August 2020

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India’s leading IT magazine for channel business VOLUME 11 | ISSUE 05 | PAGES 32 | AUGUST 2020 | RS. 20/-

PARTNER CORNER / 18 Embee Software Launches VirtuaPlace for SMBs

SME CHAT / 23

CoSoSys: Working on Strengthening its Channel Partner Program

CASE STUDY / 28

108 ambulances improved their productivity with Matrix Time-Attendance solution

CHANNEL

TO REIMAGINE

STRATEGY AND INVEST

IN RESKILLING Recently concluded Covid1- Superhero Technology Summit and Awards for Channel turned out to be a melting pot for information and practice exchange by the leaders of Indian IT industry P-20

1

inDefend Advanced is designed to inDefend Advanced is designed to secure enterprise workforce thatto inDefend Advanced is designed secure enterprise workforce that detects anomalous employeethat secure enterprise workforce detects anomalous employee behaviors opposed employee to their detects anomalous behaviors opposed to their regular behavioral behaviors opposedpatterns. to their regular behavioral patterns. regular behavioral patterns.

inDefend Advanced, being a combination of DLP + User Activity inDefend Advanced, being a combination of DLP + User Activity Monitoring + Employee Productivity, is a complete Threat inDefend Advanced, being a combination of DLP + Insider User Activity Monitoring + Employee Productivity, is a complete Insider Threat Response System monitoring the Users’ Allowed and Blocked Monitoring + Employee Productivity, is aAllowed complete Insider Threat Response System monitoring the Users’ and Blocked Activities on the endpoint level.

Response System monitoring the Users’ Allowed and Blocked Activities on the endpoint level.

Activities on the endpoint level.

Productivity Reports section will generate various Productivity Reports section generate various reports regarding the Login andwill Logout times of

The Executive Dashboard of the solution The of the solution givesExecutive a holistic Dashboard picture of the entire gives a holistichealth picturescore of the entire The Executive Dashboard of the solution organization’s based on the data organization’s health score based the data gives a holistic picture of the entire protection score, compliance scoreon and protection score, compliance scoreon and organization’s health score based the data productivity score. productivity score. protection score, compliance score and

reports regarding the Login andwill Logout times of Productivity Reports section generate various the users, Productivity Summary report, Application the users, Productivity Summary report, Application reports regarding Logout times of and Web Browsingthe onLogin a dailyand basis. and users, Web Browsing on aSummary daily basis. the Productivity report, Application and Web Browsing on a daily basis.

Reflector Module which was added as a report Reflector Module which added asreports a report that generates user wise was productivity on

productivity score.

The Activity Analytics section helps in The Activitythe Analytics section monitoring users related tohelps all thein monitoring the users related toApplications, all thein The Activity Analytics section helps activities related to Browsers, activities related to Browsers, Applications, monitoring the users related to all the Emails, Devices, File Uploads, Phrases Emails, Devices, File Uploads, Phrases activities related to Browsers, Applications, Searched and Chat Activities. The admin can Searched and Chat The admin can Emails, Devices, FileActivities.

Uploads, Phrases drill down to granular logs of which user did drill to granular logs which user did Searched and Chat with Activities.

The admin can whatdown exact activity theofrespective

that generates user wise productivity on Reflector Module which was added asreports a report a weekly basis, clearly showing the productive a weekly basis, clearly showing the productive that generates user wise productivity reports on hours, unproductive hours and idle hours spent hours, hours and idle a weekly basis, showing the hours productive daily inunproductive order toclearly increase productivity in aspent daily inunproductive order to increase productivity in aspent hours, hours and idle hours positive reinforcement manner. positive reinforcement manner. daily in order to increase productivity in a positive reinforcement manner.

whatdown exactto activity with theofrespective drill granular logs which user did timestamps. timestamps. what exact activity with the respective timestamps.

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PARTNER CORNER / 18

CoSoSys: Working on Strengthening its Channel Partner Program

Embee Software Launches VirtuaPlace for SMBs

CASE STUDY / 28

108 ambulances improved their productivity with Matrix Time-Attendance solution

MY EXPERIENCE EDITORIAL

ALL SET FOR HYBRID WORK REGIME! SANJAY MOHAPATRA

sanjay@smechannels.com

Dear Friends As the pandemic is far from being over, enterprises are prepping for adopting a new work regime. It is a toggle between work from home and work from office. We can call that as Hybrid work regime. The IT leaders are of opinion that neither work from home not the work from office is solving the purpose.

There are a lot of things happening for the IT workers. Working from home enhancing the working time. It is becoming unhealthy for the workers. The creativity and innovation are losing grounds. And on top of everything cyber security including data leak chances becoming more prevalent. On the other hand, Work from Home is also becoming productive for many of the organizations. The people are getting more time for them and more family time, and people are becoming creative and innovative too.

In this battle of WFH and WFO, the entire word is debating about to find out the best format. Now there is a truce and organizations are drawing a line between the two and saying Hybrid Work is the best option.

Of course, it all depends upon the kind of organization and the business they are into. If it is a pure consulting house, working from home is the best option but for the typical IT channel organization where customer facing is the prime objective, hybrid workplace is the better alternative. It means no one will have a permanent seat allotted in the office. When there is a need of an employee to be in the office for any sort of discussion or deliberation, he is needed to be present along with his team.

This new normal can help the organizations to reduce the cost of operation the organization at the same time see the employees’ productivity enhances. When I say cost saving to the companies it is from the perspective of keeping the lights on in the organizations from the perspective of electric consumption, bandwidth consumption and other related expenses to keep the company run in every day.

Secondly, many of the organizations vacated a good number of premises they used to have on rent for running their business. These are net profit to the organizations.

On top of it if the people are giving more time to their families and remaining in healthy mindset, they would certainly bring productivity to the organizations. Of courses organizations need to implement the tools to manage, monitor and motivate the employees, and need to have enough security at the end point and right practices to keep everything under control.

So the observation is that there has to be a change in mindset and adopting something which was not adoptable.

Tenda AC2100 Dual-Band Gigabit Wireless Router Tenda AC21 is a dual-band gigabit wireless router specially designed for households that require high-speed internet access. It supports 802.11ac wave2 Technology and provides Wi-Fi speeds up to 2033 Mbps (2.4 GHz: 300Mbps, 5GHz: 1733Mbps) to achieve the best performance. The new router is equipped with the latest 4X4 MU-MIMO technology of 5GHz band that yields wider Wi-Fi coverage and a faster Wi-Fi speed as compared to regular routers with older 3X3 MU-MIMO technology.

The newly launched Tenda AC21 is stocked with 28nm 1GHz CPU equipped with 500MHz co-processor, dual-core design that helps in faster processing speed and in optimized operation.

SPECIFICATION: The router comes with 4×4 MU-MIMO for 5GHz Band and a built-in Signal Amplifier for Main Chip, which is great about it.

FINAL WORDING: PRICED AT INR 7,999, TENDA AC21 STAND APART FROM ITS COMPETITORS.

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contents

Trusted Advisor of Channel Business

VOLUME 11 ISSUE 05

2020

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Ingram Micro India Recognized for Excellence in Distribution Management UiPath has conferred the special recognition for Excellence in Distribution Management award on Ingram Micro. The maiden edition of UiPath India and South Asia Partner Awards is the first of its kind in the automation industry and celebrates the contributions of partners who have successfully customized RPA solutions to meet specific business needs. Fifteen winners were chosen from UiPath’s extensive partner ecosystem comprising of over 200 organizations from across South Asia, based on their innovation, impact in the marketplace, ability to scale, capability and capacity building on

UiPath hyperautomation platform.

Manish Bharti, President, UiPath India and South Asia, said, “We are delighted to honour the winners for the UiPath Partner Excellence Awards. Over the last year, our partners have been instrumental in helping the customers start their RPA journey and ensure timely, high quality implementation. In recent times, they have stepped up and gone the extra mile in supporting government, public institutions, and enterprises in building new use cases to combat the current challenges. My heartiest congratulations to Ingram Micro India Pvt Ltd.”

Cyberabad Police Commissionerate and SCSC to launch “Sanghamitra” Cyberabad Police Commissionerate and SCSC (Society for Cyberabad Security Council) together to Launch “Sanghamitra’, a community outreach program.

‘Sangamitra, as names suggests is a trusted friend and guide for safer communities, informed Mr. V. C. Sajjanar, Commissioner of

6

SME CHANNELS AUGUST 2020

Police, Cyberabad in a press note issued here in the city on Thursday.

The initiative, the need of the hour, will be formally launched on 1st August. It will be formally launched in a brief function to be held on 1st August which will be graced by Smt. Amala Akkineni as the Chief Guest,

Smt. Namrata Shirdokar as the Guest of Honour and Smt. Vanita Datla- MD Elico Industries as the Special Guest. This will be followed by a virtual conference.

Over 1000 representatives of various communities, residential welfare associations, residents will take part in the launch.

SNIPPETS

Gartner Market Guide for Zero Trust Network Access Recognises InstaSafe

Nutanix Named a Leader in Hyperconverged Infrastructure Nutanix has been named a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Hyperconverged Infrastructure, Q3 2020, published by Forrester Research, Inc. The report evaluated 11 HCI vendors on Current Offering, Market Presence, and Strategy, and Nutanix was positioned as a leader with among the highest scores across these three categories.

Nutanix believes these results are consistent with additional independent market research from other firms, all of which conclude that Nutanix is an undisputed leader in the fast-growing HCI market and possesses an impressive strategy that is driving innovation in the datacenter and cloud markets.

“Our focus at Nutanix has always been to make computing invisible, starting with the datacenter and now expanding to clouds as we move to an increasingly hybrid and multicloud world,” said Dheeraj Pandey, Co-founder and CEO, Nutanix. “This unwavering focus has driven our position as a leader in the market, as we have enabled our customers to be resilient, prepared, and productive. This pandemic underscores the importance of technology companies that obsess over their customers and their needs, including real-time business continuity, handsfree IT, and lift-n-shift to either private or public clouds.”

InstaSafe has been featured as a representative vendor in Gartner’s Market Guide for Zero Trust Network Access, for the second year in a row. InstaSafe is the only Indian company to be featured in the list.

According to Gartner, the old security model of ‘inside means trusted’ and ‘outside means untrusted’ has been rendered obsolete. As users became mobile, and third party contractors and partners also required access, VPNs and DMZs became common and necessary for enterprises. However, VPNs and DMZs also tend to grant excessive implicit trust to users, which can, and has been exploited. Given the significant risk that the public internet represents, and the attractiveness of compromising internet-exposed systems to gain a foothold in enterprise systems, enterprises need to consider isolating digital business services from visibility by the public internet, while not granting excessive trust.

Worldwide IaaS Public Cloud Services Market Grew 37.3% in 2019

EXECUTIVE MOVEMENT

Tech Data Appoints Andy Berry, VP & Country General Manager, ANZ.

Worldwide IaaS Public Cloud Services Market Share, 2018-2019 (Millions of U.S. Dollars) Company

2019 Revenue

2019 Market Share (%)

2018 Revenue

2018 Market Share (%)

2018-2019 Growth (%)

Amazon

19,990.4

45.0

15,495.0

47.9

29.0

Microsoft

7,949.6

17.9

5,037.8

15.6

57.8

Alibaba

4,060.0

9.1

2,499.3

7.7

62.4

Google

2,365.5

5.3

1,313.8

4.1

80.1

Tencent

1,232.9

2.8

611.8

1.9

101.5

8,858

19.9

7,425

22.9

19.3

44,456.6

100.0

32,382.2

100.0

37.3

Others Total

Air Marshal (Retd) Bhushan Nilkanth Gokhale Joins Quick Heal Technologies as an Independent Director.

