January 2021 Issue

PLUS

Savex Technologies signs a distribution agreement with Fortinet /06 www.smechannels.com

India’s leading IT magazine for channel business VOLUME 11 | ISSUE 10 | PAGES 32 | JANUARY 2021 | RS. 20/-

GUEST ARTICLE / 28

An Analytics & Behaviour-Centric Approach to Digital Payment Security for the RBI

CHANNEL CHAT / 24 Hybrid Cloud is in Trend Today

SECURITY / 27

NTT Offers Cyber Threat Sensor to clients in wake of SolarWinds attacks

CHANNEL MARKET BOUND

TO GROW

OST COVID P/16

ANIL SETHI

AMER WARSI Channels, SMB and Ecosystem Leader, HPE India

ice President & General Manager, Channels – India, Dell Technologies

LATA SINGH Director - Partner Ecosystem, IBM India

1

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McAfee and ASUS extend exclusive PC security service Pg: 15 www.smechannels.com

India’s leading IT magazine for channel business CHANNEL CHAT / 24

GUEST ARTICLE / 28

An Analytics & Behaviour-Centric Approach to Digital Payment Security for the RBI

Hybrid Cloud is in Trend Today

SECURITY / 27

NTT Offers Cyber Threat Sensor to clients in wake of SolarWinds attacks

MY EXPERIENCE EDITORIAL

2021 WILL SEE BIG BOUNCE BACK SANJAY MOHAPATRA

sanjay@smechannels.com

Dear Friends With Covid -19 receding from the earth rapidly, year 2021 appears to be a year of big bounce back.

Along with this the pandemic has been able to instill many good things with us. We have started believing the efficacy of virtual platforms and started trusting people in virtual meetings. It is teaching us digital is the way forward. It also is teaching about hybrid work and remote work is not bad. Covid -19 is also becoming a catalyst for a great transformation in the mindset of the people that automation and machine learning are the technologies need to be at the forefront. Emphasis on cyber security and DLP are becoming priority.

As 2020 became a very sluggish year from the point of view of growth and investment, 2021 would definitely see investment for most of the corporates. They would start big bang projects to gain edge over others in the competition. There would be no organization – big or small, government or private – try to leave any stone unturned this time and this year. They would not wait for another pandemic to make their organizations digital. Therefore, the partners need to latch onto this opportunity. If they have not changed their organizations and made themselves structurally ready to cope with the change, they would have to make the changes rapidly.

Secondly, the partners would have to identify the key areas as per the priority, i.e. fast growing, moderate growing and slow growing. They cannot take any organization lightly. The second observation is that the global market grow is about to touch 3.3 per cent in 2021 and in India the growth will be around 11 per cent. It means the opportunity for tech led investments are going to be much bigger than the previous years. 11 per cent was never there in the last 2 decades and if this time it is happening; IT would get a great boost. Partners should be cognizant about it. The growth would take place with cloud and digital first as the epicenter.

So apart from acquiring the right prediction and direction, the partners need to have the right skillsets.

They either would have to be skilled enough or hire skilled manpower to handle the needs. Transition of skilled people would be a feature this year. Therefore, those partners who are heavily dependent upon skilled workforce, should be better careful.

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contents

Trusted Advisor of Channel Business

VOLUME 11 ISSUE 10

2021

JAN R VE CO RY STO

Publisher: Sanjib Mohapatra Editor: Sanjay Mohapatra Sub Editor: Nidhi Shail, Pooja Jain Designer: Shadab Khan Web Designer: Vijay Bakshi Technical Writer: Manas Ranjan Lead Visualizer: DPR Choudhary MARKETING Marketing Manager: Vaishali Shukla Circulation and Printing: Rajkumar Hansa SALES CONTACTS Delhi 6/102, Kaushalya Park, Hauz Khas New Delhi-110016 Phone: 91-11-41055458 / 8587835685 sanjeev@smechannels.com Bangalore #28/1, 3rd Floor, Sri Lakshmi Krupa, Near Shamanna Park, Model House Street, Basavanagudi, Bangalore - 560004 Ph. No. +91 88618 21044 Mumbai Tahmeed Ansari 2, Ground Floor, Park Paradise, Kay-Bees CHS. Ltd.,Opp. Green Park, Oshiwara, Andheri (west), Mumbai - 400 053.

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Probably the worst of the decade is over and ache din is coming for every one including the channel partners. The sluggish market situation during the last 10 months is going to be growing and investment let market. In this situation, channel partners have a great role to play.

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Savex Technologies signs a distribution agreement with Fortinet Fortinet appointed Savex Technologies as a value-added distributor to further expand its business and security market footprint in India.

The appointment builds on the strong demand for new solution requirements to secure the edges that make up the new network including the data center, WAN, local-area network (LAN), remote workers and cloud access.

Savex Technologies Pvt Ltd, which was selected for its long history of ICT distribution in India and its representation of many major IT brands, will work with Fortinet to target all market segments, including large enterprise, telecom and SMB. The new distributor will appoint technical resources to support Fortinet’s business, including a dedicated team to handle both pre-sales and

post-sales customer support. Savex Technologies will run marketing campaigns and conduct enablement training sessions, to equip partners in smaller cities with the necessary knowledge and skills to sell Fortinet’s solutions.

Jayant Goradia, Managing Director for Savex Technologies Pvt Ltd, said “Savex is pleased with its tie-up with Fortinet, and this partnership will help us offer comprehensive cybersecurity solutions to our vast and established enterprise channel network across India. With the added support of our TAC centre, we will grow the business for Fortinet products and services, including solutions to secure hyperscale architectures, SD-WAN, 5G, Edge networking, IoT, Endpoints, Critical Infrastructure and Operational Technologies.”

Volkswagen Finance acquires majority stake in KUWY Technology Volkswagen Finance Pvt. Ltd. India has increased its shareholding in KUWY Technology Service Pvt Ltd. by picking up a majority equity stake in the latter. This comes in succession to the first 25% equity stake investment, from September 2019. KUWY Technology is one of India’s leading instant lending digital platform and through this acquisition, which came into effect on January 5, 2021, Volkswagen

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SME CHANNELS JANUARY 2021

Finance Pvt Ltd will grow its New & Used Car Business through KUWY’s PAN India network on car financing. The acquisition is also in line with the Volkswagen Group’s - India 2.0 strategy of VWFPL in its quest to offer added value to its consumers through digital channels.

Speaking on the development, Mr. Aashish Deshpande, MD and CEO of Volkswagen Finance Pvt. Ltd. said, “Our investment in

KUWY is strategic in nature as we intend to make KUWY an important part of our India strategy. With this acquisition, we aim to enhance the synergies with KUWY Technology and make KUWY the face of VWFPL in India for retail financing business. This is a step towards the evolution of the consumer journey in the digital space by offering a simplified and agile solution to our customers. Through this association

VWFPL will grow its New and Used Car business through KUWY’s PAN India network and technology platforms. Supporting the multi-brand approach of KUWY, we are still open to further investors - also under the new additional conditions.”

PMP

TM

Peak Throughput up to

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SNIPPETS

Spirent’s 5G Network Digital Twin Technology recognized for accelerating 5G developments Spirent Communications, 5G Network Digital Twin technology has been named a winner in the 2021 BIG Innovation Awards.

With 5G still in its infancy, Spirent’s innovative 5G Network Digital Twin is a new, agile approach to testing and assurance, providing a software-emulated replica of the 5G physical network. This allows for continuous prototyping, testing and optimization across a wide variety of potential scenarios at a time when physical 5G network deployments are still limited and currently seeing only a tiny fraction of their potential future usage.

“We’re delighted that our 5G Network Digital Twin solution has been recognized for its innovative approach to making testing of the 5G networks of the future a reality today,” said Spirent’s 5G Strategy Lead, Steve Douglas. “Using the Network Digital Twin, designers and developers have a cost-effective and flexible environment to accelerate their 5G R&D processes and increase productivity. It can help reduce risk by safely testing what-if scenarios and cyberattacks, optimize decision making by modeling unlimited configurations, and improve reliability by identifying design weaknesses and opportunities.”

Matrix Comsec Bags the OutstandingMSME Excellence Award by Federation of Gujarat Industries (FGI) Federation of Gujarat Industries, Vadodara has conferred on Matrix a Certificate of Merit in the category of Outstanding MSME. This prestigious award will be presented at the 16th FGI Awards during the Excellence presentation ceremony.

The objective behind the institution of these awards is to recognize excellence in economic, social and scientific areas. The FGI believes that through these awards, industrial and social achievements in Gujarat will be publicly recognized. In order to continually encourage others to contribute to the country’s efforts, they aim to contribute towards globalization and economic development.

Speaking about the achievement, Ganesh Jivani, the CEO of Matrix Comsec, added, “We are delighted to win the outstanding MSME Award for the year 2021.

We are honoured to be recognised for making a meaningful and positive contribution to the economic and technological development of our community and country. Each of us at Matrix is passionate about our shared purpose – to create a world-class technology organization. The award is a testimony of the efforts of all our employees and associates, whose efforts have enabled us to consistently deliver world-class products and to win and keep the faith of our customers. This award is also an inspiration to work harder, towards building world-class technology solutions.”

Gartner Forecasts Worldwide IT Spending to Grow 6.2% in 2021 Accelerated Digital Transformation Abated COVID-19’s Negative Effect on IT Spending

Manohar Reddy is the new President for TiE Hyderabad for the year 2021

Worldwide IT Spending Forecast (Millions of U.S. Dollars) 2020 Spending

2020 Growth (%)

2021 Spending

2021 Growth (%)

2022 Spending

2022 Growth (%)

Data Center Systems

214,985

0.0

228,360

6.2

236,043

3.4

Enterprise Software

465,023

-2.4

505,724

8.8

557,406

10.2

653,172

-8.2

705,423

8.0

714,762

1.3

1,011,795

-2.7

1,072,581

6.0

1,140,057

6.3

1,349,891

-1.7

1,410,745

4.5

1,456,637

3.3

3,694,867

-3.2

3,922,833

6.2

4,104,906

4.6

Devices IT Services Communications

EXECUTIVE MOVEMENT

CtrlS appoints Industry Veteran Bill Barney to its Board of Directors

Commvault appoints Rachel Ler as VP & GM, APJ

Services Overall IT

Source: Gartner (January 2021)

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SME CHANNELS JANUARY 2021

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SNIPPETS

FortiGate 200F Expands SD-WAN Anywhere, Supports Large and Complex WAN Deployments FortiGate continued customer momentum of Fortinet Secure SD-WAN and the official completion of the roll-out of Fortinet’s SD-WAN ASIC-based FortiGate Next-Generation Firewalls with the FortiGate 200F series.

