FOCAL POINT: Teething troubles apart, the Internet of things is in for the long-haul. >>> PAGE 41 CHANNELWORLD.IN News Analysis IBM’s opening up of its Power architecture will help it get ahead of its revenue woes. PAGE 13 On Record: Sanjay Zadoo, Country Manager, Channel Sales, Emerson Network Power, talks about his new role and the best engagement models for the channel community. PAGE 18 The Grill: Andreas Wienold, VP International, LifeSize Communications, speaks about how software is changing VC. PAGE 23 Opinion To make a successful comeback, Microsoft needs an engineer at the helm, who loves tech products, not someone who just sells them. PAGE 46 Feature As Microsoft pushes its way into the crowded unified communications market, Lync is starting to gain lost ground. PAGE 38 Inside SEPTEMBER 2013 VOL. 7, ISSUE 6 STRATEGIC INSIGHTS FOR SOLUTION PROVIDERS | COVER PRICE Rs. 50 ChannelWorld K.V. JAGANNATH, CMD, Choice Solutions, says instead of holding on to power, partners should empower employees with P&L responsibilities to keep star performers happy. How to forge strong, long-lasting, and valuable relationships with your employees, customers, and principals. >>> Page 28 BUILDING urable BONDS D
Transcript
FOCAL POINT: Teething troubles apart, the Internet of things is in for the long-haul. >>> PAGE 41
CHANNELWORLD.IN
News AnalysisIBM’s opening up of its Power architecture will help it get ahead of its revenue woes. PAGE 13
On Record: Sanjay Zadoo, Country Manager, Channel Sales, Emerson Network Power, talks about his new role and the best engagement models for the channel community. PAGE 18
The Grill: Andreas Wienold, VP International, LifeSize Communications, speaks about how software is changing VC. PAGE 23
OpinionTo make a successful comeback, Microsoft needs an engineer at the helm, who loves tech products, not someone who just sells them. PAGE 46
FeatureAs Microsoft pushes its way into the crowded unified communications market, Lync is starting to gain lost ground. PAGE 38
InsideSEPTEMBER 2013 VOL. 7, ISSUE 6
STRATEGIC INSIGHTS FOR SOLUTION PROVIDERS | COVER PRICE Rs. 50ChannelWorldK.V. JAGANNATH, CMD, Choice Solutions, says instead of holding on to power, partners should empower employees with P&L responsibilities to keep star performers happy.
How to forge strong, long-lasting, and valuable relationships with your employees, customers, and principals. >>> Page 28
BUILDINGurableBONDS
D
n EDITOR’S NOTE
Vijay Ramachandran
Sell Relationships
SOMETIMES WHEN I hear people talk of selling so-lutions I cringe internally. And why? Because making or selling products that will lead to growth is not about selling a “solution’’, it’s about helping people to
go about their work in peace. I suspect that in your mind solu-tion packaging and sales is about tapping into an organiza-tion’s IT spend. That is a logical and legitimate target, isn’t it? Nevertheless, I strongly believe that if you want to prosper to-day—and I know this is hardly a question in your minds—then you have to radi-cally change how you go after clients.
Akio Morita, the founder of Sony, put it simply: “No matter how hard you have worked to produce a prod-uct, and no matter how satisfied the engineers or management may be, if the customer doesn’t see for himself that the product has value, the whole exer-cise is for nothing.”
Sony, especially when Morita was at the helm, is a good study in under-standing customer focus. He was totally clued in to what customers needed and wanted. Of course, he took risks and led with his instincts.
Over a 30-year period, between 1950 and 1982, the Japanese firm successfully built 12 innovative and dif-ferent product lines rang-ing from pocket radios to portable TVs and VCRs to
the Walkman and 3.5-inch floppy disk drives.
Surprisingly, Sony did not invest in market re-search to back these prod-uct launches (Morita hated market research). The decision to launch all these products was made by Morita and a small group of associates.
And the basis for their choices? They looked for ways that miniaturized electronics could help people easily perform tasks that till then were
either impossible or fair-ly difficult.
To this success recipe, that called for a lot of in-novation apart from in-tuition, they added a spot of creativity. Creativity in technology, in product planning and, of course, in marketing.
It’s a tribute to their reading of customer behavior, and Morita’s vision, that Sony tasted commercial success with almost all these products.
Now that logic is as true of a washing ma-chine as it is of big data or the cloud or of even this magazine. If it doesn’t help you do your job bet-ter or more efficiently or with extra insight, the purpose is lost. It’s that simple. So the next time you’re trying to hawk a “solution’’ to a client, pause. End your sales pitch. And, ask your cli-
ent more about what their problems are.
Your sniper-scope for targeting clients has to be based on researching them, packaging your solution with business relevance and, of course, quantifying what’s in it for them. Essentially, this is what has to guide what you pitch; when and how you pitch; and that clearly shows your client a tangible upside, in business terms.
Your options have to be about a client’s revenue growth, about customer outreach, about helping them build the right prod-uct or service and about profitable growth. All of these are a function of how well you know a cli-ent, their business drivers and competitive scenario.
If you sell your client a solution, you’ll definitely win an order. But, if you take responsibility for their situation and help them to do their work better you’ll win a rela-tionship—that will be better (and needless to say profitable) for both you and them.
As Patch Adams never said: “You push a solution, you win, you loose. You push a relationship, I guar-antee you, you’ll win, no matter what the outcome.” nVijay Ramachandran is the Editor-in-Chief of ChannelWorld. Contact him at [email protected]
n If you sell your client a solution, you’ll definitely win an order. But, if you take responsibility for their situation and help them to do their work better you’ll win a relationship.
Too often, sales reps simply regurgitate their presentations and expect to land the sale. It doesn’t work.
—Harvey Mackay (Businessman and Author)
SEPTEMBER 2013 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 3
■ NEWS DIGEST07 Oracle Unveils a New Product | Oracle has introduced a new software package for its Exalytics
high-performance analytics appliance that in some cases, will be mandatory. 10 Public Cloud Services to Exceed $180 bn | Gartner has forecasted continued strong growth in public cloud services and says that end-user spending on public cloud services will grow 18 percent in 2013. 12 Uncertain Times for Micro-soft’s Tablets | Windows’ share of the tablet market grew slightly in the second quarter, as shipments also ticked up in the face of a slow-down, according to IDC.
■ NEWS ANALYSIS 13 Is IBM Back in Power? | IBM’s
opening up of its Power architec-ture will help it get ahead of its rev-enue woes and, additionally, make chip designs more inclusive.
■ OPINION03 Editorial: Vijay Ramachandran says that the best way of winning a relationship is by taking responsibility of your client’s situation and helping them do their work better. 22 Jack Gold: As more is demand-ed of smartphones and tablets, the limits of ARM’s RISC architecture will become apparent, giving Intel an upper hand in the chip world.
InsideINDIAN CHANNELWORLD ■ SEPTEMBER 2013
FOR BREAKING NEWS, GO TO CHANNELWORLD.IN
46 Preston Gralla: To make a successful comeback, Microsoft needs an engineer at the helm, who loves tech products, not someone who just sells them. ■ THE GRILL 23 Andreas Wienold, Vice President International, LifeSize Communications,
speaks about how software is changing video conferencing.
■ FEATURE 38 Rise of the Underdog As Microsoft pushes its way into the crowded Unified Communications market, Lync is starting to gain lost ground. ■ FAST TRACK 16 Nitin Patil, Director, Logix InfoS-ecurity, says that a focus on SMBs and the mid-market has helped growth.
28
23
Co
ve
r D
esi
gn
by
UN
NIK
RIS
HN
AN
A.V
■ COVER STORY
28 Building Durable Bonds The Indian IT community—that you are a part of—is a small world in itself where partnerships of all kinds are brewing. Which is why forging strong, long-lasting, and valuable relationships with your employees, customers, and principals has become an imperative. Three successful partners have already discovered their own distinctive strategies to make this possible. If they can do it, so can you. Here’s how.
■ CASE STUDY36 Cash on DeliveryWhen Grid Infocom was on the verge of losing a deal for want of a client showcase, it dug deep and leveraged its outcome-based model to reverse its fortunes.
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.
EMC IT Solutions India Pvt Ltd . . . .Cover on Cover
Emerson Network Power India Pvt. Ltd . . . . . . . BC
of massive amounts of data, the Internet of things is poised to deliver significant business benefits to organizations.
44 Opening New DoorsINTERNET OF THINGS: Often, the Internet of things is simply a buzz phrase that companies use to sell whatever they’ve long had—just as the cloud, green, Internet, e-, and mobile labels have long been abused. But there is a there there: The Internet of things has a real meaning that’s useful to understand, as it
will affect nearly every corner of both IT and consumer technology. It can create multiple digital gateways into our physical world.
FOR BREAKING NEWS, GO TO CHANNELWORLD.IN
InsideINDIAN CHANNELWORLD ■ SEPTEMBER 2013
25 Sudhir Sharma, Director, Versatile Infos-ecurity says that sticking to what they are best at has worked wonders for the organization. Being a pure-play security player has proved to be the right decision.
■ ON RECORD 18 Sanjay Zadoo, Country Manager, Channel Sales, Emerson Network Power, talks about his
new role, the company’s channel plans, and the best engagement models for the community.
■ FOCAL POINT
41 Talk of the TownINTERNET OF THINGS: Bland by name and superficially viewed as gee-whiz technol-ogy never to be realized, the Internet of things has significant potential to trans-form business. Early forays into Net-en-abling physical objects are already pointing the way. Promising unprecedented con-nectivity among objects and the gathering
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
SOFTWARE
Oracle Unveils a New Product
customers that are only run-ning Oracle’s Endeca infor-mation discovery software, according to the post.
Customers also have the ability to purchase the In-Memory Software product under a Named User Plus licensing model, with a minimum of 20 users. Those licenses are listed at $370 (about Rs 22,000) per user, providing a potentially more economical option for com-panies with modest needs.
Product features include Summary Advisor for Oracle BI Server, which “monitors Business Intelligence usage patterns, analyzes them and
recommends the optimal data mart for best overall performance improvement,” according to a data sheet.
On July 15, Oracle un-veiled a next-generation ver-sion of the Exalytics hard-ware, but didn’t call out the In-Memory Software prod-uct in its announcement. The product showed up on the latest version of Oracle’s engineered systems price list, which is dated July 18.
Oracle’s hardware revenue has declined since it got into the business with the acquisition of Sun Micro-systems, but officials have maintained the company is focused on higher-margin products like Exalytics and Exadata. Customers also load the systems up with plenty of software licenses, giving Oracle both up-front revenue as well as ongoing maintenance streams.
To that end, the new In-Memory Software product carries licensing prerequi-sites, namely “Business Intel-ligence Foundation Suite, or Business Intelligence Foundation Suite for Oracle Applications, or Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Plus or Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Plus for Oracle Appli-cations and/or Essbase Plus and/or Hyperion Planning Plus,” according to Oracle’s price list.
—Chris Kanaracus
ORACLE HAS intro-duced a new soft-ware package for its Exalytics high-
performance analytics ap-pliance that in some cases, will be mandatory.
The new product, Exalyt-ics In-Memory Software, has a list price of $30,000 (about Rs 18 lakh) per pro-cessor license. It is “now mandatory for all valid configurations” of Oracle’s BI and EPM (enterprise performance management) software running on Exalyt-ics, according to a company blog post. However, it is not mandatory for Exalytics
Yahoo is redesigning its cor-porate logo to reflect a rapidly evolving company. The new official logo will be “more reflective of our reimagined design and new experiences,” said Kathy Savitt, chief mar-keting officer at Yahoo. The purple color and exclamation point will continue, she said.
Yahoo is going through a makeover to be more relevant to a new breed of users, who are increasingly using their
mobile phones to access the Internet. The company’s CEO Marissa Mayer has hired new staff for some key roles, and acquired a string of com-panies, including blogging service Tumblr.
The company will be dis-playing daily on its home page and throughout its network in the US for the next 30 days a new variation of the Yahoo logo. “It’s our way of having some fun while honoring the legacy of our present logo,” Savitt said.
—John Ribeiro
Yahoo to have a New Logo
BRAND
SEPTEMBER 2013 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 7
-
FireEye could soon be known on the stock market as FEYE if its plans to go public in a $175 million (about Rs 1,100 crore) bid made official with the SEC come to fruition.
FireEye has been seen as a strong candidate to go public thanks to advanced anti-malware sandboxing technology that is the envy of more established IT secu-
Trend Micro an-nounced Dhanya Thakkar will be managing director for India & SAARC. The appointment indicates the renewed focus of Trend Micro in providing mo-mentum towards the fur-ther growth of the com-pany. Thakkar replaces Amit Nath who was coun-try manager - India and SAARC for Trend Micro from November 2008 till June 2013.
ISODA announced the appointment of Nityanand Shetty, MD, Essen Vision Software, as chairman of ISODA. The ISODA man-agement committee has been elected unanimously over the last three years.
HP India launched the managed print services program that will put partners into the driver’s seat.HP MPS offering, through its channel part-ners, will create a secure, centrally man-aged print environment that streamlines work-flows, optimizes docu-ment output, and related business processes.
offer horizontal as well as vertically-based cloud of-ferings.
Keeping all these fac-tors in mind will help these offshore providers to successfully compete with reputed and successful multinational providers as they will be equipped
to address the changing de-mands of buyers.
“For broad-based offshore providers that operate in mul-tiple geogra-phies, industries
and service lines, and who seek to compete for sig-nificant ‘wallet share’ in major accounts, strategic investments in cloud-based services are manda-tory,” said Ian Marriott, research vice president at Gartner.
Offshore services revenue growth will be hampered if the service providers are slow and not able to decide on investing
in migrating to the cloud.The volume of traditional and customised services will go down because of increase in the use of industrialised services. However, these offshore providers can expect new revenue from investments in cloud-based services.
Gartner has noticed a decrease in the initial re-sistance to public cloud as customers now recognise its efficiencies as the solu-tions have become mature.
But offshore service providers will have to adapt to changing market demands, otherwise they can be displaced from the race to the top.
