ChannelWorld - April by Sreekanth Sastry

Most valued principals 2010-11

Our annual survey identifies the leading vendors across fifteen categories. Vedrict PaGE 34

channelworld hannel orld Strategic inSightS for Solution providerS | Cover PriCe rs.50

NitiN Shah, CMD, Allied Digital, is eyeing his principal’s strategy of focusing on industry verticals

Inside aPRIL 2011 vol. 5, issue 1

ANNIVERSARY

SPECIAL

News Analysis

Larry Page will not be Eric Schmidt 2.0, but Google is now different than the startup he ran earlier PaGE 12 Partners are unsure about their future after Schneider’s acquisition of Digilink PaGE GE 16 The Grill: Leo apotheker, HP’s CEO, expands on his strategy and offers frank assessments of his competition and their way forward PaGE 23

how Too VeT YoUr Vendor A look at how the best technology vendors differentiate themselves from the rest >>> Page 21

Opinion

Why do companies prohibit carrying tablets and smartphones PaGE 25

Case Study

From a mere solution to a data breach to complete IT transformation PaGE 42

Don’t Miss...

Canon and Xerox Face Off over managed print services Pa PaGE 56

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n Editor’s Note

TM Arun Kumar

Virtual Reality

urvey results usually evoke starkly different

kinds of responses. While people who are happy with the survey findings sing praises about it citing the results as a vindication of their supposed superiority, others who believe that they have received the raw end of the deal rubbish it as a useless piece of trash. The truth, as it most often does, lies somewhere in the middle and very few people see or acknowledge it. This has been our experience in the past in the numerous surveys that we have done. While some people have whole heartedly accepted the results, perhaps because the findings were to their liking, some others have clearly shown their displeasure over the findings by questioning the results and even going to the extent of questioning our motive. But, the reactions didn’t surprise us as they were pretty much on expected lines. A case in point is the bunch of reactions we received from the vendors for the first edition of the Most Valued Principal survey, which we did in the end of 2009. While some vendors were clearly happy that they were ranked as the most preferred in their respective categories, some others, perhaps, felt a sense of schadenfreude as their key competitors were ranked lower than them, even though they themselves weren’t at the top of the heap, much like an Indian fan who

would celebrate wildly and burst crackers when Pakistan loses a match. But the best reaction we got was from a vendor who refused to accept that a competitor was rated higher than the vendor in question by their respective sets of partners and started questioning everything from the results to the methodology of survey to the category in itself, much like a child, who in a fit of rage, starts throwing its toys out of the pram! The reaction was very amusing

nThe purpose is not to please or annoy some vendors. It is clearly to establish a neutral third-party feedback mechanism that is useful.

to say the least. However, merely looking at the standings and feeling happy or sad would be missing the point altogether. The objective of the Most Valued Principal survey is twin fold – one is to show a mirror to the vendors where they can see how their partners rate them and the other is for the partners to see and evaluate potential partnerships with vendors with whom they currently do not have a relationship. As partners rate vendors on multiple parameters across categories, vendors would be able to identify their relative areas of strength and weakness compared to that of their competitors. While they may be aware of some of their own strengths and weaknesses, what sometimes may surprise them is the perceived strength

or weakness of their competitors in certain parameters or categories. It is much like a feedback which needs to be looked at objectively and analyzed properly to find areas of improvement. And for partners it is a very useful way of figuring out who are the best vendors to work with. If they are already working with those vendors, well and good, else may be its time to evaluate the possibility of starting a new relationship. And what kind of a feedback [about a vendor] would work for the partners better than the one from their own peers. So, to look the survey from any other prism will be a mistake. It will be like missing the woods for the trees. Yes, the survey will throw up some interesting results; some vendors will be more pleased than the others. But the purpose is not to please or displease some vendors. It is clearly to establish a neutral third-party feedback mechanism that leads to continuous improvement for both the vendors and partners. So, one can either dispute the findings and take it with a pinch of salt or take it as a valuable feedback. The choice is your’s, but I hope it’s the latter.  TM Arun Kumar is the Executive Editor of ChannelWorld. Contact him at arun_k@idgindia.com

April 2011

Editor’s Note.indd 1

INDIAN Channelworld

4/13/2011 3:59:08 PM

For Breaking News, Go to Channelworld.in

Inside Indian Channelworld n APRIL 2011

■ news digest 06 Dell’s $1 Billion Cloud and Virtualization Gambit | Dell has

served up a new choice for buying its servers: plug-and-play configurations that include up to 200 VMware virtual machines along with the networking and storage needed to run them 08 Acer Must Look Beyond PCs | In the wake of Gianfranco Lanci’s

departure as CEO, Acer must move aggressively in the smartphone and tablet markets and step up its focus on enterprise PCs 08 Android, Windows Phone Will Lead in 2015: Gartner |

Android will dominate global mobile operating system sales over the next four years, while Windows Phonebased Nokia devices will displace other platforms says Gartner. 10 VMware Readies VDI Blueprint |

VMware is working on improvements related to scalability and WAN performance to boost its popularity

■ news analysis 12 Will Page usher in Change? | Larry Page won’t be Eric Schmidt

2.0, but Google’s now different than the startup he ran earlier. 16 Will the Link Remain? |

23 ■ The Grill 23 Leo Apotheker, HP’s CEO, expands on his strategy and offers frank assessments of his competition and their way ahead

■ Feature 40 Star Wars At the dawn of a new financial year, we take a look at six key battles that are likely to be fought in the coming months. They invoke interest, create jargons, and most importantly end up improving the products.

■ On Record

■ cover story

Manager, Channel Business, Emerson Network Power India, talks about the company’s initiatives, his strategies for the partner community and steps that would help ward off competition in the market

In one of the largest surveys of its kind, 520 solution providers from across the country rate the performance of 85 different technology vendors across 15 categories. While some of the results are on predictable lines, there are a few surprises as well.

26 Ausim Khan, Country

28 India’s Most Valued Principals

Partners are apprehensive about their future after Schneider’s acquisition of Digilink

■ case study

■ opinion

The journey between detecting a data breach to managing the entire customer IT is a challenging one which Locuz Solutions completed with aplomb. What started off as a mere solution to a data breach went on to become a complete IT transformation.

01 Editorial: TM Arun Kumar

on the reaction to the Most Valued Principal survey that has often gathered mixed responses from vendors 25 Steven Vaughan-Nichols:

Why does your company prohibhit carrying tablets and smartphones?

TOC_new_2.indd 2

42 Aligning Axis

4/14/2011 3:53:41 PM

FoR BReAking news, go to ChAnneLwoRLd.in

Inside

ChannelWorld

■ FAst tRACk

editor-in-Chief Vijay Ramachandran executive editor TM Arun Kumar Assistant editor Yogesh Gupta Principal Correspondents Radhika Nallayam, Shantheri Mallaya trainee Journalists Kartik Sharma, Shreehari Paliath

Geetha Building, 49, 3rd Cross, Mission Road, Bangalore - 560 027, India

ChAnneLwo L RLd.in Lwo Publisher, President &Ceo Louis D’Mello

indiAn ChAnneLwoRLd ■ APRiL 2011

■ editoRiAL

44 Rajesh gupta,

Director,Kiosk Technologies, says we don’t rely on OEMs for everything. They have always ensured that the company looks for customers ndependently 46 Manojkummar

51 ■ FoCAL Point

garg, COO, Taashee Linux Services , asserts that if you understand the customer’s pain points and their IT roadmap, then you are cherry amongst the group

51 Modernize your y Backup infrastructure BACk uP : Ever get the feeling that your

■ MACRo View 48

backup system is behind the times? Do you read trade magazines and wonder if you’re the only one still using an antiquated backup system. The first thing you should know is that you’re not the only one.

‘Building on Core 55 Building a Better Backup system s strength’ strength’ Q&A: Focusing on core

competence and deliverdeliver ing seamless solutions are the winning strategies to move to the next level, believes Manpreet Singh Sidhu, Founder & CEO, Apara Networks.

BACk uP: Everyone knows that storing re-

cords safely in more than one place protects the health of a business, but companies fail to establish backup systems that will keep them running if disaster strikes.

■ FACe oFF

56 My solution is Cheaper: Xerox and Canon

back their XOS and MPS resp. in saving organizational IT costs. Which is the better bet?

■ CustoM

■ design

& PRoduCtion

Lead designers Jithesh C.C, Suresh Nair, Jinan K.V senior designer Unnikrishnan A.V designer Amrita C Roy trainee designer esigner Sabrina Naresh Chief Photographer Srivatsa Shandilya Production Manager TK Karunakaran ■ eVents

& AudienCe deVeLoPMent

Vice President Rupesh Sreedharan senior Program Manager Chetan Acharya, Pooja Chhabra Program Manager Ajay Adhikari Management trainee Ramya Menon ■ MARketing

Amercian Power Conversion (I) Pvt Ltd . . . . . . . 11

HP Storage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

Check Point Software Technologies Pvt Ltd., 32 & 33

Netgear Technologies India Pvt. Ltd . . . . . . . . . . .9

Cicso Systems (India) Pvt.Ltd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . BC

Riverbed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .IBC

Dell India Pvt. Ltd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5

Trend Micro . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .IFC & 13

Emerson Networks Power(I) Pvt Ltd . . 51,53 & 55

TVS Electronics Ltd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3

Fujitsu India Pvt Ltd. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39

Zyxel Technology India Pvt. Ltd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

This index is provided as an additional service. The publisher does not assume any liability for errors or omissions.

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.

