SPECIAL REPORT: Check out the profiles of 22 successful channel heads from the biggest names in the IT arena. What is their mantra to make business tick? >>> PAGE 22 CHANNELWORLD.IN News Analysis A year later, Office 365 has moved forward, but only moderately. How will its future unfold? PAGE 10 On Record: Anil Batra, MD, Riverbed Technology, India, on the company’s hot new growth areas. PAGE 14 Opinion There is no doubt that the personal computer has evolved over the years. But has this evolution been for better or for worse? PAGE 20 Focal Point Here’s how setting up social networks can help you drive innovation internally. PAGE 73 End Line BA’s new program will make travelers wary of booking. PAGE 76 Inside SEPTEMBER 2012 VOL. 6, ISSUE 6 STRATEGIC INSIGHTS FOR SOLUTION PROVIDERS | COVER PRICE Rs.50 ChannelWorld hanne PRAVEEN SAHAI, VP, Channels, EMC India and SAARC, has big plans to empower his channel partners. CHANNEL TITANS THE 22 MEN WHO DRIVE THE CHANNEL Polycom Dell Symantec Polycom Polycom Emerson Polycom Polycom IBM mers mers Intel Cisco VMware Microsoft Juniper Dell Dell Citrix r r D-Link VMware VMware NetApp RSA Ci Ci N N Oracle Dell Dell c c Intel Intel Cisco Cisco NetA NetA RSA RSA N N N N EMC D D Fujitsu eider Electric Fujitsu Fujitsu Avaya icrosoft icrosoft x x CA Technol IBM IBM Jun Jun a Hitachi Data Systems Mware Mware SAP x x Schne Schne Avaya Avaya x x x x Schne Schne Schne Schne
Transcript
SPECIAL REPORT: Check out the profiles of 22 successful channel heads from the biggest names in the IT arena. What is their mantra to make business tick? >>> PAGE 22
CHANNELWORLD.IN
News AnalysisA year later, Office 365 has moved forward, but only moderately. How will its future unfold? PAGE 10
On Record: Anil Batra, MD, Riverbed Technology, India, on the company’s hot new growth areas. PAGE 14
OpinionThere is no doubt that the personal computer has evolved over the years. But has this evolution been for better or for worse? PAGE 20
Focal PointHere’s how setting up social networks can help you drive innovation internally. PAGE 73
End LineBA’s new program will make travelers wary of booking. PAGE 76
InsideSEPTEMBER 2012 VOL. 6, ISSUE 6
STRATEGIC INSIGHTS FOR SOLUTION PROVIDERS | COVER PRICE Rs.50ChannelWorldChannelWorldPRAVEEN SAHAI, VP, Channels, EMC India and SAARC, has big plans to empower his channel partners.
WE ARE MORE THAN A NETWORKING COMPANY. WE ARE A RESPONSE.
At Juniper Networks, we believe that new technology, mobility and the networked world are driving transformation at an unprecedented rate of speed. Countless new discoveries— business models, medical cures, technical solutions, inventions and ways of understanding the universe are happening every day. And the one thing that keeps all of that progress flowing is the network’s ability to meet the demand. Customers want an alternative to the old approach. That’s why, for us, the network is our sole focus and constant innovation is our mission.
CHALLENGE THE STATUS QUOFrom the beginning, Juniper set out to architect a di�erent kind of network. The kind of network approach that enables customers to solve the world’s most complex problems and harness its most exciting opportunities. Our goal was never to be a smaller version of the competition, but rather an answer to the status quo.
In keeping with that goal, a year ago we declared “It’s time for the new network.” We did this not as a marketing slogan, but to signal our laser focus and commitment to a fundamentally new approach to networking; answering the wave of incredible demand that we predicted then and that our ever more connected planet is experiencing now.
NETWORKING ISN’T A COMMODITY, IT’S A SCIENCEThe world doesn’t order up networking by the pound or bet their infrastructure on unproven methods. As such, we are committed to research, development and partnerships with world-class testing facilities.
In fact, in recent years no other public company has invested more percentage of total revenue in networking R&D than Juniper Networks. As a result we are ready with the kind of disruptive thinking and breakthrough products that will meet this exponential network growth long into the future.
We have introduced a bold set of breakthrough innovations to the three key areas of the network most in need of transformation:
In the data center. We have fundamentally changed the economics and performance of switching with QFabric.™ This entirely new approach to data center networks enables our customers to meet the exponential demand driven by the massive global adoption of cloud computing and the new mobile workforce. Learn more at juniper.net/qfabric
At the mobile edge. We have MobileNext,™ a unique software solution that enables more scale and capability than anything out there, by leaps and bounds. Learn more at juniper.net/mobilenext
In the core. We’ve created the Converged Supercore,™ a new architectural approach leveraging our purpose-built silicon to tackle the incredible demands happening now in the core of the network. This solution oers operators incredible flexibility, control and vision with unprecedented scale, simplicity and operational e�ciency. Learn more at juniper.net/supercore
These innovations will drive incredible value, performance and opportunity for our customers for years to come.
OUR CUSTOMERS FUEL OUR PASSION
We live in a time where innovation in every industry around the world will be the key to shape the economy of the 21st century. That truth is made clear to us every day by our customers. In fact, Juniper’s greatest partners in innovation are our customers themselves. Their vision into where their industry, new product ideas and consumers are going challenge us to push our own innovation and understanding of the networking industry forward. We thank our customers for their partnership and are proud to be part of their success.THE NEW NETWORK IS HERE
IN LAST month’s editorial, I wondered why solution providers were still hesitant to offer mobility solutions. In the weeks since then I’ve met the heads of 82 solution provider organizations across the country and came
across just two that had their hat in the mobility ring.
Why did I bring up mobility? Because it rep-resents a big, interesting and lucrative opportunity for your company? Yes, but more than that I be-lieve it’s about preparing your organizations to ride the next wave, before your mature lines of busi-ness begin to ebb.
All businesses, even the most successful ones, at a point will run out of room to grow. The options aren’t too many—reinvent the business periodically or simply stagnate and perish. But, committing to reinvention doesn’t come naturally to most companies, specially when the existing line of business is strong.
The alternative is to make the leap to a new, growing business from an existing, slowing one before revenues from that core market have stalled. This is what will give organizations ways and means to stay ahead and not be complacent with present success.
Not by any means easy given how change doesn’t come easy. For it is in the nature of humans to re-sist transformation.
While I’ve seen myri-ad organizations strug-gle to make this leap, a few distinctly stand out. My favorite has to be Ja-pan’s Sumitomo Group. One of the largest of Japanese kieretsu, its roots lie in a 17th cen-tury book and medicine store in Kyoto founded by Masatomo Sumitomo.
Over four centuries, the Group has thrived, getting into new markets and actively seeking new opportunities (copper smelting, trading in tex-tiles, mining, forestry and
banking, to name just a few). Each time the Group has translated its domi-nance in one sector to growth in another, before the earlier cash cow ran dry, while staying true to its founder’s principles of not pursuing “easy gains”.
Or take a more recent example, Apple.
Seen from the outside, the Apple Innovation Jug-gernaught seems to be all about coming up with ubercool products. But did you know that one of its iconic products, the iPhone, began life more as a problem?
From 2001 to 2005, Ap-ple’s largest revenue gen-erator was the amazingly successful iPod. If Apple were a typical corporate you’d have to wonder why this had them worried. Steve Jobs saw things differently and went on to warn the Apple board that as cellphones began to incorporate music players the iPod’s domi-nance was under threat.
Thus began Apple’s
quest to develop a prod-uct line that would not only take on increased competiton but also its consequence—declining revenues from the iPod.
Apple’s solution was to build a better cellphone that could also play mu-sic, before anyone else. The iPhone went on to cannibalize iPod sales, but, in turn gave the com-pany a new, more lucra-tive product line.
How many organiza-tions I wonder would be willing to risk killing a solid line of business in order to build a potential-ly more profitable future? Would you?
I truly believe that to sustain profitable growth in these challenging times you will have to identify value-added lines of busi-ness that have the growth potential to allow you to transition out of your current core areas. Fo-cussing on pushing clear disruptors like mobility, collaboration, cloud and analytics to me are the only ways by which you can de-risk your business, even in the near term. Look upon them less as technologies and more as the levers that will allow you to change business direction and intent.
To not do so is likely to be hazardous to the health of your business.nVijay Ramachandran is the Editor-in-Chief of ChannelWorld. Contact him at [email protected]
n Have you prepared your organization to ride the next wave, before your mature lines of business begin to ebb?
“If you think of [opportunity] in terms of the Gold Rush, then you’d be pretty depressed right now because the last nugget of gold would be gone. But the good thing is, with innovation, there isn’t a last nugget. Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities.”
—Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.
SEPTEMBER 2012 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 1
InsideINDIAN CHANNELWORLD n SEPTEMBER 2012
Here are 22 channel heads who steer their company’s fortunes. What is the secret to their success? >>> Page 22
CHANNELHere are 22 channel heads who steer their company’s
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n NEWS DIGEST05 Storm Clouds Rising | Oracle has agreed to pay a $2 million penalty to settle charges of the U.S.
Securities and Exchange Commission that it did not have proper controls to prevent employees at its Indian subsidiary from secretly setting aside funds from the company’s books.
06 Lenovo Close On the Heels of HP | Chinese PC maker Lenovo said that its net profit in the fiscal first quarter ended June 30 grew by 30 percent YoY, as the company inched closer toward surpassing HP to become the top vendor.
08 The Cloud is Now Within Your Grasp| Two of the bigger names in cloud computing —VMware and Rackspace —have each released low-cost or free trial versions of their cloud offerings.
n NEWS ANALYSIS10 In Search of Firm Ground | A year later, Office 365 seems to have moved forward, but only moderately. How will its future unfold?
n OPINION01 Editorial: Vijay Ramachandran believes that organizations need to make the leap to a new, growing business from an existing, slowing one before revenues from the core market begin to stall.
18 Rob Enderle: Reports of the death of IT departments in the BYOD era have been exaggerated. But, if IT doesn’t accept its new role then it might be time to write the obituary.
20 Steven Vaughan Nichols: There is no doubt that the PC has evolved over the years. But has this evolution been for better or for worse?
n OFFICESBangalore IDG Media Pvt. Ltd. Geetha Building, 49, 3rd Cross, Mission Road, Bangalore 560 027, India. Tel: 080-30530300. Fax: 080-30586065Delhi IDG Media Pvt. Ltd.DLF Corporate Park, Tower 4 B,3rd Floor, Room 301, MG Road, DLF Phase 3, Gurgaon- 122001, HaryanaTel: 0124- 3881015Mumbai IDG Media Pvt. Ltd.201, Madhava, Bandra Kurla Complex, Bandra East, Mumbai 400051. Tel: 022-30685000. Fax: 022-30685023
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 ON RECORD14 Anil Batra, Managing Director, Riverbed Technology, India, on the company’s hot
new growth areas, and how it’s beating back new wanna-be’s and old players.
n FOCAL POINT73 Getting It StartedSOCIAL NETWORKING | What it takes to make a successful internal social network, they say, is
strategic planning, careful follow-through and a willingness to change direction as your users showyou how they want to use the tools you’re giving them. Here’s how setting up social networks can help innovation.
n ENDLINE76 Giving the Creeps | BA’s new program will make travelers wary of booking.
PAGE 06: Lenovo Close On the Heels of HP
PAGE 06: Telepresence is All Set For Big Growth
PAGE 08: The Cloud is Now Within Your Grasp
PAGE 10: In Search of Firm Ground
WHAT’S WITHIN
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
LEGAL
Oracle: Storm Clouds Rising
Lexmark has exited the inkjet printer business and is laying off 1,700 people as part of a restructuring plan to im-prove profitability.Lexmark’s restructuring will result in job cuts mainly tied to the inkjet business, including 1,100 manufactur-ing positions, the company said in a statement. As part of the restructuring plan, the company is shutting down an inkjet supplies manufactur-ing facility in the Philippines by the end of 2015, and
eliminating other inkjet de-velopment assets by the end of 2013.Lexmark will now exit the consumer business and focus on enterprise products, in-cluding higher-margin prod-ucts such as multifunction printers, managed print ser-vices, content management, said Marty Canning, Lexmark executive vice president and president of imaging solutions and services. By Agam Shah—
Dropping the Curtain
PRINTERS
Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), but the SEC has not explicitly alleged bribery of foreign officials, though it said the use of the funds to pay recipients who were not on Oracle’s approved local vendor list, and in some cases did not exist or were just storefronts “created a risk that they potentially could be used for illicit means, such as bribery or embezzlement.”
In a complaint before a court in California, SEC al-leged that from 2005 to 2007 certain employees of Oracle India secretly “parked” with distributors and kept off Oracle India’s books about
$2.2 million of the proceeds from certain sales to the Indian government.
In the typical business model used by Oracle at the time, purchase orders were placed by customers on the distributor who in turn bought software licenses and services directly from Oracle for sale to the cus-tomer for a margin, accord-ing to the complaint.
On about 14 occasions related to eight different gov-ernment contracts, certain Oracle India employees cre-ated extra margins between the distributor and end user price, and directed the dis-tributors to hold the extra margin in side funds.
The distributor made pay-ments at the direction of Ora-cle India employees from the side funds to third parties, purportedly for marketing and development expenses, according to SEC.
Between 2005 and 2007, government customers are said to have paid Oracle India’s distributors at least $6.7 million (Rs 36.85 crore) on the sales, with Oracle receiving approximately $4.5 million in revenue, with the balance about $2.2 million parked with distributors.
Oracle failed to implement or maintain a system of ef-fective internal accounting controls to prevent improper side funds, the SEC added.
—By John Ribeiro
ORACLE HAS agreed to pay a $2 million (Rs 11 crore) penalty to settle charges of the
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that it did not have proper controls to pre-vent employees at its Indian subsidiary from secretly setting aside funds from the company’s books, SEC said.
The funds were used to make unauthorized pay-ments to phony vendors in the country, the agency said.
Oracle has agreed to settle the SEC’s charges without admitting or denying the allegations. It was charged with violating the Foreign
SEPTEMBER 2012 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 5
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The Asia Pacific telepresence market is set to reach $93 million (Rs 518 crore) in 2017, according to new analysis from Frost & Sullivan-Asia Pacific Telepresence Markets CY2010.
The market earned revenues of $41.9 million (Rs 233 crore)in 2011 and is predicted a bright future as telepresence’s highly immersive experience will
McAfee, has announced that Anand Prahlad, currently Vice President of Engineering for Endpoint Security, will assume the role of Managing Director of Operations, McAfee India. He will also maintain his current role as a VP in the Endpoint Security group.
NetApp India announced the appointment of Krithiwas Neelakantan as Director, Channel & Alliances, NetApp India. In his new role, Krithiwas will spearhead channel development and drive sales through joint go-to-market with the NetApp partner ecosystem.
RSA announced the appointment of Navin Sadhwani as Head of Channel and Commercial Business for India and SAARC. Sadhwani will also be responsible for formulating and executing the India channel and commercial strategy and work closely with RSA channel partners in the region.
strong earnings as its market share expanded to surpass Acer, and Dell last year. This comes despite a slowdown in the PC market because of weakening economic conditions, and tablets cutting into the sales of notebooks, according to
experts. In this past quarter, Lenovo’s worldwide PC shipments grew by 25 percent year-over-year, while
in contrast, shipments by both Dell and HP decreased both by about 12 percent, according to IDC.
A main driver of Lenovo’s business has been its dominance of China’s PC market, which has grown to become the world’s largest. The company said in its earnings report China generated $3.5 billion
(Rs 19, 435 crore) for the company in the quarter, accounting for 44 percent of the Lenovo’s total sales.
The company has also been expanding into emerging markets, where its growth has been strong, with its shipments increas-ing in countries like India, Brazil and Russia.
While Lenovo’s note-books made up the major-ity of the company’s sales, at 54 percent, the company has been investing heav-ily in developing products outside the traditional PC space, including smartphones, tablets and smart TVs.
In the quarter, Lenovo’s business unit dealing with mobile and smart TV products reported sales increasing by 173 percent year-over-year, reaching $587 million. These products made up 7 percent of the company’s revenue. In this past quarter, Lenovo’s market share in smartphones in China, reached about 10 percent, putting the company third behind Samsung and Chinese handset vendor ZTE, according to research firm Canalys.
— By Michael Kanw
attract several enterprises in the region looking forward.
Video is now a huge part of the mainstream enterprise communications sector but high definition (HD) video does not provide an immersive environment to the end-users.
“The interoperability with room-based video conferencing systems,
executive video conferencing (VC) solutions, and desktop video solutions will trigger demand among Asian enterprises,” said Frost
& Sullivan senior industry analyst Jessie Yu.
Increase in demand of telepresence solutions will encourage both global and local vendors to step into this lucrative market, and this will eventually lead to price wars.
Although it will also lead to technology innovation, end-users may not quickly adopt this solution due to factors such as the product’s high upfront capital investment and operational costs,
and bandwidth consumption. —By Anuradha Shukla
TELEPRESENCE
Short TakesPERSONAL COMPUTING
Lenovo Close On the Heels of HP
CHINESE PC maker Lenovo said that its net profit in the fiscal first quarter
ended June 30 grew by 30 percent year-over-year, as the company inched closer toward surpassing HP to become the top vendor in the market.
Lenovo’s net profit reached $141 million (Rs 783 crore) in the quarter, up from $108 million (Rs 600 crore) in the same period a year ago. The company’s revenue in the quarter was at $8 billion, a year-over-year increase of 35 percent.
At the end of this past quarter, Lenovo had a 14.9 percent share of the PC market, putting the company second behind rival HP, which had a 15.5 percent share, according to research firm IDC.
The Chinese PC vendor has consistently reported
BIG MONEY: Revenue in APAC is expected to rise by 2017.
Telepresence is All Set For Big Growth
35%year-on-year revenue growth recorded by Lenovo in Q1 of 2012
( Source : IDC)
6 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD SEPTEMBER 2012
CLOUD COMPUTING
The Cloud is Now Within Your Grasp
Brocade CEO ResignsThe CEO of Brocade Communications has announced plans to retire from the company, even as the storage networking vendor reported increased profits for the quarter just ended.Michael Klayko has been CEO since 2005. “Decisions like these are never easy, but I believe it is the right time,” Klayko was quoted as saying in a statement.The storage networking market has changed significantly in the seven years since he became CEO. Klayko will stay on as CEO until the company finds a replacement, Brocade said.