“The consequence to offshore providers of not responding to such sig-nificant market changes will be the deterioration of market share, acquisi-tion by another provider, or its disappearance from the offshore services land-scape,” added Marriott. “Having the right number of the right quality people in the right places, when combined with a non-lin-ear growth strategy, will deliver improved revenue per employee.”
—Anuradha Shukla
rity companies. Vendors such as McAfee and Palo Alto Networks have acknowledged some of their latest offerings are FireEye-like. FireEye also counts among its competitors Sourcefire, recently bought by Cisco.
FireEye’s virtual machine-based hardware and software offerings fit into what it says IDC identifies as a $17.9 billion
(about Rs 1.1 lakh crore) global IT security market increasingly focused on advanced persis-tent threats, spear phishing, and other nefarious attacks.
Its products can, for example, blow up e-mail carrying in-fected content before it gets to its intended target, and also ad-dress Web content malware.
In its SEC S-1 filing, FireEye reveals that it has more than 900 employees. The compa-ny’s revenue grew from $11.8 million (about Rs 73 crore) in 2010 to $83.1 million (about Rs 503 crore) last year, and it’s well ahead of 2012’s pace through the first six months of 2013.
—Bob Brown
STOCKS
Short TakesCLOUD MARKET
Public Cloud Services to Exceed $180 bn
THE PUBLIC cloud services market is predicted to exceed $180 billion (about
Rs 11 lakh crore) by 2015, ac-cording to a newly released report by Gartner.
The research firm has forecasted continued strong growth in public cloud services and says that end-user spend-ing on public cloud services will grow 18 percent in 2013 to $131 billion (about Rs 8 lakh crore).
Established offshore providers will face stiff competition from labour-intensive offshore provid-ers. Competitive edge can be gained by increased in-vestments in cloud-based services and by maintain-ing a balanced portfolio of managed services.
These providers will also have to use tradition-al delivery approaches and
LISTED: FireEye’s plan to go public could soon become reality.
FireEye Files for $175 mn IPO
18%is the expected
growth in end-user spending on public
cloud services in 2013.
Source: Gartner
10 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD SEPTEMBER 2013
TABLETS
Uncertain Times for Microsoft’s Tablets
Rackspace President to Step DownRackspace President Lew Moorman is stepping down from leading the company, he announced in a blog post, but will remain on the board of directors of the cloud computing and managed hosting company.
Moorman has been with the company for 13 years. Rackspace’s Cheif Executive Officer Lanham Napier will replace him as president. In the blog post, Moorman noted that members of his immediate family are undergoing health issues, which is why
Around
The World
he is transitioning out of the president’s role. —Brandon Butler
BMC Buys Partnerpedia BMC is continuing its push into the consumeriation of IT trend with the acquisition of Partnerpedia.Terms of the deal, which closed last month, were not revealed.
Partnerpedia’s AppZone software gives IT departments the ability to make volume purchases of applications from sources such as Apple’s iTunes store and push them into a private catalog for company use, said Geoff Mair, senior director of product development for BMC and founder of Partnerpedia.
—Chris Kanaracus
IBM Plans Employee FurloughsIBM has told US employees and executives in two of its business units that they will be furloughed for one week in late August. Affected employ-ees will receive the equivalent of one-third pay, but execu-tives will not be paid.The fur-lough affects the majority of employees in the Systems and Technology Group (STG) and the Integrated Supply Chain (ISC) that support STG.
The mandatory furlough week was slotted to begin end of August.
—Patrick Thibodeau
WINDOWS’ SHARE of the tablet market grew slightly
in the second quarter, as shipments also ticked up in the face of a slow-down, ac-cording to IDC.
But the company’s innova-tive Surface line contributed just a fraction of that tally, showing just how difficult a task Microsoft has set for itself in transforming into a device builder and seller. “The [OEM] partners who have been supporting Win-dows 8 continue to do so, which is good, and they’re starting to make some trac-tion,” said Ryan Reith, an IDC analyst on the team that tracks tablet shipments. “But I would not call Surface a success by any means.”
While all tablet shipments declined about 8 percent in the second quarter com-pared to the first, those powered by Windows grew by 11 percent over the same stretch, according to IDC.
Shipments of Windows tablets—primarily Win-dows 8 but also a smat-tering of Windows RT —climbed from 1.8 million in the first quarter to 2 million in the second. That brought Windows tablets’ share of the global market up to 4.5 percent from the 3.7 per-cent of the first quarter.
The big winners in the Windows tablet space were largely the OEMs, or “origi-nal equipment manufactur-ers,” familiar to PC buyers, said Reith: Acer, Asus, HP, Lenovo, and Samsung. “HP had a good quarter with [Windows] tablets,” he
said. “Dell shipped around 120,000, which is growth for them, although it’s such a small number compared to their traditional PC busi-ness.” Microsoft shipped about 300,000 Surface devices in the quarter —the Windows 8- and Intel-powered Surface Pro and the Windows RT- and ARM-reliant Surface RT—to account for about 15 percent of the Windows total. “Microsoft’s portion was relatively small,” noted Reith, who also cautioned that because IDC tracks shipments—tablets that come off factory lines—ac-tual sales were undoubted-ly smaller than that. “We’re pretty certain the shipment
numbers are high[er] than sell-through.”
IDC estimated that Microsoft has shipped ap-proximately 2.1 million Surface tablets of all kinds since the October 2012 de-but of the Surface RT. By comparison, Apple shipped nearly 57 million iPads in the last three quarters.
Microsoft has struggled to keep Surface afloat. Last month, the company wrote off $900 million to account for the steep discounts on the Surface RT needed to unload excess inventory. Microsoft can only hang on and try to claw what it can from the tablet market.
—Gregg Keizer
12 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD SEPTEMBER 2013
struggling. Its Power divi-sion reported a 25 percent decline in revenue last quarter, while the broader Systems and Technology Group saw revenue decline 12 percent.
Against that backdrop, IBM is making some of its employees take a manda-tory furlough at the end of August, an IBM spokesman confirmed. The furlough affects workers in the STG group and its Integrated Supply Chain division, which handles areas like procurement and logis-tics. The employees will receive an equivalent of one-third pay, while ex-ecutives will not be paid for that week, IBM says. It declined to say how many workers are affected.
Tyan will be the first company to release a server based on the Power archi-tecture, and says in a state-ment that the system was projected as an alternative to x86 servers. IBM has also included a feature in Pow-er8 for component makers to easily attach their intel-lectual property to the chip. More companies will join the alliance in the coming months, McCredie says.
Third parties could release new system-on-chips based on Power in a few years, McCredie says, adding that the design cycle lasts two years or more. The Power IP is also being opened up to manu-facturers, and IBM will continue to make chips for third parties.
REAPING BENEFITS OpenPower will be benefi-cial to IBM and its partners, as it will breed collabora-tion and innovation, and also help IBM go into new markets, McCredie says. One of those markets is
IBM WILL license de-signs of the Power microprocessor archi-tecture to other com-
panies including Google, in an effort to expand use of the architecture and reverse declines in its sys-tems hardware business.
Intellectual property of the chip design is be-ing opened up as part of a development alliance called OpenPower Consor-tium that IBM announced with Google. Consortium members will be able to make Power chips based on architecture designs, and component companies will be able to make hardware that can be integrated, or attached, to the processor.
Other initial OpenPower partners include graphics chip maker Nvidia, server maker Tyan, and Mellanox, which makes networking and storage equipment. The first products from alliance
partners could be based on IBM’s upcoming Power8 design, says Brad McCred-ie, vice president and chief technology officer at IBM’s Systems and Technology Group (STG). “What was happening on the board yesterday is now happen-ing on the chip,” McCredie says. “We wanted to get out ahead of that shift.”
In an email statement, Google says the OpenPow-er Consortium “has the potential to establish Pow-er architecture as a viable option for applications running within Google’s datacenters.”
Google designs its own servers, and the search company could design its own integrated chip—also called system-on-chip —based on the Power ar-chitecture, says Dean Mc-Carron, principal analyst at Mercury Research.
That development is tied to one of IBM’s goals—to push Power-based chips into more servers, which could prop up the com-pany’s other businesses, McCarron says. IBM also offers software, hardware, and services tied to serv-ers running on Power and x86 processors.
“IBM wanted to expand their business outside of their own products, pretty much going into a licensing play,” McCarron says.
IBM is opening its Power architecture at a time when the business has been
IBM’s opening up of its Power architecture will help it get ahead of its revenue woes and, additionally, make chip designs more inclusive.By Agam Shah
Is IBM Back
NEWS ANALYSIS n
in Power?
SEPTEMBER 2013 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 13
cloud computing, which is dominated by x86 chips from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. IBM’s Pow-er chips are mostly used in mainframes and high-per-formance servers, but the company has been taking steps to move the chips into medium-range and low-end servers. IBM in the past year has lowered the price of some Flex Systems and preconfigured PureSystems servers, both of which use x86 and Power chips, and has also configured servers for cloud and virtualization deployments.
Mega datacenters estab-lished by Google, Facebook, and Amazon mostly use servers with x86 chips, but there is a growing interest in low-power ARM pro-cessors, which are mainly used in smartphones and tablets. Many believe that ARM servers will be quick and more power-efficient at handling quick-moving cloud transactions such as search requests and social network posts.
IBM’s Power architecture brings more reliability, pro-cessing power and longev-ity to servers in cloud de-ployments, McCredie says, adding that the company is targeting the growing Asia market through the new OpenPower alliance.
The Power architecture and chips will continue to be developed for datacen-ters, and likely not go in the direction of smartphone and tablet chips such as Intel’s Atom x86 chips or ARM, McCredie says. IBM’s Power chip design for servers is not the same as Power designs being used in microcontrollers from companies like Fre-escale Semiconductor.
Opening up the Power architecture is also comple-
mentary to the Facebook-backed Open Compute Project, which focuses mostly on server designs.
IBM has been trying to push the Power architec-ture into other applications for many years, but rather than growing in opportu-nity, the market for the chip has been shrinking, says Jim McGregor, principal analyst at Tirias Research.
“IBM’s only success has been in the big iron mainframes and servers, but that market has also been shrinking for years as companies slowly migrate their software over to other hardware and software platforms, such as x86 and Linux. The biggest issue has always been with the software,” McGregor says.
The move could be viewed as a desperate at-tempt to keep Power alive, but there is an opportunity for chips based on the ar-chitecture in data centers, McGregor says.
“There have always been and will always be room for multiple architectures in servers because of the vary-ing workloads and power-performance require-ments,” McGregor says.
More features are being etched on to smaller and smaller chips, and IBM’s move to open up Power could be tied to that trend, says Mercury Research’s McCarron.“What you can see over time, with all these architectures, integration and migration has been the theme,” he adds.
Companies may not want to put multiple chips in a system, and instead would prefer to build a single chip with all the fea-tures integrated.
“It’s an acknowledge-ment of where the industry is headed and that is that discrete solutions are not going to play in products,” McCarron says.
Intel won’t sit back and will have a competitive
response, McCarron says. The world’s largest chip maker could cut the prices on its server chips, or even open up testing and design of its chips.
“If it represented any significant threat to their server business, there will be a strong response,” Mc-Carron says.
One of the more interest-ing aspects of OpenPower is IBM and Google partner-ing with Nvidia, which is tuning its CUDA parallel programming toolkit for Power processors. Both could help resolve the issue around the software and make Power another good alternative, McGregor says.
“If you could combine the big iron performance of Power with the efficiency of ARM and the parallelism of a GPU, you could de-velop some really interest-ing and diverse solutions,” McGregor says.
(James Niccolai contrib-uted to this story)
n NEWS ANALYSIS
IBM will begin licensing its Power chips to other com-panies, pursuing a direction
that companies like ARM have followed with great success.
IBM would also form the OpenPower Consortium, a collection of companies that includes Google, Nvidia, and Mellanox; that consortium will form an ecosystem of hardware and software developers to drive innovation in cloud computing, said Tom Rosamilia, senior vice president of IBM’s Systems and Technology Group, in a blog post. While consumers typically buy a graphics card or PC with a microprocessor inside, manu-facturers like Intel, which makes its own chips, are a compara-tive rarity. Instead, companies like Nvidia send their designs
to merchant foundries, such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manu-facturing Co., to perform the manufacturing for them. Com-panies like ARM abstract the process a step further: ARM, whose products power the vast majority of the world’s smart-phones, doesn’t actually make any of its chips itself. Instead, it licenses its microprocessor de-signs to companies like Apple, Qualcomm, and Nvidia, which sign agreements that let them add their own logic blocks to the ARM design and build them at a foundry of their choosing.
It’s the latter camp that IBM will fall into, licensing the Power architecture under the Open-Power umbrella. IBM previ-ously licensed Power chips from Power.org, just not server-class
chips, microprocessor analyst Kevin Krewell noted. “Under the OpenPower initiative, IBM will license the core intellectual property for our Power technol-ogies to other companies for use in designing servers employed in cloud data centers,” Rosamilia wrote. “Up until now, IBM pri-marily used the Power design in its own servers. This new initia-tive makes it possible for cloud services and their technology providers to redesign the chips and circuit boards where com-puting is done—optimizing the interactions of microprocessors, memory, networking, data storage and other components. As a result, they can get servers that are custom-tuned for their applications.”
—Mark Hachman
IBM Wants to Stay Relevant
14 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD SEPTEMBER 2013
THERE IS no dearth of SMBs in India. But con-trary to their plentiful existence, many of these go underserved and
ignored. But when the three found-ers of Logix InfoSecurity—Adwait Gadre, Prashant Mudbidri, and Nitin Patil—set up the company, they did so by focusing purely on the lower end of the SMB sector; a decision that has come good for the organization.