And sALes

President Sudhir Kamath VP sales Sudhir Argula gM sales Parul Singh AgM Brand Siddharth Singh sr. Manager Marketing Rohan Chandhok Manager sales Kalyan Basu, Pooja Nayak, Varun Dev, Minaz Adenwala Asst. Manager sales Ajay S. Chakravarthy Asst. Manager Brand Disha Gaur Associate Marketing Dinesh P Ad sales Co-ordinators Nadira Hyder ■ FinAnCe

AdVeRtiseRs’ index

PuBLishing

Principal Correspondent Aditya kelekar senior Correspondent Gopal Kishore

& AdMin

Financial Controller Sivaramakrishnan T.P deputy Manager Accounts Sasi Kumar V Asst Manager Credit Control Prachi Gupta ■ oFFiCes

Bangalore IDG Media Pvt. Ltd. Geetha Building, 49, 3rd Cross, Mission Road, Bangalore 560 027, India. Tel: 080-30530300. Fax: 080-30586065 delhi IDG Media Pvt. Ltd. New Bridge Business Centers, 5th and 6th Floor, Tower B, Technolopolis, Golf Course Road, Sector 54, Gurgaon - 122002, Hayrana Tel: 0124-4626256 Fax: 0124-4375888 Mumbai IDG Media Pvt. Ltd. 201, Madhava, Bandra Kurla Complex, Bandra East, Mumbai 400051. Tel: 022-30685000. Fax: 022-30685023

Untitled-1 1

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News

What’s within

PAGE 08: Acer Must Look Beyond PCs

PAGE 08: Android, Windows Phone Will Lead in 2015: Gartner PAGE 10: VMware Readies VDI Blueprint PAGE 12: Will Page Usher in a Sea Change? PAGE 16: Will the Link be the Same?

I l l u s t r a t i o n s b y U N N I K R I S H N A N AV

f i n d m o r e a r t i c l e s at Channelworld.in

Cloud Computing

Dell’s $1 Billion Cloud Gambit

ell has served up

a new choice for buying its servers: plug-and-play configurations that include up to 200 VMware virtual machines along with the networking and storage needed to run them. Dell is also offering a ready-made virtual desktop infrastructure in the same fashion, letting users buy servers pre-configured with hundreds to thousands virtual desktops in two flavors -- VMware or Citrix XenDesktop. But wait, there’s more. 6

The company tossed in an announcement about a new e-mail backup and archiving service and expanded partnership with Microsoft, then promised to build 10 new datacenters worldwide in the next 24 months -- three in the US -- to support what it hopes will be a massive move to its cloud. In addition to hosting virtual storage, desktops and e-mail backups, Dell says these data centers will serve up VMware, OpenStack and Azure clouds. All told, the company says it is spending $1 billion on the cloud.

Dell executives explained that despite what virtualization has done for hardware efficiency, it isn’t easy to manage. “Customers are more interested in buying VMs than in buying the physical hardware they have to assemble,” said Stephen Schuckenbrock, President of Dell Services. He adds that research reports predict that soon “virtually half the workloads will be running on virtual machines ... but it’s not that easy to do, to optimize those virtual machines.” Enter the new vStart line of servers. These are built with the Xeon-based Dell PowerEdge, VMware hypervisors, Dell EqualLogic storage and Dell PowerConnect switches and includes essential virtualization management extensions. Customers can own these units, though Dell is also willing to set them up as managed servers, promised Schuckenbrock. Not wanting to completely tick off the mighty Microsoft, Dell also announced a vague three-year agreement with Redmond that will let virtualized systems be managed by Microsoft System Center. Plus, Dell is encouraging enterprises to take the plunge with VDI by similarly offering plug-andplay servers — Julie Bort Network World

Browser

IE9 Bug Puts Win7 at Risk A new exploit for IE9 bypasses all security measures in even the latest fully patched version of Windows 7, according to a French security company Vupen. The exploit uses an unpatched vulnerability in IE 9 and bypasses all the extra security measures of Windows 7. The security hole was reported by the French security company Vupen, that previously

discovered an IE8 vulnerability in of last year. Vupen classifies the exploit as reliable, which means it’s an effective way for cyber attackers to run malicious code of their choosing on Windows 7 PCs. The exploit code has not been spotted in the wild. Jasper Bakker Webwereld Netherlands

Indian Channelworld Apr il 2011

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ZyXEL Technology India Pvt Ltd: 407, Elegance Tower Jasola District Centre, New Delhi-110025. Tel: +91-11-47608800 Toll Free: 1800-102-9995 Email: info@zyxel.in Website: www.zyxel.in Regional Distributors: DELHI } Comnet Vision: B-1 Aggarwal Bhawan, 35-36, Nehru Place, New Delhi - 110019 Phone: 09811026195 HARYANA } City Circuit:O-110, DLF Shopping Mall, Arjun Marg, DLF Phase-I, Gurgaon Phone: 09811761318/09311761318 KERALA } Coastal Traders: XL 7003, KAILAS, Sreenivasa Mallan Road, Ernakulam-35 Phone: 0484-2362616/2362686/09447744898 E-mail: ratheesh@coastaltraders.in Website: www.coastaltraders.in RAJASTHAN } Jaydeep Mathur Dot Com (JMDC): F-88, First Floor, Raiser Plaza, Indira bazar, Jaipur-302001 Phone: 0141-4026150/ 5102150/09414229091/09829096862 E-mail: mathurjaideep@gmail.com WEST BENGAL } Lalani Infotech Ltd: 25, Ganesh Chandra Avenue, Kolkata-700013 Phone: 033-66126400/22115285/09230511413 E-mail: lalani@lalaniinfotech.in Authorised Partners: Ahmedabad } Megastar Computer Services: 079-26764812/09227805656 Chandigarh } Micro Care Professional: 09417200336 Chennai } Gallant Infosys: 044-24983616/42108636/ 42108637/42312630/09841090043 } Ransys Bios Technologies India Pvt Ltd: 044-42023533/09962016292 Coimbatore } Ransys Bios Technologies (P) ltd: 09962016295 Delhi } Bansal Stan Mart: 09313206554 } Computer Plaza: 09811415675 } Indian Network Co.: 09650591591 } Jain Peripherals & Computers: 09810506641 } M.S. Enterprises: 09873004331 } N. G. Peripherals: 09811463912 } Spiral Systems: 098112 66280 } Syscom Computers: 09810393523 Erode } Bravo Systems: 0424-2260226 Faridabad } Universal Systems: 09312770934 Ghaziabad } Swas Computers: 09311745458 Gurgaon } Pixel Computer: 09811019000 Hyderabad } e-plus IT Solutions (P) Ltd: 040-40025419/07702112020 Karur } Siva Computer INC: 04324-2602/09965577821 Kolkata } Syscomp Impex Pvt Ltd: 09433019003 Madurai } Ransys Bios Technologies (P) ltd.: 099620 16299 Pondicherry } Gallant Infosys: 7305407779/9380070779 Rohtak } Jeetu Enterprises: 09812050753 Tirupur } Divine E Solutions: 0421-4323722/09843020381/09952415402 Salem } Smart Infotek: 09443747749 Vellore } Intech Computers: 0416-2224511/09443324511

Channel World_20 cm (w) x 26.7 cm (h) CMYK

n news digest Personal Computing

Acer Must Look Beyond PCs

n the wake of Gian-

phones and tablet computfranco Lanci’s deparers. Acer was one of the ture as president and biggest sellers of netbooks, sales of which have been CEO, Acer must move aggressively in the smartdeclining since Apple introphone and tablet markets duced the iPad last year. and step up its focus on “The personal computer enterprise PCs in order to remains the core of our remain a major player on business. We have built up the world stage, industry a strong foundation and analysts said. will continue to expand within, Lanci resigned especially in the from Acer over was the drop in commercial PC a conflict with shipments that Acer segment. In addithe board about experienced in the tion, we are stepthe best strategy fourth quarter of 2010 ping into the new for the company, mobile device including the immarket, where we will inportance of scale, growth, vest cautiously and aim to “customer value creation,” become one of the leading and how to enhance its players,” Wang was quoted brand, Acer said in a stateas saying. ment. Acer Chairman JT The resignation came just Wang has stepped in as interim CEO until Acer finds under a week after Acer said a permanent replacement. revenue from PCs in the first quarter of 2011 would Analysts said Lanci’s fall short of expectations. resignation may reflect a difference in opinion about Acer will face challenges if it clings too hard how aggressively Acer to its traditional PC busishould shift its focus from ness, said Jay Chou, senior consumer PCs and pursue research analyst at IDC. the markets for smart-

1.8%

Along with the decline in the netbook business, consumer spending on PCs has slowed, he noted. Acer has been slower to move into tablets and smartphones than rivals such as Hewlett-Packard and Dell. And those companies are less exposed to shifting market trends due to their bigger share of the enterprise PC market, where sales are relatively stable with the corporate PC refresh cycle underway, Chou said. Acer must also step up its enterprise focus and be aggressive in selling higher-margin products such as servers, Chou said. Right now, Acer’s servers go mainly into small- and medium-size businesses, Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis at NPD Techworld, said that netbooks had been one of the biggest growth drivers for Acer over the last few years, and replacing that growth will be a challenge. Beyond tablets, buyers are also ditching netbooks for aggressively priced laptops with full-size screens, Baker said. — Agam Shah IDG News Service

mobile os

Android, Windows Phone Will Lead in 2015: Gartner Android will dominate global smartphone operating system sales over the next four years, while Windows Phone-based Nokia devices will displace other platforms to surge to second place in 2015, said Gartner The latest Gartner forecast also shows the Apple’s iPhone OS will drop to third behind the Windows Phone software 8

in 2015, while Research in Motion’s will dip to the fourth spot that year. IDC has forecast the same overall 2015 rankings. While Android’s dominance became clear in late 2010, the projected Windows Phone climb to second in 2015 startled some observers when IDC announced its numbers, because to date the Windows Phone OS and

Leader: Android will hold half of smartphone market in 2012

Nokia Symbian devices, when sold separately, have not offered much promise. Gartner says that Android will hold nearly half of the

Short Takes  Acer India has an-

nounced the appointment of Cyberstar as its national distributor for server products. With this partnership, Acer will focus on extending its presence across India and address the growing server needs of SME and SMB’s by utilizing the partner network of Cyberstar.

 Avnet

Technology has entered into a distribution agreement with Oracle India. Replicating the global relationship, Avnet will be working together with Oracle in India to help ensure that channel partners can access the complete range of Oracle hardware and software solutions.