— IDG News Service
Around
The WorldSluggish PC Growth in 2012 Growth in the PC market is expected to be slower than last year, after mid-year shipments slowed as consumers were hit by weak economic conditions, and also postponed purchases to evaluate Windows 8 and Ultrabook products while considering spending on media tablets and smartphones, IDC said.The PC market is expected to grow by only 0.9 percent this year, down from 1.7 percent last year, although growth may pick up to 6.5 percent in 2013.Global PC shipments during the year are forecast to be 367 million with portable PCs accounting for 214 million units. IDC now expects worldwide PC shipment growth will average 7.1 percent from 2013 to 2016, down from the 8.4 percent CAGR it had previously forecast. — John Ribeiro
Dell’s New Cloud OfferingDell said that it will offer dedicated servers in its data centers and off-premises application and storage services for companies looking to establish private clouds.Dell’s Cloud Dedicated program intends to reduce the stress of companies hosting servers locally by moving workloads off-premises to Dell’s data centers. The program helps companies move applications into the cloud, and the service levels can meet security and compliance requirements, Dell said. — Agam Shah
TWO OF the bigger names in cloud computing —VM-ware and Rackspace
— have each released low-cost or free trial versions of their cloud offerings.
This follows an an-nouncement by Red Hat earlier that it too would offer a free version of its cloud computing platform. Red Hat’s and Rackspace’s offerings help users build private clouds based on the OpenStack software code, while VMware is of-fering a free trial version of its vCloud software, which allows access to public cloud resources.
The moves signal an ef-fort by cloud service pro-viders to entice businesses that may have virtualized environments to expand to a public or private cloud, one analyst says.
VMware officials say they are hoping to lower the adoption barrier for its customers who are inter-ested in expanding from an on-premise virtualized environment powered by VMware to a public cloud service offered by one of the more than 150 VMware-certified public cloud vendors. Through the swipe of a credit card on the vCloud portal at VMware.com, custom-ers can launch a vCloud Service Evaluation, public cloud instance of Linux virtual machines that are hosted by a vCloud service provider that the company does not disclose.
VMware has not had this “instant gratification,”
says Gartner cloud analyst Lydia Leong, which has resulted in some VMware customers who want to experiment with public cloud services to do so at competitors such as Amazon Web Services and Rackspace. “This is a basic offering that doesn’t really have any bells and whistles, but is a reasonable way to get the ‘feel’ of a VMware cloud,” she says, noting that it’s not meant to be a formal proof-of-concept evaluation tool.
Rumors have circulated in recent weeks that VM-ware will be releasing its own IaaS offering, as opposed to the vCloud
network of service provid-ers the company currently works with. Andrews, the VMware spokesperson, says he couldn’t comment on speculation, but says VMware will “continue to invest in our service pro-vider ecosystem,” noting that VMware is a “part-ner-led company.”
Rackspace, meanwhile, is doubling down on the company’s investment in OpenStack, including re-cently releasing a product fully powered by Open-Stack, which is the larg-est OpenStack-powered public cloud deployment, Leong says.
— By Brandon Butler
8 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD SEPTEMBER 2012
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It was in this under-served segment where Google Apps found most of its customers the first three or four years after its launch in 2007, attracting them with a free suite that included email, calendar, IM, productivity applica-tions, a website builder and, for $50 (Rs 2750) per- user-per-year, additional fea-tures, including IT manage-ment and security features.
Microsoft’s offering, the free Office Live Small Busi-ness (OLSB), which focused on website hosting and email, couldn’t hold back Google Apps, which cur-rently is used by 5 million businesses, 66 of the largest 100 U.S. universities and government agencies in 45 of the 50 U.S. states.
It seems in this respect, Office 365 has been effec-tive. According to Micro-soft, more than 90 percent of Office 365 customers are small businesses with 50 or fewer employees.
“So many of these wins are new customers for Mi-crosoft,” Webster said.
Suites like Office 365 and Google Apps, which are either free or moderately priced on a monthly or an-nual subscription model, give many SMBs the oppor-tunity to have better email and collaboration software than they’ve been able to afford, and because the ap-plications are hosted and managed by vendors, with much less IT maintenance work, she said.
REALITY BITESHowever, it hasn’t all been rosy. Many OLSB customers, faced with a recent deadline to migrate to Office 365 or to another email hosting provider, complained that Microsoft could have made the transition smoother.
AMIXTURE OF intense excitement and skepticism followed the launch a year
ago of Office 365, as backers and critics debated whether the cloud collaboration, pro-ductivity and communica-tion suite would succeed.
Skeptics said Office 365 was arriving too late as a unifying and superior re-placement to weaker and disjointed offerings like Business Productivity On-line Suite (BPOS), Office Live Small Business (OLSB) and Live@edu.
Microsoft and its sup-porters countered that it was still early days in the cloud collaboration, pro-ductivity and communica-tion market, and that Office 365 would tower over com-petitors like Google Apps.
THE PRESENTOne year later, it’s hard to say whether Office 365 has been a success or a failure,
and Microsoft isn’t making the task easier.
“We’re not breaking out customer, user, or revenue numbers at this time,” a spokeswoman for the com-pany said via email, when asked for concrete metrics about Office 365’s sales and adoption. She reiterated the “momentum” statement Microsoft has made previ-ously that Office 365 is “on track” to be one of the “fast-est growing offers” ever for the company.
One thing seems clear: Office 365 hasn’t blown com-petitors out of the water.
“It hasn’t swept the mar-ket by storm,” said IDC analyst Melissa Webster.
She expects Microsoft to release concrete data about Office 365 sales once the product makes significant revenue contributions.
“They’ll give metrics when the metrics are mean-ingful, demonstrating scale and depth,” she said.
Beyond its ability to dominate—or not—the market, Office 365’s suc-cess will also be measured against other criteria.
For starters, Office 365, whose most common con-figuration includes online versions of Office, Share-Point, Lync and Exchange, must help Microsoft make inroads into the small-business segment.
There, most prospective customers have lacked the money and expertise to buy and install in their offices products like Exchange, SharePoint and Lync.
In Search of Firm Ground
A year later, Office 365 seems to have moved forward, but only moderately. How will its future unfold? By Juan Carlos Perez
n NEWS ANALYSIS
10 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD SEPTEMBER 2012
In discussion forums, blogs and other outlets, upset OLSB users said Microsoft should have au-tomated and handled more of the work, and provided migration tools, especially to transfer websites.
Similar complaints have been voiced by some Busi-ness Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) customers regarding their move to Of-fice 365. BPOS was aimed at mid-sized and large com-panies, and included online versions of SharePoint, Ex-change and Lync based on their 2007 editions. It also lacked Office Web Apps, the Office online version. By contrast, Office 365’s components are based on the newer 2010 editions of the products.
“Yes, I heard from some smaller businesses I’ve talk-ed to that Microsoft could have done more to automate the migration process,” said Michael Fauscette, an IDC analyst. “Microsoft could have made it easier.”
With the recently launched Office 365 for Education—schools and universities that have been using Live@edu will have to engage in a similar transition over the next 18 months or so, so it remains to be seen whether these customers also raise objec-tions to the process.
“You’d hope that Micro-soft has learned from the feedback it’s gotten about this now that the Live@edu migrations are starting,” Fauscette said.
The statistic that more than 90 percent of Office 365 customers are small businesses also raises the question of whether Office 365 has been successful in a different but critical mis-sion: protecting Microsoft’s vast installed based of Ex-
change/SharePoint/Lync/Office on-premises custom-ers as they move to a cloud model for email, productiv-ity apps and collaboration.
“Every CIO in the world is looking at a cloud strat-egy,” Webster said. “Mi-crosoft needs to be able to answer ‘Yes’ when they ask if Microsoft can help them move to the cloud.”
In January, Spanish bank Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA) an-nounced its plan to roll out Google Apps to its 110,000 employees, a project that involves turning off various on-premises email systems, including Exchange, which was used by about 35,000 employees in the compa-ny’s headquarters.
Unsurprisingly, Google trumpeted the win, say-ing that when completed, the implementation would be the largest to date for Google Apps.
In May, the U.S. De-partment of the Interior announced its choice of Google Apps for about 90,000 users, a loss for Office 365, which was also considered, and for Exchange, which was one of the on-premises email systems replaced. That deal was not only a business win for Google but also a legal victory, because the com-pany sued the agency in 2010, alleging that the con-tract requirements favored Microsoft unfairly.
FINDING THEIR FEETSimultaneously, Microsoft has also counter-punched,
landing its share of large Office 365 contracts. “Office 365 has been at least moder-ately successful in protect-ing Microsoft’s customer installed base,” said industry analyst Michael Osterman from Osterman Research.
The executive branch of the Minnesota state gov-ernment is an example of a customer that has followed an ideal path for Microsoft. It consolidated about 40 disparate email systems into a single on-premises Exchange 2007 platform and later moved its about 40,000 users to Office 365.
In May, Microsoft an-nounced that it had struck a deal with the Catholic International Education Of-fice to roll out Office 365’s
education edition to about 4.5 million Catholic school students this year.
Office 365 has also bumped Google Apps from some accounts. Brazilian clothing store chain Renner adopted Google Apps in 2009, but down the line got disenchanted with it and recently decided to replace it with Office 365.
The Microsoft suite is better suited to Renner’s plan to link its cloud email and collaboration platform with a variety of third-par-ty, on-premises transaction systems and enterprise applications, said CIO Leandro Balbinot.
“At the end of last year, we realized Google Apps wasn’t complete enough for that evolution,” he said, adding that Renner histori-cally hasn’t been a big user
of Microsoft products.Microsoft did well to
design Office 365 with hy-brid deployments in mind, Osterman said.
Some companies are more comfortable keeping certain email and collaboration soft-ware on-premises, and it lets Microsoft build on its large installed base, he said.
Industry analyst Rebecca Wettemann from Nucleus Research concurs. “Most businesses are used to Of-fice and Outlook, and this hybrid approach lets them take advantage of the econ-omies and flexibility of the cloud while working on the environment they’re com-fortable with,” she said.
Although Office 365 ap-plications offer a subset
of the functionality of the on-premises versions, that subset has been more than adequate, Wettemann said. “The core functionality is there,” she said.
Office 365 has a variety of bundling options Microsoft offers, which some have suggested could be counter-productive and confusing to prospective clients.
With its various options, Office 365 is certainly more complex to understand from a licensing perspective, but at the same time it of-fers customers more flex-ibility to mix and match versions to better suit dif-ferent types of users, IDC’s Fauscette said.
“The channel partners are really good about working with the custom-ers and helping them deci-pher the details.”
With its various options, Office 365 is certainly more complex to understand from a licensing perspective, but at the same time it offers customers more flexibility to mix and match versions to better suit different types of users.
n NEWS ANALYSIS
12 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD SEPTEMBER 2012
MD, Riverbed Technology, India, on the
company’s hot new growth
areas, and how it’s beating back new wanna-be’s and old players.
By Radhika Nallayam
it’s beating back new wanna-be’s and old players.
By Radhika Nallayam
Your recent acquisition of Zeus Technology and Aptimize puts you in direct competition with established vendors in the application delivery space like F5 and Citrix. How do you position Riverbed, given its traditional focus on WAN optimization? BATRA: It is true that we started out with a WAN optimization offering and it remains our flagship product. However, like any other company, we’ve gradually brought in adja-cent technologies to create a platform. Our platform enables infrastructures to be optimized, drives applications to perform better, and delivers apps in the right manner. We also focus on application firewalls, web-content op-timization, and applica-tion-aware network per-formance management
Riverbed is a perfor-mance platform company. Yes, we did begin with WAN optimization, but that was just a part of the performance enhance-ment portfolio. In our continuing conversa-tion with the customer, it was very evident that there was a need to have a performance platform that would take care of a lot of other things. As a result, we looked at what we should have as a set of competencies, and obvi-ously the virtual ADC is a growing area. If the appli-ance-based ADC market is growing at 15 percent, then the growth rate of the virtual ADC market is more than 40 percent. With the Zeus acquisition, we became the leader in the virtual ADC space. Aptimize, which is a web-content optimization com-pany, further enhances this portfolio.
The companies that you mentioned are in differ-ent areas, but we encom-pass the whole platform. Besides, we are the only player that focuses on virtual ADCs. The market is, otherwise, appliance-based. According to in-dustry reports, the virtual ADC market will grow at a fast rate, considering the current consolidation sce-nario in the datacenter.
Do you already have customers in India for your virtual ADC? BATRA: We have a few cus-tomers for our application delivery offerings in India, and we see good prospects at this time. We are look-ing at customers of all sizes, across verticals.
The WAN optimization market, a Riverbed
Anil Batra,ON RECORD n
14 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD SEPTEMBER 2012
stronghold, is seeing new entrants like Silver Peak. Is your monopoly being threatened? BATRA: For the last four years we have been right at the top in this market. There are always going to be new companies, even as a few of the ex-isting players exit the market. There is always that churn in this mar-ket. But we continue to maintain a 50-percent market share worldwide. We are focused on R&D and building new features into our products. We are innovating at a faster rate than anybody else in this market. And we believe that we are taking care of the customer’s needs better than anybody else.
In general, the enterprise approach to WAN optimization still seems rather tactical. What’s the scene in India and how many organizations have taken a holistic approach? BATRA: I don’t think or-ganizations have taken an ad hoc approach to WAN optimization. I think it’s well thought-out. But it could be implemented in phases. If an organization has 1,000 locations, for ex-ample, they may not imple-ment WAN optimization at all locations in one go. The critical ones get priority, and then they expand further. Most of organiza-tions that have a compre-hensive IT infrastruc-ture in place will have a thought-out approach to WAN optimization.
Players like Blue Coat, who now compete with you in the asymmetric WAN optimization space, talk extensively about integrating security features into WAN optimization and of security being a differentiator. What’s your security pitch? BATRA: When we bought
the company called Mazu Networks, which is now called Cascade (a River-bed product), it was essen-tially a security product. We transformed it into an application-aware platform. The fact that we can go down to a par-ticular computer and see what application has been used and which server is responding, are all things that we do because we have security features in our products. The other thing that we have is the application firewall, which is virtual and can thus be easily integrated with applications.
It should be easy for Cisco, which dominates the core networking market, to break into most enterprises
with an optimization strategy. What do you think?BATRA: Customers are very discerning, and they know what they want. They are very knowledgeable. Most of the technologies today are sold based on proof of concepts (PoC). When a customer does a PoC with us—and with some of our competitors—they definitely observe a difference. Customers make a decision based on what they see and not on what they are told.
Do you see migration from competing brands? BATRA: Plenty. We do every day. We like to call it ‘boomerang’ because the
customer comes back to us. The cloud definitely seems like a driver for your business. Tell us about your partnership with Akamai.BATRA: We, along with Akamai, built the Steelhead Cloud accelerator, to accelerate SaaS applications. The path optimization is done by Akamai, whereas we take care of the application acceleration part. We have not had any customers for this offering as of now, as this was lunched just a few months ago.
You announced some changes to the Riverbed Partner Network (RPN) program recently. Can you tell us about it? BATRA: We introduced
our technology authoriza-tion path (TAP), which allows partners to recog-nize their strengths and access training in that area. This makes a part-ner quite knowledgeable in an area they want to focus on. As a result, pro-ductivity increases and the partner is able talk to his customers more effec-tively. Since TAP calls for some investments from the partner’s side, we as-sure them of additional benefits in terms of better margins, incentives and rebates. Feedback from our VARs has been phe-nomenal so far.
Do you see a clear trend towards opex, since you have partnerships with all
the major telecom service providers apart from your traditional channel? BATRA: We have service provider partners who provide managed ser-vices to customers—Reli-ance Communications, Tata Communications, Airtel, AT&T, Orange and a few others. They cater to customers who opt for the opex model. However, there are a lot of customers who are still quite interested in capex, because they can depreciate it over time and reduce their opex. So I think both models will grow in the future, which is why we work very closely with our global and Tier-1 SIs and also with our growing network of VARs. n
$1.3 billion: Estimated size of the WAN
application delivery market
by the end of 2012.
SOURCE: IDC
There’s always going to be new companies. But we are innovating faster than anybody else in this market. And
we’re taking care of the customer better than anybody else.
16 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD SEPTEMBER 2012
n ON RECORD | ANIL BATRA
n OPINION
Will BYOD Kill IT?
THE ANSWER to the question in the headline may seem like an easy no. But, the BYOD sea change—and the broad trend to move technology decisions closer to users and into line organizations—is mak-ing IT services redundant. To avoid getting smaller
over the next few years, IT groups will have to adapt.
At the core of the BYOD and consumer-ization trend is dissatisfaction with what IT provides. If users and line managers thought the services and hardware that IT supplied were adequate, they wouldn’t be motivated to bring their own hardware into the shop.
For example, IT is typically bypassed in lieu of cloud services these days largely because getting resources allocated is of-ten wrought with paperwork, approvals, and other hurdles. To avoid this, users in-stead go to online services, use their credit cards and submit an expense report—all of which bypasses IT until an audit or review catches this behavior and some IT or secu-rity executive has a minor coronary.
CIOs may think that simply enabling the device a user brings addresses the prob-lem—certainly the user-staffed groups put in place to provide PCs with IT support would tend to support this assumption. But CIOs need to think differently. By put-ting in place such a group, you’ve basically taken IT out of the support loop, except as an observer. If you could do that with PCs, why couldn’t you do it with, well, everything? Small companies don’t have IT departments, and they seem to do just fine—and off we go down the slippery slope, arguing whether IT is relevant.
Think about it: If users were customers, they’d take their money elsewhere. Most IT groups have trouble grasping that they are essentially staff organizations. In that
sense, line groups are customers. If cus-tomers decide to either use a third-party service or buy their own over something any vendor supplies, that is a lost customer. The line group’s funding will likely follow.
If IT sits back in a BYOD world and does the bare minimum to get employee-sourced hardware to function, that will just hasten the discussion about whether the line organizations need IT at all. Even-tually, the line organization will recognize that it is doing much of the visible work itself and decide to insource IT functions.
