August 2022

India’s leading IT magazine for channel business

MY EXPERIENCE

TRY TO CONSOLIDATE AND CREATE A NICHE AND MOVE INTO OTHER DIRECTION EDITORIAL

SANJAY MOHAPATRA sanjay@smechannels.com

Dear Friends

The IT industry was the least sufferer during pandemic. Everyone used to assume that post pandemic things would be excellent for the IT industry. But things are different and looks to be irry now. There is a huge surge of demand for the digital transformation but there is a huge pressure on the entire ecosys tem for pricing and profitability. When people are talking about metaverse and NFT in India, there is massive job cuts. Many companies have already invested in creating their own metaverse. Even people have started purchasing properties on metaverse. But at the same time thousands of skilled people are losing their jobs. How the future is going to be unfolded no one really knows. Along with the leapfrogging towards some exotic technologies, there is a murmur that USA is seeing deep depression and it is a matter of time that the news would explode. If we look at India, the indica tors are not that great too. The stock exchange performance is on resistance mode – meaning, it is nei ther going up not going down. At the same time, channel is almost stand still. There is no movement now in real sense. Partners are complaining of sacrificing margin to win deals. The industry insiders are saying that the impact is already there but no one is reporting. What we need to do as a partner ecosystem, we need to talk about future technologies for various industries and future trends in various industries. Always the big 4 takes the onus of predicting the future. Of course, they speak with some data points and snapshots but given today’s communications and social media reach, knowing what is happening across the industries is not difficult. We are think ing about whether to consolidate or jump into new technologies. My personal belief is that we should look at consolidating and being perfect in certain technology practices and then jump into adopting new technologies and practices. But we should talk about future technologies and possible adoptions. Similarly, as a partner, we are missing self-marketing. We are not at all thinking about marketing our selves regarding whatever excellence available with us. We are good at personal level but when it comes to manifesting ourselves for the public, we are not investing. What kind of problem it creates? The customers are not able to trace the right partner and end up in investing with wrong partner. This creates a bad reputation for the partners as a community. So, in order to play long, efforts should be around making oneself available to the market so that the customers can find you whenever they require. Every money you spend on marketing may not end up giving your direct ROI but in long run it helps. Try to consolidate and create a niche and move into other direction. Also talk about future technologies and adoption trend.

Zenbook Pro 14 Duo OLED (UX8402)

The new ASUS Zenbook Pro 14 Duo OLED (UX8402), a powerful and compact dual-screen creator laptop features a next-generation Screen Pad Plus secondary touchscreen, combined with the innovative Active

Aerodynamic System Ultra (AAS) auto-tilting (by 12 degrees) design that improves cooling as well as provides a comfortable angle for a seamless and immersive visual experience. The new ASUS Zenbook Pro 14 Duo OLED is a perfectly well-rounded powerhouse available in 12th Gen Intel Core i9, i7, and i5 processor capacity with up to 32GB LPDDR5 RAM (clocking 4800MHz) and 512GB/ 1 TB PCIe Gen 4.0x4 Performance SSD storage.

FEATURES: THE ASUS ZENBOOK PRO 14 DUO OLED COMES WITH 2 X THUNDER BOLT 4 PORTS (FOR 40GB/S DATA, 100W POWER, AND EXTERNAL 4K DISPLAYS), USB 3.2 GEN 2 (TYPE-A), HDMI 2.1, MICROSD EXPRESS 7.0, AND 3.5MM COMBO AUDIO JACK.

FINAL WORDING: WITH A LARGE 76WHRS BATTERY WITH SUPPORT FOR 180W FAST CHARGING, ASUS ZENBOOK PRO 14 DUO IS EXCELLENT PRODUCT FOR ALL WALKS OF LIFE.

GUEST ARTICLE / 17 Ransomware is Indiscriminatory – Prepare for Everything to Fail.

GUEST TALK / 36 How SaaS Can Tackle Supply Chain Issues.

PARTNER CORNER / 14 A Phenomenal Journey with Oracle.

Publisher: Sanjib Mohapatra

Editor: Sanjay Mohapatra

Sub Editor: Nidhi Shail

Content Editor: Manash Ranjan Debata

Art Director: Shadab Khan

Technical Writer: Manas Ranjan

Lead Visualizer: DPR Choudhary

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SNIPPETS

Oracle conducts Oracle India Partner Kickoff 2022 in Goa

At the recently conducted Oracle India Partner Kickoff 2022, Oracle announced its revamped partnercentric strategy to help accelerate digitisation for its 15,000 plus customers in India.

Organisations across public and private sectors, are looking for technology partners that can help them grow; meet rising industry and compliance mandates related to Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG); support India’s digital banking revolution and lastly, be an active participant in all major transformations across industries: public sector; banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI); manufacturing; professional services (Information Technology/ Information Technology Enabled Services) and more.

Shailender Kumar, senior vice

Lexar Appoints Compuage Infocom as Its Indian Distributor

Lexar has appointed Compuage Infocom as its official Indian distributor. Lexar, which has ranked third among the best global brands for flash memory products, is a leading brand for products with high speed and better durability. Compuage Infocom, with its strong channel presence, is expected to help Lexar expand its Pan India reach to cater to the growing demand for storage and memory products in the

country.

A leading value-added distribu tor that serves system integrators, brand stores, enterprises, retailers, and others, Compuage boasts of a diverse portfolio of IT solutions and customized services across a wide range of technology verticals. The company creates enterprise advancement opportunities for its channel partners through aggressive market development and continu

ous innovation. Compuage’s deep experience in IT distribution and pan India reach will help Lexar expand its market reach across the country.

Darren Lin, Head of APAC, Lexar Co., Limited, said ” The memory solutions market in India is seeing a boom and it is imperative for us to bring just the right set of distributors on board, who are well connected and can help Lexar expand its

president and regional managing director, Oracle India and NeSuite JAPAC, said, “Oracle India is on a massive growth drive. With our unmatched portfolio of cloud solu tions across technology and applica tions, along with our partners - our customers have the choice they need, to support their business growth and digital evolution.”

Adopting a partner-first approach to drive value to customers, Oracle offers a variety of incentives for partners to support customers. Most noteworthy among these are Oracle Support Rewards, Oracle Cloud Lift Services, Oracle Partner Network, and Oracle Cloud Service Provider.

Oracle Support Rewards is a new program which is intended to help reduce support bill for partners and customers.

presence in the Indian market. Compuage Infocom has been one of the leading distributors in the market and we are happy to work with them.”

“We at Lexar aims at fulfilling the need and the demands of our customers. By collaborating with Compuage Infocom Ltd. we believe that we will be able to expand our area of distribution to a much wider range.

LTI Strengthens Strategic Collabo ration with Microsoft

Larsen & Toubro Infotech has announced the expansion of its collabora tion with Microsoft to focus on developing high-value cloud solutions for enterprises. As a part of this multi-year collaboration, LTI has launched a dedicated Microsoft business unit that develops and offers end-to-end digital transformation solutions.

Through this association, LTI will also train 12,000 professionals from its existing workforce on various Microsoft technologies by 2024. The main objective of this effort is to enable skill development of LTI employees that are a part of Microsoft unit and enhance their competen cies across technologies like cloud, data, IoT and security.

Nachiket Deshpande, Chief Operating Officer, LTI, said, “LTI has a long-standing relationship with Microsoft as a strategic partner, service provider, and customer. Our reaffirmed partnership with Microsoft will enable us to innovate and offer 170+ distinct services to our joint custom ers. Additionally, we will also focus on training and upskilling of our talent pool that is a part of the dedicated Microsoft business unit, to empower them to meet changing business and market requirements.”

“Through their new Microsoft Business Unit, LTI will be able to help customers implement cloud strategies and drive business transformation across industries and geographies,” said. “We look forward to working with LTI as they build new capabilities and deliver innovative solutions on the Microsoft Cloud.

Commvault Appoints Arvinderjit Singh Dadhwal as Director of Sales Engineering for India & SAARC

Commvault has appointed Arvinderjit Singh Dadhwal as Director of Sales Engineering for India and South Asia. In his role, Dadhwal will spearhead the rapid integration of Commvault’s latest technology offer ings and the simplicity of our cloud solutions into the pre-sales teams to deliver the best solutions and services for customers and partners.

Dadhwal has over 25 years of experience in the software industry, including a noteworthy period with Commvault from 2013-2021, when he successfully managed the Sales Engineering (SE) team for North India, expanded the Sales Engineering team across SAARC and grew the Global System Integrator (GSI) engagement to six key India GSIs. He was also instrumental in building Commvault’s Central SE Shared Services (CSS) team for the APJ region. He returns to Commvault, after a yearlong stint at Kyndryl where he was responsible for engaging in large and complex resiliency deals pan India.

“Arvinderjit’s appointment reinforces our efforts towards ensuring a diverse and talented international team that will help us in taking Com mvault to the next level,” said Cesar Cid de Rivera, International Vice President of Sales Engineering.

EXECUTIVE MOVEMENT

BRIGHTCOVE APPOINTS APPOINTS

INT. Hosts Digital Success Summit

INT. hosted the third edition of its flagship Digital Success Summit on 5th August at the Hyatt Regency, Kolkata. The focus this year is creating a Digital Growth Playbook for attendees, encompassing the areas of marketing, technology and analytics.

The summit witnessed a lineup of stalwarts from the digital technology landscape including names such as Arjun Vaidya –CEO Dr.Vaidya’s, San tosh Panda – Co-Founder & CEO Explara.com, Udit Goenka – Founder & CEO FirstSales.io, Vivek Bajaj – Co-founder Kredent Infodege, Pallav Nadhani – Co-founder & CEO Fusioncharts, Vikas Chawala – Cofounder Social Beat, Suyash Saraf – Founder Dot & Key Skincare, Kashif Raza – Founder Bitinning, AJi Issac Mathew – CO-founder & CEO INT. Techshu.

Under the theme of Digital Growth Playbook, the distinguished gathering discussed on growth hacking for personal as well as corporate branding, amplifying business growth through influence, content marketing, data analytics, video marketing, omni-channel marketing, and blockchain to cite a few.

Abhishek Rungta, Founder & CEO, INT. said, “The new normal has transformed the conventional world in a multi-dimensional way and digital assumes prime prominence now. Within the digital technology landscape too, marketing, technology and analytics are triggering a wave of disruptions for businesses across sectors to benefit.

Consumers Pay the Price as Data Breach Costs Reach AllTime High: IBM Report

IBM Security has released the annual Cost of a Data Breach Report, revealing costlier and higher-impact data breaches than ever before, with the global average cost of a data breach reaching an all-time high of $4.35 million for surveyed organizations. With breach costs increasing nearly 13% over the last two years of the report, the findings suggest these inci dents may also be contributing to rising costs of goods and services. In fact, 60% of studied organizations raised their product or services prices due to the breach, when the cost of goods is already soaring worldwide amid inflation and supply chain issues.

The perpetuality of cyberattacks is also shedding light on the “haunting effect” data breaches are having on businesses, with the IBM report finding 83% of studied organizations have experienced more than one data breach in their lifetime. Another factor rising over time is the after-effects of breaches on these organizations, which linger long after they occur, as nearly 50% of breach costs are incurred more than a year after the breach.

Huawei ICT Academy in India Opens its General ICT Courses to All

Aiming to boost the ICT talent pipeline and support the Digital India vision, Huawei ICT Academy opened its General ICT Courses to provide free online training in courses on industry leading technologies, allowing Indians from all walks of life to learn new skills and hone existing skills. Courses covering the basics of latest ICT technologies like 5G, AI, IoT, cloud computing, network communications, big data are now available free-of-cost to students, academics or anyone interested in enhancing their ICT knowledge.

Akash Mathur, Vice President, Huawei India said, “Looking to bridge the gap between talent supply and demand in the digital era, we at Huawei are continually leveraging our technologies, knowledge, experience, and successful practices developed over years of operations in the ICT industry to cultivate more high-quality ICT talent. In response to the government’s call for skilling, we open our general level ITC courses to anyone wanting to get a better understanding of emerging technologies, or to upgrade their current skills. Our aim is to build the education, industry and public talent ecosystems, to enhance talent capabilities and create an interest in ICT, especially amongst the student community as they are on the crux of deciding upon a career path.”

Ex VMware COO Sanjay Poonen Joins Cohesity as CEO and President

Cohesity has appointed Sanjay Poonen as CEO and President. He will also join the Cohesity Board of Directors. Poonen was formerly Chief Operating Officer (COO) of VMware and President of SAP. Mohit Aron, who has been CEO since founding the company in 2013, will accelerate Cohesity’s product innova tion and roadmap as Founder and Chief Technology and Product Officer. Aron will continue to lead the company’s research and development (R&D), support and services, as well as the Office of the CTO. He will remain on the Cohesity Board of Directors.

Western Digital has partnered with the film “Darlings” as their exclusive digital storage partner. Starring Alia Bhatt, Shefali Shah, Vijay Varma and Roshan Matthew, the film will premiere on Netflix on Aug. 5th, 2022.

Gaurav Verma, Producer and COO, Red Chillies Entrainment, said, “As content producers, we know how important it is to find a safe and convenient way to store all the content related to a film. With Western Digital’s SanDisk® and SanDisk Professional line of products on board, all our data storage needs were handled seamlessly, and we are glad to have partnered with them on Darlings.”

As a part of the partnership, Western Digital has launched a digital video campaign (DVC) featuring the lead character of Darlings, Badru, played by Alia Bhatt, highlighting the benefits of a SanDisk dual drive, a simple and convenient data transfer device.

“Cohesity sits at the intersection of three of the highest priority business issues today – cyber security, cloud, and data management – and is poised to become a major powerhouse with industry analyst firms naming the company a leader and one of the fastest growing in its category,” said Sanjay Poonen, CEO and President, Cohesity.“In my due diligence with customers, I’ve found that Cohesity has the best technology in its category and protects data for many of the biggest brands in the Fortune 500. I look forward to leading this talented organisation and driving even further success in strong partnership with Mohit and all Cohesians,”

Prior to this, as the COO of VMware, Poonen over saw sales, marketing, services, and alliances and played a key role in doubling revenues from approximately $6B to $12B.

Redington Q1FY23 Results Register 25% Y-o-Y Growth

Redington has announced its financial results for Q1FY23, which ended on June 30, 2022. It has been a strong quarter for the company with an aggressive performance across all business segments and geographies. Global revenues have grown a healthy 25% YoY and at 315.8 crores. PAT has grown 33%. Operating margins for the quarter have expanded with a 34% YoY.

Rajiv Srivastava, Managing Director, Redington Ltd., said, “We are very pleased with the results of the first quarter of FY23. While the growth of technology industry is stabilising globally, our execution aligned to the strategic pillars of innovation, technology and partner ships is driving strong, differentiated outcomes.”

At Redington we are working towards addressing technology friction – the gap between innovation and adoption – across different sectors by democratizing accessibility and availability of a wide range of technology products, solutions, and services,” added Rajiv.

Redington continues to work closely with its vast network of channel partners to simplify the procurement, supply chain and adoption of technology products for Enterprises, MSMEs, start-ups and consumers in all the 37 markets where it operates.

ESDS Affiliates with ICAR to deliver Decision Support System for Farmers

ESDS Software Solution Limited has collaborated with ICAR - Directorate of Onion & Garlic Research (DOGR), Pune (ICAR- DOGR) to aid farmers with a Decision Support System for guidance and management of onions and garlic.

ESDS’ innovative digital agro platform ‘Famrut’ assists the farmers to extract high yield & thereby income from their land by linking them with appropriate stakeholders in the agricultural ecosystem. Through Famrut, ESDS aims to provide farming solutions to farmers across the nation.

ESDS’ association with ICAR enables a strong Decision Supports System for farmers that will help them in varietal selection, pest and disease manage ment, and nutrition management for onion and garlic. It will also provide advisory support system, and market support system. Additionally, it will have an onion and garlic knowledge portal with technology repository and a registration platform for the onion and garlic stakeholders like farmers, farmer producer organizations, exporters and private organizations.

ManageEngine has made it to the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Unified Endpoint Management Tools. The company has also been acknowledged in the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Privileged Access Man agement. Gartner assessed ManageEngine based on its completeness of vision as well as its ability to execute. ManageEngine believes the recognition from Gartner comes on the heels of its work to fortify security in its entire product line, including its enterprise privileged access management (PAM) suite, PAM360, and its flagship unified endpoint management (UEM) solution, Endpoint Central (formerly Desktop Central). The fortifications are ManageEngine’s response to post-lockdown demands placed upon its customers’ IT teams and workforces. For these users, work has become increasingly unscripted, ad hoc and self-organizing, especially at the edges of the enterprise where bad actors pose an unprecedented threat to endpoints, data and other organizational resources.

Tech Data Expands Partnership with Cloudera to APJ

Tech Data has announced to expand its longstanding partnership with Clou dera to the Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) region. The partnership is expected to further deepen collaboration between Tech Data and Cloudera. It will equip business partners in the region to be Cloudera-ready with support from Tech Data’s Centre of Excellence (CoE). The partnership supports Tech Data’s strategy of driving hybrid cloud motion. This emphasises the capabili ties of the hybrid data platform on the Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) that business partners can look forward to.

Bennett Wong, Vice President, Advanced Solutions for MDC & Analytics at Tech Data Asia Pacific & Japan, said, “The enterprise cloud landscape is fast evolving where the onus is on providing customers with the highest quality of service on managing IT infrastructures and applications. This partnership will enable us to provide cloud services to clients with efficiency, remote-ability, and safety.”

Tech Data’s CoE is a guided approach to enabling growth across next generation technologies.

ViewSonic Kicks off the 2022 ColorPro Award

ViewSonic kicks off the 2022 ColorPro Award, inviting all creators to submit their work based on the theme “Breakthrough”. Aside from photo graphs, a new sub-category for “Digital Art” has been added to the contest. Submissions will open from August 15 to September 16, 2022. Participants will have the opportunity to receive prize packages valued at nearly USD 20,000, including cash prizes.

As the ColorPro Award enters its third year, ViewSonic will partner with SHOOTERS, PANTONE, Capture One, Calibrite, and Shoot The Frame. The partners will join as part of the panel of judges and also provide production tools as prizes. Prizes include ViewSonic ColorPro monitors, Capture One licenses, color-forward products from PANTONE and Calibrite, and exclusive memberships with Shoot The Frame to support creators in optimizing their workstations.

“In 2022, we’ve achieved a breakthrough ourselves by transforming the ColorPro Award into a global creative visual competition by expanding the scope.

