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Microsoft launches Cloud ERP Solution

M

icrosoft Corp. has announced that its next-generation cloud ERP solution – Microsoft Dynamics AX – built on and for Microsoft Azure, is now available in 137 markets in 40 languages.

“Customers from around the world are using the cloud in incredible ways to accelerate and transform their business. The

release is an exciting milestone extending Microsoft’s business cloud offerings. It is now possible for organizations to run their entire business in the cloud with Microsoft – from productivity with Office 365, to business analytics with Power BI and Cortana Analytics Suite, customer engagement with Dynamics CRM and business operations with Dynamics AX,” said Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice-President, Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise.

Xiaomi to strengthen its roots in India

I

ndia being a perspective market for smartphones, Xiaomi plans to set up two manufacturing plants in India and launch more devices this year.

The Chinese smartphone player plans to spend a lot more time in India for manufacturing of handset peripherals and components.

India being the world's fastest growing smartphone market, , the company aims to sell around 140 million devices in 2016 to further gain momentum.

Xiaomi started local manufacturing just over a year later in India. It has partnered with Foxconn. It sells well over 1 million phones a quarter.

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HELLO INDIA

Opportunity, Opportunity and Opportunity... ease of doing Business in India India has been ranked 22nd among 60 Countries in the Best Countries Report 2016. The countries were ranked based on the data from a proprietary perception survey developed by U.S. News, BAV Consulting and the Wharton School of University of Pennsylvania. The sample for the survey included 16,248 respondents – general population, informed elite and business decision makers – across 36 countries in four regions: the Americas, Europe, Middle East/North Africa and Asia. The 60 countries were selected based on a composite performance ranking of key business, economic and quality of life data.

The target of achieving $100 billion by 2020 in the electronics system design and manufacturing (ESDM) sector under the Make in India initiative seems quite achievable. DeitY has so far received investment proposals worth more than $18 billion from 181 investors, coupled with a strong vision of Modi- led Government to seek investments to accelerate domestic manufacturing and cut imports to net zero by 2020.

Budget 2016 is definitely a big boost to Make in India with respect to manufacturing of mobile phones and tablets in the country. The differential duty regime available for promoting domestic mobile handset manufacturing in India has now been enhanced and extended for mobile handset adapters/ chargers, batteries and headsets/ speakers of mobile handsets for supply to mobile manufacturers. The domestic manufacture will attract only 2% excise duty while imports will face 29.44% duty, giving a 27.44% protection to domestic manufacturing vis-a-vis importers, while the imposition of 2 percent SAD on populated PCBs used in manufacture of mobile phones and tablet computers need to be considered.

Secondly, with huge focus on Start Ups and the benefits being doled out in the current budget, the objective is to support entrepreneurs realize those benefits by managing their entire non-core activities such as setting up entities, systems and processes, accounting, payroll processing and compliance, so that they can focus on building the business and the brand which is where the entrepreneur mind-space should be.

Going forward, IT would mean the business of Innovation. As the adoption of smart home technology increases and with consumers having more widely adopted devices, including wearables, consumer concern about what would happen to the data in their gadgets will grow accordingly. Also the way people interact with the companies around them has dramatically changed. IT leaders are now focusing to innovate on customerfacing apps while still delivering on typical internal needs.

S. Mohini Ratna Lastly, Top teams in the digital age are not afraid to take risks. Going by the latest trend, cloud migration Editor, VARINDIA is the top priority for IT leaders to meet the demands of mobile and connected customers. This will indeed mohini@varindia.com draft a new age success story for the Indian IT industry.

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HDS sees itself as the Technology Disruptor infusing change Vivekanand Venugopal, Vice President and General Manager - Hitachi Data Systems India tells VARINDIA of how being a disruptor helps it in developing and expanding its huge portfolio of solutions and the benefits that it will fetch both HDS and its partners in the long run In today’s competitive business scenario, one either needs to be the disruptor or get disrupted to survive in the volatile world. Also, Indian businesses are becoming more agile and technologies such as social media, mobility, analytics and cloud computing are coming together to unleash unlimited opportunities for organizations across. Social media, mobility, analytics and cloud computing will be the leading business-technology enablers in 2016.

Hitachi Data Systems falls in the category of being the disruptor and the disruption is brought in the way the company has expanded our portfolio of solutions. “We are trying to move most of our partners in the disruptor category through solution development and by enabling them to understand where the money is. So our value proposition to companies is that if one wants to be a disruptor, they should partner with Hitachi. The measure of our success comes from the evaluation if my customers have been successful in their business outcome and if my partner’s business is profitable. That is the only true measure,” says Vivekanand Venugopal, Vice President and General Manager Hitachi Data Systems India.

Focus for 2016...

HDS’s focus for 2016 is to help partners drive revenue around Internet of Things, Big Data Analytics and 3rd Platform Solutions.

“Our partners are the key to our success as most of our business is driven through channel partners in India. Partners in India will continue to play a key role in our growth strategy. As they deepen their expertise, they benefit more, and so do customers. With this rapidly changing marketplace, we not only transform our business, but we must be constantly evaluating our partner ecosystem. We must design it in such a way to create the right coverage for success: across business size, customer requirements, geography, vertical market competencies and solutions, and desired customer business outcomes,” asserts Venugopal.

HDS works with its network of ISVs and go-to-market partners (distribution, resellers and GSIs) in India. These include technology alliance partners like SAP for HANA, VMware for joint solutions, Microsoft, Oracle, Citrix, and Veritas. Intel remains a critical partner for it. It is also getting involved with all new set of partners in the Hadoop community, and notably Hortonworks, on full support of our solutions and seeing tremendous customer interest for Hadoop environments.

“We are also working with the government and ecosystem players to make the Digital India vision a success; some large government projects are already using our infrastructure to rollout citizen services.

We are addressing the government with these solutions and some large government projects include mygov.in and NPR (National Population Register) which are already using our infrastructure,” he adds.

Looking ahead...

The Indian market has been a key contributor to the Hitachi Data

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Vivekanand Venugopal Vice President and General Manager Hitachi Data Systems India Systems global business and is one of the fastest growing markets in the region. The next five years is seen to be promising for HDS from a business standpoint. With the Govt. of India opening up a variety of projects under the Digital India campaign, HDS expects demand to come in from various e-governance projects. “At HDS we are extremely proud of how closely we are aligning our technology efforts with our key partners both on the technology side as well as the Go-To-Market side. Most of our business is driven through channel partners in India and they will continue to play a key role in our growth strategy,” Venugopal concludes.

Additionally, Indian enterprises will focus on creating integrated data centers for optimizing existing IT assets and delivering non-stop IT services to business. This will drive greater emphasis on public cloud and software defined networking, and will drive demand for smarter and more secure storage infrastructure and data management systems, which eventually spells bigger opportunities for HDS in the long run. n samrita@varindia.com

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CONTENTS Website: www.varindia.com

Publisher: Deepak Kumar Sahu Editor: S Mohini Ratna Executive Editor: Dr. Vijay Anand Assistant Editor: Samrita Baruah Copy Editor: C. M. Dutta Sr. Correspondent: Aparna Mullick Art Director: Rakesh Kumar Network Administrator: Ashok Kumar Singh Manager-IT: Subhash Mohanta Manager-SEO: Bidyadhar Behera BUSINESS: Commercial Manager: Amit Kumar Jha Circulation Executive: Manish Kumar Marketing Manager: Dipendra Kumar CORPORATE OFFICE: VAR House, A-84A/3 Rose Apartment, Paryavaran complex, Ignou Road, New Delhi - 110030 Tel: 011-41656383, 46061809 Email: edit@varindia.com Bangalore: Bureau office Marketing Manager: S. Kamala kar Correspondent: L. G. Swami D-103 G.F., Ashish JK Apartments Thubarahalli Extended Road Bangaluru- 560066 Tel: 080-49530399 Mobile:08904205750/9916134482 E-mail: kamlakar@varindia.com, swami@varindia.com Mumbai: Bureau office Regional Manager (West): Anil Kumar Sr. Correspondent: Mamta S. Anurag Residency, 203 - “B” Wing, Plot No-5, Sector-9, Kamothe, Navi Mumbai-410 209 Tel: 022-65561292, Mobile: 08108017479 E-mail: anil@varindia.com, mamta@varindia.com Chennai: Bureau office Branch Manager: Parthiban K A2, R.C.Residency, Cholambedu Road, Thiruvenkada nagar, Ambathur, Chennai - 600 053 Mobile: 098400 55626 E-mail: parthiban@varindia.com Hyderabad: Bureau office Branch Manager: Sunil Kumar B 383 HAL Colony, Balanagar HYDERBAD, Telengana - 500042 Tel: 040-32989844/ Cell No. 08100298033 E-mail: sunil@varindia.com Kolkata: Bureau office Marketing Officer: Sunil Kumar Correspondent: Kiran Kumar New Korola, Near Alampur, Land Mark Asian International School, Howrah - 711302 Mobile: 08100298033, E-mail: sunil@varindia.com Printed and Published by Deepak Kumar Sahu on behalf of M/s. Kalinga Digital Media Pvt. Ltd. and Printed at Pushpak Press Pvt. Ltd. 153, DSIDC Complex, Okhla Industrial Are ,Phase-I, New Delhi-110020 and Published at A-84A/3 Rose Apartment, Paryavaran complex, Ignou Road, New Delhi 110030, Editor - S Mohini Ratna.

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© All rights are reserved. No part of this magazine may be reproduced or copied in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher. (1999-2014) * All disputes are subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of competent courts and forums in Delhi only.

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ROUND ABOUT

A Discourse on Dialectics W

hat is that currently occupy the minds of the public?

Opinions vary. Many feel that it is politicization of the universities, which otherwise should have served as temples of education. Another group may opine that it is the erosion of democratic norms and the right to dissent. An ultra-left sympathizer may put the onus on widening gap between the rich and the poor. A fourth group may point out the decay in civilizational values and unfettered freedom to profess anything and everything without weighing whether it is disruptive or otherwise.

Without taking sides, I must confess that there is some disconnect or flaws in all discourses whether it is of ultraleft, ultra-right or those who adopt the middle path. Are we jumping to conclusion by superficially assessing or taking stock of things? I feel so with a sincere hope that I should be proved wrong. When a section of newspapers or channels reported about lawyers masquerading as protectors of nationalism thrashed up students from a prestigious university in Delhi, we all called the people donned in black attire as goons and argued that they have brought disrepute to their profession. When students from the same university purportedly chanted slogans against the fabric and unity of India, we thought that they are misguided youth running amok in the shadow of democratic proclivities and licenses.

Are these happenings an anachronism in a digital space? One can argue in that manner. Here also we have to examine some of the paradoxes present in the so called intellectually sound societies and groups. I was reminded about an argument among a doctor, engineer and a politician as to whose profession came first. The doctor argued that my profession came first since God has created Eve out of the rib of Adam, which was a surgery and perhaps the first of its kind. Not to be chased away the engineer said that his profession came first since God has created the universe with sun, stars, galaxy etc. first before creating Adam. Stunned by these assertions, the politician quipped that his profession came first since God has created everything out of nothing, which we politicians do all the time. What I am trying to see is the ego clash among various professions and within the profession.

Respect for every profession is easy to say but difficult to practice. One hails a doctor who demonstrates maverick skills.

A businessman with a Midas touch will be the talk of the town.

A cricketer like Sachin Tendulkar is a revered demi God. What happens to a good plumber or a tailor or a blacksmith or a welder? Whatever could be professional attainment, his social status remains at the rock bottom. This is the discrimination that we collectively hold without realizing that we are also perpetrators of discrimination knowingly or unknowingly.

Many educators believe that such type of discriminations one can get over only by instilling a sense of equality and fair play right from the childhood. To a very great extent it can be true also. But what is important is what you are teaching at these schools. The curricula should be unbiased and objective, which should result in the character formation of the child and instill in him or her a sense of belonging and fellow feeling. Many of you will recall a quote widely attributed to Duke of Wellington; “ The battle of Waterloo was won on the fields of Eton."To put that quote in context, it would mean that playing fields of Eton- English public (meaning private) schools, said to be the source of British leadership, character, and competitiveness which prevailed at the battle of Waterloo. The implication is that British officers had acquired all importantattributes through their elite education. What a funny joke it is, though to be fair to Duke of Wellington, it appears that the joke had surfaced only after three years of his death.

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Jokes apart, it highlights a clear departure from our conventional thinking of education. At the same time, we should realize that all children are endowed with the same talent and attributes. First lesson to everyone is that in a class one can be the best for studies, one can be best for sports or for best in drawing and one can only be best in theater. Is there any situation when one child becomes best for all? Why then decorate all those who have the best attributes in the same way without society assigning any discrimination of this talent or the other.

Coming to the higher education, we have to draw a clear difference between a campus and a cantonment or for that matter a campus and a corporate. Campus provides a platform for expressing their constructive views without fear or prejudice, of course, subject to social norms and within the law of the land. Stifling such thoughts may be reprisals and lead to pent up frustrations which can manifest in different ways sometimes most rebellious manner. One should not forget that many of our top politicians who pioneered the reform processes had left leanings in their student or youth days. I am not taking examples since that list includes who is who of Indian politics.

Some of the ardent left wingers during their student days now have become civil servants who are occupying important positions in the bureaucratic ladder or for that matter some of the hardcore left supporters and workers are now pushing pens and singing paeans to market economy in national dailies . That is a change dictated by ones discretion and conviction and there is nothing wrong in changing the discourse midway, provided he or she is not lured by materialistic opportunities.

Let me conclude by invoking Prime Minister NarendraModi whosaid that in India we have millions of problems but more than billion mindsto resolve such issues. This also underscores the need for getting the right type of dividend from the people.

Consider a situation when more than three-fourth of the population is denied of proper education, health and shelter and remain to be in the margins of their existence. Indeed, it is a great economic loss for no country can afford and seldom venture to quantify. n

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Comparing it against our previous generations and competitors. Based on HPE internal estimates, Houston, TX, USA, July 2014. 4SmartCache Performance done with equivalent controller in a controlled environment. HPE Smart Storage engineers, Houston, TX, as of 18 May 2014 posted on internal SmartCache wiki page. © Copyright 2015 Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP. Intel, the Intel logo, Xeon, and Xeon Inside are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries.

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HOT BYTES

GIGABYTE India sets Roadmap for 2016

G

I G A B Y T E Technology has announced its progressive plans for the year 2016.

The company would be focusing on sales and marketing initiatives

targeting specific highgrowth market segments and categories in the broader PC market for 2016.

Sunil Grewal, Director, GIGABYTE Technology (India) Pvt. Ltd, explained,

“The gaming segment in India is becoming more vibrant with each passing year, with many gamers graduating from casual to serious gamers, more platforms to exhibit gaming features, and more events and contests with active participation from gaming hardware and software companies.

Gaming-related activities are now blooming even in the tier-II and tier-III cities, which a couple of years back were restricted to only top-tier cities.”

MapR Partners with Ericsson to Drive Digital Innovation

M

a p R Technologies has formed a partnership with Ericsson with the purpose of working together to drive innovation for digital industrialization.

The partnership will leverage the MapR Converged Data Platform to enable efficient processing and analyzing of information from multiple sources in real-time to support mission-critical application deployments at scale and effectively deliver customer value.

The MapR Converged Data Platform brings together Hadoop and Spark with global event streaming; real-time, top-ranked NoSQL database capabilities; and enterprise storage.

The MapR Platform provides the fastest, most reliable, secure and open data infrastructure that dramatically lowers TCO and enables global real-time data applications for a broad set of business-critical and real-time production use cases.

HCL Infosystems and Avaya to digitally transform businesses

H

CL Infosystems and Avaya have entered into strategic alliance to help businesses and organizations in India accelerate their digital

Madhavan P, Senior Vice-President – Office Automation, HCL Services Ltd, said, “We are delighted to partner with Avaya to offer their

transformation strategies.

HCL Infosystems will offer Avaya’s complete portfolio to public and private sector organizations across all industry segments in India.

cutting-edge technologies to better meet the evolving demands of a hyper-connected business environment. This is in line with our mission to add utmost value to our customers."

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Microland Ricoh wins Rs.344 Crore strengthens its of government order India presence in India Ricoh has bagged an

S

trengthening its presence in the Indian market, Microland has secured several IT infrastructure services deals across multiple sectors in India worth over Rs.100 crore in contract value. The range of multiple sectors includes one of the world’s largest beverage companies, an integrated financial services group that offers a wide range of services to a significant clientele that includes corporations, financial institutions, high net-worth individuals and retail investors, etc.

Microland has also inaugurated a new facility in Baghmane Tech Park, Bangalore which is spread around 57,000 sq. ft. It is the company’s fourth working facility in Bangalore which operates as a dedicated delivery centre for some of their clients such as Datalink, Unilever, E&Y and Clifford Chance.

NASSCOM with TN Govt. opens Chennai warehouse

N

a t i o n a l Association of Software & Services (NASSCOM) has announced the inauguration of its first warehouse in Chennai. A MoU was signed between the Department of Information Technology, State of Tamil Nadu, acting through the Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu and NASSCOM in the presence of the Hon’ble Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, Smt. J. Jayalalitha over video conferencing.

Rajat Tandon, VicePresident, NASSCOM 10,000 Start-ups, said, “Over the years, Chennai has been home to a lot of promising start-ups. ”

order worth Rs.344 crore from Kerala State Electronics Development Corporation Ltd (KELTRON).

Ricoh will supply, install and commission Computer Hardware, Connected Accessories, Software, Maintain Equipment(s) and provide Computer Education Services in 2,000 Government and Government-aided High Schools in the State of Odisha on 5 Years BOOT Model Project under the ICT @ School Scheme.

Manoj Kumar, Managing Director & CEO, Ricoh India, said, “It is the second-largest project for us after the Department of Post Digitization order, that we received last year and reflects Ricoh’s continued commitment to partnering with organizations to help them achieve greater cost efficiencies and improved productivity through increased modernization from technology.”

