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HP enhances its Helion Network Ecosystem

H

P has continued expansion of its HP Helion Network in AsiaPacific and Japan with the addition of a leading community of 50 channel partners, system integrators (SIs), service providers, independent software vendors (ISVs), and developers working with HP to deliver open standards-based hybrid cloud services designed specifically to customer needs.

“The HP Helion Network leverages our expertise from running OpenStack technology at scale and our ability to unite service providers and technology partners who want to drive a transformational journey for themselves and their customers,” said Narayanan Chellappan, Country Director, Cloud Division, HP India.

Google set to launch Android One 2.0 version

A

fter receiving a tepid response for the first Android One phones, Google has refined the strategy towards existing smartphone users, which involves a shift in pricing as well. As a result, it will come up with Android One 2.0 version, to be made by Lava International. The phone will cost about 12,000, almost twice what the first phones were priced at.

Android One was devised as a set of specifications that allowed companies to build cheap devices that run smoothly on the operating system and get direct updates from Google.The latest device has been developed in collaboration with Lava and chipmaker MediaTek on hardware and software.

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HELLO INDIA

Leveraging Technology for better Business T

he recently celebrated Digital India week shows how India is digitally driven and the nation is on the fast track for creating information highway. This sends an important message to the world at large about the strong belief that our Prime Minister Narendra Modi has in technology and social media to deliver governance, be it through mobile phones or a one-stop shop digital delivery of all crucial government services such as the Digital India project. The aforesaid project will further bolster the sector by introducing internet and broadband to the remote corners of the country and increase trade. A rough estimate predicts about Rs.10 lakh crore of investments to be coming to India for the opportunities ahead in manufacturing and smart city initiatives that will eventually create millions of jobs.

The Make-in-India campaign is also likely to help India to take on China, especially in the area of manufacturing of technological products.

The greater adoption of Internet and smartphones has been the biggest driver of e-commerce and this industry continues to evolve and experience high growth. The digital commerce market in India has also grown steadily from $4.4 billion in 2010 to $17 billion in 2014. To complement this growth, e-commerce giants are raising their investments in a very big way with their valuation increasing and the sector hotting up really fast. The question would then be whether these valuations will remain sustainable despite showing no signs of profitability.

Today, e-commerce sites are being used by consumers for convenience rather than for price discounts. It is high time for e-commerce companies to deeply understand the emerging market and customer’s needs and accordingly drive effective marketing strategies.

Furthermore, the growth in internet businesses will also give a big fillip to other related businesses like logistics and payment solutions.

With all positive signs of growth, investors are ready to invest in this emerging India’s internet market, which was valued at Rs.70,000 crore in 2013 and could rise to Rs.8.77 lakh crore by 2020. With the positive wave of investments in the air in India, the Taiwanese technology major Foxconn is exploring investment opportunities here which includes funding start-ups and plans to invest about $20 billion (Rs.1.3 lakh crore) by putting up 12 manufacturing plants in India to make iPhones, a move that will lower the price of the product in the country.

With all good things happening in the country towards the growth of technologies, opportunities for technology companies to focus on the Cloud IT infrastructure spending seem promising. The market for servers, Storage and Ethernet switches will grow by 26.4 per cent in 2015, across all regions and technologies.

Hope this technological capability will up the ante for implementing Goods and Service Tax Network (GSTN) that is touted to be the biggest Indirect Tax Reforms in the economic history.

S. Mohini Ratna Editor, VARINDIA mohini@varindia.com

How is the Indian market positioned globally for F-Secure?

For F-Secure, India is an interesting market because we see lots of development. We are looking to cover all the territories and with lots of interesting projects coming up, we are trying to drive the company in every possible sphere. We are expanding in the tier-II and -III cities by putting additional resources in place across multiple cities. Parallely, we are seeing our distribution network and the channel ecosystem extending. There are also some new technologies coming which we are incorporating in our product line. We have recently launched F-Secure Business Suite Ver. 12 which was first launched in Chennai and will soon move to other cities. This will be a big launch for the Channel where we will have 70 partners on board.

We have also turned to the government sector to be a part of their mission-critical and turnkey projects across the country. On the enterprise front, we are working with the large SIs. So it is a collective strategy we are taking across the Indian market. We also have at present an enhanced technical capability which ensures that we are ready to scale up really fast.

What kind of a relationshi p do you 6

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enjoy with the Channel?

We are a 100% channel-centred company and don’t pick orders directly from customers. We are going to leverage on this, going forward, because this is where we have evolved and are expanding our business. We help them in lead generation and provide them good projects and this is what keeps our relationship going with them in any country.

They rely on us and us being an active partner to them, we cannot think of breaking away from this relationship.

How much does e-commerce have relevance for your business?

E-commerce does not have much relevance for us because we have solutions only for the commercial and enterprise customers and not a consumer-focussed company. Though we are present in the consumer business elsewhere globally, we are completely focussed on enterprise when we talk of India. We cannot possibly take the e-commerce route since we have to give value to our customers, irrespective of the solutions we are selling. They have their criteria and testing environment and they will probably not get the licences just like that. A great deal of dialogues and negotiations take place before you can bring in your customer to your views. In our industry, we do not see

Juha Ollila VP, Channel Development F-Secure Corporation Juha Ollila has been the Vice-President of EMEA Sales, Corporate Business, and works now as the VP of Channel Development with F-Secure Corporation.

He has been the CEO of Sanako Corporation (educational software) and held several senior positions with Digital Equipment Corporation, Compaq and Hewlett-Packard. Ollila is a member of the Board of Directors of a Finnish software company Efecte.

Ollila holds a Master of Science (Technology) from Helsinki University of Techno.

any challenge coming in from e-commerce.

The percentage ofour market share is not very big but we see India as a major potential contributor. n

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“Today’s customer landscape has undergone a paradigm shift” HP has been the preferred choice when it comes to enterprise products for customers. While the high-end market has shrunk over the years, the rise of the mid-range and the SMB segment has boosted HP to deliver what it is best at – products of everyone’s choice. Barun Lala, Director, Storage – HP India, takes time out to share more on this –

Barun Lala Director, Storage HP India

T

he customer buying behavior has undergone a big change. The changing pattern in customer buying can be gauged from the simple fact that the demands for the kind of products and solutions have changed over time. “If we look back 18 months ago, what used to be the case is that we used to design a product and take it to the customer and insist on him buying it. But if I take the same approach today, the customer is not going to entertain us. This is the paradigm shift that has happened,” reiterates Barun Lala, Director – Storage, HP India. Today, it has become such that the customer spells out his requirements and the vendor has to articulate the product and the solution accordingly to meet that requirement.

Barun sees another visible shift when he meets customers. “Earlier, when we used to go and position our products and services, he used to look at the investment of the opportunity, i.e. the upfront money he is going to pay for the landscape. The shift that we are seeing now is that the customer is more bothered about the total cost of ownership for the acquisition, of how much he is saving on power, data center space, whether he can convert his capital expenses into operating expenses and so on. He is, in fact, nailing down various business parameters into his buying decisions. So it is no longer to do with features of the product but more to do with what his environment needs are.

If he feels his data center space is critical, he is going to choose the architecture which requires lesser footprint within the data center,” Barun says while explaining the change.

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Customers today are looking at an infrastructure that has the flexibility of growing both vertically and horizontally, which is typically called scale-out and scale-in.

The Indian market today is divided into three segments – high-end market, mid-range and SMB. A high-end market will typically be in excess of $20,50,000 and above, while anything between $100,000 and $20,50,000 is mid-range and below $100,000 is an SMB. The high-end market in India is shrinking in terms of the customer buying pattern, but the mid-range and the SMB segments are growing. “The high-end market is shrinking at a rate of 23–25 per cent during APJ, which is a sharp double-digit drop. It does not make sense to focus on a segment which is shrinking rapidly. With the launch of various categories of products from HP, we are increasingly getting our market share in these segments. Earlier, while designing a product, we used to demarcate whether the products are having enterprise features or SMB features and hence will cost higher or remarkably lower accordingly. Because the demarcation between SMB and high-end is shrinking, today we can design the same products for both these segments. Everybody wants the same feature set. Customers, in fact, want to know if they can have the product with all the feature sets but at different price points.” A product today will have all the features of an enterprise product but has to be designed in such a way that it is affordable to the SMB. HP is in a position to offer seamless product line across all these three segments and also giving the customer the choice of what he wants to buy at what particular price point. “And that is why HP is able to gain so much mind share from the customers,” he says.

Converged Storage – A Competitive strategy It dates back to 2011-12 when the concept of converged infrastructure first came in. There were 5 pillars to it then – virtualization, resilience, optimization, orchestration and modularity. Today these 5 pillars have become standard. The Converged Infrastructure has now moved to Converged storage, by which specializations have started coming in within the storage landscape. “Earlier the specialization was spread over the infrastructure, but now it is coming to the storage landscape as well. HP is one brand that has pioneered this journey of converged storage and has thereby transformed the storage landscape over the last 2-3 years,” says Barun.

It was in 2011 that HP introduced HP Converged Storage solutions built on modern storage architectures, designed to overcome the limitations of traditional monolithic storage and eliminate storage silos. These solutions were built to address complexity of scale and simplify how storage is delivered, consumed, and managed. Given the fact that the next generation of CIOs and CTOs will be at the center of their organization’s business strategy, HP has designed its Converged storage offerings in a way that it will enable its customers to use technology to deliver business outcomes that will drive their success. n samrita@varindia.com

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CONTENTS Website: Website:www.varindia.com www.varindia.com

Publisher: Publisher:Deepak DeepakKumar KumarSahu Sahu Editor: S Mohini Ratna Editor: S Mohini Ratna Executive ExecutiveEditor: Editor:Dr. Dr.Vijay VijayAnand Anand Assistant AssistantEditor: Editor:Samrita SamritaBaruah Baruah Copy CopyEditor: Editor:C.C.M. M.Dutta Dutta Correspondent: Correspondent:Aparna AparnaMullick Mullick Art ArtDirector: Director:Rakesh RakeshKumar Kumar Network NetworkAdministrator: Administrator:Ashok AshokKumar KumarSingh Singh Manager-IT: Subhash Mohanta Manager-IT: Subhash Mohanta Manager-SEO: Manager-SEO:Bidyadhar BidyadharBehera Behera BUSINESS: BUSINESS: Commercial CommercialManager: Manager:Amit AmitKumar KumarJha Jha Circulation CirculationExecutive: Executive:Manish ManishKumar Kumar Marketing MarketingManager: Manager:Dipendra DipendraKumar Kumar Marketing MarketingManager: Manager:Shubhendu ShubhenduNanda Nanda CORPORATE CORPORATEOFFICE: OFFICE: VAR VARHouse, House,A-84A/3 A-84A/3Rose RoseApartment, Apartment,Paryavaran Paryavaran complex, complex,Ignou IGNOURoad, Road,New NewDelhi Delhi- -110030 110030 Tel: Tel:011-41656383, 011-41656383,46061809 46061809 Email: Email:edit@varindia.com edit@varindia.com Bangalore: Bangalore:Bureau Bureauoffice office Marketing MarketingManager: Manager:S.S.Kamala Kamalakar kar Correspondent: Correspondent:L.L.G.G.Swami Swami D-103 D-103G.F., G.F.,Ashish AshishJK JKApartments Apartments Thubarahalli ThubarahalliExtended ExtendedRoad Road BangaluruBangaluru-560066 560066 Tel: Tel:080-49530399 080-49530399 Mobile:08904205750/9916134482 Mobile:08904205750/9916134482 E-mail: E-mail:kamlakar@varindia.com, kamlakar@varindia.com,swami@varindia.com swami@varindia.com Mumbai: Mumbai:Bureau Bureauoffice office Regional RegionalManager Manager(West): (West):Anil AnilKumar Kumar Sr. Sr.Correspondent: Correspondent:Mamta MamtaS.S. Anurag AnuragResidency, Residency,203 203- -“B� “B�Wing, Wing,Plot PlotNo-5, No-5, Sector-9, Sector-9,Kamothe, Kamothe,Navi NaviMumbai-410 Mumbai-410209 209 Tel: Tel:022-65561292, 022-65561292,Mobile: Mobile:08108017479 08108017479 E-mail: E-mail:anil@varindia.com, anil@varindia.com,mamta@varindia.com mamta@varindia.com Chennai: Chennai:Bureau Bureauoffice office Branch BranchManager: Manager:Parthiban ParthibanKK A2, A2,R.C.Residency, R.C.Residency,Cholambedu CholambeduRoad, Road,Thiruvenkada Thiruvenkada nagar, nagar,Ambathur, Ambathur,Chennai Chennai- -600 600053 053 Mobile: Mobile:098400 09840055626 55626 E-mail: E-mail:parthiban@varindia.com parthiban@varindia.com

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Hyderabad: Hyderabad:Bureau Bureauoffice office Branch BranchManager: Manager:L.G. L.G.Swami Swami Plot PlotNo. No.103, 103,Sagacity SagacityApartments, Apartments,Street StreetNo. No.10 10 Himayat HimayatNagar, Nagar,Hyderabad Hyderabad- -500029 500029 Tel: Tel:040-32989844/ 040-32989844/Cell CellNo. No.08374935692 08374935692 E-mail: E-mail:swami@varindia.com swami@varindia.com Kolkata: Kolkata:Bureau Bureauoffice office Marketing MarketingOfficer: Officer:Sunil SunilKumar Kumar Correspondent: Correspondent:Kiran KiranKumar Kumar New NewKorola, Korola,Near NearAlampur, Alampur,Land LandMark MarkAsian Asian International InternationalSchool, School,Howrah Howrah- -711302 711302 Mobile: Mobile:08100298033, 08100298033,E-mail: E-mail:sunil@varindia.com sunil@varindia.com Printed Printedand andPublished PublishedbybyDeepak DeepakKumar KumarSahu Sahuononbehalf behalfofof M/s.

M/s.Kalinga KalingaDigital DigitalMedia MediaPvt. Pvt.Ltd. Ltd.and andPrinted PrintedatatPushpak Pushpak Press PressPvt. Pvt.Ltd. Ltd.153, 153,DSIDC DSIDCComplex, Complex,Okhla OkhlaIndustrial IndustrialAre Are ,Phase-I, ,Phase-I,New NewDelhi-110020 Delhi-110020and andPublished PublishedatatA-84A/3 A-84A/3Rose Rose Apartment, Paryavaran complex, Ignou Road, New Delhi Apartment, Paryavaran complex, IGNOU Road, New Delhi- 110030, 110030,Editor Editor- -SSMohini MohiniRatna.

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Channel Chief

Working together with Channel – Road ahead for Lenovo Lenovo is among the many companies that has reposed faith and trust in its channel and has grown over the years as a brand influenced by the Channel business. Ashok Nair, National Sales Director, Lenovo, briefs VARINDIA at the conclusion of a recent roadshow at multiple locations in India and the channel restructuring that has taken place in the company

L

enovo has had a good performance last quarter. In this highly-competitive and dynamic market, Lenovo has grown as an end-to-end player that has built upon its scale and efficiency to operate more effectively. Its recent launch of a whole range of enterprise and consumer devices in the region further shows the company’s dedication and resolve to make India a growth engine in the enterprise and consumer technology market.

Talking about the Indian market, around 85% of Lenovo’s enterprise business has a channel influence. The total number of channel partners that Lenovo works with in the country is 1,000.

The Channel at Lenovo has, however, gone through a restructuring recently.

While the earlier channel structure had three major verticals – Consumer, SMB and REL (Relationship), the new structure now has only two verticals – HSB and Commercial.

The new structure has been simplified in which the consumer and SMB verticals have been merged to form HSB (Home and Small Business). The remaining segment was remodelled to form the commercial channel segment. “The commercial channel is a completely new entity at Lenovo that was formed a year back. While merging some of the verticals, what came out of it is the Commercial Channel,” explains Ashok Nair, National Sales Director, Lenovo.

The Commercial Channel is entitled to sell to any of the verticals like Government, education, large enterprises, mid-level customers as long as they do not clash with the accounts that Lenovo’s direct team is handling. It also works on a combination of Named Accounts and Rest of Universe (named Commercial Channel) accounts, where the Rest of Universe is driven regionally through partner-focussed dedicated channel managers.

The named accounts are usually handled by the Direct Team (usually called the Inside Sales Representatives or VLEs) at Lenovo.

Earlier, VLE (Very Large Enterprise) had 2,000 accounts but post restructuring, it only handles the top 500 accounts now and the rest 1,500 are with Commercial Channel business.

Lenovo, however, sees the Commercial Channel as a significant growth engine for its future aspirations.

In the past one year, Lenovo has had a fair amount of success in the education and the large enterprise segment. Lenovo looks at the education segment both from a consumer and a commercial perspective. “From a consumer angle, we target students when they resume schools and colleges as part of their new

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Ashok Nair National Sales Director Lenovo India Pvt Ltd academic session, which we call it the ‘Back to School’ campaign. From a commercial point of view, it will be more of institutional buying where partners will sell to educational institutions with which they have a good business relationship. Though we have grown in these segments, there is still room for us to grow. And this is what will be our focus for this year,” says Ashok.

Lenovo also conducts several Channel enablement programmes for its partners annually. For instance, there are several regular training programmes for partners and new partner schemes introduced that drive partner profitability. The annual partner meet held at Lenovo recognizes and felicitates partners.

The PC major has last month organized a multi-city roadshow for its partners that was a huge success for it. “We wanted to closely connect with our partners, talk about the

The key objective of the roadshow was to communicate Lenovo’s integration of its PC and EBG (Enterprise Business Group) sales teams that is aimed at building a stronger commercial portfolio and enhancing customer relationship

change in our go-to-market strategy and what is in store for them. It has been an effective platform to get feedback from our Channel Partners as to what worked well and what can be improved. We meet up with a couple of the partners from these locations and share with them insights on how to upgrade their business. Such initiatives are expected to go a long way in strengthening our bond across the country, especially in those markets which have high potential to grow the business,” says Ashok.