Granted, in doing so, the organization is likely to suddenly discover all of the unsung things the IT department had been doing. But, by then, it will be too late, as IT staff has been laid off, replaced by a hosting company, service or a line-staffed replacement function.
Hope is not lost. Even in a BYOD world, the IT department can be relevant, though it might work a bit differently than before.n IT can help with device selection and the location of support resources. n IT can get volume discounts for staffers. n IT can warn users about security or ser-vices issues they may not be aware of, not to mention drafting a successful BYOD policy that protects the business. n Above all, IT can stay in touch with us-ers, figure out what they need and actively work to both assure users that they are in fact relevant and remind users what IT is doing on their behalf. n
Reports of the death of IT departments in the bring-your-own-device era have been exaggerated. But, if IT doesn’t accept its new role then it might be time to write the obituary.
Rob Enderle is president and principal analyst of the Enderle Group. Enderle writes on emerging technology, security and Linux for a variety of publications and appears on news TV shows that include CNBC, FOX, Bloomberg and NPR.
ROB ENDERLE
18 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD SEPTEMBER 2012
n OPINION
For Old Times’ Sake
II GOT involved in computers just in time for the revolu-tion. It was the 1970s, and we were moving from centrally managed computers to PCs. For the next 40 years, users had an unprecedented level of choice, which put the “per-sonal” in “personal computing.” Today, that revolution is
being pushed back. I don’t want to over-state the case. In some organizations, us-ers never moved from the terminal/server model, and even if you had a PC, there was always some vendor lock-in. If you bought a Mac, you used Apple’s operat-ing system. You had more options with a Windows PC, but they were limited.
Through all those years, though, no matter what sort of PC you bought, you could always modify it to meet your changing needs. All you needed were ex-pansion slots and a bit of know-how.
The first sign that things were chang-ing came with the arrival of sealed-unit smartphones and, a bit later, tablets. Up-gradability just doesn’t exist in the tablet world. With a tablet, what you see is what you get, and there’s no way to give your-self more down the road.
The trend expanded in June, when Apple introduced the new MacBook Pro. You can’t open the case without voiding the warranty. You can’t upgrade the hard drive or RAM or change the battery. Some of these limitations have been true of the MacBook Air for a while, but the new Mac-Book Pro takes them to new levels. The problem with this is that your MacBook Pro will be obsolete when the day comes that you feel the need to move to a new ver-sion of the operating system or want to add applications that it can’t support. Your only choice will be to buy a new machine.
Another area of flexibility in the PC era was choice of operating system. We never
had complete freedom, as noted above, but let’s say you bought a new PC back in 2009. It would have come with the infa-mous Windows Vista installed, but it was relatively easy to install the older Windows XP—or even Linux. Now, with Windows 8, Microsoft is making it really hard to boot Linux or older versions of Windows . You can still find a way, if your tech knowledge is above average and you’re persistent. But it’s worse with tablets. If you buy a Mi-crosoft Surface or Windows RT tablet, you’re pretty much locked into Windows 8 forever.
But, you say, what embodies freedom more than a cloud? It’s true that the cloud can eliminate some upgradability prob-lems, since you can put not just your data but also your applications in the cloud. But more and more, the cloud has become a new road to vendor lock-in. Google apps work better with Chrome, Mac OS X and iOS are increasingly intertwined with iCloud, and Office 13 is on its way to being a Microsoft cloud-based application.
It seems as if the push to lock us into a specific platform is growing stronger. I like being able to improve my computers, whether they’re on my desk or in my pock-et. I like being able to choose my operating systems and programs.
I loved the PC revolution. I don’t want to once again have no choice but to put my trust in black boxes and services under the control of corporations that might not have my best interests at heart . n
There is no doubt that the personal computer has evolved over the years. But has this evolution been for better or for worse?
Steven J. Vaughan-Nicholshas been writing about technology and the business of technology since CP/M-80 was cutting-edge and 300bps was a fast Internet connection—and we liked it! He can be reached at [email protected].
STEVEN J. VAUGHAN NICHOLS
20 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD SEPTEMBER 2012
MEET THETITANSChampions. Torch Bearers. The channel chiefs of tech companies are nothing less than titans, fighting in a fierce, competitive landscape. These ‘Channel Titans’ are an intrinsic part of the arsenal of an enterprise solution provider to win business deals. By Team ChannelWorldThe connection between the vendors and their partner ecosystem is a delicate and fragile one. The onus of maintaining the equation between the two parties invariably falls on the channel head of the vendor company. More often than not, he encounters multiple challenges in terms of understanding his partners, their conflicts, their need for newer markets, substantial margins and incentives. Surmounting these, and establishing harmony and growth for
the vendor company, as well as guiding the partner along the growth curve, makes the channel head the face of his organization.
ChannelWorld explores 22 personalities who have become the voice of their respective companies. They walk a tight rope for their partners without compromising adversely on the interest of either party.
This is a profile tribute to each of these individuals who wield power and influence in their channel bastions.
n COVER STORY
22 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD SEPTEMBER 2012
Dell AJAY KAUL | 24
Symantec AMITABH JACOB | 26
EmersonANKESH KUMAR | 28
JuniperJITENDRA GUPTA | 44
CitrixKAUSHAL VELURI | 46
IBM ANOOP NAMBIAR | 30
Polycom ASHISH GUPTA | 32
CiscoB RAGHAVENDRAN | 36
Intel B SURYANARAYANAN | 38
VMwareGANESAN ARUMUGAM | 40
MicrosoftHRISHI PARTHASARATHY | 42
D-Link KERMAN RANA | 48
NetAppKRITHIWAS NEELAKANTAN | 50
RSANAVIN SADHWANI | 52
SAPVIVEK RAWAT | 66
Hitachi Data SystemsYOGESH SAWANT | 68
OracleNIRAJ KAUSHIK | 54
EMCPRAVEEN SAHAI | 56
FujitsuR LAKSHMINARAYANAN | 58
Schneider ElectricSHRINIVAS CHEBBI | 60
AvayaSUDHIR NAYAR | 62
CA TechnologiesVIJAYANT RAI | 64
SEPTEMBER 2012 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 23
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A S
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My management philosophy.It’s important that we channelize the full potential of our channel partners, collaborate with them to ensure that we maximize their productivity, profit and minimize expenses by keeping a dynamic balance between both.
Channel myth I’d like to bust. That it’s all about the numbers-if you consistently fret about the profit and loss statement, your channel partner sales are going to be low.
Biggest learning this year. We should continuously look for opportunities to increase our reach and be keen on working with partners who are willing to offer customized technology solutions.
Technology that will take off in 2013.BYOD and desktop virtualization.
Best advice I’ve ever got.Personal change is a reflection of our inner growth and empowerment.
Director & General Manager Global Commercial Channel–India, DELL
CHANNEL TITANS Ajay Kaul
and be keen on working with partners who are willing to offer customized
Personal change is a reflection of our
YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT ME
Ajay Kaul cooks for his family on occasions. He makes Roganjosh and Damaloo during weekends. Although he enjoys this bit, his kids think that is that there is still enough room for improvement.
24 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD SEPTEMBER 2012
A business idea that should get more attention. Effort is important, result is what matters.
What would you like to invent? A pill that could instantly inspire and motivate people.
An insightful observation your CEO made in the last year. Micheal Dell believes that it is very important to constantly transform business around new areas and solu-tions with broader capabilities. We
have constantly bettered ourselves by exploring new horizons, and keep-ing that in mind there have further strengthened Dell’s position as an in-dustry leading solutions provider with end-to-end technology solutions.
A question you wish you had better answers to. How do I make people see what they are looking for?
A habit you wish you could get rid of. Trying to solve all the problems when some only need to be managed.
Early last year Dell announced a new Global
Commercial Channel (GCC) structure, with a single point of
contact for partners, to generate higher productivity, improved time
cycles, and enable more customized programs. This partner profitability, by bringing consistent pricing, offered the partners increased growth opportunities with solution-centric offerings.”
ONE BIG INITIATIVE
WHAT I’D CHANGE IN THE CHANNEL
I think it’s important for channels to focus on customized solutions. Efforts taken by Dell for strengthening the channel business have been constant and consistent. We currently have over 2300 channel partners in the Indian market. We are continuously looking for opportunities to increase our reach and will work with partners who offer customized solutions.
It is essential to hold training programs for channels with instructor-led classroom training programs and online courses to cover more relevant areas. Dell’s recent initiative called Elite Partner Program roped in 60 tier-2 partners. We train partners on the Dell solution-stack cutting across the enterprise solutions portfolio.
YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT ME
2005
have constantly bettered ourselves by exploring new horizons, and keep-ing that in mind there have further strengthened Dell’s position as an in-dustry leading solutions provider with end-to-end technology solutions.
A question you wish you had better
How do I make people see what they
A habit you wish you could get rid of. Trying to solve all the problems when
announced a new Global
2005
CAREER GRAPH
Kaul has been associated with Dell for the past seven years, executing various roles with success. At present, he is Director & General Manager Global Commercial Channel – India at Dell which includes managing the partner community with channel initiatives and partner empowerment across India. Kaul has also been Director –sales from April 2011 for the public, education and healthcare verticals.
He was Regional Sales Manager (South & West) Public, Education & Healthcare for over two years from February 2009 to May 2011. He headed the south and west regions across central/state Govt., PSU, defense, education and healthcare vertical covering all products of Dell for revenue, margin and market share growth.
As the Regional Enterprise Manager from 2007 to 2009, Kaul headed the pre-sales team and managed the servers and storage business in north and east region across large enterprises and government segment.
Kaul’s first job with Dell was as Sales Manager-Global Accounts from May 2005 onwards. In this role which spanned nearly twenty one months, he managed select global accounts across the country to grow revenue and profitability covering all products.
DELL
SEPTEMBER 2012 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 25
26 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD SEPTEMBER 2012
My management philosophy. Set direction and get a buy-in. Good people need direction, not push. Once you have a buy-in from your people, things will fall in place.
Channel myth I’d like to bust.The myth that the channel is in the business only for money. There is a bigger gain in selling high-technology products. The overall
experience, and making a difference is important.
Biggest learning this year.This year will present a great opportunity to differentiate between the average, good and great in terms of strategies, people, processes and technologies.
Technology that will take off in 2013. As Indian organizations increase their
experience, and making a difference
This year will present a great opportunity to differentiate between the average, good and great in terms of strategies, people,
As Indian organizations increase their
YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT ME
Amitabh Jacob is a tennis aficionado and is hugely passionate about the game. He has been playing actively for the past 11 years and continues to do so at a competitive level. Perhaps, it isn’t sheer coincidence that he shares his date of birth with Swiss tennis legend Roger Federer (albeit a few years apart!).
Channel Director, India & SAARC, SYMANTEC
CHANNEL TITANS Amitabh Jacob
familiarity with strategic IT trends, assisting them with building private clouds will be a huge opportunity. In addition, organizations will move forward from server virtualization, and embrace virtualization of business-critical applications too.
What would you like to invent? An industry-wide portal that grades and classifies the best talent available by skill, experience and compensation.
Best advice I’ve ever got.
Do not lose sight of your goals—even when the goal post is out of sight.
A business idea that should get more attention.The concept of information protection in a holistic manner will gain traction among organizations of all sizes as they confront the cloud, virtualization, mobility and information explosion.
A habit you wish you could get rid of Constantly checking mails on my Blackberry.
I am extremely excited about working closely
with partners for strengthening Symantec’s distribution network,
tapping new markets and extending our reach across India. The channel community is our enabler in India. We are committed to providing them with best support and programs to drive profitability and improve partner experience.”
ONE BIG INITIATIVE
WHAT I’D CHANGE IN THE CHANNEL
It would be great if channel partners would proactively suggest their ideas on how to take their business into high-growth mode more often. Symantec expects partners with proven track record and business model to enhance available services to their value proposition. Partners must understand the need to drive incremental targets on specific portfolios.
Partners need to be encouraged to look beyond the low-hanging fruit and aim for larger deployments, constantly seek opportunities in new technologies and IT trends. Emerging trends like virtualization and cloud are continuously attracting customers. In such a scenario, the channel partner needs to be well-equipped, and trained to be an expert advisor.
YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT ME
Do not lose sight of your goals—even when the goal post is out of sight.
confront the cloud, virtualization, mobility and information explosion.
A habit you wish you could get rid of
tapping new markets and extending our reach across India. The channel community is our
CAREER GRAPH 2012
2010
Jacob took over as Channel Head at the security vendor in June. He is responsible for planning and execution of channel capacity and competency for Symantec’s channels and distribution in India/SAARC. The role covers enabling and working in tandem with the execution of go-to-market .
SYMANTEC
As the head of channels and SMB sales for India and SAARC, he was responsible for taking enterprise channel to the next level at RSA. The other responsibility was to create commercial channel and distribution for the region. He worked with RSA for a little over two from February 2010.
RSA
In January 2008, Jacob joined Sun Microsystems as General Manager - Partner Sales. His responsibility was to primarily engage and further manage the large system integrator relationships and enable partner business for Sun Microsystems.
SUN MICROSYSTEMS
He worked with IBM as Territory Manager, Mid Markets (India South) for eight years from March 2000 to January 2008. The major responsibility of Jacob was sales for IBM Products/Services at the mid- market across the southern region of India.
IBM
2008
2000
SEPTEMBER 2012 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 27
My management philosophy.I believe that there is no thumb rule for being a successful manager. My management philosophy in general is to be ethical, transparent and professional.
Channel myth I’d like to bust.It is that ‘price decides the fate of market’ and that if you offer deep discounts your business will flourish.
Technology that will take off in 2013.Mobility and anything to do with it.
Best advice I’ve ever got.Never underestimate anyone. Everyone has huge potential to do something beyond anyone can ever imagine.
A business idea that should get more attention.I think that would be sustainability. Corporate profitability should be phased-out to make way for sustainability as this would translate automatically to long- term profitability.
Channel Products & Marketing-India, EMERSON NETWORK POWER
CHANNEL TITANS Ankesh Kumar
I think that would be sustainability.
YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT ME
Ankesh Kumar has a penchant for writing blogs, where he usually puts up movie reviews. Kumar is a movie buff and is a proud owner of a collection of more than 1200 movies. He takes some time-out of his busy schedule to watch the latest flicks, and write reviews.
28 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD SEPTEMBER 2012
A habit you wish you could get rid of.I want to work on being more patient in everything I do. It’s a virtue I can’t wait to acquire.
What would you like to invent?A machine which can take you anywhere in the world in the blink of an eye.
Biggest learning this year.There are opportunities everywhere. Our endevour must be to see all
possibilities and explore available opportunities.
An insightful observation your CEO made in the last year.Saving energy is just the first step to saving your business.
A question you wish you had better answers to.How do I create everlasting processes to improve productivity at the bottom of the pyramid?
We recently introduced solutions in the data
center infrastructure management (DCIM) product family and product
launches for these are underway. We have also introduced special partner programs to enhance partner wallet-share with Emerson products beyond our existing UPS range. Additionally, we have also rationalized the channel pricing strategy to provide transparency in pricing of all our products.”
ONE BIG INITIATIVE
WHAT I’D CHANGE IN THE CHANNEL
I would like to enable the channels to have a solution centric rather than box-pushing or product centric approach. We have always endeavoured to take care of our partners’ business needs in a manner that is most beneficial to their long-term growth and profitability. To stay relevant, they have to acquire skill-sets that will enable them to sell newer technology to customers.
Focus on innovation, efficiency and scaling-up the business rather than being price conscious. We regularly reward our partners through front-end and back-end schemes as a means of incentivizing them for pushing our products in the market. These tactical moves need to be supplemented with customer focused up-selling.
2010
2002
TIMES OF INDIA
possibilities and explore available
An insightful observation your CEO
Saving energy is just the first step to
A question you wish you had better
processes to improve productivity
We recently introduced
center infrastructure management (DCIM) product family and product
channel pricing strategy to provide transparency
2010
2002
TIMES OF INDIA
In 2004, prior to his present role, he was heading the marketing and communication functioning when he had joined the Emerson Network Power. In this role he was instrumental in launching several local and global marketing campaigns. He played a pivotal role in establishing the marketing communication function for Emerson in India was instrumental in positioning the Emerson Brand as the market leader in Business-Critical Continuity for CIOs/IT Managers. Apart from hiring specific agencies and managing the annual marketing budget he used to be directly involved in all facets of marketing - PR, Direct Marketing, Tradeshows/Seminars/Events/Conference, Marketing Research, Website Management & Partners Development.
In his present role, Kumar is the Director-Product Management Channel & Marketing at Emerson Network Power in India that re-quires him to spearhead the func-tions for breaking new avenues and driving brand visibility and growth in channel products which are Small/Micro UPS, DCIM Solutions, KVMs, PDUs, and RDUs .
Prior to joining Emerson India, Kumar worked for The Times of India, Pune and managed BTL ac-tivities and events in Pune and the Ahmednagar Region.
EMERSON NETWORK POWER
EMERSON NETWORK POWER
TIMES OF INDIA
2004
CAREER GRAPH
YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT ME
SEPTEMBER 2012 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 29
My management philosophy.Recruit the best resources in your team and empower them to deliver while constantly coaching them for success.
Channel myth I’d like to bust.I would like to bust the myth that elephants can’t dance.
Biggest learning this year in IBM.Growth and opportunity exist even in challenging times.
Technology that will take off in 2013. Integrated systems will do well the next year.
Best advice I’ve ever got. Circle of concern and circle of influ-ence: It basically propagates that one should not spend too much time, ener-gy and effort on things that are outside your line of control or influence and rather look into areas where we can make a difference.
A habit you wish you could get rid of.Avoid personal participation in various seminars and industry forums.
Director, Business Partner and CSI, IBM ISA
CHANNEL TITANS Anoop Nambiar
30 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD SEPTEMBER 2012
YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT ME
Anoop Nambiar is a sports-lover and follows different games. He is greatly interested in badminton, and takes time out to play the sport regularly.
‘Smarter Planet’ as a concept. This is driven largely by IBM’s thought leadership. It is important for all concerned stakeholders to realize the impact it has on our day-to-day lives.
A question I wish I had better answers to. How can we offer seamless access to citizens for all services through a tightly woven infrastructure and software at the back-end? This should benefit everyone involved.