Ben Goodman Joins New Relic as SVP, ASEAN, India, Greater Hong Kong and Korea.

Sunil Mahale Joins Commvault as VP, Sales Engineering and Emerging Technology, APJ.

Source: Gartner (August 2020)

SME CHANNELS AUGUST 2020

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SNIPPETS

Tata Tele Business Services introduces ‘Smart Hosted PBX’ solutions Tele Business Services (TTBS) has launched new Smart Hosted PBX solutions for SMBs. Designed with security and privacy at its core and specifically for hassle-free Work from Home scenarios, it enables businesses to quickly set up telecom infra by leveraging virtual PBX hosted on the cloud.

It offers complete outbound call connect solution for their agents, along-with immediate CDR (Call Detail Records) availability, lead management and many more features. It is a click-2-call service enabled by a browser based URL login which can be accessed by a laptop/phone browser.

Elaborating on the solution, Joyjeet Bose, Sr. Vice President- SME Business, Tata Teleservices Ltd. said, “In the new paradigm dominated by remote working environments, businesses have to ensure service delivery to their customers at optimal levels to stay competent and relevant. Setting up telecom infra is a time-consuming and capital intensive which has become increasingly difficult for businesses in the new normal.”

Interdigital Files Patent Infringement Actions Against Xiaomi in India InterDigital, a mobile and video technology research and development company, has filed two patent infringement actions in India against Xiaomi. One complaint involves infringement of five of InterDigital’s cellular 3G and 4G Indian patents and the other complaint involves infringement of three of InterDigital’s H.265/ HEVC Indian patents. The claims were filed after years of negotiations and after InterDigital has made clear that it is willing to resolve the terms of a FRAND license through binding arbitration.

The patents asserted in the cellular action draw from InterDigital’s significant contributions over the years to 3G and 4G LTE cellular standards, reflected in the company’s portfolio of more than 32,000 patents and applications worldwide.

InterDigital has invested more than two decades of R&D effort in developing 3G, 4G and 5G technologies and is consistently recognized among the top innovators and owners of patents relevant to cellular wireless technologies. The patents asserted in the H.265/HEVC action reflect the world-class R&D of the company’s Research and Innovation Unit in video coding technologies, which was integrated into InterDigital’s research team after being acquired from Technicolor in 2019.

IndiaItChannels started B2C catalogue creation page for IT Partners India It Channels proudly announces the launch of its B2C catalogue creation on the portal for the registered partners as per the commitment made for the 1st of August 2020. Login-id and Passwords have already been sent to all the registered 4000+ partners via email.

Creation of a B2C catalogue page is very simple on IndiaItChannels, but if somehow partners need an assistant a help document has already been ready for their assistance, partners can access help document available in the portal. The platform had been launched with the objective of modifying the way complete IT Community works. The platform has received a wonderful and astonishing response. The creators and developers have worked hard to meet the announced time limit and have successfully accomplished their objectives.

The platform has gained more than 4000 registrations up till now, and it was promised that they could begin with their B2C page creation, so as per the commitment now, they can move forward. All partners require to do is follow the steps linked with the Business to customer (B2C) page creation.

IIFL Strengthens Security Palo Alto Networks implements security solutions at IIFL to secure its virtual environment.

IIFL Finance is one of the leaders in the Indian financial services industry covering multiple markets, including wealth management, home loans, microfinance, and retail banking.

Speaking on the occasion, Anil Bhasin, regional vice president, India & SAARC at Palo Alto Networks, said: “The cybersecurity challenges – handling multiple clients and managing thousands of employees working remotely – that a large financial services company like IIFL face on a daily basis is immense. This has become even more critical in the wake of the current Covid-19 pandemic. We are honoured that IIFL has chosen Palo Alto Networks to help evolve their IT environment to better support remote access solutions. We are confident that the dynamic nature of our platform will provide a secure environment for IIFL to safely access remote work capabilities now and in the future.”

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SME CHANNELS AUGUST 2020

Pelco Inc, USA Appoints Supertron VAD as Distributor Supertron VAD has announced a distribution agreement with Pelco Inc. for the India & SARRC regions. Adopting a consultative approach, focused on developing future-ready technology solutions drawing upon its knowledge and portfolio of audio, video, voice, data, networking and application protection and management offerings. Supertron VAD will stand synonymous to its brand building strategy and will help in making an informed decision in solution positioning through its holistic eco-system approach & robust GTM strategy.

Supertron VAD has a dedicated sales team & solutions consultant with deep knowledge of products, services, and markets, are always thriving for growth, and strongly believe in long-term strategic partnership as an extended arm with OEM. Supertron – VAD team leverages its vast capabilities of account management, partner management, presales, training, structuring large bidding deal for partners and geographic reach.

SNIPPETS

Analog Devices Collaborates with Intel on Radio Platform for Addressing 5G Network Design Challenges Analog Devices collaborate with Intel Corporation to create a flexible radio platform that addresses 5G network design challenges and will enable customers to scale their 5G networks more quickly and economically. The new radio platform combines the advanced technology of ADI’s radio frequency (RF) transceivers with the high performance and low power of Intel Arria 10 Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) giving developers a new set of design tools for more easily creating optimized 5G solutions.

The communications market is moving at a rapid pace to keep up with the strains put on bandwidth and latency as more people transact business digitally and consume and transmit data from everywhere. A significant increase in traffic over existing wireless networks is occurring in both private networks and public spaces. As a result, wireless operators are looking to shorten development times and cost-effectively implement new solutions that increase the capacity, performance and reliability of 5G networks.

Through a mix of open standards and existing communication links, mobile network operators are developing a broader set of specifications and supporting a growing span of use cases.

Zoho Launches BackToWork Application

100% of Indian IT Managers Worry about their Current Level of Cloud Security Ransomware and malware, exposed data, compromised accounts, and cryptojacking make cloud security the topmost concern of Indian IT managers According to The State of Cloud Security 2020, a global survey from next-generation cybersecurity leader Sophos, while 100 % of Indian businesses are concerned about their current level of cloud security, one third (33%) of these organizations find it tough to convince their senior management of the need to invest in cloud security.

Identifying and responding to security incidents (40%) is the biggest public cloud security concern for Indian IT managers followed by managing multiple public cloud providers (37%), data loss/leakage (35%) and sudden increases in cloud spend (34%). Nearly one quarter (24 percent) of Indian IT managers are concerned about lack of visibility of their cloud infrastructure. Surprisingly, only 19% Indian IT managers view lack of staff expertise as a top concern.

Zoho Corporation launched BackToWork, a comprehensive modular solution enabling businesses and organizations to safely transition back into the workplace.

“Back in March, we had altered our business priorities to focus on ways to best serve our community, country, and the rest of the world. Our initiatives like Swadeshi Sankalp have helped not just businesses, but also government, NGOs, and schools to adapt and survive,” said Hyther Nizam, VP Product Management, Zoho Corp. “As the lockdown is being eased, and organizations are planning to re-open in some parts of the country, we want to help them resurge, this time through BackToWork, an application enabling companies to maintain end-to-end workplace safety.”

Airtel Collaborate with AWS to Boost Airtel’s Cloud offerings

Acuver Strengthens SAP C/4HANA Capabilities

Bharti Airtel entered into a multi-year, Strategic Collaboration Agreement (SCA) with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to deliver a comprehensive set of innovative cloud solutions to large enterprise and small and medium enterprise (SME) customers in India. Airtel Cloud will build an AWS Cloud Practice supported by AWS Professional Services, as well as develop differentiated Airtel Cloud products and capabilities leveraging AWS services, Airtel’s data center capabilities, and Airtel’s network and telecoms offerings. Airtel customers will benefit from an integrated sales, consulting, and support approach from both companies, and improved security, scalability, and cloud management capabilities.

Airtel Cloud will offer customers a range of AWS services including Windows on AWS, SAP on AWS, VMware Cloud on AWS, database migration, and security and risk governance solutions. In addition, Airtel Cloud will leverage AWS’s innovation and transformation services across analytics, data warehousing, Internet of Things (IoT), and machine learning (ML) to help customers adopt new services and migrate to the cloud from legacy infrastructures.

Acuver Consulting, an emerging leader in supply chain & customer experience IT solutions, has appointed Tirupati Rao as SAP Practice Head and Amit Valsangkar as SAP Sales Head. To advance on delivering unified Customer eXperience through SAP C/4HANA, Acuver Consulting has onboarded exemplary SAP experts: Tirupati Rao as SAP Practise Head and Amit Valsangkar as SAP Sales Head.

Tirupati Rao has devoted most of his career to the CX portfolio, setting up business from scratch as Regional Sales Director at Callidus Cloud and Sales Director CX post the takeover by SAP. Amit Valsangkar has been leading Sales & Service for pioneer CRM & ERP solutions like Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and Salesforce throughout his professional life. In his previous role, he was the Head of Sales and Business Development at Knack Systems. With the very best talent and experience the domain has to offer on-boarded, Acuver is building traction to redefine excellence in the CX sphere.

SME CHANNELS AUGUST 2020

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SNIPPETS

FusionVR Empowers Mission-Critical Functions with Digital Twins FusionVR, India’s leading Industry 4.0 solutions provider strengthens its commitment to help the industry achieve excellence consistently and effectively through the disruptive Industry 4.0 technologies. Amongst the many industries, security and military functions demonstrates the impending need to integrate Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality/Mixed Reality /Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence solutions.

A recent PWC study says that VR training is four times faster and four times more focused than typical Class-Room Training. It’s also 3.75 times more emotionally connected with a 40% improvement in operator confidence. VR-Training transforms defence personnel into competent, confident resources inheriting decades of knowledge and experience in a short duration, saving years of training time.

Netmagic Partners with Zerto to Expand its DRaaS Netmagic partners with Zerto to enrich its Disaster Recovery as a Services (DRaaS) portfolio. The partnership will enable enterprises with faster and cost-effective disaster recovery of critical IT infrastructure. Zerto, a leader in IT resilience, replaces legacy solutions with a single platform to enable disaster recovery (DR), data protection, and workload mobility across hyperscale clouds, hosted services, and on-premise datacenters.

Netmagic DRaaS is a complete DR Management platform with a pay-per-use model. With workflow automation capabilities, it simplifies DR processes and dashboards to provide real-time visibility that is tied into the organization’s objectives in terms of availability, Recovery Point Objective (RPO), and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO). With this new partnership with Zerto, customers will get a lowercost alternative to traditional DR solutions. With Netmagic managing the entire DR process, customers can stay focused on their core critical business.

97 % of Indian Organizations Have Experienced At Least One Business-Impacting Cyberattack in the Past 12 Months

As per Tenable study 97% of Indian Organizations have experienced a business-impacting cyberattack in the past 12 months, according to both business and security executives. The data is drawn from ‘The Rise of the Business-Aligned Security Executive,’ a commissioned study of more than 800 global business and cybersecurity leaders, including 54 local respondents, conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Tenable.

As cybercriminals continue their relentless attacks, 76% of respondents in India have witnessed a dramatic increase in the number of business-impacting cyberattacks over the past two years.

Unfortunately, these attacks had damaging effects, with organizations reporting identity theft (44%), financial loss or theft (38%), and ransomware payout (33%). Seventy-seven percent of security leaders in Australia say these attacks also involved operational technology (OT).

Commvault Named Leader in Gartner for Data Center Backup and Recovery Solutions Commvault has been positioned as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Center Backup and Recovery Solutions1. According to Gartner, Commvault has been evaluated for its ability to execute and completeness of vision.This is the ninth consecutive time Commvault has been named a Leader in Gartner’s market evaluation for backup and recovery.