 Trend Micro has an-

nounced the appointment of Redington India as its value added distributor. Under the agreement, Redington will help Trend Micro appoint, enable and drive business through its value added partners across the tier 1 cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune and Kolkata.

smartphone market in 2012 and remain above 48 percent through 2015 when Gartner projects that 1.1 billion smartphones will be sold worldwide. In 2011, Android will get nearly 39 percent of the smartphone market, which will total more than 467 million smartphones, Gartner said. Apple’s iPhone will garner 19.4 percent of the smartphone market in 2011. — Matt Hamblen Computerworld

Indian Channelworld Apr il 2011

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n nEWs DiGEst virtuAlizAtion

vmware readies vDi Blueprint

N aN effort to boost the popularity of desktop virtualization, VMware is working on improvements related to scalability and W N performance and is Wa preparing documentation that outlines how best to use the fledgling technology, according to a company executive. VMware also plans to enhance performance monitoring for the technology, said Vittorio Viarengo, Vice President of end user computing at the company. The desktop virtualization market started to accelerate in the second half of last year, he said adding that many companies are doing pilots to understand how best to use the technology. Documentation that gives pointers on how move from a pilot to deployment will be published during the second quarter, Viarengo said. The documentation will also provide reference architectures and detail where the technology is a good fit as well as what desktop applications are not yet ready to be virtualized. Desktop virtualization is still in its infancy, and users want to be told how to approach the technology, according to Viarengo. For most knowledge workers desktop virtualization is a good fit, especially if there is a need for features like follow-me desktops, which allow users to move from one client to another and continue to work where they left off, according to Viarengo. To make that fea10

ture easier to use, VMware works with Imprivata, a company that adds single sign-on capabilities for both desktop and applications using proximity cards, he said. The a august launch of version 4.5 of VMware’s View desktop virtualization platform was a big deal for the company. The update integrated management features, smartcard authentication and the ability to run managed virtual desktops locally without a network connection. still, there is always room for improvement. For upcoming versions of View, VMware is working to improve performance monitoring and the ability

Around

TheWorld microsoft Appoints marketing Chief Microsoft has appointed a new Chief Marketing Officer, Chris Capossela, to take the place of Mich Mathews, who recently announced that she was stepping down. Reporting to Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner, Capossela will take the role of Senior Vice President of the Consumer Channels and Central Marketing groups. Consumer Channels is a new marketing group, comprising Microsoft’s retail, mobile operator and distribution marketing teams. As CMO, Capossela will as-

to assess a company’s IT environment before rolling out desktop virtualization. The acquisition of Integrien, which was announced in august last year, will help a VMware make those improvements, according to Viarengo. another acquisition that of RTO software, which

sume responsibility for handling Microsoft’s marketing, advertising, and corporate communications. —iDG news service

mcAfee to Buy sentrigo Intel subsidiary McAfee has agreed to buy database security vendor Sentrigo for an undisclosed sum. The proposed acquisition would add to the McAfee product line a range of products for monitoring database activity and for detecting and patching security flaws in enterprise databases. Officials said the deal is exex pected to close in April, when Sentrigo will become part of McAfee’s risk & compliance business unit. —Computerworld

was acquired in February last year and will allow VMware to unbundle user data from the desktop image. The company has also moved some key engineers working on the esX server hypervisor. Their task is to improve scalability. —Mikael Ricknäs IDG News Service

Polycom Buys Accordent Polycom said it bought video management firm Accordent Technologies for $50 million in cash, giving the videoconferencing vendor a leg up for future integration with Microsoft applications. While Accordent immediately brings support for Microsoft Lync and SharePoint, deeper integration is being planned, says Jim Kruger, Polycom Vice President of Solutions Product Marketing, but wouldn’t offer details. —network World

inDiAn ChAnnElWorlD Apr il 2011

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CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP APC BY SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC

CASE STUDY

High Performance Clusters Get

APC POWER AND COOLING The rack mountable UPS and liquid cooling solution occupies less space and also provides several benefits such as easy serviceability and scalability to meet future growth.

high profile government research organization was looking to set up a greenfield datacenter to build India’s largest High Performance Cluster (HPC) which consists of 512 Nodes. It would be used to conduct CPU intensive research, sometimes running algorithms for several months. It required a solution which would provide efficient cooling, expandable backup power, cable management, network-based shutdowns, plus reliable environmental monitoring and alerts. And as a government organization facing shrinking budgets, any solution also had to be cost-effective.

APC HELPS CRACK THE DEAL When the organization approached Micropoint, a leading solution provider and system integrator based in Mumbai, with these requirements, the company suggested implementing a rack mount UPS system and a state-of-the-art water based rack cooling solution. The APC pre-sales team contacted the customer to discuss their

“The customer was convinced about the outstanding support that APC would provide”

options and industry best practices to come up with the best design. According to Amul Mahale, Director, Micropoint Computers Limited, the interaction of the APC sales team with the customer was crucial in closing the deal.

UPTIME CRUCIAL FOR RESEARCH The organization was previously using a traditional UPS system in another location. It lacked UPS monitoring and alerting capabilities. The existing cooling system was not optimally configured for airflow and did not have sufficient capacity to accommodate growth. All the servers were connected to the main UPS. This caused many issues when it came to servicing and repairing the UPS, apart from causing significant downtime. Since this was a greenfield project, the organization had the opportunity to implement the best power and cooling solution to allow the data center to run continuously for months. Any downtime caused in between would result in having to start the process from scratch, and several days of research would be wasted. Micropoint installed the rack-mountable Smart-UPS systems of 5kVA capacity from APC on each rack; and these were then connected to the main UPS system. The system is architected with internal redundancy as the components are hot swappable. The APC solution also takes care of the aesthetic part. The cable management is taken care by troughs that are neatly placed over the racks.

COST EFFICIENT RACK COOLING

AMUL MAHALE

Director Micropoint Computers Limited

The HPC running CPU intensive tasks results in dangerous levels of heat. It was difficult to remove this heat without drastically redesigning data center space. Micropoint installed the APC InfraStruXure precision cooling unit which fully integrates power, cooling and environmental management within a rack-optimised design. This

AT A GLANCE Customer

A Government Research Organization

Solution Provider Micropoint Computers Limited Offering APC’s Rack Mount UPS and Cooling Solution maximized sensible cooling for high efficiency operation using water cooled solution. By bringing cooling capability directly to the rack, it was possible to cool the servers without taking additional space and power. The InRow cooling solution features a modular and scalable design which also ensures faster ROI and lowers the total cost of ownership.

SIGNIFICANT SAVINGS The customer can now focus on research without worrying about downtime. It also expects to see greater savings in electricity due to increased efficiency. The solution has added value in day to day managing and equipment monitoring, apart from providing easy and affordable upgrade abilities. “We work very closely with our channel partners with the single goal of giving our enterprise customers a seamless experience with respect to datacenter installations. This project was a highly prestigious one and I wish to thank Micropoint Computers for all the support”, said Shrinivas Chebbi, CGM & VP - APC by Schneider Electric, India This feature is brought to you by IDG Custom Solutions Group in association with

n News Analysis

Will Page Usher in a Sea Change?

Larry Page won’t be Eric Schmidt 2.0 and engineers will rule, but Google’s now different than the startup he ran earlier By Sharon Gaudin 12

owever Larry

Page decides to lead Google, one thing is for sure: He’s not going to be Eric Schmidt 2.0. That’s the word coming from industry analysts just days after Page became the CEO of Google. With Schmidt stepping down to become the online powerhouse’s executive chairman, Page, a co-founder, is back in the big chair. And everyone is certainly expecting some significant changes. “It’s very reasonable that Larry is going to sit down and he’s going to reorganize the company,” said Colin Gillis, an analyst at BGC Financial, a

New York-based investment firm. “Larry is taking over, and he’s likely to make some broad changes and he’s likely to do it relatively quickly.” Page officially took over as CEO on April 4 -- the very day that Jonathan Rosenberg, Google’s product chief, announced that he plans to resign. By all accounts a highly crucial cog in the Google machine, Rosenberg is expected to exit the company in the coming months. At this point, it’s unclear who will replace him, or if he will be replaced at all. Also on the same day, Google announced that it is bidding $900 million in cash for thousands of pat-

ents that Nortel is auctioning off as part of its bankruptcy proceedings. Obviously, the decision to make such a huge bid was in the works for some time, and Page must have had a hand in the move while he was transitioning into the CEO’s office. And it’s not as if Page had been uninvolved with the company while Schmidt was in charge. Schmidt, Page and Google co-founder Sergey Brin have been the triumvirate behind the company’s rise to the dominant position it holds today. The difference, however, is that while Page has been focused on innovation, Schmidt was the one making sure that Google was making money and that its stock price stayed up. Now the weight of both concerns -- innovation and business success -- will fall more solidly on Page. “[Page] has good vision. He’s very much a strong intellectual. He’s a challenging type,” said Gillis, adding that Google is a much different beast than it was when Page first ran it as a startup. “Remember: It’s a bigger ship to turn. It’s 200 people versus [24,000 employees today]. It’s private company versus a public company. This is a lot different,” he said. And word is that Page would like Google to again be run like a hungry young startup -- with less bureaucracy and more innovation, and with fewer middle managers and more engineers. That means there’s a potential management shakeup in the offing. Rob Enderle, an analyst at Enderle Group, said he

Indian Channelworld Apr il 2011

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CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP TREND MICRO

CHANNEL DIRECTIONS

SMEs should be concerned as they do not invest much in protection It is important for SMEs to opt for good quality security solutions rather than low-cost ones which are generally less reliable.