ManageEngine Positioned in 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Unified Endpoint Management Tools

Frost & Sullivan Confers on Cisco the 2022 Global Secure Web Gateway Enabling Technology Leadership Award

Frost & Sullivan recently assessed the global secure web gateway industry and, based on its findings, recognizes Cisco with the 2022 Global Secure Web Gateway Enabling Technology Leadership Award. Cisco offers a broad set of security capabilities – featuring a function-rich secure web gateway (web proxy) – via a single cloud-delivered service to compete effectively in the secure web gateway (SWG) market. Cisco innovates continuously, and the key differentiators in its features and/or strategic developments set it apart from its competitors. Cisco’s integrated secure cloud solution meets customers’ need for scalable security framework that integrates and consolidates multiple security capabilities into one platform. As customers evolve toward a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) approach to security, Cisco Umbrella’s SWG capability is foundational for converging security, networking (e.g. SD-WAN), and Zero Trust for better, more flexible security.

InsurTech company, ACKO has onboarded Gaurav Gupta as the Vice President of Engineering. Bespoke CTO Search firm, Purple Quarter continued to be ACKO’s preferred partner for closing the tech leadership mandates. ACKO has previously trusted Purple Quarter in closing its crucial CTPO and SVP positions.

“We welcome Gaurav onboard as ACKO’s Vice President of Engineering. In his role, Gaurav will be integral to the Product Engineering Team, primarily responsible for taking charge of technical chal lenges to scale and improve the infrastructure, data platform and analytics. I am certain that Gaurav’s expansive knowledge and experience will be invaluable for the team at large. Once again thanks to the Purple Quarter team for their exceptional role understanding and industry connect that helped us locate the most suitable leader for the position,” shared Vishwanath Ramarao, CTPO, ACKO.

DIGEST

XEBIA AND 47 DEGREES JOIN FORCES FOR MISSION-CRITICAL SOFTWARE

XEBIAS HAS UNITED WITH 47 DEGREES, A USBASED GLOBAL TECHNOLOGY CONSULTANCY FOCUSED ON UNLOCKING BUSINESS GROWTH BY CREATING ASSURED SOLUTIONS FOR COMPLEX, MISSION-CRITICAL SOFTWARE. 47 DEGREES HAS BEEN FOCUSED ON BUILDING AND DEPLOYING INNOVATIVE APPLICATIONS FOR ITS CLIENTS AS WELL AS ACTIVELY ENGAGING IN THE TECH COMMUNITY SINCE 2010. THE COMPANY OFFERS COMPREHENSIVE CONSULTING SERVICES IN FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES AND RELATED TECHNOLOGIES, LIKE SCALA, KOTLIN, SPARK, KAFKA, AND AKKA. WHILE THE COMPANY IS HEADQUARTERED IN SEATTLE, WASHINGTON, THEY HAVE STRONG FOOTHOLDS IN SPAIN, THE UNITED KINGDOM, AND COLOMBIA.

EQ TECHNOLOGIC REVOLUTIONIZES EASE OF DATA INTEGRATION & ANALYTICS WITH EQUBE CLOUD

EQ TECHNOLOGIC HAS LAUNCHED A NEW FORMAT IN WHICH THEIR PRODUCTS CAN BE ACCESSED: A NEXT-GEN CLOUD-NATIVE SOLU TION FOR DATA / APPLICATION INTEGRATION AND ANALYTICS CHALLENGES - THE EQUBE CLOUD.

Automation Anywhere is enabling Planet Water India Foundation to provide sustainable access to clean water and sanitation facilities in India.

Automation Anywhere, as part of its Social Impact Program, is empowering the organization with funding for the installation of AquaTower water filtration systems, an integrated system that delivers safe, healthy drinking water, as well as handwashing facilities to rural schools and their surrounding communities. The water system can operate without power and uses ultrafiltration technology and activated carbon for enhanced water quality providing access to 1,000 litres of safe drinking water per hour to support up to 1,800 people. Through this program, the AquaSan surface disinfection system is also provided to sanitize toilets and other surfaces in schools.

DINESH KHALADKAR, PRESIDENT & CEO AT EQ TECHNOLOGIC SAID, “EQUBE CLOUD IS A GAME CHANGER AND FURTHER DEMOCRA TIZES ACCESS TO POWERFUL DATA INTEGRA TION AND ANALYTICS SOLUTIONS, ENABLING ORGANIZATIONS TO ACCELERATE THEIR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION JOURNEYS.” WITH EQUBE CLOUD, ONE CAN SEAMLESSLY CONNECT, INTEGRATE AND MIGRATE DATA FROM DISPARATE SYSTEMS, FEDERATE, ORCHESTRATE, SYNCHRONIZE AND MASH-UP DATA, RAPIDLY CREATE APIS AND ‘FORPURPOSE’ APPS, AND REALIZE ACTIONABLE ANALYTICS WITH STUNNING VISUALIZATIONS OF NEAR REAL-TIME ENTERPRISE-WIDE DATA.

SKALEX NOW OFFERS SOFTWARE CONSULTING AND DEVEL OPMENT FOR BUSINESSES OF ALL SIZES

Quick Heal Technologies has collaborated with RevBits to address the advanced protection need for an on-premise infrastructure of government organisations. The partnership will help Quick Heal enhance its Seqrite product portfolio while enabling RevBits to expand its market presence in India. The associa tion also aims to help government organizations that prefer to run their critical systems on-premise rather than in the cloud, thereby ensuring that they operate safely and seamlessly without the fear of cyberattacks.

Dr. Sanjay Katkar, Joint MD & CTO, Quick Heal Technologies Ltd, said, “We are delighted to partner with a leading cybersecurity solution provider like RevBits, well-known for its unique three-phase detection method that can protect businesses even from the most sophisticated attacks. It also comple ments our existing suite of Seqrite security solutions and will help us further strengthen our Seqrite product portfolio to offer the best cybersecurity solutions to our customers.

LEADING GERMAN SUPPLIER OF WHITE-LABEL CRYPTOCURRENCY SOFTWARE, SKALEX, HAS EXPANDED ITS CORE SERVICES TO INCLUDE ENTERPRISE-LEVEL SOFTWARE DEVELOP MENT AND CONSULTING FOR BUSINESSES OF ALL SIZES. THE COMPANY HAS ALSO UPDATED ITS BRAND IDENTITY AND REVAMPED ITS WEBSITE TO REFLECT THESE CHANGES. IN RESPONSE TO CHANGING MARKET CONDI TIONS AND THE NEEDS OF ITS CUSTOMERS, SKALEX IS PROUD TO ANNOUNCE IT IS EXPANDING ITS CORE LINES OF BUSINESS TO INCLUDE SOFTWARE CONSULTING AND DEVELOPMENT. SKALEX IS IMPLEMENTING THESE CHANGES AFTER LISTENING TO CLIENT FEEDBACK AND NOW OFFERS THESE NEW SER VICES TO HELP ITS CLIENTS TO ADAPT AND THRIVE IN TODAY’S CHALLENGING BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT.

Quick Heal joins forces with RevBits to strengthen its cybersecurity portfolio

Automation Anywhere Collaborates with Planet Water India Foundation to Bring Clean Water to the poor Gaurav Gupta Joins ACKO as VP Engineering

Appian Opens India Product Development Center

Appian has announced the opening of its new product development center in Chennai, India. The office is staffed by Appian Engineers, including product managers, software developers, quality engineers, and user experience design ers. These experts will deliver new capabilities and features to expand the Appian Low-Code Platform. Appian is headquartered in McLean, Virginia, USA. It is a global leader in low-code. Industry analyst Gartner predicts that 75% of enterprise application development will be built with low-code by 2024.

Appian Chennai is led by seasoned IT executive Ramesh Ardhanari, who is named Vice President of Engineering. He reports directly to Suvajit Gupta, Appian Executive Vice President of Engineering. Ardhanari said, “Creating the world’s most advanced low-code technology requires the skills of the world’s best high-code developers. India has a wealth of software talent, and Appian provides truly reward ing career opportunities in this cutting-edge industry. That’s why I’m excited to lead our expansion into India.”

Frost & Sullivan Recognizes CrowdStrike with the 2022 Global Endpoint Security Technology Innovation Leadership Award

Frost & Sullivan recently assessed the global endpoint security industry and, based on its findings, and recognized CrowdStrike with the 2022 Global Endpoint Security Technology Innovation Leadership Award.. The company brings artificial intelligence and machine learning to endpoint security to pro vide unparalleled prevention of malware attacks on and off networks. Its single, lightweight agent has extremely low performance overhead achieved by running its detection technologies – including AI and ML algorithms – both on the agent and in the cloud. The company secures the most critical areas at risk and continues to refine its endpoint security solution to stay ahead of adversaries and stop breaches.

The CrowdStrike Falcon platform was developed in response to ever-growing cyberattack sophistication to quickly recognize emerging attack patterns while automatically preventing threats across the company’s global customer base.

Rinus Strydom Joins TraceLink as Chief Revenue Officer

TraceLink Inc. has appointed Rinus Strydom as its Chief Revenue Officer. In his role, Rinus will be leading the global sales and alliance teams at TraceLink and will be responsible for scaling the company’s business.

Rinus Strydom brings over two decades of enterprise technology experience to TraceLink. Rinus has led the growth efforts at SAP, Commerce One, Perfect Commerce, Ariba, Hubwoo and Tradeshift. His leadership positions in multiple customer-facing roles including Chief Revenue Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, head of Alliances, product management and solutions consult ing, provide the experience needed to quickly scale the TraceLink sales organization.

“Rinus is a tremendously accomplished sales leader with deep expertise in network businesses,” said Shabbir Dahod, President and CEO at TraceLink. “We have a tremendous opportunity in front of us. We have built the largest digital network in the Life Sciences and Healthcare industry with over 285,000 members.

Canon Targets Millennial Audience Through Its ‘Big Smile’ Campaign

Canon India, a leading digital imaging player in the country succeeded in strengthening connect with the millennial audience through the ‘Big Smile with Canon’ campaign. Extending the brand’s corporate culture of spreading Big Smiles in the community, the unique corporate campaign was launched to amplify Canon’s image as a young brand targeting millennial customer group and build top of the mind recall.

TraceLink Inc. has joined the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network (APN). The company also announced that the TraceLink Supply Chain Work Management solution is now available in AWS Marketplace.

“TraceLink built Opus, the Platform for the Internet of Supply Chains (IoSC), on AWS to achieve the scalability and reliability required for end-to-end supply chain digitalization,” said Shabbir Dahod, President and CEO of TraceLink. “Supply Chain Work Management digitalizes work between trading partners. By joining APN and featuring Supply Chain Work Management, powered by Opus, in AWS Marketplace, TraceLink is allowing an even faster and easier path to digital transformation for AWS customers.”

TraceLink Supply Chain Work Management is a revolutionary new way to execute supply chain management processes by digitalizing work across multiple tiers of supply chain partners. The solution allows teams to assign tasks, manage incidents, review documents, manage changes, and track progress with dashboards. As a result, exceptions are resolved faster, costs are reduced, and on-time, in-full (OTIF) delivery goals are exceeded.

Celebrating its 25th year milestone in India, Canon India reiterated its legacy and strengthened customer connect by adopting a unique, trendy and relatable format of comedy, marking a shift in its marketing strategy. Led by Mr. Manabu Yamazaki, President and CEO at Canon India, the campaign witnessed massive engagement across social media platforms through a video series with the ace stand-up comedian – Mr. Anshu Mor. The campaign registered a huge success as more than 48 million users engaged with the videos released and various UGC initiatives across social media platforms, further making the #BigSmilewith Canon trend on Twitter for the first 4 hours of its launch. Leveraging comedy as a platform, the 5 episodes series showcased the ideal synergy of discussing mentorship, professional culture, worklife balance, passion, and creativity in a quirky way.

Ethio Telecom Selects Hyper Sense Fraud Management

Subex, a pioneer in driving AI-led Digital Trust, announced that it has been selected by Ethio Telecom to deploy its Fraud Management solution. The solution, which is built on Subex’s AI orchestration platform, HyperSense, will replace Ethio Telecom’s existing legacy fraud management system, thereby enabling them to move from a traditional rules-based approach to an AI-first approach. This approach will, inturn, enable them to detect new and unknown threats in real-time.

Ethio Telecom is Ethiopia’s leading integrated telecommunications solutions provider, with over 50 million subscribers. The telecom opera tor has recently launched a pre-commercial 5G network within the coun try. In order to sustain its market leadership by providing high-quality, and innovative offerings, Ethio Telecom wanted to enhance and broaden its risk management strategy by having a holistic defense mechanism.

With Subex’s AI-first Fraud Management system on HyperSense, which leverages AI in every step of the Fraud management process, Ethio Telecom will now be able to bring in enhanced accuracy, coverage, and time-to-detect. These capabilities will, in turn, enable the operator to adopt a proactive approach to combatting risks such as SIM Box, Spoof ing, SMS frauds, roaming frauds, subscription frauds, device frauds, Mobile money risks, Credit Risk Management, etc.

Time for Indian SaaS Startups to Go Global

To assist early-stage SaaS startups to tap into this growth opportunity, Prime Venture Partners and Amazon Internet Services Private Limited (AISPL) are collaborating to host the third installation of ‘SaaS Central’ program. The two-week hybrid program is designed to support the startups in India that are building for the global market and assist to accelerate their growth journey by focusing on SaaS architecture, product management, go-to-market and industry connect.

“Many hyper-growth SaaS startups in India are developing products to scale globally from the start. With the majority of India’s SaaS unicorns building on AWS, we have deep experience in supporting our custom ers to launch and grow innovative software products, and go global in minutes on our secure, extensive, and reliable cloud infrastructure. We understand the needs of Indian SaaS startups at all stages of their growth, and through a combination of the broadest and deepest set of cloud products and services and a commitment to help nurture SaaS startups as they navigate critical business milestones, we are well positioned to sup port them on their journey. We’re delighted to kick off the third annual installation of the SaaS Central program to help support, guide, and grow the next cohort of India’s innovative SaaS startups.

Jidoka Technologies Eyes Robust Growth in the FMCG Sector

Canon India is celebrating the art of storytelling with its unique new campaign titled ‘The Kathakaar of Life’ on World Photography Day. With a vision of humanizing and recognizing the fervour of profes sional photographers across the country, the campaign has been sung in a captivating and innocent voice of a child. Notably, the geo targeted campaign has been customised and sung in nine different regional languages.

The campaign aims at creating awareness about Canon’s flagship EOS R System and positions it as every photographer’s quintessential companion to narrate their own personalised stories. Through this campaign, Canon celebrates photographers as superstars who are full of zeal and are out there in the world capturing every story of life; be it that of travel, weddings, fashion, wildlife or celebrations, all made possible with the help of the Kathakaar (EOS R System) to capture memories of a lifetime.

A10 Networks Strengthens Strategic Partnership With Incedo

Incedo Inc. and A10 Networks are stepping up their partnership to accelerate innovation and new product introduction.

The Global Delivery Center (GDC) at Pune, which was set up in 2020 as part of a strategic initiative to streamline global operations and accelerate innovation, is now fully operational and provides a founda tion to accelerate Incedo’s roadmaps.

In order to scale the GDC, Incedo will be hiring deep technology talent with niche skills to expand this state-of-the-art innovation center. This partnership opens a host of opportunities for the technol ogy talent in and around the Pune region, to work on the industry’s award-winning cybersecurity and infrastructure products in the multi-cloud security and AI/ML DDoS protection segments.

This state-of-the-art GDC, acts as an innovation hub and an extension of the A10 San Jose center, leveraging Incedo’s deep expertise in Product Engineering, Business Operations, and digital technologies. Incedo’s R&D team has been set up to jointly accelerate cloud transformation and introduce cuttingedge, next-generation products for A10.

Jidoka Technologies, a leader in automated cognitive inspection for the manufacturing industry, is on a rapid track to growth and now creating success stories in the FMCG sector. With the recent funding of Rs. 3 Crore from The Chennai Angels and under the mentorship of TCA Lead Venkatesh Vijayaraghavan, Director and CEO, CavinKare Pvt. Ltd., Jidoka is strengthening its presence in the FMCG industry too. The organization works with manufacturers across automotive, FMCG, pharma, general manufacturing, electronics, textiles, and printing industry domains currently and will expand to other verticals, in the future. Its key list of customers includes Mudhra Fine Blanc Private Ltd, Nexteer Automotive, IP Rings, ZF Rane, Sansera Engineering, and TVS Sundaram Clayton in the automotive sector, Shriji Polymers in the Pharma sector, and ITC Ltd. and partners of Mondelez International in the FMCG sector.

Jidoka solutions deliver complete automa tion of visual inspection – a process that is usually highly subjective.

Canon launches ‘The Kathakaar of Life’ campaign on World Photography Day

GIGABYTE Holds Global Campaign “AERO 16 Relay Challenge” Featuring Color Accurate Laptops

GIGABYTE wowed the creator community with its completely re-designed AERO series laptops since their launch earlier this year. Above all, the AERO 16 creator laptop is particularly designed with graphic designers, video editors, and photographers in mind, delivering X-Rite certified and Pantone validated (Delta E<1) color accuracy. Combined with the Super Narrow Bezel 4K+ OLED display and VESA-certified DisplayHDR 500 True Black, the AERO 16 laptop brings true-to-life colors that make creators’ inspirations come alive.

To share such a creative edge, GIGABYTE is inviting the whole community to join AERO 16 Relay Challenge and pass on the joy of color and creation on social platforms. The campaign is led off with the Color Relay Chal lenge. Starting from August 10, participants are invited to apply the AERO 16-themed Instagram AR filter and complete the tasks for a chance to win awesome prizes.

The campaign will be later succeeded by the Creativity Relay Challenge. GIGABYTE will be teaming up with several world-renowned content creators, including Asia Ladowska, Carles Dalmau, Elenamics, Elliot Ulm and Li Cambon.

Bharatpe Expands Footprint to 400 Cities Across India

BharatPe, one of India’s leading fintech companies for merchants, today announced that it has expanded its footprint to 400 towns and cities across India. The expansion is in line with the company’s commitment to driving financial inclusion across Bharat by enabling wider adoption of digital payments as well as addressing the credit gap for SMEs and offline retailers. The company also shared that it has recorded consistent growth in payments TPV and has recently achieved the milestone of US$ 20 bn in annualized TPV.

Last year, BharatPe had announced that it aims to scale its presence to 300 cities by March 2023. The company has aggressively expanded to tier-2, 3 and 4 towns and cities since then, as it believed in the opportunity that tier-2 and beyond towns and cities of the country had to offer. The company has rolled out its UPI QR payment acceptance service and loans to merchant partners in the new cities in the first phase. BharatPe also plans to top up these services with other fintech products like BharatSwipe in the second phase over the coming months.

