the opportunities for partners in terms of the mobile? How do you see that affecting the partners? If we look at field service, which we are looking at the moment, there is a huge amount of opportunity within the marketplace still. I do not think the opportunities are tapering, in fact it is increasing as far as the partner ecosystem is concerned. The field service is in line with some of the acquisitions which have been made recently is around the India domestic marketplace, in particular. Huge amount of applications can be used across healthcare, life sciences, financial, manufacturing sectors, etc. Talking to some customers I came to know how they were creating micro loans and that they were using the Salesforce platform to help automate them. Thus, there is a range of applications which we have seen.
Recently you have partnered with Mahindra and Mahindra, how are the channel partners playing a role? Today our partners can play multiple roles. They are the source of new
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HUGE AMOUNT OF APPLICATIONS CAN BE USED ACROSS HEALTHCARE,LIFE SCIENCES,FINANCIAL, MANUFACTURING SECTORS, ETC.SOME CUSTOMERS WERE CREATING MICRO LOANS AND THEYWERE USING THE SALESFORCE PLATFORM TO HELPAUTOMATE THEM
Talking to the CIOs, we understand that unified customer view is one trend which is picking up, infact you have products that amplifies that. How do you see those products picking up?
CHARLES WOODHALL, VICE PRESIDENT,PARTNER SALES INDUSTRIES AND STRATEGIC ALLIANCES, APAC,SALESFORCE
opportunities with customers. We are also seeing a lot of cross collaboration between different partners and they are utilising each others' expertise and leveraging that. The partners are subject matter experts and have horizontal expertise in the marketplace. So, the role partners played earlier involved mostly implementation of solutions but now the expectation from their role is to be a visionary. Customers expect more consulting with regards to adopting our platform and the benefits around it in the medium and long term. That is the transformation and the evolution from a marketplace today.
As we look at the customer holistically, it includes the entire lifecycle be it sales endeavour, service initiatives, marketing, the digital transformation so on and so forth. If you look at the integration layer which we have with MuleSoft now and the reaction to the recent acquisition of Tableau as well which gives the single payment layer plus the artificial intelligence layer, all these enables a holistic overview of what a customer is trying to achieve in the marketplace today no matter which vertical they are playing in. This is quite exciting.
For Salesforce, how is the India market fairing as compared to other geographies? India is actually huge in terms of growth. If I look across Asia Pacific, the largest growth is coming out of India market and that is likely to continue. It is one of the largest investment markets for us and if you look at partner ecosystem, the leading partner ecosystem growth is happening here.
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CXO Speak
Amplifier is Array’s first ‘Make in India’ initiative, outside US market Silicon Valley based, Application Delivery Controllers major, Array Networks, has launched it's first fully designed and developed Application Traffic Generator tool – Amplifier, for Indian enterprises. The product is a result of the company's investment last year into R&D worth US$ 20 million (about `140 crore). Michael Zhao, President and CEO, Array Networks, shares Amplifier's journey and plans for amplifying this 'Make in India' product to global markets By Sandhya Michu Can you talk about the journey of Amplifier? How important is this achievement for Array Networks? Launch of the Amplifier is a big milestone for us in India. I have had a strong belief in the Indian R&D team that they can develop a product on their own and sell to other parts of the world. Thereby, we started Amplifier R&D work in India in 2012 at Array Center for Technology Innovation (ACTI), a product innovation and design centre located in Bangalore. We made a significant investment in designing and developing this product to address the growing need for application load capacity at our customers. Currently, the product is being rolled out for the Indian customers and we will be testing and marketing the product in the next two-three quarters before we expand into newer markets like China. As part of our business model, the Amplifier will be available at a price point of US$ 5,000 and US$ 20,000. Additionally, customers can use it as a service as well. It will cater to both CAPEX and OPEX oriented customers.
How is Amplifier going to address the need for BFSI and government application delivery need ?
Today, several mobile payment gateways are having a huge volume of transactions per day. Latency in application deliver can cost US$ 2 million loss per second. It is an important gateway to stay alive and will assure on the most important day of business, servers and security is up. Looking at the business demand, the Amplifier can help our customers in simulating and generate thousands and millions of transaction requests. Amplifier is a new and futuristic load generating system that conducts
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performance tests and enables testing of networking devices in terms of stress, scalability and throughput, transactions, and many other system attributes. So the launch of the Amplifier is very exciting for us.
With the launch of Amplifier, will there be a change in Array's product offerings ? Traditionally, Array Networks provides IT security solutions, optimises application performance and facilitates related transactions. We
Array Networks
have the application delivery networking platforms like AVP, AVX, and now ATG-Array Traffic Generator(Amplifier). The new tool, Amplifier, will be improving the performance and reduce the latency of our application delivery platform-AVP. Nevertheless, down the road, the company will be focusing more on security. Security is our vision, we will be launching our another ‘Make in India’ initiative security product in 2020. With this success we will do more, we are doing a pilot of security products. Presently, we working towards channel development and looking for IoT focused security partners.
Can you share India's growth story for Array Networks ? India is one of the fastest-growing regions for Array Networks and we are excited about our growth momentum for the last eleven years. Last year, we were successful in generating 70 per cent of our revenue from the Government, smart cities and banks. With this new
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WE WANTTO MAKE ITA GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT CENTRE.AS PART OF OUR AMPLIFIER'S EXPANSION PLAN,ITWILL BE AVAILABLE TO CHINA MARKETS. HOWEVER,THE US MARKET WILLWAIT FOR AWHILE,AS IT IS A MATURED ONE AND USING EXPENSIVE SOLUTIONS ALREADY MICHAELZHAO, PRESIDENTAND CEO, ARRAY NETWORKS
round of investment coming in, we are positioned to expand our product line and manpower in the region.
Will the centre in India be working on products only for India or for the global market as well? Globally, definitely to start with. We want to make it a global development centre. As part of our Amplifier's expansion plan, it will be available to China markets. However, the US market will wait for a while as it is a matured market and using expensive solutions already. Having said, we will not label the Amplifier as 'Make in India' product outside Indian markets. From a competition point of view, we don't think there is enough solution at this price point. We will gain an early mover advantage in the Indian market. The people we are hiring are top-notch developers doing hardcore R&D and product development. We have about 50 employees. My target is to grow it to 75 by the year-end. Hopefully, we can grow more but it’s certainly hard to find talented people.
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CXO Speak
Educational institutes looking at scaling-up their existing security and surveillance systems Education is a focus area for Axis Communications, as educational institutes want to secure their premises and have a better response system in place in order to prevent threats, says Sudhindra Holla, Director, Axis Communications, India & SAARC By Mohit Rathod How has been 2019 for Axis Communications in terms of business? We cater to the entire gamut of security and surveillance, and we sell our products and solutions through our ecosystem of channel partners, across segments such as enterprise, commercial, government, education sector, etc. Overall, from Axis Communications’ business perspective, 2019 has been a good year. This is mainly a result of the market economics and market drivers. Despite some fluctuations in the market, the overall market sentiment remained positive. With enterprise and government investments, we have seen positive trends in the market, driving overall growth for Axis Communications.