Juniper to deliver simplified datacenter solutions

J

uniper Networks and Lenovo have entered into a global strategic partnership to leverage synergies in their respective product and technology portfolios to build the next generation of converged, hyperconverged, and hyper-scale data center infrastructure solutions for enterprise and webscale customers. The alliance reflects a shared commitment to deliver simplified, flexible and high-performance solutions that will provide

customers faster time-toapplication value with reduced operating costs.

“Partnering with Lenovo expands Juniper’s strategy to deliver a fullstack solution for a widerange of data centers, from the mid-range enterprise to private cloud and to hyperscale customers. We are excited about collaborating with Lenovo to leverage the full power of our IPnetworking portfolio based on JunosOS and Contrail,” said Rami Rahim, Chief Executive Officer, Juniper Networks.

Infosys and Microsoft to deploy Analytics Solutions

I

nfosys and Microsoft Corp. have collaborated to deploy advanced analytics solutions to support healthcare organizations in their digital transformation.

To enable healthcare professionals to unlock the potential of a wide range of datasets, Microsoft has created Integrating technology and data science to develop analytics solutions for contextualized decision support. This will help track population health trends, advance clinical

effectiveness, enhance patient satisfaction, and help providers to improve operational effectiveness, financial and administrative performance.

One of the solutions focusses on making the actuarial planning process efficient which supports payers to forecast the utilization and cost of care for better actuarial planning.

Another solution focusses on supporting healthcare contact center processes implemented in Microsoft Dynamics.

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March 2016

17

HOT BYTES

Ramco and RSA Logistics come together

R

amco Systems has joined hands with Middle-Eastern 3PL service provider RSA Logistics.

Ramco Systems will implement its Integrated Freight Management System (IFMS), an end-to-end solution suite that addresses the complete process flow of the Shipping and Transportation Industry.

Commenting on the win, Virender Aggarwal, CEO, Ramco Systems, said, “With the onset of technological transformation in the logistics industry, players

W

today are under significant pressure to deliver nearperfect performances. In such disruptive scenarios, traditional models of transportation and logistics management are proving to be ineffective.

The need for complete visibility of operations, capacity and route planning and scheduling is driving organizations to adapt technology.”

Verint strengthens its position with new acquisition

V

erint Systems has acquired Contact Solutions, a leading provider of real-time, contextual customer care solutions. This acquisition strengthens Verint’s position in Actionable Intelligence platform that enables organizations to provide crucial insights that empower decisionmakers to anticipate respond and take action.

The combination of Contact Solutions and Verint will increase the value proposition that customers of both companies receive. Verint

customers will be able to extend their investments in omni-channel customer engagement with expanded cloud-based voice and mobile selfservice options. Contact Solutions’ dynamic customer base – including many public sector and commercial organizations – will have access to new world-class actionable intelligence with the ability to leverage leading customer engagement optimization solutions to help transform their end-to-end customer engagement.

ARM and TSMC Announce Multi-Year Agreement

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RM and TSMC have announced a multi-year agreement to collaborate on a 7nm FinFET process technology which includes a design solution for future low-power, highperformance compute SoCs. The new agreement expands the companies’ long-standing partnership and advances leadingedge process technologies beyond mobile and into next-generation networks and data centers.

“Existing ARM-based

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March 2016

Western Digital EMC teams up with VMware over helps its channel VCE VxRail Appliance Family Corporation to grow and VMware have EMC

platforms have been shown to deliver an increase of up to 10x in compute density for specific data center workloads,” said Pete Hutton, executive vice president and president of product groups, ARM. “Future ARM technology designed specifically for data centers and network infrastructure and optimized for TSMC 7nm FinFET will enable our mutual customers to scale the industry’s lowestpower architecture across all performance points.”

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estern Digital has announced the myWD Certified Surveillance Storage Provider Programme.The programme aims to offer training, sales support, value-added benefits and incentives to security and surveillance system integrators, installers, solution and service providers to help them enhance their business opportunities and profitability.

“The myWD Certified Surveillance Storage Provider Programme that is currently being rolled out in India will offer our partners the opportunity to capitalize on the wide-range of WD Purple and WD Purple NV surveillance storage solutions, engineered for 24/7 always-on, high-definition surveillance systems,” said KhwajaSaifuddin, Senior Sales Director, Middle East, Africa and India, Western Digital.

BT and Intel Security Collaborate

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T and Intel Security will together create new solutions to help organisations improve security and prevent cyber-attacks. The companies will also work together in a joint cyber partnership to further develop their common vision of creating next generation security services.

These new solutions will bring together key elements of both companies’ technology platforms and address current shortcomings of traditional point security products by avoiding the operational silos that widen the gap between detection and response.

Together, BT and Intel Security will work to address these threats with a single ecosystem.

announced the new VCE VxRail Appliance family, the only integrated and jointly engineered hyperconverged infrastructure appliances (HCIA) for VMware environments.

The VxRail Appliance family brings together the best of EMC and VMware, including EMC rich data services and systems management capabilities with VMware’s hyperconverged software.

“The new VCE VxRail Appliance family, will help

Indian IT organizations with a solution that is easy to use and help them drive innovation for the business. Our joint engineering efforts with EMC allow us to bring innovations in the software stack and appliances to our customers and offer the best HCI experience,” said BS Nagarajan, Senior Director – Systems Engineering, VMware India.

Google and TechHub collaborate

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o bring opportunities to more than 700 start-ups of TechHub, Google and TechHub have announced their global partnership.

David Grunwald, Google for Entrepreneurs’ Head of EMEA Partnerships, said, “We are excited to expand our work with TechHub beyond Google for Entrepreneurs's Campus network, where we have collaborated successfully over a number of years.

TechHub's 'community first' values and their focus on supporting founders and start-ups with

education and programmes align perfectly with the goals of Google for Entrepreneurs."

TechHub, the global community for tech entrepreneurs, has announced that this partnership will benefit start-ups from India for the first time. Google supports TechHub’s work to help hundreds of tech companies to scale up their businesses. Now TechHub members in Bangalore, Riga, Bucharest, Madrid, Warsaw and London will have access to programmes and assistance from Google.

SAP empowers Indian youth to be entrepreneurs

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AP has announced an initiative to support start-ups in India and train teachers in collaboration with The Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay).

SAP will partner with two different programs: the Entrepreneurship Development Initiative* and The 'Train 10,000 Teachers' Programme (T10KT) - a STEM education initiative.

“I’m always inspired by the ambition and determination of this young generation in India,” said Bill

McDermott, CEO of SAP. “I’m especially pleased that SAP is partnering with IIT Bombay to help students build sustainable career paths in this global economy.

Initiatives like this one are critical to help students realize their bold dreams by bridging the classroom to the workplace.”

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March 2016

19

ON THE RAMP

Micromax unleashes Canvas Tab P702

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icromax has launched its first 4G tablet – the Canvas Tab P702, targeting always the on-the-move consumers.

With the launch of Canvas Tab P702, Micromax will be bringing in large screen 4G connectivity in a sleek and powerful device, addressing the burgeoning market of on-the-move millennials.

The Canvas Tab P702 is powered by MediaTek’s MT8735 processor – a highly integrated LTE System-on-Chip (SoC) which incorporates

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advanced features like LTE cat.4, Quad core operating at 1.3GHz, 3D graphics. The chipset helps tablet manufacturers build high-performance LTE smart device with PC-like browser, 3D gaming and cinema class home entertainment experiences. The tablet sports a 7-inch HD IPS display promising crisp images.

Kaspersky Lab Announces Internet Security for Mac

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aspersky Lab has unveiled the latest version of Kaspersky Internet Security for Mac. Users can be assured of their security and even save money when making purchases online.

Kaspersky Internet Security for Mac is a comprehensive security solution for Mac OS X. The product protects not only against malware and network attacks but also from dangerous web pages; the Safe Money feature offers additional protection for online financial

transactions, while the Parental Control function provides safe web surfing for children. Designed to meet the characteristics of the Mac OS X platform, the product is easy to use and does not affect device performance.

Polycom expands its product portfolio with RealPresence Centro

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olycom has announced its new collaboration solution Polycom RealPresence Centro. This solution is purpose-built to put people into the centre of collaboration.

The new solution brings a new paradigm for group conferencing. It drives deep engagement and highly productive meetings by bringing people to the centre of collaboration.

The solution keys on the instinctive human behaviour.

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March 2016

HPE expands its security offerings

“The workplace is evolving and technologies that allow us to work naturally will have a dramatic impact on increasing productivity

and for the first time in the industry, inspire creativity,” said Ashan Willy, Senior VP, Product Management & Worldwide Systems Engineering, Polycom.

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ewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has announced new security offerings.

Announcing new Cyber Reference Architecture, mobile security offerings and an expanded ecosystem of partners, HPE Security is helping organizations design security and risk management processes into IT operations to address today’s sophisticated threat landscape while providing a safer environment to meet tomorrow’s business demands.

“The traditional bolt-on method of enterprise security, emphasizing network defence and perimeter control, is proving to be insufficient against today’s radically changing threat landscape,” said Jyoti Prakash, Country Director, India and SAARC countries, Enterprise Security Products, HPE.

ZOTAC unleashes SONIX PCIE SSD

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O T A C International has introduced the flagship solution SONIX PCIE SSD, a brand new addition to the growing arsenal of fast SSDs. SONIX is aimed at enthusiasts, introducing top-of-theline high-performance SSD product for serious gaming, productivity, and enterprise. Each SONIX product undergoes rigorous testing and is fine-tuned to ensure that it meets the highest performance standards.

Eventually, ZOTAC has signed a distribution tie-up with Supertron Electronics in India.

Supertron will focus on the distribution and promotion of ZOTAC's innovative products across the country through its pan-India branches and satellite offices.

Kyocera’s new Ecosys printers to bring efficiency at work

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yocera Document Solutions has launched its new “Ecosys Range of A4 Monochrome High Productive Office Printers” to bring a new dimension to efficiency at work, besides reducing printing costs.

Kyocera’s Ecosys A4 Monochrome High Productive Office Printers features fast output speed of up to 60 pages per minute, standard duplex unit for double-side printing, secure print through User Authentication by IC Card or ID/Password

login from the Operation Panel, high Security with SSL encryption and only toner replacement design with drum yield up to 500,000 prints.

According to S. A. Chari, MD, Kyocera Documents Solutions India, said, “Our newlyintroduced Ecosys Range of A4 Monochrome High Productive Office Printers’ is the best-inline printer for business that offers value-formoney proposition without compromising on performance."

Canon accelerates business growth with new MDS

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anon India has announced expansion of its managed document solutions portfolio with the introduction of Readiris Corporate 15, an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software and IRISPowerscan, a complete document processing platforms. Both these products from the IRIS gamut of solutions are targeted to accelerate solutions and services for business growth in the enterprise segment.

K. Bhaskhar, VicePresident – Business

Imaging Solutions (BIS) Division, Canon India, said, “Our constant endeavour has been to provide comprehensive hardware and software solutions to our customers that will help in increasing organizational productivity.

In the age of digitization, the Readiris Corporate 15 and IRISPowerscan aim to ease business processes by creating digital information and allowing users to focus on their core growth objectives without losing time searching documents.”

Kingston’s IronKey product line enters the market

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ingston has finalized the integration plans for IronKey and will utilize

to Kingston’s worldclass product and service resources to offer smooth transition for its existing

its IronKey product line to deliver FIPS 140-2 Level 3 certification solutions for customers who need the highest level of encryption and security.

The company has ensured to work with its collective partners to enable access to sales and technical support as well as access

IronKey customers.

The “Kingston IronKey” USB Flash drive features FIPS 140-2 Level 3 certification which is one of the required certifications for civilian and government agencies as well as military branches in the United States and Canada.

A price tag that will get you new customers.

Introducing the ThinkServer TS140 for small businesses with big demands.

At Lenovo™ we develop technology to meet the ever-growing demands of small businesses. With that in mind, we have launched the ThinkServer® TS140 in India.

It is powered to take on tough challenges, yet priced attractively.

· Supports enterprise-grade HDDs (Built-in RAID 5) · Whisper-quiet at 26 decibels · Intel® Xeon® E3 series processor · Windows Server® 2012 R2 platform So go on, add this server to your portfolio and keep adding to your customer base.

Contact: 1800 3000 9990 / corpsales@lenovo.com Intel Xeon E3 series processor. ®

®

The following are trademarks or registered trademarks of Lenovo: Lenovo, the Lenovo logo and ThinkServer. Intel, the Intel logo, Xeon and Xeon Inside are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries. Microsoft and Windows are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. ©2016 Lenovo. All rights reserved. †Terms and Conditions apply. The test(s) above are performed on statistical samples.

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March 2016

21

ON THE RAMP

Dell extends its Data Protection Portfolio

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ell has launched a new series of data protection solutions.

The offerings are the general availability of Dell Data Protection | Rapid Recovery; three new data deduplication appliances models; new Dell Data Protection | Endpoint Recovery – Free Edition and the new Dell Data Protection | NetVault Backup 11.

“Customers face a major challenge in backing up and protecting

their data, especially in complex heterogeneous IT environments. Data is gold. Organizations understand the need to securely protect and back up their mission-critical data in today’s competitive ecosystem,” said Murli Mohan, Director & General Manager, Dell Software Group.

Element14 launches Raspberry Pi

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lement14 has announced the launch of the new Raspberry Pi 3 Model B. The new-generation board is faster and more powerful than ever before and comes with builtin wireless LAN and Bluetooth connectivity.

This new board adds to element14’s broad product portfolio which includes an ecosystem of accessories such as the recently launched Raspberry Pi Touchscreen Display.

Claire Doyle, Global Head of Raspberry Pi, element14, said, “The new Raspberry Pi 3 Model B

offers a higher level of performance than any other Raspberry Pi board on the market. We are very excited to launch this product and to get it into the hands of customers worldwide. Supported by our growing accessory portfolio, the new Raspberry Pi 3 allows customers to develop specific applications and build new projects!”

The Raspberry Pi 3 can support new and exciting application areas “out of the box”, such as IoT connectivity, streaming to Bluetooth headphones or speakers, Wi-Fi gateways and home cloud storage.

SanDisk enhances its Automotive and Industrial Storage Solutions

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anDisk has unveiled solutions designed to address the vast data generated by connected applications in automotive and industrial markets. Company has launched next-generation

“The ‘Internet of Things’ is the most dynamic force to impact the automotive and industrial markets.

Our newest SanDisk Automotive and Industrial solutions are ideal for connected applications in

SanDisk Automotive flash storage solution and SanDisk Industrial XT SD cards.

Oded Sagee, senior director of connected solutions at SanDisk said,

these markets, offering exceptional dependability and performance as well as new smart features that enable our OEM customers to better maximize their storage.”

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Seagate SSD Flash Drive to process data rapidly

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eagate has unveiled production-ready unit of the fastest single SSD, with throughput performance of 10 gigabytes per second (GB/s). With the most sustainable standards, hyper scale data centers will be able to adopt the fastest flash technology.

Brett Pemble, Seagate’s General Manager & VP of SSD Products, stated, “Your data is only as good as how easily you can access it and put it to use. Seagate is committed to providing the full spectrum of technologies to help meet the diverse needs of organizations so they can unlock this value.

Whether for consumer cloud or business applications, this SSD will help improve on demands for fast access to information, where split seconds drive incremental value gains.”

Blue Coat and NetApp to offer storage solutions

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lue Coat Systems and NetApp have joined forces and are working together to provide high-density storage solutions that enable extended network forensic analysis.

This combination of NetApp’s high-density storage and Blue Coat’s Security Analytics provide customers a highperformance and highdensity storage solution.

“Security professionals rely on an unprecedented volume of data that they must be able to swiftly capture, control and analyze. At NetApp, we ensure that security professionals have the freedom,” said Maria Olson, Vice-President, Global & Strategic Alliances, NetApp.

Allied Telesis announces IPv6 Ready Product Compliance

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llied Telesis has announced IPv6 Ready compliance for a range of its switching and security products.

IPv6 transition plans now, so they can adapt to the new IPv6-centric world in a controlled manner, rather than waiting to be

Seiichiro Sato, Global Product Marketing Director, Allied Telesis, explained, "With global supply of IPv4 addresses consumed, new services will be increasingly offered as IPv6-only.

Therefore, organizations need to be developing

forced into making abrupt changes later on. Allied Telesis has more than a decade of experience in implementing IPv6 networks, and knows how to achieve a smooth, painless introduction of IPv6 into an IPv4 network."

ManageEngine rolls out Key Manager Plus

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anageEngine has launched Key Manager Plus.

The new product joins ManageEngine's privileged identity management suite to help administrators take control of SSH keys. Key Manager Plus provides visibility into the SSH environment, enabling administrators to pre-empt breaches and compliance issues.

"SSH has become the protocol of choice for remote access to business-critical systems

both within the corporate network and in the cloud.

With identity thefts and unauthorized privileged access lying at the root of modern day cyberattacks, managing the SSH key life cycle has become a significant aspect of privileged access management programs. We are helping organizations deploy a complete privileged access management solution," said Rajesh Ganesan, Director of Product Management at ManageEngine.

Xerox launches iGen5 Digital Print Press

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resenting the industry’s most productive digital production colour platform, Xerox has debuted iGen5 Print Press.

Print providers can select the iGen 5 150 Press (150 ppm), iGen5 120 Press (120 ppm) or iGen5 90 Press (90 ppm), and with a new scalable architecture, upgrading from one speed to the next is simple.

With the iGen platform, productivity gains of up to 25 per cent can be achieved since less time is spent on reprinting, quality control

and job set-up, continuing to make iGen devices the most productive digital presses on the market.

And, now there is another option to continue that momentum.

The optional fifth colour unit increases the ability to match a larger gamut of Pantone colours or unknown spot colours without hindering productivity.

Orange, green or blue options supplement CMYK and can accurately hit distinctive brand colours without moving short runs to offset.

www.varindia.com

March 2016

23

VOICE-N-DATA

Wipro and Wind River join hands

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ipro has collaborated with Wind River to demonstrate the carriergrade features of cloud networks on Wind River Titanium Server, leveraging VEVATO framework.