Enterprise customer deployments of Fortinet Secure SD-WAN average a 70 percent return on investment (ROI) in three years and 100 percent ROI in five years. Fortinet attributes this to its ability to consolidate SD-WAN, advanced routing, a wireless controller, and in many cases built-in LTE connectivity, on Fortinet’s industry-leading next-generation firewall built around a common operating system and centralized management and orchestration system. To learn more about Fortinet’s ability to deliver real value for customers visit our blog, “Realize 100% ROI in Five Years or Sooner with Fortinet Secure SD-WAN.” FortiGate 200F Delivers Flexible Support for Both Converged and Thin Edges The recently announced FortiGate 200F Next-Generation Firewall completes the roll-out of FortiGate appliances to include the latest version (SOC4) of Fortinet’s SD-WAN ASIC, built to accelerate the performance of WAN Edge deployments.

Yotta Infrastructure Launches ‘Let’s Get Cloud’ Initiative To Boost Cloud Computing Adoption With the aim to make cloud computing services more affordable and accessible to start-ups, application developers and enterprises, Yotta Infrastructure has unveiled its latest initiative - Let’s Get Cloud. With this initiative, a bevy of incentives and schemes have been launched for availing Yotta’s cloud computing services.

The COVID crisis has been a true test for organizations’ IT infrastructure strategies. And cloud is right in the middle of it. As per the India Enterprise Cloud Survey 2020 unveiled at the India Cloud Summit 2020, cloud will become the primary IT infrastructure for 63% of enterprises by 2022, compared to 37% in 2020. According to Sunil Gupta, Co-founder & CEO of Yotta Infrastructure, “The way this shift will get played out, is that organizations will adopt a combination of public and private cloud services.

For seamless management of this hybrid environment, the reliance on cloud service providers with managed services capability, will increase. In the past few months, we have been able to create our indigenous cloud platform – Yotta Enterprise Cloud (YEC) – which comes with a self-service portal for management and governance.

Hitachi Kubernetes Service Powers CloudNative Applicationss Hitachi Vantara announced the availability of Hitachi Kubernetes Service, an enterprise-grade solution for the complex challenge of managing multiple Kubernetes environments. Hitachi Kubernetes Service enables customers to simply, consistently, and securely deploy, manage, monitor, and govern Kubernetes clusters across major cloud providers and on premises. This empowers developers to deploy workloads on their platform of choice, and eliminates vendor lock-in.

Containers are being adopted faster and more comprehensively than previously anticipated.

The containerization of applications enables them to be deployed and run easily across different computing environments, providing substantial infrastructure cost savings. Gartner expects that by 2022, more than 75% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production.[1] Kubernetes is an emerging technology standard for creating, managing, and orchestrating containers and the new Hitachi Kubernetes Service brings Hitachi’s technology leadership, expertise in the enterprise, and renowned global training and support to this sector.

VIAVI and Mavenir Collaborate to Validate Radio Access Solution Mavenir, is collaborating with VIAVI for lab validation of radio access solutions in the U.S. VIAVI’s lab test platform, in use by almost every base station manufacturer in the world, provides scalable test systems for validating network performance as experienced by end users, across multiple cells and different radio access technologies.

The year 2020 marked a significant inflection point for mobile networks around the globe.

With 229 million subscribers as of December 2020, 5G became the fastest growing mobile technology in history. New MNOs were granted licenses to establish greenfield networks to take advantage of this demand. Established network equipment manufacturers were restricted from supplying infrastructure in markets around the globe. These trends have driven an expansion of the supply chain for mobile network solutions.

10 SME CHANNELS JANUARY 2021

Vembu teams up with Savex to provide comprehensive data protection in India Vembu partners with Savex Technologies, one of the largest Information and Communication Technology distributors in India. This partnership will enable Savex to distribute Vembu’s flagship product, Vembu BDR Suite, through its wide-ranging network of Value Added Resellers and Solution Providers to the small, medium and enterprise-level businesses across India.

Vembu BDR Suite is a comprehensive and affordable backup and disaster recovery solution designed to protect the data across diverse IT environments that include virtual (VMware, Hyper-V), physical (Windows, Linux, Mac), cloud workloads (AWS, Azure) and SaaS applications (Office 365, G Suite).

Here’s what Nagarajan Chandrasekaran, Vice President of Product Marketing & Management, Vembu Technologies had to say about the partnership. “We are thrilled to announce a new partnership with Savex Technologies. With our affordable and top notch backup and disaster recovery software and Savex’s knowledge and expertise along with cutting edge technology and rigorous process control, we aim to reach more business in need of a capable solution for complete data protection of their business infrastructures.”

SNIPPETS

D-Link Creates Impact through its CSR Efforts in Healthcare Domain D-Link through its Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) wing has been working relentlessly on various social welfare projects with focused efforts on community wellbeing & sustainable development.

In recent times D-Link CSR team has been working with various organization & institutes in healthcare space. These projects are targeted towards providing quality healthcare to those from socially marginalized and deprived sections of the society. In its earnest attempt to bring about change through its CSR programs D-Link has made some significant contributions like providing Advanced Life Support Cardiac Ambulance to a hospital, donating over 8 Dialysis machines to various medical centers, supporting government healthcare initiatives including the PM Care Funds and much more. Tushar Sighat, MD & CEO – D-Link (India) Ltd., said, “A small effort is all it takes to make a lasting impact. We recognize that our actions as a responsible corporate entity can lead to progressive change in the society that we operate in.”

VIAVI Recognizes Velocity Partners with Pinnacle Award

Cloud4C collaborates with Citrix for VDI Solutions Cloud4C, World’s leading Cloud Managed Services provider, has partnered with Citrix to offer Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service for enterprises to leverage unmatched security and mobile workforce capabilities.

With expanding teams and remote working on the rise, the collaboration between Cloud4C and Citrix will help enterprises to seamlessly deploy Citrix’s Virtual Apps and Desktops to any device across the workforce with ease and zero disruption. Cloud4C’s Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solutions will enhance productivity and improve performance, with efficiency, security, and scalability. Providing secure, remote work is the core value proposition of the VDI solution and this has become more relevant due to the need for employees to work securely from home due to COVID-19 pandemic. Cloud4C provides end-to-end VDI solutions, including managed services and managed security services. Cloud4C’s compliance-ready solutions ensure a seamless transition and uninterrupted performance. Cloud4C provides highly skilled Citrix experts who simplify implementation, reduce deployment time, and help in leveraging the full benefits of virtualized desktops.

Viavi Solutions announced two Velocity Partner Program Pinnacle Award winners for 2020: Tokyo Denki Sangyo (TDS) in Japan and Butler Technologies in Ireland. The Pinnacle Award recognizes the highest performing channel partner or partners as measured by recent financial performance.

Tokyo Denki Sangyo Co. Ltd (TDS), a VIAVI Velocity Elite Partner, distributes industrial machinery and equipment in the fields of measurement, control, analytical instruments, IT communication networks, and package software development. Founded in 1946, TDS is headquartered in Shibuya-ku, Japan, and has 16 branches and 200 engineers deployed across the country to support customers’ needs. TDS aims to contribute to society through their ability to implement measurement, control and information technology. TDS’s history with VIAVI began in 1997, and the partnership focuses on providing VIAVI cable TV (CATV) and optical products and solutions. Together with VIAVI, they have conducted many training workshops for customers as well as participated in industry events such as the annual Japan Cable Show.

Ingram Micro India signs distribution agreement with Aiwa India Ingram Micro India has announced a strategic distribution agreement with Aiwa India Regional Headquarters for its range of audio products. Aiwa is a Japanese technology-based firm and is one of the leading manufacturers of electronic products in the consumer electronics and entertainment industry.

As a part of this distribution agreement, Ingram Micro India will work closely with Aiwa India Regional Headquarters to bring to the market unique products including the SBX series of speakers that are fast creating a new standard in sound, Noise Cancelling TWS and many more innovative audio solutions.

Navdeep Narula, Executive Director, Mobility & Compute at Ingram Micro India, said, “We are keenly looking forward to working with Aiwa India, using our unique position to be able to leverage our strong presence in the General Trade, Online, and Large Format Retail for the Aiwa Audio Experience.”

“The Aiwa brand is targeted mainly at the young consumer who is using technology as a lifestyle. Aiwa along with Ingram Micro will bring to India products that can enhance your personal digital experience with the highest quality and ease of

IndiaItChannels launches its ICT news aggregation app IIC SNIPS–“The tech news HUB” IndiaItChannels launches its latest offering IIC SNIPS–“The tech news HUB “an ICT (Information & Communication Technology) news aggregator app focusing of showcasing industry specific news.

In current times there is a vast and extensive collection of news available on the various news portals related to information technology, mobile, security and surveillance. IIC SNIPS cuts through the noise and clutter, providing you with latest news aggregates and relevant updates to keep you abreast with the latest developments in the industry. IIC SNIPS brings all this information to you through one app.

You can bookmark relevant news to view later or study and identify news based on different categories according to individual interest.

SME CHANNELS JANUARY 2021

11

SNIPPETS

Savex Technologies Makes a Debut in India’s Multiexperience Industry with Avaya OneCloud Savex Technologies Private Limited, the third largest information and communication technology distributor in India today announced its partnership with Avaya, a global leader in solutions to enhance and simplify communications and collaboration.

This alliance gives Savex technologies’ partner community access to Avaya’s broad portfolio of products and services ranging from cloud collaboration solutions, customer experience technologies and gives Avaya India & SAARC access to Savex’s extensive network of over 10,000 reseller partners.

With this agreement, Savex Technologies will also set foot in the customer experience and workstream collaboration industry. At the heart of Avaya’s value is Avaya OneCloud, a unique hybrid delivery architecture that protects investments, prevents disruption, and ensures multiexperience continuity across each phase of a personalized cloud journey.

NTT Offers Cyber Threat Sensor to clients in wake of SolarWinds attacks NTT Ltd is offering qualified clients a free-of-charge specialized sensor capability. This will enable enterprises and public sector agencies to make an initial determination of their risk and potential means to mitigate attacks related to the recent SolarWinds incidents.