What have been the key customer trends in the market, that have acted as growth drivers? Among some of the trends that we have witnessed, migration from analog to network camera is a significant one, because of the benefits associated with network cameras – more control, higher resolution, ease of management, open systems, etc. Another trend is around addition of other things along with videos, such as integration of access control, audio, radar systems; and
CYBERSECURITY IS A KEY CONCERN FOR CUSTOMERS; THEY DON’T WANT TO COMPROMISE, BECAUSE THEY ARE ANSWERABLE TO INVESTORS. FROM A CAMERA TECHNOLOGY PERSPECTIVE, THERE’S A NEED FOR CAMERAS TO PROVIDE EXCELLENT FOOTAGES IN LOW LIGHT CONDITIONS having a common system. This has brought a transition to integrated systems, from siloed systems. These elements, combined, form a response to a particular threat or incident. Cybersecurity is becoming more and more important for customers. For instance, if a camera is vulnerable, attackers can get into the system and cause theft of sensitive data. Cybersecurity is a key concern for customers; they don’t want to compromise, because they are answerable to investors. From a camera technology perspective, there’s a need for cameras to provide excellent footages in low light conditions.
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With widespread adoption of technologies in the education sector, and the focus on security, what’s the significance of the education segment for Axis Communications? Overall, education is an important segment for us. One of the prime reasons include the focus on safety. Educational institutes want to secure their premises and have a better response system in place in order to prevent threats. Bigger campuses also look at perimeter security to protect themselves from intruders. We see varying degrees of needs and requirements, depending on the campus size, lighting condition, etc. Going further, we also see a trend wherein, educational institutes want to use our audio systems on their networks. For background music and public announcement systems, customers want to use audio as an addon to videos. Network audio system is becoming an emerging trend among educational institutes. From an Axis positioning perspective, we have total end-to-end solutions – including software, audio, video, radar and access control. This addresses the needs of the education segment. We see a trend wherein customers in this segment want to scale their existing
Axis Communications
security and audio systems. The blend and customer needs and our offerings position us well in the market. We see education as a growing market segment, from our solutions standpoint.
How is the adoption of technology in the Indian education sector, and which are the areas that educational institutes need to focus on? The education sector has some form of existing technology in place, ranging across varied degrees. Security is definitely on the agenda for customers in this segment. Depending on the types of institutes, educational institutes already have some form of security infrastructure in place. As they realise that analog systems may not be able to address the increasing demands, they look at migration to new-age systems.
Having business presence across various countries, do you see any similarities or differences between the India and overseas market? The needs among customers are the same across all markets; therefore, our solution offerings are also the same. Our approach to customer remains consistent in different markets. From a customer trends and demand standpoint as well, there are no differences among these markets.
From a channel ecosystem standpoint, how strongly are your partners equipped to drive business from the education segment? We are closely associated with our channel partners. We might influence the customer in terms of right technology adoption, but we don’t sell directly to our end customers. Beyond products and solutions, customers also have ancillary requirements such as integration, support, training, onsite engineering, etc. To order to our channel partners to meet these, we provide them with indepth training in the form of Academy Training – a certification training by Axis. We also conduct in-depth bootcamp training, which covers
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AS EDUCATION INSTITUTES REALISE THATANALOG SYSTEMS MAY NOT BE ABLE TO ADDRESS THE INCREASING DEMANDS,THEY LOOKAT MIGRATION TO NEW-AGE SYSTEMS SUDHINDRA HOLLA, DIRECTOR,AXIS COMMUNICATIONS,INDIA & SAARC
solution configuration, integration of different systems, and making the software work on it. Further-more, we also organise a series of webinars and face-to-face training sessions, which give an overview about our solutions and their benefits for channel partners and customers. We truly enable our channel partners, and as we move up the partner chain, our gold partners are the most enabled ones, because they possess detailed knowledge across our portfolio of offerings. They also have the capabilities to propose a solution to customers and integrate it. Whenever a demand arises from a customer, we cater to it through our partners.
What is Axis Communications’ roadmap and focus areas for 2020? We are looking at few things; one of
them includes making a deep imprint in our focus segments – commercial, city surveillance, smart city projects. We want to penetrate deeper into these segments in terms of engagements, customer enablement. With our end-to-end portfolio of offerings, we would like to further strengthen our position in the education segment. We provide simple solutions that integrate complex technologies. We will also enhance the knowledge of our channel partners, and develop more gold partners, so that can address different market segments. We are also looking at channel expansion into Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. For instance, we have expanded our reach in the East region and we further plan to beef up out footprint there.
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CXO Speak
STPI looks at transforming India into a software product nation Dr Omkar Rai, Director General, Software Technology Parks of India, in conversation with Sandhya Michu shares how an autonomous society like STPI, under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India, is building a sustainable startup ecosystem with a pool of industry collaborations and chief mentors to make India a software product country Can you explain the transformation journey of STPI from its inception days ? STPI was formed in 1991 in order to ease out import and export hiccups. Software exports was not recognised by the customs department and that’s when the ministry created this platform to ease this system and we were the only single window to look after it. Secondly, the most challenging aspect at that point of time was to provide internet to the software exporters as many businesses required to get in touch with their counterparts and required high-speed secure internet connections. STPI was licensed to provide them satellite-based internet gateways and provided small and medium entrepreneurs the opportunity to work with it. The idea was to facilitate import-export, and we did well, if you look at the export made by STPI in 2018-19 it has crossed `4 lakh 24 thousand crores and this is almost 50 per cent of the total exports from India. Now the point is that since India has 56 per cent of the total share in outsourcing IT service globally, but in terms of software products, the growth is not significant. As of now in terms of software products market, India is about US$ 512 billion, so the country’s share was nearly 8.2 per cent globally, till 2019.
WE ARE NOW LOOKING TOWARDS THOSE SERVICES THROUGH WHICH WE CAN MENTOR THE STARTUPS FROM THE INITIAL STAGE TO THEIR PRODUCT COMPLETION. FOR THIS, WE ARE GOING TO LAUNCH A PROGRAM WHICH WILL BE CALLED AS NEXT-GEN INCUBATION PROGRAM People often raise questions that we do not have Facebook, WhatsApp, Adobe or Google. When STPI was created we were required to create jobs to put our talent in the outsourcing industry. Today, we have about 4.1 million professionals working in the field of IT service industry. The idea is to transform and capitalise the experience and talent of the IT service industry. The entire success the startup industry of India is witnessing is because of the strong IT services in India. Therefore, we are working very closely with MeitY and a large number of stakeholders to build a platform where we can focus on the domainspecific incubators which can be made operational in the most practical and
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professional manner. STPI is endeavoring to create Centres of Excellence (COEs) and be functional in the emerging technologies as there are more opportunities and values in technologies like AI, IoT. We have launched six COEs in 2019 and 15 more are planned for in 2020. We want to work for transformation of India as a software product nation.
How do you view the existing startup base in India? What does STPI bring to the table? Looking at the past of STPI, we have implemented the Infrastructure Service Provider (ISP) Scheme, wherein we incentivised the creation of infrastructure. We created IT Parks that came up in Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai, and Bangalore. Incubators require some infrastructure and so we have created this infrastructure all over the country and have promoted these incubators. In 2020, we are coming up with a new avatar in terms of letter and spirit and it is on the ground rolling. And as a part of the government, we have been interfacing with them since inception. The startup system requires nurturing, collaboration is to be looked at in a big and important way. Collaboration in terms that we provide an environment in which we can depute a veteran of the industry as a chief mentor of the COE.
