CHANNELWORLD.IN STRATEGIC INSIGHTS FOR SOLUTION PROVIDERS | COVER PRICE Rs.50 ChannelWorld They beat recessionary headwinds. They showed ingenuity in the face of adversity. They grew when all around them were giving up. They are the Premier 100. >>Page 20 The Ingenious IMMUNITY NETWORKS & TECHNOLOGIES WYSETEK SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGISTS TECHNICHE CONSULTING SERVICES UNIFIED DATA-TECH SOLUTIONS TRIDENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS SILVER TOUCH TECHNOLOGIES GALAXY OFFICE AUTOMATION SECURE NETWORK SOLUTIONS 4G IDENTITY SOLUTIONS VCENTRIC TECHNOLOGIES INFINITE TECHNOLOGIES E-CONNECT SOLUTIONS RAKSHA TECHNOLOGIES NETCON TECHNOLOGIES STERLING INFOWAYS B4B IT SOLUTIONS MEDLEY MARKETING VELTRONICS INDIA ACMA COMPUTERS FORE SOLUTIONS ALBION INFOTEL ACPL SYSTEMS NOVO SYSTEMS ONE NETWORK FOETRON QUANTM CDP INDIA ADIT MICROSYS SHRO SYSTEMS CCS COMPUTERS BINARY SYSTEMS RUBIK INFOTECH ACCEL FRONTLINE FORTUNE GRECELLS REGENERSIS INDIA CACHE PERIPHERALS VDA INFOSOLUTIONS JAINAM TECHNOLOGIES SECANT TECHNOLOGIES CENTRAL DATA SYSTEMS PENTACLE IT SOLUTIONS FUTURENET TECHNOLOGIES ACME DIGITEK SOLUTIONS PARTH TECHOCOMM SOLUTIONS ARCHON CONSULTING SYSTEMS SWAN SOLUTIONS & SERVICES DEV INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY DATASOFT NETWORK SOLUTIONS ARYAN COMPUTERS & PERIPHERALS NAHAR INTEGRATED SYSTEM SERVICES COMPUTERS NETWORK AND TELECOM INDIA INNOVATIVE TELECOM & SOFTWARES DYNACONS SYSTEMS & SOLUTIONS INFOBAHN TECHNICAL SOLUTIONS SHELL NETWORKS & SOLUTIONS FUTURE NETWINGS SOLUTIONS TWENTY TWO BY 7 SOLUTIONS ALLIED DIGITAL SERVICES VERSATILE INFOSECURITY SYNDROME TECHNOLOGIES ESCONET TECHNOLOGIES SUNFIRE TECHNOLOGIES MICROLINK SOLUTIONS TARGUS TECHNOLOGIES MEGAHERTZ INFOTECH AASHNA CLOUDTECH INTERCAD SYSTEMS SARA INFOWAY ITES DHANUSH INFOSOL C. I. INFOTECH TEAM COMPUTERS GT ENTERPRISES MAGIC SYSTEMS D M SYSTEMS COMPUSOFT NETSPIDER ISHAN GROUP VITAGE SYSTEMS MKT SOFTWARES META INFOTECH ESTEEM INFOTECH VEERAS INFOTEK PEAK XV NETWORKS ASHTECH INFOTECH KONNET SOLUTIONS VEETRAG COMPUTERS MERIDIAN INFOTECH BODHTREE CONSULTING ORIENT TECHNOLOGIES VALUE POINT SYSTEMS ESSENVISION SOFTWARE TAASHEE LINUX SERVICES QUESTA SOFTWARE SYSTEMS EMICRO DATA TECHNOLOGIES INSIGHT BUSINESS MACHINES TOTAL PRESENTATION DEVICES MM9 INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES PENTAGON SYSTEM AND SERVICES INTENSITY GLOBAL TECHNOLOGIES INFOTECH COMPUTERS & COMMUNICATIONS JULY 2014 VOL. 8, ISSUE 4 The ChannelWorld Premier 100 2014: Meet The Winners Page 24 SPECIAL ISSUE
Transcript
CHANNELWORLD.IN
STRATEGIC INSIGHTS FOR SOLUTION PROVIDERS | COVER PRICE Rs.50ChannelWorld
They beat recessionary headwinds. They showed ingenuity in the face of adversity. They grew when all around them were giving up. They are the Premier 100. >>Page 20
TheIngenious
IMMUNITY NETWORKS & TECHNOLOGIES WYSETEK SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGISTS
REGENERSIS INDIA CACHE PERIPHERALS VDA INFOSOLUTIONS
JAINAM TECHNOLOGIES SECANT TECHNOLOGIES
CENTRAL DATA SYSTEMS PENTACLE IT SOLUTIONS
FUTURENET TECHNOLOGIESACME DIGITEK SOLUTIONS
PARTH TECHOCOMM SOLUTIONSARCHON CONSULTING SYSTEMS SWAN SOLUTIONS & SERVICES
DEV INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY DATASOFT NETWORK SOLUTIONS
ARYAN COMPUTERS & PERIPHERALSNAHAR INTEGRATED SYSTEM SERVICES
COMPUTERS NETWORK AND TELECOM INDIA INNOVATIVE TELECOM & SOFTWARES DYNACONS SYSTEMS & SOLUTIONS INFOBAHN TECHNICAL SOLUTIONSSHELL NETWORKS & SOLUTIONS FUTURE NETWINGS SOLUTIONS TWENTY TWO BY 7 SOLUTIONS ALLIED DIGITAL SERVICES VERSATILE INFOSECURITY SYNDROME TECHNOLOGIES ESCONET TECHNOLOGIES SUNFIRE TECHNOLOGIES MICROLINK SOLUTIONS TARGUS TECHNOLOGIES MEGAHERTZ INFOTECHAASHNA CLOUDTECH INTERCAD SYSTEMS SARA INFOWAY ITESDHANUSH INFOSOL C. I. INFOTECH TEAM COMPUTERS GT ENTERPRISESMAGIC SYSTEMSD M SYSTEMS COMPUSOFTNETSPIDERISHAN GROUPVITAGE SYSTEMSMKT SOFTWARESMETA INFOTECH ESTEEM INFOTECHVEERAS INFOTEK PEAK XV NETWORKSASHTECH INFOTECH KONNET SOLUTIONS VEETRAG COMPUTERSMERIDIAN INFOTECH BODHTREE CONSULTING ORIENT TECHNOLOGIES VALUE POINT SYSTEMS ESSENVISION SOFTWARE TAASHEE LINUX SERVICESQUESTA SOFTWARE SYSTEMS EMICRO DATA TECHNOLOGIES INSIGHT BUSINESS MACHINES TOTAL PRESENTATION DEVICES MM9 INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIESPENTAGON SYSTEM AND SERVICES INTENSITY GLOBAL TECHNOLOGIES INFOTECH COMPUTERS & COMMUNICATIONS
JULY 2014 VOL. 8, ISSUE 4
The ChannelWorld Premier 100 2014: Meet The Winners Page 24 SPECIAL ISSUE
n EDITOR’S NOTE
Vijay Ramachandran
Inapt Incentive
WHILE REAMS of paper have been expended on motivating staff, from how to lead by ex-ample or how to give staffers a ‘challenging’ job to do, I’ve typically seen that in most or-
ganizations it’s incentives or compensation or bonuses that are expected to drive employees to deliver more, better, and faster. But is this a good way to keep a team going forward?
Over a dozen years ago, the start-up I worked for then had a visionary and inspirational CMD. In a bid to get us off the ground fast he came up with a package of incen-tives for team leaders tied to various deadlines and achievements. On paper, it seemed a great way to kick-start operations, for the team to co-operate and get things done.
But that’s not how the dice rolled. Every team leader got so focused on short-term milestones, that in the resultant chaos they lost track of organizational goals. Myopia set in so hard that our shutters came rolling down three years after we launched operations.
I bet you’re thinking, how can one lousy exam-ple prove that incentives are a rotten option?
Bear with me.In 1945, German psy-chologist Karl Duncker cooked up what is now
known as The Candle Problem. He handed out three objects: A candle, a box of drawing pins, and match-sticks and asked his subjects to fix the can-dles on a cork-board wall without any additional elements, while ensuring that when lit, the candle wouldn’t drip wax on the table below.
The only way to do this successfully is to dump the drawing pins out of the box; pin the box to the wall; light the candle and use the box as if it were a candle-holder.
Incidentally, people found it much easier to get to the
solution if the drawing pins weren’t in the box to start with. Because, when the pins were in the box, par-ticipants in the experiment saw it only as a ‘pin-box’, and not something they could actually use to solve the problem. This mental block or bias is called “func-tional fixedness”. It’s what comes in the way of out-of-the-box thinking.
Then some years later, Prof. Sam Glucksberg, added a twist to The Candle Problem—he of-fered a financial incentive for solving it. You’d expect that this would spur par-ticipants to do it faster.
It has the opposite effect, the incentive made people slower! In fact, the higher the incentive the slower people got (the results held true across nations and even income levels).
And why is this? Because what psychologists have found is that with straight, simple, routine and repeti-tive tasks financial incen-
tives work perfectly well and are a great motivator.
However, where you re-quire creativity or concep-tual thinking or an ability to think out-of-the-box, the increase in focus that a financial incentive entails creates a kind of myopia to the obvious solution.
So, what you get with doling out cash incentives to your salesfolk is a bunch of people with single-minded determination, who can be pretty clueless about what to do when the sale requires thinking laterally or ingeniously—like when an economic slowdown crimps IT spend.
As author Daniel Pink states in his book Drive: “Too many organizations… still operate from assumptions about human potential and individual performance that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklore than in science. They continue to pursue practices such as short-term incentive plans and pay-for-performance schemes even in the face of mounting evidence [which shows that such practices] usually don’t work and often do harm.”
What do you feel about incentives now? Do write in and let me know. nVijay Ramachandran is the Editor-in-Chief of IDG. Contact him at [email protected]
n Where you require conceptual thinking or an ability to think out-of-the-box, the increase in focus that a financial incentive entails creates a kind of myopia.
4 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JULY 2014
They are the most important link. Ignore them at your own peril, engage them and you have a highly motivated extended sales force. Channel partners have direct impact on your sales volume, market share, brand reputation and ‘share of customer wallet’.
Call in the specialists to strengthen &engage this vital link.
WHATS THE CRUCIAL LINK BETWEEN YOUR COMPANY & YOUR CUSTOMERS?
www.grassrootsindia.in
Say Hi! +91 022 40301130
267 mm
267 mm
200 mm
InsideINDIAN CHANNELWORLD n JULY 2014
IngeniousThe
When the going gets tough, only the fittest survive. But the resourceful thrive. Meet India’s hundred most ingenious channel partners. >>> Page 20
FORTINETCUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP
market rapidly and delivers projects with minimum disruptions.
A disruptive technology to me is any technology that helps speed up customers’ business processes and go-to-market. There are various products and solutions in HP’s vast array. It is a complete set. And depending on the customer’s size and vertical, it can provide a solutions that fulfills the requirement well, while delivering faster RoI.
What are some of the benefits of HP’s storage virtualization solution?Customers can realize benefits in each and every workload they manage. Existing customers find it extremely easy and simple to manage storage arrays with HP’s storage stack. Even the archiving and recovery tasks take less time, thereby reducing the need for costly system administration or other tools required for storage management. In fact, the last two to three years have been phenomenal. I am very excited about HP’s acquisition of 3PAR, which is exceptional in providing multi-tenant, thin, and elastic storage and ideal for any customer expecting unprecedented growth of data.
How long have you been associated with HP?I’ve been selling HP’s portfolio of solutions for the past 14 years, and that’s even before I founded Archon Consulting.
What according to you makes HP a leader in the industry?As an SI, we integrate different kinds of solutions—from compute, network to storage—at customers’ datacenters. But many a time, we’ve noticed that the customer would have deployed different storage architectures in the same datacenter, as a result of which, they’d be forced to manage different types of workloads for different types of applications. This complicates the entire process because maintenance would require massive investments in terms of human resources to manage each of these
complex architectures. This makes the process neither efficient nor cost-effective.
However, things are completely different with HP’s stack of products. It has features that make managing multiple workloads an easy task. This value proposition is something that we carry to our customers, and it has also helped us easily retain them over the years.
How do you sell such disruptive solutions to price-sensitive Indian customers?Before we sell a solution to a customer, we try and understand their business requirement clearly. That’s one of our key areas of work. The primary goal of CIOs at the customer end is to build a robust IT infrastructure that supports business. They need to ensure that the business goes to
HPCUSTOM INTERVIEW
AHEAD OF THE CURVESachin Rao, CEO & Director, Archon Consulting Systems, elaborates how HP’s array of storage and virtualization solutions consistently provides win-win scenarios for both channel partners and end-customers.
By Aritra Sarkhel
This interview is brought to you by IDG Services
in association with HP
I am very excited about HP’s acquisition of
3PAR, which is exceptional in providing multi-tenant,
thin, and elastic storage and is ideal for any customer
expecting unprecedented growth of data.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced by any means without prior written permission from the publisher. Address requests for customized reprints to IDG Media Private Limited, Geetha Building, 49, 3rd Cross, Mission Road, Bangalore - 560 027, India. IDG Media Private Limited is an IDG (International Data Group) company.
Printed and Published by Louis D’Mello on behalf of IDG Media Private Limited, Geetha Building, 49, 3rd Cross, Mission Road, Bangalore - 560 027, India. Editor: Louis D’Mello, Printed At Manipal Press Ltd, Press Corner, Manipal-576104, Karnataka, India.
This index is provided as an additional service. The publisher does not assume any liability for errors or omissions.
n NEWS DIGEST09 Tail-f Acquisition Big Win for Cisco | Cisco is purchasing Sweden-based Tail-f Systems for about Rs 1,050 crore. Tail-f has many service
providers as customers, which would finally give Cisco a foot in the door of Domain 2.0.
10 Google’s Cloud Gets Cheaper | Google is cutting prices of its corporate cloud platform—and vows to keep cutting them—to beat those of chief rival Amazon Web Services.
12 Juniper Merges its HW/SW Units | Juniper combined its hardware and software units to better align product development, and
share technology across product lines for cloud and intelligent networking. n NEWS ANALYSIS 13 Blinkered Vision | How Google Glass set wearable computing back 10 years. n OPINION04 Editorial: Vijay Ramachandran believes that when people require conceptual thinking or an ability to think out-of-the-box, the increase in focus that a financial incentive entails creates a kind of myopia to the obvious solution. 142 PlainSpeak: Yogesh Gupta shares why your company’s brand is too valuable to be relegated as an after-thought or to hide behind the banners of your technology partners.
FOR BREAKING NEWS, GO TO CHANNELWORLD.IN
InsideINDIAN CHANNELWORLD n JULY 2014
n PREMIER 100 WINNERS 24 When an ingenious strategy not only saves a business, but leads it to growth, it is imperative that such companies and their leaders be awarded. Here are 2014’s 100 most ingenious Indian channel partners.
n EVENT REPORT 124 Premier100 Recap | The ChannelWorld Premier100 Awards and Symposium Ceremony
brought together India’s most brilliant minds in IT, including senior-most executives, respected CIOs, and of course, one hundred of the country’s smartest channel partners.
n ON RECORD 18 Sheikh Ahmed Bin Hamad Al Thani, Chairman, Katara Investments, envisions a small-is-big philosophy to dominate Indian SME markets.
CHANNELWORLDGeetha Building, 49, 3rd Cross, Mission Road, Bangalore - 560 027, IndiaCHANNELWORLD.INPublisher, President & CEO Louis D’Mello
F I N D M O R E A R T I C L E S AT C H A N N E L W O R L D . I N
News
BUSINESS RELATIONS
Tail-f Acquisition Big Win for Cisco
out. Now it has a foot in the door of Domain 2.0. Service providers are searching for ways to increase profitabil-ity. One way of solving this is to simplify operations and replace the slow, high-touch provisioning model with something that’s real-time, orchestrated and automated. SDN and NFV solve some of the problems, but neither addresses the big issue regarding stream-lining operations, and that’s OSS systems.
The problem with OSS systems is that they’ve been patched, amended, and al-tered over the years. Some-times new OSS systems
would be brought in to han-dle certain vendors. Now most large service providers have overly complex provi-sioning processes that takes months to complete. Tail-f solves this problem through a network-service orchestra-tion solution. The product provides a single pane of glass for infrastructure from layer 2 through layer 7 and includes hardware devices, virtual appliances, and OpenFlow switches.
The solution can help bridge the gap between today’s environments and SDN/NFV by making the provisioning easier.
Tail-f models native com-mands in Yang, enabling the products to inter-operate with Cisco competitors such as F5, Juniper, Riverbed, A10 and Alcatel-Lucent. Multi-vendor management isn’t something Cisco is known for, but this can give it great-er control no matter who the network vendors are. Cisco stated it fully intends to maintain the multi-vendor nature of the product.
Tail-f can help Cisco reduce the TCO of an all-Cisco environment while being able to maintain price points and current margin structure. It provides tools to help service providers reduce the cost of running a network while enabling bet-ter service elasticity.
— Zeus Kerravala
CISCO IS to purchase Sweden-based Tail-f Systems for $175 million (about Rs
1,050 crore) and other reten-tion-based incentives.
Tail-f is a big win for Cisco because it’s majorly a service provider prod-uct. The company is well known for managing and orchestrating multi-vendor environments and has many service providers as customers, including AT&T and Deutsche Tele-kom AG. Having AT&T as a customer is of particular interest, given all the news around Domain 2.0 from which Cisco was being left
NetApp becomes the latest big vendor to shape a new product around the high-speed flash media.
The company introduced the FAS8080EX, a shared array that is optimized for use with pure flash. While all-flash arrays are still high-end items for enterprises and service providers with especially high-performance requirements, flash is expected to make up a bigger part of datacenters over time.
“With Intel Ivy Bridge processors and increased memory, the 8000 series is now optimized for flash, though it had already been configurable for all-flash,” said Nathan Moffitt, director of storage platforms marketing, NetApp.
The 8080EX replaces the 6290 array and is 75 percent faster for roughly the same price, Moffitt said.NetApp says the all-flash configuration is ideal for VDI, though it expects only a small percentage of customers to order it for the time being, Moffitt added.
— Stephen Lawson
Flash Array 75 Percent Faster
STORAGE
JULY 2014 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 9
-
According to the CTO of software provider Tibco, big data analyt-ics relies too much on historic data and has failed to provide businesses with the real-time in-formation needed to support fast decision-making in companies.
Chief Technology Officer Matt Quinn said that many firms have looked at big data as a “sci-ence experiment.” Using months
Paladion has closed a growth capital funding of $10 million (about Rs 60 crore) from Nadathur Holdings, firm of Infosys Co-founder N.S. Ragha-van. This capital will be used for enhancing its cyber security intel-ligence platform, building a cloud security services platform and expansion of multiple SOCs.
Red Hat announced the availability of Red Hat En-terprise Linux 7, the latest release of the company’s flagship platform. It not only lays the foundation for the open hybrid cloud and serves enterprise work-loads across infrastruc-tures, but also pushes the OS beyond the position of a commodity platform.
Google has acquired video advertising com-pany mDialog in a bid to provide more high quality video options to its adver-tisers. The Internet giant plans to work with the mDialog team to include their technology and expertise into its Double-Click product suite for advertisers.
storage and processors that power the cloud. “We believe, fundamentally, it should never be cheaper to run IT yourself, ever,” Goldfarb says. “We want customers to focus on their core business.”
Until now, Google mostly let the security, reli-
ability and speed of its technology do the talking. “When it comes to the datacen-ter, we’re able to out-invest, out-innovate and out-focus pretty
much anyone else doing this,” Goldfarb says. “We’re on top of [security] in a way no one else could be.”
But Google hasn’t had much experience with corporate IT depart-ments. “For the enterprise decision-maker, it’s not just about the technology and pricing, but [also about] a partner ecosystem and roadmaps that show where the products will go,” says
Nucleus Research analyst Rebecca Wettemann.
Nonetheless, many or-ganizations use Google’s cloud service and tout its viability. Financial report-ing service provider Web-Filings, for instance, has re-lied on Google App Engine since the company was founded in 2008. Using Google has allowed Web-Filings to scale faster and adjust its offerings more quickly to meet demands of customers, says WebFilings CEO Matthew Rizai.
Google’s Goldfarb ac-knowledged that Microsoft and other traditional IT companies do have large partner networks, but Google is working to build up its own network. It now has over 200 partners and another 200 in the enroll-ment process. He sees en-terprise IT cloud comput-ing as a core service, and plans to back its customers for years to come.
“I don’t expect them to walk away from this market at all,” says For-rester Research analyst John Rymer. “At one time, I wasn’t so sure. But I think Google is in it for the long haul.”
— Joab Jackson
or years of historic data to find valuable insights rather than re-acting to events as they happen. The company is coining a new term, ‘fast data’, to describe a different approach to analytics.
“The challenge with big data is that it has not gained relevance to your everyday life and to the operational decisions you are making on a daily basis,” he said.
“It may improve things, or point out inefficiencies or opportuni-ties, too, but the problem is that you are finding a needle in a haystack once.
“What ‘fast data’ is all about is being able to find the nee-dle in a haystack again and again, based on unique cir-cumstances and the context in real-time, in an impromtu situation, at that particular moment of interaction.”
Fast data is part of Tibco’s sales pitch as it expands its business from its traditional ap-plication integration products into offering events processing, analytics, social and data visual-ization technology.
—Matthew Finnegan
BIG DATA
Short TakesCORPORATE COMPETITION
Google’s Cloud Gets Cheaper
IN MARCH, Google rebranded its infra-structure and platform hosted services as
Google Cloud Platform and set about persuading enterprises to migrate their applications to Google’s compute, storage and appli-cation services.
IBM, Microsoft and HP made similar market-ing blitzes, as if they all realized that the cloud might actu-ally have legs. “I don’t think any-one in 2014 believes that enterprise IT won’t move to the cloud,” says Brian Goldfarb, head of Google Cloud Platform marketing.
Google cut prices to beat those of chief rival Ama-zon Web Services (AWS). And AWS and Microsoft immediately countered by slashing their own prices. But Google vowed to keep cutting prices to match the declining costs of the
THE REAL THING: Fast data re-acts to events as they happen.
Big Data is Irrelevant to Businesses, Says Tibco
42 Times
The amount Amazon has reduced the price of its cloud services
since it launched them in 2006.
10 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JULY 2014
PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT
Juniper Merges its HW/SW Units
Telstra Extends Its Cloud to USATelstra has extended its cloud presence to a seventh location, taking its new cloud infrastructure services on the east coast of the United States.
Telstra Head of Network Applications and Services, Martin Bishop, claims the extension will allow customers to benefit from efficient enterprise cloud services for global operations.
“Customers are increasingly opting for cloud-based services and with this expansion we are even better equipped to serve
Around
The World
organizations with operations in the US.” Bishop said.
- By Nermin Bajric
Unisys Discontinues x86 Chips ProcessorUnisys is phasing out its decades-old mainframe processor, which lags behind in speed and scalability compared to newer chips.
The chip is used in some of Unisys’ ClearPath flagship mainframes, but the company is moving to Intel’s x86 chips in Libra and Dorado servers in the ClearPath line.
