The second Session, which was the VAR Symposium started with a welcome speech given by Dr Deepak Kr. Sahu, Editor-in-Chief, VARINDIA in which he highlighted the contribution of IT to economic growth and development and the role of trade in the mutual reinforcement of global and national IT policies. “I think most organisations acknowledge the fact that IT can play an important role to deliver value and competitive edge to the organisation. Many organisations consider such slowdown situation as best opportunity to sharpen their strategy using IT. However, the focus is more on direct tangible outcome projects rather than intangible,” he said.

The first speaker of the afternoon session was Igor Borovikov, Chairman of Board of Directors – Softline Inc., who had come all the way from Russia. He addressed the audience on how his company helps customers achieve digital transformation and protect their business with cybersecurity technologies.

Rajan S Mathews, Director General – COAI spoke on the present state of the telecom sector and the opportunities B2B partners can explore in it.

In the corporate presentations, four vendors addressed the audience and elucidated their strategy on how to accelerate partner transformation. Ajay Sehgal, Executive Vice President – Enterprise Business (Channels & SOHO Business) – Vodafone Idea Ltd.; Krunal Patel, Head of India & South Asia – TeamViewer; Neerav Kumar, Director, Strategy Initiative – CommScope; Uday Bhanu Das, Co-Founder & Chief Executive – Beyond Security Technologies spoke on how their respective companies have been successful in transforming their customers’ lives with the help of technology. Rajesh Sankhe, Product Manager – LG Electronics spoke on the advantages customers can enjoy by moving to the Cloud.

The panel discussion that followed soon after was moderated by Dr Deepak Kr. Sahu, Editor-in-Chief, VARINDIA and the panelists who joined the discourse were Sailajananda Nayak, CMO – Ingram Micro; Vikas Bhonsle, CEO – Crayon Software Experts India; Suresh Ramani, President – IAMCP India; Alok Gupta, President – PCAIT and Champak Raj Gurjar, Founder President – FAIITA.

The biggest attraction of the Symposium was honouring the Champions, where 100 Eminent VARs of India were awarded in different categories of Best Solution & Service Partner, Best Sub Distributor, Best VAD, Best Retailer, Best Cloud Solution Partner, Best Digital Transformation Partner, Best Solution Partner, Best Distributor, Best Collaboration Partner, Best Infrastructure Partner, Best Information Security Partner, Best IT Service Partner, Best Networking Partner, Best Security Solution Partner and Best System Integrator.

They are the 100 top performing partners in the country who collectively manage about Rs. 30,000 crore turnovers annually.

Igor Borovikov, Chairman of Board of Directors – Softline Inc.
"I started my business 25 years ago in Russia from a scratch and now we are a $2 billion company with 5000 employees across the globe and are present in more than 50 countries. We are an IT solution and service provider and we are the global partner of Microsoft and many other vendors. When I started, the IT market was emerging but now the digital transformation market give all of us a lot of possibilities or opportunities. The market is now very huge. In India we have a very good market which is around $200 million. We are interested in partnering with Indian solution partners because all of our business is around partners."

“COAI represents the mobile as well as our associate members like Qualcomm, Cisco, Huawei etc. We are happy to consider any company who are interested in becoming a part of our association. We have realised that no single person can give end to end connectivity products and services that customers are looking for. Our industry has been through the cyclical ups and downs; we expect and hope that the government will take cognizance of the dire state of the telecom industry at present. There are avenues that are put in place by the government to look at the appropriate relief to the industry. The telecom industry has witnessed sweeping transformations, especially in the last 5 years. As India gears up for 5G, broadband for all, IoT, and a host of new telecom business and technology models, there are also some key competencies that telecom professionals should possess.”

“There is a big convergence happening between IT and Telecom. Customer demand has changed today and with it their expectations also. They want a convergence of IT as well as telecom products. If you are an IT partner, the kind of portfolio that we have built over a period of time as a telco, it is very relevant and there are a lot of opportunities for you to serve your customers. Telcos are becoming very important from a Digital India perspective and the $5 trillion country that PM Modi is driving. The overall data consumption has grown in India to 10 GB per month per user. Though technology adoption is much lower in India than in China, but the way new businesses are coming up with new business models, there is a huge opportunity for partners to explore the cloud space. IoT is also going to see new opportunities.”