STPI
STPI is planning to make India a product nation. Can you share the roadmap ? For making India a product nation, you have to create startups and they will create products. India is now becoming an electronics manufacturing nation, but of course in the value chain we are a little at the middle somewhere. The component industry is also picking up. And once this evolves, we will be go ahead in terms of electronics manufacturing. As I said, manufacturing is a challenge for us for many reasons but now things are lined up with state governments, the central government easing the norms, easing of doing business, labour reforms. I think it’s all going in a good direction and slowly the knowledge is being built up within India. All these clusters are doing well and it is creating a great foundation for large scale manufacturing. Additionally, STPI is transforming its incubation services into smart
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FOR MAKING INDIAA PRODUCT NATION,YOU HAVE TO CREATE STARTUPS AND THEYWILL CREATE PRODUCTS.INDIA IS NOW BECOMING AN ELECTRONICS MANUFACTURING NATION, BUT OF COURSE IN THE VALUE CHAIN WE ARE A LITTLE AT THE MIDDLE SOMEWHERE. BUTTHE COMPONENT INDUSTRY IS ALSO PICKING UP DR OMKAR RAI, DIRECTOR GENERAL,SOFTWARE TECHNOLOGY PARKS OF INDIA
incubation services.We are giving world-class infrastructure services. But we are now looking towards those services through which we can mentor the startups from the initial stage to their product completion. For this, we are going to launch a program which will be called as next-gen incubation program.It is in finalisation stage and very soon we’ll be able to launch this at a few centres as a pilot. In this particular program, we are just providing services through which we can map the lifecycle of the incubator, since the inception of their ideas to the product in the market. The highlight of this model is that we are only looking for collaborations. In our country we do not have proper collaborations - in academies, people are doing research but are not able to market their products in the industry. Basically, STPI is now transforming towards serving the needs of those startups and now we are motivating them to create new products.
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CXO Speak
Forcepoint uses AI, ML, analytics to keep organisations unbugged by cyber threats Cybersecurity or cyber-attack is a chicken or egg first parody. The one that can only be elucidated by cutting edge technology, right implementation and a human centric approach. With threats revving up at a rapid pace, it is quiet unsettling for organisations, big and small, but there are also definite ways of not giving in to the bad actors, believe experts. Kevin Isaac, Chief Revenue Officer, Forcepoint talks at length to CRN about cybersecurity, threats, the human element and much more By Moumita Deb Choudhury Is cybersecurity becoming an important discussion at the board room level? Also, what according to you, would be the trends in cybersecurity going forward? Talking about the trends globally, in cyber, human is at the core of the network. The focus of RSA security convention in 2020 is going to be exactly this – the human. Referring to the user, I always try to compare it to the application layer of the firewall and that way we are no longer talking about layer 7 of the firewall, we are talking about layer 8 and that is the human. Cybersecurity is also focused on data, it is an asset for companies. Today data being the new oil, the intersection between humans, human behaviour and data is the new horizon for cybersecurity. That is where we are seeing the trends moving globally and companies trying to find a way to manage that new reality. At a macro level, in cybersecurity, we are seeing a move to analytics with Machine Learning (ML) dominating the larger part of the discussion. Today we prefer to talk
WE ARE WITNESSING A TREND, WHERE CISOS ARE REQUIRED TO BE A PART OF THE BOARDROOM. MORE MEMBERS WITH CYBER CAPABILITY ARE BEING BROUGHT ON BOARD TO CHALLENGE THE CISO RATHER THAN JUST ACCEPT WHAT HE SAYS about thick data rather than big data. Thick data is the use of ML integrated with human intelligence. Forcepoint’s X-Labs builds on behavioural analytics and human behaviour, and use thick data as a tool. The market is clearly moving towards AI. Large enterprises, including fintech companies have huge amount of data around the world are buying user behaviour analytics technology and trying to understand and provide reports to the concerned person. However, the underlying problem
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statement here is that they have been unable to use their technology to actively stop threats, because the report is not in real time. Therefore, the next step to ensure cybersecurity is to be able to integrate behaviour with security technology to actually proactively stop bad actors from intruding. Most of the companies are facing a big challenge in this area. We are also witnessing a trend, where CISOs are required to be a part of the boardroom more than ever before. And more members with cyber capability are being brought on board, so that they can challenge the CISO rather than just accept what he says. Also, there is a need for more sophisticated approaches for reducing risk, building capabilities around human behaviour and integrating them with the cyber. Substantial work around it is happening in the United States and in the Western Europe at the moment.
Delving deep into the human centric approach, can you broadly explain what does it really mean in relation to data?
Forcepoint
Fundamentally, in the past, when we spoke about cybersecurity, it would mean companies adopting protective measures against cyber criminals getting into the network. But the old lifecycle of Assess, Protect, Respond, Recover – is a thing of the past now. Although hygiene in required in the environment, but the fact today is that people are already on the network and it is no longer about keeping people out, they are already inside. The threats now-a-days are different in nature and more evolved. There three types of threats on the network. First is the accidental insider, an employee who accidentally falls prey transferring a file mistakenly, or an employee can receive a fake email, and click on it thereby giving their credentials to a hacker, and allowing them to enter the network. The second is the malicious insider – a person who has access to data and intentionally wants to harm the organisation. And then the third is the the hacker himself on the network. Therefore, zero trust has become a very interesting subject. Zero trust is creating an environment where people cannot do anything on the network. This means people are given specific access for their job. Now, while that may be a good start, what if the person on the network is not who they say they are? Zero trust does not really work when the person is on the network, shouldn’t be there in the first place. So we have situations where through phishing, people’s identities can be compromised, and they can get access to the network, or even the two factor authentication, whereby they can spoof the access in some way and get on the network. Equifax, Target and British Airways are all good examples where companies have spent considerably on security, but not to much avail. This is because they have not taken into account the human element – the individuals on the network- and that is because we are still operating on wrong paradigms which works around systems, processes, departments and users groups. Ideally system or network should be subservient to what people are doing.
From the house of Forcepoint, are there some innovative technologies to tackle these issues?
When it comes to India, what would be your broader goals, your GTM strategies?
We are not the only security company in the world dealing with human behaviour, but there are interesting things that makes us unique. We are taking human behaviour and building a patent around a technology called ERS or Entity Risk Score. Entity envelopes a wide spectrum, it could be a human on the network or it could be a printer or even an air conditioning system. Remember, with Target the hackers came in through the air conditioning system and then attacked the point of sales system. With the entity risk score we are able to apply a risk scoring mechanism to a prospect. In case of humans, it can monitor whether they are on vacation? Are they accessing the system in the right way? Which country they are in? These factors start to change the baseline of the risk score from zero to 100. As one moves through different thresholds, we are able to use the ERS, to dynamically change a person’s policy on the network. So at the individual level, we can change the DLP policy.
India has been a very important market for Forcepoint and every year we have been adding people and growing our business. Earlier in India there was customer support branch in Chennai with almost 50 people but now we have expanded further to Bangalore, which houses another 140 – 150 people who are taking care of some of the customers from India, Asia Pacific and global. In India we also have offices in Mumbai and Delhi. Since, we have invested heavily in the last 18 months, in Bangalore there will be more initiatives coming from us. It is really a great market for us to be able to invest in and benefit from. We have invested heavily in three key centres including Boston in USA for behavioural analytics; in Cork, in Ireland for dynamic Edge technology and in Bangalore for other cutting-edge technologies. We perceive these centres as being core for our future in terms of how we develop our future technologies. In terms of the market, India for us is a shining light and in Asia, India is definitely one of the key countries.