Unisys also announced 12 high-end servers with Intel’s Xeon server chip E5-2600 v2 chip. The servers will enable customers in running legacy applications. - Agam Shah
CloudFlare Takes Over CryptoSealCloudFlare has acquired CryptoSeal, a provider of VPN services . The deal is supposed to extend its security services to Web users.
CloudFlare began to shut down CryptoSeal’s service after the acquisition was finalized, and the service will be fully retired by June 30, informs Matthew Prince, CloudFlare’s CEO.
CryptoSeal’s Co-founder, Ryan Lackey, will join CloudFlare as security product manager.
- Jeremy Kirk
JUNIPER NETWORKS combined its hard-ware and software units to better align
product development, and share technology across products lines for cloud and intelligent networking.
By merging its Platform Systems Division and Soft-ware Solutions Division into the Juniper Develop-ment and Innovation busi-ness unit (JDI), Juniper can eliminate unnecessary or-ganizational barriers in the company and build end-to-end systems that “crush op-erational expense” through automation, optimization and analytics, says Rami Rahim, executive vice president of the JDI.
“There’s a certain clar-ity around the company on what our mission is, and we’re aligning our products and our go-to-market mus-cle along with that strat-egy,” Rahim said, referring to the formation of JDI to address the requirements of “cloud builders” and “high IQ” networks.” According to him there’s tremendous opportunity to combine products together into solu-tions to better address cus-tomer requirements.
An example of that is the 100G interfaces on Juniper’s high-end SRX security platform, which leverages 100G silicon found on Juniper’s routing and switching products. “It helps us keep up with the pace with the change in the industry,” Rahim said. And that change is rapid and divergent. Customers are implementing fabric-
based switching to make networks flatter to address east/west traffic flows.
Juniper also offers MetaFabric, which Rahim described as a framework for enabling rapid applica-tion provisioning within and across multiple data centers by pooling network resources based on Juni-per’s QFX and EX switches, MX routers, SRX security systems and Contrail SDN controller, and partner products. “Customer de-mand is greatest for Vir-tual Chassis and QFabric because they’re older and have been established lon-ger,” Rahim says.
He adds that Juniper’s current switching lineup,
highlighted by the EX9200 and QFX5100, addresses a “very large segment” of the enterprise- and service-provider cloud-datacenter market, and this is what helped the company grow its switching business 46% in the first quarter.
Juniper’s experience in datacenter fabric and auto-mation technologies also catalyzed that growth, and helped win business in AT&T’s Domain 2.0 SDN
project. In the AT&T win, Juniper worked with the carrier in a DevOps model to align software develop-ment with operations and then quickly cut over to production mode.
In SDNs, Rahim says Juniper has 20 paying enterprise- and service-provider customers for its Contrail SDN controller, including CloudDynamics and CyberPort.
—Jim Duffy
12 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JULY 2014
Google Glass doesn’t ac-tually do all that much. It takes mediocre photos and videos. It offers slow, balky, and low-res access to some websites and on-line services. And that’s kind of about it.
But the technology is not the real problem. The real problem is that Google did just about ev-erything wrong in trying to market the devices:n It allowed only software developers—not usu-ally the most socially ad-vanced group—to buy the devices at first. The goal was to get the developers to create cool new apps for the device, but it ensured that the things would show up on the faces of the stereotypical nerds before anyone else. Glass quickly became a very ex-pensive pocket protector.n Google gave Glass us-ers a dorky, pretentious name—Glass Explor-ers—that only deepened and confirmed the creepy social awkwardness.n Google didn’t start deal-ing with the social and fashion implications of putting a computing de-vice on your face until far too late.n Google still hasn’t come up with a clear reason to wear the device in public. Is wearing Glass supposed to be fun? Is it supposed to make you smarter? Help you get ahead in business? Or what?n But here’s the biggest is-sue. It seems Google spent a lot of time thinking about what Glass buyers might do with their fancy visors, but barely a glim-mer about the Glass’s im-pact on the people around the Glasshole.
Google now recognizes that it has lost control of
THE INTRODUCTION of Google Glass at the Google I/O developers confer-
ence in June 2012 was one of the coolest technology debuts ever. Glass-wearing skydivers jumped out of an airplane high above San Francisco’s Moscone Center, floated down to the roof, jumped onto moun-tain bikes, and pedaled into the conference hall where Sergei Brin was waiting—while the audience soaked up the experience through the first-person perspective of the stunt team.
The full house went wild—witnesses to what
we thought was an amaz-ing revolution in the world of wearable computing.
Now, just two years lat-er, Google Glass is an ac-tual product that anybody with a spare $1,500 (about Rs 90,000) can stick on their face. That is, if they want to be called a Glass-hole, banned from many establishments, physi-cally mugged in others, and even more viciously mocked on national televi-sion by The Daily Show’s Jason Jones.
Clearly, something went horribly wrong.
The technology is partly to blame. It turns out that
How Google Glass set wearable computing back 10 years.By Fredric Paul
Blinkered
JULY 2014 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 13
VISION
n NEWS ANALYSIS
Panda spoke in detail about the business opportunities opening up for both Trend Micro and its channel partners. “In terms of security, we have huge expansion opportunities being made possible by trends such as consumerization of IT, cloud and datacenter security, and countering cyber threats.”
He further spoke at length about how major security players like Trend Micro have a huge role to play in enabling and empowering security solutions for the consumer market. The $8 billion (about Rs 48,000 crore) market, which is predicted to grow even bigger, indicates that the number of users in need of complete user protection will only increase multifold in the future.
Apart from individual consumers, enterprises, with their expanding cloud and virtualization boundaries, also open up a huge market for security players. “Sixty-three percent of security professionals believe it is only a matter of time until their enterprise is targeted. Seventy percent of server workloads will be virtualized by 2016, and as much as 90 percent of enterprises and government agencies will move to the cloud by 2015. That is a huge market for us to serve with our portfolio of solutions,” said Panda.
Business leaders from various channel organizations across South-East Asia and India recently congregated in an
exclusive meet in Taichung, Taiwan. The event, Trend Micro’s first ever regional Partner Summit, served as an incredible platform for technology leaders, IT security experts, and top channel partners to come together and share insight on the latest advancements in security solutions and how Trend Micro has been continuously striving hard to equip its security solutions with future readiness. Besides, the Summit also saw the presence of Trend Micro’s technology alliance partner, VMware, and external analysts’ sessions on the benefits of Trend Micro’s solutions.
Setting the context of the event, Partha Panda, VP, Global Channels & Alliances, Trend Micro, spoke about how the vendor is the market leader in information security, with numerous programs, engagements, and recognition for channel partners across geographies. He reiterated the importance of channel partners in Trend Micro’s journey forward, when he said, “We have a network of over 50,000 partners worldwide, and with $1.2 billion (Rs 7,200 crore) in sales, there are a lot of channel transactions happening this year.”
DHANYA THAKKAR,MD, SOUTH-EAST ASIA AND INDIA, TREND MICRO
He also informed that channel partners at different levels—platinum, gold, silver, and bronze—can rake in additional profits by selling Trend Micro solutions. “We have several rebates, support and training discounts, specialization bonus, and equally numerous incentive programs for partners selling enterprise solutions. Resellers can easily utilize these and increase their profitability.”
Later, Dhanya Thakkar, MD, South-East Asia and India, Trend Micro, shed light on the company’s roadmap for growth. He said, “Trend Micro’s future goal is all about double digit growth, and double revenue with double the current customer base.
He went on to say that with a flexible management and licensing strategy, end-customers can enjoy the benefits of a smarter protection plan as well. “We can easily increase our customer base by reselling more stacks to enterprises that are adopting virtualization and cloud technology,” he added.
As part of the event, Trend Micro recognized and awarded the top country and regional resellers who contributed significantly to the growth of the company in the market and the entire region.
ENABLING FUTURE-READY SECURITYIn a first of its kind summit for channel partners across South-East Asia and India, security leader Trend Micro chalked out its roadmap for future growth and listed out the various plans it has for increasing SIs’ and resellers’ profitability. By Aritra Sarkhel
EVENT REPORT
I D G S E R V I C E S
the public’s perception of Glass, but still doesn’t seem to know why.
Google’s objections to what it calls The Google Glass Myths are pathetic and tortured:
Myth 3: Glass Explorers are technology-worship-ping geeks. Our Explorers come from all walks of life. They include parents, firefighters, zookeepers, brewmasters, film stu-dents, professionals, re-porters, and doctors.
Are you kidding me? Parents can’t be technol-ogy-worshipping geeks? And just how many fire-fighters and doctors are we talking about?
It didn’t have to be this way. If Google had been able to see past the tiny screen in front of its eyes, it would have realized that something you put on your face automatically gets a lot of attention. It could have tried to pay more attention to the people around the people wearing Glass, allaying their not-unjustified wari-ness by making it clearer what the Glasshole was doing (and, especially, recording). It could have tried much earlier to make the devices fashionable, high-status accessories for the ultra-cool or ultra-rich instead of the ultra-geeky.
The results of Google’s ongoing miscalculations are obvious. Nobody wants to be seen wearing the things. At the recent SXSW Interactive confer-ence in Austin, Texas, I saw only a handful of people wearing Glass, and they seemed sheepish about it. Even Robert Sco-ble, the device’s biggest fanboy, who reveled in Glassholiness, now admits that “Google has launched
Companies that want to engage customers with
wearables, but are worried about privacy issues, should run pilots with their employees first, a Forrester analyst has said.
Highlighting the success Virgin Atlantic has had with its Upper Class Wing Google Glass pilot in Heathrow Terminal Three, Forrester Analyst J.P. Gownder advised that arming customer-facing employees with wearables is the first step enterprises should be taking.
Virgin Atlantic’s pilot saw business club lounge staff in Heathrow wearing devices to assist members with flight-connection information, destination weather forecasts and restaurant suggestions.
Gownder said, “They have reported that it is been very successful and customers felt they were getting better customer service, more information and more attention. I would think they are going to roll this out slowly, with the employees first.”
The Forrester analyst said that wearables are fast becoming a reality in the workplace, especially after the arrival of Salesforce Wear in June—a bundle of free tools and reference applications.
The devices will come with open-source reference application to help developers structure, design and build applications that
connect to the Salesforce platform.
But with many enterprises concerned about warding off consumers with privacy fears, employee pilots will help to learn more about how those concerns can be alleviated in a controlled way. Employee feedback will help develop customer-facing applications, Gownder said.
“A lot of B2B2C scenarios have thorny privacy issues. If you give it [wearable device] to your employees, you have some privacy risks—but you have the capability to calibrate, educate and learn before taking it to consumer market,” he added.
For customer-facing businesses like banks, retailers, hospitals and insurance providers, Gownder warned that extra care must be taken when employees are wearing devices that are collecting personal information.
“Customers at the airport have already opted in to the experience of the first-class lounge and have authenticated it. They come after an informed decision. But someone who walks into your shop has not authenticated you to know their personal details. The target market of wealthy, frequent travelers who bend towards the tech savvy are different from the general Virgin Atlantic kiosk in Heathrow,” he said.
Replicating successful customer engagement through mobility case studies will also help increase trust in wearables that collect data, Gownder added. He gave the example of convenience shop 7-Eleven, which enjoyed over a million mobile application downloads in the past nine months. By offering location-enabled discounts when a customer was in close proximity, without the user having to enter personal details, 7-Eleven built up trust, Gownder said. When users saw that they could get even better discounts by handing over information, they were happy to sign up.
Unlocking the potential to gain consumer insight from wearables is in enterprises’ hands, Gownder insisted, but companies need to take a big bang approach, with low expectations but an assumption that “the consumer market is roaring forward, it [wearable devices] is going to disrupt our customers and we are going to go all in”.
7-Eleven built a bridge that did not make people feel like they had to necessarily give away their personal information too much. This way organizations can strategize and get plenty of people to opt in after using it for a short time, Gownder concluded.
—By Margi Murphy
Forrester: Firms Should Use Their Staff as Wearables Guinea Pigs
n NEWS ANALYSIS
16 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JULY 2014
this product poorly.” That’s a shame. While Glass is forever tainted, a better product, marketed the right way, could have
been awesome. Imagine what Steve Jobs could have done with this concept. But given Google’s epic marketing fail, it’s going
to take a long, long time before even a much better product can overcome the stigma that now surrounds Google Glass.
n OPINION
BYOD: Legal Drill
AS BRING your own device (BYOD) reshapes the way organizations handle technology, how do we handle the uncertainty of legal liability and security concerns? The answer lies in considering
how BYOD changes the entire organization. Change is scary. More so when the impact of the change, including legal liabilities, are unclear and relatively untested.
The key is in how the technical, legal, and other uncertainties are handled. Get-ting it right requires constructive conver-sations with stakeholders and influencers.
Here are three key steps in holding pro-ductive conversations:
Embrace UncertaintyAcknowledge that BYOD introduces change. From allowing individuals their own devices, to shifting the way we pro-vide security, and adapting the legal and operational consequences. It’s natural to resist and fight change (at least on the part of security professionals).
However, the key to implementing BYOD in a way that increases security and reduces legal liability is to embrace the uncertainty. People don’t actually ex-pect you to know everything.
The legal counsel doesn’t have all the answers, either. The business people seeking BYOD aren’t entirely sure of the range of situations and conditions in which they’ll use it.
Take the lead and explain that uncer-tainty is okay. It sets up an opportunity to come together and collaborate; this is in contrast to obtuse declarative statements or enforcing draconian policies.
Bring Visibility to the ProcessEmbracing uncertainty leads to the op-portunity to gather the right people and bring visibility to the entire BYOD process. Visually map out how it works,
including elements like: Device selection, how people envision using the devices, what data and networks they need access to, and the like.
Expect this process to take time. Larger, more complex organizations take more time. Focus on bringing the right people together and allowing each the opportu-nity to contribute to the mapping. This provides the legal, security, and IT team, and everyone else involved the opportu-nity for an understanding of the process.
Once the approach is outlined, guide people through the welcomed changes in their processes. As they envision and describe the flow, that’s the time to ask questions about what needs to be protect-ed. This means everyone has a voice in explaining the benefits and potential risks of the changes.
Engage in CommunicationMessaging is one-way. And worse, mes-saging doesn’t always work (for a variety of reasons). Yet many teams still work to produce the “perfect” message only to succumb to the perfect message fallacy.
Relying on messaging to address the security challenges and legal liability con-cerns only increases the friction in com-munication that jeopardizes the effort.
Instead, of relying on messaging, hastily written e-mails, and other forms of “com-munication” that hamper conversation, get face-to-face and engage in dialog. Do this when possible. n
To ensure BYOD increases value while also increasing security requires different thinking and an approach that brings people together in a series of conversations.
Michael Santarcangelo is the catalyst smart leaders count on to take friction out of communication and amplify value. He is the author of Into the Breach.
MICHAEL SANTARCANGELO
JULY 2014 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 17
Chairman, Katara
Investments, envisions a small-is-big
philosophy to dominate the SME market
in India. By Yogesh Gupta
What business opportunities do you see in India for 2014 and beyond? AL THANI: Katara Invest-ments is a private invest-ment vehicle for me—as a member of the royal fam-ily of Qatar. It focuses on investments in the area of IT and IT-enabled servic-es through a holding com-pany called Vistas Global. The Opel Global acquisi-tion in India was done a year ago. Vistas will be the IT arm in India.
The opportunities we are targeting include the channels and enabling SMEs. We see the larg-est potential in the SME segment. It is not easy for foreign players to invest in India. But we are com-mitted to staying invested for a long time. The investment in the Opel Group ties back nicely with our global delivery business model.
But India has millions of SMEs and other vendors rely on channels to get to them. Are you exploring an indirect route?AL THANI: The big OEMs target a segment that re-quires a larger engagement at the grassroot level. Our core business is catering to SMEs as we have en-gineered the company to directly meet customer re-quirements on our own.
We offer customized so-lutions for SMBs (10 to 100 users), for the mid-market (100-500), and the upper mid-market catering to 500-plus user companies. We follow a vertical ap-proach in a regionalized manner. For example, the auto segment in Ma-harashtra, the textile/manufacturing verticals in south India, and so on. We work with industry as-sociations to stay close to customers and their pain points. We also have stra-tegic alliances with ven-dors like Dell, and IBM for large IT services project.
We have initiated a franchisee model for our execution model for de-livery and sales, which is different from what the competition does.
How will a franchisee model help Opel Global expand into Tier-II and Tier-III cities?AL THANI: It is not just a sub-contract to sub-contract route. A sig-nificant investment in terms of sales automation tools and other things for franchisee partners will be done by us. They will enable our solutions for end-customers through our ‘capex to opex’ value proposition to SMEs.
We are looking at micro entrepreneurs in Tier-II and Tier-III cities—where
His Excellency Sheikh Ahmed Bin Hamad
Al Thani,
ON RECORD n
18 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JULY 2014
Ph
oto
gra
ph
by
KA
PIL
SH
RO
FF
the largest piece of the target market lies—as franchisee partners. We will also align with small channel companies. Fran-chisee partners need to transform and understand that trading in enterprise IT is dead. These small customers are extremely important to us and for franchisee partners in the long term.
What’s Opel Global big differentiator?AL THANI: Today, Opel Global’s network reaches 674 districts in India with a four-hour response time. Out of the estimated US$22.4 billion that In-dian SMEs spend on IT, 60 percent emerges from
Tier-II and Tier-III cities. It is a colossally untapped market. How many com-panies sell IT and IT services to small custom-ers? These customers have seldom been of great interest to most OEMs or big SIs.
I believe that ‘small is big’. SMEs are our only customers and hence we give great attention to each customer. It is not that the big logos (big customers) don’t excite us, but the small ones be-cause that’s where we be-lieve there’s more growth.
The days of ‘one-size-fits-all’ is over in the enterprise IT space. Your comments.AL THANI: True. We define SMEs and the mid-market according to what they buy. We are a technology
aggregator with strong product teams that can bundle offerings by verti-cals. The roll-out of large projects by big IT service providers needs last-mile connectivity. Sometimes, these SLAs become un-manageable. For a year now, we’ve had a success-ful working model with huge traction. We have created stickiness with
franchisee partners. We don’t want a typical dis-tributor-reseller model, which you would agree, is on a downward slope.
IT projects are getting smaller in size, faster to execute, and more complex in nature. How do you plan to adapt to this trend?AL THANI: Project cycles are shortening and deal siz-es are getting smaller. Such deals fit perfectly in our GTM. Our business model is engaging with customers like large grocery stores that want mobility applica-tions or a mid-size mall in a Tier-II city exploring an NFC solution. These customers are demanding and bigger companies don’t usually address them.
Japanese OEMs invested in
Indian services companies Dimension Data & Micro Clinic. Are you acquiring Tier-II partner companies? AL THANI: Tier-1 IT com-panies do a majority of their business outside India. We are investing in Indian-based companies that cater to the Indian market. We believe that there’s a mammoth op-portunity in India. We want to address the In-dian market first and then augment our capabilities.
Within the next six months, we would like to acquire at least one com-pany, or a maximum of two, in India. We are keen to acquire smaller com-panies that do not carry legacy. Between the two
investments in India the current team size would be a 100 people. A single operating entity after a year would have 300 to 350 employees.
Do you see the ‘demand-supply’ gap widen due to an extensive push from technology vendors?AL THANI: There is an ob-vious gap in the industry, today, which we believe no one has addressed. More than 80 percent of IT business was trading and today that is over. It died very quickly and it’s on life support. Vendors resisted this change for a long time. Large OEMs going the same route is a validation of this (opex) model. We are optimistic about the cloud too.
It would have been dif-
ficult if we had legacy of box selling and we instructed our sales team to now sell SaaS solu-tions. We don’t carry that legacy. We are the fag-end of the fight with very little resistance from custom-ers, alliances, or vendors.
What are the short and long term goals of Katara Investments for India?AL THANI: India and Qa-tar have had historic relations. We expect the government to spur more change and create a fa-vourable environment for investments from foreign countries into India.
On a 12-month hori-zon, we want to acquire and enable channels as a
complete business. SMEs continue to be a sweet spot for us. More than 39 percent of Indian GDP comes from SMEs and an increased IT spend across the segment is on the cards.
After five years, we should be the only orga-nization with a delivery model from enterprise all the way up to the grassroots. It would be a strategic advantage over others from infra services to managed services to robust SaaS platform for our customers. Our India operations will then tie with our global blueprint. There is no quick win in large countries like India, which requires a different kind of mindset and time period. We are in India for the long run. n
SHEIKH AHMED BIN HAMAD AL THANI | ON RECORD n
Out of the US$22.4 billion Indian SMEs spend on IT, 60 percent comes from Tier-II and Tier-III cities. It is a colossally untapped market. And
Opel Global can reach 674 districts with a four-hour response time.
100-500 User organizations are the sweet spot
for Katara Investments in India.
JULY 2014 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 19
Ingenious
n COVER STORY | PREMIER 100
When an ingenious strategy not only saves a business, but leads it to growth, it is imperative that such companies and their leaders be awarded. Here are 2014’s 100 most ingenious Indian channel partners.
By Team ChannelWorld
The
20 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JULY 2014
NECESSITY, THEY say, is the mother of invention. That’s why, in tough times and during market recessions, companies fall back on ingenuity to see themselves through that phase. If this is true
worldwide, it’s even more true among Indian businesses, especially channel partners.
Survival is one thing, growth is another. When a strat-egy or a tactic not only saves a business, but leads to growth, it is indeed time to reward and recognize those companies and their leaders and award them for their ability survive and prosper during tough times.
This year’s theme, The Ingenious 100, recognized those who know what it is like to chase the next level of growth in an environment of doubt. They turned to new technologies, renovated existing ones, and also discovered new geographies, from which they wrested new profits for their businesses. Channel organizations across the country were invited to nominate themselves. About 376 nominations were received from partners
The Winners 24 They beat recessionary headwinds. They showed ingenuity in the face of adversity. They grew when all about them were
giving up. They are the Premier 100.
The Awards Ceremony 124 The ChannelWorld Premier 100 Event, held in Pune, was an extravaganza worthy of India’s top channel partners. Here’s
what you missed.
The Special Award Winners 136 Winners are not built equally, some are more special than the rest. We present the Special Award Winners; channel
partners who won coveted awards for their work in security, datacenter, cloud, and storage. Plus, the hall of famers.
JULY 2014 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 21
22 CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 1, 2009
n COVER STORY | PREMIER 100
spanning the length and the breadth of India.
This year’s Premier 100 award winners, the Ingenious 100, were evaluated on key parameters such as their company’s growth (rev-enue) over the last two fiscals, their ingenious strategy, their reach, and their technology portfolio. Vari-able weightages were applied to the nomination data received, based on the importance of these parameters in the overall equation. The weight-ages were tabulated and the scores calculated to see how the nomina-tions stacked up against each other in the race to the top 100.
Partners who showcased the most ingenious strategies that led to profitable growth in last fiscal were adjudged part of the Premier 100. Most of the channel organizations, interestingly, had a presence, small or big, in mega trend technology domains such as mobility, big data, analytics, cloud, social media, and collaboration.