SANJAY SINGH,

Head – Value & Volume Channel Sales (India & SAARC), Trend Micro Singh manages Value Channels and is also responsible for building the next growth platform for Trend Micro’s Volume Engine for India. Before Trend Micro, Singh worked with Nortel Networks and Avaya GlobalConnect Limited (AGCL). What have been the most important developments on the security landscape in recent times? Internet technology has facilitated e-commerce, which, unfortunately, has also created new opportunities for online criminals. In addition, the popularity of cloud and virtualization has also brought in a paradigm shift in the nature of threats. So, two of the most important developments in the recent past are those related to cloud and virtualization. In addition, today customers are also looking beyond traditional anti virus and anti malware to security at gateway, server and end points, especially in more complex enterprise environments. Trend Micro is pitted against companies like IBM and Microsoft which sell many other services. What’s your USP? We are a specialized end-to-end security solution provider. We do not do any other business except security solution. We are not direct competition of IBM and Microsoft. We are way ahead of our competitors in the

virtualization and cloud security space. We have built Smart Protection Network, which is an infrastructure to provide cloud-based security solutions which no other vendor has as of date. In 2011, we are expecting a healthy double digit growth from our India operations. Some of the success stories of Trend Micro talk about how foreign universities have cut down on malware. Is there a lot of scope for Indian universities to beef up their security arsenal? Of late, a number of educational institutes in India have started deploying state-of-the-art security solutions. However, there is still scope to do more. In our Smart Protection Network, we have a comprehensive solution for the education vertical and we have already deployed the same in a number of Indian Universities and technology institutes across the country. Partners often have a tough time convincing SMEs about the need for security. What advice does Trend Micro provide? Criminals have started targeting SMEs as well. That is why it is extremely important for SMEs to know the repercussions of such criminal activities in the cyber space. In fact, SMEs should be more concerned as they generally do not invest much in protection. It is important for SMEs to opt for specialized security solutions rather than low-cost ones which are generally less reliable. Malware attacks could bleed companies. By providing a specifically dedicated, easy-to-install product to customers, channel partners will be able to maximize their return on sales revenue while providing a fast and efficient support service to their customers.

How does it benefit partners to market Trend Micro? As mentioned earlier, channel partners are an integral part of our business. We are a 100 percent channel focused company. We always take care of partner interest in all respects including margin and support services. In addition, we also ensure that all our partners, who sell and support Trend Micro solutions, are benefited by having satisfied customers and that they are financially rewarded. Everything we do is designed to help the channel get more business and higher profits. As a company, we are continuously innovating to meet the expectations of our partners and customers by launching best-of-breed products keeping in mind the changing threat scenario. We have a comprehensive marketing plan outlined for 2011 to engage more closely and meet partner expectations. In fact, our target is to increase the number of our existing channel partners to meet the growing demand for Trend Micro Security Solutions. We will increase focus on enabling our partners with relevant training and certification in all aspects of security while providing them with the necessary sales and after-sales support to run and sustain this line of business. We also announce new incentive schemes regularly to recognize high achievers as well as reward loyal partners.

This Interview is brought to you by IDG Custom Solutions Group in association with

n News Analysis wouldn’t be surprised if some middle managers were let go in the coming months -- a move that he thinks would be a big mistake. “Google is an engineering company and by nature it would be predominantly engineers,” Enderle said. “However, a firm made up predominantly of engineers would lack the skills and depth the company would need.” “Google already is excessively engineering-focused which is part of why they haven’t been able to avoid [angering] governments, and why their image is declining,” he said. Others think Page just

might be able to inject exactly what Google needs -- a dose of excitement and innovation. “As a co-founder steeped in engineering and innovation, Page is the perfect type of CEO for a company looking to recapture its startup mojo and compete in a predominantly clouddriven marketplace where speed in engineering matters more than generating investor buzz,” said Brad Shimmin, an analyst with Current Analysis. “Page can engender a true sense of unity and leadership where previously there was confusion and even infighting between the founders and their appointed

CEO, Eric Schmidt,” he said. However, Shimmin warns that Page should be careful to not pinpoint his focus on innovation. “Believe it or not, I think Google should slow its rate of innovation, focusing not so much on wild ideas such as self-driving cars and instead focus on improving its existing portfolio,” he said. “For example, Google Apps should see enough investment to make it a truly unified, mature and enterprise-centric platform capable of beating rivals IBM and Microsoft feature for feature.” Both Enderle and Gillis said Page needs to deal with the company’s trust

issues. “Google is at a crossroads,” Enderle said, explaining that it appears to be “unfocused, increasingly difficult to work with for partners, and a problem to correct for governments.” “The company’s image has degraded to a point where few would trust them, and trust is critical to much of what they intend to accomplish in the future,” Enderle said. “It is well past time the founders looked into the mirror and realized they have become a company they wouldn’t choose to work with. Fixing that problem should be their highest priority.” — Computerworld

Judge in Oracle-Google case gets a lesson in Java

awyers for Oracle and Google gave the judge overseeing their Java patent dispute a tutorial that underscored the complexity of the case between the two companies. Judge William Alsup of the US District Court in San Francisco was given an overview of Java and why it was invented, and an explanation of terms such as bytecode, compiler, class library and machine-readable code. The tutorial was to prepare him for a claim construction conference (also called a Markman hearing), where he’ll have to sort out disputes between the two sides about how language in Oracle’s Java patents should be interpreted. It should also be useful background for him if the two sides don’t settle and the case makes it to trial. Oracle sued Google last August, contending its opensource Android operating system violates Java patents

and copyrights that Oracle inherited when it bought Sun Microsystems. Google denies any wrongdoing and has characterized the case as an attack on open source. The judge showed at least an elementary understanding of computers. At one point an attorney for Google, Scott Weingaertner, described how a typical computer is made up of applications, an OS and the hardware underneath. “I understand that much,” Alsup said, asking him to move on. But he had to ask several questions to grasp some aspects of Java, including the concept of Java class libraries. “Coming into today’s hearing, I couldn’t understand what was meant by a ‘class,’” he admitted. Oracle’s attorney, Michael Jacobs, explained how developers write Java code and run it through a compiler to produce bytecode. Jacobs sought to emphasize

the similarities between the Android and Java programming models. Android developers code in Java and run the code through a compiler, he said, although the code is converted to .dex files that run on Google’s Dalvik virtual machine, rather than a Java Virtual Machine. But the principle is the same, he argued. “Our basic contention is that having chosen that architectural similarity -- and we’ll prove this at trial didn’t have much choice other than to embody the inventions in these patents” in Android, Jacobs said. Google’s attorney emphasized that virtual machines have been around since the 1960s, and that Sun’s Java Virtual machine didn’t appear until 1994. Google views the inventions in Oracle’s patents as “efficiency improvements” to Java and “very incremental inventions,” he said, rather than central to the Java model.

The two sides also disagree how the patents should be interpreted. For instance, the so-called ‘104 patent states: “A method and apparatus for generating executable code and resolving data references in generated code is disclosed.” Google considers that “resolving” the code requires rewriting it, while Oracle disagrees, Weingaertner said. Jacobs argued that Google “strongly encourages” developers not to implement their own code, the Oracle attorney said. “We see both companies aiming at very similar things. We aim at Java compatibility, they aim at Android compatibility,” Jacobs said, again stressing similarities between the two models. Alsup told the lawyers they had done “a very good job.” Weingaertner and Jacobs both declined to comment after the hearing. The trial is scheduled for October this year. — James Niccolai IDG News Service

April 2011

News_Digest_new.indd 14

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CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP HP STORAGEWORKS

PARTNER SPEAK SHIVRAM IYER CEO, Dixit Infotech

HP STORAGE’S TRAINING HELPS PARTNERS DEMONSTRATE PRODUCT VALUE TO CUSTOMERS. Demonstration is the proof of the pudding. In addition to sales training, HP Storage also provides a technical pre-sales training and a post-sales training.

How has the demand for storage changed over the recent years? During 2008-09, there had been a huge set back for storage. From 2010, customers who had a pent-up demand have started to refresh and update their storage capacities. The government departments have become very serious about ensuring that all email and customer records for banks and telcos are archived for a period of seven years. Also all accounting details have to be stored, so that any misadventure by any organization can be tracked. All this has boosted the demand for storage. Moreover, the cost per GB of storage has come down dramatically. The NAS and SAN solutions are more affordable today and have become essential for mid to large size companies. These factors have aided our ability to sell storage in the market.

What is special about HP Storage products that makes it easier for you to convince customers about buying HP? The most important factor and one that has always been there is brand recall. Also, the fact that the company has certified partner teams across the breadth of the country. HP Storage is one company that carries out an intensive follow-up with customers. Thirdly, the company has the whole range of storage products – from the humble DAT back-up tape drive to LTO tape drive to the high end X9000 storage solution as well as products in storage technologies like D2D. HP has helped make storage very affordable and reliable, with a whole range of NAS and SAN solutions. HP Storage has made very strong inroads with partners. HP is making the current

storage market attractive for partners. This was not the case two years ago. HP is doing a lot of POC for partners which makes it easier for us to demonstrate the value of the product to the customer.

Are your training needs adequately met by HP Storage? More than adequately. In addition to the sales training that HP Storage imparts, the company also has pre-sales technical and post-sales training. Recently, HP hosted a two-day training session inviting partners’ representatives to train them on the X9000 storage solution.

Despite cloud offerings, companies still prefer on-premise storage. Why We see that most customers are completely confused about cloud offerings. There have been plenty of announcements, but none of the solutions have been tried and tested beyond a few months. All clients are adopting a wait-and-watch approach. Security issues related to pilfering of data are uppermost in their mind. Further, large organizations refuse to have their data be taken outside of their own servers and storage. Globally, too, cloud offerings are yet to mature.

Do you help customers plan their storage purchase strategy? In what way? When we meet customers, we do a complete sizing of their backup needs including taking information on what are the applications they run and therefore backup, the operation system they are running on, their datacenter environment, and the capacity of

data to be backed up. In addition, we make an estimate of their expansion plans for the next three years. Data will grow at the rate of three times every year. We recommend back up and storage solutions which will ensure that customers don’t have to upgrade for at least three years.

What is the biggest worry of channel partners like you who deal with storage? The fact that cloud offerings may extend to storage on the cloud and substantially dilute the channel partner’s role is a source of worry. As the cloud offerings continue to grow, direct storage sales will drop. However, Indians being conservative when it comes to IT purchasing, I don’t see that happening very soon. However, the cloud computing model can open new doors to many partners with new opportunities to offer storage solution to ISPs as well as data hosting companies. Also, with many medium to large companies going for private clouds, partner can play a big role in sizing, selling and servicing storage solutions for such firms.

This Interview is brought to you by IDG Custom Solutions Group in association with

n News Analysis

Will the Link be the Same?