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CXO Speak
The Indian market is a very promising economic entity A large sector of India’s data centre challenges that CIO’s face today is reducing budgets, higher compute requirements, security and increased complexity of software within their environment, says Vinay Sinha, Managing Director, Sales, AMD India By Abhishek Raval What are the recent launches of 2019 towards customer satisfaction through data centres? At AMD, we believe that setting up a comprehensive, strategic and reliable data centre environment can empower modern dynamic businesses. In this age of rampant digital transformation, streamlining technologies and processes can make the organisation more agile and efficient leading to faster decisionmaking. With the school of thought that customers are the heart of a business, we believe that data centre strategies set the foundation for delivering an outstanding experience to end users. With our recently launched 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processors previously code named “Rome”, AMD is bringing revolutionary new capabilities to server performance and has set higher standards for data centres. This is the world’s first high performance x86 7 nanometer server CPU and has brought exciting new innovations in the technology space, with better power efficiency, optimisation, scalability and security. When combined with PCIe Gen4 and leadership IO, 2nd Gen EPYC processors give customers outstanding TCO. EPYC processors are engineered to address the modern data centre challenges through big data, virtualised environments and HPC workloads. We have seen very good customer traction with customers a and are on track to ramp up
significantly faster than our first gen server processors. AMD has always kept the customer at the centre of innovation in all of what it does. The EPYC processor is one such innovation, the ability to offer performance similar to competing dualsocket platforms in a single-socket is an innovation which drives three strong pillars of energy efficiency, workload balance and security. AMD’s innovations in the data centre in the areas of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence with its Radeon Instinct platform takes advantages of open platform compute using the ROCm (Radeon Open Compute) stack.
What is AMD’s understanding of the ever-changing/increasing workloads? Workloads are driven by emerging technologies led by digital transformation and the data centre has gone through a huge evolution. This is driven by the data deluge, AI and ML led applications and edge computing. With all these rapid developments changing the way businesses function, CXOs want to harness real time data to make informed and smarter decisions. This has triggered the need for data centres that offer enhanced performance, scalability, security at reduced total cost of ownership. AMD foresaw this untapped opportunity and designed the Zen
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core architecture to provide high performance and efficiency to many workloads. With the server compute solutions, AMD delivers choice and innovation for the modern data centre for high performance computing, enterprises and the cloud. With a robust roadmap, AMD’s server offerings and architecture can be harnessed for many workloads now and in the future. AMD understands that the only thing constant is change and the only way we can keep up with the changes around us is by out innovating our earlier products. For example, AMD’s 25X20 roadmap which was set in 2014 provides a 25X improvement in energy efficiency by the year 2020. AMD has consistently either delivered or outperformed on this metric since its inception. The company continually refines the design of its processors to make them ever more efficient while delivering performance to meet the demands of new generations of more capable software.
What are the data centre challenges faced by Indian CIOs? Performance, flexibility continues to be one of the core data centre challenges that CIOs face with digitisation and growing volumes of data and applications. With newer technologies, enterprises seek disruption that reimagines the data centre, offering higher performance alongside improved efficiency.
AMD India
Traditional security is no longer enough as data is rapidly moving outside the enterprises’ cloud and data centre and creating a strong perimeter on the cloud is as necessary as safeguarding the data. Furthermore, cost continues to be a challenging factor for enterprises, especially traditional organisations who are undergoing digital transformation. “Doing more with less” is becoming more relevant as IT becomes critical with digitisation. Indian CIOs are far ahead of the curve amongst their peers with the added responsibility of being the IT capital of the world and providing IT services to their customers puts them in a unique position to have visibility into large enterprises and governments alike to stay abreast of trends. In the early days of artificial intelligence, most CIOs in India used their own companies as test beds for conceptualisation and presentation before their teams could carry forward the proposition to their customers. In the auto sector, the everchanging demands of the consumer coupled with regulatory challenges and environmental responsibility led the CIOs in the manufacturing industry to adopt energy efficient practices way before their peers elsewhere in the globe. A large sector of India’s data centre challenges that CIOs face today is reducing budgets, higher compute requirements, security and increased complexity of software within their environment. AMD works closely with the CIOs to address these challenges in a collaborative way to drive development without compromising on resiliency.
Which businesses are having challenges with regards to increasing workloads? Which business functions and what kind of technologies are generating the most data? Telecom, ecommerce, cloud service providers, BFSI, IT/ITES followed by SMBs are among the highest consumers of the data centre market in India. With significant shifts in business strategies driven by digitisation, CIOs are ready to make cloud investments to help solve business outcomes faster. With telecom,
the Privacy Bill pose a new set of record keeping compliance that CIOs have to grapple with. With the consumer being the single largest focal point for all companies, CIOs are faced with the daunting task of ever-expanding network of sensors (or data collection points) providing far greater insights into customer and buying behaviour than they ever did. This scenario has resulted in volumes of data being generated which has led to explosion of data within the data centre which are further analysed by various software tools which then provide analytics.
Do you think ‘data localisation mandate’ will be the single biggest driver for the data centre market in India? Which are some of the other drivers which you already see manifesting? Please give examples
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AMD UNDERSTANDS THATTHE ONLYTHING CONSTANTIS CHANGE AND THE ONLYWAYWE CAN KEEP UPWITH THE CHANGES AROUND US IS BYOUTINNOVATING OUR EARLIER PRODUCTS VINAY SINHA, MANAGING DIRECTOR,SALES,AMD INDIA
the demand is driven by the need to strengthen and elevate the current 4G network, and more significantly to prepare and become 5G network ready. Cloud service providers (CSPs) are next in line to ramp up and support the adoption of cloud across industries. Another significant large-scale generator of data is the Government. With massive campaigns such as Digital India, Smart City, data localisation and Startup India projects, the public sector is migrating largely to the cloud. It would be unfair to state business’ as having challenges, while in reality the transition of technology is the clear challenge. Artificial intelligence didn’t exist in the level it does today five years ago. The challenge of having a moving target as AI transitioned to Machine Learning and will transition to Deep Learning at some point in time means that CIOs have to come to terms with the rapid changes. The regulatory challenges with upcoming bills such as
We believe that increase in data consumption requires stronger security standards. Digital economy has led to more data being generated across platforms online and mobile devices. With data localisation, companies can store critical data within the national boundaries, and this requires better infrastructure like smarter and modern data centres to process, store and manage copious amounts of data of various kinds. This will create innovative solutions to augment the capacity and secure the information stored in that particular data centre. The thrust on digitisation has fueled the boom of the modern data centres with virtualised and cloud environments. Large investments from established cloud providers and industry winning partnerships like that of Reliance and Microsoft are setting to be major boosters to the data centre industry. With a growing data centre market in a country like India, AMD will continue to partner with HPE and major service providers to EPYC to large and medium enterprises for their various workloads including virtualisation, big data, machine learning and AI. Channel partners, major OEMs and SIs will play an important role in the brand’s go-tomarket plans as we continue to grow our market share.
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CXO Speak
Alibaba bets big on next generation relational database PolarDB PolarDB is the next-generation relational database produced by the Alibaba Cloud team, specifically for new age of cloud computing. Speaking to CRN, Dr Feifei Li, VP of Alibaba Group, President and Senior Fellow of Database Systems, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence speaks about how traditional database needs transformation to meet the growing data needs By Sandhya Michu
Can you tell us what are the problems CIOs face with traditional databases? In short, traditional databases are less elastic, scalable and available to adjust to the demanding needs of companies in today’s market. For example, a sales event or online activity could generate multifold of user traffic into the system. Traditional databases in such cases will not be able to respond to customers'
demand quickly and in order to respond to them in a timely manner, it will require more hardware infrastructure to be implemented, which is costly and may be ineffective for companies.