In addition, Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery software has received the highest scores across all use cases – physical, virtual and public cloud environments – in the Gartner Critical Capabilities for Backup and Recovery Solutions report, with a score of 4.15 out of 5 for the public cloud environments use case.

With the most robust data management portfolio in the market, Commvault Complete™ Backup & Recovery supports the broadest range of applications, databases, public cloud environments, OSs and hypervisors, NAS systems, and primary storage arrays of all of the vendors evaluated by Gartner.

10 SME CHANNELS AUGUST 2020

DIGEST MATRIX TO SHOWCASE FUTURISTIC SOLUTIONS AT THE GEM CII NATIONAL PUBLIC PROCUREMENT CONCLAVE ’20 MATRIX, A MAKE IN INDIA MANUFACTURER OF TELECOM AND SECURITY SOLUTIONS, DEVISES SOLUTIONS FOR DIFFERENT-SIZED BUSINESSES. THE INNOVATOR TAPS THE COMMUNICATION REQUIREMENTS OF EVERY INDUSTRY VERTICAL AND TAILORS PRODUCTS ACCORDINGLY. BEING A MAJOR PLAYER IN THE GOVERNMENT SECTOR, MATRIX IS PARTICIPATING IN NATIONAL PUBLIC PROCUREMENT CONCLAVE; ORGANIZED BY THE GOVERNMENT E-MARKETPLACE (GEM) IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE CONFEDERATION OF INDIAN INDUSTRY (CII) FROM 9TH AUGUST TO 9TH SEPTEMBER 2020. THE EVENT IS A GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY FOR SELLERS TO NETWORK WITH PROCURING AUTHORITIES OF GOVERNMENT ENTITIES.

BPE CELEBRATE 20TH YEAR ANNIVERSARY BEST POWER EQUIPMENT CELEBRATED BUSINESSES EXCELLENCE JOURNEY OF 20 YEARS ON 21ST JULY. THE VIRTUAL EVENT SHOW WAS INAUGURATED BY CHIEF GUEST MR DEEPAK GUPTA (PDG ROTARY CLUB DELHI) FOLLOWED

BY LAMP LIGHTING BY MR. AMITANSU SATYPATHY, MANAGING DIRECTOR AND MRS. SURYA SHIKHA SATPATHY, DIRECTOR, BPE .

TWO HOURS EVENT WAS FULL OF ENTHUSIASM AND ENJOYMENT. BPE AWARDED TWENTY EMPLOYEES FOR CONTINUES YEARS OF SERVICE. APPROX. 400 PEOPLE ATTENDED THE VIRTUAL EVENT WHICH INCLUDES CUSTOMERS, PARTNERS, SYSTEM INTEGRATORS, GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS. BPE AWARDED MORE THAN HUNDRED BUSINESS PARTNERS IN PREMIUM, SUPER ACHIEVER, VALUABLE AND INTERNATIONAL PERFORMING CATEGORY.

ARRAY NETWORKS JOINS THE ‘MAKE IN INDIA’ INITIATIVE ARRAY NETWORKS INDIA IS ALL SET TO MANUFACTURE FROM BANGALORE, INDIA. THE APPLICATION DELIVERY PLATFORM COMPANY PLANS TO ENTER SECURITY AND NETWORKING SEGMENT AND RESPONDS THE CALL OF MAKE IN INDIA. SHIBU PAUL, VICE PRESIDENT – INTERNATIONAL SALES AT ARRAY NETWORKS, SAID, “ARRAY’S OPERATION IN INDIA IS ONE OF THE TOP CONTRIBUTORS TO THE COMPANY’S OVERALL GLOBAL GROWTH. THE LARGE PERCENTAGE OF THIS IMPRESSIVE GROWTH HAS COME FROM THE GOVERNMENT, BFSI, AVIATION, ENTERTAINMENT AND EDUCATION VERTICALS. WITH THE GOVERNMENT AS OUR KEY CUSTOMER, WE BELIEVE THAT THE CUSTOMERS’ CONFIDENCE WILL INCREASE WITH OUR COMMITMENT TOWARDS THE MAKE IN INDIA INITIATIVE. AS THE GOVERNMENT IS NOW FOCUSED ON DIGITIZATION AND CYBER SECURITY, THE NETWORK AND SECURITY PRODUCTS PRODUCED IN INDIA WILL RECEIVE A MAJOR BOOST.”

SNIPPETS

Vertiv Introduces Monitoring Solution for Edge Computing Vertiv introduced Vertiv Environet Alert, a new software offering that brings enterprise-level infrastructure monitoring and management capabilities to smaller data centers and edge facilities. Vertiv Environet Alert is affordable and easy to use, eliminating the two most common barriers to the deployment of monitoring and management tools for these types of environments. It is available globally through Vertiv and numerous channel partners.

Vertiv Environet Alert delivers real-time, vendoragnostic monitoring of critical infrastructure systems and alerts the appropriate personnel immediately when those systems are at risk. The software acts as a single pane of glass, with a new, modern and intuitive user interface that delivers visibility and data to users.

Users can customize the data points that are monitored and reported to focus on what they need to most effectively protect and optimize their business.

UiPath Now Certified for SAP Solution Manager Test Automation UiPath is making it easier than ever for businesses using SAP solutions to automate their test management. UiPath is an SAP silver partner in the SAP PartnerEdge program and today is introducing the UiPath Test Suite.

UiPath Studio 2020.7 achieved its certification for integration with SAP Solution Manager in July 2020. This integration enables customers to obtain maximum value from their investments in SAP software by serving as a hub between SAP Solution Manager for all test management activities and UiPath Studio for Business Process test automation.

The integration delivers creation of automated test cases across the whole enterprise landscape including SAP and third party applications, while providing businesses that use SAP solutions with the ability to execute test cases, exchange complex test data, and ensure the functionality of business process change analyzer (BPCA) for automation projects. In addition, accurate reporting is available, with a consolidated view.

ServiceNow and Uber Partner to Safer Commute to Work ServiceNow announced a new integration with Uber for Business to help solve one of the largest problems businesses face—helping their employees feel safe when commuting to and from work, as soon as it’s safe to reopen.

Using the ServiceNow Workplace Safety Management app, offered in the ServiceNow Safe Workplace suite, the Uber for Business solution provides a “Book Uber” feature so employees can easily coordinate their Uber ride to and from the workplace via their mobile device. Employees can concurrently schedule arrival times, reserve workspaces and manage health screenings, all through the Now Mobile app. The new integration comes on the heels of Uber’s recent roll-out of new features and policies to help protect the health and safety of both riders and drivers. In only two months since the initial release of the ServiceNow Safe Workplace suite, which includes apps for contact tracing, workplace safety management, employee readiness feedback and employee health screening, more than 600 organizations have downloaded the apps.

Nearly 6600 Organisations Witnessed over 100,000 Email Compromise Attacks in 2020 Barracuda Networks highlights the use of malicious accounts in business email compromise.

Barracuda researchers have identified that 6,170 malicious accounts that use Gmail, AOL, and other email services have been responsible for over 100,000 Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks in 2020 on nearly 6,600 organisations.

Malicious hackers register email accounts with legitimate services to use them to conduct impersonation and business email compromise attacks. They carefully craft these messages and sometimes use the email accounts for only a short span to avoid detection or being suspended by email services providers. However, some hackers may temporarily abandon an account after initial attacks and then re-use them after a long gap. Each of these email address used for BEC attacks is defined as a malicious account and provides insight into how hackers email accounts in their schemes.

Bangalore Chamber of Industry & Commerce unveils roadmap to make Karnataka a preferred investment destination The 43rd AGM of Bangalore Chamber of Industries and Commerce held on 7th August elected T.R. Parasuraman, President and Whole Time Director of Toyota Industries Engine as its new President for the year 2020-21. Mr. Sekar Partner Deloitte Haskins and Sells LLP has been elected as the Senior Vice President. Mr. Devesh Agarwal, Joint Managing Director, Jesons Technologies Pvt. Ltd shared some of the extra ordinary achievements of BCIC such as signing of strategic MOU,s with Tourism and Hospitality sector skill council, capital goods sector skill council ,launch of CEO forum and emerging star awards for startup’s and various deliberations with national and international trade bodies and the tremendous response received from all the stake holders.

Another salient feature of the 43rd AGM was the launch of three important white papers namely,” Karnataka the most preferred destination for future investment “ a feasibility study report by Mr. Roman Shetty, President, Consulting, Deloitte, the feasibility study of the second airport for Karnataka in Ramanagara by Mr. Devesh Agarwal and the analysis of Athmanirbhar Bharat by Mr. K.R.Sekar.

SME CHANNELS AUGUST 2020

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SNIPPETS

HPE and SAP Partner to Deliver SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud with HPE GreenLake Cloud Services HPE partners with SAP to deliver the customer edition of SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud with HPE GreenLake, as a fully managed service at the edge, in the customer’s data center or colocation facility of their choice. Customers will be able to keep their SAP® software landscape and data on-premises while gaining the benefits of a subscription-based, agile, elastic, and consistent cloud experience from SAP with HPE GreenLake.

With HPE GreenLake, SAP will be enabled to offer the customer edition of SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud with a consistent, automated cloud experience and their flexible subscription-based as-a-service model. HPE GreenLake’s robust cloud services and compliance analytics tools will enable SAP to offer on-premise white-glove operations and application management services that SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud is known for at the customer’s location of choice. This partnership will be an extension to HPE and SAP’s decades’ long relationship. In addition, SAP chose HPE because of HPE’s global reach and their trusted established brand with our joint customers.

Equinix Acquires GPX India Equinix has made its intent clear that it would tap into potential Indian digital market though acquisition of the India operations of GPX Global Systems (“GPX India”). The all-cash transaction value of US$161 million represents a multiple of approximately 15x the projected EBITDA at full utilization. The acquisition is expected to close in Q1 2021, subject to customary closing conditions including regulatory approval.

The acquisition will extend Platform Equinix to India with the addition of two world-class, highly interconnected data centers, providing a platform for additional expansion across the country. Equinix customers will have access to a network-dense data center campus with more than 200 international brands and local companies, including the world’s leading cloud service providers (CSPs), leading networks, content delivery network (CDN) providers, all local carriers, 130 internet service providers (ISPs) and four internet exchanges. Both data centers are strategically located in Mumbai, home to the critical IT infrastructure of numerous global organizations and with international connectivity serviced by subsea cables at landing sites located nearby.

Emkay Global ties up with IceWarp IceWarp’s secure and robust platform will be managing the operational issues and will also help in reducing the cost. It will be providing a huge boost to Emkay’s work procedures as IceWarp will be offering a seamless cloud collaboration of 1100 users and will be facilitated with features like Cloud archiving, Customized TeamChat module, Syncing, and sharing on multiple devices, All-in-one collaboration. With continuous improvements of versions addressing key features under the demand of customers, the company is continuing to grow stronger in the market and maintaining its position as a true alternative to Gsuite and Microsoft.

Speaking on the deployment, Pramod Sharda – CEO, IceWarp India & Middle East said, “We are delighted to expand our engagement with Emkay, with more and more names on the list of our clientele we are constantly inching closer to our vision. The Indian market has been very responsive in terms of support and has effectively provided a budding ground for IceWarp to outgrow itself. As a channel-driven company, our customers remind us to invent and reinvent our technologies, our solutions to further thrive across the globe”.

MailVault ties up with BD Soft as the National Distributor, for the Indian Markets MailVault announces BD Soft as its National Distributor for Offline presence. BD Soft, is one of the largest distributors, to Internet security technology, with several national and international brands in its portfolio, for SMB and enterprise level solutions.