An interesting observation from the Premier 100 winner list this year was the substantial increase in the geographical spread of the winners. When the Premier 100 awards com-menced in 2009, winners spanned across 10 cities, mainly the metros and Tier-I cities. But six years down the line, today’s Premier 100 winners hail from across 21 cities including Tier-II cities such as Indore, Cochin, Sangli, Kanpur, Coimbatore, Ludhiana, and Ahmedabad, amongst others. It was also noted that cumulatively, the total amout of enterprise business clocked by the 100 winners over the last fiscal exceeded Rs 6,200 crore.
This year’s edition also witnessed a small rise in the number of wom-en entrepreneur winners.
ChannelWorld Premier 100: By the Numbers
Top 5 Target Verticals of This Year’s Winners
Total amount of enterprise business clocked:
The ChannelWorld Premier 100 is a mind-boggling exercise in selecting some of India’s top channel partners. We break down the numbers for you.
Number of Nominations:376
Rs 6,200 Crore
22 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JULY 2014
Manufacturing
91%
IT/ITeS
85%
BFSI
68%
Healthcare/Pharma/Bio-Tech
67%
Education/Non-profit
64%
The ChannelWorld Premier100 event gathered some of India’s brightest minds and 100 of the country’s most ingenious channel partners. For event highlights visit: www.premier100.in
SNAPSHOTS: PREMIER100 2014
JANUARY 1, 2009 CHANNELWORLD 23
4G Identity Solutions ........................................................................................24Aashna Cloudtech .............................................................................................25Accel Frontline ...................................................................................................26Acma Computers ..............................................................................................27Acme Digitek Solutions .....................................................................................28 ACPL Systems .................................................................................................. 29Adit Microsys ..................................................................................................... 30Albion Infotel ........................................................................................................31Allied Digital Services .......................................................................................32Archon Consulting Systems ............................................................................33Aryan Computers & Peripherals ..................................................................... 34Ashtech Infotech ...............................................................................................35B4B IT Solutions ...............................................................................................36Binary Systems ..................................................................................................37Bodhtree Consulting .........................................................................................38C. I. Infotech .......................................................................................................39Cache Peripherals ............................................................................................ 40CCS Computers ..................................................................................................41CDP India ............................................................................................................42Central Data Systems ....................................................................................... 43 Compusoft .......................................................................................................... 44Computers Network and Telecom India ....................................................... 45D M Systems ..................................................................................................... 46Datasoft Network Solutions ...........................................................................47Dev Information Technology ...........................................................................48Dhanush Infosol ................................................................................................ 49Dynacons Systems & Solutions .................................................................... 50E-Connect Solutions ..........................................................................................51Emicro Data Technologies ...............................................................................52Esconet Technologies ......................................................................................53Essenvision Software ...................................................................................... 54Esteem Infotech ................................................................................................ 55Foetron ................................................................................................................ 56Fore Solutions ....................................................................................................57Fortune Grecells ................................................................................................58Future Netwings Solutions ............................................................................. 59Futurenet Technologies ................................................................................... 60Galaxy Office Automation ................................................................................ 61GT Enterprises ....................................................................................................62Immunity Networks & Technologies ..............................................................63Infinite Technologies......................................................................................... 64Infobahn Technical Solutions .......................................................................... 65Infotech Computers & Communications ....................................................... 66Innovative Telecom & Softwares ....................................................................67INSIGHT Business Machines ..........................................................................68Intensity Global Technologies ........................................................................ 69InterCAD Systems .............................................................................................70Ishan Group ..........................................................................................................71Jainam Technologies ........................................................................................72Konnet Solutions ...............................................................................................73
Magic Systems ................................................................................................... 74Medley Marketing ..............................................................................................75Megahertz Infotech ............................................................................................76Meridian Infotech ..............................................................................................77Meta Infotech .....................................................................................................78Microlink Solutions ...........................................................................................79MKT Softwares ................................................................................................. 80MM9 Information Technologies ........................................................................81Nahar Integrated System Services .................................................................82Netcon Technologies .........................................................................................83NetSpider ........................................................................................................... 84Novo Systems ....................................................................................................85One Network .......................................................................................................86Orient Technologies ..........................................................................................87Parth TechoComm Solutions ...........................................................................88Peak XV Networks .............................................................................................89Pentacle IT Solutions ........................................................................................ 90Pentagon System And Services ..................................................................... 91QuantM ................................................................................................................92Questa Software Systems ...............................................................................93Raksha Technologies ...................................................................................... 94Regenersis India ............................................................................................... 95Rubik Infotech ................................................................................................... 96Sara Infoway ITES ..............................................................................................97Secant Technologies ........................................................................................98Secure Network Solutions ............................................................................... 99Shell Networks & Solutions ...........................................................................100Shro Systems ....................................................................................................101Silver Touch Technologies .............................................................................102Sterling Infoways .............................................................................................103Sunfire Technologies ......................................................................................104Swan Solutions & Services ............................................................................105 Syndrome Technologies ................................................................................106Taashee Linux Services .................................................................................. 107Targus Technologies ....................................................................................... 108Team Computers .............................................................................................109Techniche Consulting Services ......................................................................110Total Presentation Devices .............................................................................. 111Trident Information Systems ........................................................................... 112Twenty Two By 7 Solutions ............................................................................. 113Unified Data-Tech Solutions ........................................................................... 114Value Point Systems ........................................................................................ 115Vcentric Technologies ..................................................................................... 116VDA Infosolutions ............................................................................................ 117Veeras Infotek ................................................................................................... 118Veetrag Computers ........................................................................................... 119Veltronics India ................................................................................................ 120Versatile Infosecurity ....................................................................................... 121Vitage Systems Private .................................................................................. 122Wysetek Systems Technologists ................................................................. 123
Winners By Company
JULY 2014 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 23
CHOOSING THE road less traveled requires courage and vision. That’s exactly what Hyderabad-based 4G
Identity Solutions showed when it went off the beaten path and pushed innovative products and suites in unfamiliar spheres.
One of the very few players in the biometrics space in the country, it dared to traverse through the budding e-governance domain and bagged projects in public service delivery infrastructure, public distribution system, pensions, social welfare schemes, ePassport,
eVisa, immigration and border control, voter ID and national ID.
This strong capability of handling large-scale identity management projects has done good things for 4G Identity. And it has been making profits by preventing leakages in the delivery of government welfare services. Two birds with one stone.
4G Identity also courageously took solutions outside India and established new markets in Africa and Middle-East, successfully overcoming the challenges that came its way.
IngeniousStrategy
It pushed innovation in e-governance and in projects like public service delivery infrastructure, public distribution system, immigration, and border control.
Dr. Sreeni TripuraneniChairman and CEO
{Headquartered Hyderabad
Branches 4
Employees 800
Key Executive Dr. Lakshmi Tripuraneni, Managing Director
Key Principals DigitalPersona, HP, Oracle, CMITech, Morpho and Credence ID
THE REAL challenge in craft-ing strategies lies in detecting subtle discontinuities that may undermine a business’ future.
And for overcoming this, just a sharp presence of mind is needed.
The strategies that worked for Pune-based Aashna Coudtech in the last fiscal year pivoted on three pillars of growth: International growth, the ad-dition of more cloud-based products, and the addition of a hybrid model for services delivery.
With a vision of driving ballistic growth greater than that of the indus-try—25 percent—Aashna used a strat-
egy of cross-selling with additional cloud-based solutions.
The company augmented its profes-sional services revenues by including support services under the umbrella professional services. These profes-sional services were efficiently deliv-ered through the company’s offshore center in Pune, but also with some investments on onsite resources for hybrid model offerings.
With a total of 95 employees, Aas-hna offers leading enterprise applica-tions on cloud which pits it against some of the biggest names in IT.
IngeniousStrategy
It focused on international expansion. It also added more cloud-based products, and created a hybrid model of professional service delivery.
WINSTON CHURCHILL said, “However beautiful the strategy, you should oc-casionally look at the
results.” Accel Frontline, a Chennai-based solution provider, used a result-oriented strategy and invested in a subsidiary in Singapore, specifically for its IT security practice.
Accel Frontline used three strate-gies to ensure growth: It protected and grew its established business in the areas of infrastructure management services and system integration. It increased sales focus on areas like re-
mote infrastructure management. And it invested in emerging businesses like IT security services and mobility.
One of the dynamic moves of Accel Frontline made was to invest in emerging businesses in terms of resources and skill development. This strategy helped the company get in deeper and created mnore engagement with its enterprise clients, thereby opening up cross-selling opportunities.
A growth in revenues over the last year proves that these strategies have yielded definitive results.
IngeniousStrategy
The company invested in setting up a subsidiary at Singapore specifically for IT security practices.
Maqbool HassanPresident and COO
{Headquartered Chennai
Branches 40
Employees 2,960
Key Executive N. R. Panicker, Chairman and CEO
Key Principals Oracle, IBM, HP, Cisco, Extreme, Hitachi Data Systems, NetApp, Symantec, Red Hat, EMC, VMware
THE ROAD to success, for Mum-bai-based Acma Computers, is its customer-centric approach and the commitment to deliver
what it promises. Acma already had a very strong
presence in remote infrastructure managed services business, and, this fiscal, it decided to concentrate on expanding its boundaries to two new geographies—Ras Al Khaimah, UAE; and Brisbane, Australia.
This strategy has definitely led to a boost in the growth of its business activities. In terms of the number of
devices added, Acma clocked a growth of approximately 65 percent, and over-all, grew by 55 percent compared to the last year.
Discovering new geographies has helped the company add more devices under the managed services domain and also provide a much better bot-tom line than what is attained with Indian clients.
Currently, it has 150-plus engineers. With the business model getting more and more aligned towards services, it plans to increase its workforce by around 20 percent by end of the year.
IngeniousStrategy
The company decided to go international and explore destinations that would benefit it in terms of new business opportunities.
A GOOD BUSINESS is a combination of persistence, perfection, patience and prioritization. Displaying
these traits is Lucknow-based Acme Digitek as it identified its strengths and weaknesses in order to position itself better in the market.
It developed an ERP application, aDAMS (Acme Development Authority Management System), for development authorities. The application allows for the complete automation in the functioning of urban development processes.
Acme Digitek evaluated several
cloud offerings from different vendors on IaaS, PaaS, private and public cloud and then decided to host it on Windows Azure Cloud, on which it has been successfully running the application for over one year.
It also invested in building several other verticals such as IP video surveillance on wireless, software video conferencing, android tabs, POS devices, security systems and BMS. The company has managed to succeed in doing a substantial amount of business in each of these areas.
IngeniousStrategy
It developed an ERP application for development authorities. It also evaluated several cloud offerings for different vendors.
Ajit MittalManaging Director
{Headquartered Lucknow
Branches 8
Employees 95
Key Executives Amit Srivastava, Director ; P.K. Kulshrestha, Director-HR and Customer Relations
WITH THE vision of building customer relationships and not just closing sales, ACPL Systems, a Delhi-based
niche security solution provider, did something extraordinary: It acquired a startup. This helped the company build its services around data security and data loss prevention (DLP).
ACPL empowered its customers with deep engagement plans by strengthen-ing its services and consulting. The company realized the need to tweak its sales strategy and shifted its focus from product selling to a more consultation-
and-solution approach. Since it wanted to increase its involvement with the business side of IT, it used to straight-forward mantra: Work more closely with existing customers rather than in-vest resources in adding new accounts. The better part of last year’s revenue came from its existing customer base.
The strategy worked as customers began to feel the benefits of continued their relationship with the company. ACPL used in-house capabilities and its knowledge base to build customer rela-tions and increase business at the same time, and that is a winning formula.
IngeniousStrategy
It acquired a startup because it wanted to build its services around data security and data loss prevention.
Vishal Bindra CEO
Headquartered Gurgaon
Branches 4
Employees 75
Key Executives Sukhpal Singh Sandhu, Business Head, Jitender Singh, Head Finance
AHMEDABAD-BASED ADIT Mi-crosys dedicated itself to de-veloping effective outsourcing partnerships with its clients.
The company offers a wide range of services including onsite con-sulting and development, offshore software development, product life-cycle management application de-velopment, mobile consulting, Web design, license optimization and da-tabase management services.
Playing to its strengths worked pretty well for Adit Microsys; the proof is the way in which it
increased its revenues. It saw sig-nificant growth in two areas—its Oracle business for the Gujarat gov-ernment, and its business working on integrated projects in social sec-tors like health.
The solution provider helps cli-ents rapidly re-engineer their busi-ness processes and stay flexible so that it can change in line with a volatile environment. Adit Micro-sys also guides its customers and presents them with diverse growth opportunities for expanding into uncharted territories.
IngeniousStrategy
It saw significant growth in two areas—its Oracle business for the Gujarat government, and working on integrated projects in social sectors.
TO DELIVER products and ser-vice on time and to meet cus-tomer expectations is an im-portant gauge against which
a company is assessed. It’s also gotten harder to do as customers become more demanding. Dedica-tion to provision and quality gives rise to corporate reliability and, in the end, is how good companies be-come great.
Albion Infotel has always known that a good business is judged by its ability to deliver. Thus, the Delhi-based organization started concen-
trating on enterprise customers in the United Kingdom, the United States, and, of course, India, using a cloud platform and managed servic-es. This helped the company reduce costs and open itself to new markets.
The rationale behind this initiative is to exploit the platform which the company created for customer busi-nesses and to deal with SME clients.
In addition to its expertise at work-ing with leading technologies and software applications, Albion Infotel provides customized services that staunchly follow industry standards.
IngeniousStrategy
It started concentrating on enterprise customers for cloud computing and managed services platform, in locations like UK, USA and India.
Sanjeev GuptaChairman and Managing Director
{Headquartered New Delhi
Branches 4
Employees 33
Key Executives Ravinder Vaswan, CTO and President; Atul Tiwari, VP-International Business
MUMBAI-BASED ALLIED Digital Services built ADiTaaS, an in-house de-veloped tools platform, to
add value to its customer services. To sustain technological growth,
the solution provider strategically pushed itself hard into the area of cloud computing. ADiTaaS is built on the company’s proprietary integrated service delivery framework, and its key objective is to bring standardized processes, comprehensive asset controls, strong-, adaptive-, and integration-friendly architectures, rapidly
configurable and customizable layouts and workflows in a single ‘IT Service-in-a-Box’. For many customers, that’s exactly the sort of offering they are looking for.
This will considerably reduce the organization’s IT management costs. Currently, ADiTaaS is supporting one lakh concurrent users. The company also became the consulting partner for Amazon Web Services.
Allied Digital Services helps clients overcome challenging environments by helping them make better IT decisions.
IngeniousStrategy
It focused on customer service and strategically pushed itself in the cloud computing domain. It also became the consulting partner for Amazon Web Services.
Paresh ShahGlobal CEO
{Headquartered Mumbai
Employees 3,000
Key Executive Sanjiv Patki, COO
Key Principals HP, Huawei, Cisco, Amazon Web Services, Verint, Lenovo, Microsoft
A CLEAR VISION, backed by concrete plans, is pretty much a fool-proof way to achieve growth. It definitely
worked for Bangalore-based Archon Consulting Systems, when it moved its focus from a vendor-product-centric go-to-market (GTM) strategy to a completely account-centric and customers-first GTM.
It also increased focus on pitching solutions around virtualization, and on client computing solutions. Archon Consulting Systems also started sell-ing packaged solutions.
The effort of investing in market research and working closely with its principals to identify early adopters of data analytics, resulted in the com-pany being part of the Hadoop cluster in two customer locations.
Archon Consulting Systems made a significant investment in skilling and certifying its sales, pre-sales, and ser-vices team to help them understand and better pitch various back-up technologies, which typically involve long sales cycles. With this, it proved that long sales cycles do not equal to poor results.
IngeniousStrategy
It focused on an account-centric and customer-first go-to-market strategy. It also emphasized on virtualization and client computing solutions, and started selling packaged solutions.
Sachin S. RaoManaging Director and CEO
{Headquartered Bangalore
Branches 1
Employees 25
Key Executives Ramanujam S., Director; Prakash R., Director
Key Principals HP, VMware, Symantec, Microsoft, Cisco, NetApp, Hitachi Data Systems
A GOOD BUSINESS leader envi-sions something, articulates it, passionately owns it, and relentlessly drives it to comple-
tion. Sandeep Jain, partner at Aryan Computers & Peripherals, walked on the same path and succeeded in transforming the company from a box-pusher to a complete solution provider.
Kanpur-based solution provider, Aryan Computers & Peripherals fo-cused more on software and ITeS and collaborated with an IBM cloud offer-ing, SoftLayer. The company strength-ened its relationship with a key ven-
dor, which allowed it to offer cloud services to its customers, a move that many of its peers had not thought of.
It also made a significant investment in rebranding itself and on social market-ing through TSL, a Pune-based company, a strategy that increased its turnover.
With the assurance of a sustained top and bottom line growth, Aryan Computers & Peripherals took these initiatives that helped the company witness a quantum leap in busi-ness, something that would not have been possible through conventional growth strategies.
IngeniousStrategy
It focused on domains like software and ITeS. It also collaborated with IBM’s cloud offering, SoftLayer.
DELIVERING PRODUCTS and services while focusing on integrating the same with existing technolo-
gies and providing the required automation to customers to help them achieve their business objec-tives, has definitely worked for Mumbai-based solution provider Ashtech Infotech.
With the ability to see opportu-nities where others don’t, Ashtech’s major growth came from an in-creased focus on professional ser-vices, infrastructure management
services, datacenter consulting and build services. In terms of invest-ing in Oracle products and solu-tions, the company has some major wins. Besides, it also recruited smart personnel with MBAs.
The company went against con-ventional wisdom and used micro-management as a strategy, and this helped it to grow its market share in small and medium businesses. It resulted in revenue f low from clients in multiple sectors and the company grew by 32 percent in the last fiscal.
IngeniousStrategy
It shifted its focus towards professional services, infrastructure management services, datacenter consulting and build services.
Saurin ShahManaging Director
{Headquartered
Mumbai
Employees 263
Key Executives Vinod Menon, JMD and CTO; B.
Shankar, Director
Key Principals Oracle, HP, IBM, EMC, Hitachi
Data Systems, NetApp, VMware, Microsoft, Dell, Cisco, Lenovo
IF ONE wants to stand out, one has to be willing to take the risk of doing things differently. B4B IT Solutions knew this
well and thus, strategically positioned itself as a system integrator in the structured cabling industry and acquired profitable margins.
Growing at a rate of 33 percent, the renewable energy sector is one of the fastest growing sectors in India. B4B IT Solutions approached the top key consumer players with the support of its vendor partner. As a result
of this strategy, it managed to successfully get a POC and product evaluation done by the Greenko Group from Hyderabad.
It deployed its best engineers to target the market and applied best industry practices, because of which, it was able to reap tangible benefits and reduce operational costs.
With a proven track record in providing IT solutions and services, B4B IT Solutions has the right set of people, skills, solutions and technologies to meet the individual needs of its clients.
IngeniousStrategy
It strategically positioned itself as a system integrator and approached the top players in the renewable energy sector.
Suresh Prasad SinghCEO and Co-founder
{Headquartered Hyderabad
Branches 4
Employees 23
Key Executives Brajesh Kumar Singh, Director; Hari Shankar PD Singh, Head Technical
WE ALL know that a man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of
the shore. Bangalore-based solution provider, Binary Systems, did that when it waded deeper into existing accounts with a major focus on green IT, saving power and saving space.
Started in 1986 as an elite partner for Wipro, the company has today moved out of its traditional cabling business, and has shifted focus to consulting and services. This saved a lot of costs and manpower.
By ensuring its customer got what they wanted, Binary Systems managed to bag more business. It made a strong move towards green IT and has also developed better internal expertise to back its efforts. Today, Binary Systems is reaching a level where it no more falls back on its vendors for any kind for post-sales su pport.
With an educated team, opportunities have opened up for the company to bag opportunities that it didn’t have earlier.
IngeniousStrategy
It focused on existing accounts, green IT and consulting services.
GROWTH IS never by mere chance; it is the result of forc-es working together. Bodhtree Consulting, a Hyderabad-
based global IT consulting and prod-uct engineering services provider, has maintained a consistent YoY growth by never shying away from competi-tion and never leaving its business up to chance.
Bodhtree Consulting invested in Singapore operations to land better business opportunities and within six months, the company was able to access multiple accounts in cloud com-
puting, analytics, and the integration space. Targeting new vertical domains like healthcare and life sciences, and the government, helped augmented its growth in the current fiscal year.
The solution provider believed that better skills sets on its part will always result in better solutions to customers, and that’s why it invested nearly Rs 2 crore in people, processes, and IP solutions.
Bringing in the right global leaders and banking on internal domain con-sultants, Bodhtree overcame its initial challenges regarding target areas.
IngeniousStrategy
It invested in Singapore operations and in untapped markets to secure more business. It also started new vertical domains like healthcare and life sciences.
Rama KrishnaSVP-Global Sales
{Headquartered Hyderabad
Branches 8
Employees 850
Key Executives Pal Natarajan, CEO; Kiran Kumar Naik, Head-India Sales
C.I. INFOTECH’S winning strat-egy was to increase its focus on service projects which helped it increase its bottom
line by almost 40 percent. C.I. Infotech majorly started
working on cloud services after partnering with Efficloud, a brand initiative by HP. It closed one of the biggest deals for Efficloud with an MNC where the company’s complete retail application was moved from an in-house datacenter to a cloud.
Though it’s headquartered in New Delhi, C.I. Infotech enjoys a
nationwide footprint. The spirit of the organization is embedded in its principles of customer-centric approach, a fixation for quality, and its rich partnerships.
It also created extensive reporting processes for its sales team and followed it up with regular and periodic monitoring.
Currently, it has started working more closely with OEMs to ensure maximum profits and growth in this financial year. This has helped them in directly getting bottom line revenues from new clients.
IngeniousStrategy
It started working on cloud services to open up new business opportunities. It also increased its focus on bottom line through service projects.
Vineet Singh PanwarVice President-Sales and Operations
Virtualization, Facility Management/Helpdesk, Printers and managed print
services, Storage
C.I. Infotech
JULY 2014 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 39
HYDERABAD-BASED CACHE Peripherals built a strategy to implement and maintain
a complete range of customer network infrastructure which includes core switching, routing, WAN acceleration, software defined networks, campus-wide networking, campus-wide wireless connectivity, and complete network security.
At the same time, the company also created new business opportunities at within its existing customer base and won over 10 sizable deals—along with
the confidence and the loyalty of its customers.
Cache Peripherals’ magic formula didn’t end there. Cache Peripherals also collaborated with other large system integrators to capitalize on mutual strengths and work on multi-location projects. According to the company’s executives, acquiring and retaining a certified support team was the most crucial challenge for the company. It put employee satisfaction as a priority and moved to a state-of-the-art office to keep up the motivation.
IngeniousStrategy
It focused on implementing and maintaining complete network infrastructure. It extracted newer business opportunities from its existing customer base.
WHEREVER THERE is risk, there lurks opportunity, and wherever there is op-portunity, there lurks risk.
The two are inseparable. That didn’t stop Delhi-based CCS Computers from taking the risk of expanding its busi-ness by adding a new vertical: Infor-mation security solution.
The company specifically focused on the banking segment and has suc-cessfully executed many projects in the above domains in the last fiscal.
