With the rupee devaluation, the dark economic cloud is hastily losing the sheen of its silver lining. Though some sectors have been doing well, some have suffered. However, the roles of VARs and VADs have been proverbial. They play the role of a catalyst for nurturing the business. Today, technologies like Cloud and Big Data are revolutionizing the IT process by making it possible to run IT-as-a-Service to drive maximum efficiency.
 |
| Praveen Sahai, Vice-President - Channels EMC India & SAARC |
 |
| Priyadarshi Mohapatra, Vice-President – Ecosystem, Channels & General Business, SAP Indian Subcontinent |
 |
| Navin Sadhwani, Head - Channel & Commercial Business, RSA |
 |
| Rahul Agarwal, Executive Director, Commercial Business Segment, Lenovo India |
 |
| Ajay Kaul, Director & GM, Global Commercial Channel, Dell India |
 |
| K. P. Unnikrishnan, APAC Marketing Director, Brocade Communications |
 |
| Ashish Dhawan, Managing Director, Asia, Juniper Networks Enterprise |
Company’s priorities for growth
The vendors are looking at different dimensions to propel their businesses. This year, the gear is pushed harder at the face of the interim crisis. However, they are progressing aggressively in niche markets and are successfully tapping the consumer base.
“We are excited about Big Data and the Cloud, both of which will be the focus areas, and also a continuation of EMC’s core business decisions. We are present in almost all the core areas that our partner and customer communities are interested in – be it IP surveillance, security, storage, of course and now our move to the Cloud and Big Data sits neatly in this strategy. This rapid proliferation of digital information has spawned a revolution in the IT world, referred to as Big Data,” says Praveen Sahai, Vice-President – Channels, EMC India & SAARC.
The Enterprise business of Lenovo comprises approximately 40%-45% of Lenovo’s total revenue. The company is an ace player in the segment with 22.7% market share (without counting large deals). Lenovo has a strong foothold in the VLE, LE and Education space and are well-equipped to sustain our strength in the segment. Education and Government are important segments for its enterprise business in India.
Rahul Agarwal, Executive Director, Commercial Business Segment, Lenovo India, opines that in spite of the overall global PC shipments being on a decline, Lenovo’s results clearly exhibit a strong business momentum. “There is definitely room for profitable growth and we aim to outgrow the PC market by leveraging our industry-leading innovation capability to transform the PC for the PC+ era. Also, we are driving growth by expanding into, what we call, PC+ products which consist of smartphones, tablets and smart TVs. With our strong legacy, enterprise market share, and focus on innovation, we are well-positioned to win in this PC+ era and, going forward, PC+ products will be the major growth drivers for us,” he adds.
On the growth front, Dell believes that it will continue to showcase its end-to-end solution capabilities to customers and help them not only mitigate their business challenges, but also provide solutions to scale and manage IT efficiently.
“Mid-market is growing very rapidly and the IT adoption in this space is quite encouraging. We expect our channel partners to contribute in mid-market significantly by providing various Dell solution stacks for which they are equally geared,” says Ajay Kaul, Director & GM, Global Commercial Channel, Dell India.
“As far as our solution focus is concerned, we are focussed on four solution areas – wired and wireless network, data centers, securities and wide area networks so effectively, we divide our business into four sales bases. As far as growth verticals in India are concerned, we are focussed on defence, IT services, banking and finance. The growth vertical of education is doing really well,” opines Ashish Dhawan, Managing Director, Asia, Juniper Networks Enterprise.
Business from the Channel
The channel has always been the arterial route through which the big and small businesses run.
“The opportunity in the data center space for the partner is tremendous. Partners that have the ability to deliver end-to-end solutions that have the ability to integrate new technologies with the existing infrastructure and who are able to address the challenges of the CIOs of delivering more with less, will find that the opportunity is almost unlimited. Therefore, the focus for the channel is to invest in training of its people who understand not only boxes, but have the ability to deliver business solutions that will help them service the enterprises of today,” explains K. P. Unnikrishnan, APAC Marketing Director, Brocade Communications.