Speaking on the association, Mr. Zakir Hussain – CEO, BD Soft said, “We are pleased to partner with MailVault, to bring Cyber solutions for the Indian Market place. With Mailvault’s unique ‘centralized archive for emails’, we aim to democratize solutions across Businesses, as India emerges from the pandemic and its multiple Cyber challenges. MailVault’s proven email security will make it easier for businesses to function hassle-free” “This partnership is a great match for both the organizations. We are witnessing a rapid growth and acceptance of Cyber solutions in India. With this association, our intent is to reach out to businesses across the length and breadth of the country, addressing the needs and penetrating markets, more effectively” says Mr. Sharad Popli, of DigitalGlue.

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Nutanix Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure Now on AWS Nutanix Clusters are now available on AWS. With this announcement, Nutanix delivers hybrid cloud infrastructure — one that allows businesses to accelerate their digital initiatives and optimize spending, priorities further amplified in the age of COVID. Nutanix offers a single stack that integrates compute and storage, provides unified operations across private and public clouds, integrated networking with AWS, and license portability from private to public clouds, thus addressing key technical and operational challenges of the hybrid cloud era.

With this announcement, Nutanix extends the simplicity and ease of use of its software to public cloud. This eliminates the cost and management complexity of hybrid environments and enables seamless mobility across private and public clouds without any rearchitecting of the apps due to built-in networking integration with AWS. Customers now have the flexibility to choose the right cloud environment for each application with the added benefit of license portability across clouds, which has a direct impact on cost and resource optimization.

SNIPPETS

Taiwan Excellence and COMTECH INDIA join hands to hold an Online event For last two decades, Taiwan has been supportive of India and India has also reciprocated in many ways. This time, Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) held a unique online product launch and business matchmaking event on August 12. The event aimed at fostering a connection between ICT suppliers from Taiwan and buyers from India. The event stood as an online extension for COMTECH INDIA 2020 – an ICT and smart city trade show from TAITRA that was originally scheduled to be held in September 2020.

COMTECH INDIA will focus on 4 themes, including network communication & IoT, smart city solutions, new technology from startups, e-sports & gaming equipment.

However, considering the effects of the pandemic, TAITRA decided to postpone COMTECH INDIA 2020 to the second half of 2021 after extensive conversations with all the exhibitors and partners over recent weeks and months. The decision was based on rational thinking and a sense of responsibility towards the health and safety of participants and visitors.

BD Soft Launches Zerospam in India Canadian cloud-based email security protection provider with AI-powered filtering technology, Zerospam forays into India with BD Soft as its National Distributor. BD Soft as a distributor has a strong portfolio of Security brands including Bitdefender, MailVault, EndPoint Protector, Zecurion, PDF Autosigner, Proget, Abbyy, and Digitware Back up. With BD Soft Zerospam aims to capture significant market share in the SMB & Enterprise space leveraging BDSoft’s channel expertise.

Zakir Hussain, Director, BD Soft India says, “BD Soft is committed to bringing the best Cybersecurity solutions to our markets and to make them easily and readily available. Zerospam, offers state-of-the-art email security at a very affordable price. We are delighted to join hands with Zerospam and are confident that Zerospam will have great success in the Indian marketplace.”

Louis Dore, Director Sales and Marketing, Zerospam said, “With the new normal, we are witnessing a rapid growth in the adoption of Email security solutions Worldwide. India is a new market for us and the intent of our association with BD Soft is to increase our velocity and volume of business in India. I am confident that this relationship will strengthen our presence countrywide and help us reach customers that are concerned about this new normal.”

Tenable advises Organsations to Patch Windows OS to Protect from “zero-day” Exploit

Israel’s Coralogix Plans to invest Over 30M$ in India

Microsoft for the sixth month in a row patched over 100 CVEs in the August 2020 Patch Tuesday release, including 17 CVEs rated critical. For the first time in three months, this update includes patches for two vulnerabilities that were observed being actively exploited in the wild. Please find below a comment from Satnam Narang, Staff Research Engineer at Tenable about this month’s patch update.

Microsoft has patched over 100 CVEs again, addressing 120 CVEs, including 17 critical vulnerabilities. For the first time in three months, a pair of vulnerabilities have been reported as being exploited in the wild. CVE-2020-1380 is a remote code execution vulnerability in Microsoft’s Scripting Engine due to how objects in memory are handled by Internet Explorer.

In order to exploit this vulnerability, an attacker would need to convince their victim to either visit a website containing exploit code or open a malicious document that contains an embedded ActiveX control. Successful exploitation would grant the attacker the ability to execute arbitrary code as the current user.

Israel based Coralogix, provider of leading MLpowered log analytics and monitoring solution, expands into India to provide its customers with its first local AWS regional server support and data storage capabilities. By localizing data, Coralogix will help customers meet compliance requirements for India’s new data privacy laws and dramatically improve service performance. Coralogix is also rolling out an onsite team to provide comprehensive sales and customer success support to India-based companies. It plans to invest $30 million in India, in next five years.

“With today’s strategic move, we are proactively addressing new Indian data privacy laws scheduled to take effect in 2021 by providing Coralogix customers with a solution well ahead of most of our competitors,” said Ariel Assaraf, CEO and co-Founder, Coralogix. “When the new laws are enacted, we anticipate a profound sense of urgency for companies who fall under domestic compliance rules to store their data locally and avoid being penalized for non-compliance.”

DE-CIX India is Now Present in 10 DC in India DE-CIX India expands its Internet Exchange PoPs at Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai to meet the increased demand in internet usage and bandwidth capacity posed by COVID-19. In addition to its fifth PoP in Mumbai introduced last month, DE-CIX has now deployed new PoPs within STT Telemedia DC’s (Tata Communications) in Chennai and Delhi.

DE-CIX India interconnects around 250 networks and is the only Open-IX certified IX in India connecting the ISPs, Content Delivery Networks, Cloud Companies, OTTs and other network providers, along with educational institutes in the connected networks. Additionally, DE-CIX India has launched its DirectCLOUD service at DE-CIX Mumbai, to enable customers to access the DE-CIX Cloud Exchange and connect to global cloud services, including those provided by Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and Amazon Web Services.

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INNOVATION

IBM POWER10 WITH 7NM ARCHITECTURE TO BE AVAILABLE IN H2/21

New CPU co-optimized for Red Hat Open Shift for enterprise hybrid cloud IBM reveals its Nextgen CPU – IBM POWER10 processor, which is to be available in second half of 2021. IBM POWER10 design focuses on energy efficiency and performance in a 7nm form factor with an expected improvement of up to 3x greater processor energy efficiency, workload capacity, and container density than the IBM POWER9 processor.

Designed over five years with hundreds of new and pending patents, the IBM POWER10 processor is an important evolution in IBM’s roadmap for POWER. IBM’s First Commercialized 7nm Processor that is expected to deliver up to a 3x improvement in capacity and processor energy efficiency within the same power envelope as IBM POWER9, allowing for greater performance.

Support for Multi-Petabyte Memory Clusters with a breakthrough new technology called Memory Inception, designed to improve cloud

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capacity and economics for memory-intensive workloads from ISVs like SAP, the SAS Institute, and others as well as large-model AI inference.

New Hardware-Enabled Security Capabilities including transparent memory encryption designed to support end-to-end security. The IBM POWER10 processor is engineered to achieve significantly faster encryption performance with quadruple the number of AES encryption engines per core compared to IBM POWER9 for today’s most demanding standards and anticipated future cryptographic standards like quantum-safe cryptography and fully homomorphic encryption.

It also brings new enhancements to container security.

New Processor Core Architectures in the IBM POWER10 processor with an embedded Matrix Math Accelerator which is extrapolated to provide 10x, 15x and 20x faster AI inference for FP32, BFloat16 and INT8 calculations per socket

respectively than the IBM POWER9 processor to infuse AI into business applications and drive greater insights.

Further, to address new security considerations associated with the higher density of containers, IBM POWER10 is designed to deliver new hardware-enforced container protection and isolation capabilities co-developed with the IBM POWER10 firmware. If a container were to be compromised, the POWER10 processor is designed to be able to prevent other containers in the same Virtual Machine (VM) from being affected by the same intrusion.

The IBM POWER10 processor is designed to enhance in-core AI inferencing capability without requiring additional specialized hardware.

With an embedded Matrix Math Accelerator, the IBM POWER10 processor is expected to achieve 10x, 15x, and 20x faster AI inference for FP32, BFloat16 and INT8 calculations respectively to improve performance for enterprise AI inference workloads as compared to IBM POWER9,2 helping enterprises take the AI models they trained and put them to work in the field. With IBM’s broad portfolio of AI software, IBM POWER10 is expected to help infuse AI workloads into typical enterprise applications to glean more impactful insights from data.

With hardware co-optimized for Red Hat OpenShift, IBM POWER10-based servers will deliver the future of the hybrid cloud when they become available in the second half of 2021.

Samsung Electronics will manufacture the IBM POWER10 processor, combining Samsung’s industry-leading semiconductor manufacturing technology with IBM’s CPU designs.

INNOVATION

DELL TECHNOLLOGIES AGAIN NO. 1 IN X86 SERVERS opened up, making security a major concern than ever before. Organizations not only require to manage the extensive workloads across locations but also equally need to ensure that they’re securing all parts from where the data is coming without a security glitch. Thus, growing importance for security What are the factors that led to the significant growth for Dell Technologies in the market?

We have always been at the forefront in delivering the best technology innovations to our customers. Few notable highlights that helped us to achieve the market share are: End - to- end solutions - Today, we are the only organization in the industry that provides end-to -end solutions to our customers from the edge, to core, to cloud. Customers see us as being that one-stop-shop for all their IT solutions and requirements Differentiated strategy - All of the solutions that we are developing, are resonating well with our customers. Our ready solutions and innovations at the core are some of the offerings that are extremely differentiate from what anyone else is doing in the market Go-to market strategy - The trust that our partners and customers instill in us is a reflection of our successful market strategy. We are closely working with our channel partners and enabling them with working capital solution, so that they provide value proposition to our customers in current times What are some of the key trends that you can forecast in the upcoming months?

Accelerated digital transformation - To stay competitive, businesses will need to modernize and automate their systems to ensure that they are able to manage the workloads, both the traditional and new-age ones Workforce transformation - Organizations would have to provide their employees the same application and access to products/solutions that they were having in office Security Transformation - Businesses would need to have security at the core of IT infrastructure rather than the periphery. Approach to security should be proactive

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Manish Gupta, Senior Director & General Manager, Infrastructure Solutions Group, Dell Technologies India Q1 2020 has been remarkable for Dell Technologies’ server business. Highlight from which all segments you have witnessed maximum traction, and did you also witness interest from SMBs? I am happy to share that the year 2020 started fairly on a good note for us. As per IDC Q1 2020 India Server Industry report, we was ranked as No. 1 in the x86 server segment with 36% revenue share. Number of units we shipped were more than what our next two competitors shipped. I believe that our leadership in this segment is a testimony to our holistic server portfolio that resonated well with our customers in India, including SMBs. Our wins from verticals like professional services, financial institutions, high-tech semiconductor manufacturing companies, and telecommunication vendors helped us secure the top spot.