‘Smarter Planet’ as a concept. This is driven largely by IBM’s thought leadership. It is important for all concerned stakeholders to realize the impact it has on our day-to-
services through a tightly woven
at the back-end? This should benefit
CAREER GRAPH 2007
2004
Anoop Nambiar, rejoined IBM in 2007 and was appointed the Country Manager for Business Partners ISA Region in December 2007. His responsibilities include developing all IBM business—hardware, software and services, performed through business partners across India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.
IBM
Nambiar moved to Lenovo in 2004, when IBM sold its PC business and continued to work for the PC vendor for three years, before rejoing IBM. At Lenovo, he spent over two years in roles including, strategy and IT transformation, new business model implementation and also as the Sales Head for Relationship business.
LENOVO
Nambiar had earlier worked in IBM in 1997 and held various manage-ment positions in sales, channels and brand, in the personal computing division, including SAARC countries. He also spent two years in Singapore as the ASEAN Region Channel head and later as Program Manager in Asia Pacific Region.
IBM
Before IBM, he worked across multiple verticals like FMCG, consumer durables and IT peripherals in different roles . Nambiar worked with Wipro Consumer Products and Lighting during 1992 - 95 as a Product Manager and then moved to Wipro Infotech during1995 – 97, and served again as a Product Manager.
WIPRO
1997
1992Initiating services channel through
partners; through various programs and enablement
sessions, we demonstrated how channels can go beyond just selling boxes. These programs resulted in better margins for them, including elevating some of them to roles of strategic consultants across customers groups.”
ONE BIG INITIATIVE
An insightful observation your CEO made in the last year. “Our commitment is unwavering. I want you to know how much I value, personally, our partnerships. We work hard—very hard—to be unique to you because I know you have choices.”
What would you like to invent? A collaborative tool that lets business partners work more closely with ven-dors and ensures real-time learning.
A business idea that should get more attention.
WHAT I’D CHANGE IN THE CHANNEL
It is important for business partners to show the adaptability of storage and server boxes to varied work environments. By that, they must highlight how this hardware can function across varied business verticals offering multiple varieties of solutions rather than just position it a stand-alone box. This is popularly known as solution-in-a-box play.
Broaden their portfolio into selling software and services: Business partners must invest in the right skill-set and time to broaden their offerings for customers. They can no more be selling any one specific software or services and position it as their core area of expertise. Instead, they must expand their bouquet of offerings, encompassing varied needs of customers.
SEPTEMBER 2012 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 31
YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT ME
32 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD SEPTEMBER 2012
My management philosophy. Today, being an effective business leader requires knowledge and expertise that goes beyond an understanding of traditional functional areas of business. Successful business leaders need to have a sophisticated understanding of non-business subjects too.
Biggest learning this year. The 3 E’s – ego, emotion and
economics of customers are being understood and driven for meeting business needs.
Technology that will take off in 2013. Video technology is the current wave collaborating with other applications to meet business needs, and we are seeing increased adoption.
Best advice I’ve ever got.India is a key player in the modern
Head Channels and Service Business, POLYCOM
CHANNEL TITANS Ashish Gupta
Video technology is the current wave collaborating with other applications
YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT ME
Gupta’s work profile necessitates a lot of traveling, and he enjoys every bit of it. Four years back he was introduced to the world of trekking by one of his close friends. Then on, he has used every opportunity to go on treks. It provides him an opportunity to move away from his busy schedule and admire nature’s bounty.
global economy and tapping its growing potential should be one of my priorities. This would ensure the complete ecosystem involved, to succeed together.
A habit you wish you could get rid of.Getting up at 6:00 AM and reaching for my cell-phone to run through the mails and calendar for the day.
What would you like to invent? A partner’s loyalty is the key to our business. We would like to streamline
the process for engaging with channels.
An insightful observation your CEO made in the last year. We do whatever it takes to make our customers successful and ensure this success with our commitment and passion.
A question you wish you had better answers to. How do I enable my team to take risks without being fearful?
We have a strong presence of partners
in metros and tier-1 cities and continue to strengthen our service
capabilities through them to achieve customer satisfaction. We have rolled out programs to recruit partners in the SAARC countries, starting this year.Recruiting and investing in partner competency has been our key initiative.”
ONE BIG INITIATIVE
WHAT I’D CHANGE IN THE CHANNEL
Lot of partners are focused on product-selling rather than positioning end-to-end solutions. They would need to enable themselves to the satisfaction of customers to become trusted advisors for long term avenues. This should provide greater opportunities for growth and consolidation of business.
Polycom and its large partners have service practice to complement our large projects. If we are able to work towards partners by building service capabilities along with product/solution capabilities, together we can succeed. This mutual process would further enhance our relationship with our partners, and strengthen business.
SEPTEMBER 2012 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 33
YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT ME
2007
2006
2002
We do whatever it takes to make
A question you wish you had better
How do I enable my team to take risks
customer satisfaction. We have rolled out programs to recruit partners in the SAARC countries, starting
INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 33
2007
2006
2002
CAREER GRAPH
As Head Channels and Service Business, India & SAARC, he is responsible for programmatic engagement and continuing technical and sales development of channel ecosystem. His journey with Polycom started more than five years ago in which he lead the service business for India and SAARC. It involved both, indirect and direct business with partners and customers respectively. He took up the initiative of streamlining the process for India and had service competencies being built up with large SI’s and distributors. Last October, he was bestowed with the responsibility of leading channels in the region while continue fulfilling the role of Service Business Manager.
POLYCOM
Gupta’s stay as a Business Development Manager with Tech Mahindra for their client British Telecom, UK, was short. The role was transformational and led to greater insights.This was his first assignment abroad. His family obligations led to his return to India.
TECH MAHINDRA
Gupta, as Head-Fixed Access, Operations was associated with Reliance Communication since 2002. During his term with the organization, he had the opportunity of working with leaders while heading large IT infrastructure, network deployment projects, designing of business and network NOC processes, including operations. His last assignment was leading the operations planning team for Fixed Access Network for all telecom circles.
RELIANCE
HOTLINEHOTLINE
Mr. Ravi Chauhan, Managing Director-India, Juniper Networks
of trust in the security of their mobile devices and services. Sixty-three per cent do not know if they should trust that their mobile experiences are secure.The question around trust is certainly warranted.
What is the main trigger for all this?The mobile value chain and whole ecosystem are increas-ingly complex, diverse and expanding, giving criminals more opportunities to exploit vulnerabilities. Individu-als are using mobile devices for more tasks, applications and services, and are not as knowledgeable about mobile security as they perhaps are about PC security.
How do you foresee the growth for Juniper Networks in the Indian market?We are operating in a growing market, where there are lots of opportunities, especially in the enterprise space. While the service provider sector is a mature market for us, we are keen to engage partners who can take us into newer enterprise verticals. Partners need to invest on an innovative commercial model in order to drive profi tability. To achieve this, we will double our channel support strength and align them with our growth strategy.
How has 2012 been for Juni-per Networks so far and what are the hot trends that you see now, and in the future? 2012 has been an exciting year for us as we witness the gradual adoption of the “New Network” leading to increased consumption and burgeoning subscriber base driving the IPv6 migration. We also see disrup-tive technologies and emerging dynamics making a forefront in the form of fabric comput-ing, SDN / Virtualization, Cloud,
increased BYOD penetration, LTE and social computing.
“New Network” sounds very interesting. What’s it all about? Juniper’s vision for the future of networking is open, scal-able, simple, secure and automated. At the heart of the New Network is our promise to transform the economics and experience of network-ing for our customers. The “New Network” for mobility is designed to address rapidly
changing customer behaviors and expectations, while dra-matically improving total costs and revenue returns.
Challenges always accompany opportunities. Tell us more about the challenges that you face?This appetite for mobility has led to consumers and busi-nesses starting to question their trust in the mobile ser-vices and devices that they use for critical personal and business purposes. When we released our Trusted Mobility Index in May, we found that only 15 per cent of consumer respondents have a great deal
VIEW FROM THE TOP
Juniper Will Open New Avenues With ‘New Network’
NEWS UPDATE
In May this year, Juniper Networks announced customer momentum and milestones for Junosphere, its fi rst-of-a-kind cloud offering that allows service providers and enterprises to create and operate networks on-demand, in a risk-
free virtual environment. Junosphere enables network lab exercises at a scale that is practically impossible to achieve with any physical equipment. Juniper Networks also announced an expansion of its Junosphere partner ecosystem
with the integration of Ixia’s IxVM into the Junosphere virtual environment. Ixia, is the newest partner working with Juni-per Networks to provide customers with more network design and testing options. Junosphere Lab users can perform extensive pre-deployment testing using Ixia’s IxVM at no additional cost within the Junosphere virtual environment.
Juniper Networks Gains Momentum for Junosphere
EVENT UPDATE
CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP
PARTNER PROGRAM
Advantage PartnersJuniper Networks’ new Part-ner Advantage Program focuses on driving and sup-porting a deeper and profi table relationship with its partners.Juniper Partner Advantage has been designed to help part-ners cultivate deep customer relationships and, at the same time, effectively respond to the macro trends that are driving change across the industry. It’s all about scaling with pre-
grow the sales and technical skills of your entire organi-zation. Juniper Accelerate is the forum for partners seek-ing to amplify their market-ing efforts, generate more qualifi ed leads, and grow their sales pipeline. It allows access to marketing tools that help go-to-market faster, create a stronger connection between marketing and sales, and ulti-mately, accelerate the sales achievement. Finally, Juni-per Reward is a comprehen-sive partner incentive system that increases profitability with abundant opportunities to be rewarded for adding value. With it, the bottomlines improve by identifying new prospects, demonstrating the partner networking architec-ture expertise, and closing more deals quickly.
cision, investing with impact, and recognizing achievement. It’s a tool for growing network architecture expertise, and differentiating partners based on the value they add. Bot-tom line, it’s about evolving to help customers adapt. The Juniper Partner Advantage program includes, three key pillars—Reach, Accelerate, and Reward.
Juniper Reach is an innova-tive approach to help technical and sales specialists share their expertise, imagine the possibilities, outsmart the competition, and master the new network. With Reach, the partner will drive adoption, empower customers, and
PRODUCT SHOWCASE
QFX3000-M
QFX3000-M ( Fabric) is a new addition to the QFabric family. It is a smaller fabric solution system designed specifi cally for the mid-size datacenter market. The “M” confi guration (Micro-fabric) solution was specifi cally created to cater to the needs of the mid–tier, satellite and container datacenter environments. The micro-fabric solution supports upto 768 10GbE ports with an average latency of 3 microseconds port to port translating into blazingly fast and truly consistent application performance throughout the network.
VGW VIRTUAL GATEWAY
Juniper’s vGW Virtual Gateway is a comprehensive, fi rst-of-its-kind security solution that offers organizations access to robust, comprehensive security optimized for high performance, fl exibility and scale in virtualized environments. vGW provides complete virtual network and datacentre protection through inclusion of a high-performance hypervisor-based stateful fi rewall, integrated intrusion detection (IDS), virtualization-specifi c antivirus (AV) protection, and unprecedented management scale for cloud security.
In May, Juniper Networks hosted a two-day workshop in Hua Hin, Thailand to engage and educate partners on the
company’s advanced technol-ogy product line-up and the diverse value proposition solu-tions it brings to the table to
cater to the New Network plat-form architecture. The work-shop encompassed Juniper’s Data Centre Value Proposition, which included, understanding customer’s perspective on their choice for selecting Juniper’s products over competing ven-dor offerings and Juniper’s take on the benefi ts QFabric brings to a modern datacentre network architecture. Juniper also elab-orated on its Core Value Propo-sition which highlighted the need for MX Service edge rout-ers, underscored the next level of scalability and effectiveness it brought to the LTE service, and, additionally, talked about how the Core Value Proposition has secured the SP networks.
Juniper Underscores Partner Benefi ts
Authorized Distributor
My management philosophy. I believe leadership is about enabling the team, setting a vision and driving the team towards achieving that vision.
Channel myth I’d like to bust.Channel partner business is transactional and does not bring value to customers.
Biggest learning this year. Over the years, I have realized that partners prefer to work with a vendor who invests in their overall growth. In
addition to this, partners want to move into new markets and expect the vendor to help them move up the value chain.
Technology that will take off in 2013. I feel cloud computing will revolutionize the way technology is consumed, and will be the next growth-driver for both partners and vendors. The focus on enabling the workforce to be connected has made the shift to a virtual environment inevitable.
Vice President and Head, Partner Organization, CISCO, INDIA AND SAARC
CHANNEL TITANS B Raghavendran
36 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD SEPTEMBER 2012
the vendor to help them move up the
and vendors. The focus on enabling
YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT ME
Raghavendran is a connoisseur of good food, and enjoys cooking immensely. He has experimented with a variety of dishes, but mostly ends up cooking what his kids like. He is also a big soccer fan and follows the game religiously. He plays the sport on weekends.
20092009
Best advice I’ve ever got. In order to ensure that OEMs enjoy a positive mindshare within the partner community, it is important to look at all programs and initiatives from a partner perspective.
A business idea that should get more attention. Technologies that empower users to be more social, visual and mobile, should be actively considered for use.
A habit you wish you could get rid of. From what I’ve been told, I tend to get
aggressive to complete a job that I’ve started. It would probably be a good idea to take a back-seat and relax sometimes.
What would you like to invent? A perpetual battery to power our gadgets.
An insightful observation your CEO made in the last year. John Chambers said, “we innovate, and create markets that are different from any other company our partners do business with.”
CAREER GRAPH
B. Raghavendran is Vice Presi-dent and Head Partner Organiza-tion, Cisco India & SAARC. In this role, Raghavendran is responsible for building and leading Cisco’s partner efforts in the region and will drive the channel organization and the strategic alliances team under the Partner Organization umbrella. Raghavendran’s charter would be to ensure current part-ners are in-sync with Cisco’s vi-sion and roadmap and help iden-tify niche partners to drive Cisco’s architectural solutions. In addi-tion, Raghavendran would work with his team to create platforms to engage with organizations to help drive vertically relevant op-portunities and transformational partnerships. An industry veteran with over 19 years of experience in the technology industry, Raghaven-dran joined Cisco India in 1998 as an Account Manager for the company’s banking and finan-cial services vertical where he played a key role in achieving several strategic wins for Cisco India. Subsequently, he headed the IT Services vertical, West-ern region where he grew the business significantly. Raghav-endran has now been with the networking giant for over 14 years and his contribution to Cisco’s India growth has been multi-fold.
WIPROPrior to joining Cisco, Raghaven-dran was Regional Manager at Wipro Infotech for over five years. He joined Wipro in March, 1993.
CISCOOver the past few quarters, we have
significantly increased our channel efforts to augment partner
capabilities by providing leading practices, tools, and knowledge transfer, which in turn enable them to have successful and profitable customer engagements. We also introduced several incentive programs that were designed specifically to reward and recognize channels.”
ONE BIG INITIATIVE
WHAT I’D CHANGE IN THE CHANNEL
Inavailability of quality workforce and the lack of infrastructure in tier-2 cities is a key challenge. There is a need for partners to increase investments in certifications and specializations, which guarantees them with market recognition of their technology expertise and growth.
As the business gets tough, it’s imperative for channel partners to start looking at new revenue streams. This calls for investments ahead of the curve where large partners need to invest in new market adjacencies and work with OEMs in creating and developing new markets. This provides new avenues.
SEPTEMBER 2012 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 37
YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT ME
1993
Best advice I’ve ever got.Don’t spend too much time on data analysis and wait for perfection. A good plan executed with vigour today is much better than a great plan waiting to be executed tomorrow.
My management philosophy. I believe in very open and direct communication. Get the team involved in building the strategy that’s actionable, make the mistakes early and learn from them, listen but make those tough decisions.
Channel myth I’d like to bust.Channels worrying about their future due to new business models. The channel model has been in existence for centuries and will continue to exist, as they play a significant role in delivering optimal customer solutions.
Biggest learning this year.Long-term assumptions need to be validated constantly as markets change dynamically, new technologies, business models and external factors play a significant role. One has to stay
Director-Sales, SOUTH ASIA INTEL
CHANNEL TITANS B Suryanarayanan
YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT ME
Suryanarayanan completed his first trek to the Himalayas in 2010 with no formal training or preparation. He lost all his gear and luggage even before he started the trek! Taking the set-back in his stride, and overcoming the challenge at hand made the entire experience fulfilling.
38 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD SEPTEMBER 2012
programs that can scale higherneed to be deployed with strong backing from government.
A habit you wish you could get rid of. A habit that I need to rectify is making phone calls while driving.
An insightful observation your CEO made in the last year.“The PC is not going away anytime soon, if ever. It will continue to evolve.” I think this was an interesting observation.
The embedded systems market in India is emerging
as a significant growth opportunity. My current focus is to grow the
embedded business in channels and help them scale their business into new segments with end-to-end solution capabilities. Majority of the channel partners are interested in tapping this market, and we are currently organizing several training and channel enablement programs.”
ONE BIG INITIATIVE
focused on what needs to be controlled.
Technology that will take off in 2013.Touch-enabled devices will see an increase in usage.
A business idea that should get more attention. Education and healthcare delivery services in emerging markets need focus. Technology can help drive affordable solutions in both the fields. Strong public-private partnership
WHAT I’D CHANGE IN THE CHANNEL
Intel is investing to enable its channel partners to evolve and capitalize new business opportunities inline with Intel’s compute continuum strategy. With the continuous changing needs of IT, I would like to see more channel partners transition to new business opportunities in emerging segments.
We are seeing that the future business growth in India is happening in the tier-3 and tier-4 markets. We are focusing on accelerating our footprint in these markets and engage with channels here. We will enable them to address the growing demand for technology products. This should help us get a foothold and establish ourselves.