Huawei and Partners Install World’s First AI Filtering System for Salmon Building Automation System Market Estimated to Garner $194,864.1 Million: Research Dive

Huawei and local partner Berlevåg Jeger-og Fiskerforening (BJFF) have successfully deployed an AI-powered filtering system in Norway’s Storelva River that allows Atlantic salmon to pass upstream and filters Pacific salmon – an invasive species – into a holding tank.

In June 2022 under Huawei’s TECH4ALL initiative, Huawei and BJFF deployed the filtering system to prevent Pacific salmon from entering the upstream channel of Norway’s river system. A mechanical gate allows local Atlantic salmon and Arctic red-spotted salmon to continue upstream to complete their migratory spawning process. The invasive species is diverted to a holding tank for subsequent removal.

“Installing a diversion system in a turbulent river is an extremely challenging task. I was impressed with the efforts of our partners, BJFF, and the local community. Here, people aspire to prove the role that good management has in saving rivers from environmental disasters,” said Vegard Kjenner, Technical Director at Huawei Norway.

Research Dive has published a new report titled, “Building Automation System Market by Compo nent (Hardware and Software), Application (Indus trial, Residential, and Commercial), Offerings (Facility Management Systems, Security & Access Controls, Fire Protection Systems, Building Energy Management Software, BAS Services, and Others), and Regional Analysis (North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and LAMEA): Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast, 2022–2030”.

Industrial businesses continue to undergo rapid digital transformation as digitalization increases operational efficiency, productivity, and responsiveness to the market. Digital enterprises can create new, more competitive solutions and services and superior customer experiences. Gathering, analyzing, and utilizing vast amounts of data from equipment, processes, customers, and suppliers also drive this transformation. Broad, organizational information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) convergence, in which data-centric IT systems integrate with operations equipment and technology, can provide a huge competitive advantage when executed successfully. IT-OT convergence is cited as one of the most important factors for organizations to achieve their strategic goals—68% of respondents—with a majority implementing or annually reviewing some form of this process. Integration challenges range from getting old equipment to work with new systems and platforms to bridging the different goals and priorities of IT and OT teams.

According to the report, the global building automation system market is anticipated to garner a revenue of $194,864.1 million and grow at 10.0% CAGR during the 2022-2030 forecast period. Growing demand for smart buildings for benefits like proper ventilation, air conditioning, heating, etc. and the government’s rising emphasis on creat ing eco-friendly and energy-efficient buildings are some factors estimated to drive the global building automation system market during the 2022-2030 analysis years.

With a legacy of serving the market with world-class solutions for business optimization and ana lytics, Subex is now leading the way by enabling all-around Digital Trust in the business ecosystems of its customers. Through HyperSense, an end-to-end augmented analytics platform, Subex empowers communications ser vice providers and enterprise customers to make faster, better decisions by leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) analytics across the data value chain.

Subex added a feather in its cap recently in driving AI-led Digital Trust when it was selected by Ethio Telecom to deploy its Fraud Manage ment solution. The solution, which is built on Subex's AI orchestration platform, HyperSense, will replace Ethio Telecom's existing legacy fraud

SUBEX DIALS ETHIO TELECOM

Subex added a feather in its cap recently in driving AIled Digital Trust when it was selected by Ethio Telecom to deploy its Fraud Management solution

management system, thereby enabling them to move from a traditional rules-based approach to an AI-first approach. This approach will, in-turn, enable them to detect new and unknown threats in real-time.

The Power of HyperSense Founded in 1994, Subex has been enabling its cus tomers maximize their revenues and profitability. Leveraging its comprehensive product portfolio in areas such as Business Assurance and Fraud Man agement, Subex enhances them with the power of HyperSense to help CSPs reduce risk, combat fraud, and thereby ensure profitability.

Ethio Telecom is Ethiopia's leading integrated telecommunications solutions provider, with over 50 million subscribers. The telecom operator has recently launched a pre-commercial 5G network within the country. In order to sustain its market leadership by providing high-quality, and innova tive offerings, Ethio Telecom wanted to enhance and broaden its risk management strategy by having a holistic defense mechanism.

AI-first Fraud Management System

With Subex's AI-first Fraud Management system on HyperSense, which leverages AI in every step of the Fraud management process, Ethio Telecom will now be able to bring in enhanced accuracy, coverage, and time-to-detect. These capabili ties will, in turn, enable the operator to adopt a proactive approach to combatting risks such as SIM Box, Spoofing, SMS frauds, roaming frauds, subscription frauds, device frauds, Mobile money risks, Credit Risk Management, etc. Furthermore, with its earlier deployment of Subex's Business Assurance, Ethio Telecom will now be able to con solidate its Revenue Assurance and Fraud Man agement approach to ensure the breaking down of silos and enhance operational efficiency.

With Subex's Fraud Management solution on HyperSense, Ethio Telecom will be able to improve fraud coverage across their various busi ness lines; leverage Explainable AI capabilities to enhance customer experience; make quick data-

driven decisions with advanced visualization and dashboarding capabilities; cater to new business requirements with the system's scalability and elasticity; benefit from rolling upgrades, i.e., elimi nate long and expensive upgrade cycles; reduce TCO with open-source components and low hardware footprint

Commenting on the partnership extension, Shankar Roddam, Whole-Time Director & Chief Operating Officer, Subex, said, "This win marks another chapter in our long-standing relationship with Ethio Telecom and it comes close on the heels of our recent Business Assurance deployment. With the implementation of our fraud manage ment solution coupled with the existing Business Assurance solution, Ethio Telecom will now ben efit from a holistic risk management approach as they gear up to provide 5G services. Today, our risk management portfolio sets itself apart by adopting an AI-first approach to mitigate threats accurately and faster.”

Combating Telecom Risks

Ethio Telecom has consistently been at the fore front of adopting proactive measures to combat telecom risks and safeguard their business and customers. Towards this, the operator recognizes the value of an approach which places AI at the core. We at Subex feel privileged to be working with Ethio Telecom to empower them in this fastchanging landscape."

"For over two decades, Subex has been in the market leaders' group in the fraud management space. This fact, coupled with the success we have seen through the deployment of their Revenue Assurance (currently Business Assurance) solu tion have made them the ideal partner of choice in our fight against telecom risks. I believe that, in the future, as the threat landscape evolves, Subex's AI-first fraud management system will be vital in safeguarding our business and customers. We see this as a future-proof investment that aligns with our digital services initiatives," said Tsegaye Emmanuel, Chief Information Security Officer, Ethio Telecom.

“TODAY, OUR RISK MANAGEMENT

PORTFOLIO SETS ITSELF APART BY ADOPTING AN AI-FIRST APPROACH TO MITIGATE THREATS ACCURATELY AND FASTER.”

SHANKAR RODDAM

WHOLE-TIME DIRECTOR & CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER, SUBEX

TARUN AGARWAL DIRECTOR AND CEO PATH INFOTECH

A PHENOMENAL JOURNEY WITH ORACLE

Specializing in Oracle technology stack, Oracle Infrastructure, and Oracle applications, Path Infotech has been a frontline Oracle Partner. Clocking an incredible 200% y-on-y growth in cloud business over the last two years, with 85% of its revenue coming only from Oracle, this Oracle Partner’s success story makes a great study in point

BY MANASH RANJAN DEBATA manash@accentinfomedia.com

services, combined with Oracle’s technology, have enabled its customers to achieve their business goals. Integral to the company’s massive growth drive, the recent announcements are being looked up as a serious attempt to turbocharge its partner eco-system.

To understand the matrix behind the magic of partnership with Oracle, the key responsibilities and obligations of partnership, notable benefits of an Oracle Partnership, and the competitive edge brought up by Oracle solutions for partners, we had spoken to a few frontline Oracle Partners present at the gala event. Here, in an exclusive chat with SME Channels, Tarun Agarwal, Direc tor and CEO of Path Infotech – a leading Oracle Partner—lays bare his valued experience as an Oracle Partner, his vision and business priorities, and his predictions for the cloud industry. Offer ing his industry-critical insights, he sheds light on the Oracle Partner Network and the Oracle cloud. Edited Excerpts…

Please brief us about what your company is doing. What are your key focus areas and priorities at this moment?

At the recently conducted Oracle India Partner Kickoff 2022 in Goa, Oracle announced its revamped partner-centric strategy to help accelerate digitization for its 15,000 plus custom ers in India.

Always been at the heart of Oracles’ business, Oracle’s partner ecosystem has been critical to the company’s customers’ success. Their differentiated

There’s a little bit of a history around it. It takes us back by at least 32 years. Our company actually started in the Oracle system in 1990. It was a time when Oracle was the first commercial Oracle data base and Oracle six was actually launched. Oracle Five too was there. So, that’s where we started our journey on Oracle. And for the last, I think, almost 27 years, we have been an Oracle partner. As a frontline Oracle Partner, we specialize in Oracle technology stack, Oracle Infrastructure, Oracle

applications -- with 85% of our revenue coming from Oracle. Officially, we just turned 31 on 3rd of July. And, I must say, it’s been a phenomenal journey so far.

Looking back, I would say we were at the right place at the right time. And we picked up the right database. So, it was quite phenomenal..

If you look around, it’s clearly discernible that we have transitioned from the old age monolithic desktops to the present era of the Internet of the world, mobile platforms and the cloud, which has become the de facto mode now. So last I think almost 4-5 years back we started a journey with cloud. We started exploring various options on the cloud.

In the last two years, we have actually grown our cloud business with Oracle, almost 200% year on year. There’s a huge traction, especially on the Oracle OCI gentle cloud. For our customers, we do lift and shift. We have moved lot of customers from AWS to Oracle Gentle Cloud.

So that has been our focus set some 6-7 years back. You’ll be actually surprised to know that we indeed ran an Oracle application on Microsoft since Oracle Cloud was in its infancy stage at that time. But as the customer wanted cloud, we had to run the entire Fortis hospitals’ environment on Azure cloud, but the application was Oracle.

As a key Oracle Partner, would you please brief us on the specialties of Oracle cloud, which drives you to adopt and to bring in customers from AWS and other platforms to embrace Oracle?

There are two things to it. First, I’m biased towards

“SPEAKING FROM THE PERFORMANCE PERSPECTIVE, I HAVE USED IT FOR LAST 34 YEARS AND I HAVEN’T FOUND EVEN A SINGLE DATABASE ENVIRONMENT, WHICH CAN COMPETE WITH ORACLE IN TOTALITY.”

Oracle. When I say I’m biased towards Oracle, I mean, if you look at Oracle database, there is no competitor.

Speaking from the performance perspective, I have used it for last 34 years and I haven’t found even a single database environment, which can compete with Oracle in totality. You could have a very simple database which can do one single task, but Oracle database or Oracle infrastructure is capable of doing everything.

Second, geographically, India has been tra ditionally an Oracle negative environment. I think some 30 years back, Oracle Six pervaded everywhere in the government. NIC was set-up and it actually started embracing Oracle in a big way. All government started embracing, all banks too started embracing Oracle in a big way. Thus, Oracle became the de facto standard in India. So, that became a natural choice because everything, including top ten of ten of all large corporates would run on Oracle. The reason is they have been better. I would say they have the best solutions and the best database. And that’s the reason why I have brought all my customers to Oracle. The logic is if you want to run Oracle, why don’t you run it on Oracle for best optimization of results.

We are also an ISP and have a product of our own. Considering the multiple benefits of the Oracle platform, we decided last November to shift lock, stock and barrel from On Premise to Oracle. That was a big decision. I have been an Oracle technical guy for over 30 years. So, one should first practice, then profess.

I breathe Oracle and so does our organization. If you see four people there with me, including me, all four of them are Oracle vectors in the sense that they have actually worked only on Oracle.

As a Cloud player, Oracle has been adopting a cloud-first partner program. How has been your experience with OPN?

The Oracle Cloud-first partner program was recently introduced. But as I have earlier said, we have been an OPN partner for 27 years now. We signed up with Oracle in 1995.

At that time, we were not even making revenue. If remember correctly, we used to pay almost a lakh of rupees to Oracle. But that is our commit ment. OPN partnership actually has bestowed upon us two very important tools. First, the enablement of my people. I’ve got solutions avail able on the OPN platform.

Second, they have also given us the market

place access, where I can actually put solutions and services which customers would be able to search and provide.

Now coming onto the partner-first program, Oracle as well as the partner ecosystem also recognizes that a partner knows more about the end customer than the OEM itself. Thus, put ting the partner first will provide you with two benefits. One I can actually make more sales or I can provide a very comprehensive solution to the end customer because a partner knows the entire ecosystem well. Recognizing the partner early or engaging the partner early in a customer environ ment makes the entire deal obviously quite posi tive. And that’s a very positive sign which we have seen, when I was with the ISV team.

The other thing that happens in the partner ecosystem is the case of absence of or insufficient communication between ISVs. Suppose, two ISVs are not talking to each other. Let’s say some ISV has the capability in JD Edwards, which is an Oracle product and I have the capability on infrastructure. In that case, I can help that partner to do a migration from on premise to cloud and the partner itself can continue providing the man aged services to the end customer, while I provide the infrastructure services. So, I think this is really great and a positive way to go.

As a business leader, what would be the next big thing that you’re planning? Will it have anything to do with Oracle, or would it be Oracle-based?

That’s indeed a tough question. Well, the next big thing that we are looking at is a very comprehen sive integration platform that we are developing internally.

I would call it an integration platform because the way the world is moving, it will be a hybrid world. When I say hybrid world it could be two clouds and if you looked at what Larry and Satya announced on Monday, it will be a few OEMs coming too large, providers coming together, shaking hands and providing the seamless con nectivity. However, it will still be hybrid because there is a Microsoft Cloud; there’s an Oracle cloud and there is also something on premise. So, typi cally you will end up with three.

That’s how the world will move. What and how? Let’s say my bank banking application wants to interact with a JD Edward Application or a .net application running on Oracle cloud, So, how do I integrate?

Integration is one of the best and most vital

part. I’ll say, I’m developing a platform for that. It is going to be hosted or currently I’m using a pilot on Oracle itself. It is hosted on Oracle OCI. And the front to that environment is my own low code, no code environment. I have developed a low code, no code environment which will be hosted on Oracle Cloud where anybody can just integrate anything.

So that would be my biggest bet tomorrow, and it would be for anything, anything in the sense that today one of my application which is running on OCI is receiving approximately 4,000,000 hits a day. Through mobile, I’ve succeeded in getting around 35 customers. Every customer is giving me almost 100,000 calls a day. And every call is translated into at least 40 interactions. That’s how it sums up to 40 lakhs, or four millions.

That’s all being done through the mobile and everything is happening on Oracle.

As the pandemic struck the world, there had been an unprecedented rise in digitalization, and, of course, the migra tion to the cloud. As a result, there had been a hike in demand for cloud solu tions, too. How has your company been leveraging this hike in demand?

I think that’s very positive for us, businesswise. We have doubled our revenue, especially on the cloud business. Pre-covid, we were actually making neg ligible revenue and as I said in the last three years, we have started on a cloud journey.

We were doing very negligible but now almost 25% of our revenue is cloud agnostic cloud based revenue which is there. The beauty of the cloud can be gauged from the shift that’s happening around now. Earlier, the CIO would request a manpower on site. With the COVID happening, the person can be anywhere in the world and you can service using the same team. So, we were able to service more customers and every customer wanted to provide their services or their internal solutions or external solutions to either the employer, to the end customer or to the vendor. How will you do that? You can’t call them to the office. There’s no way. So, I would share with you a very interesting thing that we did for one of our customers rather for lot of our customers. Their people needed to deliver something or need to go to some residents, let’s say, to repair an AC. During COVID time, there was no movement allowed. We created a concept of e-Pass. That e-Pass could be generated on the mobile. Their men can show the e-Pass to the police and request passage on the plea that

manual work will go. However, use of automa tion will ensure that the work will be done 100% correctly. But obviously, there is a trade off.

Some questions ago, you had referred to Nadella and the Oracle chief announcing together. Considering these develop ments, as a key Oracle partner, would you forecast a future where borderless or vendor-agnostic kind of Hybrid cloud solutions will rule the roost?

Yes, that’s clearly the way to go. But I would like to just rephrase the word ‘borderless’. When you say borderless, it means my data could be parked any where, but I think, in majority of the cases, we are looking at data privacy. An Indian enterprise may prefer to keep the data in India, whether it is with Microsoft, whether it is with Oracle, or it’s with any other cloud provider.

And, if they all come together seamlessly, it will be a win win for everybody. I think it’s the right direction that two largest application software companies are heading. While Oracle is a leader in enterprise application software, Microsoft is the leader in consumer application software like office, exchange, e-mail, etc. Even though, Microsoft has a navigation and dynamics platform, the platform also needs integration with Oracle ecosystem. Similarly, Oracle ecosystem needs integration with the Office 365 with emailing.

Other than these, there are a lot many other things too. Nobody is talking about Facebook or Meta. But in India, WhatsApp is getting integrated in everything with every service. That’s a very prominent development. So, in that way it is bor derless. But from a data privacy perspective, you may need to contain it within the country or zones or whatever you may call it.

So, when it comes to data sovereignty, most nations are quite possessive about their data. In India too, customers are apprehensive about whether their data is parked inside their country or somewhere else upon which they have hardly any control. Does Oracle host the data inside India or park them outside?

It’s a very nice question. I think it is more of a matter of trust. I can say 100% categorically that from an Oracle perspective, whichever customer wants the data to be hosted or stored locally, it is being stored locally. There could be chances where the same company has got an officer, let’s say in Europe. Now, the European Government would

also want local data and so would the Indian government. So, then there is a trade off. A set of practices or a system needs to evolve to address the issue If data needs to travel across the border from one country to another. Thus, protection may not be an issue because the platform is still secure.

Issues may arise when a customer as an indi vidual demands that she doesn’t want to store her data in your machine. So, how do you delete that data from all the systems. I think that is where most of the companies need to work upon because it’s more at an application level, not at the OEM level that you need to have those systems built in, where you will be able to trace out the entire data and delete it too.

Not just Oracle, many others like Amazon, even Microsoft have their data centers locally. Every company is actually working towards local data. Everybody is guaranteeing that it’s local data. So I think that’s trust value and a legal channel right when I sign up with Oracle, there’s a legal document.

What would be your message to the channel community as a key Oracle partner?

One of the most important things I would like to suggest is “Don’t adopt the consumption.” Buying a platform is not the solution until and unless you use it. So you should go to your end customer with Oracle or without Oracle, whatever way.