How do you see market situation spanning over the period of time? Does the same imply for SMBs? The current situation has forced all enterprises,

be it large or small, to innovate and adapt themselves. It has made them realize that technology advancement is the only catalyst that will help them sail through this present latitude. Few upcoming trends that we can witness are: > Since, businesses cannot have physical connect with their customers, they are trying to deploy new channels of engagement. But, this is only possible when they have entire backend and front-end digitally connected. Organizations have realized the benefits of a digital-first approach and therefore, we are seeing increase in digital adoption across segments Present situation has also forced majority of the workforce to operate from home. This big change has necessitated new architectures and infrastructure to be deployed by organizations so that employees get the same level of granular access to data when working from home. Hence, we are seeing workforce transformation at large Employees are now working from different places and due to this, the number of ports have

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GUEST ARTICLE

As banks give consideration to segment propositions and product features, they should take into account the winners and losers in payments. The consumer is increasingly comfortable with formless, tokenized, contactless transactions, as bricks and mortar and travel have lost out to online and stay at home. Speed remains important as does the current account, so faster payment systems (FPS) and BACS are still strong. We believe that cash has become less popular as a result of Covidfriendlier alternatives. Credit cards and facilities should also be concerned about the adoption and penetration of point of sale credit and BNPL into the mainstream financial behavior of the online shopper. Ultimately, any sharp customer proposition should bear in mind that the consumer and merchant have changed, or at the very least have adopted new ways of paying tactically and quickly.

Losers • Bad news might travel fast, but FX, leisure, hospitality and travel-related card businesses won’t The impact of lockdown has had a detrimental effect on personal and business travel, with the airlines and tourism industry particularly bearing the brunt. The outlook for recovery doesn’t look positive; with many airlines now fighting bankruptcy and the International Air Transport Association having forecasted that 2019 passenger demand levels will not be exceeded until 2023.

It is no surprise that COVID-19 pressures have had severe repercussions for foreign exchange (FX) transactions, and revenues and profits for card and payments providers, and those that focus on the travel industry therein. Back in March, WEX Inc. announced it had cut its Q1 revenue outlook and then in May backed out of a $1.7 billion acquisition of two UK-based travel payment businesses.

So, what should these companies do? Just as we’ve seen airlines such as Ryan Air providing credit vouchers rather refunds (a move we’re also seeing by London restaurants), perhaps struggling financial providers in this space can look to similar incentives.

• Cash comes with a health warning ….

Literally!

The cash supply chain has slowed down dramatically since the coronavirus crisis took hold, with reports of cash going without the green for an average of 44 days. While cash is not proven to carry coronavirus, financial and retail industry bodies certainly encouraged contactless use by increasing the limit on contactless spending from £30 to £45, just in case. It certainly helped,

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because at the end of April cash use had reportedly declined by 60 percent in the UK. Last month, Barclays then reported that 90 per cent of face-toface transactions were now made using contactless payments.

• Businesses aren’t so cash friendly either Businesses heavily reliant on cash such as the food, hospitality and trade industries are likely to be getting their revenue through a higher proportion of card transactions as a result of COVID-19 cash phobia. Indeed, at the start of the UK lockdown, ATM transaction volumes fell as much as 62 per cent year on year, according to data from Link, the UK’s cash machine network.12 As a knock-on effect of contactless payments, these businesses are probably incurring fees and some delay in accessing funds.

Meanwhile, for those businesses already reliant on card and contactless payments, such as online businesses, the increased credit risk may push up capital and collateral requirements from acquirers.

Also, not so cash friendly, are fraudsters. With

new security checks such as strong customer authentication (SCA) being delayed until March 2021, and Confirmation of Payee (CoP) until the 30th June 2020, fraud is being touted as the ‘hidden cost of coronavirus.’13 From the end of February to the end of March, financial crime rose by 667 percent cent and in the past two months, more than 2,200 people have fallen victim to coronavirus-related scams.

• Plastic is not fantastic There was already a perception that credit cards were not as popular with younger generations as they used to be. For millennials and Gen Z, debit, digital wallets16 and buy now pay later (BNPL) schemes like Klarna are gaining prominence.

Since the COVID-19 lockdown took hold, almost a quarter of 18 to 24-year-olds (23 percent) have been using BNPL to fund purchases.

For those who do hold a credit card however, April’s lockdown was an opportune time to pay off debts and loans, with the news that consumers collectively reduced UK credit card debt by

GUEST ARTICLE

COVID 19: WINERS AND LOSERS IN PAYMENT The coronavirus pandemic has demonstrated just how vulnerable our business and financial services landscape is, with the world now preparing for its first recession triggered solely by a pandemic since 1870. We know that business recovery will be slow and could continue to be painful for many, and so financial institutions must make payments as seamless as possible to facilitate circulation – and remain relevant. This will be a war, and in every war, there is always something to gain and something to lose. £5 billion, more than double the previous record net repayment of £2.4 billion set a month earlier. It seems that ‘transactors’ will form a larger percentage total of credit spend in 2020 as a result of these consumers refocusing and reducing their spending habits.

Although it is fair to expect less credit card use for the remainder of 2020 given the long-term impacts of COVID-19 and payment holidays on loans and mortgages, we might see a higher number of account holders with revolving balances, persistent debt and eventual defaults.

Banks, loan providers and credit card companies may have to devise more flexible and affordable repayment plans to get customers back on track.

Winners • E-commerce is booming (unsurprisingly) For card networks, acquirers and banks, there has been a significant increase in online spending which has helped to offset the impact of the decline in lucrative FX. However, there have been sharp falls in point of sale transactions and therefore a net reduction in payment volumes.

A report by Visa has found that nine in ten consumers (89 percent) have used online shopping since the UK’s lockdown restrictions came into force, that 31 percent have used e-commerce to purchase something for the first time, and a whopping 74 percent will make it a permanent habit after lockdown lifts.19 Further bad news for UK high streets.

• As is contactless (obviously) Like online transactions, contactless payments have also had a good spell, with a 44 percent increase in tap-and- pay transactions since the week of 23 March. Sixty-two percent of consumers over the age of 65 are now using contactless methods (as well as record numbers moving to online banking).This will have been partly driven by

contactless spending limits being increased on 1st April, and aforementioned fears of virus spreading from banknotes.

The tokenized ‘Pays’ have also been positioned to do well. The customer experience is straightforward, the qualities of contactless are augmented by additional features, and the position of the phone as man’s new best friend is unchallenged.

We expect the strength of contactless to continue as lockdown eases, taking transactions away from cash and traditional chip and pin payments.

As time goes on, it will be harder for businesses to justify not accepting card payments or upholding a minimum payment threshold. 7.4 million People are already living cashless in the UK already, just another 59.2 million to go.

• Digital wallets, in-app purchases and tokenized payment services could be in their heyday In a health crisis where convenience, safety and speed are of utmost importance, is it any surprise that digital payments providers and services such as ‘click to pay’ and tokenized card payments are having a successful time of it? Food delivery businesses with in-app purchase systems such as Uber Eats and Deliveroo have not only been able to continue through lockdown but thrived off their commissions.23 Meanwhile, Visa Token has been gaining significant traction in the US, and reduced fraud rates by 26 percent.

Crypto payment providers are also having their moment. Wirex, a UK crypto-mobile payments platform, reportedly gained 60,000 new customers at the start of the COVID-19 outbreak;25 and down under, Centrapay, a digital asset integrator, signed agreements with Coca-Cola Amatil to help facilitate cryptocurrency payments from vending machines using QR-scanning.26 Although not crypto-friendly yet, Paypal are similarly going down the QR-route to drive trans-

actions during COVID-19.27 In April, the fintech reportedly saw a 22 percent increase in processed payments year-over-year and then on May 1st alone broke Black Friday and Cyber Monday records.28 It’s clear that it pays to have good UX! • A rise in point-of-sale credit and BNPL What’s not to like about a card-free, ‘interest-free’, smooth point-of-sale credit purchase? Well, 7.85 million US Klarna users seem to agree with the principle; and retailer signups have risen by 20 percent in the UK over the last two months.29 BNPL schemes like Klarna and ClearPay are reportedly growing at 39 percent a year and are set to double their market share by 2023; growing twice as quickly as bank transfers and more than three times the rate of annual growth of digital wallets.

• Faster payments and BACS As speed of payment has become more important, the volume of government disbursements increased, and more consumers and businesses chose to settle bills online, the average daily value of Faster Payments transactions in the UK rose by over 10 percent from Q4 2019 to the end of Q1 2020.31 With BACS, which is slower and often less expensive than FPS, daily transaction values have marginally increased in the same period.

• Cheques are not dead yet While cheques are considered an old-fashioned payment method (well, over 361 years, to be exact) some banks have seen a resurgence in the number of cheques being digitally deposited during lockdown. Back in April, HSBC UK reported an increase of 30 percent.32 Their days might still be numbered (the Bank of England reported a steady decline in cheque daily transaction values from 2019 to the end of Q1 2020)33, consumers appear to still appreciate a variety of payment methods.

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PARTNER CORNER

KRISHNA SAI, CTO, EMBEE SOFTWARE PVT. LTD.

VirtuaPlace is specifically designed for businesses that found themselves unprepared and scrambled to adopt various technologies to keep the ball rolling during the nationwide lockdown. Since the remote work scenario is here to stay even beyond the pandemic situation, providing seamless teamwork, collaboration, data security and more at controlled prices was the motto behind launching VirtuaPlace. Embee has been a partner of Microsoft India for more than 30 years and has empowered 2500+ organizations of all sizes with customized digital solutions.

Embee has one of the largest cloud consumption and adoption portfolios in India. They have more than 2 million entitlements in Microsoft 365 and enjoyed 70% growth in Microsoft 365 business in FY’19.

With VirtuaPlace, Embee focuses on offering best technical solutions to the customers required to make workflow for their business operations smooth and secure and empower employees to do their jobs in challenging work environments.

Most importantly, with VirtuaPlace, Embee is focusing not just on smooth on-boarding but also on ensuring customer adoption of the new

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EMBEE SOFTWARE LAUNCHES VIRTUAPLACE FOR SMBS Embee Software launches VirtuaPlace for helping Indian SMBs maintain business continuity and embark on their cloud adoption journey. Curated for bringing efficiency and security in the remoteworkplace scenarios, the platform runs on Microsoft Azure and brings together offerings across Azure, Microsoft 365, Octane HRMS, SAP Business One, and Windows Virtual Desktop. technologies on a foundation of successful digital transformation. Testimony to which is Embee’s role in the Microsoft Teams for Education program in which Embee onboarded 200+ schools to utilize Teams as a remote learning tool during the Covid-19 pandemic.

“With the solution, schools have found themselves equipped with a digital platform to ensure continuity in learning. The swift implementation, taking as little as 3-days per school, establishes Embee’s credentials to empower organizations digitally. We are looking to replicate this success with VirtuaPlace across the country,” says Krishna Sai, CTO, Embee Software Pvt. Ltd. “This COVID-19 adversity can inspire organizations to rethink their digital strategy and adopt the offerings to transform their businesses. VirtuaPlace is designed to empower small medium businesses and enterprises with business continuity, robust security, and productivity while

scaling their operations at reasonable costs. Businesses can choose from a variety of solutions and services, curated to their needs, at an attractive monthly subscription. Embee is eager to be the partner in growth for organizations in the digital age,” says Sudhir Kothari, MD & CEO Embee Software Pvt. Ltd. Venkat Krishnan, Executive Director, Commercial Partners, Microsoft India said, “Small and medium businesses form the economic backbone of our country. Bringing together the power of the Microsoft cloud and other offerings in a secure and scalable environment, VirtuaPlace by Embee can helps SMBs transform digitally and be futureready in a world of remote everything.”

Apart from creating a virtual place for business to overcome remote working challenges, Embee offers a secure environment and advanced threat protection to its partners so that they can adapt to remote work environments, more smoothly.