Vinay Rawat, VicePresident & Global Head of Network Equipment Provider business unit, Wipro Limited, said, “Both Wind River and Wipro are strongly committed to innovation in telecom and have been long-time collaborators.

This joint initiative is aimed at accelerating the

adoption of SDN/NFV and providing confidence to CXOs on the carriergrade performance of Software-Defined Infrastructure.”

“By collaborating across the ecosystem with innovators like Wipro, Wind River Titanium Server enables a foundation for a carrier-grade infrastructure that will help companies accelerate their NFV and SDN goals,” said Paul Senyshyn, VP of Commercial Operations for Networking Solutions, Wind River.

Telenor expands Project Sampark

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elenor India has announced plans to expand Project Sampark, a unique initiative to bridge the gender gap in mobile usage, to new areas in its UP (West) circle. The project will now be extended to the rural areas of Bareilly, Dehradun and Moradabad districts covering approximately 50-80 villages in each zone.

Talking about Telenor’s vision to promote mobile usage among women, Sharad Mehrotra, Chief Executive Officer, Telenor India said, “The success of Project Sampark in Aligarh has given us the

confidence to expand it to new areas and take it beyond the pilot phase.

Telenor is #morethan an operator and has a vision to empower societies with benefits of mobile connectivity in areas where we operate. Giving a phone in hands of

women is not just about connecting her to the information age but also about giving her a tool to take informed decision that can change the socioeconomic condition of the entire family.”

TCS solution powers Voice over LTE

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ata Consultancy Services (TCS) has launched a solution to power Voice over LTE for virtualized networks using TCS’ Network Function Virtualization (NFV) Concerto platform.

TCS is collaborating with Brocade, Metaswitch and Ixia, on Intel Xeon platforms to demonstrate the deployment and verification of Voice over LTE service in virtualized networks. This will help in creating new business opportunities, simplifying product development, and

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helping customers deal confidently with adoption of network virtualization.

V. Rajanna, VicePresident & Global Head of Technology Business Unit, TCS, said, “TCS’ NFV Concerto significantly reduces development and test cycle times for virtualized network functions by automating functional, performance, scalability and compliance testing.

This solution is a testament to TCS’ expertise on Intel processor-based platforms and OpenStack.”

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Binatone launches WR3010N

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inatone has announced the launch of WR3010N WiFi router. The router from Binatone is designed specifically for large home and office networking requirements and will be available exclusively through e-commerce site – Paytm.

Commenting on the occasion, S. P. Singh, Managing Director, Binatone India, said, “We are happy to introduce WR3010N Wi-Fi router in the market, as it offers defined connectivity solutions for large home and office needs.

Previously, we have received a great response for our wireless products on the online channel, so we decided to offer WR3010N Wi-Fi router exclusively through our online partner Paytm. We will be announcing more such associations in the near future.”

Idea spreads 4G LTE services to 28 towns

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dea Cellular has announced the launch of its high-speed 4G LTE services across 28 towns of Maharashtra and Goa, covering major towns of Nagpur and Ahmednagar. With this launch, the company has delivered on its promise to launch its 4G LTE services in ten circles during FY16.

Ambrish Jain, Deputy Managing Director, Idea Cellular, said, “Beginning December 23, we have rapidly expanded our 4G LTE services in these ten markets in a record time frame of just three months. We have revised our Capex guidance for the financial year 2016 from Rs.65 billion to Rs.75 billion mainly on account of accelerated 4G Capex and associated fiber rollout.”

Airtel to invest Rs.60, 000 crore

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nder the network transformation programme, “Project Leap”, Bharti Airtel (Airtel) has brought its Platinum 3G network to the customers of Shillong.

Platinum 3G will offer faster internet speeds, enhance voice clarity and offer a superior network experience to its customers.

It will also help optimize the backend engagement between the network and mobile devices, thus allowing customers to enjoy extended battery life on their phones.

The company has recently started the implementation of its network transformation

programme in North East and Assam. The company will invest Rs.60,000 crore over the next three years to improve network quality.

Earlier in July 2015, Airtel had introduced 4G services in North East. With Airtel 4G and Platinum 3G both available in the circle now, Airtel is uniquely positioned to become the only network in the North East to leverage these technologies towards delivering the ultimate “Smartphone Network” experience for its customers.

Tata Com to speed up Internet access globally

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ata Roaming Boost has been recently launched by Tata Communications, enabling mobile network operators and service providers to deliver improved mobile internet experience for their customers.

Teleena was first to roll out the industry-first service to enhance the delivery of its mobile and IoT applications globally.

Conor Carroll, Senior Vice-President, Global Carrier Solutions – Europe, Asia and Americas, Tata Communications, said, “As LTE networks

bring high-bandwidth applications such as content streaming and video calling to mobile users’ handsets, mobile service providers are under pressure to offer their customers a consistent mobile experience whether at home or abroad. Data Roaming Boost represents a breakthrough in data roaming performance and enables service providers to offer highly responsive, glitch-free, mobile data connectivity to their customers, whether they are international travelers or IoT businesses.”

Telstra ties up with Ericsson

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ricsson has announced that Telstra will be deploying its full stack telecom cloud solution, including Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN) to improve customer experience and support the development of compelling new customer services.

The deployment of the Ericsson solution will provide Telstra’s network with a 5G-ready

core and will help the network scale as Internet of Things (IoT) adoption increases. As 4G and 5G Radio Access Network (RAN) speeds increase to many gigabits per second and latency decreases, the core network needs to evolve from today’s relatively static, centralized architecture to an architecture that can elastically centralize some functions and distributes others to deliver flexibility, efficiency and low latency.

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March 2016

25

CHANNEL BUZZ

‘BUSY Partner Connect 2016’ concludes

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USY Infotech Private Limited has organized “BUSY Partner Connect 2016” in New Delhi. Around 140 qualified BUSY Partners from across the globe attended the meet and made it a successful event.

The program was focused on helping partners gain a better understanding of the company’s direction and to expand both their personal and professional network. The programme aimed to connect Product and Solution Partners with an integrated network of business relationships which was a great value addition for Channel Partners.

To achieve its goal of establishing BUSY as the Enterprise Solution of Choice for SMEs, the company is aiming to expand its Solution Partner network across different geographies. Thanks to its

Solution Partners, BUSY has been implemented at number of big enterprises in the recent past.

Speaking on the occasion, Dinesh Kumar Gupta, Managing Director, Busy Infotech Pvt Ltd said, “BUSY has been recognized as one of the most popular Business Accounting Software in India, South Asia, Middle East Asia and Africa. We are sure that through this Partner Connect programme, we would be able to interact with our partners more closely and bring in more value in our relationships.”

During the event, best performing partners from different regions were awarded.

The award categories included most prestigious installation of the year, biggest implementation of the year, emerging partner of the year, best sales performers of the year (in India and Overseas).

Sophos hosts meeting for 250+ partners in Chennai and Kochi

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ophos has recently hosted meetings in Chennai and Kochi which were attended by more than 250 of its partners in Southern India. Sophos is encouraging its pan-India partners to capture emerging opportunities in the security market with its wide range of solutions and these meetings were on a similar theme to the ‘Discover Sophos’ road shows that the company

conducted earlier in India and around the globe.

The purpose of these meets is to share Sophos’ strong focus on providing integrated security for mid-market enterprises, which has allowed Sophos to make rapid strides in emerging markets like India. With an established presence across all sectors and a deep partner network

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throughout India, Sophos offers a comprehensive range of security solutions in the market.

The company is a leader in core segments of network and endpoint security and is recognized in the market for its “security made simple” approach.

“There is a strong demand in India for security solutions which can counter advanced threats. We are confident that by

taking our advanced solutions to the market, partners will be able to meet this demand for security and make most of the opportunities in this evolving tech-landscape. We can offer many cross-sell and up sell opportunities to our partners,” say Sunil Sharma, vice president, sales, India and SAARC, at Sophos.

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Compass concludes Logitech Compass Premier Cricket League

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ith a view to bringing IT fraternity together, Compass has concluded two-day cricket event “Logitech Compass Premier League” which was

HP, Lenovo, Acer, Epson, Intex, Quickheal, Supertron, AMD etc.

Partners actively participated in the event and enjoyed the league while networking with

organized recently at FD Park Ground, Salt Lake, Kolkata.

Ten teams participated in the league, namely Techno Tornado, Alco Vipers, Lalani Acer Knights, Dell Challengers, Global Gladiators, Savera Sizzlers, Team Supertron, Astric Warriors, Galaxy Royals and Team Compass which were sponsored by major IT Vendors like Dell,

other IT fellows. Approximately 1,500 people gathered in the twoday event from IT fraternity both from Kolkata and from other parts of Bengal. Savera Sizlers team won the match and won prize of Rs.71,000/- cheque, trophy and medals. Astric Warriors was the runners-up team and bagged the prize of Rs. 21,000/- cheque, trophy and medals.

Lenovo Channel Partner Meet strengthens its India presence

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o strengthen presence across the country, Lenovo has recently hosted exclusive Channel Partner meet in seven cities as a part of its ThinkServer launch – ThinkServer TS140, an entry-level Tower server, and ThinkServer RD450an entry-level 2U rack server.

Over 500 commercial Channel Partners actively participated in the multi-city event. With intent to educate partners about its robust enterprise solutions portfolio ranging from entrylevel to high-end servers Lenovo has conducted channel partner meet. Exclusive meets conducted in the cities include New Delhi, Mumbai, Banglore, Chennai, Kolkata, Pune and Ahmedabad.

In addition to that, Lenovo also hosted an international meet at Colombo (Sri Lanka).

Speaking on the occasion of the Partner meet in New Delhi, P.K Sharma, Director, Comnet Vision (India), said, “ThinkServer

is turning out to be a game-changer in its space. TS140 is an ideal entry level server for Indian SMEs, riding on the legendary Think legacy of superior reliability.”

Speaking about the partner meets, Pankaj Harjai, Director, Commercial Channel, Lenovo India said, “Partners will always play a critical role in our business.

Through outreach programs such as these we aim to strengthen the connect we share with the partner community. With the addition of ThinkServers, Lenovo’s partners will now have access to a complete end-to-end enterprise product line and can target a larger market.”

Lenovo is looking forward to engage, educate and motivate partners with newer ways and help partners meet specific business needs.

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March 2016

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Enabling customers for Digital Transformation T

he Cisco Annual Partner Summit 2016 that was organized in San Diego, California showcased significant business transformation by moving into cloud and “Hyperconverged” Systems. The company also reiterated the fact that partners are the drivers of growth for Cisco.

The Theme of the event was based on ‘Powered by Partnerships’.

The event witnessed 2,500 delegations, including partners from all across the globe. They have attended the summit to understand the latest technologies of Cisco. Chuck Robbins, CEO, Cisco Systems addressed the keynote session on how the digital transformation is leading to industry revolution. The top leadership at Cisco assured how eighty percent of Cisco revenue is driven by partners and through distribution. In a power packed audience that also included the global media, partners got a chance to interact with the Top brass of Cisco and witness some major technology announcements on software, security and hyper converged solutions and channel programs. Various presentations revolving around the theme of this year’s conference were also presented.

According to Wendy Bahr, senior vice-president, global channel chief, CISCO Systems, Cisco’s increasing investment into the partner space and New Digital Architecture is expected to change the DNA of the Channel eco-system.

Bahr in her speech said that unlike the usual one partner summit per year, this year will see the company rolling out guiding principles about its investments over two of its partner summits.

The next summit is scheduled to take place from 1st-3rd November 2016, San Francisco.

She also claimed securing digital assets, selling more solutions and professional services to drive value, sell Cloud and hybrid IT and selling lines of business. “Partners that have adapted to these benchmarks are the most profitable partners. But what’s Cisco going to do to help partners evolve and how is it going to do so, we will let you know everything in our partner strategy that we are evolving. We want to give you the best programs, the best resources, and the best experience.”

She further added, “The evolving networking giant’s partner strategy to focus on simplification, better alignment and a new value exchange between Cisco and its channel community on the

Wendy Bahr Senior Vice-President, Global Channel Chief, CISCO Systems

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Chuck Robbins CEO, Cisco Systems new software/security roles and a bouquet of digital marketing services will be a backend rebate program VIP (Value Incentive Program). Speaking on the importance of digitisation and adopting change, the programme – Accelerating Cisco Ecosystem Sales (ACES) will also be a focus, along with aligning our sales teams.

We will continue to grow and be profitable together.”

Speaking about its Partner strategy, Chuck spoke about the three pillars - simplicity, alignment and value exchange. What this means to partners is that they should expect to see a series of evolutionary changes that will reshape how Cisco and partners work together, with an objective on how to speed up innovation.

To do that he outlined five pillars of innovation: build, buy, partner, invest and co-develop. Chuck also spoke on how the company is going to achieve its goals with its partner ecosystem.

Lastly, Cisco’s focus on jumping into the next wave of Hyper converged environment, Digital Network Architecture will be the enabler for Digital transformation. This Architecture that was showcased by Cisco for its partners at the event will enable business innovation, generate insights and create customer experiences.

It will reduce cost and complexity with new orchestration and automation capabilities, while helping protect the business with an architecture designed for security. It’s about businesses using digitisation to differentiate themselves and define strategies. Cisco needs to look at opportunities and identify new ways to leverage technology and accelerate growth. Like, amazing profitability proposition for the partners and transformation towards Software will lead to revenue opportunity.

At the event, Cisco also announced its intent to acquire Cliqr for $260 million to expand into Hybrid Cloud Management solutions.

Cisco’s focus on jumping into the next wave of Hyper converged environment, Digital Network Architecture will be the enabler for Digital transformation. This Architecture that was showcased by Cisco for its partners at the event will enable business innovation, generate insights and create customer experiences

Chris Dedicoat Global Sales head-Cisco systems CliQr provides an application-defined cloud orchestration platform to model, deploy and manage applications across bare metal, virtualized and container environments. This acquisition will enable Cisco customers to simplify and accelerate their private, public and hybrid cloud deployments. CliQr’s technology is already integrated into a number of Cisco data center products, including ACI (Application-Centric Infrastructure) and Unified Computing System (UCS). As transactions are happening faster and organizations are moving into unbelievable amount of transformation, CliQr will help to work across multiple clouds including both public and private cloud service providers like VMware, Azure Pack, OpenStack, Google Cloud, Amazon Web

Services, RackSpace, Dimension Data as well as some specialty clouds like Microsoft Azure. It will help the customers realize the promise of the cloud and easily manage the lifecycle of their applications on any hybrid cloud environment.

A lot of other announcements also happened at the Partner Summit. It focussed on data center business as a growing opportunity, now that Cisco is entering into the Hyperconverged market through an OEM agreement with Springpath.

With the acquisition of Jasper for $1.4 billion, Cisco’s IoT platform enables thousands of companies to launch, manage and monetize IoT services on a global scale. They specialize in managing the wireless connections and billing relationships with the cellular carriers needed for IoT applications.

Cisco also announced its next generation of Nexus Switches and Software that are built on its latest ASICs and are the first switching products specifically built for cloud scale. Cisco is bringing its 25/50/100 Gig capabilities to the data center at the same costs and density of current 10/40 Gig products. This is an increase in up to 10x the bandwidth at the same costs. The new product announcements included the new Nexus 9000 data center switches, Nexus 3000 data center switches and the Cisco HyperFlex systems for hyper-converged Infrastructure.

Rob Soderbery, SVP for Enterprise Products and Solutions, Cisco spoke on how digital network is the platform for digital business. Cisco DNA brings together virtualization, automation, analytics, cloud and programmability to build that platform in support of the DNA architecture.

Speaking on the Software defining everything (Network/ Software/Hyper convergence) and digital marketing services, he

Cisco has announced its intent to acquire Cliqr for $260 million to expand into Hybrid Cloud Management solutions This acquisition will enable Cisco customers to simplify and accelerate their private, public and hybrid cloud deployments.

Rajiv Kumar, CEO - Proactive Data Systems talked about what kind of transformation businesses are seeing these days as a result of change in the business model. “There are challenges because we have been doing traditionally box-based business for years and have been doing business with Cisco for 15+ years. For us changing the way we work is definitely a challenge as we need to implement that in our company with lot of thinking and understanding. Today we taking into consideration more of software and business-oriented skills along with hardware and product based business. Along the lines of Cisco, we are trying to transforming ourselves from a technology-oriented company to a business oriented company.”

said that the aim is to reach more customers, drive more demand generation, and offer analytics and campaign reporting.

Cisco executive vice president and CFO Kelly Kramer reported successful transition of Cisco software and services business model.

The fee income on the company's software and subscription services including total revenue is around 28%.

David Goeckeler, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Security Business Group said that Cisco's strong focus is on software and security portfolio and is the clear agenda of Partner Summit 2016. “Since security is very much in our networks and other technologies, we need a good security and network infrastructure and they need to connect with each other. Security has become so important to our business that it is one of the most profitable architectures. Partners are having too many security vendors in their portfolio and that is leading to even more insecurity. Now, partners can do things differently and can bring the best of breed portfolio with an integrated architecture.”

In the closing ceremony, Chris Dedicoat, Global Sales headCisco systems said that security is a key component of all its technologies. With the expansion of software capabilities, Cisco expects a strong business value complementary to its software development efforts. “This is an incredibly fast-growing business for us and it should be and could be for you as well; but we cannot do this on our own, because that’s not the way we operate,” he concluded. n

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VAR CORPORATE

Lenovo Growth Story

Ever since its founding in 1984, Lenovo has strived to rise abov PC majors globally. And sure enough, in the years that followed largest technology companies with the aid of strategies that laying the groundwork to rapidly accelerate its business. In line with its goal of leading in the EBG space, Lenovo’s plan is to ramp up the business so as to grow and meet its internal revenue targets in the coming year. “We remain confident that EBG can accomplish this through the right offerings, capabilities and people. In the Commercial Channel space, a lot of investment is being made to improve engagement and ease of business for partners,” says Rahul Agarwal, Managing Director, Lenovo India.