Going to the end customer, should you say please take Oracle Cloud? Should you just make a sale? Or should you also guide the customer to consume it? It’s here the solution lies. The moment the consumption starts, that’s when the true ROI starts trickling in. So, the first thing you should do is to work with the customers; work with your end customers; work with the channel partners and other partners and create a cohesive solution, so that the end customer actually gets the benefit out of it. Second, since the industry is facing a talent shortage, the channel partners or this entire eco system should start investing in creating talent.

The moment you start creating talent, every thing will start falling in place, because eventually you will still need people to deliver. So, adopt a customer-first approach and create talent. It will result in a win win for all.

Since Cloud is a very take-intensive platform, what sorts of partner upskilling programs are offered by Oracle to you and your team?

There are plenty of them. You can start fresh with or without any fees. There’s a series in Oracle called QBE or query by example and there’s also Oracle by example. There are various series where actual use cases are taught using videos with hands-on lab exercises which you can do at your own pace.

Oracle Cloud also has got a very interesting fea ture called as always free cloud. So Oracle provides you with almost 60% of the cloud infrastructure free of cost. Anybody can sign up and take that and it is free for life. So, any student, any developer can create an account, learn there. And once he has learned it, he can actually move to a commer cial version of Oracle Cloud.

Whatever we or our team has learned has happened through Oracle University or Oracle Online education.

Foundational

Path drives efficiency across your core business processes, boosting productivity and competitive advantage.

Sustenance It manages daily IT operations with its proactive Support Service models.

Transformational It evaluates your readiness to cloud and help transform your business with a four-step Cloud Adoption Methodology.

RANSOMWARE IS INDISCRIMINATORY – PREPARE FOR EVERYTHING TO FAIL

PROFILE

A frontline IT leader, Rick is a top-notch IT professional and media pundit. His goals are to grow each of the business areas upward he is involved in. He specializes in Analyst roles, virtualization, and IT administration. Currently, he is a Senior Director of Product Strategy at Veeam.

Rick’s passion for challenges led to his commitment to educate and communicate at all levels—engaging those new to availability technologies as well as those who are experts. As a blogger, podcaster and active member of the IT community, Rick builds relationships and spreads excitement about Veeam solutions.

Ransomware attacks continue to grow in frequency.

In the past 12 months, 84% of Indian organizations suffered ransomware attacks, making cyber-attacks one of the single biggest causes of downtime for the second consecutive year, according to Veeam’s Data Protection Trends Report 2022. As well as being more common, ransomware is also getting more potent. When businesses are struck by ransomware, they are unable to recover over a third (36%) of the data they lose on average. The threat landscape is as volatile as it has ever been. There are more attacks taking place. They are more diverse. And they can have grave consequences for the companies they affect.

On the other hand, rather than tremble with fear at the awesome power of the cyber attacks waiting to be deployed against them, organizations must focus on what they can control – their defence. Protecting your business against cyber-attacks requires follow ing some fundamental and consistent principles –no matter what is being thrown at you.

The ransomware wild west

There is a lawless and brutal feeling about the cur rent cyber landscape businesses operate in. It is difficult for governments to hold cybercriminals to account and businesses are often keen to mini mise public attention towards an incident that has compromised them. This contributes to a situation where almost all the focus is on the victim (the busi ness) rather than the criminal (the attacker).

Furthermore, ransomware – and most contem porary cybercrime – is almost indiscriminatory in terms of those who suffer. The fact is that every busi ness is a target. Yes, hacktivist organisations such as Anonymous use organised cyber-attacks as a means of exercising social justice and to call out businesses or governments they view as immoral, unlawful, or dangerous. But even the most philanthropic and virtuous companies can find themselves begging a cybercriminal gang to restore their data and systems while a hefty ransom is demanded of them to do so.

You often see a comparison made between cyberattacks and fishing. Hence the term ‘phishing’ which refers to using an email or text being used as bait

to trick a victim into ‘biting’ – in this case clicking on the link and unwittingly downloading malware onto their device. With ransomware especially we are now seeing industrial-scale attacks being carried out which are more analogous to trawler fishing. This isn’t one guy with a rod casting out to get a bite off one or two fish. It’s AI-infused algorithms pro grammed to target everyone and everything – play ing a blind numbers game to catch whatever it can.

This indiscriminate nature is compounded by the fact cyber-attacks are generally difficult to contain. For example, cyber warfare between nation states is a threat to every organisation – not just those deemed to be in the firing line. We saw this with the NotPetya attack in 2017 – an attack on a specific util ity company – which impacted multiple unrelated organisations through an entirely organic spread of the chaos. Attack types also continue to evolve. For example, the LokiLocker attack was one of the first reported strains of ransomware to include a disk wiper functionality. This means organisations are not only held to ransom by having services suspended and threats of data extortion. Now they are being threatened with losing vast swathes of data completely if they do not pay up.

Consistent principles of defence

There is some good news for businesses. No matter how scalable, spreadable, or malicious an attack is, these various evolutions can be viewed as attackers simply using bigger guns and more of them. The fundamental principles of how you prepare your defences against even the most sophisticated and powerful ransomware stay relatively the same.

First, practice impeccable digital hygiene. All employees must be trained to identify suspicious content and be warned of the impact that malprac tice using work devices can lead to. For all the might at the hands of cybercriminals, in many ways their biggest weapons are unsuspecting employees who give them the keys to the back door of an enterprise network.

To access more info login to: https://www.smechannels.com

RICK VANOVER Senior Director, Product Strategy Veeam

Protecting your business against cyber-attacks requires following some fundamental and consistent principles – no matter what is being thrown at you

SETTING NEW

Redefining modern security with one of the most advanced cloud and enterprise cybersecurity platforms, Trend Micro delivers central visibility for better, faster detection and effective response IN MODERN SECURITY

BY MANASH RANJAN DEBATA manash@accentinfomedia.com

As a global cybersecurity major, Trend Micro has redefined modern security with one of the most advanced cloud and enterprise cybersecurity plat forms. It delivers central visibility for better, faster detection and response and a powerful range of advanced threat defense techniques optimized for environments, like AWS, Microsoft, and Google. Offering a credible security package, Trend Micro effectively blocks viruses, ransomware, and other malware quickly and efficiently.

With Trend Micro’s effective security platform, customers benefit from superior protection, better performance, reduced complexity and immedi ate time-to-value. Fueled by decades of security expertise, global threat research, and continuous innovation, Trend Micro’s cybersecurity platform has been protecting hundreds of thousands of organizations and millions of individuals across clouds, networks, devices, and endpoints.

As a leader in cloud and enterprise cyberse curity, its platform delivers a powerful range of advanced threat defense techniques optimized for today’s most challenging threat environments and providing organisations with central visibility for faster detection and effective response. Its global threat research team delivers superior intelligence and insights that power its cybersecurity platform

and help protect organizations around the world from 100s of millions of threats daily.

With over 7,000 employees spanning across 65 countries, the security major is singularly focused on security and passionate about enabling orga nizations to simplify and secure their connected world.

Here in a special interaction with SME Chan nels, Vijendra Katiyar, Country Manager, India and SAARC, Trend Micro, reveals his organization’s business priorities, channel strategy, Partner Upskilling programs, growth outlook for the current as well as coming year, his predictions for the security industry, and much more. Edited excerpts…

As the pandemic struck, there has been a significant uptick in the demand for cyber security solutions. How has Trend Micro been leveraging this hike in demand for cybersecurity services, recently?

Yes, there has been a big uptick in the past two years, when it comes to the need for cybersecu rity. We publish our annual cybersecurity report with some predictions about what we are seeing is going to be our immediate future problem. So three things that have been consistent in the last 2-3 years is digital transformation, but that is something which has escalated in the last few years. When you talk about digital transforma tion, there is cloud adoption, which comes into the picture. So that is one reason that some of the companies were not ready to move to the cloud, especially the mid-enterprises. They had to escalate and accelerate their approach to digital transformation by leveraging the cloud. Due to this rapid move, cybersecurity was not something which was immediately on our mind when we go on this plan of adopting cloud, which has resulted in opening up new vectors.

When you adopt new technologies there is a different attack vector, which comes into the picture. So Cloud has introduced that and is completely in a different form today. Just to give you an example, one of the companies in enter tainment, that we were in conversation with, was referring that it was a completely different world. Last two years, everything was shut, and nobody was going to movies in the theatre and suddenly, in the last 6-8 months, they have seen a big surge. Their platforms are not ready to handle the surge. Cloud became an immediate option to choose. So applications move to cloud, flexible cloud will give you agility. We started using that and that’s when they realized how vulnerable they were when they started using this platform. Security was an after thought. Second thing we have seen, specifically

in India, is that it is amongst the top four to five countries, which is hit by ransomware and that has been consistent. It’s not just this year, it has been consistently there. It’s just that only big names, fea ture in the news and we hear that they have been attacked by ransomware. There are other organi zations that have been impacted by ransomware. So that is another reason why it is becoming very serious now because it immediately starts impact ing your business, when you are hit by ransom ware. It is not like before when a few machines are encrypted, and it was quarantined and then the business is up and running again.

Today critical business applications are getting compromised on which the business runs by itself. So, when those get compromised, business gets disrupted for 3-5 days, and ransomware is some thing which most organizations are not prepared.

Now, the third thing which we have learned especially last 2-3 years we started opening up. So the way we are doing business is, we start inter acting lot with our supply chain of our partners. So, there is a lot of integration which happens wherein we share information when and leverage platforms and technologies. So, there are some deep-rooted vulnerabilities when you start lever aging the supply chain, and that has resulted in new risks. A classic example is the recent supply chain attack, which was for SolarWinds and how it impacted at a larger scale. So, these are three things which have actually made organizations realize how cybersecurity is becoming serious and when you look at analysts like Gartner or Forrester, they have been talking about how the importance of cybersecurity has gone all the way up to the board. So it now reports to the board and is not a part of the IT function. There are profiles like BSO (Busi ness Security Officers) so that the alignment of security can happen to the business, and they can derive the business meaning out of it. So the out look towards cybersecurity has changed.

As a pioneering security player, what key mega trends do you foresee in the security market?

A lot of things are happening in security. These days, three to four things have been very promi nent. One is a lot of discussions happening around Zero trust as a strategy. Second, a lot of focus has been given to XDR (Extended Detection and Response). In recent times, people started talk ing about attack surface management which has become very important and moving away from the point solution-based approach to a platformbased approach. Now organizations are looking at consolidation when it comes to cybersecurity. Previously, what used to happen was there were 25 to 30 different tools at any given point of time

in an organization. It was difficult to manage those tools. There was a little bit of correlation or no correlation, no integration at all. Everything was happening in silos. Now, what customers are demanding is that they want a platform which should be as comprehensive as possible, and can help leverage the existing ecosystem which they have inside the organization, and encompass that platform. This is what we are doing in Trend Micro. We have transformed to become a cyber security platform provider now wherein we can take care of the IT landscape across the enterprise, whether it is the endpoint, server, cloud, net work, and then give you that risk insight. So that has become very important today, especially for CXOs. They want to know at any given point in time, what is the risk profile of the organization. So I need to know where the problem is and I need to have a single pane of glass where I can get up in the morning and I can look at it and say, these are the problem statements and I need to address them. So I think these are majorly the talk which is happening recently in cybersecurity.

How is your channel strategy aligned with the current market trends?

We recently did our yearly channel event. Our message to channel partners is that one, this whole system is changing. Previously, it used to be all about the perpetual license. So partners used to take the product and used to implement it with the customer. There used to be a multi-year contract. Now, in this entire ecosystem, there are two things which have changed, especially after the pandemic. One, when you look at customers, they are coming out of this multi-year contract. They want to move towards Pay As You Go model and especially Trend Micro today is completely cloud-driven. All of our solutions can be delivered as SaaS. When the solutions are delivered as SaaS, it is very important that proof of value is shown by the partner to the customer, which means that there is a time when you implement a product, it takes about six months to eight months to imple ment a product and then to stabilize it. This fur ther takes about two years to drive value. Today, when everything is delivered by SaaS, everything is delivered faster. This also gives the opportunity for a customer to realize whether they’re working with the right partner or the right solution. This means the approach to the customer for both Trend Micro and the partner has to change. So that is what we talked about that now how we can bring value to such customers, which means being more proactive. We want to enable our partners through various campaigns and strategies. For instance, Partner Ninja is a very important pro gram. We started doing that because we realized

that for both customers and partners, it is an uphill task to skill them on the latest technologies and we continue to keep up with the new technologies. So how do you ensure that customer understands the product, customer understands what the value is, and how to derive the value from the product? We have our partner ecosystem that has to do that job. We are a 100% channel partner-driven organiza tion. So by virtue of running this Partner Ninja program, our idea was we work with a few focus partners and make sure that they become as good as Trend Micro. So we make them certified. We not only train them on Trend Micro products, but we train them on technologies, on the latest trends as we spoke about - zero trust. What is zero trust, we train them about SecOps (Security operations) and the cloud. So, they become domain experts when they go and talk to the customers. The inten tion was that they can talk to the customers and explain to them why and once that ‘why’ is estab lished, show them. Walk the talk once the product has been implemented, what value can be derived. So, this is one thing which we are working very closely with our channel ecosystem.

Another important thing is, since we are becoming a platform-based company, how we can leverage these partners to deliver service using this platform. So, that is another thing which we are working on with the channel partner wherein they are able to deliver SOC (Security Operations Center) services using our platform. We are help ing and training them on various aspects of SOC operations, MXDR (Managed extended detection and response) is a program that we are running very closely with a few of our channel partners wherein we have taken a task that now suddenly with a CERT-In guideline also and with the huge demand, we will see that a lot of organizations will ask for services not only the solution. They are saying “don’t give me the solution and go away. I want somebody who can give me solutions as well as services.” It means maintaining it, and becom ing the user of the product. So we are leveraging channels for that also and we are scaling them up because gone are the days when we start talk ing about rebate incentives. I think those are very traditional things. Where you want to help the channel partners make sure that you help them transform, you help them change the way they are approaching customers and they are deliver ing value to the customer. So these are two things wherein we want to make sure that they find value in Trend Micro not only in the product but then how we are helping them to transform.

You look at the current trends there has been a massive digitalization drive, and of course, an unprecedented migration

to the cloud. What product differentia tion do you bring to the table, which would help partners get better traction? Whenever we go to a customer through our chan nel partners, they look at how they can have a longterm engagement with this customer. The same goes for cybersecurity, which means you should have comprehensiveness in terms of cybersecurity solutions, that can address the larger problems, not just a point problem. So, that is where Trend Micro helps the channel partner. When the chan nel partner goes to the customer and starts talking about Trend Micro, there are multiple aspects in which he can address the problem. So for instance, we have a comprehensive platform of Cloud One, which a partner can leverage and talk about hybrid cloud security to the customer, whether it is on premise, whether it is your multi-cloud envi ronment, whether it is your cloud service provider, or multiple different cloud service providers. How Trend Micro can help to address this challenge in the long run with multiple services.

Coming to the Network part since we have a very good competency portfolio on network defense channel partners can talk to the cus tomer highlighting that, we are catering to your network security requirements, by giving you next-generation IPS or by giving you visibility by virtue of providing solutions like deep discovery which can help you with advanced attacks. At the same time, the user has become extremely important. How do we take care of the user? We have a comprehensive portfolio in terms of ensur ing that how we can protect the user, the device, the application, which he uses or the way in which he accesses the application. Now, the interesting thing is when a channel partner is looking at just different solutions, how integrated they are, how much certain threat intel information is getting exchanged is becoming very important. Another thing which the channel partner also looks at is if tomorrow a customer is saying that, I have maybe two solutions of Trend Micro or maybe more than three solutions of Trend Micro, I’ve got other ecosystems of cybersecurity with me, how can a channel partner help me with that? So by taking the help of Trend Micro platform, he can integrate with the third party and have a capability wherein I can leverage my platform and talk to a third party solution or my competitive solution. So this is the flexibility we can give to the channel partner, and then they can take this value proposition and go to the customer and say I’m giving you a platform. If you’re using something else beyond Trend Micro, this platform can help you integrate. Trend Micro can help you consolidate, if you’re looking at con solidation, we can help you consolidate, and be

a true cybersecurity partner which can give you multiple facets of address, different facets in terms of cybersecurity. If you want to achieve zero trust, we are one company which can help you do that. If you want to make sure that we take care of your external attack surface we can do that. So, I think that is our USP to the channel partner. By working with Trend Micro they can address a larger prob lem in any enterprise.

How we are addressing the upskilling problem in the partners?

So there are a couple of things that we are doing, we have our regular training camp, training calendar which is published within the channel commu nity, and anybody and everybody are welcome to join from the channel community. So the idea here is in the larger interests, not just our focus partner, we keep them aware and apprised of what is hap pening in cybersecurity, the latest technologies, and the latest trends. Second, our comprehensive program like Partner Ninja, where we onboard the channel partner, we onboard the technical folks from the channel partner community and train them. We get them certified, we train them, and we make sure that they are put on the job in all fields. Third, we also run something called as Capture the flag with the channel community (CTF) wherein, it does not become very boring for them when they understand technology. Sometimes what happens is, a typical approach is less interesting, and because there are so many different technolo gies, so what we do is, we do the gamification of the product, make them part of that gamification and then run this Capture the Flag, where they can become the attacker, they can become the defender, and leverage Trend Micro platforms and understand how the platform works. So, these are two-three things, which we are doing with the channel partner community. We have our channel portal, wherein they can go to our Channel Uni versity, where we run the library, wherein they can go and leverage that library, they can read about a lot of things beyond Trend Micro on cybersecu rity, if they want to learn more. But just to add one more thing, we are investing heavily in channels. We have by far one of the largest teams in chan nels, we’ve got seven to eight people in our channel team, and everybody has a dedicated job because there are different kinds of channel partners. Also, some are catering to enterprises, some are catering to the government, and some are addressing the customers by MSSP models (Managed Security Service Provider). So we are catering to all these types of partners and that’s how the teams are also focused

Are you planning any major investment

in terms of channel expansion, or in terms of increasing your headcount in India?

Yes, we are going to invest in channels. We are almost concluding our year in the next quarter by December. We are already planning for our next year wherein we will be adding more headcount. We will also come up with some interesting pro grams for the channel community. So that they always find interest to work with Trend Micro. Some interesting roles, which we are coming up with are based on the vast portfolio which we have and how we can make sure that we take it to the channels. So yes, there are going to be investments in the channel.