1997
A habit you wish you could get rid of. A habit that I need to rectify is making
continue to evolve.” I think this was
The embedded systems market in India is emerging
as a significant growth opportunity.
help them scale their business into new segments with end-to-end solution capabilities. Majority of the channel partners are interested in tapping this
1997
CAREER GRAPH
With nearly sixteen years of experience with Intel, he is currently responsible for growing the business in channels, LOEMs and to create new business opportunity in the embedded segment. Previously, as Director Sales & Marketing–West & Central Region from Oct 2010 he was responsible for leading the team in the western region of India. It included growing the channel business, driving technology adoption, influence Intel architecture-based solutions in key enterprise government accounts, and execute marketing programs to drive demand generation for PCs via ecosystem enablement and partnership.He was responsible for leading the South and Sri Lanka teams to grow business in channels, enterprise and government. It included executing marketing programs to drive demand generation for PCs, work with government to roll out POCs on PC usage model in healthcare and education.He was responsible for marketing server platforms at Regional OEMs, channels and end-customers for APAC and working with in-country teams to execute enterprise adoption of new server technologies, usage models, platform transitions and pricing. His first stint with Intel began in January 1997 as Regional Channel Manager. Later, he was OEM manager from March 2000 onwards.
INTEL
YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT ME
SEPTEMBER 2012 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 39
My management philosophy. Keep things simple and direct. I believe in participative management and respect the individuals. All individuals have their unique strengths and manager’s need to extract them.
Channel myth I’d like to bust. Channel is only for fulfillment. Infact, the channel does add value in all businesses and they act as a bridge between OEM and customer.
Biggest learning this year. We must always begin with our strengths. While attempting to improve upon the weak areas, we should not let our strengths slip.
Technology that will take off in 2013.Private and public cloud services.
Best advice I’ve ever got.One should not shy away from proposing new ideas in fear of rejection. Even if nine out ten ideas are rejected, one good idea will get implemented. Otherwise, the good ones will not see the light of day.
40 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD SEPTEMBER 2012
Director-Partner Sales, VMWARE
CHANNEL TITANS Ganesan Arumugam
YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT ME
Coming from business-family, his ambition was to run a business of his own. Till the age of 17, Arumugam used to spend a lot of time working for his family business. However due to the changing business scenario, he decided to take up a professional course, and has not looked back since.
Excellence cannot be forced from the outside, the need should be felt from the inside. Excellence is not an act, it is a habit. The heart and soul, apart from mind should be involved in striving for excellence.
A question you wish you had better answers to. Why do people not put their 100 percent, knowing well that it would help in their growth?
Managed Partner Focus: Under this
program, we selected partners who are interested, invested and
committed to our business. We started focusing all our initiatives through them. We invested our resources in terms of man-power and development funds through these partners. This approach helped in increasing our revenue rather than spreading too thin.”
ONE BIG INITIATIVE
A habit you wish you could get rid of. I tend to be emotional if things do not go in my way. I should probably have a professional approach in the future.
What would you like to invent? A method by which we can eradicate corruption from India and build a value-based society.
An insightful observation your CEO made in the last year.
WHAT I’D CHANGE IN THE CHANNEL
I want to make partners more independent in driving their business and reduce their dependency on vendors. It’s important to ensure that the partner develops the right capabilities to address the varying concerns of customers. Being vendor independent and customer-centric is important for the success of channels.
The vendor-partner association has always been a love-hate relationship. There has been a lot of blame-game between the two. I think it’s very important to bring in more transparency and trust in vendor-partner relationships and this is something I have been consciously trying to develop.
SEPTEMBER 2012 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 41
Excellence cannot be forced from the outside, the need should be felt from the inside. Excellence is not an act, it is a habit. The heart and soul, apart from mind should be involved in
A question you wish you had better
Why do people not put their 100 percent, knowing well that it would
program, we selected partners
committed to our business. We started focusing
This approach helped in increasing our revenue
INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 41
CAREER GRAPH 2009
2009
Arumugam is Director-Channel and Alliance at VMware, India. He joined VMware in 2009 and has been instrumental in developing the company’s channel business in the country. In his current role he is responsible for developing the channel organization for this virtualization vendor in the country.
VMWARE
Prior to joining VMware, Arumugam was the Global Alliances Director at HDS, and took care of the global relationship for India based SI partners. He was responsible for setting up global alliance relationships with key partners, His stint at HDS was short. He left after working for 8 months.
HITACHI DATA SYSTEMS
Arumugam was Director for Global Alliance Partners in Symantec. He worked with the security vendor for more than four years and during his long association with the company, he took up different roles, including managing very strategic relationships with global SI partners of Symantec in India.
Arumugam’s experience in the channel front began in IBM, where he worked as the VAD manager. He was involved in setting up a value added distributor network for IBM Software Group and successfully expanded their independent software vendor network.
IBM
2005
2000
SYMANTEC
YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT ME
My management philosophy. Begin with the end in mind, take on big bold goals and challenge the status-quo.
Channel myth I’d like to bust.That innovation in channel programs and management has evolved and is now mature.
HEAD-ALLIANCES, MICROSOFT
CHANNEL TITANS Hrishi Parthasarathy
That innovation in channel programs
ParthasarathyYOU DIDN’T KNOW
ABOUT MEParthasarathy is a Chartered Accountant who worked in a finance job for only a few months. His first manager thought he had a nose for business, and pushed him in that direction. He is also an aspiring long distance cyclist, having cycled from Bangalore to Ooty.
42 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD SEPTEMBER 2012
Biggest learning this year.The benefits of genuine focus on partner win-ability and profitability.
Technology that will take off in 2013.Enterprise mobility—led by Windows 8.
Best advice I’ve ever got. Execute, evaluate and evolve.
A business idea that should get more attention.Implement social and crowdsourcing techniques to broad IT consulting and large scale IT projects.
A habit you wish you could get rid of.
I wish I could do away with internal meetings and email overload.
What would you like to invent? A business model that demonstrates and deploys the business value of IT to smaller, under-served customers. One that makes a ton of money.
An insightful observation your CEO made in the last year. Execution is strategic.
A question you wish you had better answers to. What are the biggest drivers of loyalty?
WHAT I’D CHANGE IN THE CHANNEL
Drive differentiation based on influence versus transactions: Too often the distinction is ignored, or the value of sales motion is understated. Both are extremely important, but these have to be executed to a plan and deserve differentiated returns. If executed well, the benefits for business are immense.
Respect for viewpoints: Often, vendors do not put themselves in their partners shoes and walk around in them for a bit. It does not happen the other way round either. Trusted advisor relationships are too precious and is the only way to succeed. To get to the crux of the problems, and then push growth, mutual respect is vital.
Geo-expansion through partners:
We built a rapidly scalable, pay-for-performance model to
dramatically increase Microsoft’s footprint in 65 tier-2 cities and in total of 250 cities, covering 1700 partners. This was built through partners using a unique win-win approach.”
ONE BIG INITIATIVEYOU DIDN’T KNOW
ABOUT ME
2002
2001
1998
I wish I could do away with internal
A business model that demonstrates and deploys the business value of IT to smaller, under-served customers.
An insightful observation your CEO
A question you wish you had better
dramatically increase Microsoft’s footprint in 65
2002
2001
1998
While at Microsoft India, Parthasarathy holds the alliance responsibility for top Indian SIs. Also, he drives solution sales to gain a share through partners besides improving mindshare and readiness with solution architects and bid teams.
His other roles include Director – SMB & Distribution from July 2009 to June 2011 where Parthasarathy was responsible for running a large scale SMB business. He was responsible for SMB Customer and Channel Marketing
Parthasarathy was also Director-Business Planning & Operations (SMS&P) for two years. Here, he was focused on the SLAs drawn out by the operations team. His KRAs included licensing, structuring and negotiating multi-year agreements, business insight & analytics. As Lead – Partner Strategy & Programs Parthasarathy was entrusted with the transformation of India landscape with the partner network. His roles included responsibility for Microsoft partner readiness and enablement of best-in-class channel incentive implementation.
MICROSOFT
Hrishi Parthasarathy was responsible for the marketing outsourcing services and tech helpdesks, besides handling tele and web lead generation support to US sales teams during his twenty two month stint with the company.
SUTHERLAND GLOBAL
Parthasarathy was business manager at Redington running the national software distribution business for close to three years.
REDINGTON
CAREER GRAPH
SEPTEMBER 2012 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 43
44 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD SEPTEMBER 2012
My management philosophy. Be responsive, determined and empower your team at all times.
Biggest learning this year. The biggest learning this year is was to create a differentiator through a value-selling business model. This is vital not only to beat competition but importantly to carve a niche in front of the customers.
Best advice I’ve ever got. Be enterprising, think big and execute well.
Channel myth I’d like to bust. Who will be the first person to bring business to the table—partner or OEM?
A business idea that should get more attention. Partnership is all about mutual trust
Director, Channels & Alliances-India & South Asia, JUNIPER NETWORKS
CHANNEL TITANS Jitendra Gupta
Who will be the first person to bring business to the table—partner or OEM?
Partnership is all about mutual trust
YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT ME
Born to a business family in Uttar Pradesh,
Jitendra Gupta spent his initial growing
years in the hinterland. Always a risk taker
and a consistent performer, he claims to
possess strong analytical, problem solving
and organizational abilities. Challenging
tasks excite him as it provides a feeling of
accomplishment when success is achieved.
Traveling to new places and spending
free-time reading, helps him unwind.
between both sides—you win and lose together.
A habit you wish you could get rid of. Staying calm even when things don’t work in your favor.
What would you like to invent? A device that can help achieve a great equilibrium between personal and professional life
Technology that will take off in 2013. Cloud and Gigabit Wi-Fi will do well in next year.
An insightful observation your CEO made in the last year. How do we win as a company? Two things: One is innovation—which is delivering great products that are different from anything the competition has, and the other, a remarkable customer experience.
A question you wish you had better answers to. How to recruit and sustain a team of self-driven and motivated performers to the organization?
My goal is to go deeper with fewer partners and
nurture our relationship with the existing partners. This will build
Juniper’s footprint across all major Indian cities through mutually beneficial partnerships which are inline with our long term objectives. The recently implemented Juniper Partner Advantage program will help their business immensely.”
ONE BIG INITIATIVE
An insightful observation your CEO
How do we win as a company? Two things: One is innovation—which is delivering great products that
A question you wish you had better
team of self-driven and motivated performers to the organization?
My goal is to go deeper with fewer partners and
nurture our relationship with the
Juniper’s footprint across all major Indian
which are inline with our long term objectives. The recently implemented Juniper Partner Advantage
CAREER GRAPH 2012
2006
Gupta joined Juniper in January 2012 as Director of Channels & Alliances for South Asia region. His main responsibility is to strengthen Juniper’s relationship with its strategic alliances and channel partners in the region and establish new partnerships. He is spearheading partnerships for tier-1 and tier-2 channels and distribution networks
JUNIPER NETWORKS
Gupta was Country Manager for India and SAARC and was instrumental in establishing Extreme Networks as a leading networking brand in India with a highly profitable and multi-million dollar revenue stream. Leading a team of 12 people, he was responsible for global partners like Avaya, Siemens, Ericsson, NSN in the South-Asia.
EXTREME NETWORKS
As Product Sales Manager for Cisco business, he managed the overall product line revenue, gross margin and distributor market for Cisco. He lead a team of 10 people indirectly across India. From Oct 2000 to March 2005 , he was Sales Manager (ESG) for North India.
INGRAM MICRO
For a period of three years from 1997 to 2000, he worked with Multi-Tech Computers as Sales Manager (North India). He was responsible for development of channel networks for Datacom products in the major cities of North India with an additional responsibility to push Multi-Tech products in ISP and telecom sector.
MULTI –TECH COMPUTERS
2000
1997
WHAT I’D CHANGE IN THE CHANNEL
It is imperative to build confidence and valuable partnerships with channel partners. In many cases, they are the face of the company. The vendors should be accommodating of their varied business objectives whenever and wherever possible. The channel partners are unquestionably intrinsic to any vendor’s growth and expansion.
It is always the case that the early bird catches the worm. Partners should be attentive enough to spot any changes in the market dynamics, and as soon as they spot a new trend, be prepared to react accordingly. It’s easier to traverse this less treaded path if there is mutual-trust between vendors and channel partners.
SEPTEMBER 2012 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 45
YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT ME
My management philosophy. If everyone is moving forward together, then success will take care of itself. Teamwork is an essential ingredient to ensure success in an organization.
Channel myth I’d like to bust. Channel partners are only good for transactions. My belief is that channel partners can add tremendous value to any organization with their customer relationships, skill sets, reach and passion. It is up to vendors to enable and treat them as business partners.
Technology that will take off in 2013. Desktop-as-a-Service is one of the key technologies that will take-off in coming years, making end-point devices redundant.
Best advice I’ve ever got. It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.
Director–Channels & Alliances, CITRIX INDIA
CHANNEL TITANS Kaushal Veluri
YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT ME
Veluri has to his credit, the world’s
highest bungee jump. He has skydived
from a plane, has a tattoo, and also
nurtures a dream to trek to Everest
base-camp. He has tasted goose feet,
baby octopus, kangaroo meat and pickled
eggs. He has two blogs and is a huge
Star Wars fan.
46 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD SEPTEMBER 2012
Biggest learning this year. You cannot do everything. Focus on the top five things to do, have a plan to achieve them, do them diligently, do them well.
An insightful observation your CEO made in the last year. Inspire your partners. Support them. Business will follow.
A question you wish you had better answers to. What motivates a partner to be loyal and perform efficiently for a vendor?
You cannot do everything. Focus on the top five things to do, have a plan to achieve them, do them diligently, do
Inspire your partners. Support
What motivates a partner to be loyal and perform efficiently for a vendor?
CAREER GRAPH 2012
2006
In his current role since April 2011, Veluri is responsible for maintaining the health of the channel business across Citrix solution advisors, distributors, global alliances and SI partners through training, enablement, and business planning. He has been Marketing Director since 2007 till present and he is responsible for strategic marketing across eight nations.
CITRIX
Veluri had been on the channel development role before Citrix. At Oracle, he was a Market Develop-ment Manager handling a team of 15 tele-resources who were respon-sible for generating a pipeline for the SMB team in tier-2 cities.
ORACLE
Prior to Oracle, Veluri also worked in IBM where he managed marketing for the ISV ecosystem of software partner. This involved both marketing to and marketing through the ISV partners. This facilitated an expansion in business at the organization.
IBM
Across his 18 year career, Kaushal has also worked in organizations like 3M managing their Channel Sales in South India for the Visual Systems Division while also falling prey to the dotcom bug having managed the Alliances for an online site called BuyAsOne.com
3M
2001
1997 I am a strong believer in constant learning, and
that applies to channel partners as well. I have come up with a
consistent quarter-wise training program for our partner resources that runs in multiple cities. Through many of our programs we address the enablement needs of the partner organization.”
ONE BIG INITIATIVE
A business idea that should get more attention. Food pool—collect the left over ingredients and food from all the hotels in the city, pool it together, make good dishes and feed the homeless.
A habit you wish you could get rid of. The inability, sometimes, to say no.
What would you like to invent? A time machine, maybe along the lines of the movie, Back to the Future’!
WHAT I’D CHANGE IN THE CHANNEL
Channel partners can add tremendous value to any organization. I would encourage training programmes for our partners, which will not only help them understand the latest technology but also enable them from a sales and technical perspective to take it to market, and add value to their business.
The relentless focus on extracting maximum margins from each vendor in their portfolio is what the partners need to try and de-focus from. They must focus on adding value at the customer-end. Partner organizations also need to leverage the vendor resources appropriately and keep the focus on the customer pain-points, and provide the best solution possible.
YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT ME
SEPTEMBER 2012 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 47
48 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD SEPTEMBER 2012
technology is introduced, there is a lot of apprehension as to how we communicate this to the consumer. And my answer has always been that ‘technology is not that complex to propagate to an end-user’.
Biggest learning this year. No matter what you do, ‘focus’ is the key to achieving positive results. This approach helped D-Link grow from Rs.128 Crores to Rs.223 Crores.
My management philosophy.I believe in ‘management by consensus’, as it is very important for teams in any organization to unanimously decide and device strategy based on the same. This not only creates a healthy work environment but also makes the process more gratifying.
Channel myth I’d like to bust. Over the years whenever a
Vice President–Channel Sales, D-LINK INDIA
CHANNEL TITANS Kerman Rana
And my answer has always been that
No matter what you do, ‘focus’ is the key to achieving positive results. This
YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT ME
Parsis are known to love their cars, and
Rana is no exception. Immensely passionate
about cars , speed is a way of life for
him. Rana has been a rally driver and has
won a few of them. He was the winner of
‘Maharashtra Car Rally’ championship back
in eighties.
Technology that will take off in 2013. Personal cloud computing.
Best advice I’ve ever got ‘Never say never’ is probably the best piece of advice I have received, which I strongly believe in.
A business idea that should get more attention. Anything innovative and a cut-above the rest deserve more attention. After all it’s innovation that’s the key differentiating factor.
A habit you wish you could get rid of. My temperamental nature.
An insightful observation your CEO made in the last year. Focus, speed and team work is the key to success.
A question you wish you had better answers to. Given the current market scenario,how do I convince my teams to target exponential growth despite the low market sentiment.
For profitability, we introduced various
promotional schemes that guarantee lucrative business
opportunities along with good margins for partners. To further accelerate our channel sales, I initiated strategic bundling of fast moving products along with niche products to channel partners. This strategy has paid-off well.”
ONE BIG INITIATIVE
WHAT I’D CHANGE IN THE CHANNEL
As a part of the IT industry for over two decades, I had the opportunity to travel and interact closely with the partner community across the country. Based on my experience so far, I would like to suggest the channels to not panic when the there is an air of uncertainty in the market, as the circle of business always evens-out.
All partners need to do is focus more on profitability along with revenue targets and this will definitely bring a positive outcome to their overall business. Also, it is important for channels to align their business with trusted vendors and long standing industry brands so as to associate themselves with a bigger growth story. This helps improve their overall standing in the market.
A habit you wish you could get rid of.
Focus, speed and team work is the
A question you wish you had better
scenario,how do I convince my teams to target exponential growth despite
opportunities along with good margins
sales, I initiated strategic bundling of fast moving
CAREER GRAPH 2011
2010
Since Rana joined as Vice President–Channel Sales in April 2011, Rana is responsible for driving the channel business along with formulating sales strategies, business planning and channel schemes for the networking company.
D-LINK
From January 2010 to March 2011 as Director - Business Development, Rana was primarily responsible for setting up the India operations for the company. This included charting a pan-India distribution strategy working with the channel community on product positioning, business planning and marketing strategy .