In December 2020, a supply chain attack through SolarWinds’ commonly-used network management software allowed malware to be distributed to at least 18,000 organizations around the world.

Additional threats have also since been identified, potentially exposing organizations’ applications and data. NTT’s view on these recent attacks can be seen here.

In response to these supply chain attacks, NTT will provide companies that believe themselves to be at risk of compromise with their 30-day trial of our Specialized Sensor for SolarWinds Detection and Alerting across all platforms other than Azure, at no charge.

Kodak Alaris Claims BLI 2021 Scanner Line of the Year Award from Keypoint Intelligence Keypoint Intelligence, the world’s leading independent evaluator of document imaging hardware, software, and services, today announced that Kodak Alaris has won BLI’s coveted 2021 Scanner Line of the Year Award. Given once a year, this award recognizes the vendor whose product line is deemed best overall based on its rigorous lab evaluations.

To determine the Scanner Line of the Year Award recipient, Keypoint Intelligence considers current scanners in the OEM’s portfolio that have been submitted for lab testing. To judge the overall quality of the line, analysts look at the overall rating a scanner received after testing as well as the ratings in key categories such as Reliability, Productivity, Media Handling, Image Quality, Ease of Setup, Drivers/Utilities, OCR Performance, and Value.

“From small desktop devices all the way up to high-volume production units, Kodak Alaris scanners provide businesses with everything they need to optimize processes where paper documents are fed into digital workflows or repositories,” said Lee Davis at Keypoint Intelligence.

Sophos Identifies Source of “MrbMiner” Attacks Targeting Database Servers Sophos published a new report on MrbMiner, “MrbMiner: Cryptojacking to bypass international sanctions,” tracking its origin and management to a small software development company based in Iran.

MrbMiner is a recently discovered cryptominer that targets internet-facing database servers (SQL servers) and downloads and installs a cryptominer. Database servers are an attractive target for cryptojackers because they are used for resource intensive activity and therefore have powerful processing capability. SophosLabs found that the attackers used multiple routes to install the malicious mining software on a targeted server, with the cryptominer payload and configuration files packed into deliberately mis-named zip archive files.

The name of an Iran-based software company was hardcoded into the miner’s main configuration file. This domain is connected to many other zip files also containing copies of the miner.

12 SME CHANNELS JANUARY 2021

DIGEST VIAVI RECOGNIZES VELOCITY PARTNERS WITH PINNACLE AWARD VIAVI SOLUTIONS ANNOUNCED TWO VELOCITY PARTNER PROGRAM PINNACLE AWARD WINNERS FOR 2020: TOKYO DENKI SANGYO (TDS) IN JAPAN AND BUTLER TECHNOLOGIES IN IRELAND. THE PINNACLE AWARD RECOGNIZES THE HIGHEST PERFORMING CHANNEL PARTNER OR PARTNERS AS MEASURED BY RECENT FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE. TOKYO DENKI SANGYO CO. LTD (TDS), A VIAVI VELOCITY ELITE PARTNER, DISTRIBUTES INDUSTRIAL MACHINERY AND EQUIPMENT IN THE FIELDS OF MEASUREMENT, CONTROL, ANALYTICAL INSTRUMENTS, IT COMMUNICATION NETWORKS, AND PACKAGE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT. FOUNDED IN 1946.

ZOOM RECEIVES FROST & SULLIVAN TECHNOLOGY LEADERSHIP AWARD ZOOM ANNOUNCED THAT FROST AND SULLIVAN HAS ISSUED ZOOM THE ‘ENABLING TECHNOLOGY LEADERSHIP AWARD’ IN THE INDIAN CLOUD VIDEO SPACE. THE COMPANY EARNED THE AWARD FOR ITS OUTSTANDING PRODUCT DEPLOYMENT ABILITY, LEADING INNOVATION CAPABILITY, AND A POWERFUL CUSTOMER FOCUSED STRATEGY. ZOOM HAS ALSO BEEN RECOGNIZED AS THE ‘COMPANY OF THE YEAR 2020’ GLOBALLY.

DIGICERT COMPLETES MIGRATION OF CUSTOMERS, PARTNERS TO DIGICERT CERTCENTRAL DIGICERT HAS SUCCESSFULLY MIGRATED CUSTOMERS AND PARTNERS FROM MULTIPLE LEGACY SYMANTEC ENTERPRISE, RETAIL AND PARTNER TLS CONSOLES TO ITS AWARDWINNING DIGICERT CERTCENTRAL AND SHUT DOWN LEGACY PUBLIC TLS ISSUANCE SYSTEMS. THIS MILESTONE SIGNIFICANTLY IMPROVES THE USER EXPERIENCE, WHILE CONSOLIDATING DIGICERT’S PKI OPERATIONS, FREEING RESOURCES TO FOCUS ON INNOVATION OF CUSTOMER-FACING AND BACK-END SOLUTIONS. THIS ACHIEVEMENT SUPPORTS DIGICERT’S ONGOING INITIATIVE OF MODERNIZING PKI TO ENSURE SCALABLE, FAST AND RELIABLE TRUST SERVICES FOR A RAPIDLY GROWING NUMBER OF ONLINE SECURITY USE CASES.

AARAV SOLUTIONS LAUNCHES SANVID AARAV LAUNCHED ‘SANVID’, AN EDTECH INITIATIVE THAT AIMS TO PROVIDE EQUAL LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES IN COMPUTER EDUCATION, DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY, LIFE SKILLS, LANGUAGE SKILLS AND PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT FOR SCHOOL STUDENTS IN RURAL INDIA. THE PROGRAM WILL KICKSTART FROM THE MAHARANA PJ HIGH SCHOOL, JANGRAL, DIST. PATAN GUJARAT THE FIRST SANVID CHAMPION SCHOOL IN GUJARAT. WITH INTENT TO BRIDGE THE GAP BETWEEN THE YOUTH AND THE MAINSTREAM DIGITAL WORLD, THE PROGRAM’S AMBITION IS TO EMPOWER STUDENTS BY EQUIPPING THEM WITH COMPUTER BASED EDUCATION.

SNIPPETS

Evaluating the Indian Government’s Security Strategy India has been one of the fastest-growing digitized countries in the world. India has been leaping to a major digital economy rapidly with rapid advancement, research, and implementation of efficient technological adoption. As per the research report

by McKinsey Global Institute of Digital India, India is the second-fastest adopter of the digital economy among the other 17 most digitized countries in the World. This brings major significance and importance to having robust and effective Indian Government cybersecurity policies intact.

India’s fundamental digital sectors accumulate a massive $170 billion or say 7% of the total economy’s GDP in 2017-18 and are also expected to go beyond 8-10% in 2025.

With so much inclination and transition of a 1.3 billion population to digital sectors, it surely opens doors for a huge number of cybersecurity risks and attacks.

Lessons every company can learn from the SolarWinds attack A world of digitized and cloud-based functioning is considered by all businesses and enterprises as the new way of how we will work in the future. Greater transitions to cloudbased networks are termed to be highly beneficial and efficient to promote effective remote working from anywhere using any device. Every business has understood how important remote functioning and cloud networking has gained worldwide significance.

But with an increasing cloud-based transition, cybersecurity breaches have become more commonplace, and are climbing to their peak. As per Cybersecurity Media, close to 300 billion passwords were estimated to be used in 2020 by humans and machines combined worldwide. This is due to the increased cybersecurity risks we are getting exposed to. Huge security breaches are taking place in recent times— even government authorities or large enterprises are not spared by these breaches. One such severe security breach that happened recently was the SolarWinds Orion security breach.

Bangalore City Civil Court orders Yahoo India, Apara Enterprises to clear long pending payments to Inflow Technologies Inflow Technologies is in the business of IT Infrastructure distribution services. Inflow became the distributor of M/s. Network Appliance B V (“NetApp”) in the year 2007. Apara Enterprises Solutions Private Limited (Apara) became the Channel Partner of Inflow and used to supply the NetApp products to end customers PAN India. During the course of business transactions, Apara failed to pay/clear the invoices to Inflow, which resulted in huge credit outstanding. Inflow stopped supplies of NetApp products to Apara since Apara did not clear the outstanding payments.

Subsequently, Yahoo India Private Limited being the customer of Apara was in need of NetApp products & services. Yahoo assured Apara and Inflow through letters stating that the invoice value will be credited only to ESCROW account jointly maintained by Inflow and Apara. Based on the assurance of Yahoo, Inflow supplied NetApp products & services to Apara and Apara in turn supplied to Yahoo.

Citrix to Acquire Wrike, Delivering Modern Digital Workspace and Advancing Future of Work Citrix Systems, has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Wrike, a rapidly growing, recognized leader in the SaaS collaborative work management space, for $2.25 billion in cash.

Citrix today also reported earnings for the fourth quarter and fiscal year ended December 31, 2020 and has posted additional materials, including an earnings letter and investor presentation, on its Investor Relations website at http://www.citrix.com/investors.

The combination will bring together Citrix’s powerful digital work platform, which securely delivers the resources an employee needs to be productive in one unified experience, and Wrike’s innovative work management solution, which streamlines collaboration and work execution, providing employees with additional tools to work efficiently and securely wherever they may be.

Optoma a World Leader in Projectors Doubles its Market Share in 2020; Registers 104% growth in Home Segment Optoma Corporation, market share in India doubled in 2020. Optoma has held the leading position throughout the year and its continuous success has further strengthened its leadership in the 4K UHD projector market. Interestingly, Optoma is the only projector brand to have reflected the growth trend in 2020 with doubling of market share in ProAV & Home Segment.

Optoma is among top 3 DLP projector brands in India with approx 20% of the market share and with the market opening up, it is expected to consolidate its position as market leader in 2021. The company plans to aggressively tap the Home Projector Segment, ProAV & Education projector market with an array of new product launches for these categories.

Flashing more light on the company’s growth, Vijay Sharma, Country Head India, Optoma Corporation, said, “Optoma celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2020 and we are pleased to announce that Optoma India is on a growth path and has doubled its market share in 2020. We are proud to have drawn a line under a year which has been one of the most difficult”.

SME CHANNELS 13 JANUARY 2021

SNIPPETS

Dell Technologies Intrinsic Security Helps Indian Businesses Build Resilience Dell Technologies brings intrinsic security to the forefront with new solutions and services that protect customers’ data.