Partners are apprehensive about their future after Schneider’s acquisition of Digilink By Kartik Sharma

chneider Electric’s Rs 503

Crore acquisition of Smartlink Network Systems’s structured cabling business, which sells under the Digilink brand, has the latter’s channel partners worried about their future with many feeling that they may not get the required attention from Schneider. Though the partners believe that this is a good deal for Digilink, they, however, are apprehensive about the effect this acquisition will have on their 16

business. When the deal was announced, Smartlink Chairman KR Naik had said that this acquisition will help partners to be associated with a MNC brand and will help them reap the benefits of a wider range of products. Partners, however, feel that instead of getting the perceived advantages of being aligned with a MNC, they have more chances of being starving for Schneider’s attention. “We are also partners with the other companies that Schneider has acquired recently and

have seen that they are not able to focus properly on each of these partners,” says Shital Nahar of Nahar Integrated Systems Services, a Digilink partner. Ketan Khimani, Director of Ahmedabad-based Microlink Solutions agrees, “Schneider is an electrical energy player. It has its own network of partners. We are mostly dedicated to data networking. I am worried that we will be left as a mere subset of their huge electrical projects.” Besides, Schneider already has a brand in

structured cabling named “Clipsol” and Digilink partners are worried about the amount of attention they will be given in this situation. Partners fear that prices in future will be dictated by the MNC. Rajesh Mehta, Director at Geo Systems and Solutions, says, “Schneider is an MNC and has its own global price offerings. We will be at a disadvantage as far as pricing is concerned. Bangalore-based Binary System’s Director Edward Jeevan agrees, “Global vendors usually have higher cost structure than Indian companies and this will push prices up.” Nahar is also skeptical about the channel Policy of the acquirer. He says, “Digilink had a regional distribution which was very helpful for us. We are not sure that there will be separate people appointed [to manage different sets of partners] and if channel programs will be organized by Schneider which is already flooded with partners.” Partners also don’t seem to be keen to get back into the Smartlink fold for its Digisol range of networking products. “It will not be an easy task for Smartlink to even stand up in the market with Digisol against the well settled giants like D-Link and Cisco,” says Nahar. While Smartlink believes that the market is large enough for Digisol to compete in a healthy manner and increase its market share, partners like Mehta feel that they would rather go with D-Link than pushing themselves to Digisol, which is yet to have a foothold in the market. 

Indian Channelworld Apr il 2011

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E iv us iEw cl Ev Ex Pr

The STage iS SeT May 6, 2011 ThE wEsTin, PunE

KeYnote SponSor

Special award partnerS

Supporting aSSociationS

partnerS

KEYNOTE SPEAKER DAVID LIM

PRESENTED BY

The Power of Dreams: Overcome the impossible “How we deal with opportunities or obstacles in life can significantly impact our work and life”

David Lim

Mountaineer, Author and Motivational Speaker

avid Lim is best known for leading the landmark first Singapore Everest Expedition in 1998 (as well as the second in 2001). Partially disabled from a devastating rare nerve disorder since 1998, his comeback story of overcoming the odds made the cover of the Readers Digest magazine in 2001, and has since been translated into eight languages. A veteran of over 50 alpine climbs and Himalayan expeditions, a decade of serious climbing has seen him leading expeditions and climbs to the French, Swiss and New Zealand Alps, Tibet, India, South America and Nepal. In 1997, he led an expedition to Cho Oyu (8201m), the world’s 6th highest peak.

A week after his return from the 1998 Everest expedition, David contracted the rare nerve disorder, Guillain-Barre Syndrome. The syndrome paralysed him completely and he

A personally autographed copy of David’s best-selling book will be available for the winners

spent six months inside a hospital. It took a year after his discharge to return to the mountains once again. Climbing as a partially disabled person, he successfully made the first all-Singapore ascent of Aconcagua, the highest peak in the Americas, in February 2000. David is a sought-after expert on motivation, facilitating change, building high performing teams, and creating experiential learning programs. David travels across the globe delivering keynote presentations on the power of dreams, overcoming the ‘ impossible’ and transforming good teams into great teams. He is an educator in the field of team dynamics and leadership. David is also a CSP (Certified Speaking Professional), the first and only Singaporean to be conferred the highest designation for professionalism and consistent quality by the National Speakers Association and the International Federation for Professional Speakers (IFFPS). Join him at the third annual Premier 100 sympo symposium & Awards ceremony for a lavishly illustrated pre presentation depicting not only the views from the great Himalayan mountains, but also the lessons of how lead leadership on major mountain mountaineering expeditions are not significantly different from major corporate challenges. Learn the inner workings of leadership at the edge, inspire your associates, and give your workplace a motivational boost!

SPEciAL AwARDS DATACENTER

PRESENTED BY

honoring the architects of exemplary Datacenter Solutions The Datacenter Special Awards recognizes channel partners for their commitment to grow the datacenter business

he environment in which the modern datacenter operates is fast changing. A combination of economic factors, regulatory and growth pressures and the

opportunities presented by new technologies is contributing to this change. ‘Doing more with less’ has become a mantra for our times and the channel community has

risen to the occasion in an extraordinary manner. They have helped their customers to embrace new trends and broadened their IT capabilities by improving security,

boosting operational efficiency, and delivering customer-centric services to meet the overall project objectives, while not compromising the uptime and availability of mission-critical applications. Customer needs are varied and it takes a thorough understanding of the client business to service the client efficiently. No doubt, partners need to be abreast of the latest datacenter-related technologies. Behind every great implementation, solution or service is a great idea and these awards are about recognizing the ideas and thinking that shape the best datacenter solutions. They celebrate the success of those who have managed to balance their responsibilities in providing a resilient and responsive facility and making the operations energy efficient, thus showing their concern for the environment. The partners have been relentless in their endeavor to grow the datacenter business.

We Stand Committed to the Channel Channel is the lifeline of our business. aPC’s focus will always be to grow the business in alliance with the channel partners and we have been taking huge steps in the direction of deeper channel engagement in the recent past. This is done through regular channel training, partner friendly policies, improved product portfolio and enhanced marketing and sales support. We believe a well trained, knowledgeable partner will always deliver better value to the customer. We have the industry’s most comprehensive integrated power, cooling, and management solution for datacenters and it is an honour for us to partner with Channel World to recognize and felicitate channel partners who are doing good work in this space.

Shrinivas Chebbi, CGM & VP, APC by Schneider Electric, India

SPEciAL AwARDS STORAGE

PRESENTED BY

A Proud Association

Driving Success in Networked Storage The Storage Special Awards honor channel partners for delivering exemplary storage solutions to their customers

odayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s storage market environment is currently experiencing significant change, resulting from a flurry of activity through innovation, acquisition and consolidation by major vendors. The demand for information governance solutions remains high

as organizations seek to manage risks, simplify e-discovery and cut storage costs. As organizations understand the importance of data management and increase their investments in implementing storage solutions, channel partners have an important role to play in educating their customers on innovative storage technology, and providing them with a proven, high quality and cost-efficient solution. The award-winning partners also maintain strategic relationships with the IT industry leaders which ultimately allows them to deliver best-in-class solutions with a significant competitive advantage. These awards honor channel partners who have delivered exemplary solutions

for their customers during the past year and have accomplished extraordinary business challenges. They have ensured that their customers invest in innovative storage and data management solutions, unlocking the true value of networked storage. These select few have chosen to keep their focus on helping companies connect disparate pools of storage, use disk capacity more efficiently and harness storage resources into a leaner machine â&#x20AC;&#x201D; all of which have translated into greater efficiencies for the client. They are the storage integrators, and they are passing on the benefits from the intense competition brewing among storage vendors to their customers.

Channel partners are an integral part of hP SWD growth strategy. Our Channel partners play a crucial rule in understanding our customerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s business issues and iT issues and help develop and deploy the right storage architecture. given our vast portfolio, our partners adderss every need of our customers by combining our servers, storage and networking products to offer the most compelling solutions to our customers. Be it Consolidation, or be it Virtualization, be it Cloud enablement or be it Data Protection, hP Channel Partners can combine the best of our technology to help our customers meet this need. My team and i are extremely proud to associate with the Premier100 Storage Special awards for the third consecutive year to honor channel partners who are driving excellence in this space and transforming our industry. Three cheers to all the winners.

Prakash Krishnamoorthy, Country Manager, HP StorageWorks India

SPEciAL AwARDS CLOuD CHAMPIONS

Going Beyond Blue Sky Thinking Introducing the Cloud Champions Special Awards to honor the front runners in cloud computing business

o compete effectively, organizations need an IT infrastructure that can scale quickly to meet dynamic

business demands and maximize utilization of IT investment. Cloud computing can offer businesses, whether

PRESENTED BY

large or small, wonderful potential benefits in terms of cost savings, efficiency and simplifying business processes. Besides, the advantages of the pay-asyou-use model of cloud computing are well known. The arrival and acceleration of the cloud computing model, while exciting, has created much apprehension in the channel community. The results from the “State of the Market 2011” survey, conducted by the ChannelWorld

Magazine, show that while a large number of the channel partners in the country seem to be extremely bullish about the opportunities in cloud computing, only a select few have distilled the hype from the benefits. The Cloud Champions Special Awards honor those partners who are in the forefront when it comes to adopting new opportunities, understanding new technologies, and tackling the myriad challenges that come along with them in the cloud computing space. What sets the best cloud solution providers apart is their ability to provide a solid foundation for any solution that they implement for their customers. Whether their customers are taking an evolutionary approach through virtualization or a more revolutionary approach by building an infrastructure from scratch, these partners bring the cloud down to earth for them and provide support from conception to implementation and beyond.

Championing The Cloud Agenda Partners are our lifeblood. We survive and thrive because of them as our ‘go ‘ to Market’ across different product portfolios is through partners. With eMC’s MC’s greater focus on partner enablement and customer needs, partners will help us succeed as we expand into new horizons in the infromation infrastructure space. While digital information will grow 60-fold, enterprise investments in iT and staffing will grow only in single digits. The cumulative effect is driving CiOs to transform traditional infrastructures into private cloud data centers that offer iT as a service to internal and external customers. i am very bullish about cloud computing in india and am proud to associate with the Premier 100 Special awards for Cloud Computing to honor channel partners who have displayed extraordinary commitment to this technology.