The company wanted to be cost-attractive and offered customers an end-point anti-virus protection, a perimeter firewall, and a mail server integrated with anti-virus engines. A lot has changed in the e-mail hosting business since its inception, but that has not deterred growth. Its nimble-footedness has en-sured a steady transformation in
n FAST TRACK
Logix InfoSecurity
the last decade. “We ramped up our positioning and established ourselves in the higher end of the SMB segment,” says Nitin Patil, one of the co-founders and directors of Logix. This helped the company acquire over 1,200 customers and
record a 20 percent growth rate. The move to cater to the higher end of the SMB segment and mid-market enterprises wasn’t based on instinct. Logix conducted a customer survey to get an idea of the market it in-tended to target. The survey findings showed that exchange licensing was costly, even for enterprises, and that there were a couple of challenges like mailbox synchronization and imple-mentation of exchange on-premise. “Enterprises look for stability, technology investments, and man-power in a vendor. We went all out to build this and created a powerful backend support process through which we have capitalized on the mid-enterprise segment,” says Pa-til. Additionally, the company was able to demonstrate the benefits of a hosted model —over an on-premise one—to mid-enterprises. “In the last three years, the turnover growth has been substantial for us because we have been acquiring larger customer accounts,” says Patil.
It also tied up with Microsoft. This was a strategic decision as many of its customers were familiar and comfortable with Microsoft products. Logix also partners with Zimbra which is a potent alterna-tive for customers.Currently, it has more than 300 customers in the mid-enterprise segment alone. For now, Logix is all set to etch a dra-matic growth curve. n -Shubhra Rishi
Key Principals: Fortinet, Cisco, VMware, Microsoft
Key Technologies : Cloud security, e-mail and collaboration, cloud backup
Website: www.logix.in
Snapshot
A focus on SMBs and the mid-market has helped us grow, says Nitin Patil, Director, Logix InfoSecurity.
REVENUE GROWTH
SOURCE: LOGIX INFOSECURITY
Rs 14 cr
Rs 18 crRs 20 cr
2010-11 2011-12 2012-13
16 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD SEPTEMBER 2013
Ph
oto
gra
ph
by
KA
PIL
SH
RO
FF
3-4 October, 2013 | Grand Hyatt, MumbaiEMC FORUM 2013
LEAD YOURTRANSFORMATION
EMC Forum is a global platform, featuring EMC’s newest breakthrough products and solutions, that is now in its 4th year in India!
EMC Forum 2013 aims to showcase how EMC can transform organizations of all sizes by leading IT as service, and how this, in turn, can accelerate the ability of an organization to capitalize on cloud and big data.
Congratulations on your appointment. Can you elaborate on what kind of engagement Emerson Network Power will have with the partner community in India?ZADOO: We have three different classifications of partners based on the nature of our business engagements with them. The first set of partners, called Enterprise Business Partners (EBPs) have req-uisite selling and servic-ing skills and our business engagement with them is ‘exclusive’ in nature. The next set of partners, called Network Solution Part-ners (NSPs), are into sys-tem integration and pro-vide end-to-end solutions too. They may or may not have expertise in ‘power’ as a single domain, unlike the enterprise business partners, but they work in
a multiple product envi-ronment that also includes our products. And then finally, we have the VARs who work on projects that are small in size, catering to the SMB requirements.
What’s your vision to grow the channel business in India?ZADOO: We want to look at each and every partner individually; analyze and evaluate their strengths, and thereby leverage it to build a mutually benefi-cial relationship. We have several products that are outside the power cat-egory. We vend products like smart solution, racks, precision cooling prod-ucts, etcetera. We want to help partners leverage these products to build comprehensive solutions that can address their cus-tomers’ specific domain needs. That will increase the profitability of chan-nel partners.
We want to equip our partners with solutions and not just products. When a partner is dealing in a particular industry vertical, we want to help them bundle services and solutions along with the products. Our aim is to help expand partners’ skills, and scale them up so that they can transform to a solution provider of choice, and not just be a provider of products.
What is the focus of Emerson’s channel partner programs?ZADOO: Apart from the standard ones, we have focused partner pro-grams where we initiate them into new products and help build a scope around them. The objec-tive is to help the channel
Sanjay Zadoo, ON RECORD n
18 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD SEPTEMBER 2013
Ph
oo
gra
ph
by
SU
JIT
H
partner grab the custom-er’s attention.
To do that success-fully, we have to take the engagement deeper. We have to help them ensure their people are motivat-ed. Our partner programs go beyond the ordinary. It assists the community in building the right team and skills that they need to go out there and sell the solution.
Could you elaborate on the process for recruitment of new partners?ZADOO: There are certain processes that go in re-
cruiting a new channel partner, and for them to work one needs to have some controls in place. But, these processes are an opportunity for both parties to identify each other’s strengths. It should be leveraged both ways. If one feels that a partnership is fitting into an environment that is non-conflicting and is mutually beneficial, then we proceed further. More importantly, recruitments shouldn’t be viewed as a one-time opportunity, but rather, as a long-term com-mitment. For building long lasting relationships, every partnership must be de-fined by a clear objective.
You’ve been aggressively positioning yourself as a DCIM player. What, according to you makes you a leader in this space?ZADOO: If one looks at Emerson’s power,
cooling, and infrastructure management solution, one realizes why we are positioned to be leaders in the DCIM space. First of all, our solutions are built to reduce datacenter complexity. Our solutions are architected to improve efficiency through optimum capacity utilization and asset management, thereby reducing operating expenses to manage and run a datacenter. Take for example, our Trellis real-time datacenter monitoring solution. It enables unified management of all the
layers of a datacenter. This platform optimizes datacenter performance in a high-compute density environment and can help a customer save running expenditures.
What are some of the biggest challenges for the partner community today? How are you helping them overcome those challenges?ZADOO: The slow economy is one. Not just partners, the entire fraternity is going through a squeeze because of the economy, at large. New project opportunities are limited, deal-sizes are becoming smaller and lesser in frequency. To address these challenges, we all have to revisit our fundamentals of business efficiency.
We need to identify the segments of the industry that are still
growing despite the slowdown. Fortunately, India is a growing economy and there are still many industries that are posting positive growth figures. My objective is to help partners identify these growth opportunities and help them tap into the customer base.
There are many small set-up datacenters or large server rooms which don’t have precision cooling or the best quality of power. More importantly, there are customers who don’t know what’s best for their
datacenters. This is a tremendous opportunity for us and the partner community to go out there and educate the customer. This will increase the adoption of our solutions, and thereby create more demand and opportunities in the market.
What are your focus areas in India in terms of the markets, industries, and verticals that will help you improve business? ZADOO: Recent IDC figures have documented that emerging markets [tier-2, tier-3, and rural markets] are doing better than the developed markets in the metros and areas surrounding them. We want to increase our channel footprint in these emerging markets. In the metros, rather than a broad-level strategy we want to pursue a more focused
and vertical approach. Like I said earlier, we want to identify the partner strengths and engage with them in a closed focused group to leverage the specific domain expertise or skills that they have. We want to help partners grow on the basis of their core-strengths in the geographies they operate in. The government sector, as a whole, is comparatively doing better than private ones in a tough economy, and we will accelerate our focus in this segment.
What is critical message for Channel customers?ZADOO: There are two things I’d like to highlight to the partner community. First, identify a specific domain of operation and develop expertise around it. Such level of specialization will help identify the specific needs of the customer. Customers, especially in the SME space, are looking for someone to act like a consultant, to help them get cost-effective solutions. The channel community must develop those special skills through training.
Secondly, there must be a clear and defined objective behind customer acquisition plans. Instead of waiting for enquiries to come, partners must proactively reach out to the market, consult them on the best possible solutions and create a business opportunity. n
SANJAY ZADOO | ON RECORD n
Our partner programs go beyond the ordinary. The programs assist the partner community in building the right team and
skills that they need to go out there and sell the solution.”
SEPTEMBER 2013 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 19
HOTLINEHOTLINE
nity in their enterprise and SMB customer deployment, and further, an opportunity to maximize margins.
The end-users nowadays adopt more devices and plat-forms that provide mobility and productivity, anywhere. They understand that almost every employee is now a mobile worker looking for a simple way to connect to company information, and herein lies the opportunity.
Today’s networks have to allow access to a rapidly grow-ing number of employees, partners, customers, and even casual visitors, and so they must have strong and flexible identity management systems to ensure appropriate access. At the same time, they have to protect busi-ness critical applications and intellectual property.
What are the products and solutions you are offer-ing to help the partners? Our Junos WebApp Secure (for-merly named Mykonos) takes web application protection to the next level by providing more definitive intelligence about attackers. The launch of Junos Pulse provides a defense mechanism to the grow-ing usage of mobile devices as the preferred platform for IT transac-tions. Additionally, Junos DDoS Secure will leverage Juniper Networks’ recent acquisition of certain assets from Webscreen Systems to deliver a fully auto-mated DDoS protection system for websites.
Which verticals driving trends like mobile networks, consumerization, BYOD, targeted attacks and APTs, IPv6, etcetera? How will these trends affect organizations? Today, users can access any kind of data from anywhere. The adoption of BYOD and cloud are really accelerating this trend, and providing new directions of attack. Employ-ees are looking to use their
smartphones, tablets, or next generation notebooks to con-nect to corporate networks.
Also, social media is another area where platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, or Face-book could be used for phish-ing attacks and may potentially reveal confidential company information. Thus, there is a need for enforceable policies and procedures as well as awareness training in order to control the type of information workers share. Off late, there have been cyber-attacks, both on government and businesses.
These threats can affect any vertical that is utilizing Web technologies for its business. This could be banking and finance, healthcare, or retail. We are also seeing widespread adoption of the Internet and Web technologies across all verticals in various forms.
Mobile devices are becom-ing an attractive target for cybercriminals. For enter-prises, limiting the devices
that can be used to access enterprise applications is a losing strategy. It’s simply not reasonable for companies to tell customers or even inter-nal stakeholders that mobile access can’t be supported.
Instead, enterprises need to improve security by exert-ing greater control over their mobile exposure. Today, many large enterprises are look-ing at SDN. The transition will open up new opportunities for top-tier partners. Verticals such as telecom, BFSI, media, entertainment, and IT/ITES are
VIEW FROM THE TOP
New Trends, Renewed GrowthNew technologies and trends are making way for new threats. But, Juniper Networks is helping organizations counter these by churning out the most potent solutions.
expected to be early adopters of SDN.
How can partners evolve their network security business based on these trends?Successful partnering is a key element of Juniper Net-works’ growth strategy. Juni-per Partner Advantage is all about scaling with precision, investing with impact, and recognizing achievement. It
contains three main com-ponents: Reach, Accelerate, and Reward, each designed to help partners grow their skills, communicate with greater impact, and scale their busi-ness more effectively. It repre-sents an unparalleled focus on mutual opportunity and proof of our continuing commitment to our partners’ success.
For channel partners, mobility is going to be about the accessibility of enterprise information to remote work-ers. In the process, SIs would get an integration opportu-
There is a need for enforceable policies and procedures as well as awareness training in order to control the type of information workers share.
Ravi Chauhan, Managing Director, India and SAARC Juniper Networks
CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP
NEWS UPDATE
Mobile Attackers Continue to Reap Rewards as Attacks Grow More CalculatedJuniper Networks released its third annual Mobile Threats Report (download report here: http://goo.gl/2lfFXi). It showed the rapid growth and evolution of mobile malware into a profitable busi-ness for attackers. From March 2012 through March 2013, the Juniper Networks Mobile Threat Center (MTC)—a global research facility dedi-cated to around-the-clock mobile security and privacy research—found mobile mal-ware threats growing at a
of all MTC detected threats at Android, which has a com-manding share of the global smartphone market. Accord-ing to analyst firm Canalys, Android devices accounted for 67.7 percent of all smart-phones shipped in 2012 and is projected to ship more than 1 billion smartphones in 2017. Attackers are also leveraging loosely regulated third-party app marketplaces to distribute malware and more quickly get threats on the market.
rapid rate of 614 percent to 276,259 total malicious apps, demonstrating an exponen-tially higher cyber criminal interest in exploiting mobile devices. Additionally, it is clear from devel-opments in the threat landscape that malware writers are increas-ingly behaving like profit-motivated businesses while designing new attacks and malware distribution strategies. Attackers are maxi-mizing their return on invest-ment by focusing 92 percent
EVENTS
Partner Conference Lights Up DubaiJuniper Networks held its fifth India Partner Conference, 2013 in Dubai, UAE, from June 3-5. The conference, attended by 90 channel partners, was a testimony to the company’s continued focus in driving part-ner opportunities.
The event provided a platform for Juniper Networks to celebrate and award the achievements and contributions of partner organizations in the region. There were 22 winners across categories like SP Account Excellence, Reseller Partner, Regional Partner of the Year, Strategic Win/Emerging SP/Service Partner and Top Partner Awards.
Themed “Let’s Build The Best”, the event offered Juni-per Networks’ partners the opportunity to engage, face-to-
partnership vision with key-notes by Ravi Chauhan, MD, India and SAARC; Sajan Paul, Director-Systems Engineering; Jitendra Gupta, Director-Chan-nels and Alliances for India and South Asia; Kevin Ackhurst, Vice President, Asia and Jona-than Belcher, Vice President, Partner Sales, APAC.
face, with Juniper Networks’ executives and other partners about the future of networking, campus and datacenter play in IT/ITES and education, next generation mobile backhaul, cloud-ready datacenters. Juni-per Networks senior leader-ship team from India and APAC shared channel initiatives and
The fifth India Partner Conference 2013 celebrated partner achievements.
PRODUCT SHOWCASE
Junos Spotlight Secure is the industry’s only cloud-based global attacker intelligence service that identifies individual attackers at the device level and tracks them in a global database. Compared with
currently available reputation feeds that rely only on IP addresses, Junos Spotlight Secure offers customers more detailed security intelligence about attackers and significantly reduces false positives.
The solution creates a persistent fingerprint of attacker devices based on over 200 unique attributes, delivering precision blocking of attackers without blocking valid users. Once an attacker is identified and fingerprinted on a subscriber’s network using Junos WebApp Secure, the database can immediately share the attacker profiles with other subscribers, providing advanced real-time security across multiple networks.
Juniper Networks SRX Series Services Gateways integrates with Junos WebApp Secure now benefits from the latest Intrusion Deception technology, as well as the Junos Spotlight Secure global attacker intelligence service. The integration extends the ability of the SRX Series to block attackers that are identified at the security perimeter, and is particularly effective in blocking botnets and large scale web attacks.