By building security into its supply chain, services, infrastructure and devices, Dell Technologies helps customers lower risk and become more cyber resilient.

Organizations face increasing pressure to protect themselves and their customers as security risks intensify. The Dell Technologies 2020 Digital Transformation Index found that data privacy and cybersecurity concerns are the No. 1 barrier to digital transformation for the Indian businesses.2 “While embarking on the path of digital transformation, businesses have observed that security has remained an unrelenting challenge for them. Therefore, to maneuver through ever-rising security threats in order to create a successful digital footprint, Indian businesses are looking to make necessary investments in cybersecurity and privacy in the next one to three years, as per Dell Technologies 2020 Digital Transformation Index”, said Ripu Bajwa, Director, Dell Technologies.

MemeChat Becomes The Only Indian Firm To Enter 500 Startups Flagship Accelerator Program in 2020 Became the only Indian startup to be included in the 500 Startups’, one of the most active global ven-ture capital firms’, distinguished accelerator program for its 27th batch in 2020. Its inclusion in the pro-gram comes with an endowment of $150K from the global VC. MemeChat was picked for both the fund-ing and the accelerator program after a rigorous process of selection. The funding was used to com-pletely revamp the platform, making it more user-friendly. With an international presence, MemeChat is now targeting a global user-base.

As part of the 500 Startups’ Accelerator program, MemeChat will get the opportunity to network with and learn from other cutting-edge startups in the world. The program also secures the company’s posi-tion among the most sought-after startups globally. This comes after MemeChat was named among the best apps under the Aatma Nirbhar App Innovation Challenge. It won under the people’s choice for the best app under the entertainment category.

Speaking on their future plans, Kyle Fernandes, CEO & Co-Founder of MemeChat, said, “Securing the funding from a globally renowned firm like 500 Startups will help us to push the accelerator on our growth plans. For a young company like Memechat, this global recognition is a huge boost.”

ACI Worldwide and JCB Boost Merchant Acquiring Capabilities with Successful

Zecurion partners with BD Software for Indian Markets Zecurion enters into a strategic partnership with Zecurion, a vendor of the Next Generation DLP. Zecurion is a global innovator and leader in information security solutions that address the risk of data leakages caused by internal threats. Headquartered in Moscow, Zecurion has established its presence in more than 70 countries.

Founded in 2001, Zecurion enjoys a robust clientele of over 10K corporate customers through 150+ strategic and technological partnerships globally. The company offers a range of cybersecurity products for data loss prevention, access management, secure web gateway, storage security, and more. BD Software will support Zecurion with its expertise in the Indian market.

With changing work practices caused by Covid-19 – the emergence of remote working, bring Your Own Device (BYOD), paired with adoption of cloud computing tactics, there has been a steady surge in data security lapses worldwide. Currently data security is a major concern for businesses in India.

The easy-to-use and easy-to-deploy Enterprise DLP by Zecurion support four times faster installation, 20+ customized options, and over 50 preinstalled reports. Scalable for up to 200k+ devices, the DLP solution prevents and protects sensitive and private data leaks within the organization.

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G7CR Technologies named GitHub Advanced Channel Partner G7CR has become a GitHub Advanced Channel Partner, giving its clients access to GitHub Enterprise platform. GitHub is home to the world’s largest developer community, with over 56 million developers who collaborate across 100M repos, from all over the world.

A recent research shows 52% of organizations think people and skills issues are the biggest obstacle to adopting modern software engineering practices in-house. With access to GitHub Enterprise platform, G7 CR Technologies Pvt Ltd. will be helping its clients reduce time to market for business-critical development projects. This is especially critical in today’s challenging environment when organizations are looking to launch new services and business models to help their customers.

Enterprise developers will be able to work within a private environment but also connect with the developer community as they look to bring a fresh perspective, which is extremely important as organizations look to build more human-centric products.

SNIPPETS

i2e1 unveils India’s first Public Data Office (PDO), creates the Future of Internet With an aim to digitally revolutionize India, Delhi based start-up i2e1 (Information to everyone), today announced the launch of the industry-first Public Data Office (PDO) yesterday, with a vision to bolster the Government of India’s PM-WANI initiative.

Keeping in mind the model of PCO (Public Communication Office) booths across India, PDOs are designed with a similar business model. These internet booths will establish, maintain and operate Wi-Fi Access Points and deliver broadband services to subscribers. With no registration required, users will avail free internet access which in turn will result in employment opportunities and empower the government’s Digital Bharat dream.

Commenting on the launch, Satyam Darmora, Founder, i2e1 said, “With the government’s PM-WANI initiative, India is set to experience a new revolution in the internet delivery space. Today, the disruptions caused by the internet has led to a massive paradigm shift, where this solution is now seen as a new-age public good as fundamental as air and water.”

Udemy Expands Executive Team with Key Hire Udemy announced that Greg Brown has joined the company as president. Brown brings over 20 years of executive experience leading high-growth and missiondriven technology companies and joins Udemy to help thousands of global customers achieve better business outcomes and drive innovation through learning.

“We are excited to welcome Greg to Udemy during this important growth stage for the company,” said Gregg Coccari, CEO of Udemy. “As our business continues to accelerate around the world, Greg’s leadership experience and industry acumen will be invaluable to help companies and individuals everywhere unlock the value of learning.”

“Udemy is powering the future of skills development and this is a very exciting time to be part of the organization,” said Brown. “After years in the people and talent management industry, it’s clear that traditional approaches to workplace learning can’t keep up with our changing world. Udemy has cracked the code on delivering learning that enables learners, organizations, and instructors to unlock their potential.”

McAfee and ASUS extend exclusive PC security service McAfee announced a five-year extended global agreement to be the provider of consumer security on ASUS PCs. ASUS customers who purchase a new PC will receive a comprehensive security service pre-installed on their new PC, an optimized user experience, and will receive security tips and recommendations about how to stay protected from the latest threats.

According to the recent McAfee Labs Threats Report: November 2020, 419 threats were discovered every minute representing a 12% increase from the first quarter of 2020.

Additionally, mobile threats rose 15% over the previous quarter highlighting the need for consumers to take the proper steps to ensure their personal information and devices are protected. With new threats created every day, McAfee and ASUS recognized the need to provide peace-of-mind solutions that allow customers to explore their digital world freely.

“As our digital lives become increasingly connected online it’s clear that consumers need comprehensive protection from trusted brands,” said Terry Hicks of McAfee.

Atlassian Plans to Reach Net Zero Emissions by 2050 Atlassian has released its second annual Sustainability Report for the fiscal year 2020 and announced ambitious goals to combat global climate change. This report details Atlassian’s progress and trajectory across four sustainability pillars: planet, customers, people, and community.

As part of our commitment to combat climate change, Atlassian set a goal to reach 100 percent renewable power across all our operations by 2025, which we achieved in the fiscal year 2020, five years ahead of schedule.

“We are setting ambitious climate goals because we believe in matching our words by stepping up and taking action, said Jessica Hyman, Atlassian’s head of sustainability. “It’s what our staff want. It’s what our customers expect. It’s what our politicians should be doing. And it’s what we must do for the future sustainability of our business.”

Trend Micro Announces World’s First Cloud-Native File Storage Security Trend Micro announced the world’s first cloud-native, fully serverless file storage security tool for organizations building applications in the cloud. Trend Micro Cloud One – File Storage ity is designed to mitigate threats across the cloud environment and support strict compliance requirements.

The explosion of cloud-based file and object storage presents a new attack vector for threat actors to target with malicious files. Cloud One – File Storage Security provides automated anti-malware scanning to keep information safe and ease compliance needs.

“Global organizations are increasingly looking to public cloud providers to drive IT agility, cost savings and business growth. But while the provider deals with security of the cloud, the customer is responsible for everything inside their cloud environment,” said Mark Nunnikhoven, vice president of cloud research for Trend Micro. “This is a highly scalable, automated scanning tool that’s fast to deploy with no added infrastructure, allowing organizations to confidently store cloud files and data associated with their cloud applications.”

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COVER STORY

CHANNEL MARKET BOUND TO GROW POST COVID Probably the worst of the decade is over and ‘ache din’ is coming for every one including the channel partners. The sluggish market situation during the last 10 months is going to be heavily investment-let market. In this situation, channel partners have to change their strategy and proactive.

BY SANJAY MOHAPATRA sanjay@smechannels.com

C

ovid-19 had crippled the market for last 10 months. This taught a lot of things to us. Organizations learnt the relevance of the digital strategy. A year ago, a few enterprises around the world would have anticipated the changes in store for them in 2020. The onset of COVID-19 propelled the organizations around the world to re-evaluate and accelerate their digital transformation agenda using hybrid cloud & AI solutions

16 SME CHANNELS JANUARY 2021

with enterprise-grade security which allows data and insights to be delivered anywhere.

As Cloud and AI adoption became more prevalent, tech companies required their robust ecosystem of partners to accelerate the development and delivery of solutions for their clients. The channel ecosystem is expected to help businesses embrace newer technologies by offering consulting services and handholding them through their transformation journey.

The initial challenges for channel partners during COVID were to ensure business continuity, maintain financial stability, manage remote resource allocation and most importantly improvise their skills and knowledge to better serve their customers through their rapid transformation journey.

In this edition we have taken into account three major players who have got major stake in the channel market. These OEMs include IBM, Dell Technologies and HPE.

COVER STORY

IBM believes in empowering its partners to build unmatched expertise in their field and differentiate themselves in a competitive market. In 2020 IBM announced new global initiatives focusing on providing its partners with the skills, resources and capabilities : • $1 billion investment to help partners provide their clients with a seamless and secure journey to the cloud • Partner World 2.0 (IBM Partner Program) was revamped to include more partners into our ecosystem • Hybrid Cloud Ecosystem to enable partners to build and deliver solutions using industry-leading hybrid cloud capabilities with Red Hat OpenShift at the core, unmatched open and secure public cloud technology and IBM Cloud Pak solutions • Red Hat Marketplace which provides our partners with a one-stop-shop to sell their OpenShiftcertified software • Industry Cloud Ecosystems programs have been designed to help partners grow their business with the IBM Cloud for Financial Services and IBM Cloud for Telecommunications.

Lata Singh, Director - Partner Ecosystem, IBM India, says, “At IBM we believe Hybrid Cloud and AI are fundamental to drive enterprise digital transformation and our ecosystem is critical to delivering the value of IBM’s open hybrid cloud and AI strategy.”