How is Alibaba's PolarDB meeting the rapid growth of data ? PolarDB is a cloud native database and customers only need to pay for what is being used, which is extremely
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cost efficient. PolarDB is cross-region and a globally available product from Alibaba Cloud. Our PolarDB Box is specially designed to take our Public Cloud Infrastructure and set it up and integrate with the server and our PolarDB platform. Customers can leverage a cloud-native database without migrating to the public cloud. In addition, PolarDB’s enhanced parallel query ensures faster complex query and
Alibaba
the Parallel DDL ensures fast and instant response. It also has a storage elasticity, which is transparent to application and has a capacity up to 100TB thereby allowing the large computational power of PolarDB to scale up and scale out within minutes. PolarDB has high throughput and high performance with up to six times more comparing to open source MySQL. It is highly available with zero RPO during single node failure. There are three versions of PolarDB, which are compatible with MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle respectively. They are easy to migrate from open source platforms and can be integrated with the open source ecosystem easily. There’s no lock in so customers have the flexibility to make their choices and selections. During 11.11 global shopping festival, PolarDB supported Alibaba Group’s annual sales activities with a peak number of orders per second at 540,000, which is a further testament of the products’ capabilities.
Can you share Alibaba's cloud journey in India? Can you share your partner and customer base in India? Alibaba Cloud launched two availability zones in India since 2018 to cater to the requirements of the local governments and enterprises. Alibaba Cloud came out with product offerings such as elastic computing, storage, database, network, application services and big data and big analytics to help local customers with digital transformation. Alibaba Cloud also launched the “accelerate your growth” program to help local enterprise embark on the cloud computing journey. Alibaba Cloud also runs a series of courses on Alibaba Cloud Academy and these courses such as Cricket and Big Data courses are all catered for local client needs.
What is Alibaba's product roadmap for India ? Alibaba Cloud is committed to bringing the best products and solutions offering to the Indian market. All of the products and solutions have been implemented, matured and seen
our partners' leading solutions to local customers in India.
How important is the Indian market for Alibaba? In your view, what tech disruptions would mid to large companies see? India is a very important market for Alibaba Cloud and a key component in its globalisation strategy. With government initiatives like Digital India which has given a major boost to technological advancement in the country, we feel it is the perfect market to display our abilities and collaborate with leading and promising brands. We are at the era of rapid technological development. The pace of the digital economy is expected to get accelerated by technologies such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence, blockchain, and data intelligence.
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ALIBABA CLOUD CAME OUT WITH PRODUCT OFFERINGS SUCH AS ELASTIC COMPUTING, STORAGE,DATABASE, NETWORK,APPLICATION SERVICES AND BIG DATAAND BIG ANALYTICS TO HELP LOCAL CUSTOMERS WITH DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
How do you see the growth of public and private cloud in India? How are you going to compete with traditional players like Microsoft, Oracle and AWS?
DR FEIFEI LI, VP OFALIBABA GROUP,PRESIDENT & SENIOR FELLOW OF DATABASE SYSTEMS, ALIBABA CLOUD INTELLIGENCE
success across Alibaba Group’s various business units ranging from e-commerce, fintech, logistics, media and entertainment and more. In India, we specialise in video solutions, CDN, SMS, Database, AI and ML products and we hope to work with channel partners such as ZNet to bring our matured technologies to not only big companies, but small enterprises and startups. Alibaba Cloud has strong products and solutions that cater to retail business needs such as recommendation engine and image search. In addition, we work closely with MongoDB and SAP to bring
In the current business scenario, cloud computing plays a very important part. The public and private cloud is representing the two transformative categories. This becomes integral for emerging B2B and B2C enterprises alike. According to Gartner, by the end of 2019 the worldwide public cloud services market is expected to reach US$ 206.2 billion. There is an increasing dependency on both public and private cloud and this has resulted in further growth at a significant rate. We believe more and more Indian companies will be embarking on the public cloud trend given it's more cost efficient and requires less upfront investment. Since last year, we set up a distribution channel program in order to suit the Indian market. It encourages partners to bring in-depth technical knowledge to customers and build an open ecosystem among sales, technology and service partners. We are positive that our distribution program will be instrumental in building a strong, collaborative partner ecosystem, thereby further boosting our growth in India.
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Partner Corner
Clover Infotech
Clover Infotech leads in taking Oracle Cloud solution to BFSI customers With Oracle’s focus on the cloud, Clover Infotech believes that it’s not about just one product when talking to customers, it is essential to showcase to them the entire platform capabilities Sandhya Michu sandhya.michu@expressindia.com
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umbai based Oracle’s cloud partner, Clover Infotech, has been working with a significant customer base in India on the digital experience front. Some of the key customers include a leading bank, an NBFC and a small finance bank in the country. Recently, Clover Infotech and Oracle jointly marked a Digital Experience Day with leading BFSI customers such as Edelweiss, Axis Bank and Yes Bank in Delhi. At the event, the team presented the Oracle Content Experience (OCE) platform. The sessions at the event highlighted how OCE could be used, not only for marketing purposes but also for multiple non-marketing functions. This initiative enables customers to seamlessly adopt OCE to digitally transform their online presence, ensure seamless collaboration and content creation – and most importantly – engage their customers over a secure platform. Being an old partner of Oracle since 1998, Clover Infotech has upgraded partnership with cloud in 2016. Its knowledge and training arm, Clover Academy has invested consistently on training employees and getting them certified on various Oracle products as well as Oracle Cloud. Speaking about the adoption of the cloud in the India market, Shrikant Navelkar, Director, Clover Infotech, says, “Companies in the B2C space are moving fast because their business
depends on it. They want to reduce the cost of their operations to reach out to customers, so they are faster than others in terms of adoption. However, the B2B space has started witnessing the advantage – integrating suppliers and customers into the system, and automating various internal processes. Both B2C and B2B customers are looking at it. BFSI, e-commerce, and media companies may have been early adopters, but others are catching up rapidly.” Clover Infotech has a strong presence in India and most of its customers have been with the company for over a decade – 50 per cent of Clover Infotech’s customers are from the BFSI vertical. According to Clover Infotech, with data sovereignty and new data compliance rules customers who use Oracle-based applications are moving to Oracle Cloud and those using Microsoft based applications are moving to Azure. Whereas, there are
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others who are continuing to stay on-premise. “We are also seeing a new model, ‘Cloud at Customer’, wherein a cloud machine is placed at the customer’s data centre to enable the data to remain in the premises, but the advantages of cloud can be enjoyed. BFSI customers are still taking a hybrid approach, while startups and smaller companies want everything on the cloud,” informs Navelkar. Clover Infotech has a diverse set of customers. About 25 years ago, the company started as a database service provider and witnessed growth over the years. It is among the first companies in India to implement Oracle Financial Cloud. “Although we are an Oracle partner and we are positioning these solutions to the customer, we also use it ourselves. Today, we have different groups like digital technology, infrastructure technology, and enterprise application. We work with Oracle E-business on-premise if a customer doesn’t want to move. Depending on the customer’s needs, we can move them to the cloud or manage it for them on-premise. We help the customer with the lift and shift. One of our USPs is that we provide them post-implementation support for a longer period,” he says. Clover has already expanded to five more locations from where it serves customers pan-India. The company also wants to focus on the Asia Pacific market.