RSA has always invested in partners to equip them with skill sets required to sell the latest solutions and technologies.
Navin Sadhwani, Head – Channel & Commercial Business, RSA, says that the channel has been an integral part of RSA’s business. He further adds, “Today, threat landscape has evolved and therefore we are constantly in a state of compromise. Unfortunately, today’s security model is driven by securing the infrastructure perimeter and compliance guidelines. It is reactive and defensive in nature. Keeping this requirement in mind early this year, RSA launched security analytics, an intelligent security solution designed to spot anomalies in near real or real time to reduce the window of threat timeline to the minimum.”
SAP works with over 11,500 partners worldwide along its five core market categories (applications, cloud, mobile, analytics, technology and database), to bring enhanced expertise to customers across markets and solutions.
“L&T Infotech, one of our partners in India, has successfully developed RDS on SAP HANA and these solutions enable smarter innovations, faster business processes, and simpler interactions with SAP’s leading in-memory computing platform (SAP HANA) for clients in the CPG, wholesale distribution and discrete manufacturing area,” said Priyadarshi Mohapatra, Vice-President – Ecosystem, Channels & General Business, SAP Indian Subcontinent. “We aim to achieve our revenue target of Euro 20 billion and Euro 1 billion people in active collaboration with our partner ecosystem, and foresee at least 40% of our software revenue to come from partners by 2015,” he further added.
Expectations from Indian VADs
Obviously, vendors look for partnering with VARs and VADs for Success. When it comes to selling solutions, vendors need a partner who understands exactly what it takes to succeed.
“Indian VADs need to focus on solution selling and enhancing skills in areas such as cloud, backup & recovery, security and big data. They also need to scale up in terms of offering services to maximize profitability and improve customer stickiness. EMC is committed to enable and support VADs in each of these areas,” says Praveen of EMC.
Value-added distributors help vendors achieve their goals like reaching out to the mid-market customers in the Tier-II and Tier-III cities which are a heartland for these business units.
“By associating with our channel partners, we expect to have a wider reach to our end-customers with a more focussed approach. We expect our partners to be well-equipped with capabilities in their respective areas with our help so as to have most powerful Horizontal, Vertical and Geographical spread of our IT solutions,” said Ajay of Dell.
Partners work in synergy with vendors and acts as a natural extension of their business. A significant area of focus remains on understanding the trends in the changing IT landscape and concurrently working on building their skills and knowledge base to tap new market openings.
“Partners should have an open discussion with vendors and customers to understand, forecast needs that will arise and accordingly invest in educating themselves about trends like cloud computing, social media, mobile computing which are expected to lead the wave of innovation in the near future. The partners need to have the appropriate set-up, vital skill sets to understand the products and technology and aptitude to demonstrate the same to the end-consumer,” says Rahul of Lenovo.
“The VADs should be able to support growth for RSA in India. For this, they would need to align their business goals with the RSA’s to a great extent. While RSA will continue to support the VAD through enablement, marketing, Securworld program, we expect them to reciprocate the same by helping us penetrate the market, expand footprint in the geo and carry our message to their prospect / customer base,” says Navin of RSA.
Initiatives towards technology challenges like BYOD
BYOD has spawned a new level of security challenges for enterprises that need to be managed. Today, security needs to be looked at in real time with a clear mitigation strategy. The traditional lockout approach is history due to BYOD. “EMC, through its ‘Trust’ initiative, is enabling enterprises to leverage the power of Cloud and Big Data. RSA’s security division recently announced version 8.0 of our secureID authentication manager platform. This version has a risk-based analytics engine. We also announced a Security Analytics Platform, a new approach to security management that fuses log and packet data with internal and external threat intelligence. We also recently acquired Syncplicity, a cloud-based file management, sync and share capable solution. Syncplicity solutions were built for the enterprise, enabling users to interact and share content on their device of choice with the security and governance IT requires. This acquisition has strengthened EMC's position to provide an effective Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) environment,” says Praveen of EMC.