Post IBM PC business acquisition...

Amar Babu Chief Operating Officer, Lenovo Asia-Pacific and Chairman, Lenovo India

Amar is responsible for driving the Enterprise Business Group function from an APAC level.

Having successfully established itself as a leading global PC+ player, the Chinese PC major, Lenovo has become a name to reckon with today. In fact, it claims itself to be the only major technology business that offers an end-to-end hardware portfolio of the industry’s finest innovations for the enterprise market. Its offerings, ranging from PCs, laptops, mobile devices, servers to storage, are a class apart in the industry and are constantly enhanced to suit customers who are always on the go.

Today, Lenovo is recognized as a strong leader in Asia-Pacific across all the key categories that it has presence in, namely PCs, mobiles and enterprise. Apart from being a global leader in the market, in India, Lenovo is #1 in PCs, #3 in smartphones and #3 in x86 servers. It has a strong customer base in India for its legendary Think products and is expanding its market here with a wider range of products for the domestic market here.

Lenovo recently launched its first set of entrylevel ThinkServers – TS 140 and RD450 for SMBs in the Indian market, post the acquisition of IBM’s server business.

Lenovo is also investing heavily in its Enterprise divisions and Commercial Channel,

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One core factor that helped Lenovo stay on top of the game has been its undeterred focus on the essence of Think. Post its acquisition of IBM’s PC business in 2005 and x86 server business in 2014, it ensured that it carried forward IBM’s Think legacy and successfully amalgamated it with Lenovo’s innovative ideology, resulting in the best set of devices an enterprise professional can depend on. Among all other strategies, the “Protect & Attack” strategy has worked as a long-term formula for success in the PC+ era. In addition, as part of this strategy, Lenovo aims to grow this business and over the next five years, establish itself as a leader in the space offering complete enterprise solutions.

The x86 acquisition has enabled Lenovo to enjoy the best of two worlds, merging Lenovo’s scale and efficiency together with IBM’s technical expertise. “We look forward to reaping the benefits of this business decision over the next few quarters, taking our foray in the enterprise space to the next level. Our top priorities will be around investments in Volume servers, Converged systems, and Blade, along with cloud space business growth through Hyperscale systems. We will also be focussing on solutions such as SAP HANA and Hyper-Convergence,” says Rahul.

Channel and after-sales support…A mighty affair

The business heads of Lenovo manage the Home and Small Business, Commercial Named Accounts, Commercial Channel, Mobiles and Tablets and Online.Talking about after-sales support, Lenovo commands an extensive presence with 300+ Onsite Service Centers and 150+ Carry In Service Centers supporting PCs and Tablets. The support happens through a mix of Neutral service

Pankaj Harjai Director, Commercial Lenovo India

Channel

Pankaj is responsible for driving Channel Sales for the company’s commercial business.

y Reaches New High

ve competition and build itself as a strong contender to take on d, Lenovo has seen a meteoric rise to become one of the world’s t it thinks have worked wonders for it to see such a growth – providers and AWSPs (Authorized Warranty Service Providers). This Service Network has a presence in 180+ locations across 36 states and Union Territories, covering 29,000 Pin codes.

For Lenovo, the Commercial Channel (VAR) space is a huge focus area. Apart from innovative programmes to engage and incentivize them, a lot of effort is being put in to train and certify partner teams. The training programme is structured into three means – Face to face, Webinars and Online certification. As for sustaining its partner relationships, Lenovo continues to regularly reach out to and appreciate them for the support and commitment to Lenovo, through various awards and incentive programmes. To meet its commitment to its channel and to acknowledge and appreciate the contribution of partners towards making Lenovo a leader in its space, the company has recently held an event titled “Innovation Never Stands Still” for its partners in New Delhi. The event served as a platform for the partners, press and customers to interact with the Lenovo Executive Council (LEC). “Driving partner profitability is one of our top three priorities. We have always been a partner-centric company and we make it a point to meet and talk to our key partners in person, yet another way to showcase how much the Indian partner ecosystem means to us. We look forward to working with them efficiently, as a cohesive team in the coming years,” sums up Rahul. n

Rahul Agarwal Managing Director, Lenovo India

Rahul is leading the brand to its next phase of growth by diversifying into smart connected devices while at the same time maintaining a strong PC focus.

Journey of Lenovo

Siddhesh Naik Director of the Enterprise Business Group at Lenovo India

Siddhesh is responsible for steering the newly-formed enterprise business by driving sales and strengthening the partner ecosystem.

1

2014 LENOVO * ANNOUNCED INTENT TO ACQUIRE ON JAN 23, 2014

** ANNOUNCED INTENT TO ACQUIRE ON JAN 29, 2014

2015

2016

2016

Alliance

Alliance

Alliance

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Budget SPECIAL

Union Budget 2016-17 – The Growth agenda for the Economy continues The much anticipated Union Budget 2016-2017 has outlined a positive structure for growth of infrastructure, education and the agricultural sector which simply indicates the government’s move towards giving impetus to its Digitalization mission and creating skilled employees across the country. Though there has not been much in store for start-ups and the India Inc, this can be a perfect time for women entrepreneurs to kick off their business journeys. In the networking segment, Routers, broadband modems, set top boxes, Digital video recorder and CCTV cameras will become cheaper which signifies that the IT hardware industry will get a big boost in these lines.

On the other side, implementation of the most awaited tax reform – Goods & Services Tax (GST) has still not able to take off, which is a setback to the industry and is expected to come in effect asap.

Corporates and stakeholders across the country have given a mixed reaction to the budget of 2016-17. A quick look at how the industry has reacted –

Dinesh Malkani President - Cisco India and SAARC

Debjani Ghosh Vice President, Sales and Marketing Group, Managing Director, South Asia – Intel Corp

“The Finance Minister’s balanced ninepillar approach shows a determination to keep India’s fiscal deficit at 3.5% with prudent themes of realizing social, financial and physical infrastructure. The Budget continues to focus on infrastructure and the rural and sector with planned investments that will not only create jobs but also drive economic growth. I believe the specific measures to improve ease of doing business and the favorable tax treatment for start-ups and MSMEs will go a long way in employment generation through indigenization. With the budget, the government has taken dynamic steps to nurture local innovation and entrepreneurship, generate jobs, diversify the economy and support sustainable growth. We look forward to partnering with the government in its various initiatives.”

"The budget is strongly focused on bridging the divide between the ‘haves’ and ‘have not’s’, and good work by the Government in identifying the right priorities for focus under the 9 pillars called out by the FM. This budget, unlike any other, has not treated technology in isolation but integrated the effective use of technology across all the strategic imperatives in keeping with the intent of a Digital India. This budget has laid emphasis on governance reforms and ease of doing business, while highlighting the need for enhancing educational skills in order to make India knowledge based economy. Intel along with NASSCOM launched the National Digital Literacy Mission in 2012 and we are very heartened to see the government’s continued commitment to extending NDLM to 6 crore rural households."

Anil Valluri President - NetApp India & SAARC

Vivekanand Venugopal VP & general manager - Hitachi Data Systems, India

“It certainly is a transformative budget with key focus on farmers, rural India and the middle class. The focus on infrastructure build with substantial allocation and the continued focus on skilling and empowering through additional allocations is the right thing to do for making the country more productive. This government clearly understands the power of technology as reflected in the larger flagship initiatives like Digital India. The Digitization of the government sector, like setting up of Digital Literacy mission which will cover six crore rural households in India ensures transparency and the huge focus on promoting Start-ups’ will only help create more jobs and propel the economy further.”

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“Hitachi Data Systems welcomes the measures introduced as a part of the Union Budget for 2016-17. The budget has laid the groundwork to create more opportunities for education, skill development and job creation in the country. One of the major aspects of the budget announced is that technology will be used in all spheres, starting from tax and markets to data mining and more with the help of a better IT system. The focus on enhancing digital literacy in rural areas to cover 6 crore additional rural households is a well thought move by the government to transform and deliver growth with increased connectivity across the country. As a key aspect of PM Modi’s Digital India initiative, the proposals announced by the finance minister on e-governance entail using technology to speed up governance decisions and plans.”

Rahul Agarwal MD - Lenovo India

“We are happy that the budget establishes a strong emphasis on technology in almost all the development areas highlighted by the Finance Minister. Technology has been recognized as an important enabler across initiatives ranging from agriculture to skill development to PDS to public procurement.

Also, the announcements on the Rural Digital Literacy and the Digital Saksharta Abhiyan are positive strides to bolster the ‘Digital India’ vision. ‘Make in India’ and ‘Digital India’ remained important items on the agenda in the Budget this year. The changes in the customs and excise duty rates on components & subcomponents reaffirm the ‘Make in India’ vision of the government.

This will help in building a robust component ecosystem."

Rajesh Maurya Regional Director, SAARC - Fortinet

Vinay Sinha Head of Sales – India, Director Commercial Business, AMD Asia Pacific-Japan (APJ) Mega Region

“It is great to see that the Government of India has decided to focus this year’s Union Budget on digital literacy by setting up a scheme to be launched to cover 6 crore additional rural households. This access to technology will empower citizens, enables startups, and put India’s organizations on the path to digital transformation. The decision to set up 1500 multi-skill training institutes under the National Skill Development Mission will provide India’s youth multiple options to learn future-ready skills. This will in turn foster a culture of innovation and positively impact the Indian IT ecosystem.”

Jaijit Bhattacharya Partner – KPMG

“This budget has opened up many large opportunities for technology companies and these are very exciting times especially for a leading network security company like Fortinet. We are buoyed by the business opportunities in the emphasis of using IT for tax filing/litigation, adoption of JandhanAadhaar-Mobile platform, land record modernization, automation of 3 Lakhs fair price shops in the PDS, citizen centric service delivery or the plan to start 1500 multi-skillcenters to impart IT skill throughout the county. The digitization of services will also fuel technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and data analytics. The large scale adoption of IT in governance simply means more data will be generated, processed and stored."

“The Union budget is sharply focused on a few key themes, which were already declared by the FM earlier. The budget focused on an efficient and effective government, rationalization of taxation, heavy focus on rural with funds for de-stressing rural economy, Soft and hard infrastructure with over Rs 2.2 trillion for combined rail, road, airports & waterways, focus on human resource development and destressing of the financial systems, including bank. It is also a welcome step to move from a fixed fiscal deficit target to a range, which will provide necessary fiscal headspace to the government. Overall the budget appears to focus on building the fundamentals of the economy and the economic & financial institutions.”

Altaf Halde Managing Director - South Asia, Kaspersky Lab

Hari Om Rai Co-chairman – FTTF (Fast Track Task Force) & CMD – Lava International

"The overall Union Budget 2016-17 is encouraging for the common man, especially the tax relief in HRA. The announcement of Digital literacy scheme to be launched to cover 6 crore additional rural households is a welcome move. This will not only boost the fast adoption of digital technologies across the country but also encourage digital means to reach out to consumers and different markets. Start-ups getting 100% tax exemption for 3 years except MAT is again a good call taken by the government, as this will entice budding entrepreneurs to start their own business and since we are targeting this sector for our software business, it could prove beneficial for us as well. Besides, it will also help in creation of more and more jobs in the country."

Suneet Singh Tuli CEO - DataWind

“We are pleased with the broad expansion of the social net for those at the bottom of the pyramid. Such support via healthcare, employment and skills development is broadly acknowledged as a means of poverty alleviation. The digital literacy scheme for rural households is a key element of these activities and can play a significant role in their successful implementation. We believe that the manufacturing sector should get the required thrust. Enabling the frame-work of setting up 1,500 institutes of skill development will help augment the numbers of those entering the labor market for the first time and those employed in the organized sector.”

“Thanks for implementation of industry suggestions to streamline excise procedures for manufacturing with the Excise approvals been and rightly substituted by self – declaration. The industry is unhappy on the imposition of 2% SAD on populated PCBs used in manufacture of mobile phones and tablet computers. As much as half of production cost of a Mobile phone consists of populated PCBs and this imposition of 2% SAD will mean that the duty differential between complete mobile phones and its parts / components for manufacturing will be significantly diminished. India has not yet developed the eco-system for the complexity involved in populating a mobile phone bare PCB.”

Ravinder P Singh Director – Solutions Strategy & Business Development, IoT, Smart Cities & Digitization, Dell India

“The announcement of Digital Literacy Mission Scheme in rural areas is a key stepping stone to achieve next level of human capital transformation. India is going through a massive transformation with Smart Cities, Make in India and Digital India initiatives that will have far reaching impact in the growth of urban and rural India. Technology is not only the backbone for these initiatives but also a critical stakeholder for the success and sustainability of these programs. We welcome the government's initiative as this will help in building digital infrastructure from the ground up that will help India grow much faster and better to enable economic growth.”

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Budget SPECIAL Umang Bedi Managing Director – Adobe South Asia

M N Vidyashankar President - India Electronics and Semiconductor Association

“We congratulate the Finance Minister and the government on announcing an efficient and effective budget to curtail the fiscal deficit, without a cut in expenditure.

Specifically for the IT industry, the proposals outlined in the Union Budget 2016 promise a significant expansion of the domestic market and add thrust to the government’s overall digitization agenda. Schemes like the digital literacy mission to e-educate rural households will work towards bringing more and more Indians into the folds of the connected world. Initiatives like the creation of an online repository of qualification documents, an e-platform for an unified agriculture market will ensure robust IT platforms are deployed towards furthering automation.”

“Government has shown great intent in promoting the start-up ecosystem in India. With Government's announcement to promote women entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurship in the SC/ST category, we will have an immense role to play along with MSME in making this initiative successful.

We are honored with government's trust on associations like IESA and look forward to work in tandem to realize this socially important goal. With Government’s announcement to promote women entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship in the SC/ST category with a propose budget of INR500 crore, we will have a critical role to play along with MSME in making this initiative successful.”

Deepak Kumar Sahu Publisher-VARINDIA

R. Chandrashekhar President - NASSCOM

The Union budget 2016-17 is focused on the growth and development of infrastructure including the Project in Smart cities, Digital India, Education, Healthcare, Citizen service projects, Insurance and Skill India which will give a boost to modernization programs and with heavy focus on rural India. Total fund of Rs 2.2 trillion for combined rail, road, airports & waterways will focus on human resource development and de-stressing the financial systems, including banks. It is good news for the IT hardware companies expect prices of devices like modems, routers, set-top-boxes to go down by 8% within a year. Another noticeable point is on the change in duty structure that will encourage the Indian ICT industry move to next level of manufacturing.

“The finance minister’s speech had a strong emphasis on leveraging technology to transform India. The initiatives announced combined with swift implementation of Digital India will help to digitize India and provide effective citizen services. We would urge the government to move forward at a swift pace and build an effective PPP model”.

The annual budget proposals set the policy direction for the country and Budget 2016 does articulate the emphasis on accountability, transparency and governance. However, in the backdrop of global economic volatility, there are unmet expectations on policy announcements that enable ease of doing business for our sector.

Lalit Chaturvedi GM Marketing -Kyocera Document Solution India

Ashraf-el-Arman MD - Xerox India

“At first glance the budget looks promising for IT and IT related industries.

The government has given increased impetus to investment and growth with boosting the entrepreneurs by providing investment friendly measures such as promoting the ease of doing business and improving the taxation scenario in this budget under Make In India initiative. This coupled with the rationalization of various duties and taxes in this budget, the manufacturing in IT sector is here to receive a mega boost.”

Manish Sharma President CEAMA and Managing Director Panasonic India and South Asia

“The Indian economy is growing at a rapid pace despite the global slowdown. The Finance Minister has clearly highlighted the growth pillars of the Indian economy in Agriculture, Rural, Social sector, Skills, Ease of Doing Business and Tax and Compliance reforms. We are happy with the government impetus on Make In India by providing tax and duty benefits and these will go a long way in strengthening the manufacturing capabilities of India. Another important milestone has been the use of technology to increase accountability of the government, authorities, and courts is a welcome step and will provide the right fillip to fast track procedures and will become the growth engine of the country.”

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“The Government plans to establish a digital depository of School Leaving Certificates, College Degrees, Academic Awards and Mark sheets for easy access for students, institutions and employers. With our expertise in document technology and services offerings, we believe there is an opportunity for us to collaborate with the government, institutions and employers and work with them in the vision of creating a digital repository in India.”

Anwar Shirpurwala Executive Director - MAIT

"#Budget2016 has met our demands partially to help the Indian ICT industry moves from assembly to next level of manufacturing, however, certain products have been missed out. We hope that preferential duty tariffs will be extended to include components and parts that go into the manufacture of laptops/notebooks in the near future. Having existing manufacturing facilities, this will help to unleash the full impact of 'Make in India' and realize the twin goals of higher domestic value addition and local employment generation.

Measures taken to proliferate use of technology and increase overall penetration of IT in the country are commendable."

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FACE TO FACE

Indian market is of outmost importance to Inspur Technologies India is a very strategic market for Inspur Technologies and it will be among four key markets for Overseas Business Unit (OBU). Inspur is a Cloud Computing Solution Provider in China with revenue of US$8.2 billion in 2014. Inspur OBU is present in 85 countries. It has R&D centres in China, USA, Japan and Taiwan and factories in the USA, Venezuela, Kenya, Cuba, Nigeria and UAE. Discussing about Inspur Technologies, Verinder Kumar Aggarwal, Vice-President, Inspur Technologies (India) Pvt. Ltd, explained the importance of the Indian market to the company, the strategy they are adopting to meet the challenges in the market and also mentioned about the channel expansion that the company is keen about.

Indian Market for Inspur

India is an important market for Inspur. In line with the government’s “Make-in-India” initiative, the company is investing heavily in the country and also planning to come up with a manufacturing unit.