The theme for this year’s roadshow was – “One Lenovo, One Goal”, which reflects the company’s integration to form EBG and coming together as “One Lenovo”. “One Goal” is aimed at Lenovo becoming the market leader in this space.

Through this multi-city roadshow, partners also got to understand how Lenovo is performing currently and where it is intended to be as a brand in the future. It also helps its partners take stock of how the market is growing and how Lenovo is capturing this growing demand. This year’s roadshow saw over 240 partners participating across four major cities – Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata and Chennai. “We saw a positive response and successfully unveiled our new brand identity though various interactive sessions,” concludes Ashok. n samrita@varindia.com

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ROUND ABOUT

Ibis & Bytes W

hat links the Ibis trilogy and bytes? I am sure my esteemed readers may be quizzing me to give more clarity to my thoughts and to make the statement more contextual. Well, let me then further elaborate.

The Ibis trilogy consists of three novels written by one of the most eminent English novelists of our time, Amitav Ghosh, blending history, fiction, and immigration woven into a narrative that tempts us to gobble each sentence with greed and passion.

The three novels are Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke and the recently published Flood of Fire.

Set in the first half of the 19th century, the novels take the readers to adventures, proclivities, greed and promiscuities of the Raj. So how is this trilogy in sync with “bytes”, synonymous with computers, technology, modern ideas, etc. I must confess that the link between Ibis and bytes is emotional, and not wholly organic. The setting that Amitav explains in his three novels is the era before the invention of typewriters.

Unknown to our mind is the people imbued with the zest for adventure, their savvy disposition, meticulous planning and execution that corroborate similarities of people, no matter what generation they belong to. These type of people existed in Amitav’s trilogy in as much as in the present day. They are the people who defy time through their commitment to the cause they had espoused. The present-day movers and shakers are not far behind them. The emotional link between people and their cause made me think about the connection between Ibis and bytes.

In the novel, Flood of Fire, there is a reference to free trade. One of the businessmen comments that the ultimate aim of mankind is to move towards free trade – unfettered freedom to all different types of businesses. This businessman abhors regulations, restrictions and sanctions imposed on trade, terming them as an infringement on human freedom and a shackle on creative expression. I believe he is echoing the views of many in the modern world.

Simulation is a technique used with the aid of computers to depict certain situations – imaginary or real. Let us look at some of the marvellous simulations done by Amitav, done not through the computer prism, but the sheer magic of his words. The following is a sample from Flood of Fire: “Few were the tamashas that could compare with the spectacle of the Bengal Native Infantry on the march. Every member of the paltan was aware of this – dandia-wallahas, naach girls, bangy burdars,

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syces, mess-consumers, berry-wallahas, bhishties – but none more so than Havildar Kesari Singh, whose face served as the battalion’s figurehead when he rode at the end of the column.”

Just reading these words one gets a sense and feeling of an army on the move in 19th century India. This is the simulation that I am talking about.

Modern technology is technology centric.

That is all pervading. Be it in manufacturing, infrastructure, telecommunication, technology plays an important role. Those who have the technology advantage rule the roost. That was also envisaged by Amitav in his novels. In his books, technology manifested more in the fleet of ships at the command. In this regard, the British had a huge advantage over other countries.

Strange though it may sound, there was outsourcing also at that time. Most of the ships built for Britain along with some of the war ships were built by Indians, particularly the Parsis based in Mumbai. It could be another coincidence that the Chinese, whose knowledge about ship building was limited, wanted to learn from the Indians.

Those who are keeping watch of the trends in the businesses over the years, would appreciate nuances are the same, even now.

Chinese have conceded to India’s expertise in software, though they may be ahead of India in many other avenues. Technical expertise had a premium even in the past.

Today, we are going out of the way to attract investment. Several schemes have been rolled out to motivate investors from all over the world to come to India to invest, do business and rake and repatriate profit after paying the taxes as stipulated by the government. Amitav explains about an opium auction house in Calcutta, closer to the headquarters of the

East India Company. The well-appointed auction room was frequented by highranking British businessmen, Armenians, Americans, French, and Afghans along with a sprinkling of the local gentry from famous Bengali families of Tagores, Mullicks and the like. Behind the main auction hall, in the narrow lanes situated the not-so-well-appointed den for futures trading, where people bid to rake in profits from the future prices of opium, the prices that would prevail at future dates – the type of trading which is done by highly qualified financial experts using complex digitally run computer programs.

We are now in a world that forces us to believe that information is everything in life. The knowledge economy is built around information. Here, information dictates both economic and strategic space and one-upmanship is purely on the basis of the strengths one has in information collation, sharing them and putting to the right use.

The other day, I read an interview of Amitav Ghosh in a leading national daily and a number of reviews both in the Net and print media. Most of the reviews related to the strengths and weaknesses of his thematic sequence and historical perspective – how well and otherwise he had woven up fiction with history, etc. But a question asked by the interviewer of a national daily struck me. It was: “Why do you say the opium trade was capitalism’s dirty secret?” His response was interesting: “Well, the British colonial enterprise was (a) narco system. The British and Americans were drug dealers. Major American families made their money in the drug trade. Take Franklin Delano Roosevelt: where did his money come from? It came from Andrew Delano, who was a China trader. Calvin Coolidge’s great great grandfather made his money taking opium from Bombay to China.”

On hindsight, I feel either Amitav Ghosh or the interviewer could have been more than charitable to some of the Indian families who had made tons of money from opium trade. This generation would find it difficult to digest the fact that once upon a time India and China vetted the appetite of the western forces to make money from opium. Is the history repeating now? Had opium given way to bytes, euphemism for information technology. Again, in the new revolution India and China are the centre stages, where close-to 2.7 billion, more than half of the population of the world, live. Together, they represent more than three-fourths of the world market. Will the opium wars come again? Will the sync between Ibis and bytes be apocalyptic? I wish it should not! n

National Internet Exchange of India

Registry

and many more...... www.varindia.com

July 2015

15

HOT BYTES

Juniper and Ruckus to offer Open Network Solutions

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uniper Networks and Ruckus Wireless have announced a new technology alliance to deliver open, wired and wireless networking solutions for enterprise, government and education

customer segments. The companies will work to deliver a unified wired and wireless solution, as well as collaborate on global go-

to-market opportunities to deliver resiliency and scale to mid-size and large enterprise customers.

“The network infrastructure of our customers is experiencing incredible performance pressure due to the influx of mobile devices in the workplace connecting to mission-critical apps and to content in the cloud,” said Jonathan Davidson, Executive VP & GM, Juniper Development and Innovation, Juniper Networks.

Honeywell with Intel Security to protect industrial infrastructure

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oneywell Process Solutions (HPS) and Intel Security will collaborate to help bolster protection of critical industrial infrastructure and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Intel Security’s McAfee technologies will be integrated with Honeywell’s Industrial Cyber Security Solutions, providing Honeywell customers with enhanced security software to protect their control

systems from malware and misuse.

"Protecting our critical infrastructure and the emerging IIoT from cyber threats is a priority, and the collaboration of two industry leaders will go a long way toward that goal. Technologies in the IIoT space have a tremendous amount of potential, and we can’t let security concerns undermine that,” said Raj Samani, VP and CTO, Intel Security.

Array Networks brings in 'Array Wings

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rray Networks has announced its partner programme “Array Wings”. Array Wings partner incentive programme will provide

as an opportunity to bridge the gaps between the partners and the industry, to get to know each partner better and to embark on a journey towards mutual growth and success. This is an innovative sales initiative to connect and engage with partners to rise

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July 2015

above business goals and celebrate the true spirit of partnership.

Shibu Paul, Regional Sales Director – India, ME and SEA, Array Networks, said, "The partner programme Array Wings will help Array Networks reach out to the partner community and ease critical pain points of customers by offering our unique topnotch technical solutions at an affordable cost. This programme will help Array Networks reach out to more enterprise customers who are in need of our solutions."

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NetRack expands its capacity with a new campus

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etRack’s new campus is designed to meet the increasing customer demand for high-quality products and services.

The facility will enable NetRack to expand nationwide with highly improved manufacturing and service capabilities.

NetRack has witnessed an impressive 50% growth over the previous year, and has over 30 distributors in India, besides Dubai, UK and Nepal.

Ravi Raj, Brand Head, Director Sales & SupportNetRack, said, "Our successful growth has motivated us to set up a new campus which delivers exceptional benefits to customers and partners. It will help us expand by adding new end-users, distributors and partners."

Celkon opens its manufacturing plant in India

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aking a step forward to “Make-in-India” initiative, Celkon has opened its manufacturing facility in Telangana's Medchal industrial estate. Celkon has announced that it will be investing around Rs.200 crore in the next three months for this facility.

Starting with four production lines with a capacity to manufacture 2 lakh handsets per month, the facility will eventually be increased to 12 production lines, which are expected to produce 5 lakh handsets a month. However, the company aims to reach a capacity of producing 10 lakh handsets a month in India. The consumers of Celkon will receive a 7–8% cost benefits on the handsets initially.

Cisco ties up with Radware over DDoS Mitigation

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adware has tied up with Cisco Systems to provide its distributed denial of service (DDoS) mitigation technology for the new Cisco Firepower 9300 appliance designed for service providers.

Cisco Systems selected Radware's DDoS mitigation technology as it correctly identifies and reduces cyber threats, especially those targeting application availability and it does so in the shortest amount of time. Radware's DDoS mitigation technology is a real-time, behaviourbased, mitigation solution.

"We are excited to be a part of Cisco's security platform. By incorporating Radware's DDoS protection on the Firepower 9300 with Cisco's unique security approach, a more threatcentric solution will be available to the service providers, including advanced firewalling, DDoS protection, and other security protection services," said Nikhil Taneja, Country Manager & Regional Director, India and SAARC.

IRCTC adds five new servers to improve e-ticketing operations

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o speed up e-ticketing operations, the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) has imported five new servers from Singapore. The initiative to import five new servers from Singapore comes close on the heels of IRCTC introducing two new high-speed servers earlier this month that have doubled peak-time efficiency for booking Tatkal tickets in the morning hours.

Dr A. K. Manocha,

IRCTC Chairman & MD said, “The five new HP Itanium servers, to be installed shortly in the middle layer of the Passenger Reservation System (PRS), would considerably speed up the booking of e-tickets and streamline the NextGeneration E-Ticketing System (NGET).”

With the introduction of five new servers, the number of concurrent users will go up from the existing 180,000 to 300,000.

Infor partners with HCL Technologies

I

nfor has partnered with HCL Technologies.

This collaboration will help to significantly expand implementation, development and support resources for Infor customers.

“Infor differentiates itself in the market through its user experience, industryspecific functionality and flexible deployment options, all of which will appeal to HCL customers.

HCL is investing in Infor, as we feel its applications present a viable new source of revenue for our business and will help us to deliver greater value for our clients,” said Anant Gupta, President & CEO, HCL Technologies.

www.varindia.com

July 2015

17

HOT BYTES

Riverbed eyes India market for new opportunities

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ith the launch of SteelCentral AppInternals 10, an application performance management (APM) solution, Riverbed Technologies aims to help IT teams to take control of application performance in their evolving hybrid IT environments.

Setting a new standard in simplicity and easeof-use, SteelCentral AppInternals 10 has been re-designed from the ground up. It can be set up in minutes and its modern,

web-based, interactive dashboard can be accessed on computers, tablets and smartphones – no special skills are required to set up and operate. SteelCentral AppInternals 10 monitors applications on and off the cloud to provide end-toend performance visibility and powerful analytics that help IT improve application performance, user experience, and business impact.

Telangana initiates Swachh Digital Telangana Programme

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TE & C Department, Government of Telangana, and TSIIC have launched Swachh Digital Telangana Programme in Hyderabad at Tech Mahindra office in Madhapur.

The launch has three flagship programmes – Cyber Security, Swachh IT and Make in Telangana.

The programme has been announced by Jayesh Ranajan, Secretary ITE & C, Governent of Telangana.

“We have three local variants of the Digital India programme. These include: Digital Telangana, Digital Make in Telangana and Clean Digital IT. Digital Telangana focusses on how to make technology available to common masses. The IT buildings and IT corridors need to be green. We have to plant 45,000 saplings in Cyberabad area under the Telangana Government’s massive tree plantation initiative,” he said.

Quick Heal launches programme for the Katkari Native Tribes

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uick Heal Technologies has undertaken a social development project for the Katkari tribes at Paud, near Pune. Katkari

tribe is the only Primitive Tribal Group (PTG) identified in the region of Sahyadri. This group is located in 9 Talukas.

According to 2001 census, their population is now at 14,091. Today, most of the Katkaris work as labourers at construction sites. The Katkari tribals are known for hunting, fishing and collecting

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July 2015

roots for their livelihood.

Inaugurating the Sarvodaya Bhavan (community hall) for the tribes, Kailash Katkar, Founder & CEO, Quick Heal, said, “Native communities like the Katkari’s are now facing urgent health, economic, education, and environmental impacts as they are unable to make a proper living out of their traditional jobs.

Their current problems need urgent attention.

We are glad to have been given an opportunity to help, secure, and fund environmental, health and education projects for them."

www.varindia.com

Canon’s PPP Division unveils training facility

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anon India has opened a new training centre in Noida to provide technical skill development to its engineers and channel partners. The new centre will empower them with techniques and information which will equip them to handle customer queries and installation with utmost care. This is a first-of-itskind training facility that has been initiated with an objective of increasing the product knowledge of the engineers.

Puneet Datta, Director of PPP Group, Canon India, said, “Canon believes in providing best customer experience through its various services. With the help of this facility, we aim to excel in this endeavour by imparting training to our engineers, sales teams and channel partners. "

Intel initiates Digital Wellness Online Challenge

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n line with the Government’s Digital India vision during the “Digital India Week”, Intel has launched the Digital Wellness Online Challenge in collaboration with National e-Governance Division (NeGD).

Debjani Ghosh, Vice-President, Sales and Marketing Group and Managing Director, Intel South Asia, said, “Intel has long been committed to the vision of Digital India and strongly believes that it is the foundation for transforming India into a technology empowered entrepreneurial economy.

For this vision to become a reality, enhancing digital awareness is a must amongst our young citizens who will create the future of the country.”

Dell’s Engineered Solutions empower VMware EVO:RAIL

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ell has announced Dell Engineered Solutions for VMware EVO:RAIL Horizon Edition, and updates to the Dell Engineered Solutions for VMware EVO:RAIL appliance. Both of these workload-optimized technology solutions provide customers with faster time-to-value, elasticity and greater ease of use.

“VMware and its Qualified EVO:RAIL Partners are bringing the simplicity of consumer appliances to the world of enterprise infrastructure.

VMware EVO:RAIL is a new building block for software-defined data

center environments that takes the guesswork out of building, deploying, scaling and managing softwaredefined infrastructure services. Dell’s VMware EVO:RAIL Horizon Edition will deliver the benefits of the SDDC and hyper-converged infrastructure for desktop virtualization,” said Sundar Balasubramanian, Sr Director, General Business, VMware India.

MAIT promotes Digital Education in the country

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AIT has l a u n c h e d EduVision 2015. It is a national event organized

by MAIT to promote digital education.

EduVision aims at bringing together device manufacturers, content providers, solution providers connectivity providers and also government and educational institutions on a single platform so that they can deliberate and contribute towards the development of better

education delivery system in India with the use of Information Technology.

Amar Babu, President, MAIT, in his presidential address, said, “MAIT is about manufacturing IT products and usage of IT benefiting areas are education and healthcare.

I believe IT can make a huge impact both in terms of providing access with sheer kind of technology and the ability to integrate curriculum in a more standard way across the country."

Capgemini takes over IGATE Corporation

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apgemini has completed the acquisition of IGATE Corporation.

The transaction is expected to be accretive to Capgemini

Chairman & CEO, Capgemini, said, “With IGATE, our operations in North America have taken a new dimension and are now our largest

normalized Earnings Per Share (EPS) by at least 12% in 2016 and 16% in 2017.

Paul Hermelin,

market in revenues. Our combined operations in India have now reached the size to compete at par with the world leaders.”

www.varindia.com

July 2015

19

ON THE RAMP

Brocade launches Flow Optimizer Application

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rocade has announced the launch of Brocade Flow Optimizer application and new SDN capabilities in Brocade MLX Series routers. In the New IP, the Brocade Flow Optimizer enables the network to play a role in understanding anomalous traffic patterns and behaviours, and flags them or takes action in real time.

Brocade has also announced Brocade NetIron OS 5.9

software, building on the continued advancement of SDN capabilities in the Brocade MLXe routers. Providing new OpenFlow features, this latest OS release leverages the Brocade VersaScale p r o g r a m m a b l e forwarding architecture.

By using this architecture with SDN applications such as the Brocade Flow Optimizer, organizations can improve visibility over network traffic and simplify forwarding control.

Oracle enhances its Cloud Platform with New Services

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racle has extended the Oracle Cloud Platform, a comprehensive, integrated suite of services. With more than 24 new cloud services, the Oracle Cloud Platform extends Oracle’s leadership with tits portfolio.

“We are upbeat about the growth for Oracle Cloud Services. The new Oracle Cloud Platform will strengthen our cloud portfolio for PaaS and IaaS, over and above

the success for our SaaS business. This will help us become the preferred provider of cloud solutions for Indian enterprises. We will the leverage Oracle’s large install base of Database and middleware customers who want to take advantage of the flexibility, agility, and financial opportunities the cloud (private or public) presents,” said Mitesh Agarwal, Vice-President – Sales Consulting & CTO, Oracle India.