It extended its services related to sales and consulting, auditing, and
VA/PT, giving its customers a single point of contact, which resulted in steady flow of orders from public sec-tor companies and other referral busi-ness. CCS also strengthened its Mum-bai and Bangalore operations to better focus on banking.
The company invested in manpower, skill enhancement, and infrastructure, which has definitely resulted in tangible benefits in terms of new projects. CCS stepped away from small businesses like dealing in PCs and laptops and focused more on the enterprise segment.
IngeniousStrategy
The company shifted its focus to information security assurance services and paid attention to its banking segment.
Key Principals Dell, Hitachi Data Systems, HP, IBM, Fujitsu, EMC, Cisco, APC, Emerson, Red Hat, Oracle, Microsoft, Symantec, Quest Software, CA Technologies, Citrix, VMware, Cyberoam, Websense, Array Networks, WatchGuard
CCS Computers
JULY 2014 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 41
HALL OF FAMEHALL OF FAME
WITH THE vision to build expertise around niche, high-value solutions in the finance sector,
CDP India enriched its portfolio by expanding its product line. It offered customized products for a large swathe of industries and launched two new software products (using a SaaS model) inspired from cloud computing—1MarketView and 1ConsoleView.
Revisiting its existing products and services and providing Free Trade Warehousing Zone (FTWZ) facilities were the key contributors
to the organization’s profit growth. FTWZ helped the company save costs regarding customers and facilitate large enterprise orders. With this on board, CDP can now independently fulfill overseas commitments.
Transforming an internal warehouse into a quality check center helped it improve its efficiency. This also helped in reducing its implementation cycle time and servicing machines. The company’s focus is to become a complete end-to-end solution provider along with becoming a one-stop shop for any customer.
IngeniousStrategy
It expanded its product line and rolled out two new software products in the market. It also worked on providing Free Trade Warehousing Zone facilities.
Nikesh SakariaManaging Director
{Headquartered Mumbai
Branches 5
Employees 110
Key Executives Ankit Desai, Director; Zameer Syed, Director
WITHOUT CHANGE, there is no innovation, no creativ-ity and no incentive for improvement. Those who
initiate change have an opportunity to fare better. That’s why Bangalore-based Central Data Systems under-went the painstaking process of doing market research to expand its portfolio and incorporate more relevant prod-ucts and solutions.
Central Data Systems had a two-pronged strategy. It expanded the scope of its offerings, and also added other advanced service
offerings for customers. Second, it acquired three new networking specializations—borderless, visualization and collaboration.
At the same time, Central Data Sys-tems ensured it had a greater impact on its customers by engaging more deeply with them. And the company still found the time to add new cus-tomers for higher profitability.
Finally, it make huge investments on skills enhancement, certification and process optimization within the organization, which provided it with greater productivity per person.
IngeniousStrategy
It expanded the scope of its engagement with customers by following a breadth and depth approach. It also focus on skills enhancement and process optimization.
Kota SubramanyaDirector
{Headquartered Bangalore
Branches 4
Employees 65
Key Executive Suresh H.R., Director
Key Principals Cisco, APC, Schneider, HP, Citrix, VMware, EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, Microsoft
A SLOWDOWN IS a great time to change course and innovate. Thane-based Compusoft used this insight and profited.
Last fiscal, during a slowdown in the market, customer payments became irregular. The company realized this condition and analyzed its internal strengths and opportunities that could be used to overcome the situation.
Compusoft decided to add new product technologies to its basket and started advising its customers on security solutions from Symantec and McAfee. With cloud technologies
getting more and more mainstream, it also focused on cloud services for Microsoft. The company plans to add more cloud solutions to its kitty in the future.
The solution provider identified its lack of activity in the interna-tional market and decided to invest in resources this fiscal so as to enter certain targeted market in the fol-lowing years.
Compusoft believes in being com-petent and resourceful, making it one of the most dynamic and highly-adapt-able solution providers in the market.
IngeniousStrategy
It analyzed its strengths and opportunities and decided to focus on security solutions from Symantec and McAfee.
USING BOTH capex and opex models, Computers Network & Telecom created a customer engagement model, which it
believes, will guarantee growth oppor-tunities for a minimum of five years from now.
The company formed a hardcore pre-sales team that was an expert on emerging technologies and was responsible for gathering information on the current IT infrastructure situation of its customers along with their pain points. Computers Network &
Telecom expanded its solution portfolio to include new technologies like surveillance, cloud computing, and enterprise mobility. It also joined hands with independent software vendors for bundled offerings like IPBX Server-20/50/100 seats solution and for mailing solutions for 100, 200 and 500 users on different platforms.
The company also invested in setting up a demo/PoC center consisting hardware, trainers and certified skilled resources who could provide the customer with a live picture of a proposed solution.
IngeniousStrategy
It formed a pre-sales team which was well-versed in emerging technologies. It also set up a PoC center that gives customers a first-hand feel of its solutions.
Datacenter solutions, Mobility, UC/AV/Collaboration, Virtualization, BI
and analytics, Managed services, Facility Management/Helpdesk,
Printers and managed print services, Storage
Computers Network & TelecomSPECIAL AWARD
CLOUD
JULY 2014 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 45
SUCCESS WORKS in a cycle—growth and contraction, balancing and unbalancing—all while
you’re encountering hurdles. Delhi-based D M Systems is one of the very few security partners that was able to overcome those hurdles by focusing on information data security that works with almost all leading security OEMs.
D M Systems use to focus primarily on the private sector but when it saw a market slowdown, it shifted its focus to the government sector last year. It also
compensated its sales by upgrading its existing customer base with either replaced technology or products.
The solution provider upgraded its sales team and informed the customers about its centrally-managed solutions for security, virtualization, DLP and server protection.
Another thing that added to the success of this company is that when everyone was concentrating on services maintenance, D M Systems decided to go for solutions. This foresight helped it gain value.
IngeniousStrategy
It started focusing on the government sector due to a slowdown in the private sector. It also upgraded its existing customer base.
BY EXPECTING the best, pre-paring for the worst, and capitalizing on opportuni-ties, a leader can achieve
profitable growth. Mumbai-based Datasoft Network Solutions real-ized the importance of the same and collaborated with storage gi-ants NetApp and EMC to improve its margins.
Since profitability is always an issue in the IT hardware industry, it understood the great demand for storage and made its presence felt in that domain. The strength of its technical team allows it
to meet new customers, address their pain points, and implement the right solutions.
The company’s branches in Pune and Ahmedabad gathered more busi-ness opportunities from their clients who were sourcing products from other suppliers in those regions.
An investment was made in IBM entry-level storage which ulti-mately resulted in a good ROI. Its management also constantly moti-vates its sales and services teams. Presently, SMBs and mid-markets contribute to over 60 percent of the company’s revenues.
IngeniousStrategy
It foresaw the increasing demand for storage technology and tied up with NetApp and EMC to improve its margins.
Key Technologies Security,, Networking, Servers, Cloud, Datacenter, Enterprise applications, Mobility, UC/AV/Collaboration, Virtualization, BI and analytics, Managed services, Facility management/Helpdesk, Printers and managed print services, Storage
Datasoft Network Solutions
JULY 2014 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 47
DEV INFORMATION Technol-ogy identified new business opportunities in new mar-kets, partnered with other
businesses, found new ways to expand its reach to existing markets, products and services, and then tried to exploit these opportunities to bring in more revenue for the company.
With national branches in Raj-asthan, Maharashtra, and Madhya Pradesh, and international ones in des-tinations like Australia, New Zealand, West Indies, the UK, the USA, and Canada, this Ahmedabad-based com-
pany has widely expanded its man-aged information technology services and solutions.
It also broadened its managed ser-vices and cloud offerings portfolio with the acquisition of a North-Ameri-can company.
The solution provider standard-ized its e-governance solution, which resulted in the reduction of its govern-ment clients’ overall costs.
The company also helped in ef-ficiently executing projects with its 17-years of experience in the domain of e-governance.
IngeniousStrategy
It went out to new locations and identified better business opportunities. It also standardized its e-governance solution to reduce overall costs.
Pranav PandyaFounder Director and Chairman
{Headquartered Ahmedabad
Branches 16
Employees 952
Key Executives Jaimin Shah, Managing Director; Vishal Vasu, Director and CTO
Key Technologies Cloud computing, Virtualization, BI and analytics, Managed services, Facility Management/Helpdesk, Printers and managed print services, Storage
Dev Information Technology
48 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JULY 2014
STARTED AS a solution provid-er, Bangalore-based Dhanush Infosol has come a long way. From a one-man company,
the organization today boasts of an employee count of over 45.
Dhanush Infosol’s vision is backed by a strategy of globalization, conver-gence, and diversification. Along with IT, it provides a platform for cus-tomer care and believes in finding its own success with the customers’.
Dhanush Infosol had an idea of pro-viding a virtual CIO service to small and medium businesses within its
customer base, and it strategized and mapped its resources accordingly. During the slowdown, Dhanush Info-sol took its vCIO and IMS initiatives to international markets, and signed joint ventures with companies in Sau-di Arabia, Australia and Singapore.
It also discovered new market segments like manufacturing, phar-ma and health care, retail, BFSI and renewable energy. To prevent any problems during implementation, Dhanush Infosol makes sure it tests its solutions by simulating the cli-ent environment.
IngeniousStrategy
It introduced virtual CIO service and took it and IMS to new geographic markets and new verticals.
CONFORMITY IS known as the jailor of freedom and the enemy of growth. With this thought mind, Mum-
bai-based solution provider, Dyna-cons Systems & Solutions, broad-ened its horizons in services. To ease IT infrastructure management, it built datacenters that included IT and non-IT components, and man-aged IT services.
The company undertook several BFSI and pharmaceutical datacenter projects including for State Bank of India, Bank of India, Central Bank of India, CGG and Glenmark Phar-
maceuticals. It also won datacenter managed services business deals for Maharashtra State Co-operative Bank against a multi-company pitch which included companies like Wipro and Trimax.
The solution provider, last year, focused on the growth of its system integration and managed services business that helped the company bag huge SI and services projects.
Dynacons Systems & Solutions also invested in training and certifications of its manpower and continuously came up with strategies for compe-tency and technology enhancement.
IngeniousStrategy
It widened its presence in services. It built datacenters that included IT and non-IT components and managed IT services to ease infrastructure management.
Parag J. DalalExecutive Director
{Headquartered Mumbai
Branches 10
Employees 518
Key Executives Shirish Anjaria, CMD; Dharmesh S. Anjaria, Executive Director
DON’T LET where you start dictate where you end. That piece of wisdom is exempli-fied by E-Connect Solutions,
an Udaipur-based system integrator that went beyond not only the bounds of its city, but also of India in search of business.
The company opened an overseas unit, E-Connect Solutions FZC in Sharjah, UAE, to address the require-ments of system integration in the Gulf. This helped the company extend its reach to new domains. It bagged orders worth $1 million (about Rs 590
lakh) from two prestigious customers in the Gulf.
An investment of approximately 150,000 AED (about Rs 24 lakh) in ca-pex was made for opening E-Connect Solutions in the FZC unit. A good employee base lent solidity to the or-ganization, which helped it improve its bottom line.
It also went sub-contracting with large partners like IL&FS and KPIT Technologies to reach new markets within the country with less financial requirements, thereby rotating work-ing capital multiple times.
IngeniousStrategy
It opened an overseas unit to address system integration requirements. It also sub-contracted with larger partners within the country to reach new markets.
LEADERS ESTABLISH a vision for the future and set a strat-egy for getting there; they cause change. They motivate
and inspire others to go in the right direction. One of such visionaries is Sanjiv Khushu, director of Delhi-based Emicro Data Technologies.
Emicro Data Technologies brought on board skilled manpower to ex-plore new geographical areas such as Africa, US and Dubai. Owing to its skill-based approach, the solution provider is quickly growing in the markets of Africa and SAARC.
After sensing its potential, the company made huge investments in the field of cloud computing, especially in workload manage-ment. It also standardized its cloud offerings, providing custom-ers with a f lexible and automated service offering.
Emicro Data Technologies has al-ways believed in the importance of understanding a business issue first and then finding a solution, which, more often than not, is based on its knowledge of business operations and its exceptional IT skills.
IngeniousStrategy
It adopted virtualization and cloud computing, providing customers with flexible and automated service offerings.
Sanjiv KhushuCEO and Director
{Headquartered New Delhi
Employees 25
Key Executives Vineet Mittal, Director; Tarun Bhateja, SBU Head
Key Principals NetApp, Citrix, IBM, Hitachi Data Systems, Microsoft, EMC
A CUSTOMER-CENTRIC BUSINESS will only have one worry around profits: They will be embarrassingly
large. For Esconet Technologies, a balance in hard work and fortune had a major impact on its growth during the last few quarters. Esconet focused on its existing customer base and created solutions for them that were based on their business needs and revolved around technologies which were cost effective and gave impressive returns. That ticks off almost
every box on a CIO’s checklist. Realizing the importance of ‘what the customer wants’, the company started contacting each customer separately and offered them solutions. This includes design, management, and implementation of numerous end-to-end services for enterprises of all capacity in diverse sectors.
Esconet Technologies effectively comes in at this opportune juncture to value customer needs and provide quality services that will induce success and efficiency in its objectives.
IngeniousStrategy
It started focusing deeper on its existing customer base and created cost-effective requirements around their business needs.
ESSEN VISION Software’s in-novation lay in a strategy of improving the productivity of its existing team, and thereby
the profitability of the company. By maintaining the number of employ-ees, it ensured it didn’t increase its overheads.
Emerging from a tough last fiscal, the company decided to optimize the available resources. Execution of this strategy meant the company had to maintain its employee strength and thus, it ensured there was no addition-al burden on its bottom line. The team was incentivized for its performance.
This also helped the company weed out unnecessary expenses and loopholes in the functioning that existed in the last fiscal. These measures to make the company leaner and profitable had multiple benefits with clients, OEMs, and distributors as they gaining confidence on the company’s abilities.
The company implemented a sys-tem of continuous feedback from cli-ents, OEMs, and distributors to keep itself on track. The results were visible with a large proportion of the bottom line and top line targets being met.
IngeniousStrategy
Essen Vision Software found a way to better productivity with a team, enabling it produce results without adding overheads.
IT’S A lot more expensive and time-consuming to look for new business than it is to cross-sell within existing clients. That’s
probably why Bangalore-based solu-tion provider Esteem Infotech started focusing more on upselling within its existing accounts.
The company also spread its wings within the security domain by as-sociating with new OEMs and moved from application security solutions to perimeter security.
It applied this strategy without making extra investments; the se-
nior-most technical team was given the responsibility of handling this department. The company’s manage-ment took the hard decision of laying off its entire team of sales executives because it wasn’t at par with the company’s standards. Those posi-tions were filled with a 15-plus team of technical staff, who now face the customers directly.
Esteem provides total solutions through its hands-on experience of various technologies, thereby adding value to its customers with its services.
IngeniousStrategy
The company focused on upselling within existing accounts and moved from perimeter security to application security.
Prabhakar S.CEO
{Headquartered Bangalore
Employees 22
Key Executives Kalyan Kumar, Head Security; Vinod Kumar, Head Sales
THE COMPANY grasped that the domestic market was a delicate blend of time, speed, and scale. So it decided to
bank upon this opportunity. The company had learned a lot from its implementations on the cloud, mo-bile, and the solutions space. This fa-voured its move to automate and in-tegrate mobility into its operations.
Looking to scale sustainably and tap into the growth space, Foe-tron has aligned its goals to focus primarily on small and medium businesses (SMBs). The company
adopted a two-fold approach. The company created a new ecosystem surrounding its products and con-tinued improving it. The Gurgaon-based company implemented a pow-erful digital campaign. Intelligent e-mailing system, remote delivery models, on-the-move office for the workforce were key initiatives un-dertaken by it.
The Foetron Learn and Grown (FLAG) program was a major initia-tive launched in campuses and tar-geted at the youth through which it gained visibility.
IngeniousStrategy
The company concentrated on SMBs and chose to automate and integrate mobility into its operations which helped it get faster and leaner.
Focus Verticals Infrastructure, Auto/logistics, IT/ITeS, Manufacturing, Media
FoetronSPECIAL AWARD
CLOUD
56 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JULY 2014
FORE SOLUTIONS came up with a complex but effective, three-pronged solution to tackle the slowdown of last
fiscal. The Chandigarh-based com-pany added video conferencing and IP surveillance to its solutions port-folio, focused on pushing products such as Brocade, and used the lead generation engines of its OEMs such as Ruckus, Brocade and NetApp.
For video conferencing and IP sur-veillance sales, the company created a team to drive pre-sales and clo-sures. Vendor relationships such as
that with Brocade enabled Fore Solu-tions to offer excellent value proposi-tions to its prospective customers and this resulted in better margins. While the company had to make its significant investments initially to execute the strategy—the returns were massive, especially in the net-working business, the wireless busi-ness, and in video conferencing and IP cameras’ sales.
The company also closed new deals and expanded its client base from the leads generated by the OEMs.
IngeniousStrategy
It added VC and IP surveillance to its portfolio, focused on pushing new products, and used the lead generation engines of its OEMs.
THE BLACKBOX proved to be fortunate for Fortune Grecells. The company ventured into the enterprise
segment to cater to a wider clientele by transforming the flagship Grecells data on-demand BLACKBOX into a product from a custom built system. This helped the Mumbai-based company to gain wider reach and entry into unexplored segments and verticals. The company sponsored large-ticket events and adopted a dual strategy to propel growth.
On one end, it built connections
with CIOs and IT leaders to build customized solution on BLACKBOX and on the other end, it set up a channel ecosystem to forward its goal of selling standardized products to address the SME markets. The company also used social media to create awareness and promote itself at very minimal costs.
The company constantly engages with channel partners to update them on the new product developments, features and arrange for experts to brief them about new marketing and sales strategies.
IngeniousStrategy
It ventured into the enterprise segment to cater to a wider base by turning its flagship BLACKBOX into a product from a custom-built system.
Kshitij M. KotakExecutive Director and Chief Product Innovator
{Headquartered Mumbai
Branches 1
Employees 28
Key Principals IBM, Microsoft, Intel, Gigabyte, Seagate, Western Digital
THE HIGHEST reward for a man’s toil is not what he gets for it, but what he becomes by it. That’s true of Kolkata-
based Future Netwings Solutions which provided services and support to Myanmar and Bangladesh, along with starting a separate division to offer solutions on big data and data analysis—and created a more valuable organization.
Although, it set up operations in Singapore just last year, the solution provider also realized the untapped demand in Myanmar, so it began to
provide end-to-end solutions. It also added Bangladesh, a logical extension of business since the company had al-ready started off in Bhutan and Nepal.
Resources were invested in man-power, travelling, and setting up of-fices. While working closely with lead-ing industry vendors, it continued to remain independent and consultative in its approach to ensure that best fit solutions to both its public and private sector clients. As a customer-centric organization, Future Netwings Solu-tions maintains a huge stock of spares for quick service turnaround.
IngeniousStrategy
It started business operations in Myanmar and Bangladesh. It also started a division which offers solutions around big data and data analysis.
Key Technologies Security, Networking, Cloud computing, Datacenter solutions, Mobility, Virtualization, BI and analytics, Managed services, Facility Management/Helpdesk
Future Netwings Solutions
JULY 2014 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 59
HALL OF FAMEHALL OF FAME
CHENNAI-BASED FUTURENET Technologies started in 1996 as a small firm offering facility management services. Today,
the company has come a long way, mov-ing far beyond just system integration.
Transformation of managed services using the cloud was one of the inge-nious strategies that helped Futurenet Technologies to witness a steady growth and build a strong clientele.
It started a brand, TechOnCloud, to offer new services like strategic con-sulting on cloud adoption, cloud mi-gration and managed services on the
cloud. This new cloud offering greatly helped the company beef up its bottom line in the last fiscal.
It also observed that IT is a lifeline for businesses, even in upcountry markets, so decided to offer a niche so-lution like Virtual Desktop Infrastruc-ture (VDI). It bravely invested in this new segment during a year of slow economic growth.
Those investments paid off and helped the company to become a key player for a major VDI vendor in no time. It also built up its internal competencies.
IngeniousStrategy
The company transformed the domain of managed services by using the cloud and started offering new services.
L. AshokManaging Director
{Headquartered Chennai
Employees 160
Key Executives K. Tamizhmani, Business Head; M. Baskar, Chief Technology Officer
GALAXY OFFICE Automation planned a strategy that was both thrifty and still profitable. The company
improved the efficiency of its sales unit and drove growth without incurring additional expenses by devising some strategies in the last fiscal.
New sales roles—called Solution Specialists—were created and these staffers drove sales around specific solution areas such as security, net-working, and business intelligence. To ensure quality standards were
maintained, a quality assurance di-vision was created that monitored customer satisfaction with regards to service delivery. The department was placed directly under the direc-tion of top management to reduce turnaround time.
No client wants to rely on a ven-dor without seeing tangible proof and the company reassured its cli-ents—existing and potential—by letting them have a first-hand ex-perience of over 15 solutions devel-oped at the state-of-the-art Galaxy Technology Innovation Centre.
IngeniousStrategy
The company improved the effectiveness of its sales unit and drove growth without incurring additional expenses.
Virtualization, BI and analytics, Managed services, Facility
Management/Helpdesk, Storage
Galaxy Office Automation
JULY 2014 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 61
GT ENTERPRISES took a bold step and ventured into the HPC services market and collaborated with
NVIDIA for its compute unified device architecture (CUDA) offerings. The company was quick to spot the enormous requirements and opportunities in the field and put its energies behind the opportunity.
The company noticed a gap between the academics and the industry’s requirements. It, therefore, recommended institutes to incorporate parallel computing
using CUDA in the course syllabus. The idea that technologies are interlinked drove the company to adopt new technologies such as cloud AWS, GPU, virtualization, GPU Test Drive to complement its CUDA offering. The company conducted workshops in engineering colleges and bagged orders. It promoted CUDA offerings in VMworld events in the US, SAARC nations, and the Middle East and bagged overseas clients.
Investments made on setting up HPC related in-house research resulted in increased sales.
IngeniousStrategy
The company spotted an enormous opportunity in the supercomputer services market and collaborated with NVIDIA for its CUDA offerings.
THERE ARE some companies that believe in being every-thing to everyone, and then there are companies like
Immunity Networks & Technolo-gies. This Mumbai-based company decided that focus was its best bet for growth. It’s a strategy that’s worked for many companies, and it worked for Immunity Networks & Technologies.
Immunity Networks & Technolo-gies had a focused approach that en-abled it to create a strong identity in a particular domain and it directed
all its internal and external compo-nents towards this goal.
One of the youngest companies to get an International Organization for Standardization (ISO) certification, the system integrator has always be-lieved that quality is its differentiator.
The company shifted its entire fo-cus from being an integrator to being a service provider. It provided core offerings to its customers and thus, improved its business opportunities.
The growth of this Mumbai-based company is proof that its strategy worked.
IngeniousStrategy
Immunity Networks & Technologies created more focus and a stronger market identity for itself
WITH THE straight-forward approach of offering hardware solutions to its customers, Pune-based
Infinite Technologies has bagged many business opportunities.