“We are investing in India to build ‘RAASS’ – (Reliable Products & Services / Availability of Products, Solutions & Resources / Accessibility with Defined Process & Tools / Scalability of our Products and Solution Offerings / Serviceability with best-in-class support teams). As a part of the same, we are planning to set up a manufacturing plant in India under the ‘Make-in-India’ initiative of the Government of India. Also, we plan to localize the customized solutions like Smart City, education, and taxation solutions with SI partners. We are also planning to develop account-based resources to address telecom, e-commerce, IDC (CSPs) and HPC verticals,” said Verinder Kumar Aggarwal, Vice-President, Inspur Technologies (India) Pvt. Ltd.

Strategy

Inspur aims to be present across India through its channel partners, as the partners provide better reach and accessibility of customers.

Apart from reaching customers in a better way, the company is also planning to come up with different solutions aimed at various segments.

“Our strategy is to provide coverage through distribution network to provide point of sale across India, while we will be focussed on large projects from key enterprise customers in verticals like e-commerce, Internet data center, telecom and HPC in India. We plan to bring our Smart Rack technology for IDC and telecom customers, HPC solution for R&D institutes and our Smart City solutions for Smart City projects in India,” he said.

With high-performance, excellent energy-saving, anti-corrosion, FPGA and other innovative technologies, the InspurSmartRack improves the energy efficiency and results in energy saving up to 43 per cent. Other than technology, products and services, we have readymade Solutions like Smart City projects, Education Cloud, Taxation Cloud, Digital Media solutions, etc, wherein we just need to customize as per local requirements and start implementing the same in no time. “Our solutions and localization approach will be our USP. Our key target verticals will be telecom, e-commerce, IDC (CSPs) and the Government with our Smart Rack, Cloud and HPC product solutions,” explained Verinder Kumar.

Channels

After receiving a positive response from the Indian distributors and to cater to its customers more efficiently, the company is planning to sign up a VAD and a national IT distributor. To begin with, the company is keen to spread to seven major cities and twenty other cities in India.

“We have got a very good response from the distributors in India

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Verinder Kumar Aggarwal Vice-President Inspur Technologies (India) Pvt. Ltd

Deployments

• 50% of Alibaba Fully Integrated Rack Server Platform is using Inspur SmartRack. Inspur has also started deploying for the new Alibaba datacenters in USA. The Volume of Order Transactions of Alibaba reached peak of 586 Million in a single day.

• INSPUR has built the first cabinet delivery datacenter in China for Baidu, which can rival Facebook datacenter. INSPUR’s ability on R&D, test, supply chain, manufacture, delivery, quality control won the customer high praise. The delivery ability in a single day reached ten thousand nodes. Storage capacity of this datacenter has reached 4000 PB.

and are in the final stage of signing up one Value Added Distributor (VAD) and one well-known national IT distributor to cover the panIndia Supply Chain. We will ensure coverage in seven major cities and twenty other cities at the earliest possible. SI partners and VARs have also shown great amount of interest in working with us. We have set up a global call centre in Gurgaon, India to provide 24*7 support and are appointing ASP to provide warranty support in India,” stated Verinder Kumar. n

FACE TO FACE

Lifesize Rediscovering itself as a SaaS company T

he split from Logitech has come at a time for Lifesize when the company is starting to transition to being a cloud-focussed company. Gagan Verma, Regional Director India & SAARC - Lifesize tells VARINDIA of how operating as a fully independent company gives it complete freedom to take quicker decisions and about the plans to grow its Cloud business Logitech’s focus has been purely on hardware, while Lifesize has transitioned to become a SaaS company. “Being a part of a larger company has its own limitations.

Fundamentally, the synergy was not happening and there was totally a change in the business model. We have become more independent and can take decisions much faster, so this is a positive sign for us,” observes Gagan Verma, Regional Director India & SAARC, Lifesize.

The launch of Lifesize Cloud has further boosted the confidence of Lifesize. Simple, easy and scalable, that’s what makes Lifesize Cloud different from its competitors. A year back when Lifesize launched its first Lifesize Cloud, Gagan says that he was a bit apprehensive of whether it will pick it up or not. But the way traction is happening it would not have been possible for the company

to close large deals in large enterprise. “The market dynamics are changing today and customers want more features at lesser costs.

Depending on these changing demands, Lifesize has built its module around Cloud.

Everybody has to deliver with less resource.

This means that if a customer has a 10-user Cloud and if he wants to expand it to 25, he can do it within minutes. In comparison to the conventional legacy, our Cloud will offer an ROI of more than 50%,” says Gagan.

Lifesize could have easily gone for its own Cloud by launching its data center but it chose to invest in IBM SoftLayer architecture instead. “And that’s how the traction has come, because we are using world-class architecture,” he says.

Lifesize is focussed across all verticals for its Cloud solution. “In fact we got tremendous response from all these verticals. The response has been a little slow in the govt. vertical but it is matter of time before they start adopting the Cloud,” he states.

Lifesize does not sell anything directly to its customers and channel is its feet on street. It has around 75-80 channel partners. It also has a world-class experience center in Bangalore.

“We have made things so simple that even a

Gagan Verma Regional Director India & SAARC Lifesize guard at the hotel can use the cloud. We are definitely expanding our partners and their mind share in terms of Cloud is also very high.”

Among its customers, leading names like WHO, Godfrey Phillips, Hiranandani Group, Reliance Industries form its elite customers base. “Initially, more than 50-55 % of the customers were from the SMB segment, but now more of large enterprises form our customer profile,” Gagan concludes. n

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FACE TO FACE

‘India to be the No.1 Digitization Country in the World’ T

o support the ongoing Digital India initiatives, Global networking major Cisco Systems has announced a planned series of strategic investments in India that will total over US $100 million including US $40 million to fund early-stage and growth-stage companies in the country.

“Digitization goes beyond connectivity. The impact of digitization is far-reaching, helping countries maintain global competitiveness, foster innovation and create jobs. Education and Internet are two equalizers in life. With our increased investments in education and innovation, we are harnessing the power of technology to launch a generation of problem solvers who will innovate like technologists, think like entrepreneurs and act as social change agents,” expresses John T. Chambers, Executive Chairman of Cisco, who is on his visit to India for the 2nd time in 2 months.

Supporting the next phase of the country’s digitization plans, Cisco will collaborate closely with state governments in India on strategic initiatives including the addition of 6 news innovation labs, 3 centres of expertise,

funded university collaborations and skills investments. In line with this, Cisco has already signed an agreement with Andhra Pradesh government to carry out a broadband project in the state. The project is focused on placing a 22,500-km-long broadband network, which will cover two million households.

The company has plans to set up of a manufacturing unit in Pune in the country.

John Chambers also expressed his plan to come up with an Internet of Everything (IoE) innovation centre and to launch the fibre grid network in Visakhapatnam. The facility will serve as export hub for Cisco.

Cisco will outsource manufacturing to supplier partners like it does in other production facilities globally. Apart from

Transformation of Cisco Networking Routing Switching Company è Technology Solution è Security Company è Broadband Network

John T. Chambers Executive Chairman, Cisco this, CISCO will also invest in an advanced Technology Centre of Excellence and Research Lab at the Institute of Digital Technology (IDT) at Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh. The research lab will focus on cyber security, smart city and manufacturing solutions and will train graduate engineers in advanced digital technologies. With this fiber optic rollout, Andhra Pradesh becomes the first Indian state to bring all its households online.

IP-COM aims to connect the world to make life easy

With a different approach towards business where competition is of lesser importance than customer’s satisfaction and partner’s profitability, PinakiChatterjee, Director – Sales India & SAARC, IP-COM, discussed the strategy of maintaining the company’s position among the competitors, market opportunity and its core focus on R&D.

Indian market – An opportunity

IP-COM sees India as a huge potential market. Rural India is still waiting to get connected to the rest of the world through the internet and that is where the opportunity lies for the company. Moreover, many government initiatives with multinational investments are also boosting the need of IT infrastructure.

“Networking market has a huge potential when 60% of the population is yet to get connected to the information highway.Rural areas are still waiting to get their basic connectivity.Now smartphone with Wi-Fi is available within Rs.3,000, but there is no Wi-Fi to connect and use.

At the same time, with new government initiatives, many multinationals had started investing or planning to invest in this.

Again they need IT infrastructure,” asserted PinakiChatterjee,Director –Sales India & SAARC, IP-COM Network.

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Strategy

Rather than focussing on competition, IP-COM focusses on customer’s satisfaction which will earn the company a 100% growth YOY. “There will always be some or other big or small competition.Even if we entered 10 years back it would have been almost same with different challenges. We are, in no way, competing with any big or small players as our focus is not on competition but on our customers.If we can keep our partners and customers happy and satisfied, we will maintain our growth 100% YOY as well as maintain our own position,” stated Pinaki.

It is a channel-oriented company and has always ensured profitability to partners. It also focusses on simplicity of the product and value-for-money offering.

“IP-COM is a pure SI/SP channel-focussed brand and our strategy is to ensure margins to our partners and offer value-for-money products or solutions to our customers.

Currently,we have Redington asnational distributor and then we have approximately 20 value-added distributors covering almost all the state capitals, and more than 500 SIs/ SPs spread across the country pushing our brand,” saidPinaki.

Roadmap

The company aims to become the

Pinaki Chatterjee Director – Sales India & SAARC, IP-COM preferred brand of the customers across the globe. Another major focus of the company is on its R&D to make high-quality simple products for users to make their lives easy.

“Our roadmap is to become one of the most preferred SMB/SME WLAN brands globally as well as in India.We understand there are big players in the market but at end of the day it is the same market where everyone sells and has their own fan following.Our R&D’s main focus is on making high-quality products but to make these as simple as possible for users and stick to the original idea of technology innovation that makes life easy. Our agenda is to get the world connected and make their life simple,” concluded Pinaki. n

FACE TO FACE

Sales Enablement- Forecasting Trends A

s economies the world over continue to grow, many enterprises are focusing on adopting an aggressive sales approach. This has become imperative because changing market conditions have impacted and altered the buyer environment.

Buyers today are far more informed and easily disengage with sellers who provide no value and relevant information. With time, enterprises are becoming aware of the importance of adopting processes that will fill the gaps in their sales operations. As a strategic approach, enterprises today employ sales enablement as a key driver.

The global market presents a unique platform for sales enablement, characterised by diversity and talent. Diversity in the market fosters inclusivity within the organisation – where each person will be able to grow along with others. In addition, diversity in the market signifies that sales enablement methodologies can be constant, but implementation strategies have to change in accordance with the new markets, given their dynamic nature. Besides diversity, the global market encompasses world class talent.

This allows sales enablement companies to set up R&D for their services – i.e. to strategise and try out various service models before implementing a chosen model. Sales enablement is also shaped by five significant global trends. These are described in detail below.

Mobility: Mobility is thefastest path toorganizational change, costefficienciesand increased productivity. Many enterprises areleveraging mobilesolutions todeliver services worldwide.Mobile solutions help to automatethesales forceand add on tothesales enablementprocess. Since thesales forceis constantly on themove--beiton theground for meetingsor in officeanswering customerqueries -mobileapplications and solutions empowersales teamstoperformtheir job better.With mobile solutions, thesales forceis equipped withtools and real-timeinformation tounderstand thecustomer better,respond toqueries faster,provide impressive demos, offe rextensiveproductinformation, etc.The ability toaccess information anytime, anywherenot only streamlines sales and enhances thesales enablementprocess, it also optimizes client/ customer engagement, integratesbackendapplications so that sales teamshave a complete picturetoresolve queries or offer personalized experiences, improvestraining and reporting ofsales force,and offerssecure access and controltosensitive information.

Cloud: Cloud solutions areanother addon tosales enablementas enterprises can makecontent, training, etc.accessible across any partoftheworld, in real-time.Cloud improvesmobility since enterprises can upload various applications on the cloud and provide themas services globally. When enterprises espouse a cultureofagile, data-driven decisionmaking, itgives thema competitiveedge.

ofthecontentused, customers’expectations, how thesales teamis using thecontent,etc.

With analytics, enterprises can also discover thebest sales opportunities, improvesales forecastingaccuracy, identify and manage risk effectively,gauge the performanceofsales representatives, etc.All these insights willgive enterprises a competitiveedge.

Snehashish Bhattacharjee Global Ceo & Co-Founder, Denave This is especially important forsales teamsas customerstoday arefar moreempoweredand knowledgeable. Hence,itis imperativethat sales teamsrecognize thetools and techniques that will aid in improvingproductivity, enhancing sales and delivering value. Cloud solutions arehighly beneficial foran enterprise and its sales forceas they facilitatereal-time communication, real-timecollaboration, assisted contextand information, remoteand secureaccess toassets, and increased costsavings witha “pay-as-you-use” model.

Analytics: The right information is whatenables sales success. Analytics provides sales teamswithhigh-value content,as ithelps convertthehuge quantum of data into actionable insights. Data-driven insights help improvesales and increase ROI. Enterprises can use analytics and contentintelligence totailor contenttomeetthebuyer’s needs.

By using metrics todiscover theright content,leads can beconverted into actual sales at a muchfaster rate. Content analytics also enhances visibility on theeffectiveness

Technology - drivenWhite SpaceDatabase Generation: Most sales representatives fail to achieve their targets. This alarming reality reflectsthehuge gap betweentheaddressed customerbase and the actual addressable segment. Ifenterprises areable toviewall thenewand exploredcontactabledatabase ofSMEs globally, it willhelp increase their reach significantly. Furthermore,access tovarious tools and methodologies willimprovesales closureofthese leads. The futureofsales enablementwillwitness enterprises leveraging technology togeneratewhite space database and address untapped whitespaces forincreasing sales conversion and delivering greater sales impact.

Localization ofVoice ActivatedInstructions: As newermarketsand citiesaretapped fordeeper sales reach, access toa smartsales forcewitha good commandofwritten officiallanguages (English, etc.) becomesthat muchmorechallenging. An emerging area offocus should betheuse ofvoice-activated instructions.

Voice-controlledinterfacesare constantly evolving and peopletalking totheir smartphones tosimplify theemailing/ texting process, or even tofind directions, is a common sight. Ifthis technology is applied at everylevel of thesales force– mostcritically at thegrass rootlevel -itcan make reporting simpler and ensureall details areeffectivelyand impeccablycapturedin real time. This would streamlinethesales process implementationacross diverse geographies, with multiplelocal language resources.

Therefore, localization ofvoice-activatedinstructions has the powertotakestrategy effectivenesstogreater heights.

Unlike many established concepts, sales enablement is still evolving and therefore, highly misinterpreted. For some enterprises, sales enablement is a role/function within the enterprise. For others, it is a task performed by people. However, in order to enable effective sales, it is imperative to look at sales enablement as a holistic, end-to-end process – covering every aspect of sales, right from ideating action plans to successful implementation. Executing sales enablement increases revenue, adds competitive advantage, lowers churn rates and improves customer satisfaction. As a result of these benefits, sales enablement has evolved from just an elective function to an upfront function, playing a critical role in aiding an enterprise’s sales success. No longer a choice, sales enablement has become a business necessity. n

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EVENT

Digital Transformation To Be The Top Priority For VARs

The WIITF is the definitive platform to discuss and evaluate the India opportunity. It addresses the policy framework and guidelines required to attract investors, large corporate and industries and is an ideal platform to explore the intersection of technology, innovation, vision of CIOs, Technology Gurus and investors.

M

arking the sixth year of the Western India Information Technology Fair, the 6th WIITF, 2016 provided the foremost multi-stakeholder platform, bringing together international and national speakers in Mumbai who have invested in building a sustainable roadmap for India’s future. The WIITF is the definitive platform to discuss and evaluate the India opportunity. It addresses the policy framework and guidelines required to attract investors, large corporate and industries and is an ideal platform to explore the intersection of technology, innovation, vision of CIOs, Technology Gurus and investors. The summit, besides focussing on the segments where Solution and start-up businesses will reach a new high, highlighted the challenges faced by the CIOs and how the process can be simplified to create business strategies, develop and evaluate solution effectiveness. It also presents a strong medium for Indian businesses to scale a new high.

Making it truly a global platform to connect with the industry leaders in Mumbai, WIITF was inaugurated in the august presence of 250 luminaries and was witnessed by CIOs of corporates and solution partners from across Western India. The Summit was inaugurated by Shri. V.K. Gautam, IAS, Principal Secretary-IT, Govt of Maharastra; Shri Vinit Goenka, Member Task Force-Ministry of Road, Transport, Highways & Shipping-GOI; Shri. Suresh Pansari, CEO- Rashi Peripherals and other distinguished guests joining the inaugural ceremony that included Dr. Sumit D. Chowdhury, Founder & CEO- Gaia Smart Cities; Mr. H.K. Behera, GM (Govt. Business) - Union Bank of India; Mr Kshitij M. Kotak, Chairman, ASIRT; Mr. Vishal Jain, Director- Inspira Enterprise India Pvt. Ltd.; Mr. Suresh A Shan, Head Innovation & Future Technology-Mahindra Finance; Mr. Sanjoy Bhattacharya, Bus. Head, Distribution IT- LG Electronics India; Mr. Champak Raj Gurjar, President-FAIITA; Mr. Rushabh Shah, President-TAIT; Mr. Jiten Mehta, SecretaryISODA; Mr. Chander Purswani, MD - Connect Star Networks Pvt Ltd.; Ms. Sandhya Shetty, Commercial head- Canon India; Mr. Satish Babu, SAP Practice India Head - CTRls Data center; Mr. Vipul Mehta, CEO-Tipping Point

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Inaugural Ceremony( From left to Right): Mr. Jiten Mehta, Secretary-ISODA , Dr. Deepak Kumar Sahu, Publisher & Chief editor,VARINDIA, Mr. Rushabh Shah, President-TAIT, Dr. Sumit D. Chowdhury,Founder & CEO- Gaia Smart Cities, Mr. Champak Raj Gurjar, PresidentFAIITA, Shri. Vinit Goenka, Member Task Force-Ministry of Road, Transport, Highways & Shipping-GOI, Mr. Satish Babu, SAP Practice India Head - CTRls Data center , Shri. Suresh Pansari, CEO,Rashi Peripherals,Ms. Sandhya Shetty, Commercial head- Canon India, Mr. Anil Bhargavan – Head - Certified Partners ( West)-Tally Solutions, Mr. Kshitij M Kotak,Chairman, ASIRT and Mr. Chander Purswami,M.D- Connect Star Networks Pvt. Ltd.