SECURITY IN A BOX
Authorized Distributor
n OPINION
Keeping ARM’s Length
WHEN it comes to personal computing, most of the growth today is in the mobile market, not traditional desktop PCs and laptops. You could say that the PC concept is morphing to include
next-generation smartphones, phablets, slate-centric tablets, and convertible devices in many forms. To date, most such devices have been ARM-based. Is that about to change? Intel has an-nounced its next generation of x86-based Core chips (Haswell)and new Atom architecture (Silvermont). Many question whether Intel can truly compete with the myriad ARM-based de-signs now powering the vast majority of mobile devices from ARM licensees such as Qualcomm, NVidia, Samsung, etcetera. I believe it can. But there is more to it than just producing low-power x86 chips.
Much of the competitive argument revolves around the decades-old disagree-ment over the overall benefits of RISC (reduced instruction set computing) vs. CISC (complex instruction set comput-ing) architectures. While RISC has many advantages around simplified silicon and smaller chips, it also has more difficulty processing complex instructions. CISC chips implement such processing in optimized hardware acceleration, while RISC chips use software algorithms.
When phones were “dumb” devices, this was a non-issue. They worked quite well within the more limited RISC-based archi-tectures and processing constraints. But as smartphones and tablets have evolved to become more computer-like, the amount of complex processes has increased dramati-cally. This is why many cores are being designed into chips. Indeed, along with the many 4- and 8-core CPU chip designs available, we are now seeing as many as 72 specialized cores implemented on the same silicon. This increases size and uses more power. Power management has improved,
making each core and the full chip more efficient at power management. But com-plexity of functions continues to make this an issue as more hardware acceleration is added. It is generally (although not always) true that CISC architectures handle com-plex calculations much more efficiently than RISC. That’s why PCs on RISC chips never succeeded. It’s also generally true that fewer cores are needed with CISC for equivalent processing efficiency as more accelerated special functions and instruc-tions are implemented in silicon. And if Intel can neutralize ARM’s power and size advantage, it can enable more compelling designs, especially given Intel’s substantial capacity to highly optimize software to run on its platforms.
Clearly, ARM has momentum on its side based on design wins in current products. But as it must add increasing complexity to power more advanced functions, its architectural limits represent significant performance constraints. Increasing chip complexity to include hardware-accelerated functions will ultimately increase the pow-er and size of ARM-based chips and negate the advantage it has over the more complex CISC implementations, while at the same time CISC implementations are making significant advances in power reduction and size. Longer term, the RISC advantage that ARM currently enjoys over Intel’s CISC ar-chitecture will not be sustainable. n
As more is demanded of smartphones and tablets, the limits of ARM’s RISC architecture will become apparent giving Intel an upper hand in the chip world.
Jack Gold is the founder and principal analyst at J.Gold Associates, an information technology analyst firm based in Northborough, Massachusetts.
JACK GOLD
22 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD SEPTEMBER 2013
At the start of the year, Logitech displayed signs of exiting LifeSize. Isn’t this a mas-sive setback for the company? There is no confirmation on this. But our CEO did make a mention of this during the quarterly statements, and the message was loud and clear. Our parent com-pany [Logitech] went through a major restructuring as it looked at video con-ferencing beyond the core PC and acces-sories segment.
I have seen LifeSize grow from being a small start up to a mature business, and then become a part of Logitech. Most acquisitions initially revolve around the assumption that business
n THE GRILL
VP International, LifeSize Communications, speaks about how software is changing VC.
Andreas Wienold
will move fast and the channels will be happy. Often, that isn’t true. But, Logi-tech retained the LifeSize brand, our channels, and team as separate entities. This was very important and this has helped us get to the number three posi-tion in the market.
But LifeSize is at a distant number three when compared to the other two players who simply dominate the enterprise video market. It’s tough to make a mark in the high-end market. The top three players command more than 90 percent of the marketshare. We have now built a new business unit by combining all interna-
DossierName: Andreas Wienold
Designation: VP International
Company: LifeSize Communications
Present Role: He is responsible for increasing LifeSize’s local marketshare for large and medium-sized companies and public sectors across Asia, Africa, and Australia. He joined LifeSize in April 2006 and served as VP of sales, and as Director of sales for EMEA for seven years.
Career Graph: Wienold has more than 18 years of experience working in video conferencing and networking companies. Before LifeSize, Wienold was senior VP, Global Sales and Marketing at VCON Telecommunications.
P h o t o s b y D E LT R I M E D I A
n THE GRILL | ANDREAS WIENOLD
tional businesses as many markets in the APAC display similar patterns of video consumption.
Our positioning has always been around innovation. We started off with new, high-definition video solutions, and with each passing year we have tried to introduce a change in the market. From being an end-point centric company, we are now a full-fledged video vendor. LifeSize UVC is the industry’s first, pure software platform and the future of virtualized video infrastructure. En-terprises and government organisations
always wanted to consume video ap-plication as software. LifeSize is the first to offer it. Some vendors call themselves a software company but they are largely hardware-centric.
Most technology companies are hesitant to go full throttle on software-based video conferencing as it could cannibalize their own hardware market. How do you view this? There is certainly a risk. It’s not as much about software or hardware as it is about the organization’s investment in a video strategy. The first video-call penetration means thousands of dollars spent on infrastructure between two end-points. In software-based technol-ogy, one can scale gradually according to future needs. It does away with an immediate need to invest in a big box.
Many customers appreciate that they can test the solutions before a deploy-ment. In video, many companies have made investments which did not deliver on expectations. With a software solu-tion like LifeSize UVC, they can down-load and test recordings, multipoint conferencing, etcetera, and then finalize on making an investment. This poses a big challenge to competitors. We do not run millions of dollars worth of busi-ness in hardware boxes. Hence we are not much at risk. We have made the big leap into software before our competi-tors have.
Cisco and Polycom have a well entrenched ecosystem of IT and AV partners in India. Isn’t LifeSize late in proving its value propo-sition to the channels? Some competitors, nowadays, have moved into different models which make business difficult and with lesser margins. A smaller partner network means higher margins for channels. Apart from tier-1 solution providers, we are actively targeting tier-2 IT channels who can deploy UVC solutions across customers’ virtualized server farms. AV partners are exploring UC, cloud, and form an important part of our ecosystem. Our partners, when compared to competitors’, have the flex-ibility of offering LifeSize solutions on traditional, on premise, hosted models, or through a service provider.
Companies like Avaya focus more on low-bandwidth HD video which is device agnostic. Is it the end of the road for room-
based video conferencing? Our story will be room-based, primarily. Ten years ago, many competitors felt that video will completely shift to PCs. This hasn’t happened. The room-based platform delivers a ‘wow’ experience and an im-mersive technology on a big screen for enterprises. Our end-point is hardware because the dedicated compute plat-form is better, stable, and leverages OS compared to a software solution.
Recently, we launched a new end-point system, Icon, under the ‘smart video’ theme. Like smartphones, if you don’t bring the best application in the network to the user interface, they will not value it. With Icon, you can go into a meeting room and join the desired meeting through a simple two-button remote. It’s not about dial-ins, it’s not about IP address, and it is not about where the bridge is.
Channels often hit a roadblock while trying to convince enterprises about the value proposition of videos... We want partners to demonstrate our product, which is a big differentiator. Certified partners, by default, buy demo gears which are the lowest entry ticket for a partnership. We expect partners to deploy the product internally. You do not expect an execu-tive selling a car to arrive on a bicycle. They can use LifeSize videocentre—one of our strongest products—for their company meetings to train the team, archive information, etcetera. They can close the deal faster by not basing it on datasheets, but on their experience.
According to IDC, total worldwide enter-prise videoconferencing and telepresence equipment revenue in Q1 of 2013 was at its worst performance since the Q2 of 2010. What will keep you profitable? We are liv-ing in one of the most complex phases in the IT industry. We touch emerging technologies like cloud, mobility, vir-tualization, and UC. It also makes you vulnerable to an extent. The presence of video remains miniscule today. The mid-market, again, is an unexplored space. In the past, the leaders of the video industry have disappeared or witnessed a slowdown while the relative late-comers have march ahead. We are in a perfect position to do well during this transition of the market.
—Yogesh Gupta
Our partners, when compared
to our competitors, have the flexibility of offering solutions on traditional, on-premise, hosted models, or through a service provider.”
24 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD SEPTEMBER 2013
GOING AGAINST the tide is tough. Ask Sudhir Sharma. As director of Versatile Infosecurity, it was a conscious deci-
sion to focus only on network security solutions. “It was my decision to start and remain a security player and not offer any other technology solution,” says Sharma.
As a start-up with just a single tech-nology offering, things could have easily gone wrong for the company. But his experience in the security in-dustry held him in good stead. “It was always going to be a risk. Beginners in this field tend to focus on as many verticals and solutions as possible to punch in strong bottom and toplines. But we did it differently,” says Sharma.
And taking the road less traveled has not disappointed Sharma one
n FAST TRACK
Versatile Infosecurity
bit. Projects and customer wins have been plentiful. So much so that in its initial days the company implemented an end-to-end solution at all branch offices of a Delhi-based legal firm with 1,200 employees. The success of
the implementation opened the flood-gates for the young company. “The project gave our brand leverage in the industry. As a result, more and more vendors expressed interest in working with us,” says Sharma. It prompted the SI to adopt a multi-vendor approach. It now has strategic partnerships with companies like WatchGuard, Trend Micro, Sophos, and Smoothwall among others. These associations have helped it successfully implement a number of network security solu-tions across the NCR region.
Over the years, the company has implemented security solutions in in-dustry verticals such as retail, media, legal, IT/ITES, etcetera. Importantly, Sharma has been able to retain ma-jority of the company’s customers. “Our retention rate is 95 percent. I owe this to our superior after-sales support which we have maintained consistently. The credit for taking us to these heights, obviously, goes to the skilled-set of professionals who work for us,” says Sharma.
Going forward, the SI plans to in-crease its focus on the government sector with its array of security solu-tions. It is also looking to expand by adding backup and recovery solutions. “This will complement our security business and increase our profitabil-ity,” says Sharma.n
Sticking to what we are best at has worked wonders, says Sudhir Sharma, Director, Versatile Infosecurity.
VERTICAL SPLIT
SOURCE: VERSATILE INFOSECURITY
20%Retail and
utilities
1%Hospitality
2%Education
25%IT/ITES34%
Media
18%Legal
SEPTEMBER 2013 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 25
A Value Creator How has NetApp helped Locuz drive
more business over the last five years?Locuz specializes in core datacenter in-frastructure and HPC (high performance computing). For both these streams of business, we deploy NetApp as the pre-ferred storage vendor. NetApp is a flexible, partner-led company, which is encouraging for organizations like us. In the mid-market and enterprise segment, it is important to align with an OEM that understands the
value that we provide the customer. Many OEMs often get involved during the process of setting the terms of the project with a customer. But with NetApp, we are allowed a free hand in deciding the process and terms of the project. We believe that value is best created when we have the space to execute this. Therefore, our success has been truly mutual.
We also deliver value through a dedicated practice and lab team with NetApp. We are
Insight
Uttam Majumdar, President, Locuz Enterprise Solutions, talks about why NetApp is a strong strategic alliance for its datacenter infrastructure and HPC solutions.
reason for the shift was to drive efficiency in its datacenter. It was running variable workloads and needed to take advantage of storage architecture to support its nature of work. There was immense pressure on people who were running core infrastruc-ture. The key aspect was driving efficiency, and NetApp unified storage was the answer to many of the company’s issues.
What contributes to the majority of the storage business from NetApp—net
new customers or migration projects?Well, it’s both. With a five-year-old rela-tionship with NetApp, the repeat business is going up. But, we are targeting new business too, through focused strategies like workplace transformation, datacen-
ter transformation, etecetera, wherein we help customers modernize their desk-top computing through virtualization. We have our own tool on a template model to achieve some of this transformation. It is helping us drive business through new and existing accounts.
NetApp is no longer just a storage ven-dor. Do you see cloud adoption picking
up with your enterprise customers?Technologies like unified storage, dedupli-cation, and NAS are in great demand. The new offering, Clustered Data ONTAP, is another compelling solution that takes the NetApp story further for the customer. En-terprises will have to be transformative in nature and be able to adapt cloud principles across most of the reference architecture. We try to aid the customer to modernize and adopt cloud principles. We often bun-dle our in-house developed tool, to enable cloud orchestration and automation, with NetApp storage. -
We also integrate technologies like com-pute from other vendors for customers with on-premise cloud so that they can utilize the advantages of a hybrid cloud. We want them to look at cloud solutions that we sug-gest. We believe that this can make their ar-chitecture flexible and agile.
What technology trends or business demands will drive the storage market
for Locuz in future?Locuz’s storage business is growing at 40 percent CAGR, and NetApp contributes sig-nificantly to it. Though we work with other storage vendors, NetApp is by far the larg-est and most strategic of relationships. To-day, we are a platinum partner for NetApp.
Customers who add agility to their core infrastructure in the datacenter will drive new storage business. There are huge opportunities around securing their en-vironment and to be able to execute rapid deployment around virtual desktops. The storage business, overall, will grow around technologies like virtualization, VDI, BYOD, etecetra, in the next couple of years.
also building IP with help from NetApp. In most cases, it is not only storage, but the ability to integrate other technologies like communication, DR, archival, etcetera. You need to have an understanding of various technologies to accomplish this.
Which are the key verticals you ad-dress through NetApp and how effec-
tive is the reference strategy?Our revenues come largely from projects, researchers, scientists, and scientific labs. This segment is highly receptive to HPC which includes simulation, modelling, and running experiments. That’s a close knit fraternity and the reference strategy works very well. More than 25 percent of the busi-ness comes from this segment.
We also cater to IT companies, BPO, manufacturing (engineering services), and pharma. Engineering services look at HPC and core computing in their business. Since we are well-versed in compliance in the pharma industry, we engage more with them. We then take the reference ar-chitecture and solutions of the industry to new customers.