Looking at the way IT has been per forming in India, what is Trend Micro’s growth outlook for the coming year? I will talk about this year and then I’ll come to next year because this year is looking very interesting. We operate in 65 countries globally and India in the last two years has been a very important region, for Trend Micro globally also. We have had a double-digit growth last two years. This year also we are looking phenomenal. We will be breaking all records by the end of December in terms of revenue. We have the largest market share when it comes to enterprise and mid-enterprise. We have 1400- 1500 plus customers in India. We cater to enterprise customers and the number runs in the thousands for small enterprises and smallmedium enterprises. We have got a government team which is very strong. We’re doing excellent in government, we’ve got some of the large data centers who are working very closely with the Central Government. We are looking very strong and we are very bullish. The next two years are going to be very interesting in cybersecurity, espe cially in India. The market looks very promising.

I think one added advantage to companies like Trend Micro is that we are a very stable organiza tion. From the people’s point of view, we have our founders and leaders who are still associated with Trend Micro. We are a very profitable and healthy organization. This helps us to focus on customers and address problems. So that has helped us get a better driver for Trend Micro globally and also in India.

So looking at the kind of cyber-attacks, and incidents of attacks that have been increasing over time, it’s like an eternal cat and mouse game. What do you think the upcoming days will look like? Are we heading for a massive cyber-attack? Or it will be business as usual?

I won’t be able to forecast what is going to happen

in the future, but some predictions can be made. We have seen the nature of attacks which have happened within India. We have seen that our load dispatch centers have been targeted. Some of the important verticals within the government and more enterprises have been targeted. So, yes, I think these are the concerns that are always going to remain and we have to always be on our toes to ensure that we are doing our best to keep the bad guys away. Yes, it will be a challenging time because I think one way or the other, everybody is going through this transformation, whether it is the customer, partner, or companies like ours. We are all in the transformation phase. The banking system is transforming. The service industry is transforming identities, and the way we are doing business is transforming. Everybody’s leveraging technology. So once you start leveraging new tech nologies, there are new risks that get introduced, you will use new platforms, you will use new oper ating systems, and a new way of doing business, and that will introduce risk. It is important for us to make sure that cybersecurity is part of the larger blueprint whenever we move forward.

Please shed some light on the pre-sales as well as post-sales services that you offer to the partners.

We help partners with pre-sales by assisting them during the engagement with the customer with pre-sales. We ensure that they are well supported to answer customers’ questions, ensure that the proof of concept is delivered to the customer and that the problem statements are answered. For post-sales specifically, the idea here is that the part ners themselves can be capable enough to deliver after the sales are completed. The implementation and maintenance are done by the partner. That is where we have these programs, which we run with the channel partners to ensure that we don’t take away the service part from the partner. This is something which we have always ensured. We are a solutions company. We want to be focused on providing solutions to the customers and want to leverage our channel community to provide service. Our job is to make sure that we keep train ing them on the latest technologies which Trend Micro has to offer to the customer and helping them to ensure that they get the benefit of getting their services business from the customer. So that’s how we are helping them in both aspects.

Are you planning any major product launches this year?

Yes, we are. We’ve already launched Trend Micro One, which is a unified cybersecurity platform. We are introducing attack surface management to that platform and Zero trust to the platform. We

are a company which is going completely into a platform-based approach. That’s why Trend Micro today is called a cybersecurity platform provider. We will keep on adding new capabilities to these platforms. Trend Micro One is the latest solution that we have launched in the market.

With the changing circumstances, we have to rearrange the matrix of opera tions. Do you think Trend Micro needs to remodify its channel strategy or is it fine going with the status quo?

Definitely. We have already started working on the strategy. We are delivering that to the channel partners because we have changed the way we are doing business and we want the partner to take full benefit of it. It is not going to be a status quo. It has never been status quo. We have always been very upfront and committed to our partners and make sure that we give them the right information. We tell them about what Trend Micro is coming out with and the other key messages. There are various mediums through which we communicate with our channel partners. So there is never going to be status quo and never going to be business as usual. We are going to make sure that whenever we do something new, the channel partners are informed and benefit from it.

In 2021, Trend Micro launched its Cloud One regional data center in India, to uphold data sovereignty and safeguard data privacy in the country. Trend Micro’s flagship cloud security services platform, Cloud One protects servers, resources, and applications in the cloud. With this, it became one of the first security vendors to have the broadest set of services around cloud security, delivered out of India. The move is aimed at enabling enterprises to securely adopt a SaaS-based security framework

MATRIX SHOWCASED ENTERPRISE GRADE SOLUTIONS AT MATRIX PARTNER CONNECT

Matrix has showcased its range of Enterprise Grade Solutions at Matrix Partner Connect, Kolhapur with Security and Telecom Prod ucts customized for Various Industrial Verticals. Matrix offers a comprehensive range of solutions for IP Video Surveillance, Access Control, TimeAttendance, and Telecom applications. The solu tions are designed to meet the communication and security requirements of large enterprises, SMEs, and SMBs.

With around 40% of its human resources dedicated to developing new products, Matrix has launched over 60+ cutting-edge products and solutions across its 4 domains. The company has partnered with 2500+ partners, and through them, caters to its million+ customers across the world.

Matrix has brought smart innovation in the security domain across India and the global market. With an aim to enhance its reach in the Indian security market, Matrix organized a Product Expo - MATRIX PARTNER CON NECT along with its channel partner ISHA ENTERPRISE in Kolhapur on 20th August 2022. The event aims to demonstrate innovative solu tions encompassing the entire range of Video Surveillance, Access Control, Time-Attendance, and Telecom. The event was held at Sayaji Hotel, Kohlapur.

In this event, Matrix displayed its latest range of

IP Video Surveillance solutions, including serverbased enterprise-grade NVRs, UL-listed Cameras, and Matrix VMS. The entire solution focuses on solving the challenges that customers face band width utilization, storage cost, managing multisite offices, and reactive security. On the display will be the entire Matrix range of Turret, Dome, Bullet, and PTZ Cameras. Varying from 2MP to 8 MP, Matrix Cameras come with UL Certification, a global standard for safety, and NEMA Certifica tion for protection against environmental hazards. They provide high-resolution images for better clarity and better protection. Besides this, Matrix unleashes Server-based Enterprise grade NVRs with Pre-installed Video Management Software supporting redundancies and hot-swappable hard disks - HDD/SSD. With a wide range of up to 128 channels reining in an enormous storage capacity of up to 144 TB, this solution covers all security needs.

Under the Time-Attendance segment, Matrix showcased its Aadhaar Enabled Biometric Attendance Device (AEBAS) - VEGA FAXQ spe cifically designed for government organizations. It marks government employees’ attendance taking Aadhaar information securely from the UIDAI server. Alongside this, Matrix will display its bestin-class facial recognition-based door controller - COSEC ARGO FACE. It boasts of high accuracy, an identification speed of less than 0.5 sec, and a massive user capacity of 50K. Enhanced with

multiple connectivity options such as Wi-Fi, PoE, and Ethernet, these devices provide the best for modern organizations.

Under the Access Control Domain, Matrix pre sented COSEC PANEL200P - Site Controller that manages up to 255 COSEC door controllers and 25,000 Users from its UI. Matrix will also pres ent its pure access door controller- COSEC ARC DC200P which comes with multiple benefits over the conventional access control terminal. Being PoE-based and with mounting options of din rail and wall mount makes it easy to install even in constrained space with minimalistic wiring. Matrix will be bringing forth its entire access con trol environment ranging from site controllers to modern readers to software to this event.

In the Telecom domain, Matrix is the only com pany that provides all business communication products and solutions. Matrix presented its Tele com product and solutions consisting of PBXs, IP-PBXs, Server-based PBXs, Media Gateways, Communication endpoints, and softphones.

Anil Mehra, Senior VP- Sales and Marketing stated, “Our Product Expo - Matrix Partner Con nect looks toward bringing all the System Integra tors and Business prospects together under one roof. One of our major aims is to reach out to key service providers through system integrators and share our successful case studies worldwide and explain how our enterprise-grade solutions cater to various verticals.”

As a global cybersecurity major, CrowdStrike has redefined modern security with one of the most advanced cloud-native platforms for protecting critical areas of enterprise risk - end points and cloud workloads, identity and data. Powered by the CrowdStrike Security Cloud and world-class AI, the CrowdStrike Falcon platform leverages real-time indicators of attack, threat intelligence, evolving adversary tradecraft and enriched telemetry from across the enterprise to deliver hyper-accurate detections, automated protection and remediation, elite threat hunting and prioritized observability of vulnerabilities - all through a single, lightweight agent which in turn helps its customers simplify and consolidate secu rity layers in their respective organisations.

With CrowdStrike, customers benefit from superior protection, better performance, reduced complexity and immediate time-to-value deliv ered by the cloud-native Falcon platform.

Here in a special interaction with SME Chan nels, Girish Gargeshwari, Channel Director, Asia, CrowdStrike, reveals his organisation’s business priorities, channel strategy, Partner Upskilling programs, growth outlook for the current as well as coming year, his predictions for the security industry and much more. Edited excerpts…

After the pandemic struck, there had been a significant uptick in demand for cyber security solutions. As a frontline cybersecurity player, how has CrowdStrike been leveraging this uptick in demand?

If we look at the current demand environment for cyber security, I definitely find it more robust than ever. In fact, a recent IDC report, which tracks the market share across endpoint security, has ranked CrowdStrike as number one there.

So, I can safely say that we have leapfrogged miles ahead of other vendors and have demon strated year over year growth.

And if I look at why this is happening, the answers are there on the table to see. Largely, it is happening because of the nature of the micro environment here. Also, if you look at this from an organization perspective also, cyber security has become essential utility now. It’s no more a discretionary item. No more, it’s discretionary for any organization. It has become an essential utility and largely because the threat environment has heightened even further. Cowdstrike does a lot of market research, and in our recent global Security Attitude Survey, we found that Indian firms suf fered more ransomware attacks than any other country in the world in the year 2021.

GIRISH GARGESHWARI CHANNEL DIRECTOR, ASIA CROWDSTRIKE

Several of these companies gave in to extortion demands to avoid an attack. That was one aspect. Second, there is an increasing regulation and disclosures. We have seen GDPR, CSR reporting mandates, and recently even the Indian CERT has been making it mandatory for organization on the disclosures related to cyber security incidents.

CERT-In issued a direction relating to “informa tion security practices, procedures, prevention, response, and reporting of cyber incidents for Safe & Trusted Internet. Last but not the least, it’s a top priority for businesses across all the organisations now. We see customers of all sizes - whether it’s large, midsize or small - are just looking for an outcome and which is stopping the breaches. That is where CrowdStrike is stepping in because if you look at our solutions, they are largely centered around how we can help organisations by stop ping breaches by leveraging a modern approach to security.

So, there is a significant uptick in demand. There is a significant uptick in customers adopting CrowdStrike and we continue to see growth hap pening for us.

As you rightly pointed out Security solution has gone from being an option to a compulsion. But choosing the cor rect solution from a crowd of solutions is like searching a needle in a hay stack. So what sort of product differentiation do you bring to the table that makes you distinct from others?

As I mentioned earlier, customers are just looking for an outcome which can stop the breaches. So they are no more looking at Band-Aid solutions. I have been in the field of cyber security for more

than a decade now. In the past, some organiza tions used to offer Band-Aid solutions and used to tell their customers, “If you have this issue, please have this kind of a signature. If you have some zero-day fileless attacks coming in, you can look at APD solution.” So, no one was helping custom ers look at an outcome or help them stopping the breaches. And that’s why when CrowdStrike came into the fore, our mission vision right from the day we started till date has been just three words. It says, “We stop breaches.” And that’s how you know we coined; that’s how that led to a whole platformcentric approach that was cloud delivered.

So, I would say our differentiator is that we offer a modern approach to security that relies on continuous comprehensive Endpoint visibility, which is extremely important in the cybersecurity

“WE WANT TO CAPTURE EVERY NEEDLE THAT IS IN THE HAYSTACK AND REMOVE IT FROM THAT HAYSTACK. AND THAT IS OUR COMPELLING DIFFERENTIATOR.”

world that spans detection, response, and foren sics to ensure nothing is missed.

As you rightly said, the search is like a needle in haystack, we want to capture every needle that is in the haystack and remove it from that haystack. And that is our compelling differentiator. We have various solutions in our stable. but if I have to put what do they do, we look at it ensuring that nothing is missed.

What key cyber security trends mega trends do you foresee in the security market?

Cyber security is in tune with, I would say, the way the dynamics that play out in this world. Every day you see a new kind of threat coming in and that keeps changing the trends too. But if I have to

CAPTURING A NEEDLE IN A HAYSTACK

Offering a modern approach to security that relies on continuous comprehensive Endpoint visibility, CrowdStrike ensures nothing is missed when it comes to stop a breach

generalize on what are those major trends we are seeing. then the first one would be increased cloud adoption by organizations. So the workloads are moving into the cloud big time.

The reasons could be efficiency, could be avail ability could be some other thing. But workloads are certainly moving to the cloud. And that is also putting pressure back on the organizations, espe cially the C source.

The CIO organizations are also beef up their security measures. So, that’s one major trend. The second major trend again leads to your first ques tion around the pandemic. The Pandemic has disrupted the whole system, it disrupted the way we all work. So, the hybrid work culture is going to stay. This means that organisations have to provide for these kind of capabilities to retain employees, which allows them to work in a hybrid manner. Now this, this definitely expands the attacks sur face for the organization and it exposes them to newer vulnerabilities. So that is a second trend that we are seeing.

Picking up from what Gartner actually identi fied in the top seven security and risk manage ment trends for 2022, the 3rd trend, The 3rd trend I would say, our digital supply chain risks are going to be again a major, major area that orga nizations will have to grapple with. We saw what Log 4 J did to some of the leading organisations. So, that’s going to be a big area that organisations will continue to grapple with. In fact, the same Gartner study also mentioned that 45% organisa tions worldwide will have experienced attacks on their software supply chain, which is going to see a three-fold increase over the 2021 figures. So, that’s the third trend we are seeing.

The 4th one centres around stolen credentials, around what we are doing. We are also helping

organisations to tackle the issue of around stolen credentials. How do we how do they handle stolen credentials? Organizations are investing in various tools. But if the conditions are already available with the bad actors, how do we handle that? So, identity security, Identity protection is becoming a key area where organisations will start looking at and figure out solutions to help manage these stolen credentials issues that they are going to face. So, these are some of the major trends that we are seeing in the security scape.

How is your channel strategy aligning with the current market trends?

Before going into strategy, I would like to share with you CrowdStrike’s approach to this. Our approach on partnership is a little different from other players. We consider partnering as a dial and not a switch. What I mean by that is that we are looking at every facet of partnership be it profit ability, be it systems engineers’ engagement, be it customer facing activities that drive new opportu nities for us and our partners.

We are always looking for ways to work together to put customer needs at the center in everything we do. So our customer-centric focus creates values and enhances the path to profitabil ity for partners also. This even comes down to the relationship developed from a seller to seller, from a manager to manager, from a leader to leader across the organisations. With this approach in mind, the way CrowdStrike has put up partner ing model is clearly aimed at enabling a whole ecosystem approach, which is based on six parts to partner engagement.

The first one is Channel, obviously, where reselling is the prime focus area. So, reselling of our product is a prime focus area. The second one

is technology alliances. Providing out-of-the-box integration between CrowdStrike technology and other innovative technologies is another area of partnering that we have been into for quite some time now.

The third area is now I think MSSPs. These deliver value-added services to customers and they leverage CrowdStrike as an enabling tech nology. That’s the third one. How we are helping OEMs to embed our leading cybersecurity tech nology into the third-party hardware, software and services solutions.

The other area where we are offering help to some of the innovative technology providers is around the CrowdStrike platform, building appli cations on the CrowdStrike platform to leverage the data from the Falcon platform that offers high value inside to customer environments.

Last but not the least, is the one around cloud procurement. As I mentioned earlier, organisa tions are moving heavily into the cloud. So, there are cloud-based infrastructure providers helping them. How do we partner with them, how do we ensure that they will use CrowdStrike to empower their security teams who are managing this cloud infrastructure and workloads. So these are six parts of our approach to channel engagement.

The more ebullient the cyber security solutions are becoming, the more resil ient the cyber attackers also become.

It’s line an eternal cat and mouse game. In order to get a catch, the cat would have to outsmart the mice each time. So what keeps you ahead of the cyber attacker in this game?

Well, if you if you look at when CrowdStrike came into the fore, we disrupted the way security was being looked at. We came out with a term called indicators of attack, whereas all other organisa tions were looking at a lagging indicator, which was an indicator of compromise. So, indicators of compromise was like a breach has happened, and the traces are there. You look at those traces and try to analyze what has happened. On the other hand, indicators of attack looks at what is happen ing in the environment now, whether there are certain patterns that simulate adversary behavior. And if it simulates that adversary behavior, can you know if it would potentially lead to a breach?

So, looking at the indicators of attack is what made CrowdStrike start offering very proac tive solutions to customers to stop breaches. So, indicators of attack helps us to stay ahead of what potentially an attacker would do in an environ ment. One of the approaches we brought to cyber

security was a rule of 110 and 60. One minute to detect, 10 minutes to investigate, and 60 minutes to respond. So this approach has really made it, as you rightly said, it’s a cat and mouse game. It’s a race against time. The sooner we are able to track an adversary in the environment, the faster or more effective it would be to stop a breach. And this has differentiated us from the rest in the world of cyber security.

I don’t remember anything more tech intensive than probably the cyber security solutions; particularly, how they’re being implemented, how they prevent a future attack or they nip in the bud some of the potential attacks. So, how do you upskill your partner ecosystem to provide a more ebullient security service?

Our partner program, which we call as Elevate 2.0 partner program, provides multiple avenues for partners to drive high margin opportunities. It is a knowledge-driven initiative which includes regular webinars to educate the partners. We also educate the customers through some of these pro grams about the new offerings and optimal usage of them. We also have programs like engagement license program which enables certain eligible partners to use CrowdStrike platform at no cost for a finite period of time to service their customer needs during their darkest hours, CrowdStrike is making a heavy investment around there on educating partners on our current offerings, on our new offerings and how that can help their cus tomers in stopping the breaches there. And it’s an ongoing continuous program. Quarter on quarter, month after month, week after week, day after day, my team and our distributors continuously work with partners to drive this enablement further.

When it comes to selling a product, customer experience weighs over the rest. So, what sort of pre sales and post sales services do you offer?

We have been investing in solution architects and they are the trusted advisors to our partners. And the role of the solution architect is, as I said, is to educate our partners around the offering and on how cyber security can be interwoven into a cus tomer complex environment.

The second aspect of our engagement rests our corporate alliance managers who focus on the down market. when I say down market, it is more of the SMB and in the mid-market. We also have regional alliance managers of corporate alliance managers, national align managers, even MSSP

managers who look at specific set of partners and provide those high-touch engagements to them to understand what are their business priorities, what are their requirements to support from a cyber security standpoint and how we can enable them and their team to ensure that they are ready to serve customers now and in future.