The solution provider entered into the HPC server solutions and storage market to expand its busi-ness with customized solutions from companies like Intel and Su-permicro. It also concentrated on transforming its rental services with more products like servers, workstations, switches, and Micro-soft licensing. Taking into account
the changing IT scenario across the globe, Infinite Technologies invest-ed in setting up of an in-house lab for its engineers so that they could get hands-on experience in all lat-est developments.
The solution provider arranges regular road shows on the latest technology trends and updates for its corporate clients. The company also organizes meets with systems integrators
Seventy-five percent of its revenues now emerges from systems integration and components.
IngeniousStrategy
It entered into the HPC server solutions and storage market to expand its business with customized solutions.
EVERY SMART business needs at least has two key components—marketing and innovation. Mumbai-based Infobahn Solu-
tions used an innovative marketing strat-egy and that was to identify a few areas which required better focus that could help the company boost its revenues.
One of these areas was a digital signage practice. By understanding the nitty-gritties of the eco system, today Infobahn is one of the few system integrators in the country that has the capability and the skill to implement an end-to-end enter-
prise-class digital signage system. A huge amount was invested in equip-ment and software. It then gave its customers the choice of picking up only solutions that were best-suited for their respective requirements and that helped its sales bloom.
Infobahn Technical Solutions strat-egized and fought off the challenges posed by a slow economy by changing its focus from products to services. It managed to bag customer wins despite tough economic times, even when many were unwilling to invest in newer services.
IngeniousStrategy
The company better identified its focus areas and introduced a digital signage practice to boost its revenues.
Rajeev Krishnaswamy Director
{Headquartered Mumbai
Branches 4
Employees 55
Key Executives Anand Karapurkar, Director; Sagar Singh, Sales Head
THE KEY to success in business is to do what you do better, and to keep doing that. Keeping this in mind, Haryana-based
Infotech Computers & Communica-tions have been targeting ERP pros-pects and have begun to close orders.
The solution provider also realized the importance of offering consul-tancy in the SME segment and started to provide it, a move that resulted in 5.5 percent growth in the last fiscal. It then further boosted its bottom line with major cost cutting by lowering pre-sales visits and direct advertise-
ments. Also, by increasing its focus on iOS and Android with targeted execu-tives, the bandwidth of the company improved.
Launch on January 2, 1986, Infotech Computers & Communication has been in business for over two decades and now supports more than 900 cus-tomers across North India.
It has kept pace with the evolving needs of its clients and the ever-chang-ing IT industry. Infotech Computers & Communications measures its success only by the satisfaction level of its cus-tomers and associates.
IngeniousStrategy
It targeted small and medium enterprises for its ERP offerings and consultancy business. It also reduced pre-sales visits and direct advertisements.
NECESSITY IS the mother of invention and it was essential for Innovative Telecom & Softwares to devise a strategy
to tackle the slowdown. It was con-cerned that the volatile economy was adversely impacting the company’s profitability.
It realized that it needed to inno-vate and find new ways of working to grow in a competitive and challenging market. The first step was to evalu-ate the company’s growth in terms of parameters like win revenue ratio, cost-effectiveness of sales strategies,
lead generation, finance control, target achievements, resource up-gradation, and scope for geographical expan-sion, among other things. It resolved to manage and develop company re-sources, and maintain strategic focus on growth.
It took on high-end projects that contributed to the company’s capital and helped its business grow. This strategy helped the company reach new customers. It also expanded its focus to major IT streams in order to grow its business. It did not compro-mise on customer satisfaction and this
IngeniousStrategy
It tweaked its internal processes and focused only on projects that promised good returns and customer satisfaction.
Moin ShaikhDirector
{Headquartered
Surat
Branches 4
Employees 135
Key Executives Mihir Chahwala, Director, Azim
Shaikh, Director-F&A, Zaki Shaikh, eArchitect-IT enabled Infra Solutions
NEEL SHAH, chairman of Mumbai-based INSIGHT Business Machines, has always believed that suc-
cessful warriors are nothing more than average men with laser-like fo-cus. With that in mind, the solution provider made investments in in-frastructure, sales, datacenter, and CRM and transitioned from being a box-pusher to being a solutions- and services-centric organization.
INSIGHT Business Machines also targeted energy-, transport- and services-based organizations, which dramatically increased its
revenues, and helped open new business units. It identified new markets and invested in setting up offices in new locations, which resulted in the growth of service revenues.
The company aims primarily at diversifying itself in the many are-nas of digital information technol-ogy. It also sought to understand focused verticals and develop its technical competencies for targeted customers. This unique approach helped the company increase its foothold in services-based organi-zations and the power sector.
IngeniousStrategy
It shifted its focus from product sales to business-solution sales. It also targeted energy-, transport- and services-based organizations.
INTENSITY GLOBAL Technologies believes in technological innova-tion with rich user experience, meticulously laid-out processes, a
value-based philosophy, and a highly-skilled and committed workforce.
In the last fiscal year, the solution provider used a strategy that focused on storage, virtualization, and the consoli-dation of compute that lowers the total cost of ownership to the customer.
Further, it also reduced the cost to customers through a strategy of consoli-dation of different application servers. With this optimized use of resources,
cost was also cut in terms of power, cooling and space.
It moved up the value chain from being a key player in providing customized software solutions, to a solution provider offering integrated turnkey solutions in areas of telecom network integration and information technology-enabled services. The company took the initiative of better using the current infrastructure by reviewing its cloud strategy.
The company has also evolved into a private limited company, making its corporate ambitions clear to the market.
IngeniousStrategy
It focused on storage, virtualization, and the consolidation of compute to reduce the total cost of ownership of its clients.
Aditya Narain Kakkar Director
{Headquartered New Delhi
Branches 2
Employees 35
Key Executives Ranjan Pandita, Business Head Corporate; Ravinder Singh, VP-Government and Defense
INTERCAD SYSTEMS specialized in providing niche solutions to the engineering and media In-dustry. It had expanded its port-
folio to increase its turnover. But it realized that it was miss-
ing a lot opportunities because it was not able to provide support for enterprise software solutions to its customers.
To amend that, the company start-ed an enterprise solutions division by tying up with leading software and hardware solutions companies.
The rationale behind the initiative
was to prepare the company to be-come a specialized system integrator for both niche applications like CAD as well as cater to enterprise cus-tomers at large.
This strategy increased the volume of business, provided bet-ter customer satisfaction, and as a result, the company was able to ac-quire new customers as well.
In addition, the strategy yielded considerable returns in terms of a large turnover and better customer reach. It helped the company pen-etrate deeper into the market.
IngeniousStrategy
It expanded its solutions portfolio by creating an enterprise software solutions division, thereby getting more from the same customer base.
Cinu P. ThomasManaging Director
{Headquartered Cochin
Employees 70
Key Executives David Gainneos, VP-Operations, Ajay Gopinath, Head-Sales
Key Principals Autodesk, Adobe, Bentley, Oracle, HP, Apple
Key Technologies BI and analytics, Printers and managed print services
Focus Verticals Infrastructure, Auto/logistics, Education/Nonprofit, Government, IT/ITeS, Manufacturing, Media
InterCAD Systems
70 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JULY 2014
KEYUR JATHAL, executive director, believes in doing everything as best as can be done and that’s why
the solution provider decided to address the IT infrastructure and services requirements at a holistic level as opposed to treating it as a transactional engagement.
With this strategy, the company started approaching big-ticket accounts, and started winning larger business opportunities. It also invested in certifications related to computing, storage, virtualization
and ITIL-related processes. The Ishan Group also has a datacenter set up at Rajkot where customers visit to have a first-hand experience of demos and proof-of-concepts. Having seen positive results, the company also invested in building one more technology showcase in Ahmedabad by May 2014.
While the focus is on solution selling, the company also acts as a facilitator by giving better credit terms or logistics support. This is managed by the sales team so as to understand customer requirements better.
IngeniousStrategy
It focused on better addressing IT infrastructure and services requirements. It also invested in certifications related to computing, storage and virtualization.
JAINAM TECHNOLOGIES was established in 1995 and has since been catering the entire spectrum of informa-
tion systems service to its valued customers. These include the de-velopment of turnkey solutions for network cable design, installation and commissioning of servers, and IP telephony.
As a part of its strategy, the com-pany covered security in depth for systems, networks, datacenters, security operations centers, cov-ering the flow of intelligence and vulnerability management with a
core focus on service assurance to customers and engineering support.
The 2013 strategy of the company was to adopt a strong base of architecture in security. To make the strategy work, entire processes were reworked and equal emphasis was laid on people and the technology used.
This strategy required a huge investment. While benefits are yet to f low in, customer confidence in the company has shot up. Its exist-ing customer investments have also increased by 40 percent.
IngeniousStrategy
It increased service strategies to cover areas in security. Information systems security and services were also made into a complete comprehensive solution.
Ratna SinghCOO
{Headquartered Mumbai
Branches 9
Employees 410
Key Executives Mehul Doshi, MD; Navin Salian, Finance Head
PUNE-BASED KONNET Solu-tions has never been afraid of keeping abreast with lat-est technologies, which, it
believes, the enterprise will need.A video surveillance player, the
company invested in setting up a subsidiary, Vian Technologies, which develops video analytic ap-plication modules like automatic number plate recognition and cloud-based city surveillance solutions, like a parking management solution.
It also registered itself with Mi-crosoft under the vendor’s BizSpark program. In collaboration with
Central Institute of Road Transport (CIRT), it developed an Intelligent Driving Test System (IDTS) pro-gram, which will be proposed to all RTOs in India for automation of driving tests.
In addition to all this, Konnet Solutions has produced a solution for automatic reading of rail wagon numbers, people detection and counting, directional detection, face detection and recognition, and aban-doned object detection.
Its strategy of focusing on niche technologies has helped it double its revenue.
IngeniousStrategy
It setup a subsidiary and developed a cloud-based city surveillance solution. It also registered itself with Microsoft under the BizSpark program.
TO BE a success, it is necessary to work on multiple fronts. Ahmedabad-based Magic Sys-tems did that, and managed
to grow 35 percent in the last fiscal due to the addition of new customers and nearly 100 percent renewal of the existing ones.
The ingenious strategy of the solution provider was to increase its reach to new customer and to better focus on the existing ones to generate greater finer business op-portunities. The company planned an upgrading activity and did POC
of some of its additional components with them. It has an almost balanced customer base—42 percent is enter-prise, 38 percent is mid-market, and 20 percent are SMBs. Addressing such a wide spectrum helped Magic’s team to understand the distributed adoption cycle of security offerings across the various segments.
Magic Systems are able to get a 100 percent ROI with its knowledge of high-skilled techniques and its ex-pertise in bridging the gap between technology, networking and informa-tion security.
IngeniousStrategy
It actively reached out to newer customers and at the same time better focused on its existing customer base for greater business opportunities.
DELHI-BASED MEDLEY Market-ing has a business secret: It looks deep into its clients’ needs suggests appropriate
solutions to them. It’s a simple yet an effective strategy.
Medley Marketing invested ma-jorly in growing product segments like thin clients (instead of PCs), enterprise wireless, digital signage and video walls. The company real-ized how much its customers valued good solutions and used that in-sight to help its client differentiate themselves from their competition.
This also helped clients innovate and grow. Some other key offerings from this solution provider are uni-fied threat management, customer relationship management, sales force automation, CCTV/IP-based surveil-lance, video conferencing solutions and VoIP solutions.
Initial gaps in expertise was over-come by regular training sessions. The company also initially faced long sales cycles but worked around those using requirement analysis before the PoC so that it could showcase solutions to customer pain points.
IngeniousStrategy
It focused on a couple of growing product segments like thin clients, enterprise wireless, digital signage and video walls.
WALKING THAT extra mile is a habit at Delhi-based Megahertz Infotech.
By offering system integrator and IT infrastructure solutions services, the company pioneered in these domains pretty early. It has maintained its high standards across operations and strategic initiatives.
Introducing cloud technology in the company helped Megahertz to shift from a system integrator to a solution provider. Great care was taken in terms of training and
educating its internal team. It also expanded and found new, untapped markets and technologies to bag better business opportunities.
Megahertz Infotech invested time, effort, and resources in upgrading the skill sets of its teams, as well as hiring new talent. Deep diving into its existing account base with new products and technologies helped the company sailing through tough times. Megahertz Infotech acquired positive growth by expanding its horizon to product portfolio, technology offerings and skill set up-gradation.
IngeniousStrategy
It introduced cloud technology, and opened itself to new, untapped markets. It also better focused on its existing account base with newer products.
BY CONTINUOUSLY focusing on customer requirements, Gujarat-based Meridian In-fotech has built a long-stand-
ing relationship with its customers. This has helped the company drive a significant portion of its revenues.
As part of its growth strategy, the solution provider started focusing on solution-centric business. First, it tied up with a software solution part-ner for the Cisco UCS business, and second, it collaborated with leading vendor of digital signage, interactive media and enterprise video caching
to tap new-age markets. It also add-ed a real-time location system solu-tion that utilizes wi-fi infrastructure. Meridian realized that its total solu-tion offering could help end-users achieve lower TCOs.
After brainstorming with all the department heads of the client in-cluding the shop floor, operations, safety and security, both companies agreed on a relevant solution that utilizes the existing IT infrastruc-ture. It also regularly evaluates new technologies and suggests them to its customers.
IngeniousStrategy
It focused on solution-centric business by collaborating with a software solution partner for the Cisco UCS business. It added a real-time location system solution.
WITH A sportsman’s forti-tude and an adventurer’s spirit, Mumbai-based Meta Infotech took on a
number of risks and faced down ob-stacles to turn into a big name in the channel space.
The solution provider introduced a power management tool helps clients lower their IT infrastructure energy consumption, and extended the life of various IT investments including serv-ers, desktops, laptops, mobiles and tab-lets. It also helped cut carbon dioxide emissions. Meta Infotech partnered
with top OEM’s like HP, Cisco and IBM to promote its solution.
Though the system integrator was initially a volume-player like many others in the market, it soon realized the importance of a ‘solution-selling’ approach. The company looked at the ‘solutions business’, even when the concept of ‘IT solutions’ was relatively new.
Its bold management decisions and the introduction of support ser-vices has seen its revenues increased by over 30 percent and its customer base triple.
IngeniousStrategy
It launched enterprise flash storage on PCIe slots. It introduced a power management tool that helps lower IT infrastructure energy consumption.
IF THERE’S something that Ahmedabad-based Microlink Solutions is afraid of, it certainly isn’t the new. That’s what led it to
revamping its approach to cater to new customers and their requirements, which significantly helped it mark its presence in the market.
Microlink Solutions added different domains such as power, CCTV, video-conferencing and AV solutions to its existing data networking business. It’s a strategy that gave the company larg-er value purchase order closures with the same set of customers. It also en-
sure that it burrowed itself in deeper with its clients.
The solution provider also invest-ed a huge amount in building man-power and recruiting new people. Having been a vendor neutral part-ner company for networking brands in the past, Microlink Solutions is comfortable in continuing its stra-tegic tie-up approach with AV and surveillance brands.
The solution provider pays keen at-tention to customer requirements and then works upon the offerings with the vendors.
IngeniousStrategy
It focused on different areas including CCTV, VC and AV solutions and made these new offerings work within its existing data networking business.
Ketan KhimaniDirector
{Headquartered Ahmedabad
Branches 6
Employees 330
Key Executives Amit Dave, Director, Rajendra Patel, Head-Pre Sales
SOME OF the top companies got to where they are today because they risked more than others thought was
safe and dreamed more than others thought was practical. With this mind-set, Kanpur-based MKT Softwares drove itself to provide end-to-end solutions to customers.
MKT Softwares very boldly went ahead and identified new geographies outside a tier 2 city such as Kanpur. Besides, the company also stationed one sales manager in these new markets.
Importantly, it partnered with local IT companies to focus on
new ways of how business can innovatively be combined with IT.
As a result, the company successfully got business by providing clients with enough value. From strategizing to implementation, MKT Softwares has managed to solve the most complex, high-impact software problems that companies face.
MKT Softwares combines a culture of innovation with the extensive experience of its employees to deliver a full spectrum of service offerings throughout the entire system development lifecycle.
IngeniousStrategy
It focused on new geographies and collaborated with local players to better manage sales.
FEW KNOW this, but the ‘MM9’ in MM9 Information Tech-nologies stands for ‘Monday Morning 9’, the time of the
company’s inception on January 9, 1995.Headquartered in Gurgaon, the
company has positioned itself as a single-point solutions company for all IT needs of enterprises.
It has always been a proponent of a ‘customer first’ strategy. MM9 In-formation Technologies invested in bring-your-own-device capabilities and EPP programs with high-revenue customers and collaborated with an
NBFC (non-banking financial com-pany) to fund these initiatives. MM9 Information Technologies also started transitioning to a cloud mode.
Its strategic plan was to not only leverage the cloud for the custom-ers’ benefits but to get deep insights on it to help them avoid any pos-sible pitfalls.
With its constant zest for knowl-edge and skill enhancement, its highly talented, professional and ex-perienced team has transformed the company into a ubiquitous technol-ogy solution provider.
IngeniousStrategy
It invested in BYOD and EPP programs with high-revenue customers and collaborated with NBFC for funds.
Manoj SharmaCEO
{Headquartered Gurgaon
Branches 2
Employees 90
Key Executives Surjeet Kumar, Business Head-ESSN; Manish Gupta, Business Head-Security
FROM A mere PC assembler, Pune-based Nahar Integrated System Services (NISS) has risen to become a reputed sys-
tem integrator. The strategy that pri-marily worked for NISS was to deep dive into its existing customer base.
The solution provider explored novel ways to sell new and innova-tive IT products to its customers and also added a lot of sought-after prod-ucts, such as Plantronics, Red Hat and Microsoft Cloud, in its basket to create growth opportunities at a minimal cost.
Being a novice in the IT field, the customers’ acceptance levels for the solutions that came through NISS were low during the start-up season. The company, however, braved the storm and has a strong foothold in the industry now.
NISS believes that new products in the managed services domain can be confidently pitched to its existing set of customers as well as the new-bies. This would facilitate further growth and also help the company in offering value added services to its customers.
IngeniousStrategy
It concentrated more on its existing customer base and tried to sell them innovative IT products in novel ways.
Shital NaharDirector
{Headquartered Pune
Branches 1
Employees 30
Key Executives Vaishali Shital Nahar, Director-Finance; Suresh Saykar, General Manager
Key Principals Cisco, Microsoft, Dell, HP, D-Link, Digilink, APC, Red Hat, Lenovo, Samsung, Plantronics
IN BUSINESS, one can never rely upon luck, it is always the deter-mination that gets you at the top. Coimbatore-based Netcon Tech-
nologies demonstrated that it under-stood that when it created a strategy to focus on service revenues.
This not only helped it acquire new business opportunities, but also im-prove its employee productivity and customer satisfaction.
The solution provider created a dedicated team for customer support and AMC renewals which enables regular renewals of AMC contracts.
Netcon Technologies also revisited and re-established contacts with its existing customers and renewed their support contracts.
It started a separate, focused team for consulting services, welcoming a new consulting head on board and also invested in certification of its resourc-es in datacenter design and network-ing technologies.
The company strives to adopt the best practices in the industry in terms of people, products, processes, and technologies to ensure maximum cus-tomer satisfaction.
IngeniousStrategy
It focused on garnering service revenues and created a dedicated team for AMC renewals. It also formed an in-house consulting team.
NETSPIDER FIGURED that the best way to stay ahead in a slowdown was to target the government sector. The
rationale behind this move was the fact that the sector was ripe with op-portunities in terms of digitization.
It realized that government offices generate a humungous amount of paper and electronic data in a hap-hazard manner, and digitizing them into meaningful information would be fruitful both for the sector and the company.
In order to take its services to the next level, the company tied up with
European players such as Micro-form, i2s, and ProServ among others.
The company undertook the MOD, SIFCL, and the OPEPA project. It won the Prime Minister’s Award in Public Excellence for the OPEPA project. Piggybacking on this success, the company was able to win more projects in the government sector.
This strategy paid off. And that’s evident from the company’s reve-nue. The government sector doubled company’s revenue. A massive 90 percent of its revenues came from government projects.
IngeniousStrategy
It capitalized on the digitization trend in the government sector and created niche solutions to be the go-to partner for the sector.
NOVO SYSTEMS figured that the only way to stay ahead beat competition in a tough market was to increase its
customer base by generating new leads and re-connect with customers it had done business with in the past.
Novo Systems decided to create a two-pronged strategy to grow its business. It focused on both servicing existing customers and acquiring new customers by gen-erating leads.
The New Delhi-based company which had earlier explored growth
opportunities within its existing cli-ent base, quickly realized this to be a myopic approach.
The company, thus, went ahead and listed itself on paid services like JustDial and Sulekha to increase its customer base. It also developed its own lead-generation engine and cre-ated its own tele-caller base. This ensured that the company had a continuous supply of leads.
This move gave the company good returns from the very outset with some solid leads within months of putting this strategy in place.
IngeniousStrategy
It acknowledged the power of catering to both old customers and expanding its customer base by investing in lead generation programs.
ONE NETWORK set out to do two things in order to grow its business. One was to follow the customer and foray into cloud
computing solutions as the demand for cloud services peaked last year.
It decided to provide cloud application optimization solutions from big players like F5 and Riverbed.
This strategy proved beneficial for the Mumbai-based company as it could cross-sell to its existing clients. That, in turn, enhanced its value proposition to its customers. Another goal was to acquire new clients. It
realized that a proactive approach is essential to bag new clients and it invested in enhancing its business development and pre-sales team. The strategy of expanding its alliances and increasing resource strength helped it expand its client base exponentially.
The initial investment made by the company on training, certifications and demo units, later helped it during the pre-sales and sales period. It was also able to successfully showcase how its solutions can help clients overcome performance issues.
IngeniousStrategy
It aligned its growth strategy to its customers’ needs and forayed into technologies like cloud computing to grow its business.
ORIENT TECHNOLOGIES fo-cused on services, virtu-alisation practises and the mobility business to grow
its business. But the real secret to its success is its laser-like focus on the bottomline.
Attempting to improve the top line would have needed the company to undertake considerable risks, some-thing it was not inclined to do amid a severe financial meltdown. It, thus, decided to concentrate less on the top line and focused more on profits and strengthen its bottom line.
An added advantage of this strategy was that the Mumbai-based company did not have to make any additional investments, thereby guarding its bot-tom line from any added strain.
To align the company to this objec-tive, its employees needed to align with it first. The company trained its staff to stay focused on its core tech-nological domains, along with giving constant attention to the bottom line. This process, though time consuming, helped hone the team-building skills of the employees and also developed a sense of loyalty in the company.
IngeniousStrategy
The company focused on services, virtualization, and mobility. It played to its strengths during tough financial situations.
Facility Management/Helpdesk, Printers and managed print services,
Storage
Orient Technologies
JULY 2014 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 87
OPERATING IN a niche domain and providing end-to-end solutions has helped Parth TechnoComm
Solutions become a strong player in the field.
Headquartered in Kolkata, the company belongs to an exclusive league of players who are capable of effectively implementing a combination of voice, network, data, video, and mobility solutions, thereby creating an end-to-end experience for its customers.
Clients find it easier to deal with a single vendor who possesses
the required domain expertise, resources, and capability to provide proper end-to-end service and further back it up with robust post- sales support.