Can you highlight a few customer wins wherein NetApp was selected due to
its superior technology and robust portfolio over competition?A US-based BI and analytics firm was a good win. We deployed NetApp FlexPod solution as the reference architecture. The solution was clearly far superior than the competition could put together. We put a management layer that made it simple for the company to accomplish systems provisioning and deprovisioning, systems management, etcetera. The single-pane management running operations made it compelling for the platform to take advan-tage of NetApp FlexPod.
Another example was when a Fortune 500 (technology engineering) conglomerate in Bangalore replaced an existing unified storage platform with NetApp. It contrib-uted to a lot of repeat revenue. Since it was restructuring the infrastructure, the prime
I D G C U S T O M S O L U T I O N S G R O U P
Authorized Distributor
“NetApp’s partners are enabled to offer superior and differentiated solutions with our products and technologies. Customers benefit from comprehensive and integrated services—that complement our products—our partners offer. It’s a win-win situation for customers, partners, and NetApp.”
— Krithiwas Neelakantan, Director Channel & Alliances, India & SAARC,
NetApp India
Forging strong, long-lasting, and valuable relationships with your employees, customers, and principals has become an imperative. Three successful partners have already discovered their own distinctive strategies to make this possible. If they can do it, so can you. By Radhika Nallayam
n COVER STORY
REWARDING RECRUITS >>> 30K.V. Jagannath on why you should let go of
power to empower employees.
CUSTOMER CONNECT >>> 32Varad Gupta on the importance of going
out of your way for your customer.
BUILDINGurableBONDS
D
IT isn’t just about a healthy balance sheet, or thick profit margins or superior quality products. The success of your business hinges on pillars held up by a chain of relationships. Your
employees, customers, and principals form the links in this chain.
Before you dismiss that as an overstatement, ask Bill Gates. One of the most aggressive and successful businessmen of our times, Gates once attributed Microsoft’s success to partnerships. “Our success has really been based on partnerships from the very beginning,” he’d said. And he’s right.
Closer home, the Indian IT community—that you are a part of—is a small world in
where partnerships of all kinds are brewing. Among them the links in your chain—customers, employees and principals—decide the success of your business.
Opportunism thus is a wrong strategy when it comes to these partnerships. But often these partnerships, built and nurtured over the years, are beneficial to your business in one form or the other.
Which is why, some solution providers swear by the importance of building long-lasting relationships with these stakeholders. Building these relationships isn’t as hard as it seems. Three successful channel partners have already discovered their own distinctive strategies to make this possible. If they can do it, so can you. Here’s how.
CUSTOMER CONNECT >>> 32Varad Gupta on the importance of going
out of your way for your customer.
PRINCIPAL PARTNERSHIP >>> 34Sandeep Kalhan on how to be loyal to your
vendors—and not let that get in the way.
NINETEEN YEARS ago, Ratna-kar Konte was fresh out of college and largely clueless about how to shape his ca-
reer. Without much thought, he went with his gut and joined a small firm, called Choice Solutions in Hyder-abad, as a sales executive. The com-pany was then a start-up that was yet to make a mark.
For an enthusiastic youngster, there was no dearth of options. But
Konte stuck around at Choice Solu-tions. As luck would have it, that’s a decision he never had to regret. In subsequent years, Choice Solutions metamorphosed into one of India’s leading IT solution providers in the country. And, Konte now heads a growing business division within the company.
That wouldn’t have been possible if the company’s CMD K.V. Jagan-nath had been a control freak. Jag-annath firmly believes in letting go of power.
That’s something not many en-trepreneurs are comfortable doing. But in a tough economy, boosting employee morale and building a strong relationship with staffers is an imperative. Because, it is these
employees who are capable of taking organizations to the pinnacle of busi-ness excellence. Losing them makes all the difference between being a laggard and a frontrunner in a com-petitive industry.
Also, retaining the rainmakers of any company could be an arduous task for any business owner, as they are the people who are highly ambi-tious and will thus have very high expectations from top management.
But that was something Jagannath had mastered.
LETTING GOJagannath has a simple but success-ful formula: Let go of power. Cen-tralization of power, according to Jagannath, is the worst baggage one can carry.
That’s why he has built a strong team of about eight senior managers as his company’s pillars of strength.
“Choice was not founded as a Rs 100 crore company. It had a humble beginning. I believe that an entrepre-neur alone can’t grow his organiza-tion to the biggest possible height all by himself. I rely extensively on my colleagues, to take my company to the next level,” says Jagannath.
And he is a man who practices what he preaches. Ask Konte. Starting off as a sales engineer, Konte had a remarkable career graph within the company. He now holds the P&L responsibility of Choice’s non-IT vertical (the division that focuses on non-IT datacenter components like power, cooling, and UPS).
And his growth is not just in terms of impressive designations. The man-agement team at Choice has given him the required power and author-ity to take decisions for his business division. “I am given complete control over my business division. I am ex-pected to take all the major decisions. I am responsible for the profit and loss of my vertical. About 100 people report to me. I am not a regular ‘sales-head’ whose only responsibility is to drive numbers,” says Konte. “I have seen that many leaders do not want to hand over power to their employ-ees. They usually have the last word in everything and expect everyone to take their approval before a deci-sion is made. I don’t think it’s a smart strategy,” he adds.
Jagannath believes that a business leader has to trust his people’s abil-ity to take calls and their commit-ment towards the company. He thus focuses a lot on grooming people and gradually elevating them with challenging roles to a level where they take pride in associating with the brand. In the process, he has un-clasped many responsibilities related to finance, profit, spending, as well as capital expenditure.
Choice Solutions has five levels when it comes to its organizational
n COVER STORY
In a tough economy, boosting employee morale is a necessity. Otherwise, you risk
losing talented workers to competition in an already ruthless business environment.
Retaining rainmakers isn’t a walk in the park for employers. But, today, encouraging talent and connecting with employees is an imperative.
RewardingRECRUITS
30 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD SEPTEMBER 2013
hierarchy. Level 2 consists of senior management people, who are just below the board of directors. As of now, about 90 percent of the level 2 staffers in the company are home-grown and people who have seen strong value working with Choice. This strategy has helped Choice in setting the right direction for all its business divisions and ensuring that all verticals get equal importance and attention.
Jagannath’s philosophy of ‘creat-ing entrepreneurs within an entre-preneurial firm’ has thus worked out well among many of his employees. Moreover, he does not meddle with the everyday business activities of his business verticals.
THE RIGHT CHOICE But its not just Konte who has been elevated in the organization. Jagannath and his team were able to come up with unique growth paths for many of its employees. In many organizations, showing a growth path, especially a verti-cal growth path, to an employee who has worked in the company for a substantially long period is a serious challenge. Choice thus
Konte has literally had a thrilling ride within Choice.
His new role as head-marketing for the group is something that keeps his spirits up. Though not a hard-core marketing person, Konte still got the exciting opportunity to head a key function like marketing for the company. While Jagannath was tak-ing care of marketing, the board then decided to put Konte’s experience and understanding of various busi-nesses within Choice to good use.
Like Konte, Mohan Babu, the head of Software and Services at Choice Solutions, also has an equally excit-ing story to tell. He has been with Choice for close to 20 years.
Other than heading a key busi-ness vertical, Babu now also heads HR at the company. What more, A. Bhanu Prakash, the CFO of the company, now heads the solar busi-ness of Choice Solutions.
While elevating employees to the next level and letting go of power is a tough task for entrepreneurs, Jagannath has set a great example of how doing so has only brought the company huge benefits. He has proved that it’s the people who make an organization. n
Jagannath has a simple but successful formula to build strong relationships with employees: Let go of power. Centralization of power, says Jagannath, is the worst baggage one can carry. That’s why he has created a powerful team of about eight senior managers as his company’s pillars of strength. From humble beginnings, these employees now head business divisions.
STEAL THIS IDEA
focuses on providing exciting lateral growth opportunities for such employees.
Take Konte for example. The company has ensured that he sees growth for himself at every stage. From handling one function to taking care of multiple functions, moving from a regional-focused role to a country-level responsi-bility and handling different roles in a business vertical to finally become the head of that division,
I believe that an entrepreneur alone can’t grow his organization. I rely extensively
on my colleagues to take my company ahead.”
K.V. JAGANNATH, CMD, CHOICE SOLUTIONS
I enjoy complete control over my business division. I am not a regular sales-head whose
only responsibility is to drive numbers.”
RATNAKAR KONTE, AVP, CHOICE SOLUTIONS
SEPTEMBER 2013 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 31
ANYBODY WHO believes that the customer is king is living in a bubble. A bubble that a dull economy and increasing
competition have burst. If anything, market realities have only made cus-tomers dearer to businesses, putting them on a pedestal. So much so that today, they play God. And pleasing God isn’t easy.
Customer satisfaction, however, isn’t directly proportional to custom-er loyalty. You might have given the customer the right solutions, best-in-class support, and a lot of addi-tional sops. But sometimes, that isn’t
enough to ensure that the customer comes back to you.
In today’s highly competitive en-vironment, where the customer is spoilt for choices, building a lasting relationship has become a dream that never comes true.
That could be because part-ners and vendors alike, focus on the wrong end of the relationship spectrum. For example, they tend to overemphasize the role of SLAs, assuming that the customer only cares about the fine print. On the contrary, some of the long-standing relationships between solution pro-
viders and customers are actually built on the strong pillars of trust, commitment, and transparency. And, more importantly, making an effort to build a strong non-transac-tional relationship.
That’s a reality a handful of smart channel partners—like Varad Gupta, the CTO and founder of Delhi-based Keen & Able Com-puters—are acknowledging.
UP, CLOSE, AND PROFESSIONALFor someone who operates in a market that’s simmering with sto-ries of ruthless and shrewd busi-
n COVER STORY
I do not give false promises. Whenever I realize that I don’t have the best solution,
I redirect the customer to the right partner.
VARAD GUPTA, CTO AND FOUNDER, KEEN & ABLE
The first thing I look for in a partner is his value system. If he is honest and committed,
everything else will fall in place.”
PERTISTH MANKOTIA, HEAD-IT, SHEELA FOAM
Relationships aren’t built on the fine print of SLAs. Only partners who care enough to create non-transactional bonds to serve their customers better will flourish.
CustomerCONNECT
32 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD SEPTEMBER 2013
ness folks, Gupta isn’t your typical entrepreneur.
That’s evident from the fact that he’s willing to let go of an opportuni-ty and say no to business that comes his way. “I believe that the most im-portant thing in our business today is not winning deals, but to ensure that the customer has the confidence to reach out to you anytime,” he says.
Perhaps, in some way, that ex-plains why some of his key custom-ers, like Sheela Foam—the company that manufactures the Sleepwell brand of mattresses—have worked with him for close to 15 years.
From a company that provided hardware support, Keen & Able has traversed a long path. The partner-ship between the two companies now goes beyond just providing products or support.
Gupta says that the secret behind this long association is that its non-transactional and that the customer’s needs beat everything else. “I do not give false promises and tell the customer that my product will give the best results. Whenever I realize that I don’t have the best solution, I redirect the customer to the right partner,” says Gupta.
That’s because, Gupta believes, one wrong product is equal to killing a relationship forever. “Do not al-ways look at individual transaction. You don’t need to get all the business from a customer. I would rather fo-cus on not being a person who could not see the forest for the trees.”
And this is one quality that Per-tisth Mankotia, the IT-head at Sheela Foam, finds remarkable. “The first thing I look for in a partner is his value system. If he is honest and committed, everything else will fall in place,” says Mankotia.
An epitome of the right value system, says Mankotia, is Gupta. He sees a trustworthy advisor and consultant in Gupta, who can be ap-proached every time he wants to buy something new.
For instance, being an open source-focused company, Keen & Able has come across the open versus proprietary discussion on multiple occasions. But he has never played the open source evangelist
out of his way to fix problems that are completely unrelated to the prod-ucts he provides. According to him, providing mission-critical support to the customer is easily the best way to retain a customer forever.
That’s something Mankotia agrees with. “A few years ago, one of our foaming machines went down and we were trying hard to fix the problem. The manufacturer could not give us timely support and getting a new machine would have taken us a lot of time,” says Mankotia, for whom a downtime of few hours has significant impact on business. A troubled Mankotia called up Gupta to check whether he can help. Within a few hours, Gupta and his team ensured that the sys-tem was up and running. “The best part is, he did it at no cost. It shows that they care about the relation-ship,” adds Mankotia.
It thus comes as no surprise that Mankotia never goes by SLAs and signed contracts. He has seen many incidents in the industry about how SLA driven relationships can fail mis-erably in avoiding downtime. “Some SLAs specify support during working hours. What if something goes wrong at midnight or during a weekend? Sheela Foam has a network of 45,000 dealers, 100 distributors and multiple manufacturing facilities. I can’t af-ford any downtime” he says. That’s something Gupta will take care of.
“You must have a person—not a call center—to hear the customer out. If possible, the customer should have access to a person who can take quick decisions,” says Gupta.
With Gupta by his side, Mankotia has no reason to worry. n
game with Mankotia. “If there is a better option in the proprietary soft-ware side, there is nothing wrong in admitting it,” says Gupta.
Mankotia has seen great value in this approach. “He is not just honest, but has helped me many times to get the right solution. His willingness to share knowledge has helped me find the right direction in many circumstances.”
As a result, Mankotia was ready to pay more than what was quoted by Keen & Able in subsequent business dealing. That is the right price for a partner who ensures his customer gets the right solution, says Mankotia.
AT YOUR SERVICEGiving the right solution or not giv-ing a wrong one alone won’t win you the battle. That’s why Gupta focuses on providing the right kind of servic-es to Sheela Foam, at times when the company badly needs it. He has gone
Some of the long-standing relationships between solution providers and customers
are built on the strong pillars of trust, commitment, and transparency and—more importantly—on making an effort to build a
strong non-transactional relationship.
When the foaming machines at Sheela Foam went down, and the manufacturer of the machines couldn’t provide timely help, Mankotia turned to Gupta. Within a few hours, Gupta and his team ensured that the system was up—without charging for the service. As a result, in subsequent business dealings with Gupta, Mankotia was ready to pay more than what was quoted by Gupta.