“With new technologies and new software coming in, customers have become an important aspect for any company today. Along with it customer support is becoming increasingly important and that is where TeamViewer is coming into the picture. TeamViewer helps customers achieve efficiency, profitability, cost of support and improve MTTR (Mean time to Response), which is also very important in a cloud economy. We came to India with a completely new subject as a product and now we look for partners to take our idea forward. Our biggest advantage is that we do not ask customers to change anything, whether it is the software, or operating system. With the help of our product, you can support any device, server or laptop from anywhere. There is no hardware investment either for the partners or customers. From a security perspective, you can ensure that the right person has the access and control. We have 2 distributors – Technobind and Ingram Micro.”

“Today the focus is on cloud computing. Cloud is the use of internet to provide services, applications, data to us. Every organization, either small or big are trying to adopt cloud in their organization. Earlier it used to be server based computing but now we call it the cloud based computing because of the use of computing. Cheap internet has become widespread and this is what is making cloud more prevalent in today’s time and age. So the advantages of cloud are many – it is fit for businesses with growing or fluctuating bandwidth demands. It also helps in increased collaboration and automatic software updates. The most important benefit is that you are not confined to work from one single place but you can work remotely from anywhere from your own devices. Security is another important benefit of cloud. With the help of thin client, zero client and the cloud, the life expectancy of a device increases.”

“Beyond Security is a company which is working in the cyber space. We are there in this domain since last 20 years. We do research on cyber space, identify today’s and tomorrow’s vulnerabilities and try to resolve it through our research. We have three products - beSecure, beStorm and beSource. If you look into the cyber security markets, it is a $6 trillion industry. If we use Dotnet, Java or Python as a technology in developing any application, an OEM who is using these languages to develop an application or a hardware vendor, every time they integrate these things together there are some gaps. People who want to target any hardware or software to plant a Malware, to initiate a DDOS attack etc. they always try to exploit these vulnerabilities, penetrate into the networks, applications etc. Somewhere we are missing the link.”

“We at Commscope are joining the forces in terms of refining or redefining the networks for the future and we are shaping up the networks of tomorrow. We live in a world which is highly connected and day by day we are observing a lot of requirement of connectivity. There are challenges in putting the new technologies in place to handle the rapidly evolving communication networks. These networks are different; it actually puts into different kinds of network requirement to deal with this high bandwidth connectivity requirement which we have to deal with. At Commscope, the team drives the innovation that makes the communication networks for tomorrow always up and running.”

Topic: PARTNER TRANSFORMATION

Today a lot of businesses are going digital. Small and localised partners have evolved to transform their business to tread the digital path. The panel discussion themed around ‘Partner Transformation’ tried to pass on the message that it depends on the partner on how he wants to grow in this digital world.

Champak Raj Gurjar, Founder President – FAIITA observed that everything has changed; online came to India for convenience but it also effected the way products were sold earlier. “We cannot touch and feel a product when buying online. If anything new comes, impact will be there and slowly it will settle down.”

Alok Gupta, President – PCAIT said that partners were used to traditional selling. But now they are into knowledge selling. “Now they go the customers and try to understand what the main pain area of the customer is. Knowledge selling is the major transformation which I have seen taking place among other changes. Online is a means of convenience. But whether products selling online are genuine or not, a procedure should be maintained by the government to prevent fraud.”

Vikas Bhonsle, CEO – Crayon Software Experts India also agreed that transformation is essential, when the dictionary defines it as change in shape, form, feature or expression but not diminishing from value. “My view honestly is that, it’s very personal to every single partner or organization, because it’s a particular skill set that you would want to grow or enhance and create as a value proposition. A partner needs to be open enough to accept a lot of help and support available in the market today that will help him to build his skillset.”

Suresh Ramani, President – IAMCP India said, “From the association perspective since our association is a Microsoft partner association, Microsoft has transformed totally in the last 6-7 years. About 8 years back a typical Microsoft partner used to sell licences, but in the last few years Microsoft has seen transforming primarily in to a cloud company and within that it is focusing on four solution areas - modern workplace, infrastructure where we are talking about Azure as the platform, business application, and big data & artificial intelligence.”

Sailajananda Nayak, CMO – Ingram Micro said, “Partner transformation is a topic very close to my heart. Partners have to transform themselves to be able to keep pace with the changing technology requirements. There are two key aspects of partner transformation, one is business transformation. If you sell a particular product you have to constantly look at ways of cross selling, how you can enhance your business by maintaining the same operation over-head. The other is transforming your business processes.”