The technical team at Parth TechnoComm Solutions proved to be the backbone of the company as it is certified on voice, networking and datacenter and can handle the most complex technical assistance.
The company’s intense focus on training, solutions, and POC helped it create value in the marketplace and have a successful last fiscal.
IngeniousStrategy
The company provided end-to-end solutions to clients enabling them to deal with just one vendor.
ABOUT TWO years ago, Peak XV Networks had planned to delve into IP-based sur-veillance. “We want to be
ready for the next wave, and have considered investing time and re-sources in making the big leap,” said Deepak Hoskere, MD, Peak XV Networks, in 2012.
Today, the company has made that dream a reality. It’s focusing on its networking expertise and is now providing its clients with advanced IP surveillance systems.
The Bangalore-based company
understood the problems its clients faced with security. “We help or-ganizations deploy IP surveillance systems that are f lexible, and scal-able. We also integrate it seam-lessly with their existing network,” says Hoskere.
In a niche domain like security, customization is a distinctive fea-ture. Peak XV Networks, thus, worked individual clients to devise a plan that fits their requirements.
This strategy proved beneficial and profitable to the company as it was a revenue spinner this fiscal.
IngeniousStrategy
The company ventured into IP surveillance design, configuration, and implementation to provide cost effective IP surveillance solutions to its clients.
Deepak HoskereManaging Director
{Headquartered Bangalore
Branches 2
Employees 55
Key Executives Vishwanath Venkatram, Head-Networks and Security Practice
PENTACLE IT Solutions was quick to realize that many small and medium businesses were in need of
an on-premise mailing system and that they didn’t know how to go about it. The company decided to offer Microsoft Office 365 licenses to these SMBs.
Additionally, the Lucknow-based company offered Cyberoam’s UTM solution in the security space. The company devised a strategy to offer UTM to clients who didn’t need telecom products but were interested in the security space.
To get more clients on board, Pentacle IT Solutions conducted workshops and arranged demos. To ensure maximum optimization, the company invested in hiring personnel for the product lines that it wanted to highlight and get maximum business from.
While, initially, the response in the market wasn’t overwhelming, the pace of the business gradually picked up. “Consistency in our efforts and support from our principals helped us move ahead,” says Tilak Raj Ratra, Managing Director, Pentacle IT Solutions.
IngeniousStrategy
The company took advantage of the need for mailing systems in the SMB space and offered Microsoft Office 365 licences to them, thereby winning clients.
Tilak Raj RatraManaging Director
{Headquartered Lucknow
Branches 2
Employees 25
Key Executives Zuhair Husian, Director-Technical, Ruchi Ratra, Director
ADDING NEW products to com-plement its existing solutions helped Pentagon System and Services to grow exponen-
tially in the last fiscal. In addition, the Mumbai-based company aggressively promoted its solution-based product line. The new products and services provided multiple benefits to Pentagon System and Services. For example, it was able to target a wider client base, as new potential clients were added to its database, along with improved oppor-tunities in the market. The company turned opportunities into results with
its investments. But recruiting people proved to be a major challenge. The company went ahead and invested on getting experienced personnel on board and obtaining certifications for its new products and solutions. “The tangible return on investment is that new busi-ness has grown. We have also achieved intangible assets in terms of goodwill and recognition,” says Sairaman Mu-daliar, director, Pentagon System and Services. To boost employee morale—especially for those working in the so-lutions team—the company introduced incentive programs.
IngeniousStrategy
The company added new products to complement its existing solutions to sell better and provide clients with the latest technology solutions.
Sairaman MudaliarDirector
{Headquartered Mumbai
Branches 6
Employees 290
Key Executives Prashant Tukaram Narkar, Director, Anslem Sequiera, Country Manager
QUANTM TOOK a bold step to combat the slowdown last year. It chose to enter the North American market by
launching a new technical services unit called TEQGLOBAL to provide managed services to SMB and SOHO segments in that region. This decision helped QuantM grow its business. “Today, this is the fastest growing seg-ment for us with a quarterly CAGR of 35 percent,” says Rajeev Kumar, direc-tor, QuantM.
To strengthen operations the company acquired a large business
vertical from a niche market player, bringing on board, the existing cus-tomer base and the sales, delivery and marketing team of over 40 people.
In addition, the company joined hands with Google for enterprise partnership in the Google Apps busi-ness with an objective to improve its cloud portfolio.
This move came with multiple benefits in the mid-market segment. It also helped the company make its collaborative application stack, TeamworQ Insight, available on the Google platform.
IngeniousStrategy
The company entered North America to provide managed services to SMBs and SOHOs in that region, thereby achieving a CAGR of 35 percent.
QUESTA SOFTWARE Systems realized that the markets in which it operated had reached saturation point. Therefore,
the company started looking at newer markets with low IT penetration. This pointed it to the direction of tier two cities such as Pune, Lucknow, Kanpur, and Indore.
Though it helped the company im-prove its presence and visibility in the market, setting up operations in new places was an expensive proposition. The company reduced the overheads by implementing a work-from-home policy.
The new markets the company ven-tured into are major players in educa-tion and government domains—both requiring local contacts and knowl-edge about the local markets. The company hired personnel fulfilling these criteria.
A lack of experience in local markets was a major challenge for the company. Questa dealt with it by collaborating with local dealers with experience and knowledge of local markets.
The strategy proved to be success-ful and profitable for Questa Soft-ware Systems.
IngeniousStrategy
The company expanded into newer markets were IT penetration was limited and implemented a work-from-home policy to lower opex.
RAKSHA TECHNOLOGIES reaped huge benefits as it created two new lines of businesses within the
company to focus on client needs.The Chennai-based company
introduced storage backup and archival, and client management divisions. The company understood the importance that clients attached to working closely with partners to create value.
The company made sure that the two new focus areas recruited more technical people than sales personnel. This helped Raksha
Technologies to converse well with clients and also reduced the time taken to close deals. This smart strategy of empowering technical leaders helped the company deliver better results and make its way into high end security portfolios APT solutions and governance solutions.
But getting there wasn’t easy. User resistance was a huge roadblock. The company was able to combat the challenge, and in the end, the strategy paid off as Raksha Technologies managed to earn major profits this fiscal.
IngeniousStrategy
The company created two new lines of business—storage backup and archival, and client management—to work closely with clients and create value.
V. AnandCEO
{Headquartered Chennai
Branches 3
Employees 60
Key Executives V. Raghavan, Director, K.Saravana Prabhu, VP
REGENERSIS INDIA was battling a down economy and stiff competition from both the organized and
unorganized sectors in the asset recovery domain. But it was able to beat the odds and get ahead by clinching deals with major brands, OEMs, and large format retailers.
These efforts have paid off. In a business that needs a rather large working capital, Regenersis believes that working with major brands and large format retailers is worth the investment since the return on investment is equally attractive.
Apart from focusing on the big players, the company is running a green initiative that along with helping the environment, places both the seller and the buyer in a win-win situation. This strategy helps sellers sell used assets at an attractive value and products, in turn, are affordable for buyers.
Also, in a supremely competitive environment, the company is adhering to quality standards, compliances, and best practices. All these strategies proved beneficial to the company.
IngeniousStrategy
Regenersis India focused on clinching deals with major brands, OEMs, and large format retailers, in the asset recovery domain.
RUBIK INFOTECH decided to take advantage of the lack of awareness about security products among custom-
ers. It identified the opportunity to strengthen its security products port-folio and target customers by educat-ing them about its security products.
The Ahmedabad-based company realigned its focus to concentrate only on its security portfolio and backed it up with the promise of exceptional support. This enabled the company to build goodwill and get a huge number of referral customers in the last fiscal.
“Our reference strategy actually helped us in getting some 42 new customer on board. These custom-ers bought both security products and other licensed products as well,” says Jitesh Chauhan, MD, Ru-bik Infotech.
In order to create awareness about its security products, the company conducted workshops and one-on-one interactions with potential cli-ents. This helped clients realize the need for security products, which then translated into a flood of orders in the last quarter of the last fiscal.
IngeniousStrategy
The company focused only on security products and created a customer-referral strategy for it that won over 40 new customers.
THE COMPANY realized that the Hyderabad market had reached saturated, and it, decided to offer its SAP-led business solu-
tions to companies across the country. It engaged with SAP and SAP partners to understand the needs and client demands in different geographies. The company’s success story with SAP projects at firms in Hyderabad gave it the edge to penetrate into new markets and entirely new geographies. “Ini-tially, customers looked at us like any other partner. However, our expertise matched their requirements and cus-
tomer references also brought good business,” says Rajiv Gupta, director, Sara Infoway ITES India.
It adopted a consultant-based ap-proach to penetrate new markets like Delhi and Mumbai. It also analyzed the problem areas of each individual client and then addressed them with hands-on solutions. The company’s goodwill with existing clients helped immensely as they referred new customers in newer geographies.
With this strategy, the company closed 44 SAP-led infrastructure deals across the country.
IngeniousStrategy
The company expanded to new markets and concentrated on SAP-led business that helped it close 44 deals across India.
SECANT TECHNOLOGIES au-tomated its entire enterprise management system for all internal processes, from
enquiry to payment. As part of the automation process, it has also cre-ated a mechanism to send SMSes to clients to keep them updated about the progress of their projects.
The entire process of providing better services at lower costs has not only allowed the company to retain its existing clients but has also en-abled it to bring new clients into its fold. This has also improved the com-pany’s profitability and efficiency.
The company has also introduced a mechanism of supporting clients remotely. “Since most of our customer calls are related to software or driver issues, we decided to implement remote support to cut costs and reduce turn-around-time,” says Paramjit Singh Juneja, CEO, Secant Technologies.
With 2013 being an essentially slow year, Secant Technologies used this slowdown to its benefit to restructure, and consolidate accordingly. And that has worked brilliantly to its advantage.
IngeniousStrategy
The company automated its internal processes and created a mechanism to send SMSes to its clients to keep them updated about the progress of their projects.
Paramjit Singh JunejaCEO
{Headquartered Ludhiana
Branches 2
Employees 21
Key Executives Sangita Singh, Chief Manager; Anju Bala, Deputy Manager
IN A challenging economic environment, Secure Network Solutions, took tough decisions and created strategies that
promised good returns. For one, it had the guts to enter
a new market like Kolkata and expand its business in a fiercely competitive sector.
It also decided to focus on its top 50 clients—in other markets—in order to clinch good deals without investing much.
In addition to its tried and tested strategy—of converting US dollars to
Indian rupees to grow its top line—the company had the courage to ex-periment with larger domestic deals. “This year we tried larger deals in USD via our distributors, which saved investment and gave us a healthy bot-tom line,” says N. K. Mehta, CEO and MD, Secure Network Solutions.
The company also invested heav-ily on building its own centre of excellence (COE) with returns ex-pected to come in after close to half a decade. To get clients to visit its COE, Secure Networks Solutions or-ganized workshops.
IngeniousStrategy
It leveraged a mix of large domestic deals through its distributors, and global deals to increase both the top line and the bottom line.
N. K. MehtaCEO and MD
Headquartered Chennai
Branches 9
Employees 75
Key Executives Syed Wasiq, National Sales-Head; S. Subramanian, Head-National Support
SHELL NETWORKS & Solutions devised a five-pronged strategy to achieve growth. As part of that strategy,
it decided to take steps to build a strong brand equity to gain better influence with vendors, offer more solutions to its existing clientele, and acquire new clients.
The company dived into a new domain and also introduced AV solutions to its portfolio, which it feels, complements its existing business. In addition, it also put in place a strong mechanism to
streamline activities helping the company bag and execute large deals.
The company brought captains of industries on board to obtain a better understanding of client needs and thereby, revolutionize its go-to-market strategy.
Shell Networks & Solutions had to invest heavily in order to bring about these changes. These strategies have paid off handsomely. And the results are visible in the company’s top line. This helped the company bring in a revenue and profits this fiscal.
IngeniousStrategy
It created a five-pronged strategy—which included introducing AV solutions to its portfolio—to build a strong brand image and enable growth.
ADOPTING A new style of sell-ing and focusing on five key verticals was Shro Systems’ strategy to accentuate growth
and revenues. The company decided to focus on the
cloud, software testing tools, business intelligence tools, and networking to take its business forward. Another strat-egy it adopted to grow was to align with ISVs to expand geographically.
It also worked with key ISVs and SIs helped them with the IT infrastruc-ture part of their customer projects by designing and selling it for them.
To improve its visibility, Shro Systems organized customer-centric events—for the Goa, Nasik, and Chakan markets—by selling various software application life-cycle tools and focusing on the business analytics space.
“We wanted to create growth and align with the way the market was consuming IT and what CIOs expected from part-ners like us,” says Anirudh Shrotriya, MD, Shro Systems.
This bold initiative strained the com-pany’s exchequer by almost 15 percent, but it was balanced by enabling the company to build momentum for future activities.
IngeniousStrategy
It adopted new ways to sell IT and focused on five key verticals, making it the USP that drove the company ahead.
Anirudh ShrotriyaManaging Director
Headquartered Pune
Branches 2
Employees 90
Key Executives Wg Cdr V. V. Shrotriya, Founder Chairman; Vasudha Shrotriya, Director-Finance
Key Principals HP, Microsoft, VMware, Citrix
Key Technologies Security, Networking, Servers, Cloud Computing, Virtualization, BI and analytics, Managed services, Facility management/Helpdesk, Printers and managed print services, Storage
Shro Systems
JULY 2014 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 101
DEVELOPING NEW products and services to keep pace with a dynamic business environment has helped
Silver Touch Technologies stay ahead of competition.
The Ahmedabad-based company recognized the potential of mobile technologies and devised a strategy around it.
The company, traditionally a box seller, started diversifying and offering services along with its regular platter of offerings. It decided to cross-sell its products to widen its pool of clients and upsell to the existing clients.
Silver Touch was quick to ensure that its employees were equipped with the latest technologies. In addition, the company also has an effective think tank in place to chalk out strategies.
The company has created a broad pipeline of projects which is minutely designed for implementation. These plans are reviewed frequently and tweaked according to changes in the business environment. This has helped the company put the right plan in place and achieve the desired results.
IngeniousStrategy
It adapted itself to a dynamic market by developing new products and services and adopting cross selling and upselling techniques.
IN WHAT was arguably one of the most challenging years for chan-nel partners, Sterling Infoways found a smart way to get ahead.
The Gurgaon-based company was continuously challenged by escalating service delivery costs and diminishing profit margins.
So, it decided to tie up with the big-gest tech giant, IBM. “We have tied up with IBM for multivendor support and this initiative has paid well. We have signed a major service contract with the help of IBM,” says Sandip Sarkar, director, Sterling Infoways.
The company was quick to realize that service sales platform was a re-warding domain in the rapidly evolv-ing market. It analyzed the market trend well in advance and collaborated with IBM to obtain a wider client pool.
In due course, the company was also elevated to Technical Support Services (TSS) partnership by IBM at the na-tional level.
But the challenge lay in recruiting the right people to do the job. Sterling Infoways pulled up its sleeves and trained its sales team with the help of IBM.
IngeniousStrategy
In order to combat shrinking profit margins and rising service delivery costs, the company tied up with the biggest tech giant, IBM.
Key Technologies Security, Networking, Servers, Cloud computing, Datacenter solutions, Virtualization, BI and analytics, Managed services, Facility management/Helpdesk, Printers and managed print services, Storage
Sterling Infoways
JULY 2014 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 103
HALL OF FAMEHALL OF FAME
LESS IS more, and this mantra helped Sunfire Technologies tackle the slowdown last fiscal. The Pune-based company
decided to focus on specific customers and address their needs through aggressive sales and pre- sales strategies.
Sunfire Technologies directed its entire focus on quality by concentrating on only 10 percent of its total customer base.
It had faith in its abilities to achieve quick and efficient return on investments. Piggybacking on
that, Sunfire Technologies revamped its pre-sales and sales teams to make them more successful and to keep them updated with the latest technologies. The confidence yielded results with the returns on the investments being noticeable within two quarters.
Educating clients about such a steep and concentrated change in focus was a major challenge. Sunfire Technologies and its efficient sales team were successful in overcoming the difficulty. The strategy turned out to be a revenue spinner this fiscal.
IngeniousStrategy
The company focused on specific customers and addressed their needs through aggressive sales and pre-sales strategies.
Sanjay KulkarniDirector and CEO
Headquartered Pune
Branches 1
Employees 30
Key Executive Bhaskar Ganjiwale, Director
Key Principals Cisco, Hitachi, NetApp, VMware, Citrix, HP
REALIZING THAT relying on endpoint solutions wasn’t a sustainable strategy, Swan Solutions & Services shifted
its focus to providing solutions in the enterprise infrastructure space.
The Mumbai-based company focused on certain key verticals and this strategy enabled it to broaden the client base and reduce the overheads associated with a low-margin business.
Swan Solutions and Services set up a solutions team and backed it up with an experienced execution team. It also built new sales and
pre-sales teams and provided them with adequate training in relevant technologies to position the right solutions to its customers.
The challenges were overcome by the technical team’s ability to successfully demonstrate the company’s abilities to its clients—both existing and potential. It helped the company change its customers’ perception about Swan.
Though the company executed a major shift in focus, the profits earned and the growth posted proved it to be worth the risk.
IngeniousStrategy
It shifted its focus from providing endpoint solutions to enterprise infrastructure services and this helped it broaden its client base and reduce overheads.
Managed services, Facility management/Helpdesk, Printers and
managed print services, Storage
Swan Solutions & Services
JULY 2014 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 105
HALL OF FAMEHALL OF FAME
STEVE JOBS once said, “That’s been one of my mantras: Focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have
to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.” That strategy worked for Apple and it worked for Syndrome Technologies.
By creating six verticals, the Mum-bai-based company ensured that it cre-ated more focus, which helped it create new accounts and cut across different technologies within existing accounts. The six verticals are datacenter builds,
networking, collaboration, virtualiza-tion, computing, and managed services. This strategy helped the company cre-ate both, depth in technology expertise and breadth in business opportuni-ties. Though it created vertical depth, Syndrome Technologies ensured that its sales force worked across the six verticals. To make it work, Syndrome Technologies needed to ensure greater collaboration within its teams. It did this by investing about Rs 1.5 crore in Microsoft Dynamics.
The ingenious strategy will go a long way in helping Syndrome Technologies get to its target for the year.
IngeniousStrategy
It ran against conventional wisdom and consolidated multiple offerings into six key technology verticals, thereby creating greater focus.
TAASHEE LINUX Services provided its clients—both existing and potential—with IT solutions that they did not
have the potential to develop. This created new growth opportunities for the company.
To that end, the Hyderabad-based company started an in-house product development unit that utilized the technologies of its partners. The com-pany placed everyone in a win-win situation as the approach delivered maximum value to its clients and at the same time also benefitted its partners.
The investments made by Taa-shee Linux Services to start its in-house product development unit were recovered in the first year of operations.
One of the company’s biggest challenges was to get the right people on board. So the company brought in a seed team of experts to train the rest of the IT workforce, ensuring that the right person was in the right job at the right time.
The strategy paid off well for the company and helped Taashee drive a profitable growth.
IngeniousStrategy
It started a product development division in-house to provide clients with IT solutions that they couldn’t develop.
Manojkummar GargCOO
Headquartered Hyderabad
Branches 5
Employees 70
Key Executives Abhishek Datt, CTO; Amit Kulkarni, GM Sales-West
Key Principals Red Hat, VMware, Alfresco, Liferay, Veeam, MongoDB, EnterpriseDB, AWS
GURGAON-BASED TARGUS Technologies promptly shut down unprofitable businesses and expanded its existing
business through cross-selling and upselling. The company reworked its team strategy and kept the sales team as the core.
Targus focused on employee productivity and reduced labour attrition. The company achieved this by conducting a SWOT analysis of its employees.
As a reward for its efforts, the com-pany bagged the UPLC maintenance
contract handed out by the UP govern-ment. With that, the company gained a strong foothold in the domestic market and also enhanced its visibility.
Getting the UPLC project started was a challenge due to limited availability of trained and well-equipped staff. This problem was overcome by setting up a special task force and deploying the team at different sites to ensure that it’s easier to track and manage the project at multiple locations.
All these efforts helped the company drive profitable growth.
IngeniousStrategy
It had the courage to do away with unprofitable businesses and decided to revamp its internal strategy by focusing on sales.
Col. Balwinder SinghManaging Director
{Headquartered Gurgaon
Employees 520
Key Executives Raunaq Singh, Director; Amarjeet Singh Walia, Director
Key Principals HP, Cisco, Microsoft, Juniper, IBM Oracle, Red Hat, Riverbed, VMware, Commscope, Citrix, Tyco
TRUE TO its name, Team Com-puters realized that the best way to stay ahead was to col-laborate with its clients and
strive to provide them with the best customer experience.
To that end, the company created strategies to join hands with its clients’ IT and business teams, and CIOs. It decided to focus on three verticals: Pharma, insurance, and automobile.
In order to provide its clients with the best possible solution and to get an in-depth understanding of its clients’ business, the company hired consul-
tants and domain experts. This way, the company worked with some of the biggest automobile companies across the world and created its own intellec-tual property for its analytics practice.
This strategy helped the company boost business and get more clients as it wasn’t shooting in the dark and was aware of the business needs of its clients.
Piggybacking on the benefits of this approach the company earned hand-some revenue and, at the same time, it helped its clients saved money and increase profits.
IngeniousStrategy
Instead of shooting in the dark, the company decided to hire consultants and domain experts to get in-depth knowledge into its clients’ business.
AV/Collaboration, Virtualization, BI and analytics, Managed services,
Facility management/Helpdesk, Printers and managed print services,
Storage
Team ComputersSPECIAL AWARD
DATACENTER
JULY 2014 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 109
UNDERSTANDING THE needs of customer and keeping up with market trends, Techniche Consulting
Service aligned its company goals to focus on two segments: Datacenters (physical build and IT), and IP surveillance, giving the company’s growth plans a major boost.
Understanding the shift towards the cloud, the company acted on datacenter consolidation through tie-ups with OEMs, staff training, and realigning marketing focus.
To provide complete solutions to its clients, the company invested on
building an in-house testing facility which translated into greater confidence in the teams providing solutions to the clients.
The business also grew by almost 40 percent.
The major challenge was that the available products in the surveillance industry far exceeded the total projects to be undertaken.
This was overcome through in-teractions with SIs in other geog-raphies, OEMs, and understanding the industry vertical and helped the company increase profits.
IngeniousStrategy
The company aligned to market trends and focused on two segments: datacenter consolidation and IP surveillance to gain profit.
A PIONEER IN the video conferencing domain in India, Total Presentation Devices, posted a year on
year CAGR of 30 percent.That growth was a result of a smart
strategy. The company realized the limited spending capacity of large enterprises during the slowdown. So, it decided to focus on SMBs, offering them its VC-in-a-box solution at an affordable price.
The strategy paid off. The company targeted schools, multiplexes, and manufacturing units. Its scheme of
providing clients with a buyback-with-lease option helped the company garner goodwill in the market.
Though the Indian VC market budding, SMBs contributed to almost half the company’s annual revenue last year. This achievement came at the time when the market was weighed down by a fluctuating rupee and economic volatility.