And all these elevate 2.0 program becomes a foundation for all these things.

Are you planning any major investment towards channel expansion or in terms of expanding your head count in India?

We are seeing a strong demand in cybersecurity market. Yes, we are investing heavily in sales and in channels as well. So, you will see that investment happening. In fact, our channel team presence in India has nearly doubled over last year. Number of people that we have now focus on the different set of partners we have in the region. So, that is going to be an investment that will continue as we expand our business.

The other investments we are looking at is around how we can enable partners more because that’s going to be a corner, that’s going to be a key aspect of our way of guaranteeing an outcome to a partner in terms of their understanding of our solution.

What would be your growth outlook for the current year?

If you look at how our business has been trend ing globally, we are in a hyper growth mode. You can look at any of our quarterly reports. We would be talking about 60% plus year on year growth. And this is largely happening because of three approaches we are doing which is Land, retain and expand. So, land is about acquiring new custom ers. And if you look at our quarterly reports, our new acquisition is nearly doubling every year. So many more customers are relying on CrowdStrike to safeguard their environment.

The second aspect that we are focusing on is the 20 plus modules on our platform. Each of these modules solve a specific customer problem. And so that’s where CrowdStrike and the channel part ners are working closely with the customer to see how some of our solutions can help address some of their current problems. So, there is a significant expansion that can happen by just going and sell ing these modules to the customers.

Thus, if I look at these three strategies of land, retain and expand, I think the growth momentum that we have seen in the past with these, we will also see a similar momentum in the future as well.

JOINING FORCES FOR MISSION-CRITICAL SOFTWARE

programming languages and related technologies, like Scala, Kotlin, Spark, Kafka, and Akka. While the company is headquartered in Seattle, Wash ington, they have strong footholds in Spain, the United Kingdom, and Colombia.

How Does it Play Out

Its team handles the design, development, and deployment of applications for its clients so that companies can focus on their core business goals. Their engineers—with years of develop ment expertise—coordinate with client teams to provide additional bandwidth and adapt missioncritical workflow.

Anand Sahay, Global CEO, Xebia Group, said, “We are delighted to join forces with 47 Degrees and we believe that with their strong expertise in Scala, Kotlin as well as functional Java, this acqui sition will establish our presence in the global market and also allow us to widen our functional programming expertise to Rust, Clojure, and Haskell. We aim to become one of the most sig nificant one-stop-shop for all functional program ming needs.”

Nick Elsberry, CEO of 47 Degrees, said; “We’re pleased to join forces with Xebia, strong support ers of the functional paradigm, to leverage and support our comprehensive services and expertise to our future and existing clients. Xebia not only aligns with our technology goals but our peoplefirst methodologies, and we’re excited about this next chapter.”

Addressing Hike in Demand

Global Ambition

Founded in 2001, Xebia was the first organization to embrace the Agile way of working, with gurus like Jeff Sutherland. Since then, The company has grown from a Java company into a full-fledged digital consulting company working on a global ambition. The company has been organized in complementary chapters – teams with a tremen dous knowledge and experience pertaining to a particular field, such as Agile, DevOps, Data and AI, Cloud, Software Technology, Low Code, and Microsoft.

Enviable Clientele

Xebia has been catering to the needs of an envi able list of clientele, including the world’s top 250 companies and category leaders, helping them overcome digital challenges, embrace innova tion, adopt new technology, and implement new business models. In addition to high-quality con sulting, it has also been providing offshoring and nearshoring services.

Digital Strategies

Focusing on structure, culture, and technology, Xebia has helped customers break down silos that hold back innovation. It develops new business models, implement new technology, create a new mindset, and teaches new skills, by combining its expertise with execution power at all levels.

Full stack software firm Xebia has united with 47 Degrees, a US-based global technology consultancy focused on unlocking business growth by creating assured solutions for complex, mission-critical software. 47 Degrees has been focused on build ing and deploying innovative applications for its clients as well as actively engaging in the tech community since 2010. The company offers comprehensive consulting services in functional

Functional languages provide significant advan tages while building highly scalable and paral lelized systems. As the demand for such scalable systems is increasing exponentially among enter prises as well as innovative start-ups worldwide, there is a simultaneous demand for specialized talent that is unfragmented and can support the adoption of functional paradigms.

With over 20 years of experience, Xebia’s global network of passionate technologists and pioneer ing craftsmen deliver cutting-edge technology and game-changing consulting to companies on the brink of transformation.

It has been helping to accelerate processes by automating them, cutting costs by making cloud technology work for its cusomers, securing market position with the services that the customers want and free up time and resources for innovation with data-driven solutions and managed services.

Since digital strategy determines every step of a business’s journey, getting it right becomes crucial. In actualizing customer’s ambitions and helping them how to achieve them with, for example, new IT and a new way of working. The company assesses, challenges on the way, and redesign strategies and operating models, and develop the capabilities the customers need to transform suc cessfully.

The acquisition will brought in new synergy and strengthen Xebia’s foothold in the functional programming domain

ANAND SAHAY GLOBAL CEO, XEBIA GROUP

“THIS ACQUISITION WILL ESTABLISH OUR PRESENCE IN THE GLOBAL MARKET AND ALSO ALLOW US TO WIDEN OUR FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING EXPERTISE TO RUST, CLOJURE, AND HASKELL.”

PROFILE

Sanjay is a deeply trusted industry thought leader with an accomplished record of success over the past 22+ years for Fortune 500 Telecom OEM/ Service Providers & Cable MSO clientele in the US, UK/ Europe, and Asia. In his current role, he is the Client Partner for a strategic large Tier-1 Telecom account for HCL, and has been advising clients across Americas on Public & Private 5G implementations, and Network monetization.

PRIVATE 5G: UNLOCKING BUSINESS VALUE BY SYNERGIZING ENTERPRISES AND SERVICE PROVIDERS

As 5G is fast reshaping the connectivity paradigm, technology leaders must not only fulfill its promise to address business pains, but also build a sustainable, future-proof ecosystem

The global 5G services market is projected to be worth $1.87 trillion by 2030, up from $64.54 billion in 2021, growing at a CAGR of 44.63% between 2022 and 2030. The global private 5G market, not to be left behind, is also expected to grow remark ably at a CAGR of 42.4% during the forecast period. That market will be worth a sizeable $31.58 billion in 2030, up from just $1.37 billion in 2021.

While this points to the growing popularity of 5G, the biggest question for enterprises and com munication service providers (CSPs) alike is how to accurately quantify the undeniable monetization potential of this new technology. Another inherent goal for them is to strategically align their offerings and investments to maximize the ROI. With 5G reshaping the connectivity paradigm, technology leaders must not only fulfill its promise to address business problems and enhance end-user experi ences, but also build a sustainable, future-proof ecosystem.

Steering the change with purpose

Over the last decade, with the rapid evolution of various technologies and emphasis on industry 4.0, enterprises have spent generously on emerging innovations. But there has been a perennial gap between the techno-speak and measurable business outcomes. Fundamentally, this is due to a misalign ment between the technology-led use case theoriza tion and enterprises’ short- and long-term business objectives.

Therefore, with private 5G connectivity disrupt ing the landscape, enterprises must first carefully evaluate it across the following three considerations: Establishing business problems that need to be solved: Enterprises and CSPs must identify specific pain points of the end-users and determine if and how 5G will address them. The necessary scope of change and ROI should drive the adoption of suitable technology solutions, viz. Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi 6, private 4G or 5G, CBRS, et al

Leveraging digital transformation opportu

nities for higher end-user retention: The merits of 5G digital transformation are largely discussed in terms of technological benefits, viz., higher speed and capacity, lower latency, etc. However, enterprises must begin by focusing on enhancing user touchpoints because technology usage will be more prevalent on the edge and end-user devices than at the network core. While consumer behav ior continues to evolve in the digital age, enter prises must visualize the customer lifecycle, revisit engagement models, and offer experiences that can truly be monetized. A proactive mindset toward digital transformation is key to enabling deeper user engagement and ultimately maximizing the value for the enterprise

Early definition and continuous evaluation of KPIs: For 5G adoption to deliver the desired results, enterprises must meticulously plan the business case (KPIs) that they aspire to realize. CSPs must collaborate with enterprises to translate these business KPIs to network KPIs and steer the digital initiatives toward their business goals. Both must also constantly track progress against these KPIs to identify if the technology is living up to the promise or is pointing to development opportunities. Considering these points will help enterprises and CSPs identify right-fit implementation strate gies, commercial models, and early improvements to optimize the total cost of ownership (TCO) and accelerate the value realization from private 5G investments.

Ensuring seamless change management with a strong partnership ecosystem

With the massive proliferation of IoT and smart devices, the business opportunity offered by 5G is massive across industries. In a hyperconnected paradigm, customers expect more immersive and intuitive experiences that were unthinkable with previous generations of wireless connectivity. Consider the following scenario: When you visit a supermarket, your primary focus is on shopping.

SANJAY MISRA

Associate Vice President, Telecom, Media, Entertainment & Publication Industry, HCL Technologies

But the ease with which you can find the items you need, navigate the various aisles, and proceed to a quick and efficient check-out, contributes heavily toward your overall experience. Digitiza tion, if applied intelligently and thoughtfully, can improve nearly every step of the customer jour ney. And for that, connectivity, especially private 5G, plays a pivotal role.

However, deploying private 5G comes with its share of teething problems. These can emerge from technology and infrastructure incompat ibilities to cultural dissonances within the enter prise or even a lack of niche skillsets to implement and manage 5G technology. Therefore, an efficient change management is a critical success factor for enterprises. Enterprises must work closely with CSPs and other ecosystem partners to ensure a smooth and effective private 5G implementation that meets business objectives. Here’s how:

Harmonize business case with technol ogy knowledge: While enterprises understand their core industry-specific business nuances the best to align 5G adoption with business goals, telecom service providers and system integrators are implementation thought leaders. The best minds within enterprises and their partners must synergize around and have a stake in the business goals so that the selected solution drives targeted business value and customer experience

Create a robust digital transformation strategy: As enterprises implement new-age connectivity, their focus should be on ensuring holistic digital transformation. If there are gaps in the digital strategy, the transformation will be incomplete, and the potential will remain unful filled. The digital strategy must also expedite the journey from concept design to implementation to value generation. For instance, HCL Technolo gies is driving the 5G transformation as a special ized system integrator, enabling enterprises to accelerate their digital transformation journeys. We, at HCL Technologies, see this transformation as a change agent for business models, bringing about new opportunities across industries.

Prototype, test, productionize: The quan tum of this transformation is astronomical, meaning that the margin of error is negligible. As a result, telecom service providers must develop a Proof of Concept (POC) plan that addresses enterprise challenges and their specific con nectivity requirements. The POC gap analysis against the business case can be done by testing the prototype across smaller user groups and dif ferent real-world scenarios. Once the progressive validation (and timely course corrections, if any) is complete, private 5G is ready for large-scale

implementation.

Readiness for the future: The scope of emerging technologies is constantly expanding. When it comes to private 5G and the business value it can generate, telecom service providers must always be at the top of their game and primed for quick adaptation. By adopting software-defined archi tecture and networks, strengthening partnerships, rapidly upskilling teams, and staying technologi cally nimble, they can ensure that their services are future-ready. To address the current pain points, there is a need for a strong partnership ecosystem comprising technology and connectivity service providers, as well as cloud and user-facing IoT solution providers. This will also help meet future challenges and changing business needs to imple ment future-proof infrastructure and processes.

HCL Technologies’ leadership in 5G Engi neering services has been duly recognized by ana

lysts like Everest Group, as well-positioned to help clients with 5G transformations through its sig nificant investments in innovative products and 5G Labs, proven delivery footprint, and a solid partnership ecosystem with telecom equipment manufacturers, service providers, ISVs/startups, and cloud solutions providers.

The road ahead

As we prepare for the private 5G revolution, enter prises, telecom service providers, and all their partners must work shoulder to shoulder to realize their business goals, reduce costs, and offer a large bouquet of connectivity-enabled service offerings to consumers. While mature system integra tors like HCL Technologies assume even greater responsibility in this new paradigm, the unified focus must undoubtedly remain on empowering users and achieving business excellence.

Buoyed by the massive digitalisation and ensuing migration to cloud, the server market in India has started to regain momentum. Although the revenues remained nearly flat in 2020 through early 2021, owing to the pandemic which spurred less spending by enterprises on IT infrastructure upgrades and expansion, the server market is looking up. Server players like Dell Technologies are now looking to strengthen their infrastructure as they prepare for Web3.0 demands from the infrastructure end.

In a special interaction with SME Channels, Manish Gupta, Vice President and General Manager, Infrastructure Solutions Group, Dell Technologies, India, discusses the important factors that are driving the growth in the server market, the key mega trends in the server market, challenges and humps in the server market, Dell’s channel strategy, the next-gen technologies in the server storage and cloud storage market. Edited excerpts…

Transformation to hybrid cloud and upgrades of existing infra structure to handle increased work loads is all set to provide growth impetus to the server market. How is your company looking to leverage the opportunity?

Dell Technologies’ server portfolio helps busi nesses to rapidly respond to opportunities in the digital era, enabling them on their journey to digital transformation. Our servers have compute capability that meets unique business require ments and offers real-time business insights for businesses of all sizes, ensuring secure data pro cessing and optimised costs in IT.

Our servers provide exceptional performance, simplified management, intelligent automation and enhanced security designed to address the demands of the modern data centre. The Dell PowerEdge portfolio excels in building block rack servers and small footprint tower servers for customers in India. We also offer modular and rugged servers which adapt to external chal lenges to ensure business continuity. PowerEdge XE servers are purpose-built for complex, harsh and compute-intensive workloads at the network edge.

BUSINESS-CRITICAL WORKLOADS

With increased pressure on servers due to the influx of data, server providers like Dell Technologies are helping organisations with appropriate server architecture to handle this influx of data

servers are also one of the most sustainable serv ers by Dell Technologies. With high infrastruc ture optimization, 1 PowerEdge server is able to achieve what 6 servers can perform in a day.

Furthermore, our infrastructure solutions are designed to integrate IT processes and reduce complexities for businesses. This enables organisa tions to focus on their mission-critical business decisions while their IT needs are managed by Dell Technologies’ disruptive resources. This is one of the reasons towards our industry leader ship in the country in the servers segment for con secutive three quarters, where our revenue crossed the 40% mark in the Indian servers market.

What key trends would you fore cast in the server market?

With an increased focus on digital technologies to perform day to day tasks, the pressure on servers to handle the influx of data has also risen at an expo nential rate. Organisations which had appropriate server architecture to handle this influx have been able to sail smoothly through such difficulties. Some of the key server trends that have the potential to change the technology landscape are:

Workload Centricity – With disruptions across the technology landscape, the role of IT has become more dynamic in nature to support and create new business models. In order to achieve these goals, organisations must soon deploy newage workloads at an ever-increasing pace, making it critical to adopt work-load-centric server archi tectures, to extract maximum value.

Adoption of accelerators – To meet the ever-growing demands of the customers, small and large businesses alike would soon be relying heavily on data-driven insights. For the same, we will see organisations deploying more server architectures, equipped with in-built accelerators,

with the ability to analyse large quantities of data in real-time, bringing computers closer to data than ever before.

Edge Computing - Edge computing has the power to bring computing close to the real source of data which can reduce latency and bandwidth use. As the demand for edge computing increases, the demand for new server architectures will also increase which will be critical to providing the required performance and resiliency.

In the future, the core objective of technology enablers would be to support their customers in their digital transformation journeys through advanced and innovative offerings, helping them become future-ready to meet the ever-changing demand of businesses and the workplaces.

What are the key growth drivers for cloud service providers in data centre expansion?

A consistent cloud experience wherever technol ogy is deployed and developed – whether in a data centre, in the public cloud, or at the edge - will be the strategic data control point for the multi-cloud world. For cloud service providers, providing a secure and scalable data management facility with quick deployment of services, data science insights for the IT leadership, real-time problem solving will be leading to their immense growth. As data centers expand and businesses adopt fully man aged, subscription-based service for data centre and edge locations, the ability to move workloads across multiple cloud environments and scale resources quickly with predictable pricing and transparent costs will be helping cloud service providers meet customer needs. As the dynam ics of the organisations change with Industry 4.0 and digital processes, cloud service providers have the unique opportunity to capitalise on the data needs of Indian businesses and offer them flexible

Our servers support business-critical and advanced workloads to help organisations innovate, adapt, and grow. Management of Dell EMC PowerEdge servers can be fully automated through Dell Technologies’ Open Manage port folio to reduce the burden on IT operations. Designed with office-friendly acoustics and ther mals, these servers are ideal for use inside data centers, and edge environments. The PowerEdge SUPPORTING

How do you look at the market evolution with the introduction of “As-a-Service” and “pay per use” models by server providers?

Businesses across India need to tap into the potential of data for ensuring success in the digital era. Servers which address customised business needs will accelerate an organisation’s journey into digital transformation. The Dell Technolo gies Global Data Paradox report highlighted that around 84% of Indian businesses are willing to deploy as-a-service offerings to not only increase business agility but also simplify their digital transformation. This shift towards aaS will result in businesses improving their data management, through secure and flexible server infrastructure, helping them to achieve better business results. Businesses can avoid the cost and complexity of provisioning and managing their own infrastruc ture. Instead, infrastructure is maintained and supported by third-party providers, enabling IT teams to remain focused on other priorities that can move the business forward.

How does your business model drive channel growth?

Dell Technologies has been a leading player in the technology industry in India and our commit ment to enable progress has been testified by our customer success stories across geographies. We also help strengthen our channel partners to grow and come up at a scale to see measurable success. Our partner programs are enhanced each year, after extensive research and analysis only to pro vide our channel partners with the right kind of comprehensive training and upskilling. We offer an incentive structure with regional rebates that is consistent across tracks. Our channel partners’ programs are enhanced by a multitude of other parameters including our tech refresh processes, licence resell and rebate processes, among others to help our channel partners grow and gain access to one of the industry’s most comprehensive portfolios.

As the demand for flexible cus tomised configurations in bare metal options, as well as the Edge server configurations continues to rise, what should partners do to ensure

more profitability?

With changing priorities in the server space, our partners are being strengthened to adopt IT infra structure upgrades and set the benchmark for an ideal business with a digital-first strategy. Today, we see a revived interest in bare metal across industries; and for some, bare metal is a funda mental substrate in the legacy IaaS definition that, when isolated, brings key benefits to enterprise customers.