PARTNER CORNER

SAS & CSM TECHNOLOGIES ENABLE GOVERNMENT OF ODISHA TO COMBAT THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC WITH ANALYTICS The Odisha State COVID-19 Dashboard offers insights on the state’s performance in combating the pandemic and planning ahead Life-threating pandemics create extraordinary challenges for governments, and health care systems. SAS, a global leader in analytics, works with government organizations across the globe to respond to COVID-19’s unique challenges by putting data to work and supporting evidence based policy making & governance.

SAS India, along with its partner CSM Technologies has associated with the Government of Odisha for its COVID-19 Dashboard project.

The dynamic data visualization dashboard offers the most recent statistics on Odisha’s COVID-19 performance across several KPIs through interactive charts, graphs, diagrams and much more. It has drill-down capabilities to depict the status, location, demographics, spread and trend analysis of cases at the most granular level across the state.

In addition to such rich visualization capabilities, the platform also supports advanced analytical and modelling tools that have helped the Government of Odisha to plan for the future.

This includes estimating the infection risk profile and susceptible population of geographic regions.

Collaborating closely with the government authorities, a medical infrastructure simula-

tion was also done by analyzing the data on the number of patients, potential increase of the disease, and existing bed capacities & ventilator readiness at district levels. These insights have been enabling the state to strategically allocate funds and resources to the districts basis their requirements including increasing bed capacities and providing additional medical personnel The collaborative effort between SAS & CSM has also helped the government with simulation analysis, which provides insights on the impact of the different lockdown situations as well as migrant influx on the infection rate, thereby assessing the best- and worst-case scenarios. The Government of Odisha has shown digital leadership in factoring such simulation output to decide on extent of lockdown and achieve balance of public safety & economic activity “Odisha is pushing the frontiers of digital transformation by investing in emerging technologies such as big data and advanced analytics. We looked at COVID-19 as an opportunity to leverage data to take proactive decisions and remain one step ahead in our war against the pandemic. And that marked the genesis of the

KUNAL AMAN HEAD OF MARKETING & COMMUNICATIONS - SAS INDIA & JAPAN

Odisha COVID-19 dashboard which is accepted today as the single version of truth for citizens and administrators alike,” said Manoj Kumar Mishra, Secretary, Electronics & Information Technology Department, Government of Odisha “The key to containing the COVID-19 pandemic is to harness and analyse related data and offer actionable insights. By offering SAS COVID-19 Outbreak Management Solution to the Government of Odisha, we reiterate our commitment to help governments and organizations globally to help save lives and contain the pandemic by leveraging the power of analytics” said Noshin Kagalwalla, VP & Managing Director, SAS India.

“The success of data analytics largely depends on the quality of data captured across user journeys. We have effectively leveraged the SAS platform to integrate, clean and harmonize data, and produce state of the art visualizations and modelling for prudent data interpretation”, said Priyadarshi Nanu Pany, CEO & Founder, CSM Technologies.

SAS’ dedicated COVID-19 Data Analytics Resources Hub, a public dashboard to monitor the spread of the epidemic, a data discovery environment built on SAS® Viya®, and access to free training.

SME CHANNELS 19 AUGUST 2020

COVER STORY

CHANNEL TO REIMAGINE STRATEGY AND INVEST IN RESKILLING Recently concluded Covid1- Superhero Technology Summit and Awards for Channel turned out to be a melting pot for information and practice exchange by the leaders of Indian IT industry

BY SANJAY MOHAPATRA sanjay@smechannels.com

T

his year and this season for the Indian IT market has not been that great. There is a clear slump in the market demand due to onset of Covid-19 Pandemic. India is dependent upon the global market growth therefore if no market is doing good then India depending upon the domestic demand cannot thrive. This is known to all that the domestic market is not that mature for IT rather it is growing. Therefore, the partner

20 SME CHANNELS AUGUST 2020

communities need to reimagine their product strategy and develop new practices. The pandemic is not affecting health but the crumbling the economy of the partners too as the China – India relation has gone to a new low. India has called for ‘Make in India and Atmanirbhar Bharat.” There is a resentment among the consumers about Chinese make products too.

The survival mantra for the partners is to adopt software and services on top of focussing on the

solution business. Till date maximum number of partners were dependent upon the hardware centric business and those who were doing software business were only dabbling with packaged software having no scope of creating their own value addition.

Covid-19 has of course done a good thing to the industry that it has pressurised the enterprises to quickly move to cloud computing and software driving architecture. At the same time the partners

COVER STORY

need to also move their business aligning with the customers. They must move to cloud business, collaboration business, security and applications in SaaS. In addition to this if they can do their own application will yield them good growth.

We have enough software companies and enough application companies who can support them with new applications and new technologies.

As per Lata Singh, Executive Director, IBM Partner Ecosystem & CSI, the lines are getting blurred between the partners, OEMs and customers, because the way the organizations have evolved and changed over a period of time, customers are becoming partners for some activities.

This is happening owing to the evolution of the technology – especially when there is a migration to cloud from on prem. There service needs of the customers becoming paramount and contribution is coming from all quarters. And the straightline partnership it is becoming multifaceted.

She said that that the data is becoming critical for the industry. It has to be analysed wit AI and given for the action. What IT companies are expected of is that they should built those insights for the companies. This is where the cloud, cognitive and data comes in. How are we addressing these opportunities that where we are looking at the partners creating capability and they are thinking of what solutions they can offer to the customers. It is a two-way discussion happening now – what is the immediate need of the customers and what kind of modelling can be done and how to deliver that. That is where the entire cloud, data and AI story fits in. After that comes scalability where IBM fits in and IBM is working on business AI side. They are looking at predictability, business processes and AI for ITOps. Partners need to look at how they can incorporate it into their it services when going to address the client needs. That is where lies big focus for IBM. Depending upon the level of your IT services, you will be in your journey of providing services to the customers. Therefore, the partners need to look at adopt requisite data skills and scaling them on the cloud.

She added that we all are forced to go to cloud due to the pandemic but not let us not forget about on-prem and hybrid cloud model. Underline of these lies the security. While we are talking about application, data and AI, the security is key of it.

Every partner is in a journey of evolution. The distribution partners are also changing the model they are driving. All of them are cloud service provider as well – event cloud aggregator – who would have thought about it. They are remodel-

LATA SINGH, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, IBM PARTNER ECOSYSTEM & CSI.

“THE LINES ARE GETTING BLURRED BETWEEN THE PARTNERS, OEMS AND CUSTOMERS, BECAUSE THE WAY THE ORGANIZATIONS HAVE EVOLVED AND CHANGED OVER A PERIOD OF TIME, CUSTOMERS ARE BECOMING PARTNERS FOR SOME ACTIVITIES.” ling their own organization. They are in contestant need of how to help their partners. The legacy service providers are also changing and thinking of building capability of even managed services.

They have also created teams well in advance on data.

Neeraj Bhatia, Director, Commercial Sales, Red Hat India added, “Massive transformation is happening all across us in the partner world and our go to market model is also transforming. A very essential part of any consumer to engage with technology is the channel that brings to them.

There was a time when the partners were basically resellers but now, they have evolved a lot.

The more the partner landscape evolves, it is more engaging and more invested. Partners of today are service providers. They are able to identify the of their customers and identify the right technology that can solve the need of the customers and deliver it. So we are looking at the partners who can learn and evolve with us using the open source technology that we bring, understand the customer journey and participate in that.”

As per him, Open source commands US$ 80 billion market and there is huge scope for everybody. We enable our customers and partners to consumer open source in a scalable and secure model with no vendor lock in and architectural control that remain with the customers.

Neeraj maintained, “Open source software is

about community, businesses and users. They enhance it as they use it. If you see the buzz word in the IT world, whether it is cloud, automation, microservices, etc. are coming out of open source.

It gives responsibility back to the users and to the developers and anybody participating in the open source to release the source code, knowledge, and experience back to the community so that the users can benefit. The opportunities are immense starting from cloud, to automation to Kubernetes and containers, etc., every technology base is open source.”

Neeraj concludes, “From a partnering point of view, Red Hat makes sure that partners use the Red Hat technologies in their services framework and take that framework to their customers. We enable our partners to retain and transform their customers, onboard new customers and make sure that in the whole journey they retain their people.”

“The technologies that Red Hat have will help the partners and their associates can learn and grow and can go from being a PC support engineer to a cloud engineers or a developed working on C++ to deploying applications in container platform.

Anil Sethi, VP & GM, Channels, Dell Technologies, says, “Every challenge comes with opportunity. Part of the economy is functional though work from home, telemedicine, online shopping, etc. But, the question comes how fast that is going to change. Sustainability is important.

SME CHANNELS 21 AUGUST 2020

COVER STORY

NEERAJ BHATIA, DIRECTOR, COMMERCIAL SALES, RED HAT INDIA.

“FROM A PARTNERING POINT OF VIEW, RED HAT MAKES SURE THAT PARTNERS USE THE RED HAT TECHNOLOGIES IN THEIR SERVICES FRAMEWORK AND TAKE THAT FRAMEWORK TO THEIR CUSTOMERS. WE ENABLE OUR PARTNERS TO RETAIN AND TRANSFORM THEIR CUSTOMERS, ONBOARD NEW CUSTOMERS AND MAKE SURE THAT IN THE WHOLE JOURNEY THEY RETAIN THEIR PEOPLE.”

ANIL SETHI, VP & GM, CHANNELS, DELL TECHNOLOGIES.

“SKILLING IS VERY IMPORTANT. WE ARE INTO SUCH A BUSINESS WHERE CONTINUOUS SKILLING IS ASK OF THE TIME. SECURITY IS A VERY BIG AREA. THERE IS AN INERTIA AMONG THE PARTNERS ABOUT RESKILLING, WHICH THEY NEED TO CHANGE SOON.” One trend I am seeing is that the bigger companies are becoming better. The gap between top and bottom of the economic stake holders. Top companies are becoming much bigger and better. It is reflecting upon our partner business also as our large partners are continuing to do better but what is important is that how our up-country partners come up in the business and sustain this time.

There are multiple things happening due to the unprecedented situation and cash crunch is one

22 SME CHANNELS AUGUST 2020

of those.”

He added, “After four months of Covid, I cannot see the business declines more than 20-25 per cent. It has been tough, and people are not used to it but good part is that it is bringing savings on some costs to the company. It is now reimagining of marketing. The marketeers need to see when the people are with mask, it is not only a protection from virus, but it is the change of your look. That is exactly applicable to our sales; and

also applicable to the way of our dealing with our customers. IT is an enabler of business therefore it is important to see how other business are also impacting. To me we would be out of the situation

by October – November.”

As per Anil, BFSI are growing faster in this situation and transforming with shifting their workloads to cloud. It is a testament of edge to cloud story. Healthcare is going to come up in a big way. That is an area where we need to focus on, so also education. Government is putting a lot of efforts on the education apart from thousands of private education institutes transforming towards excellence. Apart from this ITeS is a sector which is growing continuously.

From the technology point of view cloud is the biggest. For Dell Technologies along with VMWare is the strongest story. VMWare on cloud is very strong product, which is a huge opportunity for the partner. But skilling is very important.

We are into such a business where continuous skilling is ask of the time. Security is a very big area. There is an inertia among the partners about reskilling, which they need to change soon.

Anil concluded: Dell Technologies also extended its finance to the partners part of its stimulus package. The company is also helping the partners towards faster closers of the deals.

Dell Technologies did not have any issue in terms of lead pipeline, but the issue was about how soon the deals can be closed. So the focus of the company is around fast tracking the closer of the existing leads and for the new leads that are coming, the company is focusing on how to enhance interaction and bring to a logical conclusion.