Shri Vinit Goenka Member – Task Force,Ministry of Road, Transport, Highways & Shipping, GoI “The success that we have seen in the Medical field is being tried to get replicated in the Road & Transport area. So there is this company in Hissar that decided to put up an e-health centre under its CSR program. This hospital was connected with Bangalore and patient records used to be assessed here with the help of analytical tools and a robust IT network. The result is that even in the absence of doctors, specialists sitting in Bangalore can treat patients from this town. Such is the advancements that happened in IT.”

and Mr. Anil Bhargavan – Head - Certified Partners ( West)-Tally Solutions.

The event was supported by LG, Canon D-Link, Tally, CtRLS, Inspira and Union bank of India.

The summit gathers the system Integrators, Solution Partners, VARs and CIOs to discuss some of the important aspects of technologies, who are crucial to our continued success by enabling us to deliver the best experiences to our customer by addressing the ‘technology glitches’ inside the organization, key trends and issues & challenges in implementing the technology.

Being a real opportunity for the VARs, WIITF tried to understand on how CIOs are reacting to it and whether any big risks are coming with such digital investments.

Addressing the audience, Mr. Deepak Sahu, Publisher spoke about how Technology is the key enabler in this digital transformation and the rise of start-up companies in India and the emerging efforts to put the power of analytics in the hands of CIOs. “Technology has changed the face of VARs and Resellers over the decade and the pace of disruption is now quickening with digital transformation being a top priority for many resellers. But does technology change

really deliver the benefit retailers expect and desire? There are fast track transformation happening, resulting in many organizations experimenting it while others making big investments in it.”

Shri. Vinit Goenka, Member Task ForceMinistry of Road, Transport, Highways & Shipping-GOI spoke in general of where the country is heading, Dr. Sumit D. Chowdhury,

Founder & CEO- Gaia Smart Cities in his speech talked about how Smart City is the way ahead for India and is an opportunity for VARs in the eco-system.

Among the corporates, LG, CtRlS, Tally and Inspira gave presentations, with Mr. Girish Mamtani, Manager- Business Development, OEM & Government Projects- LG Electronics; Mr. Satish Babu, SAP Practice India Head -

Shri Suresh Pansari, CEO - Rashi Peripherals “Start-ups entered India in the late 90’s. In the past, innovation and research took place in countries where govt. provided support in terms of permissions, grants and investments.

In India entrepreneurs have fewer of these choices prior to 90’s. It was thus difficult for common man to start a business back then. However, since last 10-15 years, with the coming of venture capitalists and private equities, the scenario has completely changed.”

Dr Sumit D. Chowdhury Founder & CEO - GAIA Smart Cities “The mission of Smart City is indeed a grand idea. Take 100 of the Smart cities in the country and add measurement, technology, better design, integrated thinking and see how as citizens of that city would live there. It’s not about any council that’s being formed, or any elected representatives but it is solely about how we have to change ourselves to live as a citizen there or change how we think about that city. So the Smart City Mission is one in which the govt. asked everyone involved to go to their drawing board, start thinking of every city in different dimension and bring every element like Power, Water, Transportation together.”

CTRls Data center; Mr. Anil Bhargavan, Head, Certified Partners, (West)-Tally Solutions and Mr. Om Ahuja, Vice President: Information Security at Inspira Enterprise India Pvt. Ltd. from their respective organizations spoke at length about the opportunities that they sense and how these can be translated into real-time scope for growth.

Girish Mamtani Manager, Business Development, OEM & Government Projects, LG Electronics “LG has been into the business of selling IT products for the last 20 years and have been the technology leaders in terms of displays.

We have been growing 20% every year. While the penetration of PC has been just 10%, but we believe opportunities to rise as a result of enablement in different sectors. In terms of PC desktop adoption, rural markets have seen a better growth than the urban markets.”

Awards

Xpress Computers Ltd Receives the Award for Best VAR - Western India

Techlink Infoware Pvt. Ltd. Bags the Award for Best ISV - Western India

Pentagon System and Services Pvt. Ltd. Given the award for Best System Integrator - Western India

Sound Solutions Named the Best Regional Distributor - Western India

Inspira Enterprise India Pvt. Ltd. Takes the award for Best Value Added Distributor - Western India

Magnamious Systems Pvt. Ltd. Bags the award for Best Network Integrator - Western India

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EVENT

Mr Om Ahuja, Vice-President, Information Security, Inspira Enterprise India Private Ltd “Inspira has been into this industry for last 7-8 years and during this period we have been innovating our offerings and engaging & enabling our VAR community for doing something different. We are typically concentrating on 4 domains today – Cloud Security, Applications (where we have entered the Healthcare ERP scenario), DGS&D Rate Card (where we have empanelled and want our VAR community to exploit) and distribution of top products.”

Satish Babu SAP Practice India Head - CtrlS Data Center

Mr Anil Bhargavan Head, Certified Partners, (West), Tally Solutions

“In line with the vision of PM of India, we at CtrlS believe in hosting and securing the data in India. Earlier we used to opt for hosting data outside India, but now we have our own infrastructure. CtrlS today has tier 4 level data centers in India and has its DCs across 4 major cities – Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai and Kolkata. These data centers have been built with great connectivity and scaling facilities, enabling low latency and our dark fibre across Hyderabad and Mumbai.”

“We have been into this business of offering innovation after innovations for letting businesses to grow for last 28 years.

Our flagship product Tally ERP9 has been conceptualized by Shri Bharat Goenka.

We serve our customers through a robust network of 28,000 partners. We are primarily addressing the growth requirements of the MSMEs. Our relationship with them enables us to understand them, the challenges faced by them and their aspirations.”

Product display - II

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LUCKY DRAW

Product display - I

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FACE TO FACE

Meridian IT is on an expansion spree in India I

ndia always holds an important position for any company when it comes to business. As the market is growing, major companies are focussing to tap it and so does Meridian IT. Like other companies, India has been a very crucial market for Meridian IT also. It targets companies with international presence and the emergent SMEs along with BFSI and healthcare sectors.

“India is a very strategic market for us and we expect to grow exponentially in the country over the next 3–5 years. Our India growth strategy is three-pronged: • Several of our top 50 global customers have strong presence in India. We will be providing them solutions and services in India as well which will be a big revenue driver for us.

• We will target Indian companies with international presence as Meridian offers global system integration and services capabilities.

• “In addition, we will target SMEs which form a large chunk of India's economy. Initially, we will focus on the BFSI and healthcare sectors as we have strong solutions practices in these sectors, globally.

Once, we gain a foothold in these two sectors in India, we will start targeting other verticals as well,” says Krishnan Subramanian, Country Head – Sales, Meridian IT India.

Growth verticals

The core four segments of Meridian IT – data centers solutions, unified communications and collaboration, cloud services and security & risk management hold remarkable potential in the Indian market.

These days India is witnessing some major projects across verticals in the data center segment.

India offers tremendous growth opportunities for each of our core focus areas: data centers solutions, unified communications and collaboration, cloud services, and security and risk management.

“The Indian data center market is buoyed by the strong resurgence of growth-related projects across verticals such as banking, insurance, telecom and the government. Many corporates are transforming their data centers to align to the new style of IT applications like mobility, cloud and big data analytics. Converged infrastructure is another big growth driver,” asserts Krishnan.

“Improving high-speed connectivity, an emerging SMB segment investing in IT infrastructure and increasing enterprise data center expenditure are drivers that are contributing to a growing cloud IaaS market,” adds Krishnan.

In the present digital era, security has become very imperative and enterprises are investing hugely to strengthen their position. Moreover, Meridian IT is also aiming at customers with its strong unified communication portfolio.

“We see strong potential in providing security and risk management solutions, which is becoming a strategic investment for enterprises due to the key imperative of transforming their security posture in the digital business era.”

Unified communications solutions is another very promising market. We have a strong solutions portfolio and a wide customer base globally in healthcare, hospitality, BFSI and SMEs. We will leverage our expertise among our MNC customers and Indian organizations,” says Krishnan.

Acquisition

Meridian IT is looking forward to acquire companies with good solutions irrespective of their size.

"Over the past 15 years, we have followed an aggressive inorganic strategy for establishing a global footprint.

We are open to acquire companies in India with solutions and services capabilities in data center, unified communications, cloud integration and security/risk management. The M&A decision would not depend upon the size of the company but upon the range of solutions expertise and talent pool it offers,” comments Krishnan.

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Krishnan Subramanian Country Head – Sales, Meridian IT India

"The Indian data center market is buoyed by the strong resurgence of growth-related projects across verticals such as banking, insurance, telecom and the government" Partner ecosystem

Talking about the partners, Krishnan says, “While we target endcustomers directly, we would like to partner with solution providers, consultants and ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) which complement our offerings to provide end-to-end solutions to customers. We have already formed partnerships with ISVs and industry consultants in the healthcare and BFSI sectors to work in India and collaborate with them in large projects.”

Roadmap

For the ease of customers, Meridian IT aims to provide a single point of contact and has support centers across globe. The company is also planning to come up with a global support center in India to leverage the huge skillsets and will invest significantly for expansion in India.

“Meridian IT has global support centers across the globe. We will establish one in India to leverage the vast pool of skills available in India.

The global support center in India will also fit well with the company's approach of providing ‘Follow the Sun’ 24/7 support to its customers.”

Further, we will make significant investments for the expansion of our India operations. Part of the funds will be invested to expand our branch locations in India and hiring sales, pre-sales and technical resources. A major chunk will go into setting up India global support center.

The idea is to offer our clients a single point-of-contact that can provide an exceptional blend of delivery, services and support, while saving time and driving business agendas forward,” concludes Krishnan. n

FACE TO FACE

‘Our Employees are the key strength behind our success’ Vinod Kumar, Managing Director – Corporate Infotech Pvt. Ltd. gives a clear picture of what CIPL’s current focus is and about its roadmap

S

ince its inception in year 2007, CIPL has been known for its innovation, customer centric approach and best practices.

These have been the key enablers for its growth engine in all these years. Today, CIPL has become a one stop destination for IT hardware solutions & services for customers across verticals. After it has signed the DGS&D rate contract for Microsoft, NetApp & Trend Micro, CIPL has established itself as a prominent player among customers and partners across India.

“We have chosen the right time to expand ourselves, as Digital India is on priority. There are lots of activities happening around Digital India; hence opportunities seems promising. Secondly, Smart City is another big ticket item as far as IT is concerned. The Govt. wants to spend more on actual implementation of these projects, rather than spending time in procurement. Hence DGS&D becomes very important medium to support this thought,” states Vinod Kumar, Managing Director – Corporate Infotech Pvt. Ltd.

Key Strengths: There is a strong ideology of fair, honest & ethical business practices behind CIPL’s success. This runs in the blood of its employees.

“While our employees are the key strength behind our success, our vendors, partners and customers are equal contributors to our growth.

We have a team of 500+ professionals, currently operating from 16 locations to support our channel partners and customers across India.

All these partners work as our extended arm,” says Vinod.

How we differentiate?

CIPL is always keen to look at new avenues to support its partners and customers. “We have been able to create a strong portfolio of products and services around IT. We have also signed rate contracts with NISCI, which is currently being leveraged by partners and customers across the country. Currently we have active rate contracts for Lenovo Desktops & Laptops with NICSI. The responses on business closure have been tremendous through these rate contracts, since this is widely acceptable tool within Govt. Departments for procurement,” explains Vinod.

CIPL’s vendor relationship is increasing, hence business opportunities for partners will also increase. “Also our portfolio on DGS&D will increase with time. We would be building a complete IT portfolio on DGS&D which will include Desktops, Laptops, Servers, Storage, Software, Security & Surveillance products, which we will offer to customer thru order channel partners across India,” says Vinod.

To establish itself well among partners & customers, CIPL has completed numerous partner and customer events across India. Few of these cities which were covered are Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Nagpur, Hyderabad, Dehradun and Jammu. “These events were conducted with the help of our vendors and distributors,” Vinod adds.

Way forward As CIPL moves on the growth path, CIPL has a very strong plan and roadmap for its vendors, partners and customers. “Our portfolio on DGS&D and NISCI will become stronger. We will spread our reach in the country. Also our portfolio of products and services will grow as we move on. We would also like to invite like-minded vendors to come along to address this business opportunity together. Because we have the passion, the tool, the infrastructure and the vision to address this huge business opportunity,” concludes Vinod on a positive note. n

Products:

Services:

IT Hardware & Software Solutions

IT Facility Management Services

Data Centre & Infrastructure Solutions

IT Hardware AMC & CMC

Network & Security Solutions

Data Centre Managed Services

IT Surveillance & VC Solutions

IT Infrastructure Consulting Services

Office Automation & Power Conditioning Solutions

Multi Vendor Technical Support

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ISODA CORNER

ISODA unveils a new initiative, ISODA InterConnect ISODA InterConnect will drive the adoption of best practices and foster collaboration among the channel community Infotech Software Dealers Association (ISODA) has launched a unique initiative ISODA InterConnect that is aimed at helping the IT channel partners grow and excel in their businesses. Through ISODA InterConnect, ISODA will share best business practices, case studies, partner success stories, technology trends and provide perspective and advice on matters related to organizational growth including taxation, HR, marketing, sales and finance.

Emphasizing the objectives of this unique initiative, L Ashok, President, ISODA, said, “We are excited to launch ISODA InterConnect. It is an initiative by the partners, for the partners and of the partners.

It will be a forum to highlight and share business performance and achievements of partners from across the country.It will serve as a platform to discuss business challenges and its solutions, and share best practices adopted by partners in different spheres of the IT business.”

L Ashok, President ISODA “We are excited to launch ISODA InterConnect. It is an initiative by the partners, for the partners and of the partners. It will be a forum to highlight and share business performance and achievements of partners from across the country. It will serve as a platform to discuss business challenges and its solutions, and share best practices adopted by partners in different spheres of the IT business.”

ISODA InterConnect will also represent the voice of channel partners from across the country on aspects like taxation, government policies, vendor policies and any such facet that positively or negatively impacts the present and the future business prospects of the IT channel.

“ISODA InterConnect is one of the key elements to achieve ISODA’s objective

to

ensure

continuous

profitable growth of the IT channel and the overall industry. It will provide greater representation and recognition to the partner community. We expect this initiative to help the vast IT channel community to participate, learn and collaborate."

Nilesh Kuvadia Vice President - ISODA

ISODA expects the new initiative to enable and encourage continuous interaction among the channel community for learning and collaboration.

“ISODA InterConnect is one of the key elements to achieve ISODA’s objective to ensure continuous profitable growth of the IT channel and the overall industry.

It will provide greater representation and recognition to the partner community. We expect this initiative to help the vast IT channel community to participate, learn and collaborate,” added Nilesh Kuvadia, Vice President - ISODA. ISODA InterConnect will be driven by the newly formed media committee of ISODA which consists of L Ashok, President; Nilesh Kuvadia, Vice President; Manasi Saha, Regional Secretary, East; Harish Tyagi, Regional Secretary, North; Rajeev Mamidanna, Regional Secretary, West and CR Ramesh, Regional Secretary, South.

InterConnecting the channel community ISODA InterConnect will cover following aspects with the aim of representing the voice of the channel, propagating the adoption of best business practices, and celebrating the successes and achievements of the partner community Best practices: Industry-leading business practices in fields of HR, finance, sales, marketing, and business development, which can be imbibed by partners to scale up their businesses.

Perspective: Channel views on new opportunities and challenges that can contribute or hamper healthy business environment and profitable growth.

Case studies: Partners will share implementation of complex solutions and services that have helped their customers gain strong RoI and competitive advantage.

Success stories: Leading partners will share their success journey and their success mantras.

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VAR MOBILITY

Infocus Bingo 50 Infocus Bingo 50 runs on Android 6.0 Marshmallow and is powered by a quad-core MediaTek MT6735 processor, clocked at 1.3GHz and clubbed with 3GB of RAM. With a 5-inch HD display, the InFocus Bingo 50 delivers a vivid viewing experience. InFocus Bingo 50 strikes the perfect balance between style and substance as it blends distinctive curved edges with metallic casing on the sides, making it ergonomically fit for single handed usage. Bingo 50 comes with luxurious Sandstone finish for a smooth texture and a lavishly comfortable grip. The rounded back is carved to perfectly fit the contour of your hand and feels extremely sleek. InFocus Bingo 50 is made for selfie lovers, who get to capture their best side with the 8 MP front camera on the device, which uses Samsung S5K3H7 camera module. This module offers back-side illumination for better low-light performance and has virtually zero shutter lag. Even the primary 8 MP camera on Bingo 50 sports Samsung S5K3H7 camera module with a f2/2 aperture, Auto Focus and LED Flash. The Primary camera is equipped to capture 1080p full HD video and supports up to 30fps. The high-speed sensor allows the capturing of motion snapshots and continuous shooting of fast-moving subjects such as pets and sports in action. InFocus Bingo 50 is also available in Black Leather grain texture which adds a dash of sophistication to your device.

Lenovo Vibe K5 Plus The Vibe K5 Plus comes with a 12.7 cm display encased in a tapered metal body, stunning Dolby Atmos experience over headphones, a powerful 2GB RAM and a Qualcomm 64-Bit Snapdragon 616 Octacore chipset to give you seamless multimedia experience, making Lenovo Vibe K5 Plus a unique handset. It runs on Android 5.1 Lollipop wrapped under Vibe UI. Lenovo has also preloaded apps like SHAREit, SNAPit, and Guvera Music among others. Vibe K5 Plus also gives you seamless performance while watching movies or gaming. The 12.7 cm full HD IPS display, which when combined with the revolutionary TheaterMax technology by Lenovo delivers mesmerizing viewing experience for users on a super-size virtual screen. TheaterMax is a deeply integrated solution that provides users with an immersive cinematic experience. You can pair a K5 Plus with AntVR glass and convert any content (Videos, Games, Live Streaming, YouTube etc.) into a large virtual screen experience. It has a 13MP rear camera which is equipped with a 5-piece lens that allows you to capture full HD videos and special moments. Taking selfies will be much simpler with the 5 MP camera that the K5 Plus is equipped with.