According to the company, it is the only ISO 9001-2000 certified company for excellent services in integration of VC and AC systems in India.
IngeniousStrategy
In order to combat the slowdown, the company shifted focus to SMBs, offering them its VC-in-a-box solution at affordable and competitive prices.
Nandita SingghaManaging Director
Headquartered Mumbai
Branches 15
Employees 850
Key Executives Sanjay Sarkar, VP; Naveen Gupta, DGM; Ira Sengupta, Senior Manager; Patitapaban, Finance Head
Key Principals Own IP-based Solutions, Cisco, Lifesize, Vu
Focus Verticals Education/Nonprofit, Manufacturing, Media
Total Presentation Devices
JULY 2014 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 111
TRIDENT INFORMATION Systems realized that in order to grow its business and stay relevant, it needed
to shift its focus to cloud computing. It was quick to figure that buyers were no longer interested in traditional services and were keen to push the cloud agenda.
“In order to take advantage of the business opportunity that the cloud presented, increase our win rate, and meet our customers’ need for complete, integrated solutions, we realized that we must become cloud solution curators,” says Anita
Jain, CEO, Trident Information Systems. This move also meant that the company needed to adopt a differential pricing strategy. Unlike traditional service, the cloud is a pay-per-use model and this thrilled Trident’s customers.
Because the company built its cloud offerings around Microsoft’s Azure Platform, there was no need for upfront investment. But a major challenge was the fact that cloud-based ERP services didn’t have many takers but that changed with the maturity of cloud computing.
IngeniousStrategy
It read the pulse of the market and let go of traditional services to shift its focus to cloud computing, leading to business growth.
Anita JainCEO
{Headquartered New Delhi
Employees 130
Key Executives Mamta Diwan, VP-Sales and Marketing; Rajneesh Bhagat, Operations Head
Key Principals Microsoft, SAP, IBM, QlikView
Key Technologies Cloud computing, Enterprise applications, BI and analytics, Managed services, Facility management/Helpdesk
TWENTY TWO By 7 Solutions was battling a tough economy and it realized that it needed to adapt to this challenging busi-
ness landscape by tweaking its go-to-market strategy.
It turned its GTM strategy on its head by employing a proactive sales ap-proach instead of a reactive one. This meant that the company invests an in-credible amount of time to work closely with clients and understand their busi-ness challenges.
This approach ensured that the com-pany’s solutions are in tune with its cli-
ents’ business problems. While the in-novative change in GTM strategy didn’t require the company to invest—in terms of money—but it had to invest a consider-able amount of time to understand the clients’ business challenges and ensure that their needs were met.
The only challenge was to get buy-in from employees so that they are able to transition to the new strategy.
Despite the slowdown, a well-trained staff implemented adapted to the change in strategy, thereby retain-ing existing clients getting new ones on-board.
IngeniousStrategy
It changed its GTM strategy from indulging in reactive sales to proactive ones, resulting in increased opportunities and revenues.
UNIFIED DATA-TECH Solutions was ambitious in a year when most companies had little to write home
about. It wanted to provide the best possible service to its existing client by offering greater value. And at the same time, it also wanted to acquire new clients.
Rather than have its fingers in many pies, it decided to concentrate on specific brands and solutions.
Devising a strategy and aligning the company in line with that strategy was a major challenge
which the company handled deftly by investing in dedicated sales and an implementation team that ensured delivery of solutions according to customer requirements. This decision proved to be fruitful as it yielded the company benefits in terms of revenues and a healthy client base as well.
Putting in place a system of reviews to keep its projects on track helped the company earn a handsome revenue.
IngeniousStrategy
It designed niche solutions to increase its footprints in existing accounts and also traverse into new accounts which yielded additional revenues.
Amarish ShahDirector
{Headquartered Mumbai
Branches 2
Employees 38
Key Executives Hiren Mehta, Director; Ashish Khandelwal, VP-Technology
THE COMPANY looked both inward and outward to grow its business and take it to a new level.
In order to expand its business, the company decided to provide direct service in over 300 locations. It has also taken up a slew of e-gov-ernance projects that have helped it garner enormous revenue.
It realized that satisfied customers make all the difference in a down economy and the best way to ensure that is to give customers what they want. To be able to do that, the com-
pany consulted customers to move away from proprietary solutions to open platforms.
Internally, the company strength-ened its sales force by providing them with mobiles to access business applications and respond to custom-ers in a timely manner. The company also optimized costs by using tools and automation, such as SAP, and putting in place a service desk.
The company trained its staff in analytics and cloud solutions, thereby increasing its client base and revenue.
IngeniousStrategy
It took a holistic approach by making changes internally and externally to grow its business and increase revenue.
Sapphire, AMD, VMware, Tyco, QlikView, Jaspersoft, Citrix, Red Hat, Schneider, Emerson, Ruckus, Apple,
Huawei
Value Point Systems
JULY 2014 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 115
HALL OF FAMEHALL OF FAME
VCENTRIC TECHNOLOGIES figured that the best way to stay ahead of its competitors in a slowdown
is to play to its strengths. To that end, it analysed areas--region- and industry- wise--that provided immense opportunities and then it positioned its service offerings based on them.
Understanding the need for innovative and packaged solutions that give predictable outcomes in terms of costs, scope, and benefits for customers helped vCentric Technologies leave others behind.
The challenge for the Hyderabad-based company was to package so-lutions in such a way that it would meet most of the requirements of its clients.
To be able to do that well, vCentric Technologies started by investing in market research followed by further investments in building the necessary solutions. Therefore, it revamped its sales, delivery, and operations. This enabled vCentric to carve its service offerings in such a way that it could meet the growing demands of its customers.
IngeniousStrategy
It played to its strengths and analyzed the areas that provided immense opportunities and positioned its service offerings based on them.
VDA INFOSOLUTIONS understood the volume—and value--of the mid-tier region and focused on greater
penetration in this market with its current range of services and solutions. It realized that there was more value in investing in training its staff than introducing a new range of products and services.
This strategy clicked as it helped the company cater to a greater number of clients and increase its footprint across the country. The company used its expertise in its
verticals and enhanced its reach by recruiting more resources in its sales and tech teams.
In order to optimize its resources, the company invested heavily on hiring staff and training its personnel. As a part of that, it also helped its sales and tech team complete certifications in various technologies.
Armed with a potent sales team and a qualified tech team, the company was able to set new benchmarks. It added over 30 new clients in the last year.
IngeniousStrategy
Instead of introducing new products, it believed in investing in training its personnel and creating an army of qualified sales and tech teams.
Deepak JadhavDirector
Headquartered Mumbai
Employees 500
Key Executives Vikas Save, Director, Ashutosh Deuskar, Director
Key Principals IBM, EMC, Microsoft, Symantec, Red Hat, Cisco
Key Technologies| Security, Networking, Servers, Cloud computing, Datacenter solutions, Enterprise applications, Mobility, UC/AV/Collaboration, Virtualization, BI and analytics, Managed services, Facility management/Helpdesk, Printers and managed print services, Storage
VDA Infosolutions
JULY 2014 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 117
VEERAS INFOTEK strove to achieve higher standards of customer satisfaction. It wanted to ensure that
every customer got what he or she wanted. And the best way to do that was to ask customers. “We met 30 CIOs across customer organizations to find out what they expected from us. Today, customers want IT to drive business outcomes. Based on these trends and expectations, we went back and relooked our strategies,” says T N Srinivasan, Veeras Infotek.
It realized that it needed to
change its entire service delivery model and move to an outcome-based engagement one. It used its CRM to plot its customers in terms of their existing infrastructure, growth indicators of the verticals they operate in, their business outlook, and existing processes, among other things.
Then, it trained its staff to enable them to have discussions with customers not from a product, but from a business outcome perspective. As a result, Veeras has executed about 12-14 projects.
IngeniousStrategy
It listened to its customers and transformed its service delivery model to an outcome-based engagement one, thereby winning big-ticket projects.
Key Technologies Security, Networking, Servers, Cloud computing, UC/AV/Collaboration, Virtualization, BI and analytics, Storage
Veeras Infotek
118 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JULY 2014
HALL OF FAMEHALL OF FAME
IN 2013, Veetrag Computers focused on the educational sector. It ventured into a new business domain—installing CCTV and
IP cameras—in educational and healthcare institutions.
The Sangli-based company devoted a large part of its time working with schools in Maharashtra and Karnataka. Apart from CCTV and IP cameras, it deployed thin clients in over 250 schools.
As the concept of digital and virtual classrooms saw increased adoption in the educational sector, the company
latched on to the opportunity and collaborated with Epson, and executed the project in engineering colleges.
Because adding new resources would have increased the company’s investment, it outsourced a major chunk of its skilled manpower require-ments, while imparting the necessary training to its existing staff.
In addition, it also promoted and installed Dell’s VRTX computer hard-ware product in financial institutions. Apart from that, it also took on the task of providing cloud-based solu-tions to its clients.
IngeniousStrategy
It focused primarily on digitizing the education sector and entered into the CCTV and IP cameras domain to propel its growth.
Praveen NaikFounder and Business Head
{Headquartered Sangli
Branches 3
Employees 19
Key Executives Mahesh Mahajan, General Manager; Chandrakant Chougule, Service Manager
VELTRONICS TOOK a bold and courageous step to move away from its tried-and-tested retail business.
The decision to shift focus from the retail segment to government projects, enabled Indore-based Veltronics to drive growth. It also helped the company move out of the LFR and online business model, which was not price competitive.
In order to be aligned to its strategy, the company deployed more man-power towards government projects. One of the biggest challenges was the
number of deals finally closed, which according to Sanjeev Gupta, director, Veltronics, is rather low, at approxi-mately 15 percent, due to a totally dif-ferent kind of competition from the retail and LFR business.
Even with these challenging impedi-ments, Veltronics posted a significant year-on-year growth.
While Veltronics still had to make additional investments in EMD (ear-nest money deposits) and BG (bank guarantees), the quantum of invest-ments was brought down by restrict-ing the stock levels to a minimum.
IngeniousStrategy
It took the bold step of shifting focus from the retail segment to deploy more manpower on government projects.
Sanjeev GuptaDirector
{Headquartered Indore
Branches 1
Employees 15
Key Executives Vikas Gupta, Director; Nasir Ali, Director
I HATED EVERY minute of training, but I said, ‘Don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.’”
Muhammad Ali’s words resonate with the strategy that New Delhi’s Versatile Infosecurity took when it wanted to drive up growth. Towards that end, the company set up an internal lab where it could train its engineers after obtaining know-how from original equipment manufac-turers (OEMs).
The company extensively tested concepts in its labs and collated data
from these tests to equip its engi-neers with the latest technical skills and know-how in the field of network security, the company’s main area of operation. The strategy increased the productivity of its main assets: Its people.
Realising that closures are slow in this domain, the company also pri-oritized the availability and visibility of its products, resulting in a year-on-year growth. “We have not had to make any additional investments for our strategies yet,” says Sudhir Shar-ma, director, Versatile Infosecurity.
IngeniousStrategy
The company set up an internal lab to train its engineers after obtaining the know-how from original equipment manufacturers.
LAST YEAR, Vitage bagged a BFSI project in Africa that called for a scale up like never before and
the company sensed a huge opportunity there.
Jayanth Gojer, COO, Vitage, said, “In large overseas heterogeneous network deployments, we had little or no access to products and skillsets locally. Everything for this project was sourced out of India.” Given these odds, the solution provider had to strategize its Africa debut well.
Poor connectivity and
infrastructure around the continent could have been a roadblock, but Vitage handled it by posting a 24/7, on-site team and also by remote handling problems. Vitage invested in skilled manpower and in certifying existing sales and pre-sales teams to support the additional portfolio of products and solutions offered by the African company.
Over the last year, Vitage optimized its existing resources to meet client expectations and improve its client base, which helped the company boost sales.
IngeniousStrategy
The company sensed the huge potential of the BFSI sector in the underexplored African markets and advanced in that direction.
IF THERE’S one company that’s the epitome of dedication, it’s Wy-setek Systems Technologists. And that’s evident from its unwavering
focus on virtualization and niche tech-nologies around this domain.
Last year, Wysetek Systems Tech-nologists, had added desktop virtu-alization to its portfolio. It had also delved into niche solutions like virtu-alization security.
It was a timely move as there was incredible demand for technologies like cloud computing and virtualiza-tion in 2013.
Latching on to this opportunity, helped the company expand its cli-ent base. And the revenue generated from it helped post a healthy growth.
The company also invested in recruiting personnel for pre-sales, technical, and solution sales and also awarded certifications in virtualization.
The only hurdle was changing the mindset of its employees. The compa-ny’s sales team was more comfortable selling products—not solutions—and Wyestek knew this needed to change if it had to grow.
IngeniousStrategy
Its dogged dedication to virtualization and focus on niche solutions helped the company create a mark in the industry.
TRIUMPH OF INGENUITYThe ChannelWorld Premier100 Awards and Symposium Ceremony brought together India’s most brilliant minds in IT, including the IT industry’s senior-most executives, respected CIOs, and of course, one hundred of the country’s smartest channel partners.
“Ingenuity plus courage plus work equals miracles.”
—Bob Richards
THIS year’s Premier 100 recog-nized and awarded the 100 most ingenious channel partners in India at an Awards and Symposium Cere-mony, held in Pune, on June 6, 2014.
Over the last six years, The ChannelWorld Premier100 Awards, has become a benchmark for brilliance in the Indian IT enterprise channel space. But the ChannelWorld Premier100 is more than an awards ceremony. It is complemented by a symposium that brings together some of the
124 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JULY 2014
INGENIOUS 100
SPECIAL AWARDS PARTNERS
PARTNERS
ASSOCIATE PARTNERS
best minds in IT, from across the stakeholder spectrum. This includes the IT industry’s senior-most executives, respected CIOs, and, of course, India’s smartest channel partners.
The ceremony held keynote sessions from some of India’s lead-ing thinkers, technology briefings with global IT leaders, feedback sessions with celebrated CIOs, and peer-to-peer networking—all over a two-day event.
In addition, ChannelWorld also presented special awards in storage, datacenter, cloud, and security to honor these winners, who have excelled in these areas last fiscal. Besides these, the Hall of Fame award was also presented to those who have consistently performed for over four years. Here’s what you missed.
POWERED BY
JULY 2014 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 125
Partnering for ProfitAt the ChannelWorld Premier100 2014, some of India’s top IT providers discussed what goes into market development from a channel partner perspective and how to ensure profitability and increase customer pipeline.
IN a first of its kind initiative, the Premier100 2014 event launched the Captains’ Table series. In a two-part panel discussion, it brought together some of IT industry’s top, global, channel-centric players to share their insights on some of the most pressing issues in the channel space.
In one such panel titled, Market Development: Partnering for Profit, the panelists—Nikhil Pathak from Schneider Electric India, Rajesh Janey from EMC, Sameer Garde from Samsung India, Surendra Singh, from Websense—discussed what goes into market development from a channel partner perspective. They also shared insights on how to make it a win-win situation for both principals and partners, in terms of pipeline and profitability.
126 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JULY 2014
Value creation and customer lifecycle
management is a joint, complementary effort by both OEMs and their partners. NIKHIL PATHAK VP & Country GM-IT Business, India & SAARC, Schneider Electric
Evangelizing and educating customers is
the critical piece in the game because the actual funds lie with them. RAJESH JANEY President, India & SAARC, EMC
RoI is a critical measure to see how vendor-partner
relationships go. It’s a thumb rule to see the value that the parties derive from each other. SURENDRA SINGH Regional Director, India and SAARC, Websense
Partners give us a greater degree of
market intelligence than the other way round. This is a significant process of market development. SAMEER GARDE SVP and Country Head-Enterprise Business, Samsung India
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP | PREMIER 100
Market development is a complex term in an OEM-partner relationship and entails a host of things such as funding, joint marketing activities, lead genera-tion, and strategy, among other things. It can span across mature markets, portfolios or may surround a new ge-ography or technology.
The panelists argued that the onus of optimal utilization of funds allotted for market development would lie with partners, though the source of funding is essentially vested with the OEM.
The common observation was that the channel space is a mix of partners who do market intelligence on their own, or explore independently before taking assistance from their principals, or rely on their OEMs.
The participants also discussed ROI as a function of market development, saying that ROI is a buzzword not just for customers, but for partners too. Un-less their deals are profitable in a larg-er sense of the word, they will not see value in doing business with OEMs.
The panelists also acknowledged that when the market is new, much of the evangelism happens at the OEM end. Significantly, the moot point that OEMs and partners must note, according to the panel, is that funds and actual spending power lie with customers. Unless customers are educated about the shift in markets and technology trends, the wheel of market development would not move in the long term.
PanelistsNikhil Pathak from Schneider Electric
India, Rajesh Janey from EMC, Sameer
Garde from Samsung India, Surendra Singh,
from Websense, and Vijay Ramachandran,
IDG Media ,discuss how OEMs can help
channel partners ensure profitability,
increase pipeline, and what goes into market
development.
Vendors Take Responsibility At the ChannelWorld Premier100 2014, some of India’s top IT providers discussed how to manage controversial vendor-partner challenges including poaching and direct incentivization of partner employees.
AT the ChannelWorld Premier100 2014, IDG brought together some of the IT industry’s top leaders in a panel discussion called Captains’ Table.
One such panel, The Captains’ Table on Employee Responsibility, moder-ated by IDG’s Editor-in-Chief, Vijay Ramachandran, brought together in-dustry leaders such as Ashish Dhawan from Juniper Networks India; Sanjay Rohatgi from Symantec India; Anil Valluri from NetApp; and Dr. Alok Bharadwaj from Canon India. These India heads of some of the biggest global IT companies deliberated on the dynamics of vendor-partner rela-tionship through its different dimen-sions such as revenue performance, access to training, certification, soft skills, marketing resources, and em-ployee retention, among others.
128 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JULY 2014
Some of the churn that happens in the
industry is positive because it calls for enhancement in skillsets, which pan out well for all parties. ASHISH DHAWAN MD, Juniper Networks India
The focus of the industry must be on building an
ecosystem of higher employee retention and institutionalizing processes and practices. ALOK BHARADWAJ EVP, Canon India
It is on us as vendors to make sure we are
staying true to our commitment of not poaching an employee from a partner organization. ANIL VALLURIPresident, India and SAARC, NetApp
The principals play a vital role in grooming
and enabling employees in partner organizations, not with a mere selfish motive, but with a long-term goal. SANJAY ROHATGI President Sales, Symantec India
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP | PREMIER 100
The discussion also broached on sensitive, controversial areas such as poaching of skilled certified employees from partner organizations by vendors. While all the panelists unanimously agreed that the onus of retaining an employee in a free market was on the partner organization itself, there was no denying that there are fine lines that had to be drawn to maintain a healthy relationship between partners and vendors and poaching was a big ‘no’. Here’s the writing on the wall: Vendors contribute to the grooming of a partner’s workforce, but they do not ethically exercise the right to wean away those same employees.
The other key issue was whether direct incentivization of a partner employee by a vendor was accept-able. Ruling this out as a dated, short-term ploy, the panelists remarked that this could be the death knell of the vendor-partner relationship.
It was also noted that an inspired employee is less likely to leave than a detached one. The need was to ensure that employee aspirations are ad-dressed, skillsets refreshed, and that staffs are constantly rewarded and rec-ognized by their employers.
Keeping a 360-degree view from an HR, marketing, technical perspec-tive without being overwhelmed by myopic terms such as revenue perfor-mance, can go a long way in keeping equations within partner organiza-tions intact.
Rohatgi from Symantec India; Anil Valluri from NetApp; and Dr. Alok
Bharadwaj from Canon India, discussed the
intricacies of vendor-partner relationships and
how both parties can benefit from each other.
Running a business isn’t easy. A lot of businesses don’t see the expected growth curve because eventually they lose focus and aren’t able to adapt to change. Founder Director and Master Coach of Intrad School of Executive Coach-ing (ISEC), M. Krishna Kumar, explains how one can stay focused and deal with change. He says when changes have to be implemented at the last minute, there is a mixture of anxiety and fear, but change can also be an opportunity.
That’s because, often, the start of a new initiative is excit-ing. However, a time comes, says Kumar, when that excite-ment ebbs and performance starts falling. This is the stage when things need to change. But how people react to change makes all the difference.
Another challenge businesses face in today’s dynamic world is mastering the ability to stay focused.
Kumar illustrated this with an example. “Say, there are two lines. The first line is how a person actually performed and the second line denotes ideal performance. People would like both lines to be equal, but it is difficult to gauge if actual performance is potential performance,” says Kumar.
The trick is to figure out what pulls down performance. The technical word is interference which adversely affects focus, he says.
A very helpful technique to improve focus is to use the STOP method, where S is step back from a situation, T is think, O is organize your thoughts, and P is proceed. These methods can help organizations get ahead.
A great leader changes the world. Pawan Bakshi, a certified executive coach, and trainer from the Army War College, believes that high emotional intelligence and a high state of self and social awareness are the two major steps to lead change. “The first step in the journey towards emotional intelligence is self awareness,” he said, during his session at the Premier100 Awards 2014.
Bakshi says that emotional intelligence is the ability to distinguish and control emotions. It helps one to gauge the emotions of other people in order to work effectively with them. The four ingredients of emotional intelligence are self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management.
Bakshi also highlighted Robin Sharma’s new model of leadership known as Leadership 2.0. It is about every
participant in a company showing leadership in the work they do. Simply put, any person in any organization has the power to be the CEO of his or her job. One can start with training, coaching, and building a culture of leadership. Leadership 2.0 also addresses employee productivity, customer service, employee retention and profitability, as business priorities.
Bakshi also says that management and leadership work on parallel tracks. Leadership is one of the several aspects of management. Often the same people play both leader and manager at different points in time and leaders can excel with some degree of management skills.
Mastering Business: The Power of Focus
What it Takes to Lead Without a Title
“A very helpful technique to improve focus is to use the STOP method, where S is step back from a situation, T is think, O is organize your thoughts, and P is proceed.”M. KRISHNA KUMAR, Founder Director & Master Coach, Intrad School of Executive Coaching
“Emotional intelligence is the ability to control emotions. It’s made up of four ingredients: Self and social awareness, self-management, and relationship management.”PAWAN BAKSHI, Certified Executive Coach & Trainer, Army War College
130 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JULY 2014130 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JULY 2014130 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JULY 2014
“The datacenter footprint is decreasing while the density of the drive is increasing,” said Barun Lala, director, HP Storage, in his session at the ChannelWorld Premier100 2014 event.
Lala said that with time, the storage industry has undergone huge shifts—from floppy disks to HDD to SSD. On the client end, a shift from the client-server architecture to a new economy of scale has happened. This is due to the emergence of a mobile world, where connectivity is constant and unrestrained.
According to Lala, data created in the last two years is equivalent to the data created in the last 98 years. And a major portion of it is unstructured.
With data growing exponentially, the impact has directly been on the 3 Vs: Volume, velocity, and variety of data. As
a result, managing client datacenters has become complex and challenging. The storage ecosystem, said Lala, is the most technology-driven among the three verticals of servers, storage, and networking. Storage can be split into three main blocks—primary storage, information retention, and analytics. To accommodate the increasing storage demand, Lala said, organizations would have to shed their false sense of security regarding the existing infrastructure.