NetApp expands its AllFlash Storage Arrays

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etApp has expanded its allflash storage array line with new models tailored for enterprise buyers. The All-Flash FAS (AFF) 8000 series packs performance and data management

President, Product and Solutions Marketing, NetApp. “We help customers achieve better long-term outcomes with a complete set of enterprise capabilities and the unique ability to

in a single solution. It ships with NetApp Data ONTAP FlashEssentials innovations, which increase flash performance and efficiency.

“The AFF 8000 line is built to take highperformance flash storage into the mainstream,” said Lee Caswell, Vice-

support data movement from flash to disk to cloud as needs change.”

NetApp has also announced new installation and extended support offers for the AFF 8000 series. Customers can acquire the new systems at prices starting as low as US$25,000.

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July 2015

www.varindia.com

Sify launches Cloud Solutions for SMBs from Kerala

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ify Technologies Limited has announced the launch of the company’s Cloud services targeted at the Enterprise and SMB market in Kerala. Sify has tested the Kerala market and has received encouraging response. As a special offer, Sify’s Cloud services will be made available to customers in Kerala for a trial period 15day. Sify has chosen a mix of internal promotions and Channel partners to maximize its go-to-market strategy.

Raju Vegesna, Chairman, Sify Technologies, said, “We have received commendable response from Enterprises and SMBs here and are extremely excited to enter Kerala in a big way. At Sify, we focus on building sustainable Cloud & Managed solutions for our customers.”

Thinspace Announces skySpace Suite

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hinspace has announced the launch of new skySpace solution suite, providing desktop virtualization and application delivery in a simple, effective, and affordable end-to-end solution with integrated device management.

Thinspace's skySpace is a complete solution comprising of hardware endpoint devices and management software designed to work together for the delivery of centralized desktops and applications. It eliminates the complexity of dealing with multiple vendors and provides a centralized single vendor platform for all the desktop computing needs of an organization.

Acer launches Aspire Notebook and Gaming Monitor Series

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cer has launched its latest range of devices including the new Aspire E5 Series with solid performance packed into a sophisticated design, the Aspire V NitroBlack Edition with more powerful processing and gaming-grade graphics, Aspire V3 with metallic aesthetic cues, the Aspire Z Series All-in-One with HD screen, XB240H Gaming Monitor with 4K 2K NVIDIA G-Sync technology, the first curved 34-inch display with NVIDIA G-Sync technology, XR341CKA and the new Aspire Switch 12 featuring 5 versatile modes of usage at

an unbeatable price.

S. Rajendran, Chief Marketing Officer, Acer India, said, “We have always lived up to our promise of introducing fresh technology that would allow consumers to explore newer features and innovations. The advanced ergonomic design and elegant looks deliver every need at an exceptional value.”

Avaya launches Collaboration Pod for midsize enterprises

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vaya has announced a new model of the Avaya Collaboration Pod, built specifically to serve the needs of midsize enterprises. Designed for rapid implementation and streamlined management of Avaya Engagement Solutions, the Collaboration Pod 2400 Series combines applications, servers, storage, networking and management components in an easy-to-deploy, ready-to-operate package.

“Midsize enterprises understand the strategic value of technology, but typically have more financial and skills support restraints than larger enterprises. The Avaya Collaboration Pod 2400 is perfect for their needs, enabling them to rapidly utilize our Engagement Solutions via a significantly streamlined deployment model and improving engagement,” said Priyadarshi Mohapatra, MD, Avaya India and SAARC.

Fujitsu strengthens its PRIMEFLEX Lineup of Integrated Systems

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ujitsu has c o m p l e t e d the rollout of its PRIMEFLEX portfolio.

With its comprehensive PRIMEFLEX lineup of Integrated Systems, Fujitsu is empowering organizations to accelerate digital transformation of their businesses, eliminate complexity and reduce risk.

Ayman Abouseif, Vice-President – Product Marketing, Fujitsu Global Marketing, said, “Customers who want

to quickly deploy new types of workload in their data centers are looking to leading infrastructure vendors like Fujitsu for Integrated Systems."

www.varindia.com

July 2015

21

ON THE RAMP

WD Launches redesigned My Passport Ultra hard drives

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D has introduced the new, redesigned My Passport Ultra portable hard drives in India.

The My Passport Ultraportable hard drives are now available in four stylish colours –Classic Black, Brilliant White, Wild Berry and Noble Blue.

“With more data being stored than ever before, it is critical to have a reliable external storage solution that you can carry everywhere. The latest

Z

generation My Passport Ultra drives deliver an easier automatic back-up experience and encryption for security,” said Khalid Wani, Director, Content Solutions Business for WD in India, Middle East, and Africa.

NETGEAR presents R6220

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he nextgeneration NETGEAR AC1200 Smart Wi-Fi Router with External Antennas offers a dual-band gigabit Wi-Fi and falls in the category of 802.11ac wireless products.

With its new and enhanced features, it supports new and upgraded devices like PC, MAC, iPhone, iPad, Android devices, etc. with improved network speed. Whatever the user wants to do everything is covered by NETGEAR R6220, the only DualBand Gigabit Router.

The NETGEAR Genie App – a mobile dashboard used to manage, monitor and repair the network –

lets users easily monitor, connect and control their home network from a PC, tablet or smartphone.

“Now you can keep your Wi-Fi devices streaming effortlessly with AC1200 Wi-Fi technology that delivers, the highest speed, range, and reliability you need has become much easier,” said Subhodeep Bhattacharya, Regional Director, India & SAARC.

Zicom introduces ‘HOMEWATCH’

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icom Electronic has launched ‘HomeWatch’, the most advanced, innovative and affordable residential security solution in India.

‘HomeWatch’ brings together a host of cutting-edge technologies transforming home security from the hitherto passive to more active, more collaborative, more intelligent and more exciting security system.

Announcing the launch, Pramoud Rao, Founder Managing Director, Zicom Electronic Security Systems Limited said, “Encouraged by the

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July 2015

Zebronics launches IP Cameras

phenomenal success on the home security front, we wanted to come out with more innovative and instantaneous solution in view of growing threats, robberies, burglaries and, vandalism violence in homes across the country.”

www.varindia.com

ebronics has enriched its surveillance portfolio by extending its foray with the launch of IP Cameras designed for security surveillance of both commercial and industrial settings. The digital, network video surveillance (IP) system provides a host of benefits and advanced functionalities which include superior image quality, remote accessibility, distributed intelligent video capabilities, easy installation and integration, and better scalability, flexibility and cost-effectiveness.

“IP Cameras are most widely used camera category because of their ease of installation and also for the fact that they can be remotely monitored on a smartphone or tablet,” said Sandeep Doshi, Director, Zebronics India

Veritas announces Solutions for Data Centers

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eritas has announced new offerings for rapidlyevolving enterprise data centers, as well as significant upgrades to its core portfolio of backup and information management products.

“Data is increasingly viewed as a valued asset.

With it being stored at higher rates than ever, the volume of data is also expected to double every two years,” said Chris Lin, Sales Leader of Asia-Pacific & Japan Region, Veritas. “To help companies make sense of their tremendous volumes of data, our offerings will allow customers to realize information availability while gathering the insight to supporting their business goals.”

ViewSonic launches LightStream Full HD Projectors

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iewSonic has launched its LightStream Full HD 1080p projector series for data projection or home entertainment. The series of projectors include the PJD7825HD (black chassis), PJD7830HDL (white chassis), and PJD7835HD (black chassis), with a brightness ranging from 3,000 lumens to 3,500 lumens.

“The projector series is packed with smart technologies that bring HD content to life for home entertainment or enable rich multimedia presentations in the boardroom, conference room, or classroom.

The Full HD 1080p resolution, sleek design, high brightness levels and wireless streaming capabilities make this series the go-to projector solution for a wide range of applications,” said Erik Willey, Product Marketing Director,ViewSonic Americas.

Designed with two HDMI ports, LightStream 1080p projectors can display 3D images directly from 3D Blu-ray players.

Other inputs include Mini USB, USB and Audio In/ Out.

C-DAC Kolkata innovates Third Eye

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entre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) Kolkata, an autonomous Research & Development organization under the Department of Electronics and Information Technology, Ministry of Information & Communication Technology, Government of India, has come up with a unique product called Third Eye that helps to take snapshots of intruders and transmit

them to remotely located storage devices for analysis at a later stage.

This solution can be used for surveillance of individual houses, apartments, housing complexes, Bank ATMs, hotels, guest houses and in similar locations where potentialities exist for unwanted people to trespass and cause unwanted and unlawful activities.

Third Eye has a userfriendly design with easy installation mechanism.

SanDisk announces iNAND 7232 Storage Solution

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anDisk has introduced the iNAND 7232 storage solution – a new, advanced embedded flash drive (EFD) optimized to deliver best-in-class imaging performance and superior storage capacity in flagship mobile devices. Available in capacities up to 128GB, the solution enables OEMs to introduce smartphones, tablets and other connected devices that feature ample storage to meet the needs of increasing consumer content while providing

data-rich application experiences.

The combination of iNAND 7232’s advanced architecture and innovative storage technology both enhances popular current mobile photography capabilities and allows for breakthrough application experiences.

FACE TO FACE

SanDisk popularizing Flash Technology Vivek Tyagi, Director – Business Development, SanDisk India, shares with VARINDIA how flash is soon becoming a rage among industry OEMs and what has been SanDisk’s contribution to it

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hen it comes to the Indian market, there are two segments for SanDisk to focus on. The first one is the Indian smartphone market that is doing well at the moment. The only thing that can differentiate these handsets could be the memory. “The five top handset brands in India happen to be Indian brands today. Though hitherto they used to import raw materials from China to assemble their products here, they are slowly gearing up to make phones in India under the ‘Make-in-India’ initiative. Most of the mobile manufacturers will probably have their manufacturing units ready here in India by 2016. SanDisk is the leading supplier of embedded flash memory chips to smartphone OEMs. That is one of the areas we are looking at in India,” shares Vivek Tyagi, Director – Business Development, SanDisk India.

SanDisk has two departments for sales and marketing worldwide. One is retail sales that deals purely with consumer products, sold through the retail stores. It is a huge market and forms 35– 40% of SanDisk’s business worldwide. In 2011, it decided to venture into OEM and enterprise business. The OEMs span across product ranges from storage to servers to smartphones.

Secondly, with IDC, Gartner reports pointing to a good growth in the enterprise data storage, SanDisk is also eyeing this market with great interest.

SanDisk also has its R&D unit that was started five years ago.

Flash coming of age

It has been 26 years since SanDisk was formed. When SanDisk invented the flash memory for the first time, it was not too sure how to sell it to customers. The first Flash customer that SanDisk got was Kodak camera.

Kodak was looking for a solution to store pictures and was keen on the idea of a memory storage concept which can store pictures even without power supply. They wanted it in a card format to use in their cameras. “This is how the first SanDisk product was a camera card for Kodak. Moving on, SanDisk came up with storage cards for other camera companies and when mobile got introduced we came up with cards for mobiles as well,” says Vivek.

E-commerce is the fastest-growing industry in the country. Their data is growing remarkably fast with them adding millions of customers every year when compared to traditional enterprise. So they need a lot of storage as their business is completely through the website. The performance of their website needs to be really fast. So if their backend works on hard disk drive storage, the performance will be slower since hard disk is a mechanical rotating drive. Also, it might be such that these servers may fail sometime.

Vivek Tyagi Director – Business Development, SanDisk India E-commerce has hence come to look at the flash technology as an alternative to hard drive storage. SanDisk has flash-based servers

SanDisk bought a company last year called Fusion-io to offer customers the broadest set of enterprise flash solutions which make data storage for these e-commerce platforms easier, thereby breaking away

from the common perception of data storage only available on portable devices. “We are hence selling directly to data centers in these e-commerce companies,” says Vivek.

“We are possibly looking at replacing hard disk with flash technology. Flash-based drive provides anywhere between 50,000 IOPS (Input/Output Operations per second) all the way up to half a million IOPS. Though it is more expensive than hard disk drive, flash brings the IOPS in line with the CPU IOPS. So their performance can really match. Flash memory is fundamentally a semiconductor technology that also follows Moore’s law. It is very likely to replace hard disk in the coming days. It has already come to be used in data centers and is fast becoming a rage. Though at the consumer level, adoption of flash might still takes a while longer,” explains Vivek.

SanDisk works with all the OEM partners when it comes to its flash technology. “Dell is one important customer for us that uses our flash drives. Also, HP 3PAR has recently launched all flash data centers that are based on SanDisk flash technology. We are also engaged with other customers like Netmagic, Control S and so on,” he says.

SanDisk bought a company last year called Fusion-io. “Together, we will offer our customers the broadest set of enterprise flash solutions in the industry,” Vivek states. n

www.varindia.com

July 2015

23

VOICE-N-DATA

Nokia to lead in the 5G era with collaborative research

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okia Networks has showcased some of its futuristic and cutting edge global technologies in the mobile broadband segment on its India Innovation Day 2015 that it hosted. The technologies showcased are aimed at empowering operators in their journey of evolution in order to effectively manage and monetize the surging mobile broadband growth.

Nokia’s real time live demos highlighted company’s innovations in Telco Cloud (VoLTE/ VoWiFi), 5G, Security solutions, Predictive

marketing, etc.

Nokia is heavily engaged in demonstrating leadership in internal and collaborative 5G research such as 5GPPP, METIS, NYU and few others.

Nokia is also collaborating with some of the top operators like NTT docomo in Japan and SK Telecom in Korea in this space.

The company has set a target leading in the 5G era by starting pre-standardized trials from 2018 onwards and deploying pre-commercial 5G in the 2020 Summer Olympics in Japan.

ICA signs MoU with Taiwan’s III

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he Indian Cellular Association has inked an MoU with the Institute for Information Industry (III), Taiwan to give further boost to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision of “Smart Bharat”.

III Taiwan will provide its expertise to ICA’s ongoing digital India initiative – “Action Centre for Smart and Broadband Bharat (ACSBB)”.

With this objective, the MoU between the two bodies was signed during

ICA’s National President Pankaj Mohindroo’s recent visit to Taipei.

“Our partnership with the global leader in digital technology deployment and information society programs will speed up swift realization of PM Modi’s vision of Smart Bharat. This is one more of our initiatives towards unlocking the country’s digital potential while strengthening Government’s ambitious ‘Digital India’ program,” said Pankaj Mohindroo.

Bharti Airtel to invest Rs.6,400 Crore in 3G Services

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harti Airtel is investing 1 billion dollars (Rs.6,400 crore) to extend its 3G services across the India, expanding the network in new and existing circles to deploy data spectrum.

According to a source, Airtel will roll out 3G networks aggressively over the first six months of this financial year as it has acquired additional 3G airwaves in many circles to plug coverage gaps. The company will take a call on injecting additional funds in 3G network expansion after getting a fix on whether the

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July 2015

targeted revenue growth has been generated.

During the company's fourth-quarter earnings call, Gopal Vittal, Managing Director & CEO for India & South Asia, Bharti Airtel, had stated that while rolling out 3G networks, the company "would look at up fronting this capex in the first half" itself. According to a report released by UBS brokerage, the proportion of the mobile phone operator's 3G sites increased to 33.3% of the total in the quarter ended March 2015, from 22.6%.

www.varindia.com

Foxconn to start TP-LINK releases its all-new production 150MBPS Wireless N Router P-LINK has Router will give 650% of Xiaomi launched its latest faster speed than 802.11g.

T 150Mbps router, the It is also compatible with Smartphones TL-WR720N 150Mbps all IEEE 802.11g and IEEE Wireless N Router. The 802.11b products. Based in India T L - W R 7 2 0 N i s on 802.11n technology,

X

iaomi is all set to start manufacturing its handsets in India, from August expectedly.

Foxconn is contracted for the manufacturing of the smartphones for Xiaomi.

A close source from Foxconn’s new plant in Sri City said that, from the beginning of last month, the company has started shifting its machinery from its Chennai plant to the new plant. The relocating process is at the last phase and the production can start by August, the official said.

The manufacturing unit is, however, not so large and is just 20,000 sq. ft. in area, as disclosed by the official.

D-Link wins the ‘European Business Assembly’

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he Socrates Award Ceremony held in association with the Europe Business Assembly (The Socrates Committee – Oxford) presented D-Link with multiple accolades - ‘Best Enterprise’ in the field of IT & Computer Networks and ‘Manager of the Year’ Acknowledgement to Tushar Sighat.

Tushar Sighat, Executive Director & CEO – D-Link (India) Ltd. said, “This is yet another proud moment for all of us at D-Link as we continue to grow & achieve new milestones of success. D-Link’s journey in recent times has been extremely rewarding, with our employees & business partners/ associates showing highest level of commitment & perseverance.”

a simple and secure way to share your highspeed Internet connection at Wireless-N speeds for surfing the Internet, email or online chat.

T h e Wireless N Router provides up to 150Mbps wireless connection with other 802.11n wireless clients. The performance of this 802.11n wireless

the router gives users wireless performance at up to 150Mbps, 9X the speed and 4x the range of traditional 11g products.

It supports up to 4 SSIDs. The device comes with a CD featuring an Easy Set-up Assistant that leads u s e r s through the set-up process step-by-step, and even helps with wireless network settings and security configurations.

Orange Business Services allies with Tata Communications

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range Business Services has partnered with Tata Communications to expand its network footprint in India. The Netw ork-to-Netw ork Interconnect (NNI) agreement is part of a strategic partnership between the two companies and will increase Orange domestic coverage ten-fold to over 120 cities to meet customer’s demand.