Last year, IBM not only made financial investments but also introduced program enhancements and simplification, to drive growth, enable innovation and provide value for our partners globally including the launch of Hybrid Cloud Ecosystem, Partner World 2.0, Red Hat Marketplace and Industry Cloud Ecosystem.”

In India, as businesses moved to a virtual working model, IBM quickly responded to meet the gap by providing digital resources, skills enablement programs and engagement solutions. The company launched a special set of offerings to cater to the increased demand for Cloud solutions, Cybersecurity, Remote Workforce and Business Continuity Planning and some specifically to assist them.

Some of these initiatives include: • My Digital Marketing , a no-cost digital collaboration platform with ‘ready-to-execute’ digital campaigns with personalization and measurement mechanisms to better respond to new ways of communicating.

• Digital workshop to provide access to key virtual selling, training & learning tools • IBM Virtual Client Center for 24/7 access to solutions, demos, webinars and more • IBM Skills Gateway for access to digital badges and professional certifications and Seismic a central repository to provide enablement mate-

LATA SINGH, DIRECTOR - PARTNER ECOSYSTEM, IBM INDIA

“THIS YEAR WE WILL ACCELERATE OUR ECOSYSTEM TRANSFORMATION WITH A SHARPENED FOCUS AND DEEP INVESTMENTS TO SUPPORT OUR PARTNER ECOSYSTEM ON A PATH TO EVEN GREATER VALUE.” rials on demand • Business Partner Connect offered both IBM and Red Hat partners the ability to discover new collaboration opportunities, by leveraging Watson’s matching technology to help find the right tools for shifting business needs.

On the other hand, Dell Technologies is committed to strengthen its partners’ ecosystem, with renewed focus and ample growth opportunities.

Anil Sethi, Vice President & General Manager, Channels – India, Dell Technologies, says, “While the world is going through changes in terms of uncertainty, we are witnessing a change in customer behaviour as well, leading to companies updating their go-to-market strategy to meet customer expectations with utmost safety.”

He added, “Our partners place their trust with the customers, as and they continue to support their large system integration and infrastructure requirements seamlessly. I must say that the year 2020 brought out the best from all of us – as we went that extra mile to demonstrate the commitment of our team (and our partners) in the success of our customers.”

“It is important that customers trust our partners as Dell’s extended arm who can help them build the right foundation to accelerate their digital transformation. They need partners who are technically proficient, partners who understand their businesses and what they are trying to accomplish. With ever evolving needs, customers seek partners who have their back and can offer world’s best solutions to deliver the results they are looking for,” he added.

Understanding the importance of financing and cash flow liquidity, Dell Technologies rolled out Partner Relief Package in early 2020, with an

intent to provide immediate financial relief to its metal partners, while helping them build capabilities and pipeline for the future. In addition to this, Dell also introduced new team-based pricing options for solutions providers, to make all trainings affordable for our partners.

• MDF (Marketing Development Funds) validity extended – thus giving partners more time to plan and execute (up to 3 months more than the previous 6 months window) • Option of advance withdrawal – up to 50% of their earned MDF – to ease cash flow • Free training and certifications – for solution deployment capabilities • Digital Marketing Tool – enabling partners to execute Digital Marketing – the best tool in current contact-less economy to run customer outreach marketing activities • Attractive Working Capital Solutions – minimizing the financial burden and working capital pressure for partners – when they transact with Dell • In a recent global announcement we also talked about how our services are helping our customers and partners to drive business continuity in this new normal and how we are offering $9B in financing this year for critical technology • Dell has globally launched the new Payment Flexibility Program (PFP). One of the best in the industry, the program offers more choice and predictability for our customers. The program is built on the strong foundation of Dell Financial Services and our end-to-end portfolio.

• Dell has also introduced Dell Technologies On Demand (DTOD), comprising of full range of solutions for partners to resell products, solutions and services. DTOD enables partners to offer ser-

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COVER STORY

vices and solutions that match the ebb and flow of a customer’s business, achieving cloud economics in the on-demand economy • Our lead flexible consumption offering – Flex On Demand, is available across our end-to-end infrastructure solutions portfolio and offers two sales motions for the partners. First is the referral fee option, which allows partners to receive payment equal to 10% of the committed contract value. The second option allows Dell Technologies to invoice the partners monthly, at a base usage charge and the partner can invoice their customer at their uplifted service charge • As part of this new offering, the company is expanding its extensive flexible consumption portfolio to support Dell EMC PowerEdge servers and the new Dell EMC PowerOne autonomous infrastructure system • Dell Technologies also launched its new Project APEX, as-a-Service capability that will help customers and partners consume solutions as per their needs.

Dell continues to listen to thousands of its customers globally, and these initiatives are conceived based on those inputs – to meet their expectations and to help solve their challenges.

Similarly, HPE had robust business continuity plans in place to mitigate disruptions, meet partner and customer demands, and protect HPE team members. Last year, at a worldwide level, HPE Financial Services (HPEFS) offered $2 billion in financing and new programs to help customers and partners weather COVID-19. These initiatives helped businesses reduce cash outlays, generate cash from assets, and align payments to deployment schedule.

Amer Warsi, Channels, SMB and Ecosystem Leader, HPE India, added: “Last year, we witnessed acceleration of digital transformation journeys, which put many companies far ahead of schedule. This has instilled resiliency in our channel partners and we have seen many of them quickly expand their expertise, double-down on focus areas and redefine the meaning of partnership with their customers.

ANIL SETHI, VICE PRESIDENT & GENERAL MANAGER, CHANNELS – INDIA, DELL TECHNOLOGIES.

“ORGANIZATIONS AND PARTNERS SHOULD FOCUS ON RE-SKILLING AND UPSKILLING OF THEIR WORKFORCE TO STAY RELEVANT IN THE MARKET AND NAVIGATING THROUGH THESE TOUGH TIMES.”

AMER WARSI, CHANNELS, SMB AND ECOSYSTEM LEADER, HPE INDIA.

“WE ARE MAKING AVAILABLE TO OUR PARTNERS THE SERVICES AND OFFERINGS, WHICH WILL BRING THEM MORE OPPORTUNITIES TO SELL, HELP THEM BETTER SERVE OUR JOINT CUSTOMERS, AND EXPAND THE SCALE AND REACH OF HPE GREENLAKE RAPIDLY.”

INTERVIEW Lata Singh Director - Partner Ecosystem, IBM India

18 SME CHANNELS JANUARY 2021

What are the technologies that the market is going to invest in?

Our research shows that only 20% of the workloads have moved to the cloud globally. So the opportunity here is significant.

In 2020, we saw large scale adoption of Cloud and AI technologies. This year, we will continue to see the momentum as organizations realize

the value of hybrid cloud and AI while exploring newer technologies. Based on the growing need for hybrid cloud we anticipate: • Wider adoption and experimentation of new security technologies, 5G, Blockchain and Edge • AI automation accelerating and simplifying the shift to hybrid cloud • Multi-Cloud Integrations with on-premise

COVER STORY

systems into a single hybrid platform • Leveraging hybrid cloud to push more workloads onto intelligent edge devices Our recent Hybrid Cloud IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV) survey corroborates the market sentiments while revealing that organizations in India are expected to spend nearly half of their cloud budget on hybrid over the next three years. They expect to be using at least 10 clouds from a growing number of vendors by 2023 but only 29 percent of businesses have a holistic multicloud management strategy.

Aligned with this consumption and adoption model, the channel partner ecosystem will play a key role in the organizations’ growth strategy by bringing domain expertise and good technology together to offer strategic industry-specific digital capabilities for their clients while helping them expand their businesses and accelerate skill development in emerging technology areas.

Any plan to bring new strategy for the channel?

At IBM we believe, our large ecosystem of partners provide the fuel to accelerate adoption and drive scale for our open Hybrid Cloud platform and AI. As the market continues to evolve, our approach is to expand and deepen relationships with our ecosystem while identifying the next generation of “non-traditional” partners that are transforming the industry. We will continue to invest and focus our efforts towards helping partners build deeper skills and deliver value-added offerings based on their Intellectual Property (IP) using IBM technologies across industries and delivery models.

The traditional linear business models create value for the products and services, with our Build & Service ecosystem we want to leverage the

Platform Economy. In line with this, we are significantly expanding our Individual Software Vendor (ISV) and Managed Service Provider (MSP) ecosystem by supporting these partners in transforming their client experiences while expanding and accelerating their Hybrid Cloud and AI journeys.

As part of this initiative, we will continue our investment of $1 billion in our Cloud Engagements globally, which will provide access to tools, resources and support to build and deploy cloud, mobile, analytics, AI and other next-generation projects. We have also simplified our partner ecosystem programs, initiatives and benefits to provide greater agility to our partners through defined Build, Service and Sell competencies.

• The Build competency is about building and selling software solutions and SaaS on IBM technology and platforms for use by end clients.

• Service competency is where partners create custom solutions, managed services and system integrations for end clients, leveraging IBM technologies and platforms.

• Sell is where partners sell IBM technology directly to end clients.

We will continue our strong focus on enabling our business partners with skills to address client needs, engage with them to cater to new customer requirements and empower them by identifying new revenue streams for their offering.

What would be the key differentiator and winning stroke for your partners for 2021?

Our strategy reflects IBM’s ethos of - driving value for our clients and partners which in turn will help drive success for IBM. In 2020 we made investments in the IBM partner ecosystem, not just dollars, but program enhancements and

simplification, to drive growth, enable innovation and provide value to our partners by helping them enhance their market position. This year we will accelerate our ecosystem transformation with a sharpened focus and deep investments to support our partner ecosystem on a path to even greater value.

Our new go-to-market model is designed to unite ecosystem partners and IBM to deliver consistent client experiences based on ‘how clients want to engage with us.’ It offers the best mix of experts, education, enablement, incentives, and flexibility to help partners get to market and go to market their way. This includes: • Simplified coverage through a single focal to provide a personalized partner experience • Investments in IBM sellers to work exclusively with partners to drive growth, identify opportunities and help partners with deals across all three tracks (Build, Service, Sell) • Deep technical support to help them architect solutions with IBM technology • Hybrid cloud build resources to help partners design, build and/or migrate solutions with IBM systems and software technology built for hybrid cloud • And we’ll be creating more opportunities to drive demand and partner success, including: o Additional demand generation funding and digital campaign support to anticipate client buying behaviours and help generate new opportunities for partners o Expanding the Cloud Engagement Fund for investing in partners and accelerating client journeys to cloud.