STEAL THIS IDEA
SEPTEMBER 2013 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 33
WHEN SANDEEP Kalhan, CEO of Houston Tech-nologies, met Scott Kriens, the then CEO
of Juniper Networks—for a long freewheeling conversation in the early 2000s—he knew it was the beginning of a strong relationship. Not many channel partners get an opportunity to have a one-on-one meeting with the CEO of their ven-dor companies. That’s exactly when he learned that he should look at the permanence of a partnership rather than pursuing principals based sole-ly on parameters like brand value or market share.
Kalhan was probably instinctively prophetic. More than a decade later, Houston still remains one of the key partners for Juniper Networks in In-dia. Kalhan’s association with Juni-per started by executing one of the largest BSNL deals for the company. It’s a journey through which both the companies decided to “win and lose together”.
ADDING VALUEShrinking margins have always been the talk of the town among systems integrators. Irrespective of the na-
ture of the product, reselling is in-creasingly becoming a low-margin, high-risk business. Value-addition from systems integrators, in most cases, gets confined to mere imple-mentation and post-sales support. This alone does not help partners create any differentiator, much less, profit. The first thing that people like Kalhan look at is the opportu-nity to add true value.
Houston, being one of the key OSS (Operations Support Systems) partners of Juniper, is able to offer integrated solutions to customers, based on Juniper products. “This means that we work closely with Ju-niper’s alliance partners like Arbor Networks, Dorado Software, and InfoVista to offer solutions, which include software and services on top of Juniper hardware. This also allows us early access to software enhancements, participation in beta programs, and interoperability test-ing. Thus, we are able to bring in sig-nificant differentiation as we are not seen as mere resellers by our cus-tomers. We offer additional network management functionalities over and above the hardware,” says Kal-han. This aptitude for value-addition
is something Juniper Networks appreciates the most in partners like Houston. “The solution require-ments of our customers are very complex these days. So, a partner is not somebody who merely executes a transaction. We see value in part-ners who combine the right services with the right product to offer a true ‘business solution’ to our customer. In fact, we don’t see a partner as our selling arm. We, instead, work with them as our customer’s buying arm,” says Ravi Chauhan, managing direc-tor of Juniper Networks.
The focus on value and service addition enables Houston to position itself in a very different way in the market. Other than the regular im-plementation and support services, Houston now carries the entire gam-ut of professional services, which includes key aspects like integration services. This, in turn, helps the company to maximize the business it gets from each customer account.
One of its key customers Railtel Corporation, for example, initially bought basic networking solutions from the SI. Houston then gradu-ally spread out its business within Railtel to provide the end-to-end IT
n COVER STORY
Value-addition from systems integrators, in most cases, gets confined to mere implementation and post-sales support.
This alone does not help partners create any differentiator, much less, profit. What counts is a strong vendor-partner team.
The relationship between a partner and vendor is a mix of loyalty, flexibility, and understanding. It’s a tie that isn’t binding.
PrincipalPARTNERSHIP
34 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD SEPTEMBER 2013
infrastructure, including technolo-gies where Juniper Networks has no presence at all. “We would not have been able to do this, had we failed to create the initial impres-sion while selling Juniper Networks’ networking products,” adds Kalhan. It, thus, comes as no surprise that Houston experiences almost 100 percent customer retention rate with Juniper Networks.
JOINT VENTURESeventy-five percent of Houston’s networking business is now driven by Juniper Networks. This naturally translated into loyalty, wherein the SI started giving preference to selling Juniper Networks products. This loyalty is reciprocated well by the vendor too. Projects that are executed by Houston continue to be in their fold. Kalhan has faced many bitter experiences with some other vendors who claim to have lead-locking systems.
However, Kalhan likes the fact that his company’s loyalty isn’t obligatory or burdensome. While most partners who choose to show loyalty to one brand are expected to always push that particular brand in
give the right solution to the cus-tomer. If the partner, who has stud-ied the customer environment well, feels that there is a better option, we would rather want him to win that deal, than jointly lose business.”
Kalhan recalls a project in which he decided to position a non-Juniper Networks’ firewall. “Though Juni-per Networks has firewall products, we decided to go with a different product that better suited the spe-cific needs of that customer. Juniper Networks not only agreed with us on that, but also worked with us closely to design the entire solu-tion,” he says.
At the same time, Chauhan ap-preciates the high level of trans-parency and openness shown by Houston. “Though we are in the business of technology, the true differentiator is the nature of the relationship. It will never go out of fashion because people buy from people; which is why we see no value in building ‘disposable’ rela-tionships with partners,” Chauhan sums up.
With both companies making an all-out effort, the partnership surely is going to stand the test of time. n
To establish a strong relationship with Juniper Networks, Houston Technologies’ Kalhan started off by implementing a huge project for the company. With that, he won Juniper Networks’ trust and from then on both the companies decided to win and lose deals together. Despite that understanding, Juniper Networks doesn’t bind Kalhan to sell only its products.
every single deal, Juniper Networks offers a lot of flexibility, says Kalhan.
“Juniper Networks respects the relationship and is absolutely fine when we incorporate non-Juniper Networks products in a solution, wherever we deem fit. We appreciate the fact that there is no compulsion to offer a particular brand. The compulsion is only to offer the right solution,” says Kalhan.
Chauhan, too, respects this ap-proach. “The paramount goal is to
Juniper respects the relationship and is abso-lutely fine when we incorporate non-Juniper
products in a solution, wherever we deem fit.”
SANDEEP KALHAN, CEO, HOUSTON TECHNOLOGIES
If a partner feels that there is a better option that suits a customer’s need, we would rather
want him to win that deal than jointly lose business.”
RAVI CHAUHAN, MD, JUNIPER NETWORKS
STEAL THIS IDEA
SEPTEMBER 2013 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 35
When Grid Infocom was on the verge of losing a deal for want of a client showcase, it dug deep and leveraged its outcome-based model to reverse its fortunes. By Anup Varier
IN 2010, Tata Power-Delhi Dis-tribution Limited, a joint venture between Tata Power Company and the Government of NCT of Delhi,
was looking to cater to the need for consumer-centricity with a world class call-center. It decided to re-engineer its organizational processes by deploying SAP’s Business Communications Man-agement solution. “We wanted an IVRS-enabled integrated call-center for all types of complaints, which would reduce call handling time, improve call quality,
and enable skill-based call routing while also allowing supervisors to monitor and improve a call-center executive’s pro-ductivity,” says Arunabha Basu, Chief (Technology & Systems), Tatapower-ddl.
But when it came to deployment, the Rs 6,000 crore-giant hit a roadblock. Tatapower-ddl’s IT governance frame-work required it to engage a partner that had prior experience in a similar sort of project.
Grid Infocom—among the first few partners of SAP for the solution in In-
dia—was involved in the pre-sales ac-tivity for this deal and made sure that the necessary licenses were sold to the utility major that distributes electric-ity in north and north-western parts of Delhi and serves a population of nearly 50 lakh.
As SAP’s BCM was a relatively recent introduction back then, Grid Infocom was the only partner that ap-proached Tatapower-ddl directly. But it was disqualified despite being a trained and certified SAP partner for BCM because it did not have implementation experience with the solution.
EXPERIENCE IS EVERYTHINGIt’s hard to blame Tatapower-ddl. That’s because there’s no alternative to experience. You may yearn otherwise, but the process of its accumulation is gradual, and possibly slow, but, the education received is sublime. That’s the lesson Manoj Gupta, founder and CEO, Grid Infocom, used in this deal which he almost lost. “Had we got the deal, it would have been our first implementation, but Tatapower-ddl was concerned about giving it to a partner who had no implementation experience,” recalls Gupta.
Having more pressing engagements at hand, in the form of improving its commercial efficiency, Tatapower-ddl implemented SAP ISU modules (CS,
CASH ON DELIVERYManoj Gupta (L), Founder and CEO, Grid Infocom’s experience
and tenacity came in handy while delivering a solution for, Arunabha Basu, Chief (Technology & Systems), Tatapower-ddl.
36 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD SEPTEMBER 2013
experience. “So, we took the calculated risk and coughed up the money for the implementation and reaffirmed that the company could pay us on successful completion of the project,” says Gupta.
Gupta wasn’t acting out of foolhar-diness or sheer desperation. In his career, he has had enough experience on other technology implementations. His experience, combined with the experience of his team, which included experts in business applications, gave Grid an understanding of what not to do. “Most solutions don’t fail because of technology failures, but because the requirements aren’t fully understood, properly mapped out, or well adopted by users,” says Gupta.
With Tatapower-ddl being hesitant to make additional investments in infrastructure without a surety of the project seeing the light of day, it was agreed that the project and consequent payments would be broken up into two phases. “Finally, it was Manoj’s background and overall experience in the field that convinced us to take a chance,” says Basu. It was also decided that only on successful completion of phase-1 would the client be asked to make the investments needed for the full-fledged rollout.
phase-1 was about forming the call management and basic integration of the sub-systems. A truncated function-ality was created. So, when a customer called up Tatapower-ddl contact-center, the call would go through some self-ser-vice options, route itself to the relevant customer-care agent, and land up at the executive’s desk with the preliminary information about the customer.
It chose an environment with the least business impact and tested the system for effectiveness in a live envi-ronment. “We implemented the tele-phone links and calls were simulated and routed to the agents who answered live calls,” says Gupta. A successful rollout of this functionality at the end of two months led to the first payment. Additionally, it encouraged necessary investments on the hardware front to get phase-2 off the block.
Phase-2 was about incorporating additional functionalities and features that Tatapower-ddl wanted, along with a disaster recovery environment. This was started immediately after the procurement of necessary hardware, which took about three months, and was concluded in another five months. Once a strong groundwork was laid during phase-1, the second phase was a breeze. The client was so impressed with the results that along with the re-mainder of the payment it handed Grid Infocom a contract for annual support and maintenance till the IT team at Tatapower-ddl gained more hand-on experience with the solutions. “It may be a small company but I must admit that it has better knowledge in this do-main than most others,” says Basu.
It was almost as if the Tatapower-ddl deal was meant to be Grid Infocom’s lucky break in the BCM space. Soon after this implementation Grid got another deal, and by end of this year it is expected to have completed many more similar implementations. The company, these days, needs to pitch outcome-based pricing less often as most CIOs place confidence in Grid’s work and opt for regular pricing mod-els. “But, even after successfully com-pleting close to 150 projects, if the next customer asks for an outcome-based pricing, we are ready to take it up,” says Gupta. Confidence, it may seem, is a worthy competitor to experience.
Key Parties: Tatapower-ddl, Grid Infocom
Location: New Delhi
Implementation Time: 8 months
Key People Involved: Arunabha Basu, Chief (Technology& Systems), Tarun Batra, Group Head-GIS (from Tatapower-ddl); Manoj Gupta, Founder and CEO, Maneesh Airen, Project Manager (from Grid Infocom)
Main Vendor: SAP
Key Technologies: SAP Business Communications Management
Key Challenges: No experience in a similar project, no customer showcase
Post Implementation ROI: Reduced operations and maintenance expenditure by about Rs 80 lakh per annum due to manpower optimization
SnapshotDM, FICA, Billing, UCES and CRM) in April 2011 and discontinued 13 home-grown commercial applications. The SAP BCM project was put on hold for almost two years till the completion of the ISU modules’ implementation as it was to be integrated with these modules. Post this, it became vital for it to upgrade its systems and have a multi-channel contact-center inte-grated with its CRM.
Tatapower-ddl interacted with SAP’s professional services and asked the company for a quote. “It did a due dili-gence and found that there was a lot of integration required with third-party applications, and this wasn’t something SAP professional services would take responsibility for,” says Gupta.
Tatapower-ddl realized that SAP’s proposal wasn’t fully aligned to its needs or the budget. “Not only were the various global practices of SAP quoting an astronomical figure for the implementation, but it was also going to use the standard rapid implementation methodology based on templates and replication, which would barely meet 15 percent of our requirements,” says Basu.
During that period, Gupta continued to trawl the market for BCM and con-ducted a number of demos to gain con-fidence and deeper understanding of the utility sector. He was in touch with the management at Tatapower-ddl and once again presented its case by show-casing Grid’s technical expertise and domain knowledge. “It would have been a big disaster if we had failed despite working with a big partner. There was less risk involved in taking a chance with a smaller partner,” says Basu.
Even then, there was the risk of going with a partner who had not executed a similar deployment. “That’s when we offered them an outcome-based engage-ment; where we get paid only if we de-liver to their satisfaction,” says Gupta. While this took away most of the risk for Tatapower-ddl, it was a very bold move for Gupta. Grid had much to lose.
KEEPING HIS WORDIn a domain like BCM, where the cus-tomer did not a have a lot of options to choose from, Tatapower-ddl needed some sort of assurance to engage a partner without prior implementation
CASE STUDY
SEPTEMBER 2013 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 37
THE LYNC unified communica-tions (UC) server belongs to that long list of Microsoft enterprise software products
that began as a modest offering, dis-missed by competitors, and years later evolved into a solid option for IT departments.
Largely dismissed as a non-threat by competitors when it first arrived in 2003 with the name Office Communi-cator, Lync today has positioned itself as a product that demands attention from enterprises looking to upgrade or adopt a UC platform.
“In the UC landscape, Lync is absolutely a real competitor. It has a full feature set, a customer base,
and channel partners,” says Henry Dewing, a Forrester Research ana-lyst. “Microsoft can deliver the UC services that businesses want today with Lync.”
The product, whose latest ver-sion is Lync 2013, includes presence, instant messaging, Web meetings, audio chat, video conferencing, and IP telephony.
In the crowded UC market, it competes against offerings from ven-dors including Cisco, IBM, Avaya, Siemens, Alcatel-Lucent, Mitel, and ShoreTel.
However, Lync isn’t being hailed as a product that stands out from the rest in any significant way nor that is
As Microsoft pushes its way into the crowded unified communications market, Lync is starting to gain lost ground. By Juan Carlos Perez
blazing trails of innovation in this UC market. “It’s a good, competitive, tra-ditional UC tool,” says Zeus Kerrava-la, founder and principal analyst with ZK Research. There are challenges for Lync and other UC products. For example, the UC market is hobbled by poor interoperability between products, especially at the IM and presence levels, Kerravala says. In ad-dition, UC systems provide access to a partial subset of the collaboration and business software people use, ac-cording to Kerravala.