The Vibe K5 Plus is packed with a 2750 mAh battery to last an entire day.

It has 2GB RAM and a 16GB built-in-storage.

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COVER STORY

Cloud Rage in India... still a Long way to Go! Despite Cloud being a rage in the rest of the globe, its uptake till now has not been very satisfactory, but the scenario will tend to change with time as predicted by many new-age CIOs. The tug-of-war of which is the best among Private, Public and Hybrid however still continues, with each claiming to be a strong contender with its benefits and usage pattern

T

he entire IT ecosystem is very upbeat about Cloud and its possibilities in India. According to “India Cloud Computing Market Forecast & Opportunities, 2020”, the market for Cloud computing services in India is projected to grow at a CAGR of over 22% during 2015-20 with industry analysts putting the adoption rate of Cloud around 67%.

Gartner predicts high rates of spending on Cloud services in India to continue through 2019 when the market is expected to reach $1.9 billion.

“India is undergoing a sea change with respect to adoption of enterprise technology.

Today, the question is no longer about making the choice whether to deploy Cloud solutions.

Rather, organizations are fully convinced of Cloud technology as an asset. A more integrated and cogent approach of Hybrid cloud is making its foray into the Indian IT sphere, slowly replacing the restrictive ‘One Cloud’ concept,” says Nilesh Goradia, Head, Workspace Services and Government Business, Citrix.

Parag Amalnerkar, Director – Marketing, India & SAARC, NetApp, feels that Cloud computing is no longer a future trend, but a critical technology consideration for CIOs in corporate India. “CIOs of enterprises across the globe and in India are shifting their business applications from dedicated infrastructures to private and public cloud environments.

Customers are making concerted efforts to extract actionable information from data, while simultaneously tackling the data deluge

George Chacko Principal Systems Engineer & Lead Technical Consultant, Brocade India

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upfront. NetApp is assisting customers in their move to Software-Defined Storage and Cloud computing architectures through the Clustered Data ONTAP Storage Operating System – a single storage and data management platform enabling unrestricted, secure movement of data across public and private clouds,” states Parag.

“Cloud computing has already arrived in almost all the sectors and 2016 will see this

Rajarshi Bhattacharyya Country Head SUSE growth taking a new direction, witnessing increasing market penetration across the globe, especially in India. Some of the main factors responsible for this increasing preference for Cloud-based software are adaptability through collaboration, cost-effectiveness, better connectivity and adaptability,” says Varun Gupta, Delivery Manager, Infogain.

“We expect the market to grow to US$2.5 billion or even more by the end of 2018. The main bottleneck is the high cost of bandwidth in India. However, the government’s strategy and Digital India initiative will invoke more rapid acceleration,” states Rajarshi Bhattacharyya, Country Head, SUSE. According to Manish Godha, Chief Executive Officer, Advaiya, Cloud services market in India has generated excitement among tech leaders and led to optimistic forecasts for the future. “Cloud services are gaining momentum during the past few years with increased awareness and acceptance.

Indian companies are moving from Capex

to Opex model by shifting their on-premise infrastructure on Cloud and migrating their traditional licensing model to SaaS-based licensing to optimize costs,” he says.

VMware is committed to actively helping customers to select the right choices for their specific Cloud requirements. The company provides a multi-cloud, multi-device software platform, which helps customers deploy, run, manage, secure and connect all the applications across all clouds and devices. “In summary, VMware remains uniquely positioned to help customers manage highly complex, multicloud and multi-device environments with its software-defined approach,” says Sundar Balasubramanian, Senior Director, General Business, VMware.

In February, IBM and VMware entered into a strategic partnership to help customers move to the IBM Cloud while preserving their existing IT investments. The two companies will jointly market and sell new offerings for hybrid cloud deployments. VMware’s software-defined data center architecture will be delivered on IBM’s growing footprint of 45 Cloud Data Center worldwide to help companies scale globally and manage their data locally and securely. The partnership enables clients to easily embrace the cloud while preserving their existing investments and creating new business opportunities and will help accelerate enterprise hybrid cloud adoption.

Among all the segments of consumers, SME is the fastest-growing segment in terms

Nilesh Goradia Head, Workspace Services Government Business, Citrix

and

Sundar Balasubramanian Senior Director, General VMware

Business,

of Cloud adoption as they have little IT footprint. “They can easily avail the benefits of advance technology and become more efficient in their business without making capital investments,” view Rajarshi.

States Manish, “Even though the familiarity of SMEs with the term Cloud computing is rising, they are still in the process of developing a good understanding of the benefits of Cloud computing. Another aspect is cost and understanding the total cost of ownership concerning Capex and Opex, which is a huge barrier often deterring Indian SMEs from leveraging cloud technologies.”

SMEs realize the benefits of Cloud computing, but they still worry about other aspects of security and data privacy. Cloud services demand by SMEs is explicitly raised in the areas of email and document management, collaboration and CRM. A niche area related to project management in the Cloud is also emerging. However, there is an excitement for running trials and pilot, and the next few years will witness a much higher level of adoption. In fact, latest figures indicate that 68% of SMBs having over 100 employees have resorted to Cloud computing.

Public, Private, Hybrid – What is driving Cloud market?

Cloud has, indeed, become one of the most popular emerging technologies of all times. Scalability, expenditure and security are three key facets which influence the choice of Cloud-based services. “While Public cloud leaves room for scalability and is economical, it results in security loopholes. The Private cloud infrastructure offers exclusivity but comes with a dedicated cost factor. Thus, Indian enterprises are consciously opting for a Hybrid architecture,” says Nilesh.

According to many, hybrid is the default, easiest and wisest choice for most companies, be it a large conglomeration or an SME. “Especially, companies in the vertical dealing with sensitive data like the BFSI, Retail, Manufacturing and Healthcare are going for hybrid arrangement. There are several factors to it. Sensitivity of organizations data is the biggest concern for corporates. It will take some time before corporates adopt to cloud more wholeheartedly,” replies Vishal

Barapatre, Group CTO, In2IT Technologies.

The hybrid cloud model is more popular as it provides enterprises to be more flexible, availing the benefits of cloud without the fear of critical data security loss. Using a hybrid model is a valuable approach to architecture as you can mix and match resources between local infrastructure, which is typically a sunk cost but difficult to scale, with infrastructure that is scalable and provisioned on demand.

Agrees Varun, “In the case of SMBs, the public cloud continues to grow, driven by venture capitalists looking to get products to market quickly and easily. But in larger organizations, where IT is more complex, it is the hybrid model that prevails. The hybrid cloud allows enterprises to hold sensitive data behind their firewall while taking advantage of the lower cost and flexibility of the public cloud.

Today, the benefits of the hybrid cloud are primarily lower cost and higher speed. A properly configured hybrid cloud solution changes the conversation between IT and business as it shortens time frames and expands possibilities. Deploying hybrid clouds is the next step beyond private clouds in the evolution of Cloud computing. “However, moving to hybrid cloud is flawed with its own set of challenges such as incompatibility with legacy systems, etc,” cautions Varun.

But Rajarshi still feels that public cloud is becoming increasingly popular, followed by

Vishal Barapatre Group CTO In2IT Technologies

SMEs realize the benefits of Cloud computing, but they still worry about other aspects of security and data privacy.

Cloud services demand by SMEs is explicitly raised in the areas of email and document management, collaboration and CRM. A niche area related to project management in the Cloud is also emerging.

Parag Amalnerkar Director – Marketing, India & SAARC, NetApp Hybrid and Private. “The reason for this is immediate cost benefit and lower of capital expenditure,” he says. His views further get reiterated by Gartner which believes that “Public cloud services revenue is driven by high growth rates in the key market segments, such as Cloud Infrastructure-as-aService (IaaS), cloud management and security services and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).”

Manish points out that, while there is a boom in the adoption of public cloud services, including SaaS services, organizations are cautious of migrating all of their services on the public cloud. “The adoption of private or public cloud service is based on specific workloads, compliance requirements, and mission-critical requirements. Most of the core enterprise applications are still on the private cloud or data centers, and only peripheral applications or shared services, which are not very critical, are migrated to hybrid or public cloud,” he says.

A multi-cloud strategy...

With the value of cloud firmly established in India, organizations are building varied strategies to meet their objectives. As customer bases and device types grow, a multi-cloud approach can offer not only the hardware and software but also the infrastructure necessary to optimize fault tolerance. “It is significant that organizations around the world are looking at a multi-cloud strategy.

Large enterprises in India have already started opting for multi-cloud strategy. During the past one year, there has been substantial growth in multi-cloud approach in India.

This also makes sense, since services offered by different providers serve diverse needs,” says Varun. “Some of the organizations have even opted for ‘Test and See’ scenario. On the other hand, SMEs segment still seems to be evaluating it due to cost and manageability issue.”

Most importantly, a multi-cloud strategy can enhance application fault tolerance and availability by offering geographically diverse hosting centers. And it gives enterprises the flexibility to leverage the unique strengths of individual cloud providers, including potential cost savings. “The base line of having a multi-cloud strategy is to avoid redundancy

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COVER STORY

Manish Godha Chief Executive Officer Advaiya and freedom from vendor lock-in. While the Indian industry today is using a lot of SAS and IAAS, CIOs are increasingly getting riskaverse and the adoption of multi-cloud is the way forward to mitigate risk and become more efficient,” opines Rajarshi.

“People are also seeing multi-cloud as an option to optimize their finances. There is a higher cost with private when you initially establish it, but sometimes the economics are better than with the public clouds. Multicloud adoption is essential for companies to achieve a successful cloud strategy. A multicloud strategy can help vendor competition that will give enterprises a greater choice of features and cost options. Multi-cloud adoption is still at the front end of what our customers are thinking about. Customers that have already made the jump to the public cloud, multi-cloud solutions are prevalent,” explains George Chacko, Principal Systems Engineer & Lead Technical Consultant, Brocade India.

“It is not uncommon for Indian business customers to use multiple cloud vendors for their diverse needs – SaaS, IaaS, and Platformas-a-Service (PaaS) applications. They also test and see the results as well as compute the total cost of operations to optimize their budget, and take advantage of cloud vendor competition,” agrees Manish.

“As time progresses, multi-cloud strategy will move forward,” says Vishal. “In India as well, most companies are gradually moving towards multi-cloud strategy because in a multi-cloud strategy organization hosts its clouds on multiple vendors’ platforms which can enhance application fault tolerance and availability by offering geographically diverse hosting centers.” He cites the examples of how big brands like Microsoft with its services on Office 365 and Azure or Google with its mail services are helping SMEs to get certain services at pay-per-use module providing facilities or hosting applications on the cloud.

Then, there are specialized companies like Ramco that provides ERP on cloud helping cloud gain wider popularity.

However...

India is still far from becoming a data center hub due to lack of infrastructure. Yet

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many companies have discussed their plans to set up a data center in the country. “There are several positive factors that are responsible for painting such an optimistic picture,” points out Vishal. “Firstly, compared to the world economic scenario in India, the economy is healthy for quite some time with a GDP growth rate of 7.5 per cent. Secondly, with our PM’s initiatives like Make in India, Startup India, SMEs will look for Cloud as a tool for growth. Thirdly, the Indian market is a real big opportunity for large foreign MNCs to let go,” says a confident Vishal.

Moreover, to address certain sectors like the BFSI, government, these data center companies have to have a base in India.

Reason being, most of these verticals deal with sensitive data would not be allowed to be stored outside the country. While the counter argument regarding lack of infrastructure will float time and again, but the opportunity in India is too big to ignore infrastructure issues which these large MNCs can manage to create in-house.

The market opportunity for data center in India continues to mature with the growing prevalence of 3G, broadband connectivity The market opportunity for data center in India continues to mature with the growing prevalence of 3G, broadband connectivity and emergence of disruptive technologies like cloud and virtualization. Also, for reducing cost and risk, data center facilities will be designed and constructed from integrated and prefabricated modules. and emergence of disruptive technologies like cloud and virtualization. Also, for reducing cost and risk, data center facilities will be designed and constructed from integrated and prefabricated modules.

However, barriers to adoption of cloud are similar to what are faced by the industry globally– data security, privacy, and compliance. Some challenges which are unique to India are more related to infrastructure which includes internet infrastructure impacting download/upload

Arun Shetty Managing Director, Avaya India and SAARC

Varun Gupta Delivery Manager, Infogain speeds and network latency, an inconsistent power supply that is limiting data center operations and cloud growth, to name a few.

“One seemingly unnoticeable cultural factor hindering public cloud adoption is observed mostly in SMBs -- they are not willing to expose their systems to the internet. Once SMBs get the assurance that they can manage these risks with some economic solution, the rate of adoption would increase,” assures Manish.

In the last few years, the security concerns over cloud deployment have contributed to slower growth not only in India, but across the Asia-Pacific and Middle East and African regions. This trend is however changing 2016 onwards. “Businesses are increasingly open to considering cloud in all its forms as a viable option for digital transformation. We believe that India needs to address challenges related to data privacy, security, intellectual property rights and cyber-crime to make the market conducive for adopting cloud based services.

Basic infrastructure in terms of stable and continuous power and bandwidth is necessary for adoption of cloud based services,” cites Arun Shetty, Managing Director, Avaya India and SAARC. In the last few years, the security concerns over cloud deployment have contributed to slower growth not only in India, but across the Asia-Pacific and Middle East and African regions. This trend is however changing 2016 onwards. “We believe that India needs to address challenges related to data privacy, security, intellectual property rights and cyber-crime to make the market conducive for adopting cloud based services.

Basic infrastructure in terms of stable and continuous power and bandwidth is necessary for adoption of cloud based services,” cites Arun Shetty, Managing Director, Avaya India and SAARC. As cited by Vishal, in the current scenario, use of cloud is confined to limited applications like mail, document, etc which are provided by either Microsoft or Amazon and the like who push their products. However, the actual benefit of cloud will only be successful when more applications will be able to be hosted on the cloud. n

PRODUCT OF THE MONTH

Asus Zenbook UX303 Zenbook UX303 takes the form factor to another level of complexity with fresh and gorgeous new colors including Smoky Brown, Icicle Gold and Rose Gold. The elegant color themes are further enhanced by the iconic spun-metal finish that echoes the spirit of Zen. The classic lines of the ultralight, all-aluminum ZenBook have been enhanced with a slimmer profile, tapering to just 3mm at the front. It is chic, elegant, timeless, and powerful, thin and light. Zenbook UX303UB features the latest 6th Gen Intel Core i5 processor, making it even more powerful, combined with Windows 10. The display looks just as good as you would expect from such a beautiful laptop.

The ultra-sharp screen has an amazing QHD+ resolution of up to 3200 x 1800 and a brightness of 300cd/m2, making it always easy and comfortable to view. With an incredible pixel density of 275 pixels per inch, images and text are always pin-sharp and ultra-detailed. It comes with 1TB hybrid hard disk and up to 512GB SATA 6Gbit/s solid-state disk (SSD). ZenBook UX303's three USB 3.0 ports transfers up to 10 times (10X) faster than older USB 2.0 connections, and also deliver more power for faster charging.

ZenBook UX303 goes further still, with ASUS USB Charger+ technology built into one port to charge connected devices up to 50% faster – even when ZenBook is asleep or switched off.

WD 2TB My Passport X My Passport X is a sleek, compact enclosure for a 2TB drive.

My Passport X from WD expands your Xbox One or PC gaming experience. The black plastic case is clearly designed as homage to the latest Xbox console, with diagonal black lines matching the top of the Microsoft box, although WD's version is still fairly smooth to touch. The User can connect this portable and powerful drive to immediately add storage capacity to your system. Built around a high-quality WD drive, My Passport X is performance-tweaked to meet the desires of serious gamers. The power of USB 3.0 lets you access and save files in a blazing-fast speed. Plus, no separate power supply is necessary as My Passport X takes just minutes to set up.

Plug it in, follow the easy on-screen instructions and you are locked and loaded to take on armed marauders, aliens and opponents of all types. The actual setup of the My Passport X drive is as simple as you could want it. Plug the drive into one of the Xbox One's USB ports on the back and follow the on-screen prompts. It's worth noting that the drive isn't pre-formatted for the Xbox One, so if you just like the looks of it as a portable storage drive, you can plug it into your PC and copy files. Once you plug it into the Xbox One the first time, you will have the chance to reformat the drive to store Xbox One games. After you have formatted, it will however be available only for Xbox One games.

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MARKET WATCH

End-to-End Solutions in Redefining mode The trend towards end-to-end solutions is jostling relationships between vendors and partners. Providing a complete set of quality solutions has risen up in a big way which has led to partnerships or alliances in distributor communities. Sometimes, one partnership breaks and another form which sends a ripple through the industry.

D

ue to high competency in the industry, end to end solutions have been offering more value than standalone solutions and have inspired more confidence in end users and partners. Once the solution is offered and implemented at the customer site, potential problems that may arise can be easily taken care of by Solution providers.

Interestingly, those SIs who can meet the needs of evolving businesses of the future and redefine end-to-end solutions will be able to create more value for their business. SIs for instance can add various services to their solutions while offering them to their customers or similarly come up with many other creative ways to meet the customers’ needs.

Sometimes it is being heard in the market that customer preferences donot seem to be the only motivational factor for SIs or vendors to create their end-toend solutions. Partners and vendors mostly try to reinvent their solutions on the basis of what they think is in the favour of the market.

Alliances and Partnerships....

The partnering of vendors and SIs has reached fever pitch. In fact, some argue that to survive in today's market, manufacturers have got to relax their focus on open architectures and form partnerships that will let them make and promote end-to-end solutions.