Manoj Chugh President (India & SAARC), Director, Global Accounts - Asia Pacific & Japan at EMC

SPEciAL AwARDS SECuRITY

PRESENTED BY

The Channelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Support is Key to Our Success

A Pat on the Back for Security Warriors Security Special Awards recognize solution providers who have helped clients put the right defences in place.

o protect the enterprise in the digital age, one must look beyond just technology safeguards and strive for a synergy involving people, systems, networks, applications and business processes. The need of the hour is to empower organizations

to more effectively manage risk, protect critical infrastructure, safeguard the continuity of operations and maintain regulatory compliance. And while they are at it, they need to reduce complexity, manage costs and not compromise on application performance. No wonder then, that this is a momentous challenge for the channel community, and a huge responsibility on them to help ease the worries of their clients with regard to information risk management and allow them to concentrate on their core operations. They need to provide the bestin-class technology to help customers get the most from their IT investments. This award recognizes those in the channel community who are

redefining the benchmark of excellence by planning, implementing and managing security programs that significantly improve their customerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s security posture. They are the leaders in their field and the dedication and expertise they exhibit in serving their clients and addressing specific security requirements is unparalleled. By comprehensively addressing security vulnerabilities, these channel partners help their customers to explore new models of revenue, enable collaboration inside and outside of their organizations, and create a growth strategy, knowing that this will help clients be tuned with the changing threat landscape.

Channel partners are an extremely vital part of our ecosystem. Cyberoam has a unique and strong product offering which in combination with our committed channel partners has helped us reach the leadership position in the UTM market as per iDCâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Q3 2010 report. We have an excellent support system for our partners which allows them to stay abreast with our solutions and offer the best to the customers. We would have not attained this position without their trust. For last two years, Cyberoam has been breezing ahead in its growth momentum with excellent support of the channel partners. We are absolutely thrilled to associate with Channel World Security Special awards to honor outstanding partners in the security space.

Tushar Sighat Senior Vice President, Cyberoam (india & SaaRC)

n The Grill

Leo Apotheker

HP’s CEO expands on his strategy and offers frank assessments of his competition When you were announced as CEO, there was some surprise in the industry. What do you want to say about why you’re the right person for this job, at the right time for HP? I’m almost tempted to say I don’t think I need to answer that question, but I won’t go that far. There must be more than one person as the right person to be the CEO of HP. I would be pretty arrogant to believe that there is only one human being on the whole planet who is capable of doing that. This being said, I believe that I bring to the table a certain number of unique assets. Mine is to have a pretty

Grill.indd 23

broad view on what IT is and where it can go, and then translate that into a strategy and into an executable plan. I think that’s the main reason I am where I am. I think we have been able as a team to articulate an encompassing vision for HP on a given direction we want to take this company, and I think there is buy-in within the company to go and follow that route, which is important. Having spent a lot of time with customers, I believe many will respond to this equally well. And I will work very hard to transform this vision into reality.

Dossier Name: Léo Apotheker Designation: CEO and President Company: HP Career Graph: Prior to joining HP, Apotheker served as CEO of SAP and as a member of SAP’s executive board from 2002 until 2010. He began his career at SAP in 1988 and, over the next 20 years, was integral in helping build the company into one of the world’s leading providers of enterprise software in various leadership positions. Apotheker was the founding president and chief operating officer of ECsoft BV. He also has held leadership and management positions at ABP Partners, McCormack & Dodge Europe, S.W.I.F.T. and Altex GmbH.

4/13/2011 3:50:18 PM

n The Grill | LEO Apotheker can’t provide connectivity for all of the things that are happening in the cloud, you could almost wonder, why bother to have a cloud in the first place? I mean yes, there is scalability and dynamic flexing. But one of the other great advantages of the cloud is that if you combine this with networks, you have the capability to consume, render and input into the clouds from mobile devices, which I think is going to be a megatrend as we move forward. So you’re offering hosting or Amazon-like capabilities to enterprise customers now? We have many enterprise customers who want to use infrastructure as a service for a whole bunch of purposes and that service is available for them as we speak. We’re going to make that available as a public cloud as well.

With all respect to John, if we can do the same thing at a cheaper price than what he does, why wouldn’t that be a strategic alternative?

About HP’s cloud announcements -the three parts appear to be IaaS, PaaS, and an application store. And connectivity. Connectivity as part of a cloud offering? Well, you’re right, it’s probably not the purest definition of the term a “cloud offering,” but I think these two worlds are coming together. The mobile world and the cloud world are kind of blurring together, and if you 24

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Often SMBs are the prime adopters of public cloud services. How do you plan to attack that market? We embrace that. HP has a storied history of working with channel partners. If you look at the cloud, if we can create the right kind of platform and tools ,PaaS is an important element of our strategy. And that kind of an environment will create space for our partners, for our VARs and ISVs, to create capabilities and applications on our cloud in the most effective way possible so that they can service their customers. HP’s capabilities seem to overlap almost 100 percent with what IBM is doing. How do you intend to differentiate your strategy from IBM’s approach? I would qualify it slightly differently: IBM overlaps 100 percent with us. I mean, HP has been doing these things for years -- we didn’t really call them out this way -- but this is nothing really that revolutionary or new. But we actually have two strategic advantages over IBM. One is we understand the consumer business, so therefore we understand the endpoint devices. And that is a huge advantage, which IBM has given away when they sold their PC business to Lenovo. And secondly, we have deep insight into security and manageability, which helps us to secure and manage the entire stack in cloud. We are agnostic to a

certain number of technologies, which they are not, by definition, and therefore we can really optimize and mix and match the best solution. And maybe last, but not least, we don’t have any legacy to protect, so we can really leapfrog to the leading edge and we don’t have to worry about cannibalizing this or the other part of our legacy software business because in that space we don’t have enough. How would you respond when people like [John] Chambers or others say that the threat from HP is just a lowerpriced alternative -- it’s not a strategic alternative for customers? That’s an interesting argument. With all respect to John, if we can do the same thing at a cheaper price than what he does, why wouldn’t that be a strategic alternative? Help me understand what is a strategic alternative then? I think he’s talking around things like fabric architectures and the vision of the nextgeneration data center network That’s what we’re talking about converged infrastructure, except that we have it. He’s still in the PowerPoint version. Speaking of Cisco in the server market, is it a threat or an annoyance to HP? Neither. We hardly ever see them. They claim that sales are growing pretty rapidly of the UCS system, but you’re not seeing them in competitive situations? They must be selling on planet Zircon. What are the myths or misunderstandings about HP? I think HP is a company that hasn’t done a very good job in selling itself. HP has such a rich collection of assets and a wide portfolio that should be used by professionals and consumers alike in a totally different light than the way it’s being viewed today. I’m not saying it’s being viewed badly, but I think it’s being undervalued, and I think we have a great opportunity to put HP where it really belongs.  (Excerpts from a comprehensive conversation with John Gallant, IDG Enterprise Chief Content Officer and Eric Knorr, InfoWorld Editor in Chief)

Indian Channelworld Apr il 2011

4/13/2011 3:50:20 PM

n opinion

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

I want my iPad at work!

oes it seem to you that everyone and his brother

wants to bring his own gear into the office now? You’ve got people wanting to bring their Apple iPads to work, users who want to use their iPhones or Android Droid 2s instead of their company-supplied Blackberries as their smartphone. And CIOs who don’t support employee-owned devices, smart phones, iPads, etc., may be a minority: i.e. dinosaurs. This isn’t just talk. According to Nielsen’s latest smartphone market research, RIM is currently in a marketing-share dead heat with Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, but it’s losing ground. Forty-three percent of recent smartphone buyers purchased an Android device, compared to 26 percent for Apple iOS and 20 percent for RIM’s Blackberry. Of course, some companies, such as Wells Fargo, just say no to all personal phones and tablets. They seem to be in the minority, though. But what the heck is a CIO, CTO or anyone in IT support to do? Support multiple platforms with the same budget? That’s exactly what most companies seem to be trying to do. But there are no serious

management tools that can handle iPads, iPhones and Android phones. There are companies trying to do it -- Good Technologies and BoxTone come to mind -but no one has emerged as a market leader. There are complications beyond that. Android Market, as we painfully discovered recently, has real security problems. What’s the IT department to do? Turn off the app store functionality? How? Remove user-installed applications? I don’t think so! Insist that users only run approved applications? Good luck with that! Insist they all in-

n RIM is currently in a marketingshare dead heat with Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, but it’s losing ground

stall an antivirus program of the company’s choice? Well, that’s probably doable, but it’s not perfect. The problem isn’t just the IT department’s. Let’s say an iPhone user gets laid off and the powers that be want all corporate e-mails off the phone now. How do you deal with that? It’s a darn good question, and I don’t have a great answer. I don’t think anyone does at this point. This isn’t the first time we have run into this kind of problem. I can remember well when PCs were first coming into the office. In the places I worked in the ‘70s and ‘80s many of the first PCs belonged to employees. IT kept trying to keep us on mainframes or minicomputers, but once you went PC, you couldn’t go back. Now, IT faces the same problems. Then, it was a April 2011

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols.indd 25

horde of CP/M and MSDOS PCs, which were, more or less, compatible with one another. Today, it’s several different platforms -- phones, tablets and laptops -- using an even wider variety of operating systems -- four different versions of Android at last count, Apple’s iOS, WP7, HP’s webOS -- the list goes on and on. I wish I had an easy answer. I don’t. You may want to get users to standardize on one official platform, but they’re determined to go their own way -- apparently with corporate proprietary data in their pocket. Back in the day there wasn’t a solution either. Eventually, for better or for worse, IT settled on Microsoft products for the desktop, and then the laptop. I don’t see that happening this time. Microsoft only managed to do it the first time thanks to illegal pressure on PC vendors. In this go-round, Microsoft is barely a player on the new platforms, Apple still has little interest in the business market, and everyone else is going their own way. It’s going to be a rough few years in the IT business. I’m just glad that while I’ll be covering it, I won’t be in it. Good luck, guys and gals. You’re going to need it.  Steven J Vaughan-Nichols has been writing about technology and the business of technology since CP/M-80 was cutting-edge INDIAN Channelworld

4/13/2011 3:48:51 PM

On REcORD n

Ausim Khan

Country Manager, Channel Business, v Emerson Network Power India, talks about the companyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s initiatives By Shreehari Paliath 26

Onrecord.indd 26

What is Emersonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s focus areas in India in terms of the markets, industries and verticals that will help you maximize the potential? Khan: We can segregate our business from two perspectives. The first one would be our approach on the different verticals and the other would be our approach to the market from a channel perspective. Internally we are divided into dif different verticals which include government, IT/ ITES, energy which was called oil and gas earlier, manufacturing, etc, depending on the kind of business the partner is involved in. The partners who are associated with us also work in different verticals. From the channel perspective, all the customers obviously work in different domains and therefore there is a cross benefit that can be derived out of it on the basis of how the market is segregated. how do you asses the Indian market in terms of you partner concentration? how is it different from the international market? Khan: In the Indian market we have four categories of partners. We have business partners, who are both our sales and service partners, and networking partners who look at the IT part and complement their product line by pitching in our products. Then we have the value added resellers. And finally, we have the vertical specific partners who focus on one domain area. These partners could be working in an IT or non-IT domain.