We are connected with our partners to ensure that they continue to serve customers, busi nesses and communities. Enterprises have started embedding AI/ML in their business processes. These are compute-intensive processes that require additional resources. With full control and access to the hardware components, bare metal lets one choose how a server is being used and who has access to it, ensuring data protection for sensitive applications. Partners should be pro active adopters of industry-leading technology. With industry-leading bare metal technology, a business can become more agile, allowing hybridcloud strategy and simplified infrastructure man agement.

MANISH GUPTA VICE PRESIDENT AND GENERAL MANAGER, INFRA STRUCTURE SOLUTIONS GROUP, DELL TECHNOLOGIES, INDIA

“OUR SERVERS HAVE COMPUTE CAPABILITY THAT MEETS UNIQUE BUSINESS REQUIREMENTS AND OFFERS REAL-TIME BUSINESS INSIGHTS FOR BUSINESSES OF ALL SIZES, ENSURING SECURE DATA PROCESSING AND OPTIMISED COSTS IN IT.”

automated cloud solutions through scalable data centre infrastructure.

The Pandemic triggered an unprec edented digitalization drive. So establishing digital trust became more than ever the need of the hour. In a special interaction with SME Channels, Sarabjeet Khurana, Country Manager, India & SAARC, DigiCert, reveals the role played by DigiCert in enabling Digital Trust; where does DigiCert factor in to ensure secure connected operations; how is DigiCert ensuring compliance with Matter for businesses being serviced; and how can busi nesses in India benefit from a strong Digital Trust strategy in the Zero Trust environment and much more. Edited excerpts…

What role is DigiCert playing in enabling Digital Trust for its customers in India?

As the world’s leading provider of digital trust, DigiCert provides the building blocks for any company to succeed. Working with our autho rized partners in India, we offer our customers a complete solution that includes local customer support and understanding.

The building blocks include the following: Standards: DigiCert participates in and fre quently chairs industry groups and consortiums that develop standards for digital trust. These standards apply to website security, email security, smart home and other IoT device manufacturing and implementation, healthcare delivery systems, digital signing for government-sanctioned and

other forms of contracts and legal documents and much more. Being at the center of this work, Digi Cert ensures the standards are developed to meet the highest level of digital trust. We then make it easy for our customers to meet the requirements.

Compliance & operations: Compliance and operations are the set of activities that establish trust. Compliance is the set of policies and audits that verify that operations are being conducted according to the standards set by a governing body. DigiCert ensures compliance with regula tory and other requirements so that its customers can be at peace.

Trust management: Companies are increas ingly relying on certificate lifecycle management and other types of software to manage trust. This software reduces business disruption from certificate outages, reduces rogue activity by driv ing adherence to corporate security policy, and reduces the administrative burden of managing certificate lifecycles and other enterprise identities through business process automation. DigiCert provides a highly scalable and robust platform that addresses global, regional and local needs.

Connected trust: Companies also need ways to extend trust into more complex supply chains

“IF ZERO TRUST IS THE ENVIRONMENT OF NEVER TRUST, ALWAYS-VERIFY, THEN DIGITAL TRUST IS THE RESULT WHEN EVERY CONNECTION IS AUTHENTICATED AND CAN BE TRUSTED.”

SARABJEET KHURANA COUNTRY MANAGER, INDIA & SAARC, DIGICERT

What is Digital Trust?

Society is now digitally connected in a pervasive way, with online interactions foundational to individual and business communication, transactions, and processes. Digital transformation has continued to accelerate in recent years, with remote pro cesses replacing face-to-face interactions; devices, systems, and facilities becoming Internet- or network-connected; and new deployment methods changing the landscape of IT architectures. In this environment, digi tal trust is an essential requirement of online operations. Digital trust is what enables indi viduals and businesses to engage online with confidence that their footprint in a digital world is secure.

In the early days of the Internet, digital trust centered on interactions and transac tions between users and websites, secured with a public key infrastructure (PKI), a technology that delivers authentication, encryption, and integrity to a digital interac tion. With digital transformation expanding the use cases for PKI, trust has now become the backbone for security in the connected world: for securing users, software, servers, devices, digital content, documents, digital rights, identity, and more.

The delivery of digital trust in our con nected world hinges on four key elements:

• Industry and technology standards that define what constitutes trust

• Compliance and operations that govern delivery of trust

• Software that provides management of public/and or private trust within an organi zation, with centralized visibility and control over digital certificate lifecycles

• Extension of trust through ecosystems, such as across device lifecycles, software supply chains, consortiums, and more.

or ecosystems. Examples are ensuring continu ity of trust throughout a device lifecycle, across a software supply chain or in the establishment of digital rights provenance in a content community. DigiCert for Connected Devices and its technol ogy for secure software supply chains are just two of the ways that the company extends trust for its customers where they need to be.

The Matter Protocol ensures that all devices, apps and platforms work seam lessly together. Where does DigiCert factor in to ensure secure connected

DIGITAL TRUST IN THE AGE OF ZERO TRUST

Implementing a zero-trust policy is one way of achieving digital trust. A digital trust is what enables us to build, participate in and grow this connected world that we now live in

operations?

First of all, Matter-compliant devices will carry the Matter logo as an important signal of trust to consumers. DigiCert has been involved with this important industry effort for several years and has played a key role in developing the standard for how smart home manufacturers can achieve device attestation. This standard helps authenti cate the device’s legitimate identity, protects data transmitted to and from the device, and ensures the integrity of data during firmware updates throughout the device lifecycle.

To gain device attestation, each device must contain a unique digital certificate. DigiCert achieves this for manufacturers by issuing digital certificates from its root Certificate Authority that is trusted by Matter. This requires several invest ments in technology and compliance with Matter. This in turn takes the burden off of companies, so they do not need to be PKI experts and invest heavily in the technology themselves. DigiCert can host this for them for full device lifecycle secu rity through our DigiCert ONE platform.

How is DigiCert ensuring compliance with Matter for businesses being serviced?

DigiCert has been deeply involved with develop ing the device attestation aspects of Matter. We understand the requirements and have been pre paring for years to be able to support smart home manufacturers adopting Matter. We can make it much easier for manufacturers to comply and can help them get their Matter devices to market much sooner than if they tried to do device attestation themselves. We can accommodate any scale.

Additionally, there will be rigorous require ments for a root Certificate Authority to be trusted

by Matter. At DigiCert, we are prepared to meet those requirements and expect to be one of the first to be approved in the Matter trusted root store.

How can businesses in India benefit from a strong Digital Trust strategy in the Zero Trust environment?

Implementing a zero-trust policy is one way of achieving digital trust. After all, digital trust is what enables us to build, participate in and grow this connected world that we now live in. It is the thing that enables us all to have confidence that the things we are doing online — whether these are interactions, transactions or business pro cesses — are secure.

If zero trust is the environment of never trust, always-verify, then digital trust is the result when every connection is authenticated and can be trusted.

An all-encompassing approach to digital trust requires that companies make it a strategic imper ative to understand what needs to be protected and to use the pillars of authentication, encryption and integrity throughout their digital footprint. When implementing a zero-trust environment, companies need to authenticate each connection point (device or user), encrypt all data and ensure the integrity of data. Having a unified way of man aging digital trust to provision trust, manage it throughout the lifecycle and respond to changes in industry standards, regulations or your environ ment, are all critical to success. DigiCert provides all of the technology and understanding to help companies comply, reduce outages and vulner abilities, and rest easier.

SECURING END-TO-END IOT NETWORK AND DEVICES AGAINST ATTACKS

SUNDAR BALASUBRAMANIAN Managing Director Check Point India and SAARC

PROFILE

A seasoned and much accomplished business leader with diverse sales, business and partner leadership experience in the IT industry, Sundar has siezable experience in working with industry leaders like EMC, VMware, Microsoft and IBM. With a strong grip over various business processes, he has always led from the front and has driven direct sales, new business creation, partnerships, channel management and service delivery.

Sunder has also been credited with building high performance businesses and teams, and executing swift turnaround for troubled businesses.

Across the world, there are trillions of devices which are connected to the network, systems and other devices to provide what analysts call an intelligent system of other systems. Through the cloud, these systems and devices monitor data for analysis to transform businesses. Banks for example can have a full view of customers’ finances in real-time, simply through the customers’ use of smart devices to access data and to utlise other banking services. Banks themselves also utilize such smart devices from printers to systems to ensure they are able to connect to customers faster and more efficiently and depend on these IoT devices to deliver the data required. With its widespread use, these IoT devices are set to grow. According to Statistica, in 2019, there were approximately 250 million internet of things (IoT) connected devices in India and this number was expected to reach over two billion by 2021.

It’s no secret that leveraging Internet of Things (IoT) devices across bank facilities delivers produc tivity benefits. However, these same IoT devices can also possibly expose banks to new cyber threats. Huge banks can easily have more than 1 million IoT devices on its network. Many of these IoT devices can be unpatched and, in many cases, exist invis ibly throughout the network. This is a cause for concern in India, where an organization is being attacked on average 1789 times per week in the last 6 months, compared to 1643 attacks per organiza tion in APAC, according to Check Point’s Threat Intelligence report. Banks today must have the ability to protect against IoT network threats. From IP cameras and smart buildings to access devices and printers, they must protect their infrastructure against IoT network cyberattacks and identify and protect all IoT devices on the bank network.

Unfortunately, connecting IoT devices to the network naturally extend the attack surface. This is because it provides additional entry points for hackers, which may result in unauthorized access to and from IoT, lateral movement, lead to a significant data breach, as well as damage the bank's reputation and customers' privacy and security.

Securing a bank’s IoT devices to protect the network from attacks is a great challenge for many, requiring the ability to:

• Identify and map every IoT device connected to the network

• Apply and manage multiple and complex IoT profiles/policies

• Protect and manage the network and all IoT assets.

Here I’d like to share a real-life use case of a North American bank, their challenges, and the solution they leveraged to overcome the challenge and boost their security posture, with the objective that in sharing such best practices for this bank, other users will find means to also adopt security measures to secure their bank’s IoT networks and devices.

Customer story: North American bank protected its IoT environment in a short time while investing minimum effort

The bank’s business need was to secure their general purpose IoT devices and have complete visibility and risk information of “everything” connected to their network.

The bank chose a unified solution by Check Point and a partner. The partner part provides the devices' discovery and risk information, while Check Point provides Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) and threat prevention to protect the environment.

The main benefits of the solution for the bank are the strong integration between the partners. Check Point allows them to protect their environment in minutes while investing the minimum effort. The system creates all the devices as dynamic objects at the Check Point management solution and offers recommended policies based on device behavior.

Solution for securing the bank IoT devices to protect the network from attacks

Fortunately, Check Point provides the perfect solu tion to overcome such a challenge, transforming what would be a challenging project into a much

As connected IoT devices naturally extend the attack surface, providing additional entry points for hackers, businesses should turn to more effective cybersecurity measures

simpler and cost-efficient project. Check Point Quantum IoT Protect’s main benefits for the bank included:

Advanced Discovery and Risk Analysis engine

An ongoing automated process identifies and maps all IoT devices in the bank’s network, assesses device risk, and provides complete visibility into the bank's IoT assets.

Seamless Profiling

Provides autonomous zero-trust segmenta tion access-control policies, which are deployed automatically across the bank’s IoT devices. The solution uses AI and behavioral learning-based analysis, providing a high level of policy granu

larity: based on destinations, applications, and commands.

Real-Time Threat Prevention

Provides virtual patching and activates protection against the bank’s device exploits. The solution blocks known and zero-day attacks, continuously updated through Check Point ThreatCloud.

Quantum IoT Protect Identifies any IoT device on the bank network and assesses its risk, prevents unauthorized access to and from IoT devices with zero-trust segmentation, and blocks IoT malicious intents with industry-leading threat prevention security services and 300+ IPS signatures.

Feel safe 24x7

By adopting a consolidated security approach

with the Check Point Infinity architecture and services, banks gain preemptive protection against advanced fifth-generation attacks while achieving a 50% increase in operational efficiency and a 20% reduction in security costs.

Check Point’s broad cybersecurity offering of solutions and services has enabled 6,500 financial institutions around the world to overcome their toughest challenges today.

Check Point enables banks to provide advanced digital services to their customers with the highest level of security to their network, cloud, users, and access, with Check Point Quantum, CloudGuard, Harmony, and Infinity products. And make bank ing safer for the banks and the customers.

Advanced Discovery and Risk Analysis engine

Real-Time Threat Prevention

Seamless Profiling safe 24x7

HOW SAAS CAN TACKLE SUPPLY CHAIN ISSUES

SANDEEP MUKHERJEE Director

Fluent Commerce India

PROFILE

Dynamic Business leader with 26+ years of experience and proven track record in IT industry, Sandeep has demonstrated his strong capabilities in driving Product & Service Lines Business Strategy and Sales (SaaS, Cloud and On Premise) as well as Sales & Consulting for Digital Transformation (CxM, InforEx & OPEX) solutions across industry segments including Retail & CPG, Public Sector, Automotive, Travel & Hospitality, Tele-Communication, Life Science & Healthcare, ERU and BFSI. Apart from expertise in LoB P&L management, encompassing Goal, Strategy, Operations & Sustained Growth, he has proficiency in driving Global SI Partnership Management to achieve substantial YoY growth around Influential, Non-Linear and Re-Sell Revenue model.

SaaS, or software as a service, has recently been a game-changer in the logistics and supply chain management industries. Because of recent tech nological advancements, businesses can now out source various functions to the cloud, opening up new possibilities for how these functions can be used. This shift is especially noticeable in the fashion business, where supply chains have many moving pieces and the potential for errors is far larger.

In today's world of global, interconnected orga nizations, SaaS has proven essential in streamlining firms and enabling transparent supply chains, which are more crucial than ever. This creates a challenge for companies with global supply chains because most companies employ suppliers and contractors all over the world – and sell their products in a vari ety of nations. It's no surprise that providing SaaS to support these emerging global supply chains has shown to be a lucrative business opportunity.

According to Allied Market Research, the global SaaS-based supply chain market earned $7.3 billion in 2020 and is predicted to reach $26.0 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 13.4% between 2021 and 2030.

The SaaS model makes it possible to reap the benefits of automated order management. Integra tion of end-to-end automation with pre-existing processes is made possible by SaaS, which covers the entire document lifecycle from initial capture and storage to workflow, maintenance, and retrieval. Instead of hosting an order management automa tion system in-house or outsourcing a revenuegenerating activity, a SaaS approach automates sales order processing without the risks of outsourcing, increased IT complexity, or associated expenses, allowing businesses to save funds better.

Driving technology adoption in the industry with MACH Alliance

Modern technology has progressed rapidly, paving the way for business operations. Fluent Commerce, which is an OMS company, has taken the MACH Alliance way to enable businesses to take advantage of the most innovative and adaptable enterprise technologies and accelerate the workflow. MACH

stands for Microservices based, API-first, Cloudnative SaaS, and Headless, which facilitates busi nesses in adopting seamless interactions.

MACH is an industry-standard that governs modern technologies. It is a non-profit industry organization that promotes innovative, high-quality technology ecosystems. The objective of the Alli ance is to future-proof enterprise technology and enrich present and future digital experiences with open and connected enterprise technology.

Fluent Commerce is one of the founding mem bers of the MACH Alliance and has undertaken this endeavor to increase global awareness of MACH technology. The company’s MACH Certification provides businesses with the assurance that they are selecting best-in-class providers capable of deliver ing future-proof technology. When the MACH Alli ance certifies a platform, it means that the platform is not only cloud-ready but also cloud burn. A SaaS platform with MACH certification assists organiza tions in improving their product cycle times, reduc ing order fulfillment issues and implementing better inventory management strategies.

How does SaaS help Supply Chain Management?

SaaS products are far more accessible, allowing pro fessionals at all levels of the supply chain to access vital data from a broader range of locations and devices. Whereas more traditional systems would have required expensive, specialized hardware for remote access, can access SaaS apps via almost any connected device.

It is also more cost-effective and stable over time. Storing data on the cloud eliminates the need for onsite infrastructure, as well as the security and upkeep that comes with it. Software and technol ogy advance quickly these days, with new programs appearing to be obsolete in the time it takes to install them. With SaaS, your program receives continuous support and upgrades, allowing it to adapt to chang ing technology as it develops.

The benefits of SaaS solutions in Supply Chain are described below.

● Innovative Tech-driven Approach

As businesses are busy outsourcing various functions to the cloud, SaaS, or software as a service, has emerged as a game-changer in the logistics and supply chain management industries

MANIFOLD BLESSINGS OF SAAS

There are multiple tech solutions around the globe, offering cloud based SaaS software for you to access everything from anywhere instantly, from handling returns to accessing inventory snapshots to reviewing monthly order volume and more.

● Enhanced Workflow

Logistics SaaS can assist you in improving your organization's workflow. For example, you can quickly automate repetitive processes like paperwork or documentation. This allows your employees to concentrate on more vital tasks that necessitate human interaction.

● Improved Data Handling

Because SaaS solutions are cloud-based, they make it simple to collect, store, use, analyze, and safeguard data. Forecasting features can also be used to reduce inventory losses, ensure proper deliveries, and eliminate last-minute situations.

In addition, there is no physical storage medium for the data. You save money because infrastructure installation and management costs are eliminated.

● Strengthened Data Analysis

Previously, data was simply collected and main tained, as in the case of commercial airlines, which keep client information and flight information. However, organizations have gradually realized the value of data analytics. As a result, organiza tions use data in novel ways to make informed decisions.

Logistics SaaS solutions can help with this. With a dependable SaaS solution in place, you are able to analyze multiple processes and identify and resolve issues as they arise.

● Increased Transparency in the Supply Chain

Companies must have real-time visibility into various logistics processes and data in order to maintain operations under control. And a solid logistics SaaS solution can assist you in accom plishing this. You can keep a close eye on all pro cedures and deal with problems as they arise.

● Financial Benefits

Companies using an on-premises software solu tion must invest in licenses, pay for server man agement, bear per-device costs, and deploy the program across a variety of devices. This equates to a considerable sum of money.

All of this adds to overall efficiency gains, mostly through improved communication between departments and partners, and strength ens your brand and supply chain for the future.

LEXAR’S BATON IN COMPUAGE’S HANDS

BY SANJAY MOHAPATRA sanjay@smechannels.com

Lexar has appointed Compuage Infocom as its official Indian distributor. Lexar, which has ranked third among the best global brands for flash memory prod ucts, is a leading brand for products with high speed and better durability. Compuage Infocom, with its strong channel presence, is expected to help Lexar expand its Pan India reach to cater to the growing demand for storage and memory products in the country.