Rahul of Lenovo quips, “We expect that mobility at the workplace will vastly impact the future of products for the enterprise PC market. As more organizations understand the significance of technology as a business enabler, we expect an extensive interest in technologies like cloud computing, enterprise-grade tablets and other mobility-based devices as we have seen these technologies drive process innovation, reducing operational costs, and help organizations to focus on their core proficiencies.”
The present-day workforce is shifting towards more flexible solutions which give them the freedom to have an always connected lifestyle and, increasingly, organizations are starting to see the benefits in letting their employees bring their own devices to the workplace. But the proliferation of these devices in the organization poses security risks which come with granting access to unknown devices on the organization’s secure network. In such cases, it is important to take an end-to-end approach to increase user productivity – starting with the endpoint or desktop, and extending into the data center.
According to the 2013 CIO Enterprise Survey commissioned by Dell, 80% of organizations are looking to implement a BYOD model in their organizations within the next one year. These organizations are looking for technology options that seamlessly integrate within their existing IT environment without threatening data security.
“At Dell, we believe that organizations can limit security risks by updating security policies and regulating requirements from data center to endpoint devices which are secure. The IT department is responsible for ensuring that the solutions implemented meet the productivity and security requirements of the management team, as well as the flexibility and diversity requirements of the workforce at large. We are able to help IT departments go beyond plugging a device into the network. This brings us to the latest concept of BYOx. While BYOD is restricted to the device itself, BYOx, on the other hand, brings into its purview a plethora of things associated with the device like the applications, the data, the services, the ports, etc. BYOx is about combining personal and work-related content in a single interface (possibly on multiple devices) to generate a secured and personalized workspace that enhances user experience and promotes productivity,” says Ajay of Dell.
In a BYOD scenario, there are a number of operating systems that are now available in the market and the challenge is to have a uniform security measure across these different systems.
“We tried to solve the problem by making sure that the CIO a uniform application that runs on all operating systems and that’s called ‘Junos Pulse’ and the CIO gets a tool which has remote access which ensures device security which acts as a firewall, an anti-phishing, anti-theft on the device itself and device management which gives the CIO an idea of how the device is being used, if the device is lost, the device can also be remote wiped, it can be tracked on GPRS and the data can be backed up and restored. No other application in the market has device management, security and remote access, in one application. We are trying to make sure BYOD happens in the most secure manner as possible as security is the biggest concern,” says Ashish of Juniper.
BYOD changes IT procurement – the company-provided PC is becoming a thing of the past, as businesses increasingly allow, and even encourage, employees to bring their personal, consumer devices into the workplace and access corporate applications.
“This allows application availability at anytime, from anywhere, and helps business slash procurement costs. The Smartphone/tablet phenomenon has fuelled this trend, and the drive uptake of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), wireless networking and end-point security solutions in the corporate arena,” opines K. P. Unnikrishnan of Brocade.
The greatest risk with BYOD is probably of Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) . While APT has always been a risk lurking in the background, the BYOD will further amplify the possibility of such attacks as the smart devices with high processing power will prove to be a bridge point for the hackers to get an entry into the enterprise network.
“APT is not a direct threat to the organization. It actually goes through various intermediary steps before its final attack is launched. The hacker (who is a part of a larger group) knows exactly what he wants from the final customer or user. But to get to that organization, he will go through intermediate stages. One of those stages will be the mobile device. Similarly, social networking increases vulnerability of an organization. The organizations have to find a balance which gives employees access to some social networking because it is a tool which can be used for branding, marketing, HR, etc, while also ensuring that the window of vulnerability is kept as small as possible," says Navin of RSA.
BYOD threats are restricted to only a few organizations like logistics, insurance, etc as they are whose employees actually access organization-critical applications remotely through their own device. The others don’t really allow you to bring your own device and plug into the core applications. Almost all people with their own devices access emails, concur, etc. Hence, the threat is not as big as it’s made out to be if you are generalizing it for all corporates.
moumita@varindia.com