Recently Emerson decided to provide datacenter solutions for Datacraft India. Will a focus on the large systems integrators be the way forward for the company in the future? Khan: We have very deep engagements with large systems integrators for our datacenter business wherein we work with them for their datacenter projects. One of the recent cases is where Emerson designed six major data centers for Datacraft India in different locations. Apart from that we also engage through our channels. Our focus is to develop partners who can focus on the datacenter opportunities available in the market. The company offers many products in the market which has other equally potent competitors, especially in datacenters. how do you plan to ward off such stiff competition in the market? Khan: Our products are entirely unique. We are into AC power, precision cooling, high end inverters and racks. These are niche products and hence it is a unique proposition for channel partners. Hence there is a difference from the otherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s of offerings. So the partners may be engaged with other vendors for products, but wit Emerson, we believe it becomes a winning proposition for them. So the partners can differentiate the other vendors through product line. So then, who do you consider as your competition? Khan: We have multiple products across different verticals. So for each cat-

InDIan channElWORlD Apr il 2011

4/13/2011 3:47:07 PM

Ausim Khan | On Record n egory there are a number of other vendors. I don’t think naming these vendors would be correct on my part. How does Emerson look at cloud computing? Is it a domain that you are looking at seriously in the future? Khan: Our product line cannot be directly deemed as a solution for cloud technologies. The product line that we sell becomes an integral part of a solution for a partner who is pitching in for a solution in cloud computing to their customer. So in that way it becomes important for large or medium systems integrators in the country. Since Emerson has a large array of products many of the systems integrators are more than willing to ally with us. What are the different partner programs that you have? How have you structured it here in India? Khan: Apart from the classification I mentioned, we have Ingram Micro as our national distributor. We have few partners buying through them, and also some directly from us. We are not overly distributed. We ensure that the numbers are optimal. We have more than 1000 value added resellers and close to 30 networking partners. We also have 90 business partners which will increase to 120 by end of next month. So we have a great reach all across India and therefore I believe that we are ready to support the customer in any location and facilitate their requirements. Could you elaborate on

My agenda would be to have a deeper engagement with our partners. As we have so many products, the partners can increase their bottom lines through right sales and product mix. the enrollment process for partners in Emerson? What are you looking for when you look to attract more channel partners? Khan: We follow a tedious process for enrolling partners. As the products are technical in nature, we conduct a lot of training, evaluate their business model, and suggest the go to market approach. There are also a lot of compliances in terms of sales and service that Emerson looks into before including partners. Since it also includes sales and service, we also evaluate these capabilities of the partner. In order to keep the customers satisfied Emerson conducts many sales and service audits and then brings onboard a new partner. Emerson has acquired a few companies lately. How do you integrate the partners of the acquired company to your existing partner com-

munity after an acquisition? Khan: Emerson acquired DB power recently. We have to do a lot of integration by assuring that there should not be an overlap and minimize channel conflict. We also have to ensure that the training process that is carried out for the other partners is also done for the new partners, which is an important part of integration. So it’s a slightly long drawn process where we have to accommodate the new partners and at the same time make it favorable for Emerson. Could you tell us about the new technologies you have to offer? Are there any new markets that Emerson is looking at? Khan: As a part of our product roadmap we bring exciting new products to the Indian market. We have introduced a new 30 kVA inverter which is in demand considering the Indian power condition. We are also being aggressive about the solar invertors. From the IT perspective we have launched Rack Data Unit (RDU) which offers security, power management etc. We will also have few launches from Avocent, which also has been acquired by Emerson. This should further add to our datacenter capabilities and help our partners with more options for solutions. With the government encouraging alternate energy methods, how are you looking at this domain? Will you have a different strategy or approach to green technology for the market? Khan: You are right in April 2011

Onrecord.indd 27

that assessment on our focus on green technology. There is a huge opportunity here. We have launched solar invertors and given the government thrust on clean power and alternate sources of energy, we will surely be focusing a lot more on this product line, especially solar invertors in the next few quarters. Obviously since there are different products available, we have different go to market strategies for each of these. This, I believe, will in turn benefit our partners by allowing them to choose from a wide array of possible solutions for their customers. As the new channel head for Emerson, what are you plans personally going forward. Do you have any specific goals charted out from the channel aspect specifically for the company? Khan: My agenda would be to have a deeper engagement with Emerson’s partner community. Since we have many products, we would like the partners to know that with the right sales and product mix they can increase their bottom lines. So if the required training and knowledge to develop good solutions is available, then most certainly this would help the partners further. Another goal to for me would be to bring up the partners to a level where they can configure and offer Emerson’s products to the market. So my thrust area would be to engage them with a right mix to maximize business for them and also Emerson.  INDIAN Channelworld

4/13/2011 3:47:07 PM

Most valued principals 2010-11

dentifying vendors who are leaders in

a category is one thing. But identifying vendors who display certain strong characteristics or traits across categories is entirely another. While the former helps partners in finding out perceived category leaders, the latter helps in understanding the best practices employed by the vendors. It throws light on how the leading vendors with their commitment and focus establish benchmarks in certain areas for others to follow.

When we analyze the results of the MVP survey, it becomes clear that some companies are strong in certain areas like say technology solutions or customer service across categories that they are present in. These are their areas of perceived strength. For instance, IBM was rated consistently highly by the partners for its technology innovation across categories like servers, systems & network management software, and storage management software. Allied Digital, which has been associated with IBM since the

mainframe era in 1978, throws some light on this. Chairman & Managing Director Nitin Shah says, “Allied Digital Services was incepted on the learning from IBM services in early eighties. We look upon IBM as role model for our organization. For IBM technology or products, it’s a full stop. No questions can be asked about their innovation.” An IBM Premier Business Partner, Allied Digital understands enterprise customers’ needs. “This [IBM technology] has helped us clinch some of country’s biggest deals in the past

India’s

Most Valued

Principals In one of the largest surveys, 520 solution providers rate the performance of 85 technology vendors across 15 categories. By Team ChannelWorld 28

Indian Channelworld Apr il 2011

Most Valued 333.indd 28

4/14/2011 4:23:50 PM

decade. In many cases, IBM technology was a real differentiator and deal clincher,” says Shah. Allied Digital is following IBM’s philosophy to move from marginalized product business to focus on technology solutions and service industry verticals. “IBM is a very ethical company in terms of their partner ecosystem. We are trying to imitate best practices of IBM in our company,” explains Shah. Similarly, Check Point was another such company which received consistent high scores for its technology across categories that it is present in. Sanjay Agarwal, Director, Momentum Infocare, says, “Check Point’s technology offers ease of management for enterprise set-up and single consoled management for multiple technologies like UTM, DLP, encryption, etc. Check Point covers all the aspects of security relevant to customer, so we can offer entire spectrum.

Marketing Muscle

IBM technology has helped us clinch some of the biggest deals Nitin Shah, Chairman & Managing Director, Allied Digital

However, when it comes to marketing assistance, HP and Symantec are clearly seen as the leaders across categories that they are present in. Partners evidently see this as the strength of the two vendors. Vineet Panwar, VP, Sales, CI Infotech, opines that the kind of investments that HP makes for partners in branding activities helps tremendously to focus on the market. An HP partner for over 12 years now, CI Infotech has been able achieve a consistent and steady growth rate in topline and bottomline due to the support that HP has given to the company through the Partner One program, wherein incentives are given to partner organizations for deals, training and certifications, etc. HP’s backend rebates have also found favor with Mumbai-based CDP India. Ankit Desai, CDP’s Director says that the company’s storage and server business is growing at a rate of 20-25 percent thanks mainly to the incentives HP shares not only with its own marketing executives, but also with the marketing executives in the channel organization. Similarly, Symantec’s bid to help partners with back end incentives April 2011

Most Valued 333.indd 29

INDIAN Channelworld

4/14/2011 4:23:59 PM

Most valued principals 2010-11 apparently has hit bulls’ eye. Muneer Ahmed, Director, Digital Track, feels that Symantec’s plan to pass on incentives of 9 percent of total deal value for closed projects valuing not less than $5000 is a major sell out for partners and motivates them to achieve targets. He says, “Symantec rewards us even when we do not completely close the deal and it is registered by us (lead generation) with a 3 percent incentive.” Incidentally, according to Ahmed, Digital Track recorded the maximum such closures and registrations in Chennai and this has been reportedly been acknowledged by the Symantec Regional Manager during the last QBR meet. A five year association with Symantec has been paying rich dividends to the organization with 25 percent of its total revenues attributable to Symantec products.

Eye on Training When in comes to training & certification, which is a major investment for solution providers as they try to suffice customer needs and win enterprise deals, partners continuously need to upgrade the skill sets of their technical team while working with

various principals. Here vendors like IBM and Symantec have been rated highly by partners across categories. The vendors scored consistent high scores for their training & certification practices across network security software, servers, BI, storage management software, and systems & network management software. Harish Menon, COO, Futuresoft Solutions, says, “IBM’s training & certification not only helps partners to be abreast on technology but also helps in getting new projects/ business opportunities.” Especially for partners with a services practice, IBM certifications around Tivoli, Lotus, Websphere, DB2, Rational are must haves, adds Menon. “Training helps stay ahead in the curve and solicit more business. With skills around Tivoli, Lotus, DB2, investment in training our staff has also improved employee satisfaction,” says Menon. A silver partner of Symantec, Delhi headquartered MM9 Information Systems is focusing more on Symantec since past two years. “Due to customer demand for security products, we aligned with market leader like Symantec. We are enabling our team

Ankit Desai Director, CDP India

Most Valued 333.indd 30

on technologies like DLP, Patch management as the vendor is consistent with its training & certification practices across its widespread portfolio,” says Manoj Sharma, MM9’s CEO adding, “Rather than training more people, these people would get trained on breadth of other products for further penetration across customers.” Apart from offering value to customer, a certified partner helps company’s bottom lines by increasing its services business, says Sharma.