QNAP SYSTEM
NETGEAR
PHILIPS INDIA
Rana helped set-up Netgear business in India in 2004, followed by streamlining its distribution strategy to engage with VARs. Rana was instrumental for product planning, engaging with channels, and driving sales. Following his India success, he was appointed MD for Central Asia Pacific in October 2007.
From January 2003 to June 2004, Rana was Head of Corporate Sales of Computer Monitors for CRT and LCD range of monitors at Philips. During his tenure, he was successful in identifying key corporate resellers and system integrators, expanding business, and increasing market share.
2004
2003
SEPTEMBER 2012 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 49
YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT ME
My management philosophy.There are three aspects to my philosphy: Empower employees to drive efficiencies and quality, enable employees so that they go further than expected, and that there should be no economy in one’s efforts.
Channel myth I’d like to bust.Services business is essential for growth and profits. If your partner builds the right solution for the customers, there will be no looking back.
Biggest learning this year.To thrive in an era of social computing, build communities, leverage employees and partners as marketers, and create brand-loyalists.
Technology that will take off in 2013.Innovation is an all-time favorite when it comes to any technology. However, I think real time analytics will take-off.
Best advice I’ve ever got.Losing a deal is not as bad as losing customer respect.
Director, Channel & Alliances, India & SAARC Operations, NETAPP
CHANNEL TITANS K Neelakantan
To thrive in an era of social computing,
employees and partners as marketers,
Innovation is an all-time favorite when it comes to any technology. However, I think real time analytics will take-off.
YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT ME
Neelakantan is voracious reader. He is a
keen follower of biographies, and is especially
interested in world history. He has read a
lot on World War-II. Apart from books, he
is a big fan of Rajnikant and wishes to direct
a film with the South-superstar, who he
considers a personal hero.
50 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD SEPTEMBER 2012
A business idea that should get more attention.I believe that agility and efficiency of IT, which is the Holy Grail of computing, should get more attention from businesses.
A habit you wish you could get rid of.My impatience for results.
What would you like to invent? I would like to invent BYOD batteries that can be recharged without wires— using light.
An insightful observation your CEOmade in the last year.Watch out for talent within the organization as well as outside. Seek them out and look for opportunities to work with them.
A question you wish you had better answers to.India has the scale, talent and ability. I often wonder why we lack the innovation to harness IT better to build an equitable society?
WHAT I’D CHANGE IN THE CHANNEL
We have a robust channel community and I would like show them several options on how they can definitely grow their business by building the right kind of collaboration with organizations like NetApp. Through adding innovative solutions to its portfolio, channels can certainly build better business and benefit further.
I would recommend investment in the right partnership which can help them enable their customers solve their business problems efficiently. I am particularly working towards cementing channel relationships and further drive sales through joint go-to-market with the NetApp partner ecosystem to facilitate growth.
I think the launch of ‘Agile Data Infrastructure’ is
the convergence of innovation at NetApp. Customers can ensure
their data is immortal, remains intelligent and can scale infinitely. All this in one unified architecture has dramatically simplified deployment and management. We are preparing our partners to deliver this to the customers across geographies and industries.”
ONE BIG INITIATIVEYOU DIDN’T KNOW
ABOUT ME
2012
2004
1995
An insightful observation your CEO
organization as well as outside. Seek them out and look for opportunities
A question you wish you had better
India has the scale, talent and
I think the launch of ‘Agile
at NetApp. Customers can ensure their data is immortal, remains intelligent and can scale infinitely. All this in one unified architecture
deliver this to the customers across geographies
2012
2004
1995
In his current role as Director, Channels and Alliances at NetApp for India and SAARC, Neelakantan heads the channel strategy for the region. He spearheads channel development and channel enablement programs, cementing channel relationships and further drives sales through joint go-to-market with NetApp partners.
NETAPP
Before joining NetApp, he was Director–Channels at Sun from March 2010. He was exposed to different roles during his eight year stint with the vendor including expanding channels, creating new markets for established products and exploring new avenues for products by creating capable channel representation in the market. He joined Sun in 2004 as National Business Development Manager.
SUN MICROSYSTEM
He joined Wipro in 1995 and worked as Area Channel Manager and also worked as Regional Channel Manager. He executed various roles, from expanding channels, creating new markets for established products, explor-ing new avenues for products by creating capable channel repre-sentation in the market to manag-ing multiple lines of businesses ranging from education, health-care, volume sales, business development and channels. His four year career experience with Wipro helped him to understand the importance and relevance of good channel partnerships.
WIPRO
CAREER GRAPH
SEPTEMBER 2012 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 51
My management philosophy.Provide strategic direction and vision to the team for growth and self-development with the right dose of feedback, encouragement and rewards.
Channel myth I’d like to bust.Channel is not integral to a company’s enterprise strategy. It is infact the com-plete opposite, as channels play a key role with any product company and is essential for the business growth.
Biggest learning this year. Traditional security measures are not enough to stop new threats. Threats are becoming more complex and are evolving each day. It’s important that we remain aware of the sophistication in these attacks.
Technology that will take off in 2013. Network security analytics platform: This is the future, and the path beyond network monitoring and log analysis.
Best advice I’ve ever got.You’ve got to make your deposits before you can make a withdrawal.
Head, Channel and Commercial Business, India and SAARC, RSA
CHANNEL TITANS Navin Sadhwani
52 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD SEPTEMBER 2012
YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT ME
Navin Sadhwani is passionate about sports, especially those that have been traditionally played in India. Kabbadi is one of his favorite games. He will wake-up early in the morning to watch a kabaddi match if India is playing. He would love to contribute to Indian sports in the future.
An insightful observation your CEO made in the last year. Our adversaries are better co-ordinated, have developed better intelligence, and easily outflank our traditional perimeter defenses.
A question you wish you had better answers to.Is technology the means to an end or an end in itself?
Although I joined RSA only recently, a couple
of early initiatives include strong partner account mapping
in the enterprise space. I would want to drive engagement in the enterprise space with mapped partners leading with joint business planning and executing it with complete transparency to minimize channel conflict, and gain partner loyalty.”
ONE BIG INITIATIVE
A business idea that should get more attention. Automating governance, risk and com-pliance. Today, the enormous cost and complexity of compliance and risk is managed manually through disconnect-ed processes within the organization.
What would you like to invent? I would like to create a technology that eases the use of technology.
WHAT I’D CHANGE IN THE CHANNEL
In order to meet market needs, channel partners today have been expanding their product portfolio without planning their growth strategy properly. This has resulted in them losing their stance as a vertical market exporter, and has infact resulted in them becoming an overall technology channel partner rather than an expert.
Develop stronger and deeper services capability to add value to transactions. This always reaps dividends in the long-term. Services are going to be a better opportunity in the future for channels and they need to consciously develop these capabilities to capitalize on all available business avenues.
An insightful observation your CEO
intelligence, and easily outflank our
A question you wish you had better
Is technology the means to an end
Although I joined RSA only recently, a couple
CAREER GRAPH 2012
2011
Sadhwani is responsible for fostering and managing RSA channel relationships by empowering channel partners effective information-centric solutions. He came onboard about two months back. He will also be responsible for formulating and executing the India channel and commercial strategy, and work closely with RSA’s channel partners.
RSA
At Symantec, he worked as the Product Lead-Core Security. His was primarily responsible for growing core security revenue in India and SAARC through a strong channel eco-system. During his first stint with Symantec in 2001, he was instrumental in the the company becoming a prime security vendor in the region.
SYMANTEC
Sadhwani joined Oracle as General Manager–Commercial in 2010. He was part of the technology division with a responsibility to drive commercial sales in the southern and western regions. He has over 17 years of professional experience in enterprise sales, alliance and channel functions.
ORACLE
In 2008, Sadhwani moved to Microsoft as the National Partner Manager and looked after some of the key partner relationships. During his two year stint in Microsoft, he was responsible for managing and growing revenue from national partners (large account resellers) like Wipro, HCL, Dell and Sonata.
MICROSOFT
2010
2008
SEPTEMBER 2012 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 53
YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT ME
54 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD SEPTEMBER 2012
My management philosophy. Get the right people on board, work out the vision, and then guide the team into working their magic. Consistent and clear communication is vital to the organization’s success.
Best advice I’ve ever got. Focus on what is within your control, than blame external forces.
Channel myth I’d like to bust.
Do not wait for the OEM to build new markets for the partner. When a partner realizes a new business opportunity, they must initiate it with the OEM. If not, the partner will lose a vital opportunity to become a leader in a new space.
Technology that will take off in 2013.Combination of mobility, security, customer experience and big data will reap huge business dividends.
opportunity, they must initiate it with the OEM. If not, the partner will lose a vital opportunity to become a leader in
customer experience and big data will
YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT ME
Kaushik’s interest in cooking started at an early age when he spent time in the kitchen picking up tips and tricks. Gradually, he went through books and courses to improve his skills. Presently, his interest is smoked and barbecued meats. He also dabbles in Hindi-film music and often has karaoke sessions with friends.
A business idea that should get more attention.Engineered systems: Partners and customers are slowly gearing up to this new concept, but it requires advanced understanding of selling/buying beyond the standard box experience.
A habit you wish you could get rid of.The tendency to get into everything —roll up my sleeve and start digging right away.
What would you like to invent? A device that allows citizen services
to be delivered by the government at home, thereby eliminating external interventions.
An insightful observation your CEO made in the last year. Do you buy a car by its components – engine, steering, seats, etc? Then why do customers buy IT in pieces and integrate them? Simplify IT and make hardware and software work together, and that’s the idea behind Oracle’s integrated technology stack.
to be delivered by the government at home, thereby eliminating external
components – engine, steering,
customers buy IT in pieces and
and make hardware and software
idea behind Oracle’s integrated
CAREER GRAPH 2008
2003
Since June 2011, Kaushik is driving sales through channels, leveraging the entire Oracle portfolio of applica-tions, middleware, database, servers and storage. The role of Senior Direc-tor - Commercial & Channel Business from June 2009 to June 2011 gave him exposure to large opportunities, high volume transactions and created new GTM models.
ORACLE
As a Country Manager for India/SAARC with Trend Micro, he led business operations in SAARC region for over five years. His role involved strategic planning and overall operational execution, developing and effective utilization of people. Under him, Trend Micro grew to be a recognized leader in the security space.
TREND MICRO
HP
LOTUS DEVELOPMENT
Between June 1999 and April 2001, Kaushik spearheaded HP’s busi-ness expansion in the infrastructure segment as the company’s Country Business Manager. Later in his stint, he was responsible for running the UNIX server business in India. He also set up a new UNIX server sales model and new systems for configuration, pricing and support.
During his association with Lotus Development as Channel Manager, he handled channel marketing, develop-ment and management for SAARC. He also drove the work flow solutions and established successful OEM sales programs with HCL, Wipro, Compaq, HP, IBM, Sprint, Sun as an evangelist. He built the Lotus Business Partner program in India.
The consolidation of our channel teams into
one group under my leadership this financial year. For a product focused
company, this is a big development and challenge that the channels division will have to deliver on. Now my team becomes the true representative of the Oracle Red Stack—where hardware and software work together.”
ONE BIG INITIATIVE
1999
1996
WHAT I’D CHANGE IN THE CHANNEL
Build disciplined engagement in planning and execution. In an environment where revenue expectations are going up and budgets are being tightened, it is vital that the OEM and partner have complete clarity on where to do business, how to engage for the desired outcome. It is important that both sides work outside their comfort zone.
OEMs deploy well defined and comprehensive partner portals for the benefit of their channel partner base. However, most of the time, the partner’s employees do not take as much advantage of the information and knowledge assets. This hampers their awareness and preparedness in sales engagements in front of their cusomers.
SEPTEMBER 2012 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 55
YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT ME
56 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD SEPTEMBER 2012
My management philosophy.I believe in a blend of participative and delegative styles of management. If the situation demands, one needs to be authoritative as well.
Channel myth I’d like to bust.Neither the companies nor the channel partners have an upper hand in the relationship. To build a healthy business both need the support of the other. Mutual respect and vision is beneficial.
Biggest learning this year.A sale is a by-product of a relationship.
Technology that will take off in 2013.The next year will see an increased adoption of big data and analytics. I also believe that cloud computing will become main stream. Big data will be driven by video surveillance, BFSI, media and entertainment, and government projects. We will have to wait and watch how it unfolds.
Vice President, Channels, EMC India and SAARC
CHANNEL TITANS Praveen Sahai
A sale is a by-product of a relationship.
The next year will see an increased adoption of big data and analytics. I also believe that cloud computing will become main stream. Big data will be driven by video surveillance, BFSI, media and entertainment, and government projects. We will have to
YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT ME
Sahai is a foodie and his family co-owns a chain of restaurants. The restaurant presently serves only oriental cuisine but he plans to introduce continental cuisine soon. Person-ally, he love to cook and often prepare Indian dishes for his friends and family. While dining out, he prefers oriental cuisine.
Best advice I’ve ever got.It is great to have a strategy, but success is all about execution.
A business idea that should get more attention.I believe cloud computing has a huge potential in healthcare and education. If I get a chance, I would build a business around cloud solutions for the healthcare and education sectors.
What would you like to invent?In fact, EMC has filed a patent in my
name around “composite data storage, networking and media device” to help utilization of cloud-based solution for healthcare and education sectors.
An insightful observation your CEO made in the last year. Our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Joe Tucci said, “It’s all about how we understand our customers’ needs, wants, how we understand where we’re doing a great job and where we’re falling short.”
name around “composite data storage, networking and media device” to help utilization of cloud-based solution for healthcare and education sectors.
Executive Officer, Joe Tucci said, “It’s all about how we understand
how we understand where we’re doing a great job and where we’re
CAREER GRAPH 2012
2006
Sahai is responsible for growing and driving EMC’s Partner strategy in India and SAARC region. He also spearheads the company’s distribution and systems integrators strategy, deepening current partnerships and alliances, and creating new ones to increase EMC’s footprint in the market.
EMC
Sahai was Director of Sales, India & SAARC, and Strategic Marketing Director–Asia Pacific and Japan, for Iomega for six years. He was responsible for all operations in the region which included all local functions like sales, marketing, and support. Additionally, he spearheaded strategic marketing in APJ.
IOMEGA
As the product manager for the South-Asia region, Sahai was responsible for developing marketing strategies for the Data Management Group in South Asia. He was responsible for developing marketing strategies for Sun’s data management group during his four year tenure.
SUN MICROSYSTEMS
Sahai began his career at PowerTel Boca where he was in charge for sales, channels development and management of enterprise accounts. He went on to become Marketing Communications and Alliance Manager following Citrix’s acquisition of PowerTel in India. He was with Citrix for five years from 1997 to
CITRIX
I am proud of the corporate social
responsibility initiative by EMC with HOPE School in Bengaluru. In
2011, the school educated 395 underprivileged children, which included 207 girls. This is part of our long cherished dream that will allow children to get an education from cradle to college, through the HOPE school.”
ONE BIG INITIATIVE
2002
1997
WHAT I’D CHANGE IN THE CHANNEL
To increase the addressable market for my partners and build discipline around sales adjacency growth. I would like to introduce new initiatives in the partner’s line of business, and enable them to sweat every dollar invested, as they are trusted advisers to their customers. Our initiatives include ones on cloud, big data and analytics
To help partners shape their strategic outlook besides meeting short term goals and quarterly goals. In addition, I would like to make the partners a part of the EMC family and give them the right to do pricing and support service. This will uplift their morale and further empower them to address a much wider customer base.
SEPTEMBER 2012 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 57
YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT ME
My management philosophy.My philosophy in personal as well as in professional life has been about empowerment and accountability.
Channel myth I’d like to bust.I would not call it a myth but a channel generally looks forward to someone they can trust and rely upon.
Technology that will take off in 2013.Private and public cloud are the two main technologies that will really take off.
Best advice I’ve ever got.Don’t leave money on the table. This is an advice I received when I joined this industry. Ultimately cash is king.
General Manager-Channels, FUJITSU INDIA
CHANNEL TITANS R Lakshminarayanan
58 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD SEPTEMBER 2012
Private and public cloud are the two
Lakshminarayanan YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT ME
Lakshminarayanan believes that in his line of business, it is very important to think out-of-the box and come up with innovative ideas. His decision making and communication skills have kept him in good stead.
A business idea that should get more attention.One key observation that I have made is the lack of focus in today’s generation in managing accounts end-to-end.
A habit you wish you could get rid of.The team gets all the facilities that they need to deliver. Probably I need to push them a little less to achieve the desired results.
What would you like to invent? I would like to invent predictability. It is very difficult to forecast. Therefore, I would like to device something that could forecast the industry.
Biggest learning this year.It is important to work with your head on your shoulders from the company’s messaging and channel standpoint. This helps improve the standing within the industry.
An insightful observation your CEO made in the last year.Commitment is something he stresses upon a lot.
A question I wish I had better answers to.Forecast. Client needs and demands is an aspect that is difficult to forecast. I wish i has better answers to it.
It is important to work with your head on your shoulders from the company’s messaging and channel standpoint. This helps improve the
An insightful observation your CEO made
Commitment is something he stresses
CAREER GRAPH 2010
2009
Presently, Lakshminarayanan is managing the channel sales unit of Fujitsu India. He is responsible for management of of enterprise level products like servers and storage through the partner ecosystem. Fujitsu has helped him build his knowledge in various domains and he continues expanding his horizon.
FUJITSU
Lakshminarayanan used to work for Infoline in the Middle East. As the vice president of the company, he was responsible for the sales and marketing of the hardware and system integration business and at the same time,he also took care of the BPO business at the organization.
INFOLINE LLC
Lakshminarayanan was initially in charge of the transaction business at Lenovo. Thereafter, he took over as Vice President Transaction Consumer Sales Business and also briefly looked after the SMB business where he handled about 1500 partners around the country. While at Lenovo, he was responsible for creating business in the major metros.
At HCL Infosystems, he started off as a trainee in 1988 and worked there for almost 12 years. The journey at HCL gave him a lot of opportunities to learn and grow. He quit HCL in 2000 and started a new venture of his own but eventually rejoined HCL. He later quit HCL after his second stint as Vice-President.
HCL
2008
1988
When I joined Fujitsu, almost 60-65 percent
of our customers came from the direct engagement model.