Please share your technology predictions for 2021 and what technologies will the industry invest in?

Dell Technologies believes that ‘2025 is the new 2030’. The year 2020 brought with it an accelerated pace of digital transformation faster than anyone could have ever predicted. Dell Technologies’ Digital Transformation Index for 2020, revealed that 94.7% of Indian organizations have fast-tracked digital transformation programs this year. As we head into 2021, organizations’ top IT priorities will be centered on learning and working from home with automation and agility across IT for consistency and operational resilience. This extends across industries and both private and public sectors.

What is your strategy and plan for 2021 to cope

with the demand of the market?

Our focus on sectors like healthcare, online collaboration, education, telecommunication and digital cities will be more now than ever. We look to foster new ways of working, learning and living with technology as the enabler. In 2021 we will see; Hybrid cloud for the hybrid workforce, Edge opportunities will come into focus; Edge innovations will create urgency for Telcos to accelerate 5G and Intelligent PCs will adapt to hybrid, hyperconnected users. Dell is focused on key six strategic technologies such as Multi-cloud, Edge, 5G, AI/ML, Data Management and Cybersecurity to enable end-to-end, modern IT systems for future.

These apart, the various consumption models mentioned earlier – Flex On Demand, Dell Tech On Demand and Project APEX – will help us (and

INTERVIEW

Anil Sethi Vice President & General Manager, Channels – India, Dell Technologies

SME CHANNELS 19 JANUARY 2021

COVER STORY

our partners) to meet customers expectations and address their demands.

What would be the key differentiator and winning stroke for your partners in 2021?

The rapid introduction of new, sophisticated infrastructure and application solutions is upon us as emerging technologies hit their stride. Information technology is becoming more specialized, not standardized, requiring both Partners and OEMs alike to build expertise. Organizations and Partners should focus on re-skilling and upskilling of

their workforce to stay relevant in the market and navigating through these tough times. In order to ensure business continuity, we should bank on new breakthroughs and technology trends, which will set the tone for what is to come over the next 10 years: • Remote Work Solutions and Cloud solutions: CIOs will make connect workplace and data visibility a top IT imperative because after all • Intelligent devices change the way you work and collaborate: Advancements in AI and

machine learning will turn our PCs into even smarter and more collaborative companions • Innovating with integrity, sourcing sustainably: Investments in reuse and recycling for closed-loop innovation will accelerate, hardware will become smaller and more efficient and built with recycled and reclaimed goods, which will minimize e-waste and maximize the already existing materials

work, technologies such as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) that enable digital and remote workspaces will continue to drive demand. In the next year, with many remote work orders remaining in place through 2021 and companies shifting more permanently to remote and therefore hybrid workplaces, businesses will be looking at how to maintain application performance and security for their workforces.

What is your plan for 2021 to cope with the demand of the market?

To continue sales momentum in 2021 we have introduced demo and enablement opportunities for our channel partners and made virtual learning and sales certifications, available to them. In 2021, and especially as the uncertainty of business continues, channel partners will be leveraging these resources to hone their expertise and become more savvy in engaging with customers in virtual settings. Additionally, collaborative selling, such as through HPE’s Cloud28+ platform, will help drive growth and engage more partners from across the channel ecosystem.

Any plan to bring new products or new strategy for the channel?

During the HPE Discover Virtual Event 2020, we announced a number of as-a-service offerings and initiatives to help partners expand revenue opportunities, accelerate delivery and transform client relationships with HPE’s breakthrough cloud services and software platform. These new HPE GreenLake cloud services and software offerings, which are optimized for the edge, data center and co-location facilities, deliver new levels of speed and innovation to customers. Moreover, to expand partner collaboration and as-a-service sales with customers, we announced plans to integrate partners onto HPE GreenLake Central.

We also unveiled updates to the HPE Pro Series programs to help our channel partners enhance learning and increase their solution expertise.

Which technologies that the partners are going to invest?

There are those customers who urgently needed certain technologies and quick fixes for their infrastructure in early 2020, and in 2021 they will be reassessing what’s really needed in the longrun, resulting in more technology investment. The SMB and mid-market segments are a big focus for channel partners in the next year. Globally, SMBs are increasingly interested in investing in IT that will accelerate their digital transformations, garner insights from data and improve the employee experience – making them more competitive and helping them recover through the pandemic.

Channel partners who expand their footprint with SMB and mid-market will see growth in 2021.

What would be the key differentiator and winning stroke for your partners for 2021?

We are making available to our partners the services and offerings, which will bring them more opportunities to sell, help them better serve our joint customers, and expand the scale and reach of HPE GreenLake rapidly. These initiatives and our commitment to supporting channel partners are key aspects as we pursue our goal of delivering everything as a service by 2022.

INTERVIEW

Amer Warsi Channels, SMB and Ecosystem Leader, HPE India

What is your prediction for 2021 from market perspective?

In 2021, as more customers embrace a hybrid cloud model, Managed Service Providers (MSPs) will continue to see a unique demand as they offer extensive knowledge of local business and local governance. In many cases, MSPs also provide a heightened and more personalized customer experience. Also, while the prospect of a “second wave” of the pandemic creates a turbulent future for many industries, we expect the technology industry to remain fairly steady throughout as digital technologies are only become more important.+ What are the technologies that the market is going to invest and why?

The need for pay-per-use IT or as-a-service technologies has become clearer in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. As on-demand capacity on a pay-per-use basis is a must-have for today’s businesses, we expect this trend to continue through 2021 and beyond.

Globally, as businesses are adapting to remote

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CASE STUDY

MATRIX SECURED NASHIK RAILWAY STATION DURING KUMBH MELA

Introduction Kumbh Mela is one of the most sacred pilgrimage festivals of India and is organized at a grand scale at Nashik, Haridwar, Ujjain, and Prayag. As Kumbh Mela is being celebrated after a period of 12 years in Nashik, 100 million people are expected to visit, security is a major concern for the Government bodies. Nashik will be getting an opportunity to host these guests from July 14 to September 25 and no stone will be left unturned in hosting the massive gathering.

Challenges Nashik Railway Station authorities wanted video surveillance devices that would not consume larger areas when it comes to installing them as the railway station had congested platforms.

Moreover, they wanted a surveillance solution that gave them superior image quality and at the same time did not consume heavily on the bandwidth. Furthermore, the authorities wanted to monitor the whole place centrally and gain central control of the entire place.

• Installing Devices and Control Room in the Congested Platforms • Restricted Allotted Bandwidth for the Video Surveillance Solution.

Solution Matrix addressed these challenges by proposing SARVAM UCS, which is a Unified Communica-

tion Server for Modern Enterprises that manages all business communications from one place.

SARVAM UCS is an enterprise-grade Unified Communications solution that offers La Maison Royale the much needed- Collaboration, Communication, Messaging and Mobility between multi-locational sites. Unifying all the communication networks and devices provides users with the flexibility of accessing the calls, messaging and voicemails from any of the devices irrespective of their location.

Requirement

railway station entrance, platforms, and connecting bridges • High reliability of the solution for utmost security • Storage of the entire 4 Month period as evidential proof.

For further information, please contact: 394-GIDC, Makarpura, Vadodara-390010, India Toll Free -1800-258-7747 E-Mail: inquiry@matrixcomsec.com Website: https://www.matrixvideosurveillance.com/

• Prompt and smooth installations of cameras and hybrid video recorders within 30 days • Setting up the control room for monitoring

SME CHANNELS 21 JANUARY 2021

GUEST ARTICLE

HOW THE CLOUD WILL ACCELERATE ECONOMIC RECOVERY FROM COVID-19 RECOVERY – AND GROWTH FOR INDIA’S BANKING SECTOR

CIARAN CHU, Practice Leader – Public Cloud, ACI Worldwide

22 SME CHANNELS JANUARY 2021

2020 has been a whirlwind year. Among the profound changes the pandemic has ushered in, the mass adoption of digital payments and banking platforms is likely to be long lasting in nature. As we adapt to a world shaped by physical distancing, banks and financial institutions are adapting and innovating. For firms looking to recover in the short-term and accelerate their growth trajectory in the longer term, technology-fuelled experiences can help them compete, ramping up services and profitability while reshaping customer experiences.

Additionally, Banks must focus on internal IT operations and systems to ensure operational integrity. This is where the power of the cloud will come in. In 2021, cloud will power vital infrastructure for India’s banking and payments sector, enabling agility, improved remote collaboration, and faster application development and deployment.

Outlined below are the three big cloud trends that ACI Worldwide sees having the biggest impact on India’s BFSI sector in 2021: Revaluation of operational control processes: One of the big challenges of cloud adoption preCOVID-19 was the amount of operational overhead and risk acceptance knowledge required to migrate workloads from on-premises to the cloud.

This was coupled with the fact that many banks had in place arduous control processes that were difficult to overcome. Due to the pandemic, banks have realized that many offshore resources that were maintaining systems could not log in from home, causing a risk issue. banks were forced to re-evaluate these processes to ensure they were fit for purpose in this new world, where physical distancing quickly became the norm. As a result, in 2021 we will see banks increase expenditure on process simplification and improvements – something that the cloud can deliver.

Changing relationship between data regulation and innovation: With changing geopolitical dynamics, we will see increased focus around data sovereignty and consumer safety, as consumers seek to understand how precisely their data is being used and governed. As a result, we can expect more countries to follow the likes of Poland, setting up national

clouds, where banks can enjoy the benefit of cloud computing, shifting from capital expenditure (CAPEX) to operational expenditure (OPEX), even as the data remains in country. Big cloud providers will continue to canvas and work with regulators to find common ground on the best way to run their infrastructure long term. Regulators in the past have stood in the way of innovation, in part due to a lack of understanding of the competitive landscape.

Banks would end up spending more on maintaining the status quo to placate regulators. While it will be a gradual shift over the next five years, I would hope banks can reduce overheads, which restricts their ability to innovate, by working with cloud providers and regulators to automate and simplify activity through increased transparency.

Long live the marketplace platform: One of the greatest drivers of cloud within the BFSI sector will be the need for banks to diversify their revenue models from fee-based transactions (where it is a race to zero) to new client-based services. Banks will also realize how much easier it is to drive partnerships and gain meaningful data insight in the cloud.