The NNI will enable Orange to utilize Tata

Communications’ 120 points of presence (PoPs), extending Orange's reach to tier-II and tierIII cities such as Pune, Bhopal and Ernakulam.

The increased domestic footprint of the Orange network is particularly suited to support the expansion plans of global multinational customers looking to connect to the farthest corners of India with robust and reliable network services, featuring global SLA and straightforward billing.

Vodafone, Tata DoCoMo allows NMNP

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ligning with the Government’s mandate to roll out panIndia Mobile Number Portability, Vodafone India and Tata DoCoMo are two of the service providers that have announced the launch of National Mobile Number Portability (NMNP) services.

The NMNP service facilitates customers to carry their existing mobile number from one telecom circle to another across India and choose the

operator of their choice.

NMNP is applicable to all pre-paid and post-paid customers.

Vivek Mathur, Chief Commercial Officer, Vodafone India, said, “Customers will be the biggest gainers of the National MNP service as it allows them to carry their existing number across India and also choose the operator of their choice. Vodafone has benefited from the intra-circle MNP that was rolled out in 2011."

FACE TO FACE

Intel continues to innovate the PC space Rajiv Bhalla¸ Director, Sales and Marketing - Intel South Asia tells why reinvigorating the PC segment is very important for Intel and also shares about the usage rates of PCs in the country today With PC sales going drastically down, how is Intel looking at reinvigorating this space?

With the explosion of computing devices, the PC retains its role as the key engine for innovation. Intel has always been committed to growing the PC user community in India.

With innovation being our DNA, Intel is focussed on reinvigorating PC through compelling new products and new form factors like the Next Unit of Computing (NUCs) and portable All-in-Ones (AIOs) in addition to 2 in 1s, desktops, laptops and AIOs. This is being complemented with brand new usage models and natural and immersive user experiences delivered via Intel RealSense technology, voice assistant and WiDi. Intel continues to enable an ecosystem of innovative devices which will cater to the growing computing needs of the fast developing nation. We recently launched a social media campaign `#MyPcMyPride’ to amplify the value of custom-built PC, meeting individual computing needs. Through this campaign, Intel seeks to illustrate how today’s systems, when compared to desktops from just five years ago, bring alive a whole new computing experience for users such as better graphics, superior audio and higher power efficiency at affordable price points.

and are confident of driving the adoption of new form factors like 2-in-1, All-in-One, NUC across various buyers segments, be it consumer or business. Intel will continue to work with local OEMs, ODMs and the ecosystem to bring relevant technology to the market across price points.

What are the common PC buying trends do you find at present? How is it going to impact PC sale in the country?

From a consumer perspective, usability, style and performance will be dominant drivers impacting PC buyer decision. We now see a lot of demand emerging from Tier 3 and 4 cities. Higher awareness about PC benefits, availability and better after-sales service have contributed to higher demand. According to a recent MAIT and KPMG report, 30 percent regular PC users don’t even own a PC. Also, India’s younger audience typically use PCs for entertainment, gaming, and educational purposes and they look for style, userfriendliness and solid specs in their devices.

We also see demand coming in from the business sector – with both public and private enterprises being amongst desktop PC buyers, owing to their business policies and security concerns.

Which are the segments do What will be the role of the you think will adopt the PC in the Channel in the initiative that Intel coming times? is starting to popularize the PC?

Intel launched its channel membership program called the Genuine Intel Dealer program in 1995 and it was instrumental in driving PC adoption penetration in the country. Over the past nineteen years, the program now known as Intel Technology Provider Program has evolved to keep up with the changing channel dynamics with over 20,000 technology providers registered across India.

The 20,000 Intel Technology Providers have been a strong channel in driving technology transitions and delivering form factor innovations on Intel devices. The channel community has been a beacon of the ‘Make in India’ construct as they’ve been offering consumers the flexibility of choice when it comes to customizing their own personal computers for several years now.

Intel continuously works along with Intel Technology Providers to further empower them and create awareness amongst consumers in making their own PC or buying new form factors like Next Unit of Computing (NUCs) and portable All-in-Ones (AIOs).

Do you think remodelling the PC will help revive this segment?

We see a lot of opportunity for growth

It is exciting to see innovation in PC is driving interesting new form factors and usage models; these help fuel PC adoption in both consumer and enterprise segments.

Usage models for consumers are rapidly evolving (for e.g. demand for larger screens and larger audio systems among home users), and consumers expect their PCs to be smart, savvy and stylish. Consumers are demanding desktops that are appealing in design, easy to use and pack a punch in terms of performance, with the added bonus of touch or gesture interface.

In the last year, demand for AIOs and other small form factor PCs with always-on capability, low energy footprint, without compromising on good performance has gone up.

What future does Intel foresee for the dying PC segment?

The rapid innovation in PC with new form factors and usage models continue to strengthen the PC segment. The relevance of PC is growing by the day as it is driving both societal and business transformation across the world. So, it’s going strong and not dying.

We are very enthused to see very positive response from the consumers and enterprises to the new form factors of PC. n

From a consumer perspective, usability, style and performance will be dominant drivers impacting PC buyer decision.

We now see a lot of demand emerging from Tier 3 and 4 cities.

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CHANNEL BUZZ

GIGABYTE delights Bangalore Partners

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ecently, Bengaluru-based channel partners of GIGABYTE Technology took a welcome break at a delightful resort. The icing on the cake was that these partners were with their family members to enjoy an eventful and entertaining day at the picturesque resort in Bidadi, about 30 kilometres away from

Director – Sales & MarCom, GIGABYTE Technology (India), said, “At GIGABYTE, we have always believed that partners are our biggest strength. We have achieved this high growth in India majorly because of our partners’ unstinting support and goodwill for the GIGABYTE brand. Most of our partners have

the Silicon Valley of India.

Each member of the partners’ families present, went back with pleasurable memories because the activities at the event ensured loads of fun for guests of all ages, especially the kids. While the children made the most of the fun-games, interactive contests, music, dance, water park, and a magic show, among other things, the elders indulged themselves in activities, such as golf, indoor games, and swimming.

Commenting on the objective of the event, Sunil Grewal,

grown with us. I think sometimes we should invite their families too, to celebrate this growth.

The event also had a brief informal partner orientation session in the morning that focussed mostly on the GIGABYTE G1 Gaming motherboards, and the GIGABYTE 9 Series motherboards. An overview was given of GIGABYTE’s patented technologies, such as DualBIOS which automatically recovers BIOS data when main BIOS has crashed or failed.

ASIRT Techday helps members evolve their business

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he ASIRT Techday is slowly turning into a transformation vehicle for the SIs and Retail community. June 2015 Techday was one such event.

Cloudleap presented its set of backup, business continuity and disaster recovery

solutions; a new set of solutions for ASIRT members to offer to their customers promising total commitment, higher margins and high quality of support.

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Cloudleap Co-founders Srikant Sreenivasan and Amod Phadke held the audience spellbound with a live demo on stage. They also announced great schemes for ASIRT members to get kickstarted with their solutions as well as white labelled services.

Kunhar Peripherals unveiled their new logo of ARTIS brand of products for the first time anywhere in the country. An amazing range of Artis solar power and smart accessories evinced great interest among members. It was noticed that ASIRT & ARTIS share the same letters and brought a big smile to all in the room.

They invited two speakers who got the audience on their toes in their own ways. The first was Vaibhav Devanathan, an IITian. He inspired the audience to look at doing different things and move away from the normal, requiring a leap of faith.

Maj. General Ajay Saxena talked about army, life in army, difficulties and how Indian Army bravehearts lay down their today for country'stomorrow.

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Kaspersky concludes Endcustomer event with eCaps

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aspersky Lab along with its National Distributor for Enterprise products, eCaps Computers and partner Alliance Pro IT, has successfully concluded an Enterprise End-customer event last week in Hyderabad, Telangana, to explore business opportunities in one of the leading IT hubs of the country.

The Customer Pitstop was attended by over 25 companies from across Telangana, where Kaspersky Lab along with eCaps Computers, and partner Alliance Pro IT detailed out their enterprise product suite to address the Customer’s security concerns such as Patch Management for OS and third-party applications, Application start-up control, security for virtual infrastructure, etc.

In this Customer Pitstop, Kaspersky Lab took an initiative to educate its enterprise customers on the current security challenges faced by corporates in India, and advocated the need for IT managers to have a single

management console to manage multiple threats from within and from outside the organization.

Altaf Halde, Managing Director, Kaspersky Lab – South Asia, said, "Alliance

Pro IT has been associated with us for long for Enterprise business with the aim to offer a broad range of solutions to our customers and work together to enlarge our reach to newer customers in Hyderabad, particularly in the B2B space."

FAIITA combats against predatory prices

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AIITA III Conclave hosted by the Federation of IT Associations Maharashtra (FITAM) has concluded successfully rendering the delegates with predilection to work for the cause of the IT fraternity.

The agenda of the conclave was quite successful after lots of brainstorming, and the conclave was addressed by Saket Kapur, General Secretary, Champak Raj Gurjar, President, and Hari Balasubramanium, VicePresident. Leaders from across the country briefly introduced themselves and shared their associational achievements and expectations from FAIITA. Presentations by HP, Dell, Lenovo, Acer and Asus palpably highlighted their support for the conventional IT channel through adoption of series of initiatives advised by FAIITA during December’2014 to scupper the predatory prices. At the same time, the brand owners were convinced on e-commerce being the new route to the market.

Subsequent to the presentations by the vendors, it was felt by the leaders that there is a long way to go before price parity is restored

between online and offline retailing of IT products.

Shri Vineet Goenka from BJP IT Cell patiently heard the woes of the IT channel and categorized the same into ABC and promised to extend all personal advisory support to escalate the impending issues related to 6-per cent increase in the Customs Duty, OLS predatory pricing.

FAIITA Mumbai conclave is a landmark event, whereby issues related to its membership and membership fee were unanimously resolved.

Committees were formed with the immediate task to achieve the near-term objectives of the Federation. The need for Convener was felt by the leaders, and Shri Alok Gupta, President, PCAIT, New Delhi, was selected unopposed for the responsibility.

Four functional Committees have also been formed – Membership & Website Committee to be chaired by Arun Kumar Dey; Grievance Committee to be chaired by Pawan Jajodia; Government Interface Committee to be chaired by Mahendra Agarwal; and Vendor and OLS Committee to be chaired by Karthik. S.

FACE TO FACE

Iris aims to be a Partner of Choice for OEMs and Partners I

t has been a year since Inflexionpoint and Iris Computers came together, with the former acquiring a controlling stake in the Delhi-based distribution company. Within this one year, Iris has seen a growth of more than 30 per cent in terms of revenues. “From a financial backing perspective, we have no challenges or anything lacking for further growth.

The overall vision for Iris is to be the partner of choice for all the OEMs which want to move their products across India and for the partners who want access to all these brands,” asserts Vishal Sopory, CEO, Iris Computers.

From a short-term goal perspective, Iris tends to become a billion-dollar company in the next two years. The key to reaching there from a product or industry standpoint would be its entry into the telecom space. “This year, we should see us focussing on foraying into the telecom category in a big way. We are talking to various handphone companies for distribution. For instance, we will have different strategies for a brand that is trying to position itself among the masses in the B-, C- and D-class cities and for one that is selling phones for more than Rs.40,000. So we are talking to brands from both the ends of the market and accordingly we will have a plan in place,” says Vishal. Iris is intent on growing in the IT space but at the same time will focus on the telecom.

Around 15–17 per cent of Iris business is into the consumer side, while the rest of its business is all commercial. Today, Iris is working with all the leading brands – Dell, IBM, Lenovo, WD, Asus, Wacom, HP, APC and Huawei. As a value-added distributor, Iris tries to create the right ecosystem for the partner by getting him new products and try adding value to the OEM’s business by taking him to the right partner. “This way, we try to help both the OEM and the partner. Supposedly, there is a brand that specializes in switches and we have the channel that is going to the data center customer with a server product. Our job as a VAD will be to bridge both of them where the vendor gets an advantage of a new channel and the partner a new product range,” reiterates Vishal.

A Credit Backbone to Partners…

Iris also ends up being a favourite choice for system integrators. “The larger the project gets, the more complicated it becomes from a credit or logistic perspective. Iris has built its capability in such a way that we are able to

Vishal Sopory CEO, Iris Computers

financially support these SIs execute large transactions. For instance, a small SI with a yearly revenue of Rs.5 crore could pick up an order of Rs.30 crore with our credit backup. We picked up that order and surprisingly all the money came in before time,” explains Vishal.

Iris also helps smaller and newer partners with lower capital in terms of credit again to handle corporate clients. It arrives at an arrangement with the partner where it capitalizes on the expertise, customer relationship, technology knowhow of the partner and helps them get into the business. “In smaller places like Kerala, we executed transactions of around Rs.5 crore to partners whose balance sheets are Rs.1 crore. The DNA of this company is to help partners build their business and at the same time grow it further,” he says.

There are two routes to funding partners for Iris – • Iris supports smaller partners to execute transactions and has more to do with the kind of customers they are working with. So a two people company working with a customer like IIT becomes a great partner to fund than someone working for an unknown customer.

• From an X10 perspective, it is the experience of the company that matters for the funding, for instance, the number of years he has been active in IT, the balance sheet and so on.

Vision of Iris for 2015 • Foray into the telecom space and enter into distribution agreement with handset vendors • Continue to be a VAD to both the OEMs and the channel • Help system integrators with lower capital pick up large projects by offering credit • Fund small partners from tier-II and -III towns to enter into business X10, another subsidiary of Inflexionpoint in India and an NBFC (Non-banking Financial Corporation), also engages in funding the projects of partners. Iris has crossed Rs.30–40 crore of funding to the Channel through X10.

While Iris is helping smaller partners execute larger transactions, X10 helps larger partners pick up larger orders.

Moving on…

Margins have become an issue in the Channel business today. They are no longer what they used to be 7–8 years back and have shrunk over a period of time. There is a big challenge of how to differentiate one’s services, add value to it and make money out of it. In spite of that, Iris has managed to grow 10–15 per cent in the past one year. In the wake of new initiatives like Digital India and Smart Cities, Iris feels this will result in an explosion of opportunities for the channel as well as for the IT industry which, in turn, will help Iris grow. n samrita@varindia.com

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e-Governance

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has launched the “Digital India Week” in New Delhi as part of the larger initiative to empower the people and extend services better with the use of information technology and its tools.

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ith this launch, the dream of being an empowered technologydriven economy has come one step closer to reality. The key speakers in the Digital India Week were Shri Ravi Shankar Prasad, Minister of IT; Shri Arun Jaitley, Minister of Finance; Shri Jual Oram, Minister of Tribal Affairs; Ms Nirmala Sitharaman, Minister of Commerce & Industry; Shri R. S. Sharma, Secretary – IT; Shri Rakesh Garg, Secretary – Telecom, besides other industry stalwarts that included Tata Sons’ Chairman Cyrus P. Mistry; Shri Anil Agarwal, Chairman - Sterlite Technologies; Mr. Mukesh Ambani, CMD - Reliance Industries; Mr. Anil Ambani, Chairman - Reliance ADAG; Mr. Sunil

Bharti Mittal, Chairman & Group CEO Bharti Enterprises; Dr Bernhard Gerwert, CEO - Airbus Defence & Space; Mr. Kumaramangalam Birla, Chairman - Aditya Birla Group; Mr Ping Cheng, CEO - Delta Electronics; Mr. Azim Premji, Chairman - Wipro; Mr. Hari Om Rai, Chairman & MD - LAVA International; Mr. Pawan Munjal, Chairman - Hero Group and Mr. Mikio Katayama, Vice Chairman - Nidec who shared their vision and commitment on Digital India.

Lava, Delta, Hero and Nidec have also announced about their manufacturing plans in India.

The Prime Minister also unveiled a logo for Digital India and all the existing and ongoing e-governance initiatives have been revamped to align them with the principles of Digital India. The single programme will comprise of various initiatives that will be targeted to prepare India for becoming a knowledge economy and for bringing good governance to citizens through synchronized and coordinated engagement of the entire Government.

What is Digital India?

Shri. Ravi Shankar Prasad Minister of Communications and Information Technology Government of India

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Digital India has been envisioned as an umbrella programme that seeks to transform India into a digitallyempowered, knowledge economy with a host of initiatives for a synchronized and coordinated engagement of the Government and its agencies. It is no longer an initiative by the Government but has evolved into a revolution, a movement. Digital India is all about advancements in technology and connectivity which will make an impact on all aspects of governance and improve the quality of life of citizens.

Several initiatives have been taken for introduction of Information Technology

Vision of Modi

"I dream of a Digital India where highspeed digital highways will unite the nation. I dream of a digital India where government is open and governance is transparent. I dream of a Digital India where 1.2 billion connected Indians will drive innovation. I dream of a Digital India where the world looks to India for the next innovation. I dream of a Digital India where ICT-enabled citizengovernment interface is incorruptible.

E-governance is going to change into m-governance (not to be mistaken as Modi Governance) – it is mobile governance. Mobile governance is going to become a reality soon.

Additionally, We need to resolve that we will reduce our reliance on imports and protect the world from cyber warfare. Indian talent needs to come forward and assure that the world is protected. I invite start-ups to come forward and contribute to the nation's growth. We will offer all possible support and technology will play a big role in realizing the dream of minimum government, maximum governance.” to empower people. Some of the initiatives have resulted in the development of products to extend various services in areas relating to health, education, labour and employment, commerce, etc.

However, the larger goal of Digital India includes providing broadband connectivity in all panchayats, Wi-Fi in all the schools and universities and public WiFi hotspots in all important cities by 2019.