Moreover, despite improvements in mobile access to their software, no UC vendor can claim to have a fully mobile-centric approach to UC today, he adds. “A vendor that makes a breakthrough in those three areas could disrupt the UC market and dis-tance it from the competition,” Kerra-vala says.Until then, the adoption, en-gagement with and benefits of having a UC system will remain impacted.
Dewing concurs, saying that UC systems need to provide what he calls “deep business process integration” so that they are available in the con-text of the tools people work with on a daily basis, such as ERP and CRM applications. “That’s where UC has to get,” he says.Bern Elliot, a Gartner analyst, says it’s critical for UC systems to deliver an end-user experience that is intui-tive, cohesive, and integrated.
“The productivity doesn’t happen because now you have video and IM and presence and you can do video conferencing. The productivity is there because all those things are readily usable by your average work-er,” he says.
BRINGING BUSINESS VALUE Microsoft is satisfied with its recent improvements in the Lync mobile client applications for iOS, Android, Windows 8, and Windows Phone, and says it will continue enhancing them on a rolling basis, according to B.J. Haberkorn, director of product mar-keting for Lync at Microsoft. “We’ve dramatically improved those clients,” he says.
Haberkorn also touts video com-munications improvements in areas like image quality, device support
Rise of the Underdog
38 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD SEPTEMBER 2013
Server, except for the IP telephony, which Microsoft has said it plans to add. However, enterprises can buy the full featured Lync Server and have it hosted in a dedicated cloud by Microsoft partners including AT&T and HP.
But are companies betting on Lync? In February, Microsoft an-nounced that it had hit 5 million seats of enterprise voice, up from 3 million in late 2011, and that 90 of the Fortune 100 companies were Lync customers.
Among those making big bets on Lync is L.A. Fitness, the health club chain, where about 25,000 employees use Lync for every UC function—from IM to telephony. “Lync has been a huge hit for our company,” says George Bedar, the L.A. Fitness CIO.
The company started with the product about four years ago, in the R2 version of Office Communicator,
and Bedar has been happy with the way the product has been expanded and enhanced.
In the 2013 version, he highlights performance, redundancy, and stabil-ity improvements on the back end, enhanced mobile clients for iOS, An-droid and Windows Phone, and better video quality.
Bedar also likes that Lync is inter-twined in various ways with Out-look/Exchange, SharePoint and Of-fice, which are all Microsoft products that L.A. Fitness uses broadly.
Lync is also widely deployed at Sprint, where about 50,000 use it for IM, presence and online meetings, including 25,000 that also use it for IP telephony.
Lync has helped Sprint, which began using the product in 2007, to eliminate about 500 traditional PBXs it had company-wide, according to
and management of sessions. With Lync 2010, Microsoft said it beefed up the product’s IP telephony capabili-ties to the point where enterprises could use it to replace their tradi-tional PBXs, and in Lync 2013 those features were further refined, Haber-korn says.Microsoft has also focused on providing APIs to application de-velopers and on building partnerships with hardware vendors to port to and integrate their products with Lync.
Looking ahead, Microsoft is work-ing hard on integrating Lync with Skype, its consumer IM, audio/video chat, and IP telephony product.
The first phase is completed, allow-ing Lync and Skype users to add each other to their contact lists, see presence information, exchange text IMs, and do audio calls. Video confer-ence and other features will be inte-grated later.
Elliot calls this Skype integration a potentially transformational im-provement for Lync. The Lync-Skype pairing can allow Lync customers to connect with their clients, partners, and other outside parties who are on Skype, which has hundreds of mil-lions of users worldwide.
“It creates a next-generation dial tone,” Elliot says. It’s still early to an-ticipate all the use cases and ramifica-tions of this Skype-Lync integration, but the potential for real business value is there, he says.
“For example, it would let you have customers and partners included in your enterprise collaboration teams, and in your enterprise support teams, so it would let you shift from a cus-tomer support model to a customer partnership model,” Elliot says.
Microsoft is also taking steps to scale Lync up from the desktop with its Lync Room System. In partnership with vendors like Polycom and Crest-ron, Microsoft is aiming at bringing Lync to conference rooms and thus compete more closely with vendors that provide telepresence systems like Cisco.
Another frontier Microsoft is pursuing is the cloud. There is a ver-sion of Lync, called Lync Online, in Office 365, the public cloud suite hosted by Microsoft. Lync Online has most of the capabilities of the Lync
Chris Peasley, Sprint’s manager of en-terprise communications systems.
Sprint has also found great value in the improvements to the mobile clients, as well as in the back-end enhancements, and in the synergies between Lync and other Microsoft products like SharePoint and Out-look/Exchange, he says.
IS IT RIGHT FOR YOU?According to Gartner’s Elliot, it’s most common for Lync to be de-ployed in environments that are al-ready heavily into Microsoft.
“We see Lync being strong where a Microsoft portfolio is being advanced broadly,” he says.
Likewise, Lync may be less attrac-tive in environments that are commit-ted to, say, IBM’s collaboration and communication products, since IBM has its own Sametime UC component,
or that are heavily invested on Cisco networking, IP telephony, video and collaboration wares like the Cisco WebEx and Tandberg products.
Lync is also a UC system that is tightly integrated with a communica-tion and collaboration stack, which differs from other vendors whose of-ferings approach UC more strongly from other areas like telephony.
“The big question or criteria for choosing a UC system is which infra-structure are you better able to sup-port? Which one will link most easily into your business apps and process-es,” says Forrester’s Dewing.
IT departments should also de-termine the total cost of ownership (TCO) of UC systems, the difficulty in installing and integrating it and its present and future capabilities to be accessed from a broad variety of de-vices, he says.
Largely dismissed as a non-threat by competitors when it first arrived in 2003 with the name Office Communicator, Lync
today has positioned itself as a product that demands attention from enterprises looking
to upgrade or adopt a UC platform.
SEPTEMBER 2013 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 39
UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS | FEATURE
BLAND BY name and superficially viewed as gee-whiz technol-ogy never to
be realized, the Internet of things (IOT) has significant potential to transform busi-ness. Early forays into Net-enabling physical objects are already pointing the way.Promising unprecedented
Teething troubles apart, IOT is in for the long-haul. By Bob Violino
connectivity among objects and the gathering of mas-sive amounts of data, IOT is poised to deliver significant business benefits to orga-nizations forward-thinking enough to envision the op-portunities and efficiencies IOT can reap.
Resource monitoring, us-age pattern tracking, just-in-time delivery of goods
EVERYTHING ABOUT INTERNET OF THINGS
FocalPoint
and services—some IOT pioneers have launched or are deploying projects, and they’re seeing positive results.
But if your organization is looking to explore IOT as a business strategy, be warned that a number of technical and administra-tive challenges await you. Here’s a look at the oppor-tunities, hurdles, and new skills required to make the most of this intersection of Web-enabled physical ob-jects and the deluge of data they will bring.
WHAT IS IOT?At its heart, IOT is a wide-ranging ecosystem of everyday physical objects connected to the Internet, capable of identifying themselves and communi-cating data to other objects on the network.
The concept initially gained traction via the Auto-ID Center, a nonprofit collaboration of private businesses and academic institutions that created a Web-like infrastructure to track goods through the use of RFID tags that carry EPCs (Electronic Product Codes). The Auto-ID Center shuttered in 2003. EPC-Global was then launched to commercialize EPC technol-ogy, and research continues today at universities around the world.
The basic IOT stack is composed of a tracking technology such as RFID or bar codes, sensors, embedded software, and wireless Internet connectiv-ity. “Transponder nodes” affixed to physical objects —anything from a truck to a bottle of pills—uniquely identify themselves to the Internet. By Web-enabling just about any type of prod-uct or equipment (vehicles,
construction equipment, gas and electric meters, appli-ances, vending machines, and so on) the IOT will allow information about these objects to be captured, resulting in a network of “smart objects” that can actively participate in a vari-ety of business processes.
Fueling the IOT revolu-tion is a combination of ubiquitous connectivity, low-cost sensors, and micro-electronics that allow almost anything to be connected to the Internet. The greatest enabler of IOT applications for business may be the smartphone, with its ability to optically scan bar codes or RFID tags.
“Even simple phones sup-port manual data entry of se-rialized identifiers such that an individual item can be tracked,” says Stephen Miles, research affiliate and consul-tant at the Auto-ID Labs and Center for Biomedical Inno-vation at MIT, both of which are working on IOT projects.
The rise of mobile devices and steadily decreasing pric-es for components, such as Wi-Fi radios, GPS chips, and 8-bit controllers with flash memory, have Gartner pre-dicting that nearly every in-dustry will be affected by the IOT. The research firm cau-tions, however, that the IOT “will be widely adopted only if the technology is available to all [including consumers] in a way that is inexpensive and easy to use.”
OPPORTUNITIESFor all its whiz-bang futur-istic appeal, IOT presents compelling business bene-fits, especially for organiza-tions prepared to make the most of the stream of real-time data that will come from networked physical systems. “IOT technolo-gies allow for real-time and
Talk ofthe Town
SEPTEMBER 2013 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 41
accurate data sensing and wireless transmission of that data to Web applica-tions and servers connected to the Internet,” says Ronak Sutaria, lead researcher at technology consulting firm Mindtree. “This leads to a more precise and accurate monitoring and control of physical systems.”
IOT-related technologies are already being tapped in a variety of industries, Sutaria says. For example, agricul-tural companies are moni-toring crops in real time to improve the yield quality of produce and to conserve the resources needed for farming, including pesti-cides, fertilizers, and water. Utility companies have implemented smart meters to monitor energy, gas, and water consumption, and municipalities are launch-ing “smart city” projects to help ease traffic congestion, improve waste management, monitor energy radiation from cellphone towers, and control street lights. Some of the more successful and instructive endeavors have come from the health care sector. Great River Medical Center is one health care or-ganization that’s connecting many of its medical devices into a network using Micro-soft’s Windows Embedded, a family of operating systems designed for use in embed-ded systems.
The deployment “spans our entire operation of med-ication management, from anesthesia workstations that monitor controlled substances in our operating rooms, to automated and secure cabinets that track and dispense medications at nursing stations, to an inventory management car-ousel in our pharmacy that records medication levels, automatically reordering
when medications are need-ed,” says Darwin Cooley, director of pharmaceutical services at Great River.
The devices are all con-nected to a central server running Windows Server with a SQL Server database. Each medication is bar-cod-ed in a single-dose package, Cooley says, which the med-ical center is able to track and control during each step throughout its facility.
“The big driver from our administration and board of directors was to be more cost effective,” Cooley says. “Automating the distribu-tion of our medications drives efficiency, keeping down personnel costs, as it’s much more efficient than people running all over the hospital to take medications out to the patients each time a prescription is written.”
The automated bar-code system is designed for patient safety, tracking medications at each step to assure the correct dose is
being administered to the right patient.
“This system is so ac-curate that pharmacists are required to check only 5 percent of doses leaving the pharmacy, compared to 100 percent before bar-cod-ing,” Cooley says. The tech-nology has allowed Great River to cut medication delivery time to patients by 67 percent, from an average of 90 minutes down to 30 minutes. Getting the cor-rect medication to patients faster has improved patient outcomes and reduced the rate of readmission. The technology also cut phar-macy costs by $300,000 (about Rs 1.8 crore) annu-ally and provided a one-time inventory savings of $400,000 (Rs 2.4 crore).
ADDRESSING CHALLENGESOrganizations can’t ex-pect to reap the benefits of IOT without addressing a number of hurdles. At the minimum there is the need
to inventory, bar-code, and cross-check every physical object to be brought online. For Great River, this pro-cess, which involved thou-sands of medications, took several months to complete, Cooley says.
IOT deployments will in-troduce a host of technical and procedural challenges that companies will need to overcome to reap the ben-efits of a connected physical network. IOT also involves multiple technology com-ponents across the IT stack, so it will require expertise from various parts of the organization —or perhaps from outside resources.
“IOT by itself is not a technology; you can’t buy a box of IOT off the shelf,” says Mike Redding, manag-ing director at Accenture Technology Labs, the tech-nology R&D organization within management con-sulting and outsourcing firm Accenture. Each technology component brings with
n FOCAL POINT | INTERNET OF THINGS
CHANCES are you’ve heard about the Internet of things (IOT)—or you will soon enough. The term carries a number of definitions. But in general, the IOT refers to uniquely identifiable objects, such as corporate assets or consumer goods, and their virtual representations in an
Internet-like structure.The idea of the IoT first became popular through the Auto-ID Center, a non-profit collabora-
tion of private companies and academic institutions that pioneered the development of a Web-like infrastructure for tracking goods around the world through the use of radio frequency identification (RFID) tags carrying Electronic Product Codes.
The center closed operations in 2003 and EPCGlobal was created to continue the effort to commercialize EPC technology, and the center’s research is carried on today by Auto-ID Labs at various universities worldwide.
While RFID is often seen as a prerequisite for the IOT, the concept includes Web-enabling virtually any type of product or machinery so that data about the object can be captured and communicated.
In effect, these networked things become “smart objects” that can become part of the Internet and active participants in business processes.
Current or potential examples of the IOT include a vast array of objects: Fleets of trucks, medi-cal equipment, vending machines, construction equipment, gas and electric meters, thermostats, household appliances, advertising display signs, and many others.
—Bob Violino
Internet of Things: The Beginning
42 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD SEPTEMBER 2013
it unique issues. At the transponder and reader-device level, this means questions of reliability, bat-tery life, security, access, and data processing.
Network services and application performance is also a concern for IOT de-ployments, Miles says. For example, a simple sensing and monitoring application for a site with 100 sensors installed and collecting te-lemetry data might produce raw data totaling more than 4PB in a year.
From a system design per-spective, challenges include ensuring effective, data-driven decision making, dealing with a whole new level of data granularity, and determining who owns the data, Miles says. On this last point, for example, under current U.S. health care law patients have a legal right to access their medical re-cords. “But who owns this data, the doctor, the hospi-tal, the software or hard-ware/services provider?” Miles asks.