Another critical trend to watch for will be the continuing demand for use of hybrid and multi-cloud environments, where banks avoid being locked into a single vendor by using a mixture of private and public cloud offerings. Following in the footsteps of Spanish multinational BBVA, we will see a lot more banks embracing a hybrid cloud approach to build a platform of services, which customers and partners can easily access as they diversify their business models.

As the industry moves further into its cloud journey, we will see more bank leaders and CIOs recognize the need to get machine-human collaboration right. We will see more investment in employee reskilling and upskilling, as banks begin to unlock the value that lies at the intersection of employees and technology. There will be a more top to bottom approach to “applied intelligence” – combining intelligent cloud technologies and solutions with human ingenuity – across all areas of banking business, reshaping core banking processes and transforming customer experiences.

SECURITY

WHAT CYBERSECURITY INC. CAN EXPECT FROM THE BUDGET 2021

I

t is Budget season, and the Budget in question could very well be one of the most important budget discussions in recent times. For one, all eyes will be on the road that the Government takes towards economic recovery. With the economic outlook looking gloomy, it is up to the Government to get back to the drawing board and reinforce its strength to bounce back. Added to that, it is imperative for the Government to continue its Digital growth programs with the same enthusiasm that they have for the past 7 years.

Digital growth programs have been a key driver in driving up employment and simplifying operations, and the pace of digital growth needs to be consistent in the next decade for India to embark on a road of sustained economic growth.

That said, a robust cybersecurity posture makes up the backbone of the digital growth story. Growth without security might well result in unforeseen circumstances that can result in the collapse of the economy. And India’s growth story so far has been marred by the conspicuous absence of a commendable cybersecurity policy India’s Fintech Innovation and Digital Payment

Drive over the past 5 years has been commendable, and as the RBI Predicts, digital transactions could reach Rs 15 trillion a day by 2025. The lockdown scenario, and the aftermath of the pandemic has only served to give a fillip to the digital transaction cause. But, with the proliferation of digitisation, come the obvious risks and challenges. Digital Frauds have risen by 500% in this year alone, accentuated by the increased digital dependence.

The fact that the Government has been dabbling with the idea of a National Cybersecurity Policy without resolving on a concrete plan means that the breaches and instances of fraud could reach a point of no return. The breaches have proliferated from finance to other areas as well (bearing in mind the Mumbai powercut), and could also present a potential threat to India’s vaccine drive.

To be brief, a Concrete plan of action with respect to a National Cybersecurity policy is imperative in the Budget this year, as it will form the backbone of India’s Digital Push in the next decade, and additionally, set aside funds for cybersecurity awareness amongst the general populace as well. What the Government could do is setup a

Cybersecurity Center of Excellence and work with the DSCI and Nasscomm, which have been doing exceptional work, to further nurture the cybersecurity ecosystem in India, and build indigenous offensive cyber capabilities.

With respect to harvesting and replenishing the start up space in India, which has taken a hit due to the pandemic, the Government needs a more nuanced approach to encourage funding.

This can be done in n number of ways, the first of which is the realisation of a more flexible framework for funding of startups by foreign investors, which would actually help in mobilising the startup funding arena. Apart from that, given the significant maturity that has occurred in the startup space over the past decade, it is ideal for the Government to facilitate growth by relaxing Angel Investing norms, and adoption of measures such as inclusion of debt funding as a part of Angel Investments. All in all, a flourishing startup space is indispensable in making India bounce back to booming economic growth, and complementary policies will help in ensuring this growth.

SME CHANNELS 23 JANUARY 2021

CHANNEL CHAT

With the constantly changing business environment, how do businesses decide between on-premise vs cloud?

Decisions between on-premise or cloud are driven by criticalities, compliance policies and turnaround time. Cloud computing is a diverse

24 SME CHANNELS JANUARY 2021

CHANNEL CHAT

HYBRID CLOUD IS IN TREND TODAY As the organizations are facing a lot of business pressure due to the contraction of budget, their attraction towards cloud and Hybrid computing becoming natural as they are getting better business value. Sachin Waingankar, Head of Cloud, Web Werks India, explaining how cloud or hybrid environment offers better value over on-prem environment.

SACHIN WAINGANKAR, HEAD OF CLOUD, WEB WERKS INDIA

“ORGANIZATIONS WITH ON-PREMISE DATA CENTERS ARE NOW MOVING TO THE HYBRID CLOUD BECAUSE OF ITS PERFORMANCE, STABILITY, SECURITY, AND QUALITY.”

computing paradigm incorporating the benefits of service-oriented architectures through virtualization. Hence if a business is required to deploy IT architectures in two days, procuring and deploying servers in such a short span is close to impossible. In such scenarios, cloud computing becomes the business’ best bet. In addition to that, organizations experience a major cost-benefit when they move to the cloud as they move from capital expenditures to operational expenditures.

However, compliance issues can act as inhibitors concerning storage, usage, data protection, etc.

Organizations can thus maintain benchmarks and compliance checklists with their cloud service providers, to ensure that their offerings are

designed to comply with data regulations like ISC, PCI-DSS, HIPPA, TIA, SSAE, OIX-2, etc.

One determining factor includes the duration of the project. In short-term projects that have huge requirements, investments in on-premise infrastructures for minimal business applications are more like an aimless decision. On the other hand, the pandemic forced even well-established businesses to undergo digital transformations and mitigate risks, thus shifting even long-term projects to the cloud for its disaster recovery and business continuity plans.

One of the latest trends in data centers is the Hybrid cloud. Can and should firms adapt it to suit their business needs?

Hybrid cloud, the amalgamation of cloud services and on-premise data is gaining high popularity among users due to various reasons involving improved performance, flexible business operations, capacity expansion, optimized costs, and enhanced security. To maintain the confidentiality of data for security and compliance, organizations choose to maintain data on an internal network or a private cloud that will be hosted on-premise.

This gives the firm access to both the physical and logical infrastructure. The Hybrid cloud is in trend today since it allows businesses to choose their computing models along with giving them the benefits of operational costs and management perspectives. Organizations however should move to the hybrid cloud after due diligence of their IT study. This includes understanding applications, understanding application dependencies, its portability followed by accessibility and compliance.

This study will enable organizations to decide between which workloads and data could be hosted in a public cloud, the benefits, and risks it entails and, applications and data that are too sen-

sitive, too specialized, or otherwise would be best hosted in a private cloud and thus helping them transition to the Hybrid cloud easily.

Since the pandemic, we have seen a 25% increase in cyberattacks. How can the cloud deal with it?

Any application or data that goes over the internet, whether deployed on-premise or in the cloud is exposed to an equal amount of risks. Data centers have multi-layered and constantly upgraded security systems in place to prevent data theft. Such a high degree of data security requires advanced tools and manpower which is unlikely to be available in-house for most companies. In addition to that, even if applications are protected with the best firewalls and IT policies, it is still susceptible to a cyber-attack if it isn’t updated to the latest security badge.

What defines normal for the future of businesses in 2021?

With the public cloud utilized mainly by e-commerce and, information and communication technology providers, more and more businesses are moving towards a hybrid cloud. Organizations with on-premise data centers are now moving to the hybrid cloud because of its performance, stability, security, and quality. This has been pushed by the pandemic that resulted in work from home policies and the inability to access systems in a lockdown. One great benefit of cloud computing is that lifecycle management, upgrades, and, replacement of used resources are taken care of by cloud service providers. This greatly reduces costs, labour, and time for organizations performing this task on-premise in a traditional environment and brings in business feasibility through virtualized architectures.

SME CHANNELS 25 JANUARY 2021

SECURITY

TREND MICRO IPS RULES INTEGRATE WITH AWS NETWORK FIREWALL

T

rend Micro is a Launch Partner for AWS Network Firewall, a managed service that makes it easy to deploy essential network protections for all of your Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (Amazon VPCs) on Amazon Web Services (AWS). As a Launch Partner, Trend Micro has integrated managed threat intelligence feeds from its cloud security solution to enable superior protection in line with this new AWS managed firewall service.

As digital transformation is accelerating globally, businesses consider how to strategically protect their cloud environments while maintaining scalability and minimizing friction. See how Trend Micro continuously works to provide easy to manage, scalable cloud security solutions

26 SME CHANNELS JANUARY 2021

to support AWS customers as an AWS Advanced Technology Partner: www.trendmicro.com/aws.

According to Gartner, “In the past, organizations deployed more than one firewall brand at the perimeter or in front of the demilitarized zone with an aim to provide an overlap of capability in case a single product could not be relied on…

While this argument has some merit — back doors and vulnerabilities occasionally happen – implementing multiple firewalls increases management complexity and the potential for human error, reduces scalability, and increases operational costs.1” Trend Micro’s built-in IPS intelligence will inspect traffic for malicious intent so that the firewall can stop threats before they get a foothold in

a virtual private cloud. Together, AWS and Trend Micro offer a simple, scalable service with reliable protection that does not require any infrastructure management.

“Our customers asked for the ability to manage network security at scale, and we are thrilled to deliver just that,” said Andrew Thomas, General Manager, Perimeter Protection, Amazon Web Services, Inc. “This low friction network firewall functionality is bolstered by AWS Partners like Trend Micro, who has stepped up to deliver additional layers of protection for customers through integration with AWS Network Firewall.”

SECURITY

MATT GYDE, PRESIDENT AND CEO, SECURITY DIVISION AT NTT LTD

N

TT Ltd is offering qualified clients a free-of-charge specialized sensor capability. This will enable enterprises and public sector agencies to make an initial determination of their risk and potential means to mitigate attacks related to the recent SolarWinds incidents.

In December 2020, a supply chain attack through SolarWinds’ commonly-used network management software allowed malware to be distributed to at least 18,000 organizations around the world. Additional threats have also since been identified, potentially exposing organizations’ applications and data. NTT’s view on these recent attacks can be seen here.

In response to these supply chain attacks, NTT will provide companies that believe themselves to be at risk of compromise with their 30-day trial of our Specialized Sensor for SolarWinds Detection and Alerting across all platforms other than

NTT OFFERS CYBER THREAT SENSOR TO CLIENTS IN WAKE OF SOLARWINDS ATTACKS Azure, at no charge.

This offering includes: Deployment of a specialized sensor in AWS and Google Cloud Platform environments for the detection of Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) specific to the SolarWinds breach.

Near real time notification to a client’s security organization in the event a compromise is detected.