It will be deployed in delivering services in areas like health, education, agriculture and banking.

The vision of Digital India can be summarized around three key areas • Digital infrastructure as a utility to every citizen • Governance and service on demand • Digital empowerment of citizens

Digital India Initiatives • Digital Locker System aims to minimize the usage of physical documents and enable sharing of e-documents across agencies. The sharing of the e-documents will be done through registered repositories thereby ensuring the authenticity of the documents online • MyGov.in has been implemented as a platform for citizen engagement in governance, through a “Discuss”, “Do” and “Disseminate” approach.

The mobile App for MyGov would bring these features to users on a mobile phone • Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) Mobile app would be used by the people and government organizations for achieving the goals of Swachh Bharat Mission • eSign framework would allow citizens to digitally sign a document online using Aadhaar authentication • The Online Registration System (ORS) under the eHospital application has been introduced. This application provides important services such as online registration, payment of fees and appointment, online diagnostic reports, enquiring availability of blood online, etc • National Scholarships Portal is a one-stop solution for end-to-end scholarship process right from submission of student application, verification, sanction and disbursal to end-beneficiary for all the scholarships provided by the Government of India • DeitY has undertaken an initiative, namely Digitize India Platform (DIP) for large-scale digitization of records in the country that would facilitate efficient delivery of services to the citizens • The Government of India has undertaken an initiative, namely Bharat Net, a high-speed Digital Highway to connect all 2.5 lakh Gram Panchayats of the country. This would be the world’s largest rural broadband connectivity project using optical fibre • BSNL has introduced Next-Generation Network (NGN) to replace 30-year-old exchanges, which are an IP-based technology to manage all types of services like voice, data, multimedia/ video and other types of packet switched communication services • Electronics Development Fund (EDF) Policy aims to promote Innovation, R&D, and Product Development and to create a resource pool of IP within the country to create a self-sustaining eco-system of Venture Funds • The National Centre for Flexible Electronics (NCFlexE) is an initiative of the Government of India to promote research and innovation in the emerging area of Flexible Electronics • The Centre of Excellence on Internet on Things (IoT) is a joint initiative of the Department of Electronics & Information Technology (DeitY), ERNET and NASSCOM

9 Pillars of Digital India

To conclude...

The estimated impact of Digital India by 2019 would be cross cutting, ranging from broadband connectivity in all Panchayats, Wi-Fi in schools and universities and Public Wi-Fi hotspots.

The programme will generate a huge number of IT, Telecom and Electronics jobs, both directly and indirectly. The success of this programme will make India digitally empowered and the leader in usage of IT in delivery of services related to various domains such as

health, education, agriculture, banking, etc. Indian citizens can now connect their phone numbers with their Aadhaar authentication number for streamlined data verification. Going further, the Government is launching apps for Swachh Bharat Mission, PayGov and MyGov, and setting up National Centre for Flexible Electronics and National Institute for IoT (Internet of Things).

It is indeed going to be a huge opportunity for everyone!

1. Broadband Highways 2. e-Kranti Framework – Electronic Delivery of services 3. Universal Access to Phones 4. Public Internet Access Programme 5. I-Governance – Reforming Government through Technology 6. Information for All 7. IT for Jobs 8. Early Harvest Programmes 9. Electronics Manufacturing – Target Net Zero Import

Reactions from India Inc Cyrus Mistry, Chairman - Tata Group "I congratulate PM for setting up Digital India to provide governance in real time and digitallyempowering citizens. Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) plans to hire 60,000 IT professionals this year and has partnered with the Government for various projects like Passport Seva and income tax e-filing, as well as state-level projects.”

Mukesh Ambani, Chairman - Reliance Industries “With Digital India, the Government has moved faster than the industry. Reliance Jio Infocomm will invest Rs.2, 50,000 crore as part of Digital India programme. The company will also roll out a best-in-class internet network.”

Azim Premji, Chairman - Wipro “Digital India initiative will democratize the nation and "break down the digital divide in India and it is the first step towards empowering citizens with technology. The level of skills of India's people will have to be significantly improved in order to make full use of the new initiative. India Today + Information Technology = India Tomorrow has become a staple mantra of IT firms.”

Sunil Bharti Mittal, Chairman & Group CEO Bharti Enterprises “Digital India has power to transform the country in the shortest time, also digitally friendly. The Prime Minister is the right man to lead the drive and he understands the power of technology and how it can transform the nation, connect the nation in the shortest time frame and Airtel will invest $16 billion to build deeper IT infrastructure to offer telecom services to Indian citizens in rural and urban parts of the country and will bring 4G for the masses.”

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e-Governance Kumaramangalam Birla, Chairman - Aditya Birla Group “In Digital India, the company has invested over US$15 billion in the telecom industry, wherein we have laid 1 lakh kms of fibre, to further improve this digital infrastructure.

We plan to invest an additional US$7 billion over the next five years in areas such as network rollout, broadband and Wi-Fi deployment."

Anil Ambani Chairman - Reliance Group “The company will invest Rs.10, 000 crore in tech projects as part of Digital India. The company's investment in data centers will continue and upcoming five fully operational Cloud Xchange points that will help government departments access 240 times the amount of compute power currently available in government data centers."

Satya Nadella, CEO - Microsoft “Microsoft is proud to be a part of Digital India launch and believe that technology can uniquely support the government’s initiatives in key areas including: rural internet connectivity, digital cloud services for all its citizens, and communications and productivity services for the Government."

Hari Om Rai, Chairman & MD - Lava International “Three key pillars that will define India’s transformation into a digitized nation will be Make in India, Skill India and Digital India.

And technology will be at the core of this.

Lava is committed to these initiatives. We have already set up our first manufacturing unit in Noida and plan to invest INR 12 billion."

R. Chandrashekhar, President – NASSCOM “The ambitious plan of the Government being established in collaboration with the industry will create an inclusive ecosystem for budding entrepreneurs and organization to leverage new-age technologies and access to researchers, industry and other stakeholders. This Centre of Excellence will act as an innovation accelerator to explore product ideas."

Anil Valluri, President - NetApp India & SAARC “Digital India is one of the most significant transformations the country will witness by eventually connecting over a hundred crore people of India, with technology as its focal point. A digitally enabled nation means that citizens will have instantaneous access to government services over the internet, like the Digital locker, e-governance services on demand."

Sanjay Rohatgi, Senior Vice President - Sales, Asia, Pacific and Japan - Symantec “The 'Digital India’ program can indeed empower inclusive and sustainable growth by harnessing the power of talent and technology to create the India of tomorrow.

With initiatives such as countrywide broadband access and digital locker linked with Aadhaar and mobile, the possibilities are endless."

Vinay Shenoy, Chairman - IESA “IESA lauds this Digital India initiative. It is a colossal project even on a global scale, delivering services digitally to every one of 1.2 Billion citizens in the country. Inclusion is an integral part of the program - Inclusion of all citizens in availing digital services, inclusion of all cross sections of the Industry – Indian start-ups, small, medium and large and multinational enterprises."

Koichiro Koide, MD - NEC India Pvt. Ltd. “We, at NEC India Pvt. Ltd, welcome the launch of PM Modi’s Smart Cities Mission guidelines and the three flagship urban development schemes as it is a great step towards making urbanization as one of the most critical drivers of growth in today’s scenario. The three schemes also commit to readying a few hundred more to become smart cities in the next phase."

Deepak Kumar Sahu, Editor-in-Chief, VARINDIA “The industry has come in full support of Digital India Week where announcement of billions of dollars of investments into electronics manufacturing and Digital India programme which is one of the most vital decisions by the Government and is aimed at creating and delivering large-scale welfare policies. Seems promising opportunity for IT players in the country."

Rahul Rishi, Partner- Advisory Services - EY India “I feel the current government does not see “Digital India” as a project/Program or a scheme, it is an AGENDA for the country. This in my opinion is the right approach to have to bring impactful change. Digital is a new age term. I particularly liked the PM’s emphasis on Optical Fibre as a civilization necessity and strengthening cyber security to prevent bloodless war."

Dr Jaijit Bhattacharya, Partner, Cities & Digital Innovation - KPMG “The Digital India vision will prove to be a game-changer for India. The entirety of the vision also dovetails aspects of other policies of the current government such as Smart Cities and Make in India. Clearly, the vision is not a short-term one and would require considerable investments."

Vineet Kshirsagar, Senior Director & Head – Government Business - Oracle India “Oracle has been working tirelessly in the Indian public sector over the last two decades and on this momentous day, we are inspired and overwhelmed to see the exhilaration not just from the government but from the citizens of this nation as well. We congratulate the government on this milestone for which Oracle is prepared."

BVR Mohan Reddy, Chairman - NASSCOM “The technology industry is rapidly moving towards convergence of software and hardware. And this phenomenon is leading to the development of some of the innovative products and solutions that will change the way we look at the world. NASSCOM welcomes the government in this partnership of setting up this Centre of Excellence."

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PRODUCT OF THE MONTH

Liva X Mini PC Liva X is powered with Intel Bay Trail-M / Bay Trail-I SoC processors. It is provided with 64-bit dual-core performance up to 2.25GHz on Intel's advanced 22nm architecture and comes with low-power consumption. LIVA X with fan-less design stays cool while eliminating inflow of debris which might harm the system.

Fanless LIVA X delivers 0dB silence to extend lifespan and provide better acoustic performance. It consumes only approximately 1/10 the energy that traditional PCs consume and brings the most efficient performance. This mini PC supports the latest Windows 8.1 and the most popular Windows 7 (Via mSATA SSD), Linux and Ubuntu OS. Liva X comes with HDMI and D-Sub support. It provides two independent output displays for home entertainment and multi-display applications. This mini pc comes with various connectivity options like WiFi, LAN and Bluetooth. It has 2 GB Ram and 32 GB Internal storage. LIVA X offers a Wireless Combo Card and supports mSATA SSDs for more storage with faster data transmission. It supports Microsoft Remote Desktop app to access data anywhere and lots of popular WiFi streaming options for wireless delivery of video and audio. With VESA Mount, you can turn your TV into a PC with a bigger screen, and turn your monitor into digital signage with processing ability.

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COVER STORY

The ‘BIG’, ‘FAT’ SMBs of India

India has the 2nd largest population of SMBs, when compared to nations such as Brazil, Russia, China and US. SMB contributes more than 60 percent to the Indian GDP while their spending on IT has been only 30 percent of India’s total IT spending.

Brands state why are there such reservations on the part of Indian SMBs

B

efore writing anything on the SMB market, it would be wise to check out what the research agencies have to say about this segment. According to a report by NASSCOM in FY2013, the IT spends of Indian SMBs stood at USD 8.7 billion. Of this, 45 percent was spent on hardware, 40 percent on IT services (implementation, support and training) and 15 percent on software licensing and SaaS. According to Zinnov ‘Indian SMB ICT Adoption Insights’ report, SMBs in the country are likely to grow at a CAGR of 15 percent by 2015, contributing US$15 billion or over one-third of India's overall IT spend. According to IDC, SMBs have spent nearly $152.3 billion on various forms of IT in 2014, and this accounts for over 25 percent of overall global SMB IT expenditure while Gartner's forecast for worldwide dollar-

Shibu Paul Regional Sales Director – India, ME and SEA at Array Networks

Barun Lala Director, Storage HP India

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Mid-segment SMBs are shifting from home-grown solutions and legacy application deployments to packaged software The kind of business opportunities for the SMB sector is limitless

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valued IT spending growth in 2015 has fallen by 5.5%, down from last quarter's decrease of 1.3%.

“The rising US dollar is chiefly responsible for this change,” states Shibu Paul, Regional Sales Director – India, ME and SEA at Array Networks. “When we convert this into constant-currency terms, the forecast growth for 2015 is down by only 0.6 percentage points to 2.5%.”

Hence, it clearly indicates that there is a huge potential as regards the increase in IT spend among Indian SMBs as they are still ‘untapped.’ Taking cognizance of this opportunity are all the large MNC technology companies that have identified the SMB sector as the growth area. Shibu says that though the percentage of business coming from SMB sector is comparatively low, it is

Vishal Parekh Marketing Director Kingston Technology

increasing its focus on this sector and as a step forward, Array has been creating solutions along with cloud partners for the SMB sector.

Many SMBs still prefer to invest in solutions that would either aid directly in increasing the revenue or have a more defined ROI, while many small to midsized firms are considering moving their data and applications to the cloud-based solutions. “However, there is still a chunk of SMB consumers who are apprehensive about the security that a public cloud offers. In such a situation, personal cloud solutions would provide a great alternative with one-time ownership cost and subscription-free model that could be beneficial for an SMB that operates under tight budgets,” says Khwaja Saifuddin Senior Sales Director - South Asia, Middle East and Africa - WD. It is interesting to note that upper SMBs have a more developed IT landscape and maturity; hence they tend to seek value from IT that is similar to enterprise accounts. “Mid-segment SMBs are shifting from home-grown solutions and legacy application deployments to packaged software. The kind of business opportunities for the SMB sector is limitless. We at Logitech recognize the potential that the SMB sector has and hence a big chunk of our efforts has been around catering to the needs,” asserts Ashok Jangra, Cluster Category Manager, India & South West Asia, Logitech.

Today’s enterprise is undergoing a massive and sometimes complex transformation. “SMBs today are getting better systems installed to make use of virtualization, for network security, to get cost effective results, and much more.

Though they are present in clusters and geographically dispersed, their digital footprint is growing rapidly. We as a practice do not differentiate the SMB segment with others. We want them to make use of the best products that we can offer, at the best price,” remarks Vishal Parekh, Marketing Director, Kingston Technology.

With the emergence and growth of BYOD amongst enterprises of all sizes,

Jitendra Ghughal National Channel Manager, India & SAARC, Fortinet

the mid-market sector is also opening up to the concept. In line with the latest government initiatives like Smart Cities having a large impact on the economic infrastructure of the country, enterprises are facing an overall digital transformation. “It is hence, crucial for the mid-market companies to adapt themselves to the growing needs of the economy. There is currently no leader for providing unified communications and collaboration solutions in this segment, giving us an opportunity to expand our business in this segment,” says Arun Shetty, Director of Collaboration Solutions - India, Avaya.

Businesses also know that they must innovate to stay ahead. The rapid pace of technological innovation and the growth of the always-connected generation have left organizations in verticals like retail, education and healthcare playing catch-up when they look to empower their employees, customers, students or clients with Wi-Fi access. Fortinet has over 15,000 customers in India and 45%

Arun Shetty Director of Collaboration Solutions - India, Avaya shift in their buying pattern. “Earlier the demands of SMB customers used to be far less than their enterprise counterparts.

But today their requirements have been at par as enterprise customers; they want high availability, better service levels, want an infrastructure that is scalable but at a lesser cost. They don’t want any compromise on the features which earlier they used to. If we are not able to do it, they will switch to some other vendor for that same solution. I find them to be very aggressive today,” explains Barun Lala, Director, Storage, HP India.

Technology Adoption on a rise

C. Ramanan Director – Commercial business, India Subcontinent– Citrix of our business comes from Small and Medium Businesses. Fortinet’s portfolio of industry-leading security solutions enables businesses to consolidate standalone products, embrace new technologies and pursue business opportunities, all while remaining completely secure,” says Jitendra Ghughal, National Channel Manager, India & SAARC, Fortinet.

According to Xerox, around 90% SMBs are based in the top 200 Tier II and Tier III cities and it is quintessential to tap these cities aggressively. “Around 4045% of business comes from SMBs today for Xerox. The printing requirements of these businesses are very different from large enterprises. They are looking for high quality printers at affordable price points to address their needs,” says Balaji Rajagopalan, Executive Director, Technology, Channels & International Distributor Operations - Xerox India.

HP that has been making tremendous amount of improvements in the SMB market share growth observes a paradigm

The SMB opportunity in India is growing tremendously. Today SMBs are shaping the IT industry, thus impacting the overall growth of the economy. SMBs and SOHOs in India are increasingly becoming aware of technology and its implications in advancing their businesses

The technology needs of SMBs are different from the enterprise market. They are more open to newer technologies like cloud and open source and gaining competitive advantage.

However, they are extremely careful in terms of technology they invest in.

It looks for cost-effective, reliable and secure IT networks to ensure business continuity. They want to adopt IT strategies which enable them to achieve their business goals and plans.

“The technology needs of SMBs are different from the enterprise market. They are more open to newer technologies like

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COVER STORY

Jim Simon Senior Director of Marketing, Asia-Pacific, Quantum cloud and open source. In fact, there are many successful cloud providers which are totally driven by SMBs,” says Shibu.

Interestingly, the growing maturity of SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud) technologies is also providing companies the channel to reach SMB customers.

“So far SMB sector has been focusing on basic IT infrastructure. They have been utilizing IT very smartly to manage and grow their business. Now they are moving for more value add product,” cites Arun. He however has observes that the SMBs have always been a little apprehensive on technology uptake. The reason could be the price sensitivity challenge, which is one of the major challenges faced by this segment. “But with time SMBs have been evolving and realizing that it is the adoption of technology which will help them grow the business faster and differentiate them from their competitors. The next level of growth for SMBs would be investing in solutions and technologies that are scalable and grows with their business,” he says.

Currently, the SMB segment contributes 25-30% of Citrix’s business.

The adoption of Citrix’s solutions in the SMB segment has witnessed a 5-10% year-on-year increase. According to C. Ramanan, Director – Commercial business, India Subcontinent– Citrix, the technology adoption in the SMB segment overtime has been greater than expected. This can be warranted

to the increasing cost of IT, resource availability, manageability constraints and up gradation to new technology.