He also said that today the five pillars of a converged infrastructure—virtualization, resilience, optimization, orchestration, and modularity—have become industry standards and organizations can’t do without them.
Gartner predicts that, by the end of 2016, approximately 30 percent of businesses will opt for cloud-based services. Im-provising on the trend, Gemalto introduced an array of prod-ucts which deliver the same high level of security as tradi-tional strong authentication solutions. All this has been done while addressing customer needs for new devices, mobility, and BYOD, said Philippe Inserra, vice president, Identity and Access-Asia, Security Business Unit, Gemalto, at Channel-World Premier100 2014.
Inserra says that Gemalto has clients from about 190 coun-tries, and comprises the world’s well-known enterprises, mo-bile operators, national administrations, transport operators, banks and financial institutions, and number of other indus-tries looking for profits in productivity, security, and sim-plicity. The company has also developed two types of Prox
readers—dual interface smart card reader (Prox-DU) and the contactless reader with SAM slot (Prox-SU)—to address the needs of the organization and to reduce the TCO.
Headquartered in Amsterdam, Gemalto, a provider of two-factor authentication (2FA) and cloud, earned a revenue of about Rs 1,944 crore in 2013 and expanded to more than 44 countries worldwide. It also provides solutions across a wide range of sectors such as banking, mobile telecommunica-tions, retail, healthcare, and security. “In a world where the digital revolution is gradually changing our lives, Gemalto’s solutions are planned to make personal digital interactions easy, secure, and enjoyable,” he said.
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP | PREMIER 100
Storage: When Data’s Filled to the Brim
Making Room for a Secure Digital World
“To accommodate the increasing storage demand, organizations would have to shed their false sense of security regarding the existing infrastructure.”BARUN LALA, Director, HP Storage
“In a world where the digital revolution is changing our lives, Gemalto’s solutions make personal digital interactions easy, secure, and enjoyable.”PHILIPPE INSERRA, VP, Identity & Access-Asia, Security Business Unit, Gemalto
JULY 2014 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 131
IN uncertain economic times, dependence on energy that powers our world, drives our economy, and sustains our very existence has increased. But ensuring efficient use of energy is a major challenge. But Schneider Electric is trying to make things better. In his session, Rohith Balakrishnan, GM-Enterprise, Schneider Electric, stated that the company is a global expert in managing energy with operations in more than 100 countries. It leverages its portfolio to make energy reliable, safe, productive, efficient and green. “We help organizations make the most of energy by providing integrated solutions, ultra secure and high quality power, efficient energy and end-to-end services,” he says.
The biggest concerns for organizations—especially in countries like India—are related to energy cost and low quality of power. Almost 50 percent of the cost of operation in an organization is energy cost. This leads to downtime. The vision behind Schneider Electric’s services is to provide operational efficiency to customers using technology and expertise. With this vision in mind, Schneider Electric, according to Balakrishnan, is at the forefront of capturing the trends of the new energy world. Urbanization, digitization, and industrialization are opening new market opportunities for Schneider Electric.
In addition, Balakrishnan advised channel partners to look at every green IT deal from a long-term perspective and to broaden their scope and market.
IN today’s world, complex networks and security technolo-gies are difficult to manage. But FireMon is changing that. It is a leading provider of security management and risk analysis solutions. “The biggest challenge a channel partner usually faces is to reduce complexity through technology and to drive innovation into businesses through the use of technology,” says Ruby Khaira, sales manager, FireMon.
FireMon, says Khaira, has solutions that helps organiza-tions visualize and analyze this complexity in real time. “All large businesses, government agencies and managed service providers demand the qualities, which are found only in FireMon solutions. We allow organizations to retain visibil-ity into network security and IT risk, which is required to prevent intrusions,” he says.
In addition, Khaira says, FireMon’s security manager, policy planner, and risk analyzer help businesses to analyze, regulate, and manage firewall configurations centrally.
Founded in 2004, FireMon helps enterprises to find, correct and ultimately omit gaps in their existing network security infrastructure. Its proactive, real-time, enterprise security management platform gives security decision makers key management and operations data to reduce risk and provide appropriate levels of access. “We have deployed our solutions across a number of industries such as financial services, insurance, healthcare, retail, telecom, energy, and technology. With FireMon, organizations can protect their network and keep business up,” he says.
Building an Energy Efficient Enterprise
The Magic of Untangling Complex Networks
“Channel partners should look at every green IT deal from a long-term perspective and broaden their scope and market in order to prosper.”ROHITH BALAKRISHNAN, GM-Enterprise, Schneider Electric
“The biggest challenge a channel partner faces is to reduce complexity and, at the same time, drive innovation by using IT.”RUBY KHAIRA, Sales Manager, FireMon
132 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JULY 2014
CtrlS is a leader in the datacenter market with close to 9,400 racks currently available. It started with a datacenter in Hyderabad and then opened one in Mumbai, with plans of moving forward to Delhi and Chennai subsequently.
Anil Nama, CIO, CtrlS, said that 40 percent of the business is generated from the BFSI segment. Elaborating on the continuity and security aspects of its latest cloud version, he said each VM would have four copies of data and three copies of compute.
It created one of India’s largest CDNs, rolling out 20 India-specific POPS. The company also allows clients to take back-up data and charges them on the basis of usage.
The unified dashboard implemented by CtrlS allows an agent to monitor systems, irrespective of whether they are running SAP, Oracle, or Cognos. The company has also built a partner-dedicated IaaS cloud. Each partner is provided with his own simple IaaS cloud that is personalized and localized as per his portfolio.
With security threats on the Internet becoming a major issue, the company upgraded its bandwidth to a three-tier system. This primarily includes Internet bandwidth, the DDoS bandwidth and the OSP hacking, protected bandwidth.
Nama said the company received and acted upon the feedback from its clients and started providing every VM with an OTP, log analyser and host-based intrusion detection systems. A full SEM tool is also now integrated in the system.
MARKETING a business is mostly about how one sets a position accurate enough to satisfy market’s needs. Praveen Sahai, VP, Channels, EMC India and SAARC, spoke about the four Ps to profit during his chat with editor-in-chief Vijay Ramachandran at the Premier100 2014 awards. Prod-uct, price, place and promotion are the essential marketing mantras. Each of these four Ps is a variable that should be controlled to create a perfect mix that attracts profit.
“This marketing mix or the four P model can be used to help a business decide how to take a new offer to market. And can also be used to assess your existing marketing strategy” he says.
For EMC, enabling channel partners was the key to suc-cess and it worked towards developing best practices and well-organized models to create a skilled channel work-force. Another 3P philosophy—profitability, pipeline and performance—helped them in keeping a sharp focus on their channel partners. The solution provider understands that the channel community is vital to build customer confi-dence. “The major issue a channel partner usually faces is to keep on leveraging the profits” he says.
Sahai says that the cloud has changed the way indepen-dent software vendors sell their products by highlighting profitability and ease of scalability. It has also altered the way IT departments now sell and buy software. “The avail-ability of storage capacity will attract more businesses and applications to move towards cloud for affordable and scal-able IT investment” he says.
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP | PREMIER 100
On Higher Ground: Reaching for the Clouds
Road to Growth: The Four Ps to Profit
“We have built a partner-dedicated IaaS cloud. Each partner is provided with his own simple IaaS cloud that is personalized and localized as per his portfolio.”ANIL NAMA, CIO, CtrlS
Praveen Sahai, VP, Channels, EMC, India and SAARC, highlighted the four Ps of marketing—product, price, place and promotion in a chat with IDG’s Editor-in-chief Vijay Ramachandran at the Premier100 2014 event.
JULY 2014 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 133
K. BHASKAR, senior director, office imaging solutions di-vision, Canon, in his session, pointed out that the company is focusing on managed print services—a sector towards which both SMEs and large PSUs are migrating to.
In a managed print services framework, the document cycle starts with creating, managing, followed by printing, archival, archival retrieval and finally ends with destruc-tion. This is managed by a workflow solution, where critical documents need to be archived and indexed for proper, easy and quick retrieval. These documents have a lifespan, post which, they need to be securely destroyed.
In order to help organizations achieve that, Canon has introduced solutions and expertise in managing paper re-sources. In addition, Bhaskar says, when companies move from paper to data (or bits and bytes), security becomes a
big issue. For this, Canon has a two-level security strategy in place.
At the first level, it ensures that printed documents remain confidential. This means that other than the person printing it, nobody should be able to access it. At the second level, it introduces a mechanism that lets administrators decide who should have viewing rights and who should have editing rights. This helps minimize manipulation of documents.
Apart from that, Canon is also ensuring that it provides a standardized service quality across over 600 cities that it operates in. With its managed print services solutions, Canon is setting new benchmarks in the industry.
ON the sidelines of the Premier100 2014 awards, Vijay Ram-achandran, editor-in-chief, IDG Media, revealed the find-ings of CIO’s annual State of the CIO 2014 survey.
In order to give channel partners an overview of the chal-lenges that their clients face, their budgets, and staffing is-sues, Ramachandran said that Indian organizations spend upto 3.5 percent of their annual revenue on IT.
He said that post slowdown, almost all new funding comes out of departmental budgets giving LOBs greater say in projects.
Also, he said, the business’ near-time horizon is now upto 12 months. This means that CIOs are expected to get product justifications, select partners, start rollouts, and get results within this duration. And the slowdown isn’t making it any easier for CIOs. That’s because despite the slowdown,
companies are doing more projects in lesser time, on tighter budgets, and with fewer people.
Apart from that, CIOs feel there are challenges with out-sourcing. There is a lot of attrition at outsourcers’ end and talent is rarely replaced, said Ramachandran.
Another pain point for CIOs is the fact that datacenter complexity is increasing and companies are porting to cloud for simplifying IT. The survey pointed out that the hybrid cloud spectrum has breached the 40 percent mark across organizations.
But the good news is that new technologies like augment-ed reality and M2M are gaining ground.
Managed Print Services: Print, Protect, Prosper
CIO Viewpoint: The State of the CIO 2014
“When companies move from paper to data (or bits and bytes), security becomes a big issue. For this, Canon has a two-level security strategy in place.”K. BHASKAR, Senior Director, Office Imaging Solutions Division, Canon
“The business’ near-time horizon is now upto 12 months. This means, CIOs are expected to select partners, rollout, and get results within this duration.”VIJAY RAMACHANDRAN, Editor-in-Chief, IDG Media
134 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JULY 2014
AT the ChannelWorld Premier100 2014, IDG Media ar-ranged a panel discussion with some of India’s top CIOs to discuss ‘The New Economics of IT’.
According to Rajeev Mittal, IT/IS head at Piaggio Vehi-cles, changing business dynamics is what’s driving the new economics of IT. Today, he said, IT projects that improve ef-ficiency are important and tend to be focus areas.
Vijay Ramachandran, IDG’s editor-in-chief, who was moderating the conversation, asked the panel what they thought about the trend of lines-of-business (LOBs) and de-partment heads increasingly funding IT projects.
Sharat M. Airani, global CTO, Intellinet Datasys, said that this is an ideal situation. Funding in IT, he believes, is too restricted. LOBs have different requirements, he said, so it’s better that LOBs get independent budget approvals.
Yogesh Zope, group CIO, Bharat Forge, wasn’t totally con-vinced that allowing different LOBs run independently was a good idea. This system would make integrating individual solutions with core systems “a painful process.”
Ramachandran pointed out to the panel that many chan-nel partners lament that CIOs like to partner almost exclu-sively with big players. In response, Mittal said that some of the major parameters that CIOs consider include the depen-dency of a partner on its OEMs, potential delays in project implementation, what kind of certifications a partner orga-nization has, and what value they can add. The Indian mar-ket, he said, works largely on relationships.
AT the ChannelWorld Premier100 2014, Venkatesh Swami-nathan, country head, Novell, spoke broadly about Novell’s portfolio and history—and why it made sense for channel partners to work with it.
Swaminathan said the company has a software presence from infrastructure to cloud to mobile applications. Glob-ally, he added, Novell has 48,000 customers, over 7,000 partners and a revenue of $1.1 billion. Its India operations, based out of Bangalore, has over 700 employees and over 670 developers.
In a 2012 report, Forrester placed Novell among the top worldwide infrastructure services software vendors. Since then, the company has been placed there regularly by Forrester. Novell, he said, started its India operations in Bangalore in 1994 with Texas Instruments and is one of the
pioneers of the Bangalore IT boom. In 2011, it was acquired by the Attachmate Group. Novell, as it is now, is essentially an amalgamation of four different companies.
Software created under the Novell and NetIQ (a brand acquired in 2005) portfolios, are created in India by Indian engineers and sold globally. The India operations of the company manage the Asia-Pacific region. The company focuses primarily on the identity and access management segment in the Indian markets.
The last few years have been good for Novell. Its NetIQ portfolio grew by a humungous 300 percent during the last fiscal.
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP | PREMIER 100
CIO Panel: The New Economics of IT
Towards Stronger Relationships: The Perfect Partnership
“We focus primarily on identity and access management in India. Our NetIQ portfolio grew by a humungous 300 percent in the last fiscal.”VENKATESH SWAMINATHAN, Country Head, Novell
Vijay Ramachandran, Editor-in-Chief, IDG Media, gathered some of India’s most renowned CIOs to discuss the new economic realities that are changing the IT landscape.
JULY 2014 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 135
CDP India Raksha Technologies Targus Technologies Twenty Two By 7 Solutions Unified Data-Tech Solutions
STORAGE SPECIAL AWARD
AWARDEES
More data means more storage, and more complications. This award honors some of the best storage solutions in India. Barun Lala, Director, HP Storage, gave away the awards to five channel partners.
CLOUD STORAGE, virtual machine (VM) backup, big data and vendor consolidation have caused a significant change in today’s storage market environment. As orga-nizations understand the importance of data manage-
ment and increase their investments in implementing storage solutions, channel partners have an important role to play in educating their customers on innovative storage technology and providing them with a proven, high quality and cost-efficient so-lutions. The award-winning partners also maintain strategic re-lationships with the IT industry leaders which ultimately allows them to deliver best-in-class solutions with a significant competi-tive advantage. These awards honor channel partners who have delivered exemplary solutions for their customers during the past year and have accomplished extraordinary business challenges.
The datacenter award honors those channel partners who ensure that their customers run datacenters that adapt to changing business demands. Nikhil Pathak, VP & Country GM-IT Business, India & SAARC, Schneider Electric India, presented the awards.
THE ENVIRONMENT in which the modern datacenter operates is fast changing. ‘Doing more with less’ has become a mantra for our times and the channel community has risen to the oc-casion in an extraordinary manner. They have helped their
customers to embrace new trends and broadened their IT capabilities by improving security, boosting operational efficiency, and deliver-ing customer-centric services to meet the overall project objectives, while not compromising the uptime and availability of mission-crit-ical applications. Customer needs are varied and it takes a thorough understanding of the client business to service the client efficiently. No doubt, partners need to be abreast of the latest datacenter-related technologies. Behind every great implementation, solution or service is a great idea and these awards are about recognizing the ideas and thinking that shape the best datacenter solutions.
Datacenter Special Award
SPECIAL AWARD
Presents
DATACENTER AWARDS
Congratulations Winners
The security awards recognize those who excel at planning and implementing security programs that improve their customers’ security posture. Mangesh Mantravadi, Zonal Manager-West, Cyberoam, gave away the awards.
THE NEED of the hour is to empower organizations to more effectively manage risk, protect critical infrastructure and maintain regulatory compliance. And while they are at it, they need to reduce complexity, manage costs and
not compromise on application performance. No wonder then, that this is a momentous challenge for the channel community, and a huge responsibility on them to help ease the worries of their clients with regard to information risk management and al-low them to concentrate on their core operations. They need to provide the best-in-class technology to help customers get the most from their IT investments. This award recognizes those in the channel community who are redefining the benchmark of excellence by planning, implementing and managing security programs that significantly improve their customers’ security posture.
Security Special Award
SECURITY SPECIAL AWARD
SPECIAL AWARD
Accel Frontline Dynacons Systems and Solutions Jainam Technologies Rubik Infotech Versatile Infosecurity
AWARDEES
Presents
SECURITY AWARDS
Congratulations Winners
The cloud champions special awards recognize partners’ ability to provide a solid foundation and help their customers succeed in the cloud, Rajesh Janey, President, India & SAARC, EMC, presented the award to the winners.
IF CLOUD COMPUTING is a disruptive force within the enter-prise, just imagine what the cloud is doing to the vendor landscape. The sheer number of cloud players—or companies that claim to be cloud players—is staggering. Given the hype,
anticipated exponential growth, and ambiguous definitions, many technology companies are claiming to be cloud-computing pro-viders. A large number of channel partners appear bullish about the opportunities in cloud computing, however only a select few have distilled the hype from the benefits. The Cloud Champions Special Awards honor those partners who are at the forefront when it comes to adopting new opportunities, understanding new technologies, and tackling the myriad challenges that arise in the cloud computing space. What sets the best cloud solution provid-ers apart is their ability to provide a solid foundation for any solu-tion that they implement for their customers.
Cloud Champions Special Award
CLOUD CHAMPIONS SPECIAL AWARD
SPECIAL AWARD
Aryan Computers & PeripheralsCentral Data Systems Computers Network & Telecom Emicro Data Technologies Foetron
AWARDEES
Presents
CLOUD CHAMPIONS AWARDS
Congratulations Winners
The Hall of Fame winners have consistently proved that they push themselves year after year to transform—rather than merely improve—their business.Vijay Ramachandran, Editor-in-Chief, IDG Media, gave away the awards.
WHEN SUCCESS repeats itself it reflects the highest level of achievement. The ChannelWorld Premier100, now in its sixth year, is proud to present the Premier 100 Hall of Fame. The award honors the partners, whose work has
made a profound difference to their customers. Solving complex IT challenges can be complicated, and it requires innovative solutions and unparalleled experience. Whether their customers are look-ing for ways to streamline and modernize their IT infrastructure or want to understand how mainstream IT technologies and solutions can be used to support their ever-changing business requirements, the winners have helped their customers improve infrastructure and application performance, while helping to control costs, enhance productivity, and improve services. They have worked to achieve two objectives: To come up with the strategies needed to overcome their customers’ challenges and to implement those solutions efficiently.
Hall of Fame Award
HALL OF FAME AWARD
Ashtech Infotech CCS Computers Future Netwings Solutions Infobahn Technical Solutions Ishan GroupSterling Infoways Swan Solutions & Services Value Point Systems Veeras Infotek Vitage Systems
AWARDEES
HALL OF FAMEHALL OF FAME
Presents
HALL OF FAME
ChannelWorld
Congratulations Winners
Keynote speaker M. Krishna Kumar, Founder Director & Master Coach, Intrad School of Executive Coaching, enlightened the crowd with his insights.
Some of India’s biggest IT solution providers showcased their products on the sidelines of the Premier100 2014 event.
Apart from regular sessions, this year a new panel discussion made its debut. Titled the Captains’ Table, the session, brought together some of the biggest IT providers in India to discuss issues like vendor-partner relationships among others.
The Premier100 2014 event wasn’t devoid of glitz and glamour. Indian Idol 5 finalist, Shashi Suman, enthralled the audience with popular bollywood numbers. A fusion band called Sur also graced the stage with foot-tapping Indian folk songs in multiple languages.
On the sidelines of the event, the attendees got an opportunity to network with their peers, top solution providers, and CIOs of some of India’s biggest companies.This provided partners’ with a platform to build relationships.
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP | PREMIER100
n PLAINSPEAK
Name of the Game
WHAT’S IN a name? A brand name to be precise. A lot, I would say. You could take a company with technical expertise, customer loyalty, tons of experience, a dedicated team, and you’d
still be left with a company half as good as it could be if it had brand recall. In today’s hyper-competitive climate, brand equi-ty is critical across companies, immaterial of their size. Tradi-tional channel partners, in particular, continue to grow in thereflected glow of the brands of their vendor alliances. But with technologies’ colours changing fast and OEMs spread-ing themselves thin, it will be a ‘mission impossible’ for enterprise channels to continue to piggyback on the brands of their alliances.
Ask yourself: Are you identified first as a channel partner of X or Y and then seen as a competent solution provider or a popular technology company? Do you be-lieve that technology companies that are majorly—or solely—dependent on their OEMs for all branding activities are seen as loyal channel partners? Think again.
Spend time, money, and resources to create your own brand. Allocate the bud-gets necessary to create vital components of a channel business including market-ing, advertising and PR. Many channel folks are reaping the benefits from taking this plunge. Be willing to spend on brand-ing as a portion of your sales targets and profit margins, and cast it in stone at the start of a fiscal.
Enterprise technology companies contin-uously empower their channel partners at events, awards ceremony, partner meetings and networking conferences. I am not sug-gesting to impart less importance or boy-cott these vendor-led activities. The mutual benefits of co-marketing, joint GTM, MDF-shared events to both the sides—OEMs and the channel—is colossal.
But partner organizations must also mar-ket their stories highlighting technical strengths, domain expertise, and entrepre-neurial vision. Customers should weigh your company’s value proposition first, and then weigh your vendors alliances.
Many partner companies seldom bother to redesign their websites. That’s a ‘self-dug’ pit. Websites are the virtual face of your company. Highlight the ‘vendor agnostic’ story you have proudly been asserting with customers—on your site. Mentioning OEM alliances is great—but it should not always be the ‘poster thing’ on your online space.
Indulge intelligently in ‘almost-zero budget’ social media marketing. Popular-ize reference case studies among potential customers. Create innovative visiting cards for the team. Design e-brochures that get you noticed. Websites, visiting cards, brochures et al may sound incon-sequential but as coach and trainer Mike Marchev says in his blog, “Little things can make or break deals. Remember El-ephants don’t bite, mosquitoes do.”
Create a brand in the technology indus-try and it will garner you more customer mindshare, more brand loyalty, and more business opportunities. Are you a reliable cloud provider or a competent mobile app vendor? These differentiators need to resonate—loud and clear—among CIOs, OEMs, and the competition. n
Your company’s brand is too valuable to be relegated as an after-thought or to hide behind the banners of your technology partners.
Yogesh Gupta is executive editor at ChannelWorld. He is a computer engineer from Mumbai University. You can contact him at [email protected]
YOGESH GUPTA
142 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JULY 2014
The Internet of Everything demandssuperhuman speed.
Explore the Unexplored with Cisco WLAN Technology
With continued growth of mobile data traffic, IT
professionals need new Wireless technologies
to provide employees and customers better
applications, services and experiences.
GetGet thethe CCiiscosco WLANWLAN EdgeEdge
- Broadest WLAN Portfolio in the Industry
- Enterprise WLAN Leader per Gartner Magic
Quadrant
- Largest Customer-base in the WLAN
Industry
- Largest Development Team in the WLAN
Industry
For more details, visit us at http://cs.co/JSI orCall us at 18001037723
TOMORROW starts here.2014 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved
RNI NO.KARENG/2007/20996 Registered No. KA/SK/UDP/1287/2013-2015 Posted at Manipal HO on 28/29th. Licensed to Post without prepayment – License No. WPP -103Printed And Published By Louis D’Mello On Behalf Of IDG Media Private Limited, Geetha Building, 49, 3rd Cross, Mission Road, Bangalore 560 027, India.