Case Study
Progressive Infotech
Progressive Infotech streamlines IT operations of Medanta Noida-based IT managed services provider Progressive Infotech, has been helping healthcare giant Medanta – The Medicity in its digital transformation Sandhya Michu sandhya.michu@expressindia.com
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ince last two years, Progressive Infotech has helped Medanta – The Medicity in its digital transformation. Today, Progressive manages massive IT infrastructure of Medanta, which is meant to deliver, over 20 lakh reports, two lakh appointment requests and 50,000 telemedicine consultations that are done across more than 50 countries. Progressive Infotech provides 24X7 services ranging from data centre management, end user support, service desk, managing IT assets and monitoring the critical IT infrastructure remotely from the state-of-the-art Remote Infrastructure Monitoring Centre at Medanta. The service provider ensures all the applications and IT Infrastructure is up-andrunning without any downtime and the experience is elevated. It also provides a wider range of IT services as part of a multi-year service contract including preventive maintenance, backup management and close monitoring of critical services, ensuring these applications are up-and-running without any downtime. Medanta has invested heavily in technology with the promise of increased quality of care and reduction in costs while maintaining regulatory compliance and a competitive position in the market. Technology has also helped Medanta in delivering continued customer services where regulations, cost
restrictions, staffing issues, compliance and cybersecurity challenges compete for resources and funding. Today, the company operates in eight locations across India and has reached a stage wherein there is a clear business case to improve and streamline IT operations. Progressive Infotech, with its holistic IT infrastructure management services, helped standardise, implement proven processes and optimise the infrastructure operations across locations. Their NextGen IMS portfolio – Service Desk, Workplace Management and Hybrid DC Management helped Medanta with improved visibility into IT infrastructure operations, high availability through 24×7 IT service desk and SLA-based service delivery. “Since the inception of a patient from OPD to discharge after treatment,
the whole process is run through automation. Once a patient ID is created, the history is maintained even if they come after three or four years – whether it’s payments, medical insurance, medicine, diet charts, and food. While serving a world-class healthcare service provider, we understand what it takes to ensure every single patient to be well treated. We need to have the most motivated team, close monitoring, and governance,” says Prateek Garg, Founder, Progressive Infotech. “Progressive Infotech majorly helped Medanta in decreasing the response time through ITIL Complaint Service Desk, introducing new processes, following Zero Defect approach and automating the monitoring of network devices. Medanta is scaling its infrastructure and investing more on automation,” adds Garg. Rajiv Sikka, CIO, Medanta Hospital, says, “The stakes are high in healthcare. We wanted to be 100 per cent sure to trust infrastructure managed services to a firm that has the experience and expertise, and would free up our technology department to focus on other strategic initiatives. Progressive Infotech stood tall amongst various IMS vendors with proven expertise in hybrid infrastructure managed services. IT managed services provided by Progressive Infotech has relieved pressure on us, resulting in access to greater efficiencies, reduction in operating costs and improved services.”
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Partner Corner
Digital Track offers seamless digital transformation to enterprises The company aims to ease an enterprise's transition into the cutting edge digital and internet age. It offers a full range of IT, network, collaboration, data centre, storage and backup infrastructure, virtualisation, cloud management, IT facility management and system integration services and solutions partnering. To know more about the company and its solutions and services, especially with PRTG Network Monitoring solutions, CRN India caught up with Jürgen Thiel, Head of Global Sales & Business Development, Paessler AG By Moumita Deb Choudhury Please tell us about Digital Track and its growth and expansion plans, especially with PRTG Network Monitoring solutions?
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PRTG doesn’t need an introduction as each one of us in the IT industry would have used it in our career. But the interesting part is we have been under the impression PRTG will monitor only the internet links, but to our surprise it is a complete monitoring solution competing with the leading products in the market. DT’s growth plan is all about offering new product, technology and geographical expansion, with PRTG our plan is to be a top partner in India for PRTG in terms of both revenue wise and technical capability wise.
How is PRTG deployed across the network and what advantages it brings to an organisation which deploys it? With PRTG in place, organisations will have a complete visibility and health of the network and devices. It helps the IT team to trouble shoot and assure the availability of the network
WE HAVE TRAINED AND CERTIFIED RESOURCES ACROSS ALLOUR BRANCHES,WITH WHICH WE WILLBE ABLE TO SUPPORTOUR CUSTOMERS TECHNICALLY. WE ALSO INVESTED IN SETTING UPALAB SETUPTO SHOWIT LIVE TO OUR CUSTOMERS JÜRGEN THIEL, HEAD OF GLOBAL SALES & BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT,PAESSLER AG
99.9 per cent at any given point in time. As IT infrastructure has become a business enabler, organisations cannot afford to have down time. PRTG can help the IT team to achieve maximum availability of IT infrastructure.
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Please share with us PRTG Network Monitoring solutions’ key features The key features can be listed as quick download, installation and configuration; it uses built-in database, no additional DB required like
Digital Track
SQL/Oracle; PRTG is based on sensor license, around 200 sensor types covering IT infrastructure monitoring; distributed monitoring using remote probes; PRTG cluster failover solution; and easy DB backup and rollback.
As a partner, we are positioned well enough in the India market. The Eastern market is a bit untapped as of now, however there are considerable work which has been done from this market as well. The plan is to create a positioning in front of the customer with a differentiator and having conversations deeper than any other partner would have done by now. Surely customers will fall back to the partner who gives a transparent, doable and optimistic roadmap to them.
Which verticals are you catering to? Can you share any interesting case study/ies? We cater to all verticals, starting from small businesses to enterprises. Education institutions like schools use PRTG to monitor the complete network which helps them to a great extent as the number of IT staff are very less compared to organisations.
How you are planning to go about your upcoming maiden multi-city event? Every other customer uses PRTG for some specific use case like link monitoring, however most of the customers do not know the full capabilities of the solution. This event would help us educate the customers and create an awareness.
How is it going to benefit you and your partners? This event will create awareness about the presence of the OEM in Indian market. As a partner we offer one of the best monitoring solutions to customers along with our services, which will help our services revenue and profitability.
Is there any other important factor you want to highlight? We are excited about this partnership and looking forward to taking it to the next level. Our investment has started by getting our technical resources trained and certified. We have trained and certified resources across all our branches, with which we will be able to support our customers technically. We also invested in setting up a lab setup to show it live to our customers. To further expand its footprint into eastern market in India, Digital Track has recently appointed Nilanjan Sengupta as the Regional Director for Eastern India. He carries with him over 18 years of
NILANJAN SENGUPTA REGIONAL DIRECTOR, EASTERN INDIA,DIGITALTRACK
experience in the IT industry in the sales and services domain. His deep technical background with almost a decade of experience in Cisco Systems for India East always helped the customer as trusted advisor for developing complex and large solutions for their projects. With a rich mix of technical and sales acumen and deep relationship with key customers in the market, he has worked with organisations like Wipro, ITC, HCL, and Paladion Networks to name a few. His work also spans across the public sector, enterprise, BFSI and commercial segments. CRN India also spoke to Nilanjan Sengupta to understand the company’s expansion plans for the Eastern market.
Having been in the Eastern market for so long, what are your plans for Digital Tracks’ expansion in the region? I have worked in the Eastern market long enough to create mindshare and customers see me as a trusted advisor. With the technical background I have and the relationship I share with the technical as well as the CXO level, am sure I will be able to drive business in new and newer heights, moving away from traditional ways of doing business by most of the partners in this region. Plans are in place, the execution is on its way!
How are you positioned in the market and what competitive advantage do you have over others?