SMBs increasingly view technology as a key business enabler. “Customers are increasingly seeing great value in adopting new technologies and are realizing the business benefits and profitability it brings to their organisation,” he reiterates.

He further states, “We have witnessed that most SMBs prefer to opt for pay-asyou-grow model for IT solutions unlike large companies. It reduces their CAPEX spent as well as helps them to rapidly scale their business and do not necessarily invest heavily on infrastructure. A concept like DAAS has benefits targeted towards SMBs, keeping in mind their scale of operation.”

Cloud technology is a tailor made platform for SMBs as it enables them to adopt business applications without large capex, lower TCO and attain technology benefits. Agrees Jim Simon, Senior Director of Marketing, Asia-

Khwaja Saifuddin Senior Sales Director - South Asia, Middle East and Africa, WD Pacific, Quantum, “SMBs have been as quick as enterprise organizations, if not quicker, when it comes to opting new technologies like virtualization and cloud. Virtualization has taken off because it helps organizations big or small get more out of existing resources.

Cloud is attractive because it can save an SMB from onsite management of their backup data.”

SMBs have been evolving and realizing that it is the adoption of technology which will help them grow the business faster and differentiate them from their competitors.

The next level of growth for SMBs would be investing in solutions and technologies that are scalable and grows with their business 36

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Balaji Rajagopalan, Executive Director Technology, Channels & International Distributor Operations - Xerox India Small and medium-sized businesses have unique requirements for data protection.

It's important to find a solution that fits their kind of environment. Quantum abides by a Guiding Principle which says that whatever an SMB's choice for data protection is, have a backup plan and stick to it. “Case studies have shown that up to 90% of SMBs that suffer a major loss of data and have not adequately backed it up will go out of business,” says Jim. Adding to this, Balaji says that mobile and cloud will bring the next level of growth for the SMBs. “This is because the response seems to only be quoting out of the report,” he says.

Sooner or later, these SMBs will enter a critical phase between small and midsize. At this phase there is a lot of business for these companies and the limited staffs are under a lot of stress. This is a critical time especially for network security and there are lots to be done to secure the growing network. Unfortunately, network security is often put on hold or takes a back seat for redesign of the network or implementing new business support systems. This is a crucial phase of business for the SMBs and compromising on network security can result in a major setback for their growing business. “With a proper baseline defence of integrated firewalling, Web filtering, Network based antivirus and client antivirus; the SMB IT staff should be able to pull though this phase. SMB’s would also need to reduce overheads on managing networking and security infrastructure independently without compromising either the control on the network or the security,” Jitendra admits.

“Technology enables an SMB to gain competitive advantage. Although they maybe small today, many start ups and smaller businesses have scaled up in not much time. They need to develop the forward-looking mind set of investing in scalable and efficient technology solutions that suit their needs to catalyze their next level of growth,” shares Khwaja.

SMBs need greater customization and

more servicing because they have limited resources at their disposal. Though in initially stages of adopting technologies, SMBs have realised the importance of new technologies that will give their business a distinct edge over their competitors.

Challenges along with Evolution…

It is needless to say that SMBs have played a vital role in our country’s development and this largely impacts our economy. The SMB sector has the potential for huge growth as they are service providers to primary industries.

The emerging and newer technologies are expected to drive its growth level even higher.

However, SMBs are a diverse group of businesses – in many ways, more dynamic than the enterprise businesses.

It is this uniqueness that gives rise to several challenges while addressing this market. Despite being large and fast growing, the Indian SMB market has not been considered very profitable for business by the Indian ICT industry.

This is owing to factors such as low IT awareness, high geographic distribution, small deal sizes, long sales cycles and high cost of customized solutions. “This scenario will however change and we expect the SMB segment to undergo substantial growth in the time to come,” says Ashok.

The major challenge faced by most of the vendors is cost as SMBs have comparatively lower budgets. SMB customers are also very price sensitive and sometimes prioritize lower price over value. “There are two major limitations that we see affecting the IT adoption and growth in the SMB segment – Limitations with capital and Availability of information about the best compatible products and solutions,” says Vishal.

“The main challenge that we face while dealing with the mid-market sector is, ensuring we have sufficient reach to be able to deliver the solutions.

With India being such a huge market, the demand of organizations varies based on their location, vertical and size of the business as well,” says Arun. Another challenge also is the lack of a formalized IT department and strategy in growing mid-market organizations. “We need to find compelling ways of getting in front of busy executives to talk to them about how an investment in their collaboration systems and tools will drive significant returns for their business,” he says.

SMB also being largely scattered across the country, creating awareness on numerous products and solutions become a big challenge. While overcoming such challenges, vendors often attribute their success on its ability to find and engage with the right partners, engaging and building capacities and deploy fullstack solutions to the customers in

Ashok Jangra Cluster Category Manager, India & South West Asia, Logitech

The demands of SMBs are as same as the large enterprises today. The growth if the SMB is co-related to the industry that it is evolving into.

For instance, if we take the example of the Retail industry, the buying pattern of e-commerce companies like Amazon and Flipkart would be same as that of retail giants like Shoppers Stop and Pantaloons – the kind of infrastructure they are laying, the amount of server and storage they are buying is huge

this segment. “We are seeking channel partners who have reach throughout India and will represent Quantum well with SMBs,” replies Jim. On the part of SMBs, the primary challenge face by them is in terms of infrastructure, its hosting and availability.

Typically, many SMB organizations do not have the right kind of infrastructure or necessary capital available to host a solution which requires datacentre, storage etc. “Desktop virtualization has gradually become a mainstream enterprise technology that has the potential to replace traditional desktops and offer more usability to the users and the IT team. However, it was perceived as a niche or high-end technology which was beyond the reach of most companies, mainly due to its pricing structure,” says Ramanan.

Most SMBs and start-ups have one primary objective, growing revenues within the existing budget and resources’ constraint. As long as the IT solution is not really adding to the overall revenue of the organization, people are not generally serious about adopting them. While a Website has become a necessity due to the growing popularity of e-Commerce, the same may not hold true for the internal collaboration tools.

“Many SMBs do not have the manpower to deploy and maintain cumbersome IT solutions. We understand these challenges that smaller businesses face and offer customized solutions that can take care of their data storage problems,” says Khwaja.

And so…

The SMB market has a lot of potential.

In fact, they are the fastest growing market in India by far. Having said that, SMBs are growing significantly and will be key to the growth of companies who possibly consider SMB as an important vertical for them.

Many companies have admitted to having witnessed a double digit growth in this segment. While it is also true that the barrier between SMB and an enterprise customer is fast diminishing. As cited by Barun, the demands of SMBs are as same as the large enterprises today. The growth if the SMB is co-related to the industry that it is evolving into. For instance, if we take the example of the Retail industry, the buying pattern of e-commerce companies like Amazon and Flipkart would be same as that of retail giants like Shoppers Stop and Pantaloons – the kind of infrastructure they are laying, the amount of server and storage they are buying is huge.

Earlier an SMB storage deal used to be in the range of $ 25,000 - $ 50,000 but today that same deal would be in the range of $ 2, 500, 00 - $ 3, 500, 00. The pace at which they are growing is much higher than what it used to be a few years back.

This is indeed a big growth story for a country like India. n samrita@varindia.com

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INDUSTRY WATCH

The Journey from Product to Solution W

e are living in The Information Age. The radical shift is happening from traditional Industries to informative industries. Applications are shifting curve from Desktop device to mobile device.

People need access to information from anywhere and at any time. With these changes happening all around, demands of people are also witnessing a paradigm shift.

Not only the demand of common mass but also the business needs are changing. The consumer wants their needs to be addressed in better and quicker way. They now look for an overall solution rather than multiple products for their business complexities.

Moreover, consumers also expect a solution provider to become their business advisor.

Emergence of Solution Providers In recent times, a major change in customer behavior has been observed

DevendraTaneja Director, PC Solutions Pvt. Ltd "In order to cater to the demand of customers, System Integrators are today forced to change their business model.

Its more to do with the survival July 2015 www.varindia.com 38 rather than anything else."

Vikram Dham MD & CEO, Emkor Solutions Ltd. “The focus of customers has now shifted to “outcome”.

They need outward looking solutions that give them the real results. " while adopting technology. Previously the customers concentrated on technology or services for a particular problem they face in their business. But it is due to the evolving economic environment that the customers are looking for a single solution for multiple problems.

“The focus of customers has now shifted to “outcome”. They need outward looking solutions that give them the real results. Previously, the customers used to acquire either pure play technology or pure play services. Today, what matters to them the most is one single solution that can mitigate all their problems. Typically, traditional products and services address a particular problem while creating new ones. The customer is left with a mess of new problems that add to the complexities of the business. They do not want any new problem, but a solution to all the complex

problems. That is when solution providers come into the picture. They provide an end-to-end solutions from planning to execution to support and thus they match the exact needs of the customers,” Vikram Dham, MD & CEO, Emkor Solutions Ltd. Moreover, the latest technological enhancements have further accelerated the demand of a single solution.

As per DevendraTaneja, Director, PC Solutions Pvt. Ltd., “Need for this change is forced on System Integrators by the changing customer behavior/expectations; as end customers have to change their IT usage/adaption due to changes in economic environment in which their business are competing in the market. Dramatic and fast pace advances in IT like cloud; mobility and social media further accentuated need of customers to depend on single point of call to solution deployment vis a vis go for nut and bolt procurement and put solution together in-house. In order to cater to the

Kshitij M Kotak Managing Director, Fortune GrecellsPvt. Ltd. “Maintaining margins were unsustainable and have been bleeding IT service providers since long and recent tsunami of deep discounts on e-commerce goliaths have washed away staple business of reselling computer hardware."

Vikas Gupta Vice President, Hi-Tech Business Unit, Infogain “This approach is a winwin proposition for both the IT solution provider and their customer. " demand of customers, System Integrators are today forced to change their business model. Its more to do with the survival rather than anything else.”

Another view that has surfaced emergence of Solution Providers rather just than being a simple box seller is believed to be the sudden surge of e-commerce platforms.

“Maintaining margins were unsustainable and have been bleeding IT service providers since long and recent tsunami of deep discounts on Flipkart, Amazon and other e-commerce goliaths have washed away staple business of reselling computer hardware.

Change in customer profile and behaviour being evident, a small percentage of IT service entities have embraced change and entered solution space.Businesses with foresight entered solution space early and evolved themselves, they believed in and acted upon Darwin’s theory of evolution: Survival of the Fittest,” stated Kshitij M Kotak, Managing Director,Fortune Grecells Pvt. Ltd.

New approach meeting today’s business needs Modern day businesses face several challenges and to meet those, customers seek a technology provider who can address the pain points and offer multiple solutions under one umbrella.

Now, we are in that phase where IT needs to give back value additions to business or help them achieve more against their respective competition which leads to the need of complex business solution.

These business requirements generally are not fulfilled by one single tool / product.

System Integrators may have to create a solution which requires a combination of tools / products and sometimes customized solutions as well. Solution partner with his expertise and skills can propose the same effectively.

“This approach is a win-win proposition

for both the IT solution provider and their customer. As an IT solution provider we constantly strive to find the right fit solution to address our customer requirements so that the customer is able to rapidly respond to their market,” said Vikas Gupta, Vice President, Hi-Tech Business Unit, Infogain.

Similarly, Amarnath Shetty, Managing Director, LDS Infotech said, “Businesses use technology to reduce business costs through automation processes covering an entire gamut of front and back office functions, such as accounting, payroll, ERP, CRM, Sales management using technologies to create secure environments for maintaining critical business or consumer information.

Helping business owners implement the right technology incorporating industry best practices in their planning process helps create world class operations deploying best technologies available.”

Another major factor that has led the customers to adopt a single solution approach is IT spends. Companies have stipulated budget and hence most CIO/

Tarun Seth Managing Director, Hitachi Systems Micro Clinic Pvt. Ltd. “System Integrator understands their business challenges and works with a customer not as a vendor/supplier but as a business partner. " CTO are caught into dilemma of addressing business demand with limited budget or budget carved out of opex expenditure. This has pushed them to seek Partners who are technically sound, have deployed similar projects, flexible and commercially viable.

“Customer’s budget is limited, they want partner who can address their issue with some smart solution using newer upcoming technologies with competitive pricing. If partner companies can meet these expectations they can grow much faster in next 2-3 years than what they grown in last decade,” stated Deepak Jadhav, Director, VDA Infosolutions Pvt. Ltd.

Solution centric approach enhancing Partner’s business Today, the role of a System Integrator has evolved from just a technology

Amarnath Shetty Managing Director, LDS Infotech “Organisations of today seek IT vendors that come as dependable “IT Consultative Approach” aka Business Advisors/ Business Consultants." provider to a technology enabler.Gone are those days when customers only look for a solution which will solve their pain points. Now they look for more than just a solution. So, to remain profitable in this competitive market the Solution Providers have widened their offerings by expanding their role as a strategy provider, industry expertise, advisor on business optimization & development and also aprovider of 24/7 solution support to their customers.

“In a solution-centric approach, customer values the System Integrator’s effort to size the right solution for them.

It entails a lot of services along with products; and the customer is willing to pay for quality services. Hence, this helps the company to remain competitive and drive profitable business,” said Tarun Seth, Managing Director, Hitachi Systems Micro Clinic Pvt. Ltd. Reiterating similar view, Jiten Mehta, Director, Magnamious Systems Pvt Ltd.said, “With solution your different services will also go along which will make you remain

Deepak Jadhav Director, VDA Infosolutions Pvt. Ltd. “Customer’s budget is limited, they want partner who can address their issue with some smart solution using newer upcoming technologies with 39 www.varindia.com July 2015 competitive pricing. "

INDUSTRY WATCH

Tilak Raj Ratra Director, Pentacle IT Solutions Pvt. Ltd. “The approach is helpful for the vendor in keeping his customer glued to him, by acting as the consultant for his customer by selling solutions which will be relevant to the business of his customer. " profitable can allow you to retain/develop the skills and can remain in the business.

Also with the BRT model of any solution you can start the recurring service revenue and can help you remain profitable.”

The solution providers who follow this approach are likely to be preferred by customers. The solutions given to them are aligned to their business requirements.

The customers are also willing to move to a solution that helps them respond quickly to the market situation.

“For solution providers this is a great news as competition is limited and attaining specialised skillset is difficult and time consuming. Not every box pusher or computer dealer can attain requisite competency. Scalability too is limited as even with a 100 million investment, this business is not easily and quickly scalable like e-commerce or services virtually guaranteeing solution provider much needed profitability,” said Kshitij M Kotak, Managing Director, Fortune Grecells Pvt. Ltd. “To evolve to new realties; System Integrators had to choose areas of growth for them and undertake lots of investments in up-skilling work force. Few who are able to manage strategy, finances, humane capital are seeing enhancement in profitability.

Solution centric approach allows more stickiness with the customer due to close proximity of solutions with the customer’s business” reiterated DevendraTaneja, Director, PC Solutions Pvt. Ltd.

As a Business Advisor With transforming world, the approach of these solution providers has changed.

The next gen solution providers have really moved up the value chain. Instead of asking the problem and the solution that you a company wants, they put forward the complications and their solutions to their customers. Thus, the DNA of solution

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providers is changing.

“System Integrator understands their business challenges and works with a customer not as a vendor/supplier but as a business partner. Customers are relying more and more on system integrators to work with them as business advisors,” said Tarun Seth, Managing Director, Hitachi Systems Micro Clinic Pvt. Ltd. This approach of Solution Providers to become a Business Advisor helps their customers find more time to focus on their core business strengths than on trivial IT issues.

“Organisations of today seek IT vendors that come as dependable “IT Consultative Approach” aka Business Advisors/ Business Consultants. Customers don’t want product sellers or transaction salesmen who are interested in one off sale.

As such we at LDS Infotech take Business Advisor Role when we go to customers, with a bouquet of products, understand customer requirements, and offer a long lasting customer centric solution,” said Amarnath Shetty, Managing Director, LDS Infotech.

Jiten Mehta Director, Magnamious Systems Pvt Ltd. “With solution your different services will also go along which will make you remain profitable can allow you to retain/develop the skills and can remain in the business."

“Our approach is simple, we take care of three things, one – the headroom for unpredictable growth, two – Sensing the bottleneck and providing resources on demand, three – fast and secure delivery platform,”Neel Shah, Chairman, Insight Business Machines.

Moreover, customer acquisition is not difficult but customer retention is. The solution providers constantly need to evolve their technology platform as well as services.

This requires not only one time selling of products or services, but selling them as business advisor i.e. by understanding the pain areas of customers.

“The approach is helpful for the vendor in keeping his customer glued to him, by acting as the consultant for his customer by

Neel Shah Chairman, Insight Business Machines “Our approach is simple, we take care of three things, one – the headroom for unpredictable growth, two – Sensing the bottleneck and providing resources on demand, three – fast and secure delivery platform.” selling solutions which will be relevant to the business of his customer. The customer is only interested in using IT as a tool for enhancing his business outcome which can only happen if he pays to his vendors for getting his business problems solved,” Tilak Raj Ratra, Director, Pentacle IT Solutions Pvt. Ltd. “When we are dealing with different business heads we need to be winning their confidence and trust to make sure that they listen to us and also share lot of their pains with us which will help us designing a solution to their needs and can enable them for a higher efficiency and productivity.

So unless they consider us their trusted business advisor any of your sales expertise will never work,” Jiten Mehta, Director, Magnamious Systems Pvt Ltd.

To conclude…

With the evolution of technology, role of Solution Providers have also evolved.

Rather than just being a technology provider they have grown into an enabler of businesses by offering various products and services according to the needs of their customers. This is not enough, they have moved beyond their capacity and also act as a Business Advisor for their customers.