WOKING IT OUTThe biggest hurdle facing or-ganizations considering IOT deployments will be knowing what to do with the massive amounts of information that will be gathered.
“Social media, sensors, and embedded devices expand the ability to gather data from previously unexplored areas,” Redding says. “One challenge is to design for an-alytics—creating a strategy that sees data more as a sup-ply chain than a warehouse.”
As tools mine count-less new unstructured data sources, the problem is no longer the absence of enough data, Redding says—it’s making sure you aren’t missing out on the data you really need while
spending too much on data you don’t need.
“With a supply chain of data, organizations can fill the gaps in whatever way is required,” Redding says. They can create new APIs to current applications, ask for data from partners or third parties, or create the data by quantifying the business/physical environ-ment around them, he says.
Acquiring the needed analytics skills to cope with the data deluge is another challenge. Research from Accenture shows that find-ing top analytics talent to manage massive amounts of data will be difficult in the years ahead. The results of a year-long research project by the firm show that the United States is projected to create nearly 39,000 new jobs for analytics experts through 2015, but will only be able to fill 23 percent of those roles with qualified candidates.
With IOT, basic data analytical skills won’t cut it; companies will need people who know analytics and have a solid understanding of what this new data will mean for their specific industry.
“One of the key infra-structures that companies [considering] IOT solutions require is to have a culture of data-driven decision mak-ing,” Sutaria says. “IOT es-sentially provides a stream of accurate data from the real world. Converting that data to information, then to knowledge, and finally to wisdom requires traditional analytical skills of the do-main where the IOT solu-tion is being deployed.”
For example, in the ag-ricultural field a scientist must understand how much irrigation is needed for a crop under various weather conditions. “IOT can provide accurate and automated data
collected at very periodic intervals, of the weather, farm, and individual crop conditions,” Sutaria says. “But once the data is col-lected, the actions that need to be taken based on the data is dependent on the domain-specific scientists.”
Along with the growing volumes of data and analysis needed, companies must be prepared for “an onslaught of devices that connect consumers and objects any-where, anytime,” Redding says. “Those that adopt the data supply-chain philoso-phy will surf this wave of information without drown-ing in the details.”
Additional common bar-riers to adoption of IOT technologies will include the investment needed in sensors and analytics capa-bilities and support, such as data security, Miles says.
THE FUTURE OF IOTAs IOT becomes main-stream, it will likely play a huge role in areas such as supply chain management.
According to Gartner, “the movement of smart goods can transform a logistics operation into a smart sup-ply chain.” OEMs selling new Internet-connected smart goods and devices will see their supply chains evolve, Gartner claims. A physical supply chain that ordinarily stops once goods are shipped will be ex-tended by a digital supply chain in which monitoring services, content, updates, and other services will be provided.“Businesses
have a tremendous opportu-nity to use IOT to fill in cor-porate blind spots to provide just-in-time goods and ser-vices,” Redding says. “When customers’ preferences or needs can be tracked in real time, businesses have the opportunity to react accord-ingly and immediately, with options such as dynamic messaging, pricing, or ser-vice delivery.”
Tracking usage patterns will allow businesses to plan for spikes or quiet pe-riods in advance, Redding says, reducing the chance of service outages or run-ning out of stock. “Inter-nally, businesses can track their own equipment in order to prevent failures or outages before they occur, increasing operational effi-ciencies,” he says. Develop-ments with the Internet it-self will have a huge impact on IOT. In the coming years, Internet applications built on IPv6 “could conceivably communicate with virtually any man-made object due to IPv6’s huge bandwidth,”
Redding says. “This will un-doubtedly open the door to more and more innovative IOT projects.”
At a time when organizations are looking to take advantage of big data, IOT offers an opportunity to gather even more information that could prove extremely useful to business.
“Knowledge is power, and businesses that leverage IOT have the potential for an in-credible competitive advan-tage,” Redding says. n
IOT deployments will introduce a host of technical and procedural challenges that compa-nies will need to overcome to reap the benefits.
SEPTEMBER 2013 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 43
ANSWER A call or go to a conference these days, and someone is likely
trying to sell you on the concept of the Internet of things (IOT). However, the IOT doesn’t necessarily involve the Internet, and sometimes things aren’t actually on it, either.
In some cases, the IOT is simply a buzz phrase that companies use to sell what-ever they’ve long had—just as the cloud, green, Inter-net, e-, and mobile labels have long been abused. But there is a there there: The IOT has a real meaning that’s useful to understand, as it will affect nearly ev-ery corner of both IT and consumer technology.
At its core, the IOT means just an environ-ment that gathers infor-
mation from multiple de-vices (computers, vehicles, smartphones, traffic lights, and almost anything with a sensor) and applications (anything from a social media app like Twitter to an e-commerce plat-form, from a manufactur-ing system to a traffic con-trol system).
Basically, you need data and a means to access it— that’s where the “Internet” label comes from, though of course you don’t need the Internet itself, or even an always-on network con-nection. The Internet may be the backbone of an IOT, but it’s not the only bone in that body. Then you need something that works with that information to analyze it, act on it, or otherwise process it. That something is typically
software, whether auto-mated, semi-automated, or human-controlled. THE INTRIGUE Where the IOT gets interesting is when you combine information from devices and other systems in novel ways, tapping into the huge process-ing capabilities available today to do the kinds of expansive analysis usually associated with the con-cept of big data—meaning analysis of data not neces-sarily designed to be ana-lyzed together.
Otherwise, you’re talk-ing about sensor networks and machine-to-machine (M2M) networks com-mon in factories, hospitals, warehouses, and even streets (think the street-lights and “next bus” elec-
tronic signs) or network-connected product systems (like an Apple TV-based entertainment system, the Bluetooth stereo in your car, or iPod Touch-based cash registers in retail-ers)—useful but not pro-foundly new.
To achieve the notion of the IOT, you need most of the following pieces in place:n Network connectivity, which is typically wirelessn Sensors and/or user in-put that capture or gener-ate datan Computational capabili-ties, at the device and/or back end
“Most” because you could have a store-and-forward connectivity ap-proach such as plugging a device into a USB port on a computer. Store-and-forward is essential in any case, because connectiv-ity is not ubiquitous, so you need a way to send data captured when of-fline. That’s a hallmark of the Internet, which was initially designed to allow communications even af-ter a nuclear war through store-and-forward and auto-rerouting.
PLACING THE THINGS You need things, but they need not be independent items like printers or ear-buds or sneakers or golf clubs—yes, there are golf clubs that monitor your swings and upload their data to apps that help teach you to golf better. A thing in IOT could be simply status information, such as where you are or where the temperature is at a cer-tain location or the engine temperature—that may be collected through a gener-al-purpose device such as a computer or smartphone.
The Internet of things will create mutltiple digital gateways into our physical world. By Galen Gruman
Opening New Doors
44 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD SEPTEMBER 2013
n FOCAL POINT | INTERNET OF THINGS
In other words, the thing itself need not be in an IOT, though data about it must. And you need a pur-pose for having all these connected devices. There are thousands of possible purposes—perhaps mil-lions. That is why the IOT is not a thing but a concept that can be applied to all sorts of things. In most cases, those purposes are expressed through ap-plications or services—whether local, cloud-based, datacenter-based, or a combination of any or all of those.
In some cases, the ser-vices sift through huge amounts of data, which Hadoop and other big data technologies in combina-tion with cloud services now makes possible. But an IOT doesn’t have to in-volve big data—there are small-data uses too, such as the Web of sensors on
highways to detect chemi-cal and nuclear weapons that are always monitoring but transmit only when an anomaly is detected. Com-bine that sensor network with traffic management systems, electronic high-way signage and perhaps emergency broadcast notices, first-responder de-ployments, and so on, and you get a public-safety IOT.
Its versatility is what opens up so many possibilities for the IOT. For example, running an app like Foursquare or Google Now that monitors user locations takes an existing set of devices (smartphones), their sensors (location data), and their network connectivity to aggregate information to a datacenter somewhere in the cloud that uses that information for, in this case, ad delivery and market research.
It’s an example of how the IOT can simply be an application taking advantage of today’s connected environment. But an IOT can be more purpose-built, such as the devices that plug into your car’s computer to transmit engine, speed, and other readings to your insurer or your smartphone. At its most basic, this is just a sensor network in your car tying into a central transmitter. But the IOT twist is that some of that data would go to the government and private agencies that monitor traffic, feeding in real-time travel data to augment what they collect via in-road sensors and highway cameras.
TWO BETTER THAN ONE An IOT can enable hybrid uses. For the car example, multiple services might get pieces of that automobile
and travel data for every-thing from traffic manage-ment to insurance rate-setting, from mechanics’ diagnostics to road-repair prioritization.
As another hybrid ex-ample, think of all those health sensors available, like the Fitbit and Nike+ for personal health manage-ment, or like the Worthings blood pressure monitor or Agamatrix glucose moni-tor for medical monitoring. The personal ones expand the capabilities of the con-nected mobile world with a new sensor that sends data to an app in the cloud. But the medical ones may ex-pand that same connected mobile world but send it to a medical provider’s elec-tronic health records (EHR) system. It’s even possible that the two types of health sensors could cross-deliver, with your Fitbit data also going to the EHR and your physician-prescribed medical sensor also going to your personal health vault—with each subset serving multiple purposes.
That notion of multiple purposes is probably the best reason for using the term “Internet of things,” as the Internet is more than a resilient network but a conduit for any com-bination and collection of digital activities. The Internet started as a way for the government to com-municate after nuclear war but has evolved to be much more than a network.
In many ways, the Inter-net has become a digital world that has gateways into our physical world. The IOT takes that concept to the next level, allowing multiple worlds—some connected to others, some not—that mash up physical and digital in all sorts of ways. n
T HE Internet of things (IOT) represents that next major wave for
computing, replacing the server-client model with a cloud-based infrastructure that pulls data from far-flung sources—from RFID sensors and wearables to social net-working feeds to back-end ERP and CRM data troves—and seamlessly transforms and delivers that data to any and all computing devices as useful information. Com-panies that aren’t poised to ride this wave will find them-selves left adrift.
In fact, the desire to be IOT-ready is so strong, it can lead companies with a tra-ditionally frosty relationship to warm to each other. Just
take a look at Oracle and Salesforce.com, which just inked a nine-year partner-ship after several years of passive-aggressive sniping.
Because the IOT is so cloud-dependent, Oracle even is trashing its old cloud strategy. One of the key components of its deals with Salesforce, Microsoft, and Netsuite is the tight, fully supported integration between Oracle technolo-gies, including Oracle’s Linux OS distribution, Java, Exa-data, WebLogic Server, and Oracle Database, and its rival-turned-partners’ cloud platforms. This represents a shift from Oracle’s previous patchwork approach to the cloud, which has been about
buying up and assimilating companies in its infamous Borg-like fashion. That’s an expensive and time-consum-ing approach, and it doesn’t lend itself well to the age of cloud computing. Partnering with formidable companies like Microsoft and Salesforce means enterprise customers can more quickly and confi-dently move into the cloud, bringing their existing Oracle apps with them.
Whether or not Oracle’s partnership gambits will pay off remains to be seen. The company has some catching up to do in the cloud space, but if it can position itself to catch the Internet of things wave, it will be in for a sweet ride.
—Ted Samson
Making Strange Bedfellows of Oracle and Salesforce
SEPTEMBER 2013 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 45
n OPINION
Engineering Change
PEOPLE GIVE plenty of reasons for Microsoft’s fall from the top of the tech heap. Two of the more common ex-planations are internal turf wars and the inevitable de-cline of a near monopoly that got fat and happy. But I
think there’s something much simpler at work: It’s been years since Microsoft has been run by an engineer. Bill Gates stopped working full time for Microsoft in 2006, and since then the company has been run by non-engineer Steve Ballmer. Before joining Microsoft, Ballmer worked as an assistant product manager for consumer products giant Procter & Gamble and spent a year in the MBA program at Stanford. That’s not the skillset and background the CEO of a tech company needs today.
Take a look at the tech companies that have surged since Ballmer took over from Gates. Google is headed by engineers. True, people thought that founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page needed some adult supervi-sion. But who stepped in to run the place? Eric Schmidt, a former director of software engineering at Sun. Facebook is run by an engineer. Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were engineers, and though Jobs couldn’t rival Wozniak’s prowess, he could code and build hardware, and he lived for overseeing product design. Tim Cook, the current CEO, has a degree in in-dustrial engineering. Why does it matter? Because in tech, the product rules. Products trump marketing, strategy, and even smart management. What drives technology isn’t dividing up an existing market. It’s creating entirely new markets by developing products that people crave.
Google succeeded for a very simple rea-son: At launch, it was by far the best search engine on the planet. Facebook became a success because it was far more useful and “sticky” than any other social media ser-vice. As for Apple, its history suggests that,
while engineers can’t always save a strug-gling tech company, a marketer has almost no chance. When Jobs was forced out in the mid-1980s, the CEO was John Sculley, an MBA who had been, among other things, a vice president of marketing at Pepsi. Although he was followed by two tech-oriented CEOs, it wasn’t until Jobs returned that Apple took off again. The spate of new products Jobs developed was remarkable and spurred Apple’s meteoric rise.
Engineers succeed as tech leaders be-cause they live and breathe products and care about them in visceral ways that man-agers—even very good managers—don’t. For people like Jobs, Zuckerberg, Brin and Page, building products is a calling, not a job. Not so for Steve Ballmer. Listen to him talk about products. He’s robotic, his enthu-siasm is artificial, and his message never strays from whatever marketing campaign has been designed for him. During the launch and early days of Windows Phone 7, he incessantly repeated that the new phone operating system would “delight” users. It was by far one of the most inauthentic, marketing-driven performances I have ever seen. Jobs, Brin, Page and Zuckerberg never needed to gin up their enthusiasm for what they created. If Microsoft wants to get its mojo back, it should be looking for a leader who’s similar to those four: an engineer who loves tech products, not someone who just sells them. n
To make a successful comeback, Microsoft needs an engineer at the helm, who loves tech products, not someone who just sells them.
Preston Gralla is a Computerworld.com contributing editor and the author of more than 35 books, including How the Internet Works (Que, 2006).