How would you define the Eastern market in terms of tech adoption? There are big accounts who are very advanced in technical adoption. We have the biggest and largest security NAC deployment in this market, by a company that is 100 years old. There are PSU banks having a record investment on WAN optimisation while other IT/ITES companies were just thinking of the same. Early and deep adoption of technology is very common here, might be all are not big sized. However, I see deep and informed customers in this part of the country, who can question technical giants as well and keep them on their toes.
Do you see a real demand for your products and solutions in the Eastern market? How are you planning to address it? Yes, there are real demand of the products and solutions which we bring on to the table, however from the OEM hardware products perspective its all the same. The main difference which we will drive here is to position the solution after understanding the customer requirement, the roadmap, the budget and the adoption, which they might be looking for. Box selling is never a plan for us. We add value to the solution we sell by knowing why the solution is positioned. With this we are covering South, West and Eastern parts of India with eight branches in this country and one in Singapore.
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Startup Corner
Making payments effortless and safe AS Technolutions aims to revolutionise the way retailers, businesses and professionals accept payment from their clients and customers, through its merchant friendly mobile POS
Sudipta Dev sudipta.dev@expressindia.com
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S Technolutions is an early stage revenue making fintech startup based out of Gurgaon. Founded in January 2017, the operations went live in mid of 2018. AS is an innovative alternative to card swipe machines which empowers merchants to accept card payments from customers using a smartphone only, without any hardware attached to it. “We have also partnered with HDFC Bank to offer merchants to accept UPI which will make AS a one stop solution for payments. In addition, AS offers
several other value-added services like cash register, bulk messaging feature, make your team, analytical dashboard, etc., which are specifically beneficial to small and mid-size merchants, enabling them to track and manage their payments better, manage their team etc,” says Anubhav Saxena, Founder, AS Technolutions. The target customer segments for the company are - micro, small and medium sized retailers; corporates which are into home delivery segment or home services; and professionals/ freelancers. The company gives its clients two key benefits which have a significant
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impact on their business – cost advantages and operational effectiveness. “Swipe machines are hardware based, thus have a manufacturing cost which is cascaded to the merchants. Subsequently, merchants pay heavy monthly rentals and periodically incur repair and maintenance. In addition to the cost, the machine needs daily charging, has network issues, more than one machine to accept multiple cards, inconvenience of carrying machine for home delivery orders, needs bluetooth connection to phones while transacting, etc. These concerns add on to the operational complexities of using swipe machines
AS Technolutions
on a daily basis,” he says, adding that his company has smartly addressed the above mentioned issues by simply migrating from hardware to a mobile app which not only brings down the cost but also takes away the operational efforts mentioned above. AS Technolutions replaces swipe with a scan which is the key feature of the product. “Which means AS scans the card and executes the transaction using the two-factor authentication. AS takes away the need of machines from the market,” states Saxena, adding that from the card industry perspective, AS has smartly integrated the “card present” scenario with “card not present” process to empower merchants to accept cards with just a smartphone. And the “pull mechanism” based transaction flow is much more convenient and safer than machines. Along with scan option, AS also empowers merchants to send link and accept remote payments and UPI to accept payments via QR code or intent. Speaking about the marketing strategy, Saxena says that for retail, they have their feet on the street, which is the direct sales channel. The company has four strategies under indirect sales : “CIP” i:e customer is promoter – the current users /merchants refer new merchants in bulk and get incentives; network partnering with banks; and BTL activities like merchandise at retail points, kiosks at big markets to bring awareness to the end customer, etc. With the next round of funding, the company is planning to engage in extensive marketing across digital and non-digital platforms, specially newspapers in local languages, radio, movie halls, etc., to build awareness and trust among end customers / card holders and also to increase retail and corporate sales. Saxena believes that channel partners by virtue of their operational expanse and years of existence can be a great sales and branding/ customer awareness platform for new startups. “They have a direct reach to the customers, a significant influence on generating demand and provide a direct link for customer feedback. In the
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WE HAVE ALSO PARTNERED WITH HDFC BANKTO OFFER MERCHANTS TO ACCEPT UPI WHICH WILL BE A ONE STOP SOLUTION FOR PAYMENTS.IN ADDITION,WE OFFER SEVERAL OTHER VALUE-ADDED SERVICES LIKE CASH REGISTER,BULK MESSAGING FEATURE,MAKE YOUR TEAM,ANALYTICAL DASHBOARD,ETC. ANUBHAV SAXENA, FOUNDER,AS TECHNOLUTIONS
retail market, our schemes like Customer is Promoter (CIP) encourage retailers to tap into their network and promote new downloads for AS. The channel partnering gets further beneficial if the tech based solutions are capable of signing up the merchant in real time using the technology which helps the organisations to not only
penetrate faster but also the adoption. We are also in conversation with banks to look for synergies on the channel partnering,” informs Saxena. Saxena acknowledges that the pace at which technology is evolving, one needs to think of the next tech disruption/enhancement asap. “The success of AS in a highly saturated fintech space is dependent on the innovations we are able to provide to make payments effortless and safe. It is important for industry leaders to accept that technology’s longevity has decreased, and thus makes the technology vulnerable in less than three to four years. A clear roadmap is a prerequisite with radical changes every two years in the product line for similar offering,” he states. From time to time they bring in SMEs and consultants to challenge the AS team, to innovate and ideate on product enhancement. “We have also partnered with ethical hackers to ensure we are ahead in the game and can anticipate as well as mitigate any potential threat. The team also participates in sandbox challenges, industry and academy forums to bring in the best of thinking to evolve AS,” he shares. In the future, AS aims to become a one stop solution for merchants. “We envisage to be partners with merchants in their day to day business life. We are focused on our next big release i:e tap payments which will allow customers to tap the card on the app, which is in merchants phone followed with in-app billing, mobile ATMs, full-fledged payment gateway, virtual credit cards, BQRs, etc. Our strategic expansion plan is clear in terms of both customer acquisition and product. We tend to penetrate other major cities like Mumbai, Hyderabad, Bengaluru and even cities like Jaipur, Ahmedabad, etc. At the same time, we are in conversation with bankers for becoming network partners with us as “SOFT POS” or say hardware less solution to accept card payments,” explains Saxena. AS is exploring alliance partnerships with banks, NBFCs, etc. to penetrate deeper and faster in 2020 and open more revenue sources.