Playing various role at the same time is only the result of neck to neck competition to stay profitable.

From a simple box seller to solution provider and further extending the boundaries as a Business Advisor this portfolio has evolved time and again. In the coming years with changing customer demands and profitability factor will further redefine the role of solution providers so that they can cater to their customers in a much better way… n aparna@varindia.com

MARKET WATCH

From a Wired to a Wire– ‘less’ Nation 2015 is going to be a crucial year for the telecom sector, as this is the year when Wi-Fi is expected to become a reality in India. Giving this Wi-Fi growth a push are the Digital India and the Smart City initiatives that will spell a new opportunity altogether

I

f everything falls in place and with the one-year-old Modi Government promising free Wi-Fi services in the key cities, it is likely that India will see exponential growth in the number of Wi-Fi users and public hotspots deployments across all major cities. Given the opportunities that are opening up, telcos like Reliance Jio, Airtel and Tata DoCoMo are also stepping up their efforts to deploy Wi-Fi in the country, which can, indeed, become a big growth story for India.

However, when we dive into it deeper, the real story does not look to be as promising as it appears.

The India ‘Wireless’ story…

Though it is difficult to estimate the size of the Wi-Fi market in India, the current market size of Wi-Fi in India is estimated to be closeto $170 million. With a CAGR of 16 per cent, India still has to accelerate even faster in terms of percentage to match the growth of the global market. “We still, however, have a small share with respect to the global figure which is close-to $11 billion and expected to double worldwide. Some of the surveys put that this figure will double in the next five years,” observes Atul Jain, Vice-President – Channel Sales, TP-LINK India.

Nikhil Jain, MD & CEO, Elitecore Technologies Private Ltd, feels that as a technology, Wi-Fi is set to gain more prominence and importance in India.

Whether it is a Wi-Fi hotspot deployment in small or big cities or carrier-grade Wi-Fi that can power the networks for the operators, Wi-Fi is likely to play a major role in terms of delivering a seamless connectivity experience for the end-user. “As a globally recognized

leader in the field of delivering OSS/BSS solutions, we find ourselves in the forefront of this communication revolution in India,” he says.

Wi-Fi deployments are divided between private and public hotspots and each hotspot can have multiple access points. These touch points include multiple type of locations – starting with residential, offices, hotels, hospitals to marketplaces. And, then there are hotspots with multiple access points, such as an airport or a hotel. “How does one arrive at the number of hotspots? There is no central Wi-Fi committee in India at present to conclude on the size of the market. As the market evolves, we could see new standards coming into place,” remarks Sanjeev Bobby Sarin, CEO & Founder, Ozone Networks.

Similar are the views of Rajiv Kapur, Managing Director, Broadcom India, according to whom there is no industry market research on Wi-Fi in India. “However, the broadband market data is available from

Atul Jain Vice-President – Channel Sales, TP-LINK India

Nikhil Jain MD & CEO, Elitecore Technologies Private Ltd TRAI and we are now seeing a growing attach rate for Wi-Fi in the CPE taking it far over 50%,” he says.

According to Rajesh Goenka, VicePresident – Sales & Marketing, Rashi Peripherals, the current Wi-Fi penetration in India is miniscule and is limited to corporates and home segment only at present. “There are very few public Wi-Fi hotspots in the country. But considering high internet and smartphone penetration, Wi-Fi has become a necessity. Additionally, usage of internet for banking, reading newspapers and day-today shopping on the internet will propel the demand for Wi-Fi. In short, the more data is consumed, the more Wi-Fi will be used,” he says.

There are several factors that are driving growth of Wi-Fi in India. However, one of the major factors driving the Wi-Fi growth in the market are the smart devices which are used for both personal and business usage and this will create the need for Wi-Fi zones at all

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Sanjeev Bobby Sarin CEO & Founder Ozone Networks places while you are being mobile or stationed at any place. “Given the current population in India, India Context is going to be even much ahead than developed economies like the US, Europe, etc. Today’s India has more population and percentage of youth than any other country in the world which I count as one of the strongest factors of driving India’s growth for the next ten years,” says Atul.

Sanjeev too agrees that the sheer volume of population in the country coupled with massive demand for entertainment and Internet access on the move will drive Wi-Fi penetration. “Wi-Fi is becoming a popular choice for many. If we look at the amount of social sharing in the form of photos and videos that is happening on smartphones today, WiFi over 2G or 3G is gaining preference simply because its low cost and offers better Internet experience. Furthermore, with the current state of broadband penetration, a large segment of the population is left behind who do not have access to the basic broadband. If broadband is made accessible to this segment, the opportunity will be even very huge.”

Another big area that is finally evolving as a massive use case point in India is video calling over the Internet. Wi-Fi is going to be the biggest driver for VoIP. “Imagine the huge benefit Wi-Fi would lend to consumers by way of providing them access to their loved ones without any cost,” muses Sanjeev.

Implementation

of

initiatives and services like NOFN, 3G and 4G is further expected to propel the growth of Wi-Fi in India. The thrust of the Modi Government to create Smart Cities would further push Wi-Fi growth in the country 42

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The growing phenomenon of the Internet of Things is another market driver for Wi-Fi as also the increased smartphones and tablets at affordable prices growing demand for connectivity. The increasing attach rate of Wi-Fi in consumer devices like smartphones, televisions, consumer electronics, and the growing space of the Internet of Things, combined with the growing interest in the installation of Wi-Fi hotspots and access points in the country – for example, the recent announcement of Wi-Fi facilities to be provided at over 400 railway stations in the Railway Budget 2015 – are the other factors contributing to the growing WiFi opportunity. “The growing interest in watching photo, audio or video clips (YouTube, Facebook, cricket, etc) on the go increases the demand for connectivity and bandwidth. Retail set-ups (restaurants, coffee shops, malls, etc) are recognizing the interest in Wi-Fi access amongst their customers and are starting to offer it. Additionally, last-mile challenges whether to provide broadband access to the home or within the home is often leaning to wireless options due to ease

Rajesh Goenka Vice-President – Sales & Marketing, Rashi Peripherals of installation,” asserts Rajiv.

Moreover, the increasing use of wireless access technologies for last-mile connectivity and backhaul is also significantly driving the opportunity. There is also an increased interest in the use of Wi-Fi in home networking, be it in home gateway, Wi-Fi receiving devices like set-top boxes that indicate clearly the growing opportunity in Wi-Fi. Hospitality and education are the two sectors in the country that have been the early adopters of Wi-Fi and have since then seen considerable growth. They have been the key drivers for Wi-Fi deployment in India. “SME, retail, IT-ITeS had their own challenges in adopting Wi-Fi into their networks initially, but soon as the credibility of the technology grew, they slowly started realizing its significance. Though, in numbers, Wi-Fi penetration is negligible right now since it is the beginning but it is going to catch up fast.

It will soon grow up into an industry in the IT infrastructure space,” assures Sudarshan Boosupalli, Director – Enterprise & Service Provider Business, SAARC Region, Ruckus Wireless.

New opportunities mark its growth…

The most cohesive of wireless technologies today is Wi-Fi as it can provide gigabit speed and is extremely cheap when compared to 3G or LTE rollout; every device is enabled with a Wi-Fi chipset. So whether we talk about small cell, or LTE, or Wi-Fi, all these wireless technologies are going to coexist and complement each other. Opportunities for each of these technologies are going to expand as and when they are rolled out,” asserts Sudarshan.

It has become clear by now that there is immense opportunity in Wi-Fi in India. As a part of digital India initiative, the government is initiating steps to create Wi-Fi in the public domain. To give it a further boost, the Government, on its part, has last year announced a project for a speedy rollout of Wi-Fi hotspots at select public places in the top 25 cities with a population of over 10 lakh. Under this project, the government aims to cover cities with a population of over 1 million and tourist destinations with Wi-Fi services by December 2015.

Additionally, implementation of initiatives and services like NOFN, 3G and 4G is further expected to propel the growth of Wi-Fi in India. The NOFN (National Optical Fibre Network) project was conceived in 2011 by the UPA Government in which all panchayats will be connected to provide highspeed broadband connectivity. Till date, the rollout has been completed in 20,000 village panchayats and has set targets to take the network across 2.5 lakh village panchayats by the end of 2016. The project has been renamed as 'BhartNet' which should be completed by 2017. The thrust of the Modi Government to create Smart Cities would further push Wi-Fi growth in the country.

“The Government is still working on NOFN and doing feasibility studies on the effective usage of bandwidth under this project and the cost optimization. So we will have to keep our fingers crossed before any concrete result comes out of how profitable this initiative might be,” Atul ponders. TP-LINK is a worldwide 3G/4G products provider which is looking to further enhancements in the field of 4G. “Once we have 4G services

Rajiv Kapur Managing Director, Broadcom India

Wi-Fi vs Small Cells or rather a Convergence?

Sudarshan Boosupalli, Director – Enterprise & Service Provider Business, SAARC Region, Ruckus Wireless started, we will also have our 4G- compatible product launches soon. In fact, we will release one of our 4G Mobile Routers in India in Q3 2015,� he says.

Rashi that is currently distributing Netgear Wi-Fi routers is seeing the Wi-Fi business already growing by leaps and bounds and with the increase of data, there will be further boom witnessed. “While saying so, the launch of 4G will also trigger higher and faster data usage, which, to some extent, will be fulfilled by Wi-Fi. The dream is to have cities like Mumbai and Delhi with 100% WiFi connectivity,� says Rajesh.

But Wi-Fi rollout also has got its own challenges. Some of the present challenges in rolling out Wi-Fi hotspots nationwide include lack of connectivity, sharing of infrastructure and the need to establish a neutral Wi-Fi network. Then, of course,

Do more

Under pressure from more users, devices and applications, mobile networks have to transport higher traffic loads, which are straining the current infrastructure and frustrating subscribers when they cannot use the services they have paid for. Technologies like Wi-Fi and Small cells add capacity to mobile networks and both bring an important contribution to capacity increase. While Wi-Fi is already a widely adopted mature technology, small cells are still in the planning stage.

What is Small Cells? They are low-powered radio access nodes that operate in licensed and unlicensed spectrum that have a range of 10 meters to 1 or 2 kilometers. Small cells are a vital element to 3G data offloading, and many mobile network operators see small cells as vital to managing LTE Advanced spectrum more efficiently. With mobile data traffic expected to double annually, small cell base stations are set to play an important role in expanding the capacity of wireless networks.

However, experts commend the convergence of small cells and Wi-Fi networks to help solve coverage, capacity and spectrum issues in our increasingly connected, mobile-dominated world. Today more than ever, mobile operators are increasingly realizing that Wi-Fi and small cells must be part of their traditional licensed network in order to realize the future of mobility.

To conclude‌

there are challenges faced with the complexity of the device ecosystem, with a large share of feature phones even today not being Wi-Fi capable. Poor experience of entertainment access over the Internet due to lack of bandwidth continues to be another challenge.

According to Rajesh, capital investment in setting up and maintaining a Wi-Fi network along with the security concerns over the misuse of Wi-Fi are the two key challenges faced today. “Another challenge being faced is that Wi-Fi is predominately set up in metro locations or focus cities where there is uninterrupted power supply, whereas due to electric shortages, Wi-Fi cannot be a viable option for rural areas,� he says.

Also, backhaul networks may need upgrades to offer reasonable bandwidth for growing video heavy use cases.

At an overall level, awareness and education of Wi-Fi in the country is the need of the hour that has to be driven by the industry as a whole. Also, seamless integration with operator networks to provide seamless roaming experience becomes a must. 90 per cent of the data activity happens over Wi-Fi today and it is crucial for operators to come together and start sharing hotspot infrastructure. That is the only way to grow the Wi-Fi industry just like they did in the cell tower business. And as Sanjeev puts it, massive fiber network rollouts alone will not suffice as consumers wouldn’t physically tap into the wire to connect but instead would require Wi-Fi to access the Internet. A lot of these physical network implementations will be used as a backhaul in the long run to provide last-mile connectivity to the consumers. n samrita@varindia.com

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43

Smart City Mission - A Big Boost to Urban India Keeping in mind the fact that India’s urban population will reach 590 million by 2030, it is imperative that a proactive strategy like the recently announced 100 Smart City Mission will help to manage this urban explosion

I

f everything goes as planned, India will have 100 Smart Cities across 21 States in the next 5 years.

In the 2014-15 Budget Session, the FM announced the allotment of 7,060 Crores of Rupees for the proposed 100 Smart Cities.

A total of Rs 98,000 crore has been approved by the Cabinet for 100 smart cities and rejuvenation of 500 others. However, the two schemes, Rs 48,000 crore for Smart City Mission and Rs 50,000 crore for Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation, may merge at some point.

Smart City is an integrated planning approach with a business model. Smart city

aims to resolve multiple problems through use of ICT-based technology. Leveraging technology for life and cities should be liveable for citizens. It must have organic integration of IT, physical, social & business infrastructure.

It must empower its citizens and achieve social equity & sustainability. The justification for initial cost of these projects needs a wellthought of business model from the very start.

Improvement in Quality of Life will always attract higher costs (Taxes/user-charges). The challenge however will be to educate Indian consumers to use the smart city infrastructure correctly.

Ongoing development projects from Indian

Government include – Smart Cities Mission (will reach 100 cities across India), AMRUT (Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation, it will reach 500 cities across India); HRIDAY (Heritage City Development & Augmentation Yojana that will revitalize 12 heritage cities); Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC); Bengaluru-Mumbai Economic Corridor (BMEC); ChennaiBengaluru Industrial Corridor (CBIC); Visakhapatnam-Chennai Industrial Corridor (VCIC); Amritsar-Kolkata Industrial Corridor (AKIC) among others.

With these stepping stones, a bright future in Indian economy is anticipated.

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Pune – Maharashtra Mumbai – Maharashtra Nagpur – Maharashtra Nashik – Maharashtra Aurangabad – Maharashtra Bhivandi – Maharashtra Calcutta - West Bengal Durgapur – West Bengal Haldia – West Bengal Habra – West Bengal Jangipur – West Bengal Ahmedabad – Gujarat Surat – Gujarat Vadodara – Gujarat Rajkot – Gujarat Bhavnagar – Gujarat Junagadh – Gujarat Gandhi Nagar – Gujarat Bhopal - Madhya Pradesh Indore - Madhya Pradesh Gwalior - Madhya Pradesh Burhanpur - Madhya Pradesh Jabalpur - Madhya Pradesh Chennai - Tamil Nadu Coimbatore - Tamil Nadu Madurai - Tamil Nadu Tiruchirappalli - Tamil Nadu Salem - Tamil Nadu Tirunelveli - Tamil Nadu Bangalore – Karnataka Gulbarga – Karnataka Bidar – Karnataka Bijapur – Karnataka

July 2015

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Badami – Karnataka Pattadakal – Karnataka Mahakuta – Karnataka Thiruvananthapuram – Kerala Kollam – Kerala Kottayam – Kerala Tiruvalla – Kerala Ernakulam – Kerala Cochin – Kerala Thrissur – Kerala Hyderabad - Telangana Warangal - Telangana Karimnagar – Telangana Nizamabad – Telaganana Nalgonda - Telangana Guntur - Andhra Pradesh Vijayawada - Andhra Pradesh Kurnool - Andhra Pradesh Chittoor – Andhra Pradesh Kanpur - Uttar Pradesh Allahabad - Uttar Pradesh Lucknow - Uttar Pradesh Jhansi - Uttar Pradesh Faizabad - Uttar Pradesh Varanasi - Uttar Pradesh Jaipur – Rajasthan Ajmer – Rajasthan Bharatpur – Rajasthan Bikaner – Rajasthan Jodhapur – Rajasthan Kota – Rajasthan Udipur – Rajasthan Ludhiana - Punjab

67. Amritsir - Punjab 68. Jalandhar - Punjab 69. Patiala – Punjab 70. Muzaffarapur - Bihar 71. Patna - Bihar 72. Gaya - Bihar 73. Bhagalpur - Bihar 74. Bihar Sharif – Bihar 75. Faridabad - Haryana 76. Gurgaon - Haryana 77. Panipat - Haryana 78. Ambala – Haryana 79. Guwahati – Assam 80. Tinsukia – Assam 81. Obalguri – Assam 82. Tangla – Assam 83. Goalpara – Assam 84. Bhubaneswar - Odisha 85. Cuttack - Odisha 86. Rourkela - Odisha 87. Sambalpur - Odisha 88. Balasore - Odisha 89. Shimla – Himachal Pradesh 90. Dehradoon - Uttarakhand 91. Haridwar - Uttarakhand 92. Roorkee – Uttarakhand 93. Jamshedpur – Jharkhand 94. Dhanbad – Jharkhand 95. Ranchi – Jharkhand 96. Gangtok - Sikkim 97. Pelling - Sikkim 98. Yuksam – Sikkim 99. Bishnupur – Manipur 100. Chandel – Manipur

Movers & Shakers

RDP names its Associate Vice-President-Global

Vodafone India names Amit Pradhan as new CTSO

RDP Workstations has appointed Saurabh Sureka as Associate Vice-President for its newly-launched SKU AL-400.

Saurabh will spearhead globally. Prior to Joining RDP, he has vast experience in Thin Clients & Alternate Computing Solutions in Supreme Global Trading (Vamaa Thin Clients) where he worked as Head (Sales & Operations) for five years.

“Saurabh has got tremendous and credible long-term relationships with channel partners, distributors and system integrators, which he has built and nurtured over the years. I am confident that under his leadership, we will be able to strengthen and build a robust, vibrant and committed channel network,” said RDP’s Brand Manager.

Vodafone India has appointed Amit Pradhan as Chief Technology Security Officer (CTSO) of the company, a post that was lying vacant after the exit of his predecessor.