Thereafter, the main aim of the company then was to make it a
completely channel driven company. That is where I stepped in. Today, I can proudly claim that Fujitsu is nearly 90 percent channel driven.”
ONE BIG INITIATIVE
WHAT I’D CHANGE IN THE CHANNEL
The two very important aspects which most of the competitors miss are transparency and being upfront. It is important to build a good relationship with the channel. Once our partners articulated their expectations from us we worked with committed effort to meet those expectations consistently. Commitment and long- term relationship is extremely crucial.
It is also important to be upfront about issues like cost with the channel, and not keep them in the dark about such matters. It makes a whole world of sense to keep a good relation with the channel community, and communicating regularly helps keep them well informed about our initiatives and their prospects.
SEPTEMBER 2012 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 59
YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT ME
LENOVO
60 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD SEPTEMBER 2012
My management philosophy.I believe that every human being is born with immense potential and it is upon us to nurture that potential. I believe in motivating my team to push themselves, to achieve their best and to not give up till they succeed.
Channel myth I’d like to bust. That “channel partners do not have the foresight to build a long term relation-ship with a company; they focus on short term goals and immediate profit”.
On the contrary, they have always add-ed value to a project and built a strong customer-base for us.
Biggest learning this year. Long term strategies entail a primed mindset to sow some seeds today, nurture it , while you know the fruits borne will secure the future.
Technology that will take off in 2013. Data analytics (big data) and energy efficient infrastructures will do well.
Country General Manager and President, India & SAARC, SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC
CHANNEL TITANS Shrinivas Chebbi
On the contrary, they have always add-ed value to a project and built a strong
Long term strategies entail a primed
nurture it , while you know the fruits
YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT ME
Shrinivas Chebbi is an egalitarian and free-spirited individual. He also nurses a secret dream of becoming a vagabond—just breaking away and exploring the world as a backpacker. He wants to explore countries, meet different people, learn about their culture and way of life.
Best advice I’ve ever got.“Karmanye Vadhikaraste, Ma phale-shou kada chana”. It is a verse from The Gita which means, “You have the right to perform your actions, but don’t expect the rights to the fruits of the actions.”
A business idea that should get more attention. Enterprise energy management and leveraging carbon efficiency as a key differentiator is a great business idea that will provide opportunities.
A habit you wish you could get rid of. At times, I think I am guilty of chasing perfectionism.
What would you like to invent? Personal power generator that runs on water and air.
A question you wish you had better answers to. I would like to know how I could reduce or prevent the attrition of key talent, despite providing the best of everything?
In line with our company’s strategy to
become an energy Ambassador and trusted advisor to our
customers, I set up a vision with my leadership team to become a full-suite datacenter and critical facility service provider. As a result, our services are in demand with more than 50 practice consultants and specialists in this domain.”
ONE BIG INITIATIVE
WHAT I’D CHANGE IN THE CHANNEL
I would like to change the way investments are made by channels towards building their future and change management. I understand their pain-points due to the changing technology, increasing operating and service costs, and availability expectations, but they need to think of long-term gains instead of short-term profits.
The way channels use their principals to train and develop new talents should be improved. It is important to work closely with each employee; they should be kept abreast of new technological developments and the changing market scenario. Most importantly, they should be given sufficient exposure and be able to implement the learning.
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A habit you wish you could get rid of. At times, I think I am guilty of
What would you like to invent? Personal power generator that
A question you wish you had better
I would like to know how I could reduce or prevent the attrition of key talent, despite providing the best
company’s strategy to become an energy Ambassador
leadership team to become a full-suite datacenter and critical facility service provider. As a result, our services are in demand with more than 50 practice
ONE BIG INITIATIVE
WHAT I’D CHANGE IN THE CHANNEL
1988
2008
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CAREER GRAPH
Shrinivas moved to APC by Schneider Electric (Critical Power & Cooling Solutions BU) India as Country General Manager & President of India & SAARC countries in 2008 April.
APC BY SCHNEIDER
He joined Schneider Electric International Division in 1998 and was responsible for the operational Marketing of Industrial Control products (Telemecanique) for the Gulf countries based in Dubai as Business Manager. He established the Telemecanique brand and industrial control offer in Gulf which enjoyed significant growth during his tenure and after. Shrinivas moved to Bahrain as Country Manager in 2001. He was instrumental in establishing Franchise licensee operations of the group for LV equipment and led the success of the group in securing large contracts in the Kingdom Of Bahrain. He moved to Dubai in 2004 as Regional Director and member of the Gulf management committee and was responsible for the Country Management of Dubai, Northern Emirates and Oman which contributed 50 percent of the Gulf Countries business. He led the establishment of Square D offer in Dubai and was responsible for driving the growth through strong participation in buildings and infrastructure boom of the country.
SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC
Shrinivas started his career in 1988 in the power electronics field. Later, his stint in industrial automation and process control filed for next eight years and was involved in many significant projects in India.
BELL
SEPTEMBER 2012 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 61
YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT ME
Your management philosophy. My management philosophy is based on the three fundamentals: 1) Hiring the best talent 2) Empowering them with all the right tools to help perform efficiently 3) Mentoring them to reach their maximum potential.
Channel myth I’d like to bust.In India, there exists the concept of re-verse leveraging of OEMs by channels which needs to change. Normally, it
should be the reverse, with the chan-nels having more people than OEMs.
Biggest learning this year.Unlearn all that I did learn in the last 11 years.
Technology that will take off in 2013.Video is the next big technology that everyone will be using across devices.
Best advice I’ve ever got.
Director-Channel, Alliance & Networking, India & SAARC, AVAYA
CHANNEL TITANS Sudhir Nayar
62 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD SEPTEMBER 2012
everyone will be using across devices.
YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT ME
Public speaking was a field that Nayar was not comfortable with initially. But this being an essential part of any leadership role, he decided to take the bull by its horns . He referred a number of books and participated in as many events as possible, before he could achieve the goal of speaking in front of a live audience.
“The most difficult thing in life is to handle success. If one can handle success, then humility and polite-ness will help handle any situation.”
A business idea that should get more attention.A mechanism to demonstrate our products in a uniform manner.
A habit you wish you could get rid of. I wish I can get rid of my habit of staying connected on emails for 15-17 hours a day.
A question you wish you had better answers to. How do I encourage my team mem-
bers to spend at least 10 percent of their time on self-development?
An insightful observation your CEO made in the last year. There is a saying, “In God, we will trust; everybody else, please bring your data.” This simply implies that we do not need to go by perception but we will have go by data and facts.
What would you like to invent?A tool that can help customers see all of the company’s products at the click of a button. This should help us communicate better with clients.
When I moved to Avaya, I realized that 70 percent of our orders
were very small in size, but the amount of effort that was going
into processing these orders was significant. We launched our project called
‘Avaya Swift’, to route all orders of small values to one distributor. This has worked well for us.”
ONE BIG INITIATIVE
WHAT I’D CHANGE IN THE CHANNEL
I want the channels in India to be more independent than they are today. Both, from a people and technology perspective, channels rely extensively on the OEMs which should change. The channels should make all efforts to understand technology and have a meaningful interpretation of that technology for their customers.
Each of the channels need to bring their own focus and not tie-up with vendors for the sake of it. I read a study that shared that an average channel has tied up with atleast 12 OEM vendors. It is important that the channel is focused, specialized and strategic, because it is difficult to do justice to every product line.
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bers to spend at least 10 percent of their time on self-development?
will trust; everybody else, please
perception but we will have go by
A tool that can help customers see all of the company’s products at the click of a button. This should help us communicate better with clients.
Avaya, I realized that 70
significant. We launched our project called
2010
2009
2001
CAREER GRAPH
Nayar joined Avaya as the Channel Head for India and SAARC in 2010. In this role he is responsible for growing business with more than 200 partners and also drive specialized products like networking and SME product sales. He also takes care of the channel capacity and competency planning, business development activities through channel, and ease of operation.
AVAYA
Post the Sun acquisition by Oracle, he was responsible for the corporate strategy where he was responsible for drawing a three year growth blueprint. In 2009-10, he was responsible for the national sales growth of the software division at Oracle. After the acquisition of Search, he was successfully able to lead a team that managed two large wins in India for Sun Software.
ORACLE
During his stint here, he was designated various roles. For six years he was heading the channel business at Sun. His last assignment was as Country Head for the software business. He has 21 years of experience leading diverse teams to new levels in a variety of highly competitive industries and fast-paced environments.
SUN MICROSYSTEMS
SEPTEMBER 2012 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 63
YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT ME
My management philosophy. To provide an environment that leads to the creation of a productive and growth oriented business ecosystem. Focus is on fostering collaboration at all levels, internally as well as with partners and customers. The idea is to create consistency and predictability in the business whilst staying nimble and pragmatic to take advantage of changing market scenarios.
Channel myth I’d like to bust. That the channel is only for fulfillment. From my years of experience, while working with the channel community, I can vouch that nothing is farther from the truth.
Biggest learning this year.What got reinforced this year pretty strongly is that change is a constant.We need to be well organized to handle the challenges which arise. We must be nimble enough to take advantage of opportunities it presents.
Technology that will take off in 2013. Remote infrastructure management
Director-Channel Sales, India & SAARC, CA TECHNOLOGIES
CHANNEL TITANS Vijayant Rai
64 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD SEPTEMBER 2012
YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT ME
In addition to a healthy interest in various sports, Rai tries to take time-out to play them whenever possible. He also likes to indulge in computer gaming and gadgets. At gaming, be it Nintendo or Playstation, he considers his 10 year-old-son, a worthy competitor.
and access of technology, and consequently quality education content/systems across India need more attention. This has the potential to unlock huge value both in terms of growth of human resources and innovation.
What would you like to invent? A teleportation device like the one used in the sci-fi series Star Trek to beat Mumbai’s snarling traffic. This will make travelling effortless and non-cumbersome.
The intention of Partner On-Boarding
program was to bring in and technically enable new partners on
CA’s Arcserve Backup, Replication & High Availability solutions. This was followed up by intensive hands-on technical training and certification in various cities. This initiative has given a huge impetus to our data management channel coverage across the territory.”
ONE BIG INITIATIVE
and adoption of hybrid cloud in case of enterprises will move to the next level. In addition, backed by enormous growth of data, technologies catering to storage and big data are expected to see vigorous adoption in next few year.
Best advice I’ve ever got.Success is where preparation and opportunity meet.
A business idea that should get more attention.Initiatives that promote propagation
content/systems across India need more attention. This has the potential to unlock huge value both in terms
to beat Mumbai’s snarling traffic. This will make travelling effortless
technically enable new partners on
CAREER GRAPH 2004
Rai heads CA’s Nimsoft & Data Management business for India and SAARC region. He is a member of CA’s Asia Pacific Growth Markets Management & Leadership team. He joined CA India in 2004 and has held a variety of senior roles within the enterprise and channel sales organization.
CA TECHNOLOGIES
As Regional Sales Manager at Internet Security Systems (ISS), he managed business in the western and eastern regions of India across both partner & end-user constituencies. He handled Major Account Solution Sales with a focus on targeted large enterprise accounts and enhancing ISS’s
customer base.
ISS
Rai was a key member of the team which set-up Trend Micro operations in India. As Sales Manager–Overseas Business Unit, he was responsible for signing up, enabling and nationally driving business through large system integrators like HCL Infosystems, HCL Comnet & SIFY. He rolled-out a well-received partner program for
Trend Micro’s enterprise partners.
TREND MICRO
As channel manager at Oracle he was responsible for handling a set of major accounts besides the Internet Start-up/Dot Com segment in western India. At Oracle, he was conferred with Oracle's ‘Values Champion Award - FY2000’ for market development Dot Com/ Internet start-up market segment.
ORACLE
2001
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WHAT I’D CHANGE IN THE CHANNEL
Though, by and large a majority of partners have augmented their technical and services capabilities, we would like to see more of these skill-sets upgraded by the channel community. This not only helps them to create a differentiation in the marketplace but it also helps improve stickiness with customers.
It is encouraging to see many enterprise channel partners aligning with the latest market trends and customer requirements by providing a number of cloud-based services. Having said that, it is important that each partner evaluates his best fit or positioning in this respect, and then focuses on necessary enablement in real time.
SEPTEMBER 2012 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 65
YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT ME
66 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD SEPTEMBER 2012
My management philosophy. I have always believed in motivating my employees and helping them focus on doing the right thing which would eventually show in their work.
Channel myth I’d like to bust. The myth that there is no perceived value for channel partners in the enterprise segment.
Technology that will take off in 2013.
We will see a surge in the adoption and enterprise deployment of mobile applications across verticals.
Best advice I’ve ever got.Well, it is not a nice idea to procrastinate in your personal and professional life.
A business idea that should get more attention. Universal communication proficiency.
Head of Ecosystem and Channel, SAP
CHANNEL TITANS Vivek Rawat
and enterprise deployment of mobile
Universal communication proficiency.
YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT ME
Rawat is an adventurous person. He loves to be amidst nature. Considering his busy schedule, he still ensures that he takes his family out, atleast once a year, to experience a sporting activity and be one with the natural world.
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This should help remove the language barrier.
A habit you wish you could get rid of.My inability to switch-off at certain times.
What would you like to invent? I would definitely like to find an affordable alternative to fuel for increased efficiency.
Biggest learning this year.To be able to adapt well to this dynamic industry and improvise to accelerate innovation.
An insightful observation your CEO made in the last year. While we all have broader responsibilities, we should always look forward to pick and choose the battles or instances where you can help the team as a whole and make an impact.
A question you wish you had better answers to.I would like to know how effectively can we execute and co-ordinate between various internal and external processes of the organization?
The expansion of partner investment and focus
on large enterprise reselling is our focus. Accelerate co-innovation
around all five of SAP’s market categories with an emphasis on game-changing co-innovation, growing third party solution portfolio and the proliferation of partner-developed solutions on all platforms, will be our mandate.”
ONE BIG INITIATIVE
WHAT I’D CHANGE IN THE CHANNEL
I would like to bring a change in the perception that channel partners do not add signification value in the enterprise segment. Partners not only help optimize market expansion and customer touch points, but they can scale adoption of the portfolio across all segments—both SME and enterprises.
We also would like drive adoption. I would like to scale-up the partners’ services capacity and skills, especially for the latest innovations, while ensuring quality delivery. This should help drive profits for partners and strengthen our relationship with the channel. This will further help expand the services protfolio for their customers
CAREER GRAPH
At SAP, Rawat heads the Ecosystem and Channel functionality. In his current role, he is responsible for the partner and channel contribution to SAP’s overall success. This includes driving the five-pillar strategy with partners, increasing indirect channel business and ensuring high quality implementation services capacity across the entire ecosystem and channel.
SAP
Prior to joining SAP, Rawat was a part of the IBM India Software Group. He was involved in various sales leadership positions in the region. At the same time, he had held some key SWG Leadership role in India as Sector and Territory leader. In his last position at IBM India, Vivek was the Vice President – WebSphere Brand and was responsible for the sales, channel sales and marketing of the WebSphere brand portfolio.
IBM
While at Oracle India, Rawat was involved in various alliance and channel roles and has been responsible for software enterprise sales across all complex large software transactions. He has also been instrumental in setting up the Offshore Software Global Alliance team based out of India which included sales, pre-sales and solutions for global customers.
ORACLE
SEPTEMBER 2012 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 67
YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT ME
My management philosophy.Whatever you do, do it for glory.
Channel myth I’d like to bust.Price is not equal to cost. Being cheaper does not mean not having the lowest cost.
Technology that will take off in 2013.One technology that will continue to shine bright all through 2013 would be virtualization. Consolidation will drive virtualization in a big way.
Best advice I’ve ever got.Always go prepared for every call. Your meetings with customers and partners should be for only two reasons: If it’s not to close a sale, then it should be to create opportunities.
A business idea that should get more attention.Success means a great strategy and even greater execution. One must focus on execution as much as one focuses on the strategy.
Director, Partner Sales and Field Alliances Organization, India, HDS
CHANNEL TITANS Yogesh Sawant
68 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD SEPTEMBER 2012
reasons: If it’s not to close a sale, then it should be to create opportunities.
Success means a great strategy and
focus on execution as much as one
YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT ME
Those who know Yogesh Sawant would unanimuosly agree that he is a movie buff. Moreover, very few people are aware of his desire to showcase his acting capabilities to an audience.
A habit you wish you could get rid of.Procrastination.
What would you like to invent.I would like to contribute to a cleaner environment with a technology that uses minimum power consumption, low heat generation, yet, one that generates maximum output.
Biggest learning this year.There is no substitute to hard work. I realized that the harder I worked the luckier I got.
An insightful observation your CEO made in the last year.Organizations are adopting cloud as an alternative to save on growing infrastructure costs. However, they are fundamentally failing to identify what the reasons are for the increase in infrastructure costs.
A question you wish you had better answers to.How do I motivate people better to ensure improved efficiency?
We have engaged with key partners in
mutually identified accounts and industries. For enablement,
we have aggressively delivered various training programs. We have also floated aggressive bundles aimed at garnering mindshare if not market share in the mid-market segment. We are confident that these bundles will allow our partners in the long run.”
ONE BIG INITIATIVE
WHAT I’D CHANGE IN THE CHANNEL
Trust is one of the most important factors in our line of business. We have to focus on mutual trust within the partner community. At the same time, I would want to take concrete steps towards building a symbiotic relationship between the channel community and us. This kind of mutual trust will enhance the belief in our shared engagements.
I believe that it is necessary to leverage the available resources to a certain threshold and encourage the channel community to fully exploit the tools and alliances available to them so that they can derive the maximum benefit enhance profitablity, and expand business. This should is a sure-shot way to doing well in business.
SEPTEMBER 2012 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 69
YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT ME
An insightful observation your CEO
Organizations are adopting cloud as an alternative to save on growing
to identify what the reasons are
A question you wish you had better
How do I motivate people better to
INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 69
CAREER GRAPH 2012
2010
Presently, Sawant heads the Partner Sales & Field Alliances Organization at Hitachi Data Systems. He has been working for HDS for a year with a charter to foray into the system integration and re-seller segment as well as the alliance community.
HITACHI DATA SYSTEMS
Prior to joining Hitachi Data Systems, Sawant was in Oracle India as a part of the alliance and channels team in the role of Key Partner Director. His responsibilities included the sale of cross-LOB products through TCS across various industries throughout India.