SME CHAT

FILIP COTFAS, CHANNEL MANAGER, COSOSYS

COSOSYS: WORKING ON STRENGTHENING ITS CHANNEL PARTNER PROGRAM In the current WFH scenario, every technology vendor is supporting the partners and CoSoSys is no different. It has not only added training to its programme but also webinars and other programs too.

SME Channels spoke to Filip Cotfas, Channel Manager, CoSoSys to understand the strategy.

How is the current status of WFH impacting Businesses?

The WFH policy has been challenging all types of businesses. Companies have a harder time to have an overview of employees since they work from their homes. They also need to implement extra security measures, in order to keep their sensitive data safe.

How to simplify the current security landscape?

Working remotely, especially for organizations with no solid remote work plans in place, will mean that data will become more vulnerable.

Tools like Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solutions applied at the endpoint level can support remote compliance through their focus on special categories of data protected by data-protection legislation.

How important is DLP in the Covid19 situation?

Along with the WFH policy, the number of

security threats is rising, putting business’s data in danger. With a Data Loss Prevention solution in place, companies can monitor and control the transfer and use of personal information remotely, ensuring that it is not sent outside the company or uploaded to unauthorized third party services.

“WITH A DATA LOSS PREVENTION SOLUTION IN PLACE, COMPANIES CAN MONITOR AND CONTROL THE TRANSFER AND USE OF PERSONAL INFORMATION REMOTELY.”

Any specific solutions you have launched for the covid19 situation?

During the Covid19 situation, our company kept informing and educating customers and partners on how to deal with the new reality of WFH and remote users.

for the WFH scenario. It included training sessions and webinars with the channel partners on a daily basis.

Brief us on the Channel partner support in given times. How is the customer support during this period?

Our company has strengthened its Channel Partner Program, educating all partners with the right guidance to accelerate the adoption of a data protection strategy that works from enterprises

Any message to the partners to build a sustainable business using CoSoSys solution?

We are very channel focused in India, seeking to establish an understanding of why DLP solutions are business-relevant and should be a priority, through our channel programs, webinars and training sessions.

SME CHANNELS 23 AUGUST 2020

SME CHAT

SHANTARAM SHINDE, NATIONAL HEAD CHANNEL BUSINESS, NTT- NETMAGIC

THE FUTURE BELONGS TO TECHNOLOGIES SUCH AS AI, AUTOMATION AND IOT, ETC. If the pandemic as brought in a lot of adversity to the market, it has turned out to be a boon for many market segments and technology – specially for cloud and digital transformation. SME Channels spoke to Shantaram Shinde, National Head - Channel Business, NTT- Netmagic to understand his perspective for the partners fraternity.

What is the sense of the market from a growth perspective?

The market is quite bullish, and the trend of accelerated growth is expected to continue in the years ahead. While NTT-Netmagic has already been doing very well in terms of growth and witnessed strong performance in 2019/20 fiscal, the pandemic has further boosted the growth. Businesses, especially those in IT and ITES segment, are undergoing cloud-driven transformation and we are witnessing very strong demand from the Tier 2 and Tier 3 markets. We are focused on creating a growth ecosystem for us as well as our partners in the non-metro cities and ensuring better growth and compensation opportunities for them.

by cloud, data storage, network and managed security services. There is a huge demand for solutions related to digital communications and remote working. At the same time, the global surge in the percentage of people working from home has led to a lot of demand for data security tools and services.

Multi-cloud, AI and IoT technologies are rapidly expanding their markets and we see a high demand for network bandwidth as well. The growth is now being witnessed in almost every industry vertical. The current scenario has pushed even the traditional industries such as construction, transportation etc towards the cloud adoption and automation practices.

What are the verticals and technology driving the growth?

In the current context, the growth is being driven

How is cloud and multi-cloud playing in the situation?

The cloud/multi-cloud market is seeing a sig-

24 SME CHANNELS AUGUST 2020

nificant surge in demand in the post-pandemic world. The previous projections had expected the domestic cloud market in India to cross $7 billion in size by 2022. However, the pandemic has further boosted the demand and cloud as well as cloud-related products, are now being demanded from companies irrespective of their size or industry. Hence, we are confident of the actual growth being even higher than the projections. Multi-cloud adoption is also being expedited in the current scenario. Companies that have their private cloud setup are also looking at acquiring multi-cloud operation of their critical processes and data storage. The likelihood of future disruptions is going to remain high in the foreseeable future. Hence, there is a need to adopt a multi-cloud strategy that enables companies to smoothly operate even during such situations.

NTT-Netmagic is a full stack service provider and

SME CHAT

“WE ENCOURAGE OUR PARTNERS TO DEVELOP THEIR CORE COMPETENCIES BY INVESTING IN AREAS OF EXPERTISE SUCH AS DATA CENTER, NETWORK AND CONNECTIVITY, CLOUD, MANAGED HOSTING, MANAGED SECURITY AND MANAGED SERVICE DOMAINS”

Where do you think channels should invest?

NTT-Netmagic is focused on creating a strong partner ecosystem of self-reliant and value partners. We encourage our partners to develop their core competencies by investing in areas of expertise such as Data Center, Network and Connectivity, Cloud, Managed Hosting, Managed Security and Managed Service domains.

we offer not only cloud hosting, but also various other solutions such as network bandwidth, Security as a Service etc. Our collocation data centers are network independent and give our clients the freedom to choose cloud products from leading service providers such as Google Cloud, AWS and Azure.

What other technologies are driving the future market?

The future belongs to technologies such as AI, automation and IoT etc. The current pandemic has accelerated the demand for automation and

sensor-based technologies that can operate independently. We have created automated 24x7 data security solutions which monitor the systems continuously and proactively raise alerts or take steps to prevent the company’s data and equipment from hacking or phishing attacks. The future market will also be greatly shaped by the sustainability of solutions on offer. We are focusing on using renewable sources of energy in our data centers. We have already commenced work on a 50-MW solar power plant in Solapur, Maharashtra and more such projects will come up in the future.

What does NTT-Netmagic have to offer in the present situation for the partners?

The current situation has expedited the demand for our services ranging from cloud, data centers, network and various managed solutions. We are creating a structure where we link partner compensation with value delivery and not the typical trade margin or structured commission. We are also working towards enabling our partners in providing managed services independently or semi-independently with an aim to increase revenue generation for both.

To achieve this goal, we have envisaged a strong Partner ecosystem that will be capable of serving all the intra-network customers by collaborating and leveraging each other’s core competencies.

From fiscal 2020-/1, we plan to follow a Partner only strategy for the Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities.

SME CHANNELS 25 AUGUST 2020

SME CHAT

PANKAJ LULLA, DIRECTOR, PARTNER ORGANIZATION, CISCO INDIA AND SAARC

DIGITAL JOURNEY BRINGS CHALLENGE AND OPPORTUNITY FOR PARTNERS Covid-19 has changed the market dynamics for sure. It has pushed forth the agenda digital transformation for the enterprise aggressively. This has created opportunity and challenge for the partner ecosystem. Recently appointed, Director, Partner Organization, Cisco India and SAARC, Pankaj Lulla speaks to SME Channels about it.

How is the present market shaping up and what is the new normal?

There are a few trends that are shaping the new normal, influenced by changing consumer behaviors. First, as consumers become more conscious of their health and safety, every business will need to create a promise around health to gain back their customers’ trust. Next, the post-COVID world will also see the emergence of disruptive business models, as organizations try to pivot their portfolios in preparation for the new normal. And finally, the pandemic has accelerated digital transformation journeys by several years, and technology is quickly becoming essential to everything we do.

This is where the challenge and opportunity lie for partners. As they work towards catering to new markets and digital consumers, they need to accelerate the automation of their operations to reduce costs and optimize their supply chains.

They also need to reimagine their own business models to accommodate the rising demand for managed services and everything-as-a-service.

As our customers prepare to start operations post-COVID, Cisco, along with our partners, is well-positioned to help them navigate the new world. We make the technologies that power

26 SME CHANNELS AUGUST 2020

remote productivity, and we have a global scale through our partners to effect change Which are the sectors driving growth for the technology providers?

Digitization is no longer a choice; it is an imperative. During the pandemic, many industries witnessed accelerated digitization of existing processes, and are now switching to new ways of doing business and delivering services.

The preference for digital alternatives is rising in healthcare, education, BFSI, e-governance, shopping, events, entertainment, etc., as well as remote working. As a result, the demand for cloud-delivered, simplified collaboration, and security technologies is also increasing tremendously. For instance, Cisco Webex hosted over 15.8 million meetings in July, the highest volume since April – indicating that this trend is here to stay.

Additionally, small businesses in India are accelerating their digitization journeys to pivot quickly, plug gaps, and create a gamut of differentiated offerings for the newly digital consumer as well as a level playing field.

Lastly, given the extent to which the pandemic has disrupted global supply chains, the focus is

shifting to fortifying local supply chains that allow a greater degree of agility and resilience.

All these changes present a massive opportunity for technology providers to cater to shifting consumer behaviors and new business models.

Which technologies are going to drive the market?

Telehealth, e-learning, e-governance, online shopping, remote working, etc. are not new concepts, but the adoption and demand they are witnessing today are unprecedented. With new digital consumer behaviors and business models taking firm hold, the focus will shift from mere enablement to streamlining the hurdles of digital experiences and making them far more interactive, intelligent, and “human” than ever before. Here, emerging technologies like AI/ML, robotics, data analytics, and cybersecurity will become critical.

The use cases of these technologies extend far beyond citizen services to powering smart agriculture, smart cities, industrial automation, and more. They are key to leading India to its next phase of sustainable and balanced economic growth. In enabling this low-touch ecosystem and the new digital practices it will bring, networking technologies like 5G and WiFi-6 will also become crucial.

SME CHAT

the Practice Development program. This involves understanding the ecosystem within which they are operating to create solutions that they can take to the marketplace.

Another important part of enhancing our partners’ capabilities is assisting them in building their CX practice. We have been working with them to fine-tune their CX practices and become CX specialized. The CX specialization for partners mirrors the capabilities of Cisco in terms of structure, process, and tools. Some of the updated CX portfolio includes BCS 3.0, Solution Support, Software Support, Cisco Managed Services.

What kind of financial support is Cisco offering to the partners?

Many of our partners are currently facing a slowdown in their cashflows and business. Through Cisco Capital, we hope to ease their financial burden by providing a broad range of flexible payment solutions to customers, allowing partners to receive payments on time.

How is Cisco supporting partners through the pandemic?

Over the last several months, our priority has been to support our partners through these unprecedented times. To make their transition to remote working easy and seamless, we have enabled free access to cloud-based offerings across our security and collaboration portfolios.

We have been focusing on delivering on our mantra of “Perform and Transform”, which is about helping partners achieve their daily business goals while working towards capitalizing on new opportunities emerging today.

Many of our partners are currently facing a slowdown in their cashflows and business.

Through Cisco Capital, we hope to ease their financial burden by providing a broad range of flexible payment solutions to customers, allowing partners to receive payments on time. We have engaged with more than 400 partners over 150+ Cisco-led enablement collaboration sessions across India and the SAARC nations. We have assisted our partner in creating offerings for secure work from home with our Webex and security platforms. Moreover, together with our partners, we have enabled our customers to migrate to remote work models quickly and securely.

We have also reassured our partners that their Cisco certifications, specializations, and autho-

rizations will not be impacted during this time, even if they are unable to complete their training or take exams.

As there is a visible technology shift in the market, how is Cisco focussing on the training and skilling of the partners?

Partners need to build new skill sets to make themselves relevant to their customers in the current times. Our partner programs are aimed at three key areas – recognizing strengths, refreshing to digital, and moving to lifecycle and recurring revenue.