Leveraging Compuage’s Channel Presence

A leading value-added distributor that serves system integrators, brand stores, enterprises, retailers, and others, Compuage boasts of a diverse portfolio of IT solutions and customized services across a wide range of technology verticals. The company creates enterprise advancement opportunities for its channel partners through aggressive market development and continuous innovation. Compuage’s deep experience in IT distribution and pan India reach will help Lexar expand its market reach across the country.

“The memory solutions market in India is seeing a boom and it is imperative for us to bring just the right set of distributors on board, who are well connected and can help Lexar expand its presence in the Indian market. Compuage Info com has been one of the leading distributors in the market and we are happy to work with them,” says Darren Lin, Head of APAC, Lexar Co., Limited.

“We at Lexar aims at fulfilling the need and the demands of our customers. By collaborating with Compuage Infocom Ltd. we believe that we will be able to expand our area of distribution to a much wider range. Fluent speed and longer durability are what any tech enthusiast strives for, therefore at Lexar, it is our prime goal to produce the best and we are obliged that with the association of Compuage Infocom now the products will be easily available for every user out there,” Gaurav Mathur, Director of Lexar Co., Limited.

Prime Focus on Storage & Memory Products

Atul H Mehta, Chairman and Managing Director of Compuage Infocom Ltd., said, “We are excited to start working with Lexar and help them meet their business objectives, and our top priority is to provide the best experience by working as a family, with the goal of increasing the market share for the accomplishment of the company. Our prime focus will be on distributing storage and memory products.”

Super IT Distributor

A leading volume technology products dis tributor, Compuage has been a vital link in the technology value chain, creating opportunities for vendors and resellers. The company has been striding ahead of competitors thanks to its creative marketing programs, logistical support, technical support, financial support and product aggrega tion and distribution.

Starting on in 1980s, Compuage has gone on to become one of India’s top super IT distributors. Addressing both enterprise as well as consumer segments, the company has clocked an impressive Rs 4,500 Crore in revenues in the year 2018-19. The company is one among a handful of IT dis tributors that boasts such a huge channel presence across the country.

Channel Centricity

“We’ve always worked with our channel partners, helping them with the best solutions for their cus tomers,” says Mehta.

The company provides value-added services including technical assistance, marketing support, warehousing and credit financing to the entire channel-customer ecosystem. It has made sig nificant investments in partner training programs too. It always keeps OEMs updated on its policy of deep channel engagement.

With its strong channel presence, Compuage is expected to help expand Lexar’s Pan India reach to cater to the growing demand for storage and memory products

DARREN LIN HEAD OF APAC LEXAR CO., LIMITED

ATUL H MEHTA CHAIRMAN AND MANAGING DIREC TOR, COMPUAGE INFOCOM LTD.

“THE MEMORY SOLUTIONS MARKET IN INDIA IS SEEING A BOOM AND IT IS IMPERATIVE FOR US TO BRING JUST THE RIGHT SET OF DISTRIBUTORS ON BOARD.”

“WE ARE EXCITED TO START WORKING WITH LEXAR AND HELP THEM MEET THEIR BUSINESS OBJECTIVES, AND OUR PRIME FOCUS WILL BE ON DISTRIBUTING STORAGE AND MEMORY PRODUCTS.”

TECH DATA EXPANDS PARTNERSHIP WITH CLOUDERA TO APJ

The partnership supports Tech Data’s strategy of driving hybrid cloud motion, stressing upon the capabilities of the hybrid data platform on the Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) that business partners can look forward to

BY SANJAY MOHAPATRA sanjay@smechannels.com

Further expanding its longstanding partnership with Cloudera to the Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) region, Tech Data expects to further deepen col laboration between it and Cloudera. The partner ship will equip business partners in the region to be Cloudera-ready with support from Tech Data’s Centre of Excellence (CoE). The partnership supports Tech Data’s strategy of driving hybrid cloud motion. This emphasises the capabilities of the hybrid data platform on the Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) that business partners can look forward to.

Bennett Wong, Vice President, Advanced Solutions for MDC & Analytics at Tech Data Asia Pacific & Japan, said, “The enterprise cloud landscape is fast evolving where the onus is on providing customers with the highest quality of

service on managing IT infrastructures and appli cations. This partnership will enable us to provide cloud services to clients with efficiency, remoteability, and safety.”

Tech Data’s CoE is a guided approach to enabling growth across next generation tech nologies. It is an end-to-end approach designed to drive growth through enablement, technology innovation, market ready solutions, and its ben efits include:

Partner Enablement - Tech Data Practice Builder Methodology empowers business part ners to expand their sales and pre-sales capa bilities in data & analytics by leveraging Tech Data CoE’s Practice Builder enablement framework.

Solutions Factory – Tech Data CoE has the capability to design and build solutions capa bilities around Cloudera’s offerings, with pre-built

assets and materials that allow business partners to jump-start their data journey with Cloudera. Leveraging Tech Data allows them to explore cross-solutions capabilities in this domain.

Sales Acceleration – Tech Data’s CoE can also function as an extended pre-sales support for driving sales opportunities through POCs, demos, or solution design. This empowers busi ness partners to rapidly expand customer reach.

“We are committed to the success of our cus tomers and partners and believe this partnership will allow our partners to service our customers better. Through the Tech Data CoE facility and our collaboration with a broader network of part ners, business partners will be empowered with Cloudera’s skills, pre-built end-to-end solution assets, POCs and demos that facilitate solution discovery and formulate the right data driven use cases for our customers. Customers can speed up their access to insights while ensuring control and security over multiple cloud environments and data centers. The wide range of offerings will cater to multiple facets of cloud infrastructure such as data centers, hyper-converged infrastructure, hybrid cloud, and DevOps. This flexibility allows them to unlock more value from their data while working towards being data-first,” said Remus Lim, Vice President, Asia Pacific and Japan, Cloudera.

Representing the view of end-users, SS Lim, Managing Director for PTC Systems shared “The ability to harness data provides great insights for companies, and Tech Data’s CoE for Cloudera is an excellent value-add for the customers. Through this CoE, we have a platform to conduct idealiza tion workshops and demonstrate value creation as an outcome of Digital Transformation.”

Cloudera has just been named a 2022 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Cloud Data base Management Systems (Cloud DBMS).

REMUS LIM VICE PRESIDENT, ASIA PACIFIC AND JAPAN, CLOUDERA

BENNETT WONG VICE PRESIDENT, ADVANCED SOLU TIONS FOR MDC & ANALYTICS, TECH DATA ASIA PACIFIC & JAPAN

“THROUGH THE TECH DATA COE FACILITY AND OUR COLLABORATION WITH A BROADER NETWORK OF PARTNERS, BUSINESS PARTNERS WILL BE EMPOWERED WITH CLOUDERA’S SKILLS, PREBUILT END-TO-END SOLUTION ASSETS, POCS AND DEMOS.”

“THIS PARTNERSHIP WITH COUDERA WILL ENABLE US TO PROVIDE CLOUD SERVICES TO CLIENTS WITH EFFICIENCY, REMOTE-ABILITY, AND SAFETY.”

Data breaches has always been one of the crying issues for businesses as well as individuals. But the recent spate in cyber attacks and consequent data breaches has assumed phenomenal proportions. Whats more worrying is that data breach costs have gone head over the heals accentuating busi ness pains.

Raising the red flag, cybersecurity whistle blower IBM Security has recently released its annual Cost of a Data Breach Report. The find ings of the report have been nothing sort of an eye opener. The company reveals that costlier and higher-impact data breaches than ever before, with the global average cost of a data breach reaching an all-time high of $4.35 million for sur veyed organizations.

With breach costs increasing nearly 13% over

ACCOUNTING FOR DATA BREACH COSTS

the last two years of the report, the findings sug gest these incidents may also be contributing to rising costs of goods and services. In fact, 60% of studied organizations raised their product or services prices due to the breach, when the cost of goods is already soaring worldwide amid inflation and supply chain issues.

Leading from the Front Offering one of the most advanced and integrated portfolios of enterprise security products and services, IBM Security has been at the forefront in the fight against cyber attacks. The company’s vast portfolio, supported by the proven IBM Security X-Force research, enables organizations to effec tively manage risk and defend against emerging threats. IBM operates one of the world's broadest security research, development, and delivery orga nizations, monitors 150 billion+ security events per day in more than 130 countries, and has been granted more than 10,000 security patents worldwide.

Haunting effect of data breaches

The perpetuality of cyberattacks is also shedding light on the “haunting effect” data breaches are having on businesses, with the IBM report finding 83% of studied organizations have experienced more than one data breach in their lifetime. Another factor rising over time is the after-effects of breaches on these organizations, which linger long after they occur, as nearly 50% of breach costs are incurred more than a year after the breach.

What it Costs

The 2022 Cost of a Data Breach Report is based on in-depth analysis of real-world data breaches experienced by 550 organizations globally between March 2021 and March 2022. The research, which was sponsored and analyzed by IBM Security, was conducted by the Ponemon Institute.

Some of the key findings in the 2022 IBM report include:

• Critical Infrastructure Lags in Zero Trust – Almost 80% of critical infrastructure organiza tions studied don’t adopt zero trust strategies, seeing average breach costs rise to $5.4 million – a $1.17 million increase compared to those that do. All while 28% breaches amongst these organiza tions were ransomware or destructive attacks.

• It Doesn’t Pay to Pay – Ransomware victims in the study that opted to pay threat actors’ ransom demands saw only $610,000 less in average breach costs compared to those that chose not to pay –not including the cost of the ransom. Factoring in the high cost of ransom payments, the financial toll may rise even higher, suggesting that simply paying the ransom may not be an effective strategy.

• Security Immaturity in Clouds – Fortythree percent of studied organizations are in the early stages or have not started applying security practices across their cloud environments, observ ing over $660,000 on average in higher breach costs than studied organizations with mature security across their cloud environments.

• Security AI and Automation Leads as Multi-Million Dollar Cost Saver – Participat ing organizations fully deploying security AI and automation incurred $3.05 million less on average in breach costs compared to studied organizations that have not deployed the technology – the big gest cost saver observed in the study.

“Businesses need to put their security defenses on the offense and beat attackers to the punch. It’s time to stop the adversary from achieving their objectives and start to minimize the impact of attacks. The more businesses try to perfect their perimeter instead of investing in detection and response, the more breaches can fuel cost of living increases.” said Charles Henderson, Global Head of IBM Security X-Force.

“This report shows that the right strategies coupled with the right technologies can help make all the difference when businesses are attacked,” Charles further added.

To access more info login to: https://www.smechannels.com

“THE MORE BUSINESSES TRY TO PERFECT THEIR PERIMETER INSTEAD OF INVESTING IN DETECTION AND RESPONSE, THE MORE BREACHES CAN FUEL COST OF LIVING INCREASES.”

60% of breached businesses raised product prices postbreach while vast majority of critical infrastructure still lags in zero trust adoption

CHARLES HENDERSON

GLOBAL HEAD IBM SECURITY X-FORCE

MATRIX COSEC PATH ACCESS CONTROL DEVICE

BY MANAS RANJAN info@smechannels.com

MATRIX COSEC PATH is a state-of-the-art door controller from Matrix’s stable. This Con tactless and Secure Access Control Device based on Fingerprint and Card, has been specifically engineered for rugged use and to weather rough conditions. Its inbuilt innovative controller tech nology helps to make access control and timeattendance easy and foolproof.

The Matrix COSEC PATH comes with Mul tiple Credentials, including Fingerprint, BLE, and Card, and has Multiple Connectivity Options, such as PoE, Ethernet, and in-built Wi-fi. The device can store up to 1,00,000 Finger templates and 50,000 User data. It has a capacity to store 1,00,000 Card data and 50,000 User data. The door controller has an Event Buffer up to 5,00,000. Its compact build makes the device suitable for use in indoor as well as outdoor applications.

ASUS VIVOBOOK PRO 14 OLED

Equipped with advanced features like Wi-Fi & Bluetooth connectivity, PoE, IP65, and multi-credentials support of fingerprint and RFID card options have made it a good can didate for use in various conditions in differ ent organizations.

The new AV Line of M4250 switches main tains the same thorough functionality found on the M4300 and M4500 switches for almost all AV-over-IP encoders and decod ers. Pre-configured with NETGEAR IGMP Plus, the M4250 switches can simply be plugged in and turned on, making multi cast setups a breeze. This reduces setup and installation time, allowing the installer to focus on other parts of the project.

ASUS’S LATEST MID-RANGE OFFERING IN INDIA THE ASUS VIVOBOOK PRO 14 OLED, WHICH WAS LAUNCHED ALONG WITH THE ZENBOOK S 13 OLED, IS A FEATURE-PACKED DEVICE. THE TOP-END VARIANT COMES WITH RYZEN 7 5800H CHIPSET, 16GB DDR4 RAM, 512GB PCIE 3.0 SSD AND AMD RADEON GRAPHICS. THE MAIN HIGHLIGHTS OF THE DEVICE INCLUDE ITS 2.8K OLED DISPLAY AND ITS LIGHTWEIGHT DESIGN.

THE ASUS VIVOBOOK PRO 14 OLED FEATURES A MINIMALISTIC DESIGN AND COMES WITH AN ALUMINUM LID. IT FEA TURES A SLEEK DESIGN, WEIGHS 1.4 KG AND IS 18.9MM THICK CAN BE CARRIED IN 14-INCH LAPTOP BAG.

NINE VENTS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE DEVICE ENSURE PROPER AIRFLOW, KEEPING THE TEMPERATURES UNDER CONTROL. THIS MAKES THE LAPTOP TEMPERATURE STAY WITHIN CONTROL, EVEN DURING GAMING. THE MATTE FIN ISH AT THE BACK PREVENTS FINGER PRINT SMUDGES. THE DEVICE PROUDLY FEATURES HARMON KARDON SPEAK ERS. IT HAS STRONG ALUMINUM-BUILT CHASSIS.

DISPLAY

THE DISPLAY IS EASILY THE BOAST OF THE DEVICE. THE ASUS VIVOBOOK PRO 14 OLED FEATURES A 14-INCH 2.8K OLED DISPLAY WITH A 90HZ REFRESH RATE, 16:10 ASPECT RATIO AND HDR SUPPORT. IT COMES WITH SLIM BEZELS ON THE SIDE AND OFFERS AN 85% SCREEN-TOBODY RATIO.

AVAILABILITY:

Listed at ₹59,990 for the Ryzen 5 5600H variant and ₹69,990 for the Ryzen 7 5800H variant, the Asus VivoBook Pro 14 OLED comes in two colors: Solar Silver and Cosmos Blue. It is available from Asus India, and its authorized retail stores as well as online retailers across the country.

DELL

NEW DELL LATITUDE LAPTOPS

Recently, the Dell Latitude series laptops got three new members into the family: the Latitude 9430, Dell Latitude 7430, Latitude 7330. Dell Latitude laptops can help create a hybrid workplace that makes use of cloud technol ogy, collaboration and communication platforms, remote monitoring tools, and productivity management systems.

SPECS:

The new Dell Latitude laptops are equipped with the latest 12thgeneration Intel Core processors, paired with NVidia’s GeForce RTX GPUs. The Dell Latitude 7330 comes with a 13.3-inch display and weighs under 1kg.

The Dell Latitude 7430 comes with a 2-in-1 design with a 14-inch display. It comes with up to a 12th-generation Intel Core i7 processor, paired with up to 16GB of RAM.

The top-end Dell Latitude 9430 comes with a 14-inch display with a 16:10 aspect ratio. It has an FHD camera for better video calls. It is suitable for C-Suite, and other such professionals who want to work remotely and so require the best mobile performance, collaboration tools, and connectivity.

n Pricing and Availability: The new Dell products are available for sale in India starting today. The Dell Latitude 7330 starts at a price of Rs 99,990 in the country, the Latitude 7430 starts at a price of Rs 94,990, and the Dell Latitude 9430 is priced at Rs 1,45,990 onwards.

EPSON EH-LS12000B 4K LASER PROJECTOR

Epson’s high end 4K laser home theater projector, the EH-LS12000B promises to redefine the home cinema experience with an immersive big screen experience. This makes the projector ideal for film enthusiasts, and people who enjoy streaming shows and live sports.

The projector offers high brightness, high image quality and flexibility with a range of features, as it features Epson’s laser light source, and a new 4K image processing chip delivering 4K resolution. Strategically priced at INR 599,999, the EH-LS12000B promises larger-than-life cinematic expe rience from the comforts of one’s home.

The powerful projector’s impressive display is made possible by a combination of high-end technologies. It produces images with a high 2,500,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio, 4K resolution (8.3mil pixels), HDR10+ support, 3LCD and a laser light-source. With powered lens shift and zoom lens it’s easy to achieve an accurate display.

The use of 3LCD technology ensures vivid colours. HDR10+ support creates extra detail and depth for natural yet richer colours. Detail in the shadows is defined with the high contrast ratio of 2,5000,000:1 delivering deep blacks. Besides it has 4K Frame interpolation, 4K Super Resolution and scene adaptive gamma correction/auto contrast enhancement.

n Verdict: Doubtlessly, the EH-LS12000B is a great projector. The device offers laser UHD delivery at a great price point. It also offers full optimisation for those needing full calibration. The powerful projectors truly cinematic images is something which would endear it to its users.

VIEWSONIC COLORPRO MONITOR

ViewSonic’s new Fogra-certified professional display ColorPro VP2786-4K is built with 100% Adobe RGB color gamut. The device delivers true-to-life color reproduction on all digital and print mediums. The monitor is tailored for the allnew ColorPro Sense software, which automati cally suggests color combinations from Pantone’s color library to best match the creator’s vision. It is also equipped with the intuitive ColorPro Wheel for in-depth color control and management.

The ColorPro VP2786-4K takes another step forward into the realm of true color management

with its combination of software and hardware. It has a 100% Adobe RGB color gamut that delivers a larger range of color precision for true-to-life outputs. The cinema-grade 98% DCI-P3 color space offers a vast color spectrum to play with. With a true color depth of 10-bit, creators can expect over a billion colors for stunning and rich visuals.

The monitor is Fogra-certified which guaran tees absolute color reproduction. This ensures a consistent color output across all printed materials.

The monitor complements the all-new and exclusive ColorPro Sense for truly unfettered color performance. The software automatically recommends multiple alternative palettes from Pantone’s color library to assist creators in better visualizing and realizing their ideas. Users can

also share their palettes with other creatives. Moreover, the intuitive lens-based color sensor - ColorPro Wheel, also allows creators to calibrate the display and control OSD settings for efficient workflows simply with the turn of the dial, while being compatible with Adobe Creative suite and Capture One editing software. The monitor’s detachable magnetic hood also provides instant shade to eliminate unwanted ambient light for better focus.

EPSON