Prior to Vodafone India, Pradhan served Cipla for almost three years as a Group Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). With close-to two decades of experience now, Pradhan has spent most of his time in the areas of security operations, consulting, IT advisory and technology audits.

Pradhan has earlier worked with KPMG, Wipro Consulting and The Royal Bank of Scotland where his core expertise included setting up of security functions like ISMS, SOC, Cyber Threat Response, Incident Response, Forensics and business continuity framework.

MTS appoints its new CTO and COO

Lenovo appoints Rahul Agarwal as Managing Director, India

Sistema Shyam TeleServices (SSTL) that provides telecom services under the MTS brand has appointed Bijender Yadav as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and Ashok Singh as the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Kolkata and West Bengal circles.

Bijender Yadav will be responsible for overall network strategy and operations for the company. Incidentally, Bijender Yadav had joined MTS India in 2009 and has ever since been a key figure in network planning and strategy for the company. He has risen through the ranks to being appointed as the Chief Technology Officer for MTS India.

Ashok Singh, a telecom industry veteran, has more than 25 years of experience and has deep knowledge and understanding of Channel Sales, Marketing, Operations and General Management. His last assignment was with Tata TeleServices as COO for Jharkhand circle.

Lenovo has appointed Rahul Agarwal as MD for Lenovo India. Rahul takes over from Amar Babu who will now take on a regional mandate as COO, Lenovo, AsiaPacific and Chairman, Lenovo India.

Rahul Agarwal takes charge at a time when Lenovo is gearing up for its next phase of growth, diversifying beyond PCs into the smart connected devices while maintaining a strong PC focus.

The company is transforming into a global consumer technology brand differentiating itself on innovation and design. India plays a key role in this transformation and therefore is an extremely critical market for the company. Rahul’s extensive and multifunctional experience will help in India’s continued growth and increased contribution to Lenovo’s global success.

PRODUCT OF THE MONTH

BenQ XL2730Z Gaming Monitor The BenQ XL2730Z is built to dominate the professional gaming arena. Boasting a QHD resolution, 144Hz refresh rate, 1ms GTG response time and VESA Standard Adaptive-Sync technology, this all-new flagship gives you the finest, smoothest and fastest display performance for competitive gameplay.

The XL2730Z comes in an all black design with matte plastics used for the bezel, stand and base. There is a red trim in a few places, most notably on the cable tidy hole as you can see above. The bezel is reasonably thin and measures ~16.5mm along all edges. Fast response time of 1ms GTG means speed without the smear for an enhanced gaming experience. Fast-moving action and dramatic transitions will be rendered smoothly without the annoying effects of smearing or ghosting.

BenQ's new Motion Blur Reduction technology further enhances an ultra-smooth, free-of-blur gaming experience. It is absolutely vital that the XL2730Z give you the flexibility you need to get the color performance you seek. This is why BenQ built into the monitor 20 levels of Color Vibrancy setting to meet gamers' specific viewing requirements and preferences for all types of gameplay. The newly improved Black equalizer Dynamic color engine technology takes visibility optimization to a whole new level with automatic brightness adjustments. The adjustable height stand is now scaled with 14 height levels tractable by a moving marker. The S Switch Arc is an external controller that comes with preset buttons that can be customized with personal display settings for gaming, work or entertainment use. The Auto Game Mode enables the XL2730Z to detect the genre of the game being played and switch the display setting to the corresponding game mode automatically. They can also share their own game modes with everyone via cloud storage or social media platforms.

This innovative feature allows gaming communities to share, collaborate and bond freely with ease.

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July 2015

45

Sparsh stands for Trust, Reliability and Innovation In a chat with Sanjeev Sehgal, Managing Director, Samriddhi Automation Private Ltd, he has talked about the strategy and trends. He has also discussed about the scope in the Government of India’s Digital India initiative

U

nderstanding the “Making India Digital” initiative and aspiring to lead the Digital Surveillance space with innovative and advanced technology, Sparsh aims to position India in the global market as a high-quality and technologically advanced surveillance equipment maker country.

Based on three key elements – Trust, Reliability and Innovativeness, Sparsh has been able to maintain its position in the competitive and unorganized Indian surveillance market with its dedicated partners.

The company also considers its strong after-sales service as its backbone which has helped them to be competitive in the market.

Strategy In spite of the major security market in India being unorganized, Sparsh has always stood by its values of delivering the right product to the consumers which has been a big differentiator over the years in a market governed majorly by unorganized players.

The power of our brand “Sparsh” is such that today in such a competitive and also still majorly unorganized market, the company has dedicated partners which only sell “Sparsh” products due to the reliability, robustness and strong after-sales support they offer.

The Indian CCTV market is still majorly unorganized with many traders flooding the market with inferior imported products. Customers need to be educated so that they can buy the right product and technology for their security needs and get best return on their investment. In addition, the government needs to set standards for security devices that can be sold and provide guidelines for import of electronic security

Trends The Indian market is witnessing a rapid shift in the technology space. The market is moving towards IP and HD technology with new, differentiated and customized products being introduced.

• The market is very much in the transition phase. So there is a shift in technology in addition to sharp drop in the prices of Analog cameras over all correction in IP and HD pricing.

• With technological advancement and changing customer’s needs, the analog video surveillance has been shifting to network video surveillance.

• Apart from technology, there has been a shift on the product side too from box to fixed-dome cameras and PTZ (pan-tiltzoom) dome cameras.

• Not only has the market transitioned from Analog to IP, from box to fixed-dome cameras, the demand for high-resolution cameras is also visible. In continuous pursuance of clarity standard (medium) resolution cameras have replaced highresolution cameras and from standard dynamic range to wide dynamic range (WDR) cameras. In the recording space, DVRs are being replaced by network video recorders and external storage.

• HD CCTV video surveillance equipment is the fastest-growing segment in the Analog space and is the next big promising segment.

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July 2015

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Sanjeev Sehgal Managing Director Samriddhi Automation Pvt. Ltd. products in India.

Sparsh understands the importance of a safe and secure neighbourhood and vicinity, so the company is in touch with all the concerned authorities including administration, Noida authority for installing CCTVs in all the Noida residential areas. To take this noble step forward, Sparsh would take such initiative for many other areas and regions also.

Digital India, A scope…

The government’s initiative of “Making India Digital” programme seeks to transform India into a digitally-empowered society and knowledge economy. Taking “Making India Digital” initiative further, Sparsh would like to lead the Digital Surveillance space by continuous innovation and offering technically advanced products in the market. Due to its focus on technology, various global leaders in electronic security have partnered with the company to further advance the technology and bring the products to market. Sparsh’s vision is to put India on the global map for designing and manufacturing high-quality and technologically advanced electronic security equipment.

Roadmap The need for security in almost every walk of life is driving the demand for CCTV cameras, thus providing attractive business opportunities for multinationals, local companies and traders.

Based on various estimates, the global CCTV market is still growing at double-digit rate and the Indian market is growing more than double the global growth rate.

The commercial sector is estimated to have been the largest enduser sector which includes hotels, restaurants and offices. It is followed by banking and finance, retail, manufacturing and industrial, and government sectors. The fast-growing end-user sectors include city surveillance, traffic monitoring, Railways, and education. n aparna@varindia.com

www.varindia.com

July 2015

47

Karbonn boosting manufacturing in India W

Strategy

ith a major developmental plan of setting up of two manufacturing plants in India, the home-grown mobile handset company, Karbonn is aiming to achieve Rs.5,000-crore revenue in the financial year 2015-16. Karbonn is also planning to roll out its 4G handsets this year during the festive season. Discussing the target and investment plans of this financial year, Karbonn Mobiles Executive Director Shashin Devsare also puts forward the upcoming trends and marketing strategy.

Upcoming Trends in India

The features that Indian consumers look for in terms of hardware specifications are not very different from the global demands. Customers are moving towards big screen handsets, but it also seems to be optimizing at about 5 inches. The move is upwards or between 4 and 5.5 inches, but beyond that it starts losing relevance among the customers.

“As per my view, a phablet is a smartphone. Anything above 5 inches is categorized as a phablet. At the same time, what you need to keep in mind is the relevance of the screen size from convenience and pocketablility perspective.

Here, the screen size is playing the typical role. The screen size of 5- to 7-inch which is considered as a phablet is definitely going to find acceptance among the consumers,” said Shashin Devsare, Executive Director, Karbonn Mobiles.

The upcoming trend is going to be performance-based aspects of a phone.

So whether it is memory, processor, configuration in terms of GPU, CPUs that are going to be applied. The reason for this is that as the data networks keep coming and keep getting stabilized, the instances of people using data networks for various applications are going to go up. “The most important role is going to be played by video. In order to do that, you need to have a large good screen. All these things are actually interlinked and that is why when you look at a phone you don’t slot it as a high-memory phone or a best camera phone. When all these are put together, then it will make sense to you. I think Indian consumers are also going to look at such performance aspects,” he added.

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Shashin Devsare Executive Director, Karbonn Mobiles

“For us, the visibility is directly proportionate to the numbers that you want to drive in the market. We believe in driving profitable growth."

Karbonn has been one of the most dominant feature phone players. But it is also true that the feature phone market is shrinking. So the company believes that as long as the demand comes in, the company needs to cater to that segment but now its focus is clearly on smartphones.

Karbonn is such a brand that covers 90% of India’s districts and also has one of the largest service networks in India which expands across more than 900 service centres. Around 100 service centres are exclusively owned by Karbonn and the rest are franchisees.

Talking about marketing strategy, Devsare said, “For us, the visibility is directly proportionate to the numbers that you want to drive in the market. We believe in driving profitable growth. We don’t want to be over-aggressive over pricing of a product and marketing over products. We will go about it as it suits our business model which is about driving profitable growth. So any growth that comes at the cost of a profit that is something in which we are not interested.”

Future roadmap of the company

In terms of technology, the indigenous handset maker is looking at launching 4G products. Devsare further expanded, “I think our 4G handset launch will be slated around before Diwali. We will be providing 4G feature at all critical price segments so it would be entry, mid and high. They would not be in line with the kind of price segment that exists in 3G as it needs cheaper chipsets but it will cover all the three segments.”

Talking about service, Karbonn is continuously expanding its service network and aims at about more than 1,100 service centres by the next financial year. In terms of brand and marketing this year, the company has embarked about Rs.200 crore for marketing investments.

Along with these, it has also its manufacturing initiative. “We would be planning the manufacturing units in two prong lines starting with an assembling line which will be based in Noida and Bangalore.

After that, we will be moving on towards the SMT line-based production which will be set up in Telengana,” added Devsare.

So these are the critical four components of Karbonn’s roadmap. n aparna@varindia.com

VAR MOBILITY

VIVO V1 Smart Phone VIVOâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s new addition in its V series of smartphones, V1 comes with Hi-Fi music experience, customized Funtouch OS, 4G LTE network and ultra slim metallic body. The ultra-slim and light weight handset has been packed with amazing features which is especially designed to complement the energy, enthusiasm and passion of Indian youth. Vivo V1 runs on its unique Funtouch 2.1 Operating System which is based on Android Lollipop 5.0.

It is powered by advanced Qualcomm Snapdragon, 64 bit OctaCore processor. The 2 GB RAM and 16 GB ROM along with 4G LTE network support allows users to download unlimited music, movies, games, surfing and sharing faster and smoother.

The five-inch full HD screen provides high-clarity visual delight to the viewer from wide viewing angles. In the mid-segment category, Vivo V1 has the highest long-lasting 2300mAh battery with Battery Stamina Mode that keeps the smartphone going for much longer time. The ultra slim curvy design blends perfectly with engineering precision to present a perfect smartphone.

The metallic frame and durable tempered glass panel showcases superior craftsmanship. Currently the colors available in India are Silver & Gold. V1 has a 13 megapixel rear and 5 megapixel wide-angle front cameras with 6P lenses and F2.0 aperture minimize the noise in the picture. The cameras are designed to take vivid shots in both bright and dark environments.

Panasonic T33 The new Panasonic T33 comes with an exclusive layered design & leatherette back cover giving it a stylish look & palm fit grip. It has a 4-inch WVGA screen. T33 is powered by a 1.2GHz Quad Core processor which runs on Android 4.4.2 (Kitkat) with a support of 512 MB RAM, 4GB internal memory and 32 GB expandable storage slot. This phone sports a 3MP camera with LED Flash and has a VGA camera in front. The uniquely designed phone has an advanced software functionality. The phenomenal battery capacity of 1500 mAh promises faster charging and longer battery durability for its consumers. T33 comes with 21 Indian regional languages. It comes in Pearl White and Duke Blue colors and also comes with a free screen protection guard in the box. It has dual SIM support and 3G connectivity. The T33 smartphone has been developed and designed to overcome the fundamental problem of language barriers faced across India by giving them an option to choose from various languages to interact, engage, entertain and connect in their preferred language.

www.varindia.com

July 2015

49

VAR MOBILITY

LG debuts G4 in Indian Market

Spice Mobiles rolls out new “X Life" Series Smartphones

S

L

G Electronics has rolled out Leather and DSLR feature-packed smartphone, the LG G4, in India. Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan unveiled the LG G4.

Soon Kwon, Managing Director, LG India, said, “We are really proud to bring the LG G4 to India.

With this smartphone, we are living up to our promise of Innovation for a Better Life. This is a fashionable, premium smartphone that is more focussed on delivering a balanced user experience. With the G4, we are giving users a truly human-centric device that combines the analog sensibilities with technologies that deliver real-world performance.

The G4 is by far the most ambitious phone from LG.” With the G4, LG is focussing on delivering a great photography and visual experience, comfortable elegance and a human-centric user experience.

Its camera features a rarein-smartphones F1.8 aperture lens which allows 80-per cent more light to hit the image sensor than in the LG G3. The innovative camera module is paired with the new IPS

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July 2015

Quantum Display LG has designed the 16MP camera in the LG G4 to capture beautiful images, even under less than ideal lighting conditions.

Available only on G4, Manual Mode allows photographers the ability to exercise more artistic expression by letting them directly control the focus, shutter speed, ISO, exposure compensation and white balance for every shot. Advanced photographers can also save their photos in RAW format, in addition to JPEG, for more precise editing with no loss of details. It is complemented

by Color Spectrum Sensor (CSS).

LG included an 8MP front-facing camera for sharp, detailed portraits and group shots.

The LG G4 is available in three beautiful colours – brown, black and red.

It is equipped with a high-capacity 3,000mAh removable battery, a rare feature in to-day’s high-end smartphones.

Combined with the benefits offered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 processor with X10 LTE, the LG G4 has no trouble getting through a full day of normal use.

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pice Mobiles has launched its new X Life series of smartphones, targeted at first-time smartphone buyers in the Tier-II and Tier-III cities.

Under X Life series, the company has launched four smartphones – XLife 404, XLife 431q, XLife 431qLite and XLife 512, offering superior technology features at very attractive price points keeping in line with its brand promise of always offering the latest technology to its consumers at affordable prices. The X Life series is specially designed for consumers seeking an exciting combination of innovation and great design.

Spice Mobiles has aggressive plans to expand its market share in the smartphone segment considering the huge upgrade potential for feature phone users towards smartphones.

The X Life series has been conceptualized on the basis of a growing demand for high-quality and good-looking phones in the sub-Rs.5,000 segment.

Amandeep Singh, CEO, Spice Mobiles, said, “After extensive market research, we observed a product gap and significant market opportunity in the subRs.5,000 segment of smartphones, offering both technology and design. A large number of Indian consumers still use feature phones.

Hence, there is huge upgrade potential towards smartphones and we are targeting first-time users in the Tier-II and -III cities. We are delighted to launch our new X Life series of smartphones in Rajasthan which is one of the largest feature phone markets in India.”

Samsung rolls out Galaxy J5 and Galaxy J7

S

amsung has announced the launch of two new 4Genabled smartphones in

consumer offerings, reiterating the company’s commitment to develop innovative products

the J Series – Galaxy J5 and Galaxy J7, making 4G experience more accessible and enjoyable for Indian consumers while expanding its LTE smartphone portfolio to 10.

The new smartphones from Samsung are a combination of powerful technology, innovative features and superior

based on deep consumer insights.

Samsung has also decided to launch the devices online and has tied up exclusively with Flipkart. The Galaxy J5 is priced at INR11,999 and the Galaxy J7 at INR14,999. Both models can be pre-booked on Flipkart from 16th to 22nd July, 2015.

Zen Mobile launches Sonic 1 eBay India has exclusive launch of Sonic 1, a new smartphone from Zen Mobile on its platform. Priced at INR5,999/- Sonic 1 will be available exclusively on ebay.in for a limited period.

Sonic 1 offers 2GB RAM and 16GB Internal Memory, along with up to 32GB expandable memory support and 2,000 mAh battery for longer use. This stylish and sleek phone has 5-inch IPS capacitive screen and is powered by 1.3 GHz Quad-Core processor coupled with Android Lollipop 5.0 operating system. It has 5-mega pixel auto-focus rear camera with flash and 2- mega pixel front camera.

Vineet Bhatia, Executive Director, Zen Mobile, said, "Sonic 1 is developed for the modernday smartphone gamer, with 2GB RAM and 16GB internal storage. It runs on

Android 5.0 Lollipop and has an affordable price of just Rs.5,999/-. We are delighted to partner with e-bay and hope to further strengthen our association with many more innovative and smart priced devices in the coming future."

Pankaj Ukey, Director, Categories eBay India, said, “We are thrilled to announce the exclusive launch of Sonic 1 on eBay. in. Zen Mobile’s Sonic1, packed with new-age technology and unique features, is a complete value for money."

www.varindia.com

July 2015

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July 2015

www.varindia.com

52 pages including cover