Nevertheless, the concept of partnering has brought the industry together and formation of alliances is promoting end-

Ramesh Subramanian Chief Technology Officer Infogain

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to-end solutions with advanced technology updates.

More and more products have entered into the market these days and faster product release cycles are forcing System Integrators to re-evaluate their business alliances. Moreover, Technology trends have changed vigorously and new business models are being introduced with every start-up coming into picture, thus forcing a change of approach. Traditional players

Samarjeet Singh CEO and Founder Iksula

are finding it difficult to cope up with the dynamic environment because of their monolithic sizes; hence proliferation of small players with niche competencies can be witnessed, which in turn is forcing SIs to review their business alignments. Dynamic Industry environment has thus resulted in formation of big alliances. It seems, the industry is going through a paradigm shift and with more and more organizations coming out with full stack solutions has led to change in demands of SIs. Elaborating further on this,Samarjeet Singh, CEO and founder, Iksula said, “We ourselves operate as a solution provider by partnering with system integrators.

When our clients come to us, they want a holistic & integration solution for their eCommerce business. And, one of the ways we achieve that is by ensuring tight system integrations. For example, we use Magento and Drupal platforms to build highly-customized, scalable & responsive eCommerce websites. Having said so, we realise that there are gaps with existing

systems and we overcome them by building our in-house alternatives.”

“System integrators do not produce any original code; instead they help a company to use off-the-shelf hardware and software packages to meet the company's computing needs. Nowadays SI alliances are taking form of membership in a suppliers’ system integrator program. But one of the main concerns for system integrators is competitions from their supposed partners,” mentions Ramesh Subramanian, Chief Technology Officer, Infogain.

In general, the market trend is inclined towards delivering end-to-end solutions. The increasing number of solutions available is forcing distributors to invest significantly in maintaining inventories, which leads to an increased risk of exposure. Partner alliances are growing and distributors are specializing in specific products. There are bigger players also who cover a range of products. Based on the current scenario, we could definitely see distributors shifting towards end to end solutions, sometime down the line. The shift might take time though as observed by Wasim Jafar, Vice President (Service Delivery) - Xavient Information Systems.

As with any competitive scenario there are certain challenges for smaller contractors compared to the big ones. At the same time, smaller contractorsare able to create their own customer segments / verticals and focus on them. For example, certain SIs do not participate in the Government contracts while some develop domain

Syed Wasim Jafar Vice President (Service Delivery), Xavient Information Systems

Ganesan Arumugam Director – Partner & Commercial Sales, India, Symantec expertise in individual sectors like BFSI or Healthcare. Smaller SIs will always have a competitive advantage over bigger ones in terms of creating a more loyal customer base by building long term engagement, fostering a more informal relationship, improved efficiency, personalized services etc.

Expansion in Solutions: Challenges and benefits Grabbing a set of solution from different partners can pose a wide range of challenges and benefits. If we talk about the benefits, it includes easy adoption requiring only a little effort to develop a complete solution, cost effectiveness, flexibility in identifying solutions that will meet the customer requirement in the best possible manner and a broader partner eco-base which tend to increase options.

On the other hand, it can create a challenge of managing a multi-vendor environment, continuously aligning and realigning after sales support based on changing business dynamics, building the required in-house talent pool, to cater to demands of the evolving market.This is particularly true for new technology areas/ products and rising expectations of the customers in terms of TTM, Responsiveness, Specialized customer service, and overall quality of service.

Inevitably, an expansion in the solutions that SIs sell will impact the effort they need to undertake for presales and post-sales support/ service. Sometimes one can get efficiencies out of common shared service centers, but that is rare.

Says Ramesh, “One is to find the right technologies as the feedback on technology is scattered only to find that feedback is spread across emails, social media, and so on from people of varied reputability. With all the new technologies, suitable training programs for the team are required to empower and enable the sales teams- this is frequently a challenge when taking solutions from different partner companies.”

Adding further to it, he said, “Once solutions are chosen from different partners,the biggest challenge probably is the inter-operability under real life

conditions, and our responsibility as SI to ensure seamless and smooth operations.

This is always an area of high risk, and demands strong product knowledge as well as technical expertise in a variety of technologies, and we always watch out for problems even long after the solutions are well in place.”

“It does not affect the client if there are multitude of systems that are tightly integrated and aligned to meet the client's needs. Then, after-sales support becomes more value-focused rather than the usual troubleshooting. However, due diligence and extensive research should be conducted to properly evaluate the available solutions right at the onset of the project,” mentions Samarjeet.

Redefining end-to-end solutions….

Syed Wasim Jafar, Vice President (Service Delivery) - Xavient Information Systems cites that the primary focus is on integrating open source products for end to end solutions. “The technology options for each layer of solution stack have increased so more choices are available. The emphasis is on developing solutions that are scalable, high performing and cost effective.”

Companies like Fortune Grecells offer end-to-end continuous business operations ability with BLACKBOX Data Safe server, backup and disaster recovery, collaborate with vendor for business continuity at datacentre, offer cloud implementation, IT maintenance service and security through

System Integrators always work with various vendors to provide suitable solutions to their customers, sustaining a good relationship and building skills around leading technology vendors on each solution area. It is definitely good for businesses that are looking to grow as market leaders as capabilities of SIs help in delivering right solutions to the customers.It is beneficial to the system integrators as they retain the customers offering them products and services they do not own the competency for. Needless to say, system integrators who partner make greater profits and also improve industry health

Kshitij Kotak Ceo Fortune Grecells Pvt. Ltd. partners. Kshitij Kotak of Fortune Grecells says, “We conduct system analysis inhouse but collaborate with ERP and CRM companies to deliver end-to-end solutions.

Similarly, our partners utilize our expertise in data security and protection, servers, backup, firewall, server mirroring to offer end-to-end services to their customers.”

Symatec has launched it’s Secure One program for its partners which enable its partners, irrespective of its size, to leverage its products and services to grow their businesses. At its core, the enhanced program provides Symatec’s partners with a clear path to take advantage of the innovation and growth we expect to drive as the world’s largest cyber security company.

Also, the company has pioneered the delivery of multiple protection technologies on a single endpoint agent years ago and, today, that approach makes the company the leader in true next generation endpoint protection. Symantec’s enterprise security business saw massive strengthening in 2015 with the announcement of Unified Security Strategy and its progress in several product segments. “Aligned with its four pillars - threat protection, information protection, cyber security services and big data security analytics, we are addressing the need to protect the businesses from threat and security breaches, secure the information, continuously gather and apply intelligence to gain advantage; and providing comprehensive incident response and forensic support. Symantec is the only company with the proven expertise to engage across all four fronts and with our scale and assets, we aim to change the game for cyber security,” says Ganesan Arumugam, Director – Partner & Commercial Sales, India, Symantec.

System Integrators always work with various vendors to provide suitable solutions to their customers, sustaining a good relationship and building skills around leading technology vendors on each solution area. It is definitely good for businesses that are looking to grow as market leaders as capabilities of SIs help in delivering right as well as redefined end-to end solutions to the customers. n

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India is among top 10 countries facing web-application attacks Sudeep Charles, Product Marketing Manager – Asia-Pacific & Japan, Akamai Technologies in a chat with VARINDIA, has discussed about the evolving security landscape in India, the new threats in the cyber world and also talked on government initiatives to spread awareness The cybersecurity landscape has witnessed evolving attacks at different stages and with time these attacks have become much more sophisticated and remained undetected while causing tremendous damage to organizations.

Even government organizations are not free from this malaise. But these attacks have fuelled the awareness among organizations.

“From India’s perspective, attacks have evolved from defacement and moved on to be more web-application related threats. Bots are also playing a key role in these cyber-attacks.

Unlike DDoS attacks, remotely controlled bots, by their very nature, go undetected. The results of our recently released State of the Internet Security Report for Q4, 2016 clearly show that India is one of the top ten target countries for web-application attacks.

Organizations from all sectors are victims of these attacks. More recently, there have been a spate of attacks on government websites and this is public knowledge already.

Attacks backed by nation- states and hactivist collectives have only increased in frequency and sophistication. In the last 18 months, with the rise in cyber-attacks, there has been an increase in awareness. Cybersecurity has become a pain point for many organizations and they are slowly opening up to understanding the landscape and taking necessary steps to protect their business,” says Sudeep Charles, Product Marketing Manager – Asia-Pacific & Japan, Akamai Technologies.

But it is also a fact that new security offerings are present in the market for sectors like government/ public sector, banking and financial service sector. Apart from these, security measures are not abundantly present for other industries.

“In India, there is still a gap between being aware and strategizing about what needs to be done. New initiatives are in the offing in the public/government sectors and also among banking and financial service industries. But outside of this, there is little happening in terms

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Our Bot Manager offering has over 1,200 bot signatures that are constantly updated.

Organizations can use tools such as Bot Manager to mitigate challenges that bots pose while ensuring that the benefits that good bots provide are not lost. Customers have a range of options like blocking, slowing, redirecting bots to alternate pages giving them the flexibility to customize their responses in real time,” explains Sudeep.

Government initiatives to address cyber-attacks

Sudeep Charles Product Marketing Manager – Asia-Pacific & Japan, Akamai Technologies of the security measures available for other industries. On the other hand, the Internet boom has resulted in e-commerce players taking a serious note of this issue, focussing on being proactive rather than reactive,” adds Sudeep.

New threat – Bots Everyday, a new threat is emerging in the cyber world. The latest threat to have hit the cyber world is Bots. It can be of various kinds and needs different kinds of responses to prevent it. The new offering from Akamai Technologies – Bot Manager – is able to address these challenges.

“Organizations that have moved on to cloud-based solutions like the ones we offer have the advantage of utilizing skills and expertise to proactively mitigate threats. One such threat is from Bots. However, we need to understand that there are different kinds of bots that will need different kinds of responses where security is concerned.

To deal with the cyber-threats or attacks, the government has initiated a few nodal agencies which operate in the non-FSI space.

Though this government is trying to create awareness among people, proper guidelines should also be introduced for the guidance of companies.

“There are a few nodal agencies that the government has set up for the companies operating in the non-FSI space to approach in the event of cyberattacks. This is an excellent step forward by the government in showing awareness and initiative to protect critical infrastructure. However, it also needs to define the next steps as well in order to guide companies smoothly. Enterprises need to be made aware as to how government agencies can help and what it is they can do that enterprises themselves won’t be able to.

However, the major drawback is the lack of awareness with regard to the programmes undertaken by these government agencies. In order to make things easier, our suggestion to the government would be to define an interface between the public and the private sectors, making it easier to work with nodal agencies. These steps will help businesses to tackle security issues to a great extent,” comments Sudeep. n aparna@varindia.com

INDUSTRY EVENT

GATES concludes ICT summit 2016 G

ATES has concluded the ICT Reseller Channel Summit 2016 with over 250 top notch executives from the ICT industry. The 3-day event brought together leading resellers from over 50 cities that gave the technology vendors from around the world an opportunity to pre-schedule oneon-one meetings with senior executives and buyers.

The Summit was supported by Platinum Partner, TOSHIBA; Gold Partners AMD & Canon and Silver Partners Philips & QNAP. The event’s Research & Media Partners included GfK-India, NAVO Informatica, SPIRE Research & Consulting and VARINDIA has supported as a media Partner.

Over 170 companies were represented at GATES 2016. The delegate list included 178 reseller executives, 65 vendor executives along with influential speakers, industry experts and media partners. The number of vendors and channel partners participating at GATES was encouraging as this was the first time for such a closed-door Summit to be held in India.

Ashish Kapahi, CEO, GATES, said, “The event concluded with over 800 prescheduled one-to-one meetings between vendors and resellers channel partners. Many new agreements were facilitated as a result of meetings at GATES 2016. By bringing all of the key channel stakeholders together in one place at one time, GATES provides the most efficient channel development platform for all vendors – whether they are new to the region or a leading player with established channels.

As a neutral platform, GATES provides an opportunity to discuss key issues impacting the industry.”

(Left to right) : Neeraj Hedau, E Commerce Director - rediff.com; Polad Pi Garada, Senior Manager-Marketing, Toshiba Storage Devices; Subhash Chandra, CEO, Sangeet Mobiles; Champak Gurjar, CEO, Creative Distributors; Ketan Mahta, Asso. Vice President, infibeam.com; Gurjendra Singh Verdi, Founder and publisher, apnismartcitylife.com The highlight of the Summit was the SMART PITCH, which gave both new to market and existing vendors an opportunity to deliver an elevator pitch for their latest product on a common stage.

The extensive conference programme, including workshop sessions and Panel Discussions were welcomed by the channel partners. The participants hailed the workshops to be extremely useful by far. An elite panel was drawn from among the participants who discussed the challenges of omni-channel and approached of adapting the new normal. As a part of its support to Startup India initiative, GATES included a new category of vendor in its ICT industry excellence awards 2016 called the “Hardware Start-up Vendor of the Year”. GATES has also announced that in the second edition, Start-up India will take a special zone and will aim to bring some of the illustrious hardware start-ups from different parts of the country.

Category Awards 1.

HP was voted as the computing vendor of the year

2.

Apple was voted as the tablets & smartphone vendor of the year

3.

Logitech was voted as the pc & mobile accessories vendor of the year

4.

Canon was voted as the imaging vendor of the year

5.

Seagate was voted as the storage vendor of the year

6.

HP was voted as the printing vendor of the year

7.

Samsung was voted as the display vendor of the year

8.

D-link was voted as the home networking vendor of the year

9.

Microsoft was voted as the software vendor of the year

10. Philips was voted as the acoustics vendor of the year special awards 11. Apple was voted as the most innovative vendor of the year 12. Fin robotics was voted as the hardware startup vendor of the year for its product wearable ring.

13. Canon was voted as the marketing excellence vendor of the year

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LeEco stepping towards Breakthrough Performances T

oday, to stay ahead companies are constantly innovating their offerings to stay relevant to the consumer. Technology is seen to be evolving every day and companies like LeEco aim to disrupt the market with innovative technology and aspire to stay that way. The market is replete with many smartphone and technology companies and LeEco has been embracing challenges and opportunities.

In an exclusive interview, Atul Jain, COO – Smart Electronics Business, LeEco India shared company’s disruptive business model and a user-centric ecosystem created for LeEco users to give breakthrough performances in the industry.

LeEco and India…..

LeEco is a global internet and technology conglomerate and is known globally for its comprehensive ecosystem offerings, ranging across screens- smartphones, TV and electric cars. In smartphones segments, LeEco introduced a series of breakthrough price performance smartphones including Le 1, Le 1 Pro, and Le 1s Super phones to wide acclaim and record setting sales.

LeEco entered the Indian market in January 2016 and in the past few months it has successfully wooed the Indian consumers with the launch of their Superphones – Le 1s and Le Max. “Our strategy is not just aimed at driving sales, but is focused on providing our customers a superior experience with best in class technology, disruptive pricing and our unique vertically integrated content ecosystem. We are deeply humbled by the response we have received from our Indian consumers which has helped us achieve this leading industry position in such a short span of time,” stated Atul Jain.

LeEco’sdisruptive business model…

The content ecosystem is a LeEco exclusive and is going to be a game changer in India for the company, going by the definitive edge that it has given the brand in other global markets.

“Our Superphones are not just best-inclass smartphones but offers consumers a truly redefining comprehensive eco-system experience. Buyers of the Le Superphone can

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organized one of the largest shopping carnivals on Flipkart- the LeEco Day, which too was very successful. In just a short span of time, our flagship killer Le 1s has become #1 smartphone online,” elaborated Atul.

Atul Jain COO – Smart Electronics Business, LeEco India expect a content ecosystem to be uploaded into its android-based EUI system in the 2nd quarter of this year since the company has already signed contracts with Eros and Yupp TV for content streaming,” said Atul.

On the same, Atul elaborated, “We want to create exclusivity with our offerings given the fact that there is no other brand here which offers an integrated vertical content ecosystem, which clearly sets us apart from competitors in the industry. Such an ecosystem will provide a large platform, giving consumers an edge over others.”

Flash sales…

The success of LeEco Superphones is evident through the over-whelming response the brand has received both during its flash sale, the LeEco Day on the 25th of February (which was touted as the largest shopping bonanza on any e-commerce platform) as well as Flipkart’s Big Shopping Days festival. The success of LeEco’s Superphones is testimony to their customer centric approach which has helped them achieve an industry milestone of selling 2 lakh smartphones (Le 1s) in just less than 30 days. Moreover, in just a month’s time, LeEco’s Le 1s has become India’s #1 selling smartphone online.

“Our success in India is evident from the industry milestones we have achieved - sold 2, 00,000 devices in India in just 30 days which is a phenomenal number that is achieved by any brand. Also, in the past month, we have

Big and Bold Innovations…..

There has been a steady rise in the demand for smartphones in India. Consumers today are spoilt for choice and what attracts them are the differentiators. If we look at where the market is going, there is definitely a good demand for something between a phone and tablet.

Large screen phones have created a separate target customer base for themselves and will continue to grow in popularity with more and more content becoming available online.

LeEco is well poised to use this trend as an opportunity with its content centric ecosystem which will be integrated across its devices.

Road Map… Considering how important after-sales service is, for Indian customers, LeEco India has given its complete attention to its aftersales service setting up 555 service centres across more than 300 cities and towns in the country. Moreover, company has ensured to offer the best after-sales experience for their customers by providing a 24-hour hotline that is accessible through the internet and telephone. LeEco will be soon activating its own e-commerce platform LeMall.com in India. Apart from this, company wish to reach out to certain sections of Indian consumers who like to feel and experience a product prior to buying, but as of now these remain a part of long term plans for India.

“Going forward, we look at being among the top three players in the Smartphone industry in India. We aim to be among the top-three smartphone brands in the next one year and number 1 in terms of online business within six months. Our target will be driven by our unique ecosystem proposition that has a four pronged approach: devices, content, cloud and platform. We believe the integration of these four will enable us to deliver towards the entertainment needs of all our customers in India, making us a distinctive brand in the country,” he said. n

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60 pages including cover