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Partner Corner
Supertron
Kolkata based Supertron enters VAD business Distribution house Supertron recently added global brands like BARCO, Synology, ZeeVee among others to its value-added distribution (VAD) business Sandhya Michu sandhya.michu@expressindia.com
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upertron Electronics, one of the leading regional distributors from the eastern region for consumer electronics products has decided to venture into value-added distribution (VAD) business. The distributor feels the new line of business, having VAD capabilities like a product demo, installations and services will be paying dividends in the long run. As of now, this six months old business is looking to add more vendor partnerships. Speaking to CRN, V K Bhandari, Chairman and MD, Supertron says, “In last 25 years, Supertron has established a strong position in IT hardware distribution. With VAD, we have partnered with global brands like BARCO, Synology, ZeeVee among others. Nevertheless, we will continue to grow our traditional hardware, retail partners network. Currently, we are a distributor for 29 brands and every year we add six-seven brands into our kitty. Despite this, the distribution business is seeing sluggish growth, but we have been maintaining a doubled digit growth year-on-year.” When asked how Supertron is maintaining the growth, Bhandari replies, “We believe in exclusive and sole distribution for brands, even though vendors tend to have a multidistribution approach. But, we always push for exclusivity as that brings more responsibility on our shoulder and we don’t work as a fulfillment provider. We put in lots of effort in building the brand in the channel and market. A large amount of our successful partnership with vendors is based on this and we will continue to maintain this business
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WE BELIEVE IN EXCLUSIVE AND SOLE DISTRIBUTION FOR BRANDS,EVEN THOUGH VENDORS TEND TO HAVE A MULTI-DISTRIBUTION APPROACH V K BHANDARI, CMD,SUPERTRON
strategy as we grow.” On the hardware distribution side, Supertron has recently added anti-virus software business for the Kaspersky line of consumer range solution. The distributor looks to strengthen the Kaspersky brand in the channel and sees a healthy market share for the AV business. This Kolkata based distributor believes in mapping the market before entering into any brand partnership. “We strongly believe in our expertise of channel network and
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distribution capabilities to create the market for our vendors. For example, the Dell TFT business and many others are a success story that we have built from scratch,” Bhandari informs. Today, Supertron is reckoned for building brand positioning for the vendors. Over the years, it has a pan India presence with 36 branch offices and warehouses and 19 satellite offices across 37 states and UTs, covering 712 districts with 650 plus employees and a strong network of 27 service locations. Supertron caters to horizontal as well as vertical centric IT System Integrators as well as Audio Video partners spread across the country. The success of its strategic tieups with key OEM’s has bolstered the growth of Supertron and helped the company to strengthen its position among the leading distribution houses in India. Recently, Bhandari’s son Vipul Bhandari has joined the distribution business. The new VAD business is headed by Debraj Dam with a prime focus on Unified Communication, AVS (Audio, Video, and Surveillance) and DCS (Data Centre and Storage) domain. The strategy is a consultative approach to understand and work together with system integrators as well as their customers by providing unique solutions based on future technology deployment Audio, Voice, Data, Networking, and Application. “We started working to build an energetic team in order to align the significant range of skills and capabilities. These are designed to offer superior services to partners and customers PAN India as we are majorly working as an extended arm of our OEMs”, says Debraj Dam, Chief of VAD business, Supertron.
Startup Corner
TNQ InGage
Augmented and Virtual Reality tech for experiential training TNQ InGage has completed 500 projects, served 250 + customers, and created more than 50 million AR/VR experience views to redefine the way people train, learn, and work across various industries Sudipta Dev sudipta.dev@expressindia.com
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NQ InGage develops immersive technology solutions using Augmented and Virtual Reality for experiential training and education, product visualisation, and prototyping. The tech startup is headquartered in Chennai, with sales presence in the UK and Germany. “Our endeavours began in the year 2012, when we sensed the need of a medium that could make a difference to its users. We strive to leverage the benefits of AR, VR and IoT to make a socially meaningful impact on the way people train, learn, and work across industries,” says Vijay Karunakaran, CEO, TNQ InGage. The startup has completed more than 500 projects, served 250 + customers, and created more than 50 million AR/VR experience views. “We promote our products, solutions, and ideas through digital marketing, print marketing and organic social media. We partner with AR/VR associations and other channel partners. Last but not the least, we have a happy customer base who comes back to us for more. And we sometimes even reach new customers through this stronghold that we are happy to have,” says Karunakaran. The company strives to explore new channels and maximise the potential of the same by scouting potential channel partners and establishing a sense of mutual trust and ambition with them. “Our digital marketing team consistently works towards devising
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OUR APPROACH OF IDENTIFYING CHANNEL PARTNERS IS BASED ON THE TYPE OF BUSINESS AND THE REACH WE COULD GET THROUGH THAT BUSINESS VIJAY KARUNAKARAN, CEO,TNQ INGAGE
new channel strategies that will take us on the road to awareness and excellent endeavours,” states Karunakaran. Future plans include developing their own range of AR/VR products and penetration into the global market, which includes the world of bookpublishing. “Our current operations outside India are based at the United States, Singapore, Dubai, and the United Kingdom,” he says.
“Our approach of identifying channel partners is based on the type of business and the reach we could get through that business. For this, we analyse and synthesize large chunks of technical data within the market. Such a partnership provides a platform where we can reap the rewards of mutual benefit and incorporate easier ways of conducting business,” says Karunakaran, adding that they intend to create a healthy sense of competition among the partners, allow them to make their unique contributions in planning and development, leverage the expertise of top performers, and create open lines of communication with them. The clients are Larsen & Turbo, Mahindra, Ashok Leyland, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), SaintGobain, among others. “We cater to various industrial sectors, which includes manufacturing, construction, and healthcare,” points out Karunakaran. The scope of services, among various others, include: ◗ Experiential training and education, which transforms the way people learn. ◗ Industrial safety training and product visualisation. ◗ Maintenance, prototyping and field services makes the tasks of the customers easier through state-ofthe-art realistic experiences. ◗ Digital Experience Centres are a valuable resource for company-wide workshops and employee onboarding.
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Association News
ISODA
ISODA to celebrate the 10th edition of TechSummit at Baku A significant milestone in the history of ISODA, the 10th edition of its flagship annual event, TechSummit, is being organised in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, from February 5–8 Sandhya Michu sandhya.michu@expressindia.com
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fter nine successful seasons, Infotech Software Dealers Association (ISODA) is back with the 10th edition of its flagship event, TechSummit – an annual congregation where partners and and technology meet to architect new alliances. Being held in Baku, Azerbaijan, this year, TechSummit X (TS X) is being organised by the western region of the association, having five members in the core committee, including Jiten Mehta, Hemant Chabria, Ashish Shah, Tushar Parekh and Rajeev Mamidanna. Scheduled from February 5 - 8, 2020, the 10th edition of TechSummit is looking to be bigger and grander than its previous editions. Speaking to CRN, President of ISODA, Manasi Saha says, “We are excited to conduct this year’s TechSummit in Baku for our partners. We are promising that this edition will bring innovative ideas and new business opportunities for them. Moreover, we have seen 115 online registrations from our members, which is higher in numbers compared to the previous years.” Jiten Mehta, TSX Chairman, informs, “Generally, 80-90 partner CEOs attend TechSummit. To our surprise, we will see 115 members attending the event this year. I attribute this achievement to the good work done by the ISODA Management committee who have been relentlessly
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WE ARE EXCITED TO CONDUCT THIS YEAR’S TECHSUMMIT IN BAKU FOR OUR PARTNERS.WE ARE PROMISING THATTHIS EDITION WILL BRING INNOVATIVE IDEAS AND NEW BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES FOR THEM.MOREOVER,WE HAVE SEEN HIGHER NUMBER OF REGISTRATIONS FROM OUR MEMBERS MANASI SAHA, PRESIDENT,ISODA
working towards bringing new partners on-board, across India. Sponsorship discussions are on with the majority of vendors and we have already secured a good number of them for TS X. This time, the event will be bigger and there will be more collaboration between vendors, members, and the leading industry experts.” “Our association with ISODA has been an enduring one, which goes back several years. ISODA is a great platform for cybersecurity professionals to network and work towards a singular mission – keeping organisations better protected from cyber threats. ISODA’s theme ‘Reform, Perform, Transform’ is also in sync with our core belief in delivering transformational and evolved cyber security solutions for our customers to stay a step ahead of the cyber criminals. We look forward to exciting and interactive sessions at this year’s TechSummit,” adds Sunil Sharma, Managing Director – Sales, Sophos India & SAARC. Since 2010, ISODA has been organising its annual summit to empower its members. ISODA was formed in the year 2008 by the resellers of packaged software products in India. Over the years, ISODA TechSummit has reached a glorious stage and this in-house event of the association is a platform for bringing enterprise and software channel and technology vendors under one roof.
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.