The Cisco Black Belt program is a simplified enablement framework to help partner sales representatives and engineers understand Cisco’s competitive advantage and how our solutions stand against the competition. It is delivered in a virtual environment to provide scale, agility, and is on-demand for a self-paced experience. India currently has the highest adoption of the Black Belt program.

Similarly, the “X-sell” program arms partners with improved knowledge and skills through sales development practice and training in the partner’s region to help them create, lead, and drive sales.

We are also working with our partners to pair their capabilities with our architecture through

Enumerate the top 3 technologies that partners need to focus on and why?

In this new decade, especially post-COVID, technology will be core to everything we do, consume, innovate, and build. This spells tremendous promise for new and renewed growth for partners. However, to tap into these growth areas, partners must look at digitizing their operations and supply chains to reduce costs and improve efficiencies, for which robotics, AI/ML, and data analytics will be essential.

Next, as consumers become increasingly dispersed, distributed, and digital, partners need to foster new skillsets to remain relevant. They must also look at pivoting their business models and building capabilities in managed services, everything-as-a-service, adoption services, and custom-developed apps, which necessitates investing in robust cloud and networking infrastructure.

Lastly, in the new low-touch/no-touch economy that the pandemic is shaping, cybersecurity must be at the forefront to ensure the success of remote environments. Partners must, therefore, look at deploying cybersecurity protocols to safeguard their own assets and employees and support their customers in doing the same.

Our efforts over the last few years have been focused on enabling our partners to develop digital solutions that offer an enhanced customer experienced, and we are well-positioned to help them capture the opportunities of the next normal.

SME CHANNELS 27 AUGUST 2020

CASE STUDY

108 AMBULANCES IMPROVED THEIR PRODUCTIVITY WITH MATRIX TIME-ATTENDANCE SOLUTION Controller for Time-Attendance Application Product: COSEC CENTRA ME Quantity: 1 Description: Application Server Platform with 500 Users and Expandable up to 1,000 Users Product: COSEC ME TAM Quantity: 1 Description: Time-Attendance Software Product: COSEC USER1OO Quantity: 3 Description: 100 Users License Application: Time-Attendance Users: 700+ Devices: 144+ Industry: Healthcare Location: Multi locations across Madhya Pradesh

About Matrix

Company Overview Rural communities have struggled for a long time to maintain access to quality health care services.

There is a lack or limited number of clinics in rural areas. Ziqitza Health Care Limited signed to implement “Madhya Pradesh Emergency Medical Ambulance and Healthcare Services� for the government. This mobile clinic would travel in rural areas, covering every small village. These are called Madhya Pradesh Mobile Units (MMU).

Challenges As the ambulance is on move all the time, attendance capturing of doctors and nurses was a problem. Above that, vibrations from a moving vehicle led to difficulty in installation of an attendance marking device. Furthermore, provision of LAN connection not being possible in a moving vehicle, device connectivity posed as another problem. Moreover, keeping track of 144 ambulances all together with their doctors and nurses was a difficult task for the government of Madhya Pradesh.

hya Pradesh Mobile Units) in rural areas. Around 144 devices were installed in the ambulance in a way that they could withstand the vibrations of a moving vehicle. Matrix Time-Attendance solution enabled them to capture accurate attendance of doctors and nurses. These devices also allow keeping track of each of these ambulances having more than 700 users. These products have auto push technology which transfers data to the server in real-time. For real-time data transfer, they used a USB data dongle with 3G/4G connectivity.

Results Improved Efficiency through Real-time Attendance Data

Solution

Product Offered

After comprehensive discussion, Matrix offered flexible and reliable devices and software to the government of Madhya Pradesh for MMU (Mad-

Product: COSEC DOOR FOT Quantity: 144 Description: Fingerprint and Card based Door

28 SME CHANNELS AUGUST 2020

Established in 1991, Matrix is a leader in Security and Telecom solutions for modern businesses and enterprises. As an innovative, technologydriven and customer-focused organization, the company is committed to keeping pace with the revolutions in the Security and Telecom industries. With around 40% of its human resources dedicated to the development of new products, Matrix has launched cutting-edge products like Video Surveillance Systems - Video Management System, Network Video Recorder and IP Camera, Access Control and Time-Attendance systems as well as Telecom solutions such as Unified Communications, IP-PBX, Universal Gateways, VoIP and GSM Gateways and Communication Endpoints. These solutions are feature-rich, reliable and conform to international standards.

Having global footprints in Asia, Europe, North America, South America, and Africa through an extensive network of more than 2,500 channel partners, Matrix ensures that the products serve the needs of its customers faster and longer. Matrix has gained trust and admiration of customers representing the entire spectrum of industries.

Matrix has won many international awards for its innovative products.

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/

REVIEW

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NETGEAR NIGHTHAWK “MK62” AND “MK63”

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NETGEAR Nighthawk Mesh Wi-Fi 6 MK62 and MK63 can meet the needs of the modern connected home. Designed for the tech enthusiast, the new Nighthawk Wi-Fi 6 Mesh System brings the experience of reliable and flexible Wi-Fi coverage with specialized features such as Dynamic QoS, which automatically prioritizes both video streaming and gaming traffic.

FEATURES OF NIGHTHAWK MK62 AND MK63 n Whole Home Wi-Fi — Experience smooth 4K UHD

streaming and reliable Wi-Fi in every room. The system includes one router and two satellites n Latest Wi-Fi 6 Technology — Improved dual-band

BY SANJAY MOHAPATRA info@smechannels.com

D-LINK DCS-9500T Group Temperature Screening Camera Kit can simultaneously scan up to 30 people with a rapid response time within 30 ms, eliminating queues in busy public areas such as office buildings, factories, schools, shopping centers, etc. The DCS-9500T features dual-lens technology for high-quality footage, while 17 viewing modes and intelligent facial recognition allow for accurate, rapid identification. The DCS9500T can precisely distinguish people and raise an alarm when someone has an elevated temperature. Body temperature can be measured to an accuracy of ±0.3°C with a sensitivity of 40mK. The total solution includes the thermal camera and blackbody, providing higher accuracy results and fewer false alarms. The DCS-9500T also comes with free management software that allows for remote management, device configuration, and data analysis across multiple sites.

FEATURES: n Scan up to 30 people with a rapid response

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technology designed for faster, more reliable connections that can handle 25 or more devices for smoother streaming and connection capacity

time within 30 ms.

n Super-fast Wi-Fi — Combined speeds up to

Eliminating queues in busy public areas.

Dual-lens technology for high-quality footage.

Can distinguish people and raise an alarm.

Body temperature can be measured to an accuracy of ±0.3°C with a sensitivity of 40mK.

1.8Gbps to keep up with your family’s streaming, gaming, and smart home needs n Works with Existing Wi-Fi Devices — Backwards

compatible with 802.11a/b/g/n/ac client devices (Wi-Fi 5 and below) n Reliable Coverage — Enjoy strong Wi-Fi throughout homes up to 3,000 (for MK62) and 4,500 sq.ft (for MK63) which is perfect for medium-sized homes. n Expandable — Add satellites to expand coverage

even further. This mesh Wi-Fi system supports Wi-FiEasyMesh™ for compatibility n Single Wi-Fi Name and Password — Single

network name provides seamless room-to-room roaming throughout your home so you can stream without the signal dropping

PRICE: ON REQUEST. WARRANTY: ONE YEAR. CONTACT: SALES@IN.DLINK.COM

PRICE: INR 17,499/- and INR 25,999/WARRANTY: ON REQUEST CONTACT: TOLL FREE: 1800 419 4543

SME CHANNELS 29 AUGUST 2020

PRODUCT PRODUCT

MATRIX

MATRIX IP DOME PROJECT SERIES - 5 MP Matrix Project series IP Dome cameras are built specifically for demanding small scale enterprises. These compact cameras are best suited for SOHO and Small to Medium-scale Enterprises. It provides glitch-free performance even under extreme operating temperatures. These IP cameras are designed to provide high definition, crystal clear images and at the same time withstand harsh environmental conditions. Furthermore, the dome IP Cameras are vandalproof, which comes with an unbreakable enclosure (IK10), making it impossible for miscreants to damage it.

Features: • Back Illuminated Sensors for Colorful Image at Low Light • Latest Compression Technique H.265 • Motion Detection, Trip Wire and Intrusion Detection • Capture larger Field of View; Up to 113° FOV • Divides a Single Stream into Multiple Resolutions based on its Importance • Records at Lower Bit-rate during Non-Activity Period.

• Consistent Image at Variable Light Exposure • Allows Streaming and Recording of Critical Areas only from the Entire Image

n Contact: Toll Free -1800-258-7747, E-Mail: inquiry@matrixcomsec.com, https://www.matrixvideosurveillance.com/

CADYCE

CADYCE USB-C KEYBOARD AND DOCKING STATION USB Type- C devices and cables are everywhere these days, and their popularity is reaching new heights in the tech market with each passing day. The CA-KBDS by Cadyce is a USB Type-C keyboard cum docking station that is compatible with ThunderBolt 3 port. We can use this keyboard dock on tablets (like iPad Pro) and Android and iOS smart phones as well.

The keyboard dock gets connected to your computer or tablet with the help of a detachable USB-C cable. The product can be your best travel companion.

30 SME CHANNELS AUGUST 2020

TENDA

TENDA’S WI-FI EXTENDERS Tenda Wi-Fi extenders not only connect with your router wirelessly but also help extends your internet signal into rooms that are Wi-Fi dead zones due to walls, furniture obstructions or general spacing. It’s a separate device that sits between your wireless router and the areas where you require stronger Wi-Fi coverage.Tenda Wi-Fi extenders provide a coverage area of 120 sq. meters and offers up to 300 Mbps data rate. These Wi-Fi extenders have 2 Omni-directional antennas that provide better connectivity. Also, these extenders can work in Repeater/AP mode and have unique features of Intuitive signal LED which helps in identifying the best repeater location by analyzing Wi-Fi signal strength.

Apart from these features, Tenda Wi-Fi extenders hide SSID, extend your existing Wi-Fi network via WPS button and can work in Mix WPA/WPA2 encryption mode. n Availability: Tenda Wi-Fi Extenders are available through authorized partners, e-commerce platforms and other leading surveillance reseller channels across India and come with excellent after-sale/maintenance services. n For further information, please visit, https://www.tendacn.com

Features of CA-KBDS: • The Display 1 VGA Channel supports output of 1920×1080@60Hz • Display 2 HDMI supports the output of 4K@30Hz. • The USB 3.1 Type C Host port supports 10Gbps, which ensures lightning-fast speed.

• The USB 3.1 Type C in Cadyce’s CaKBDS supports PD charging 100W MAX (20V@5A) • The device has a USB 3.0 Type-A port that supports 5Gbps and BC1.2 charging (5V@0.9A).

• The LAN port in Cadyce’s CA-KBDS supports 10/100/1000M. This means that the LAN port supports transfer speeds of 1GB, unlike 10/100M ports, which support a

maximum transfer speed of 100Mb. • The device has an SD3.0 (UHS-I) Card Reader that supports SDXC cards of up to 2 TB and data transfer rates up to 104Mb/S (SD and Micro SD use single-LUN).

• The CA-KBDS contains a 3.5mm audio jack that supports stereo audio output.

The audio jack also supports microphone input. n Availability: www.cadyce.com

RNI NO: DEL ENG/ 2010/ 31962 Postal Reg. No.: DL-SW-1/4145/16-18 Red-Hat_Fortune_fullpage_ad_fs_202008.pdf 1 4/8/20 5:38 PM Licensed to Post without pre-payment U(SW)/19/2017-18

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