An actionable incident report delivered automatically, immediately upon detection of IOCs linked to the SolarWinds compromise.

Organizations can then engage with NTT for a more in-depth review, analysis, recommendations, and remediation including a rapid incident compromise assessment. NTT can also provide ongoing managed security services such as Security Operations Center as a Service (SOCaaS) and develop a Strategy for Supply Chain Security

Assurance, to help clients monitor their technology assets and reduce risk from future threats.

Matt Gyde, President and CEO, Security Division at NTT Ltd., says, “Threat actors have exploited disruption during the COVID-19 crisis to launch an accelerated wave of cyberattacks around the world. The SolarWinds incidents were orchestrated by sophisticated operators and exploit the broad distribution of commonly-used software packages. NTT has now moved to proactively offer clients a way to identify potential problems in their technology infrastructure and take the steps needed to close those gaps.”

“At NTT our ongoing commitment is to make the world a better place through the power of technology, as we all navigate the new normal, we have an opportunity to build a better, connected future. With innovation, the possibilities to use technology for good are endless,” concludes Gyde.

SME CHANNELS 27 JANUARY 2021

GUEST ARTICLE

AN ANALYTICS & BEHAVIOUR-CENTRIC APPROACH TO DIGITAL PAYMENT SECURITY FOR THE RBI BRIJESH MIGLANI, Lead Security Consultant, Force point

28 SME CHANNELS JANUARY 2021

The recent news of cyberattack on a large private bank, where banking operations were halted for two days is really alarming. It appears to have been a denial of service (DDoS) attack or some other flaw in the netbanking system, which led to this attack, where people were not able to connect to the bank’s server and its netbanking site for 48 hours. These types of attacks are always related to flooding of traffic for a specific service because of which the service would stop responding or crash. A known vulnerability within an internal application can also pose these kinds of issues which can lead to a big impact such as bringing the system to a complete halt.

Examples like this always result in the amendment of current security practices. It is good that the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is focusing on this and bringing more digital initiatives that will ensure banking transactions are secure from a cybersecurity perspective. When banks undertake updates or add new applications, they should evaluate the risk related to these applications and ensure that people accessing them can trust the new services. These parameters need to be assessed every time the bank does a vulnerability assessment. The security team at a bank should know how a certain application is behaving, what is the baseline load, what type of transactions are happening, etc, but this information also needs to be captured at an analytics level.

Then if this baseline load is exceeded, it acts as an early warning system to step in and address DDoS attacks quickly.

As RBI is focused on building a more secure digital framework, it should look at utilizing analytics to make sure banking platforms are resilient. In India, the banking sector seems to be heading towards a big transformation. For instance in the past, RBI rolled out new kinds of credit cards for users where a small chip is inserted in cards to improve security and convenience for card transactions. This shows how RBI is working towards modern initiatives and

frameworks for the banks to adopt. Once we get to know the new policy and guidelines, we can further share our thoughts.

I imagine that RBI would intend to build a robust security policy that takes all types of banking players (private, nationalized, overseas and cooperative) and modes of transactions into account. As India is talking about data protection and data privacy, these factors will also have to be considered. For example, whether a person completes a transaction from a mobile phone or laptop or from any location, data gets logged into the system. This brings up the question of data security and privacy. I’m sure RBI will focus on these aspects from their digital initiative perspective-how to manage the infrastructure risk along with the privacy risk. Data protection is another point that RBI may keep in mind while designing security policies. Data can be protected and better secured by taking a behavior-centric approach to security.

For instance, during a crisis Forcepoint’s Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solution can help banking customers detect and protect data leaks from a compromised system, the web, email or from an endpoint. As any B2B service consumes that data, it can also monitor data over the transport layer.

Our Dynamic User Protection helps in detecting and preventing an insider threat, and monitors user activities using indicators of behaviors to implement an auto-response based on the risk matrix. This helps banks detect risky behaviors in the core banking system and to identify people who interact with that data.

As people are working from home even in the banking sector, our Private Access replaces the traditional VPN and brings in micro-segmentation.

This solution helps in segregating network and data management plane to provide secure remote access to applications and data in the datacentre.

REVIEW

PRODUCT

TSC PRINTRONIX AUTO ID MOBILE PRINTERS, “ALPHA30L” & “ALPHA-40L

TENDA 4G WIFI ROUTERS– 4G06

BY MANAS RANJAN

info@smechannels.com

TENDA’S 2 NEW WIFI routers i.e. 4G06 and 4G03 are to facilitate data connectivity on the 4G/4G + LTE network. Each model is outfitted with the SIM Card slot and is compatible with all network providers in India.

Based on the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) network, with specific profiles for control and media planes of voice service on the LTE wireless broadband service.

With LTE signal coverage for best performance and allows you to receive Internet access without cable and fiber ,it is the ideal choice for remote areas such as rural and suburban ,temporary store,holiday home ,giving devices ability to access to the Internet wherever and whenever the user is located.

Thanks to a powerful 880MHz and 28nm processor, it shares the Wi-Fi up to 32 devicees base on dependable network .

KEY FEATURES AND BENEFITS OF 4G06 • Download speed of 150 Mbps, Wi-Fi speed : 2.4GHz-300Mbps • 4G/3G enabled • Wi-Fi Standard: 802.11b/g/n • Dimensions: 185*126*60mm（L*W*H） • Weight: about 350g • Antenna : 2 detachable 4G/3G/2G Antennas and 2 Internal Wi-Fi Antennas • Package Content : 1 * 4G LTE Router, 2 * Detachable antennas, 1 * Ethernet cable, 1* RJ11 Tel cable, 1 * Power adapter, 1 * Quick Installation Guide

PRICING: MRP OF INR 12000- AND INR 10000/- RESPECTIVELY WARRANTY: 3 YEARS CONTACT: HTTPS://WWW.TENDACN.COM/EN/PRODUCT/4G06.

HTML

TSC Printronix Auto ID Alpha-30L and Alpha40L mobile printers expand the mobile printer line-up offering advanced productivity and management feature for a premium mobile printing experience.

Built for high performance and durability, the new mobile barcode label printers are user-friendly, heavy-duty, and drop-resistant.

The high-quality printers were designed to be rugged for on-the-go printing in the most demanding environments. The Alpha-30L and Alpha-40L are IP54 rated without the aid of a protective case for dust and water resistance, reducing added weight and bulk for operational comfort. Both models have been rigorously tested to withstand a 1.0-meter tumble and 1.8-meter drop. Protective cases are available for even further durability to withstand 2.5-meter drop. With their rugged design, the new mobile printers meet military-grade standards for drop and vehicle vibration. Ideal for enterprise professional’s on-the-go, the Alpha-30L and Alpha-40L support printing applications for direct store delivery (DSD), manufacturing and retail end-users.

PRICE: ON REQUEST, WARRANTY: ON REQUEST, CONTACT: HTTPS://WWW. TSCPRINTERS.COM/

SME CHANNELS 29 JANUARY 2021

PRODUCT PRODUCT

NETGEAR

NETGEAR WI-FI 6 – NIGHTHAWK RAX50 With the broadest range of Wi-Fi 6 offerings in the industry, NETGEAR Nighthawk RAX50 is a dual-band model, but it has 6 strings. It also has four LAN ports, so one can connect wired devices such as game consoles and smart TVs without purchasing an additional switching hub. Now, one can enjoy more comfortable home time with RAX50, including timeless web meetings and uninterrupted video streaming.

MATRIX

MATRIX COSEC ARGO Matrix COSEC ARGO is a performance, design and engineering pioneer that aims to answer the security challenges. This intelligent door controller features a 3.5’’ IPS Touchscreen LCD for a visually splendid experience.

Performance and Elegance Redefined – COSEC ARGO is a device that is designed for multiple applications such as Access Control, Time-Attendance, Cafeteria management and Job Processing & Costing that eliminates the need for dedicated hardware for diverse solutions.

Key Features: • Touchless Credentials • 3.5’’ IPS Touchscreen LCD • Intuitive User Experience • Vandal Resistant Enclosure • Engineered to Withstand Tough Outdoor Conditions

Features: • Extremely Fast Wi-Fi — Up to 5.4Gbps (600 + 4800 Mbps †) wireless speeds.

• Improved Capacity — Wi-Fi 6 uses OFDMA to improve the capacity and efficiency of your network, so more devices can connect without slowing down your Wi-Fi. • Powerful 1.5GHz Triple-Core Processor — Smooth 4K UHD streaming to Smart TVs, mobile devices and gaming consoles.

• 5 Gigabit Ports — Connect more wired devices for faster file transfer and uninterrupted connections with 1 WAN & 4 LAN ports • 160MHz Channel Support — Enjoy over 1Gbps Wi-Fi speeds for blazing-fast streaming and downloading to newer mobile devices that support 160MHz bandwidth.

n For further information, please contact: 394-GIDC, Makarpura, Vadodara-390010, India Toll Free -1800-258-7747 E-Mail: inquiry@matrixcomsec.com https://www.matrixaccesscontrol.com/

n Pricing and Availability The NETGEAR Nighthawk AX5400 6-stream Wi-Fi 6 Router (RAX50) will be available in India through various e-commerce and authorized NETGEAR store at a price point of INR 19,499/-.

FORTIGATE

FORTIGATE 200F EXPANDS SD-WAN Fortinet continued customer momentum of Fortinet Secure SD-WAN and the official completion of the roll-out of Fortinet’s SD-WAN ASIC-based FortiGate Next-Generation Firewalls with the FortiGate 200F series.

Enterprise customer deployments of Fortinet Secure SD-WAN average a 70 percent return on investment (ROI) in three years and 100 percent ROI in five years. Fortinet attributes this to its ability to consolidate SD-WAN, advanced routing, a wireless controller, and in many cases built-in LTE connectivity, on Fortinet’s industry-leading

30 SME CHANNELS JANUARY 2021

next-generation firewall built around a common operating system and centralized management and orchestration system. To learn more about Fortinet’s ability to deliver real value for customers visit our blog, “Realize 100% ROI in Five Years or Sooner with Fortinet Secure SD-WAN.

n Pricing: On request, Warranty: On request, Contact: https://www.fortinet. com/

RNI NO: DEL ENG/ 2010/ 31962 Postal Reg. No.: DL-SW-1/4145/16-18 Licensed to Post without pre-payment U(SW)/19/2017-18

Date of Publication: 13 of Every Month Date of Posting: 15 & 16 of Every Month

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