ORACLE
Sawant spent close to eight years at Sun Microsystems. In this role, his varied responsibilities ranged from partner management to being involved in various direct sales and partner sales roles. He also headed the sales for the Western region, and also handled the sales of Sun products and services in different verticals.
Sawant was a part of Hewlett Packard for five years in the role of Major Account Manager at Compaq (later acquired by HP) from 1998 to 2001, and then at HP for two years extending from 2001 to 2003. His key job was to strengthen the alliance relationship of the technology vendor.
HP
2003
2001
SUN MICROSYSTEMS
E V E N T R E P O R T
With the constant changes in technologies like cloud and mobility across enterprises, Juniper Networks gets in touch with the channel partner community to emphasize its value proposition in today’s times.
NETWORKING WITH PARTNERS FOR BUSINESS GROWTH
uniper Networks conducted the fi rst phase of the event called ‘Toward Disruptive Growth’, for enterprise channel partners in association with Avnet Technology Solutions. The event held
in Delhi (24 July) and Mumbai (25 July) powered by ChannelWorld wit-nessed participation by C-level executives of partner organizations.
To strengthen their presence across South India, Juniper Networks conducted the second phase in association with Ingram Micro. Over 40 partner organizations attended the event in Bangalore (28 August) and Chennai (29 August).
Both events began with Vijay Ramachandran, Editor–in–Chief, IDG Media sharing the results of the CIO Mid Year Review Survey 2012.The survey was recently conducted by CIO India (a sister publication of ChannelWorld) which details about 192 Indian enterprises, their business drivers and IT spend patterns.
The survey gave a roadmap on how the growing adoption of cloud and mobility is infl uencing the CIO community. Ramachan-
dran pointed, “the emergence of the new trends has shown an increased concern among CIOs about the lack of good systems integrators in the country. This often compels them to form internal teams or outsource certain applications.”
The Juniper team was led by the Kevin Ackhurst, Vice President, APAC Partners, Juniper Networks in the fi rst phase, while Ravi Chauhan, Manag-ing Director–India, Juniper Networks was present in Bangalore and Chen-nai. India Channel Head Jitendra Gupta and other technical/sales executives of Juniper interacted with the partners through the course of the event.
Focus on ‘Cloud & Mobility’Kevin Ackhurst, concurring with the survey results, said , “partners need to adapt quickly to the two trends—mobility and cloud computing—that will lead to disruptive business growth. Issues like frequent change in demands and IT projects of shorter
duration mean that partners need to be alert and highly skilled to stay rel-evant and ensure long-term business with their customers.”
Ravi Chauhan, stated “most enter-prise deals in last few quarters have been won by Juniper through our part-ner network. We are no longer just an alternate networking brand, but are fast becoming a vendor of preference.” He added, “we are ahead of competi-tion as our solutions for BYOD work seamlessly across most mobile plat-forms. Junos Pulse can be uploaded on the enterprise network .Whenever a new device enters the network, it can be confi gured easily and quickly to the existing platform.”
Addressing Partner ConcernsThe Q&A session saw ample partici-pation from the solution providers in both cities. Pawan Khurana, CEO ,QuantM Net Technologies expressed diffi culty in replacing the prominent networking vendor in their accounts. In response Ackhurst said, “our Open source technology (powered by Ju-nos) helps partners position our products in the existing infrastruc-ture and the interoperability ensures a smooth transition.”
Anantharam Varayur, MD, Webcom Information Technology, enquired about the scope of value-addition by a partner. Chauhan said, “The value-addition comes in the form of cus-tomized solutions according to the customer’s business demands. With cloud and mobility, CIOs would need frequent and dedicated hand-holding from partners which is an opportunity for them.”
Many partners at Delhi and Mumbai enquired on the leasing option by Juni-per. Diwakar Khatri, Founder and CEO at Ingenius Technologies, Mumbai asked, “most enterprise deals occur on an opex model in India through fi -nance option. How is Juniper placed?”. In response, Ackhurst said, “We do have a leasing option arrangement with IBM on a global basis, and we can pass it to partners too.”
JUNIPERCUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP
This event report is brought to you by IDG Custom Solutions Group
in association with
“Juniper is perfectly poised to empower the partner community with a high
tech portfolio, unlimited business opportunities, and importantly, good margins.”
KEVIN ACKHURST, Vice President, APAC Partners, Juniper Networks
Subramaniam Madhira, CEO, Omninet Systems remarked about the growing diffi culty in maintaining the correct price due to various partners fi ght-ing for a single deal. “Our strategy is to have lesser but competent chan-nels to help partners create a differ-entiator and demand a good premium price,” said Chauhan
More than 100 executives from 80 part-ner organizations across Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Chennai benefi ted from Juniper’s enhanced value proposition es-pecially around cloud and mobility.
RAVI CHAUHAN,Managing Director– India, Juniper Networks
“Junos Pulse is a great mobility solution for partners
to pitch for, especially with the incessant demand for BYOD, and register good
businesses and we cannot stress more on the criticality of having it at your finger tips. The challenge is to have relevant information that equips you with the power to stay ahead.
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NASA COULD land hu-mans on the moon and put exploratory rovers on Mars, but
in the last three years, the agency just couldn’t find a way to build an internal social network that would encourage its employees to collaborate.
Here’s how setting up social networks can help you drive innovation internally. By Todd R. Weiss
Getting It Started
Initially launched in early 2009, “SpaceBook” was supposed to be a place where NASA workers could go online anytime to get feedback, learn from others’ experiences, collaborate on projects and get to know each other better. But NASA ultimately squashed the
EVERYTHING ABOUT SOCIAL NETWORKING
FocalPoint
effort this June, taking it of-fline for good.
The problem, says Kevin Jones, a consulting social and organizational strate-gist with NASA’s Marshall and Goddard Spaceflight Centers, was that no one sufficiently explained to us-ers what they could do with SpaceBook to move their collaboration forward. So it languished when users didn’t adopt it.
That kind of crash-and-burn experience happens in enterprise IT when plans are established without understanding what users want or need. But it doesn’t have to be that way for your organization, according to companies that have made internal social networks an integral, thriving part of their employee communica-tions streams. What it takes to make a successful internal social network, they say, is strategic planning, careful follow-through and a will-ingness to change direction as your users show you how they want to use the tools you’re giving them.
We’ll share these com-panies’ best tips for getting employees on board with a private social network. But first we’ll explore some of the benefits internal social networking can bring.
HOW ARE ORGANIZATIONS UTILIZING IT?Why invest in a company social network in the first place? That’s a familiar question for Jonathan Yar-mis, principal analyst at The Yarmis Group, which follows social, mobile and cloud technologies.
“Clients ask how can they get value from this and why should they spend money on it when they’re not con-vinced that there is ROI,” he says. “But I think it’s pro-
foundly important. It allows people to do things with information that they can’t do with email. During the course of the day you can ask, ‘Who do I know that knows what I need to know?’ You can only do this on a so-cial networking platform.”
The companies we spoke to have found that their in-ternal social networks provide multiple benefits, including giving employees a stronger voice, helping them pool and share infor-mation, and strengthening company culture.
PROVIDING EMPLOYEES A VOICE
At San Francisco-based Salesforce.com, the social media tsunami known as Facebook got company ex-ecutives very interested in how such a phenomenon would eventually affect en-terprises, says Dave King, the company’s director of product marketing. That’s how the company developed its Chatter employee social networking application.
Unveiled to customers in June 2010, Chatter was first rolled out internally to Salesforce’s 8,000 global employees in the months be-fore the product launch. “We used it ourselves before we offered it to anybody else,” King says.
Every Salesforce employee has a Chatter profile and can post questions or comments, share information and col-laborate from around the world in real time. “People tell us that instead of hitting a bottleneck, they post an inquiry on Chatter and get an answer,” he says. And the platform is searchable, so us-ers can pull up past discus-sions, data and more.
The social network gives a voice to individual contribu-tors, King says. “In the past
SEPTEMBER 2012 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 73
job. Here the company on-boards new workers and shares HR information, company procedures and more in a social place where the new employees can ask questions and meet co-workers immediately.
The social networking system gives a “look into the hearts and minds of employ-ees, where they can see a bit about the culture of the com-pany and fellow workers. Es-pecially if you are a work-at-home employee, I think this is really important,” Castro says. “We can disseminate messages and hear from the employee base in a much more fluid and transparent way” compared to email and other communications.
The platform also helps workers share best practices inside BMC, she says. “It allows us to have dialogues on topics, and to support these policies and allow employees to ask questions and get answers.”
Finally, it allows employ-ees to follow topics that are
employees to share more of their knowledge than we’ve seen before.”
Margerum wouldn’t disclose how much his company spends on Jive for its employees, but Jive says that pricing for its Jive Social Business Platform for internal corporate use begins at $12 (Rs 650) per user per month.
REINFORCING COMPANY CULTUREAt BMC Software in Austin, Texas, internal social net-working has been used for a year, with some 7,000 em-ployees creating 965 groups in which they collaborate and share information, said Hollie Castro, senior vice president of administra-tion. The company uses Chatter from Salesforce and has found that it enhances communications with and among employees in several ways, Castro says.
BMC uses Chatter to in-troduce new employees to the company before they start their first day on the
that Plantronics is already running.
“It has a Facebook-like ap-proach,” he adds. “It’s clearly not ‘what I did yesterday’ or ‘what I did on my vaca-tion.’ It’s about a news article someone saw or someone asking a question about a particular idea. You might mention that a competitor brought out a new product and ask people what they think about it.”
The end result is real-time idea sharing that benefits the company, Margerum says. “You’re trying to get a conversation started that’s going to elevate this knowl-edge to everyone in that community. It’s sort of like a brainstorming session.”
It’s still too early to point to specific successes in the company, he says, but participation has been very strong and is showing clear benefits. “Jive is emerging as a frictionless way to share expertise and opinions with the enterprise pool,” he says. “It seems to be motivating
it was people in the corner office who had power in a company. But with this, people anywhere in the company can give input that can be influential.”
One young developer was fresh in the company and in his free time was build-ing applications for Chatter, King says. Other users saw them, downloaded them and used them. That cre-ativity and success bubbled up to Salesforce’s chairman and CEO, Marc Benioff, who invited the young developer to a closed-door leadership session with company executives about innovation. “That 24-year-old junior employee makes this huge impact and now leads one of our Apple iOS development teams.”
INFORMATION SHARINGSanta Cruz, Calif.-based Plantronics launched a pilot of the Jive Social Business Platform in March for 150 beta testers, with plans to roll it out to all 3,500 employees later this year, says Barry Margerum, the company’s chief strategy of-ficer. Jive was brought in to modernize communications among employees, deliver a framework for integrated knowledge management and to encourage crowdsourcing the company’s informational assets, he says.
“Crowdsourcing informa-tion benefits a company by opening up information to everyone,” Margerum says. “You find out people are very smart who you didn’t know about. That changes things for everybody.”
Margerum says Plan-tronics chose Jive because of its extensive search capabilities and its good integration with desktop applications from other vendors, such as Microsoft,
n FOCAL POINT | SOCIAL NETWORKING
Demand for enterprise social software will
grow strongly in the coming years, as more organizations implement the products to improve collaboration and communication primarily among employees, but also with customers, according to IDC.
Between 2011 and 2016, IDC expects the compound annual growth rate in spending to hit 42.4 percent for this type of product, also commonly referred to as “enterprise social collaboration” and “enterprise social networking” software.
“We’re seeing good strong growth from the major players in this market and that’ll continue for quite a while,” said Michael
Fauscette, lead author of two IDC reports out this week about enterprise social software.
Customers spent $767.4 million (Rs 4259 crore) on the products globally in 2011, and will spend almost $4.5 billion (Rs 25, 000 crore) in 2016, according to IDC’s “Worldwide Enterprise Social Software 2012-2016 Forecast.”
Due to their potential for sharpening employee communication they’re becoming important tools for “decision support” and productivity across most industry verticals, according to Fauscette.
Among the growth drivers are a push to add social
collaboration capabilities to other enterprise applications, and demand from employees for software that resembles the consumer applications they use outside work.
Google officials have also been saying for months that they are developing a workplace version of the company’s Google+ social networking site, which could give Google Apps an enterprise social component it currently lacks.
In addition, large software vendors, including Oracle and Salesforce.com, are also adding enterprise social features to their enterprise application stacks.
-By Juan Carlos Perez
A BRIGHT FUTURE FOR ENTERPRISE SOCIAL SOFTWARE
74 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD SEPTEMBER 2012
applications that drive busi-nesses, says analyst Yarmis. Right now, the data from each are typically in differ-ent silos—“they don’t talk with each other yet.” Once that kind of integration truly arrives, he says, it will make these kinds of platforms more useful for enterprises.
The time to begin planning for such integration is now. “While you’re investing in it right now, it will put you ahead of the game when this is important five to 10 years from now,” he says.
Jon Reed, an independent enterprise analyst with Jon-ERP.com, agrees that social
networking will be critical for enterprises in the future, but he cautions against get-ting caught up in all of the hype surrounding it at this early time in its development. One big issue, is that social networking vendors haven’t yet solved all their products’ shortcomings or filled all their customers’ needs.
That will happen in the next year or two, he pre-dicts, as vendors bolster their offerings and provide the critical features that business users want, he explains. “I think that ven-dors are going to be aggressively trying to pur-sue things in the end that deliver a lot more value” than is available now, Reed says.
“Right now you’re just scratching the surface. We’re early in that journey. It’s not headed to be Face-book for the enterprise. It’s going to be something entirely different.” n
relevant to them, rather than the company sending out in-formation randomly. “This is a huge benefit,” Castro says. “It’s giving us another vehicle for internal communications that is more effective.”
Castro wouldn’t disclose how much BMC pays for Chatter, but the basic Chat-ter social networking ser-vice is free, while the paid service, which adds features such as workflow tracking and calendar integration, starts at $15 per user per month, according to a Sales-force spokesperson.
The success of any social network depends on user engagement. If employees aren’t using it, even the most innovative internal network is a failure. Here are a few keys to success.
START WITH THE EASY STUFFOne of the lessons Sales-force executives learned, says King, was to do the easy things first to in-troduce users to the new system. “We started with a high-value process—global account planning—that was easy to implement from a change manage-ment perspective,” he said. “It had been a total pain to deal with previously, then we put it into a Chatter group. It made everyone’s lives easier.”
Next were other areas that could bring in quick wins with users, he says, includ-ing groups where employees could air grievances. Only then did the company be-gin to look at larger, more ingrained processes that would be harder to imple-ment and take more time to finish. “Where we see in-ternal social networking go wrong is when people start with those tough ones,” he says.
CONSULT USERS EARLY AND OFTENBMC’s Castro says her com-pany started small with a pilot program so that feed-back could be collected and an internal buzz could be generated among employees. “We worked with groups of employees around the world to get input,” she says. “You learn along the way. One of the reasons we are getting good use by employees is that we really engaged our user groups up front.”
Being responsive to em-ployees’ feedback—and flex-ible enough to try out their ideas—is vital, King adds.
“What kills these things is when people bring in their own new ideas for how to make improvements and they get shot down by execu-tives or legal or HR,” he says. “Even when you’re not sure, give things a chance. It’s im-portant not to manage it at an institutional level too closely. Inevitably what happens is that there are bright spots for users that pop up. You need to bring them in and encour-age them.”
EXPLAIN THE BENEFITSAnother key to getting em-ployee buy-in, King says, is to clearly explain to users what they can do and gain by using the social network. “Articulate where the value is and share those best prac-tices, such as sales leaders telling how they sell more using Chatter. By doing this, these tools get adopted by others.”
Better yet, make social networking integral to other
tasks, advises Ethan McCar-ty, digital and social strate-gist at IBM. McCarty says all 400,000 global employ-ees use IBM’s homebuilt social networking plat-form, Connections, which is also sold to customers. “You have to make it part of the work as opposed to a separate thing people do,” he says. “If it’s not inte-grated and is an additional task, it becomes a burden and hurts productivity.”
EASE THEM INMcCarty says it’s also impor-tant to make sure that your employees understand what
the expected user etiquette will be under the systems you choose. “That understanding needs to be arrived at mutu-ally and collaboratively” so that users feel comfortable posting their comments and profiles, he says.
IBM has developed a sys-tem where less technical us-ers can earn “merit badges” as they gain experience and confidence with the capabili-ties of Connections, McCarty adds. “You have different groups of people who are going to use it differently. It builds confidence with those users. We want to reward them for their success using the system.”
MORE NEEDS TO BE DONESo is this technology ready for every business to deploy? Not quite, say some analysts.
To make social network-ing a must-have tool for en-terprises, those capabilities need to be tightly integrated with the critical enterprise
“The social network gives a voice to individual contributors. In the past it was people in the corner office who had power in a company. But with this, people anywhere in the company can give inputs that can be influential.”
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BA’s new program will make travelers wary of booking. By Jared Newman
reference Google image results to greet a high-profile, first-class pas-senger when he or she boards the plane. British Airways will also dig into its own passenger data, so if a regular customer experienced a de-lay on a previous flight, airline staff can offer a personal apology.
Not surprisingly, some privacy advocates are upset. “Since when has buying a flight ticket meant giv-ing your airline permission to start hunting for information about you on the Internet?” Nick Pickles, direc-tor of Big Brother Watch, told the Standard. Some customers just don’t want to be bothered—especially fa-
mous ones—so it’s presumptuous for the airline to think no one will mind being stalked on Google for the pur-pose of a greeting.
A better way might be to let people opt-in to such a service through Face-book. That way, the information would be more reliable and less creepy, and would only affect willing participants.
Using Google for image search is also a slippery slope that could lead to broader Internet data mining. British Airways should draw the line at image recognition, and think of smarter ways to provide personal-ized service that doesn’t revolve around Internet stalking.
Giving the Creeps
ENDLINE
OFF THE WALL
WE’VE ALL Googled our-selves from time to time, but British Airways has crossed the creepy line
for looking up its own passengers on Google Image Search.
The airline is rolling out a new program, called Know Me, that tries to improve passenger recognition through Google search and other methods. British Airways will create dossiers on passengers, and will use the profile data to offer 4,500 per-sonal recognition messages by the end of the year, the London Evening Standard reports.
For instance, flight attendants may
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