Support Strength The importance of customer support can never be undermined. And companies who do well in this usually have a good and long lasting relationship with their customers. For companies like CA and Symantec, partners feel that customer support is certainly an area of strength with both firms being rated consistently high across categories. Sri Harsha Subbanna, Vice President -Convergence and Communications, of Bangalore’s G7 Infotech, feels that CA’s service assurance background may have lots to do with its proactive customer support system. According to Subbanna, G7 has about 60-70 CA customers and there is a huge satisfaction quotient since CA’s service team never waits for partners in the event of service issues and acts on a lead time of just two hours as against a promised lead time of 48 hours, which is way above the industry average. He says, “Apart from online support, CA also has multiple teams with single points of contact to engage with customers. This explains their effectiveness.” Subbanna further detailed that G7 also works with an ecosystem of partners who feel that the vendor’s knowledge updates on industry aspects such as Cisco QoS and Brocade QoS, amongst others, also act as timely catalysts for problem solving. T N Srinivasan, Business Head of Chennai-based Veeras Infotek, believes that Symantec’s customer support mechanism is quite stable. He says, “Symantec has a great support system in place. Customer escalation processes are easier and are based on product lines.”

4/14/2011 4:24:00 PM

Srinivasan elaborates that for critical storage foundation support, one can get on the phone with a Symantec L3 support right away. This is because it is rated as part of DR for the customer. For AV, based on criticality, Srinivasan said that Symantec provides supports with clear timelines. Srinivasan says, “Critical support happens in 4-8 hours.”

Money Matters Healthy margin is something that a partner would never want to compromise on as it’s the one key factor that would make or break his business. Hence pricing flexibility offered by a vendor is always quite highly appreciated by its partners. Though it tends to depend a lot on the relationship between a vendor and a partner, CA and Symantec seem to lead the field when it comes financial terms. At least that’s what the partners feel. “Our relationship with CA goes back a long way. The vendor has always assured very good profitability. Better margins allow us to develop our skill sets on a regular basis and depute quality resources to provide quality services to the customer. This eventually results in better relationship and repeat business,” explains Madhu Madhavan, CEO, Cubic Computing. The SI has bagged multiple deals and has successfully completed a good number of implementations for the vendor so far. Symantec partners also speak with one voice about the company’s flexible financial terms. Mumbai-based VDA Infosolutions, in fact a relatively new partner of Symantec, is quite happy with the way the vendor takes prompt calls when discounts are required. Though the SI has not closed very many deals for the vendor, the vendor has ensured double-digit margins for its ‘not-so-big’ partner. “We have got huge discounts from Symantec in spite of the fact that we are not a key partner for them. Though the transaction amounts were not very large, we have been able to get healthy margins,” says Deepak Jadhav, Director, VDA Infosolutions. Though diminishing margins is always pointed out as the biggest

Vivek Gupta Director, Ablaze Infosys

challenge of a systems integrator, vendors many a times don’t do much to improve the situation. But if they are able to get into the act, it would surely result in partner loyalty and satisfaction.

Relationship Reality How many times were your calls to your channel manager unanswered? If it is way too many times, that speaks volumes about your principal’s interest and involvement towards you. More than anything else, management style is something that is closely related to the culture of an organization. Unfortunately, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. But companies that have invested considerable amount of time and effort on it have definitely seen the benefits. Partners feel that CA and IBM clearly hit the mark. Improved interaction levels, ability for conflict resolution, and role played in vetting technical specifications are factors by which the vendors were rated. Ablaze Infosys, one of the old partners of IBM, recalls how the vendor improved its relationship with the SI as they evolved to become a key partner. “People in IBM are eas-

ily reachable and are prompt in their responses. In fact, I can reach out to people who are in higher levels as there are no hierarchy related complications,” says Vivek Gupta, Director, Ablaze Infosys. “The vendor has many times gone out of the way to help us, especially in designing the right solution. IBM also ensures that people movement does not cause any trouble to us,” he adds. Gemini Communications, one of the key partners of CA, rates the vendor pretty high on its management style. “In the last couple of years, CA has almost doubled its field force. They have a dedicated set of people for each vertical and region, which makes it extremely easy to communicate with them and confidently approach the customer. One of the recent examples that I can recall is about the vendor’s role in a banking deal that we bagged. The team from CA spent more than 20 days with us in convincing and showing the PoC to the customer,” says A Krishnakumar, CMO of Gemini. “To say the least, I have many times had the CEO of CA visiting my office, which sums up the kind of focus it has towards its channel,” he adds. April 2011

Most Valued 333.indd 31

INDIAN Channelworld

4/14/2011 4:24:01 PM

CHANNEL DIRECTIONS

BHASKAR BAKTHAVATSALU, Regional Director, Indian & SAARC, Check Point Software Technologies

Bakthavatsalu set up the Indian operations of Check Point and currently heads the sales operations for the region. He has been with Check Point for over seven years and has more than 15 years of experience in the IT industry.

Making consultants out of partners Check Point enables its partner community to move towards a consultative, solution-based approach. It believes this will give its partners the right outlook to be successful in the market.

The market for security solutions is growing by leaps and bounds. What is the roadmap that Check Point has for its growth strategy in India? Check Point has been growing ahead of the market in India. This was mainly achieved as we had kept abreast with the market trends. Check Point has been continuously strengthening and broadening its portfolio of software blades. The modular architecture of software blades has enabled them to be quickly enabled and configured into a solution based on specific business needs. Additional blades can be quickly activated to extend security to an existing configuration within the same hardware foundation. With our 100-percent channel-driven philosophy we believe in giving our partners the right outlook to be successful in the market. We train them to evolve to be consultants rather than resellers to the customers. In its Magic Quadrant reports, Gartner has recognized Check Point as a market leader in security (Enterprise Firewall, Mobile Data Protection,

CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP CHECK POINT

and UTM). Our leadership in the IPS space has been recognized by NSS Labs, the leading independent, information security research and testing organization, which had shown 97.3% effectiveness with our Software Blade IPS protections. Businesses are demanding better endpoint tools to address rapidly changing security threats. How does Check Point’s enterprise solution address these needs? It is important to have endpoints integrated with the network, providing collaborative and integrated security. Check Point End Point security product portfolio not only comprehensively covers all the threats pertaining to endpoint, data, and mobility, but also integrates these controls with the network. Check Point’s unique ABRA solution solves most of the security concerns around mobility. How do you train partners to show customers the value of lesser-known tools like full-disk encryption? Training at Check Point is a regular affair. Our trainings enable partners to position Check Point solutions whether they be full-disk encryption, UTM or VoIP protection. We use various channels for training, starting from webcast to face-to-face hands-on training. Also there are various types of training like sales, pre-sales and post-sales. Hands-on training enables partners to give product demonstrations and also to implement the solutions for the customers. Check Point also provides professional services training that include advanced trouble shooting training, conducted by experts from our global R&D and solution center team. Check Point’s certification training programs like CCSA, CCSE and CCMA are well known. More and more SMEs are investing in security, but others are shy of investing. How can partners convince SMEs to invest? Security concerns all, irrespective of the size of the organization. The only distinction is the level of exposure to the threat; therefore any security solution should have a feature of pay as you grow. Ideally,

any security solution should have the capability to adapt with the changing threat profile. With limited budgets, SMEs should invest judiciously after carefully doing a risk assessment of their organization and considering the desired security posture. An approach using software blades provides this flexibility to SMEs across their security gateways, endpoint and management. For instance, a startup company in life sciences business may require only media encryption and antivirus, but once it grows, it may need endpoint firewall, browser security, endpoint compliance, etc.

What role does Check Point envisage for its partners? Additionally, what kind of tools does Check Point provide its partners, in terms of support, product training and customer acquisition? Channel partners are the fulcrum of Check Point business, as across the globe 100% of our businesses are done through our loyal partners. In this business model, our partners play a key role in not only carrying our solutions to the end customers but also in communicating our vision, mission and execution strategies. Check Point offers the Collaborative Enterprise Support model, where the front-

Hands-on training enables partners to give product demonstrations and also to implement the solutions for the customers.

What are the benefits for solution providers who partner with Check Point to offer security solutions? Check Point believes in long term strategic relationships rather than transactional ones. We look for partners who are ready for a long haul with us. We enable our partner community to move towards a consultative solution-based approach rather product selling. This approach ensures better profitability for the partner and he earns the respect of the customer as a consultant rather than a reseller. The benefi t of Check Point 3D Security approach is that it combines policies, people and enforcement for stronger protection across all layers of security— including network, data and endpoints. This approach ensures that the partner approaches the customer from a solution perspective rather than pushing to sell a point solution. The Software Blades architecture allows partners to enhance their business with the customers by selling more blades for both security controls and security management.

end support is delivered through partner and the back-end support is through Check Point. In order to acquire customers we provide our partners with various promotional tools. Some of the promotional tool s include var ious competitive replacement programs, functionality upgrade program for existing customers and funded demo units purchase program. These programs are designed to generate more business and provide an accelerated growth path for our partners. Check Point Partner Program rewards partners with an extensive combination of sales, marketing and support offerings.

This Interview is brought to you by IDG Custom Solutions Group in association with

Most valued principals 2010-11

Technology Solutions

Marketing Assistance

Training & Certification

Customer Support

Financial Terms

Management Styles

Overall Score

Standing 2009

MVP

business intelligence

Microsoft

IBM/Cognos

Methodology

SAP/Sybase

HE ChannelWorld Most Valued Principal survey was conducted online during March 2011. Channel partners were invited to rate the performance of vendors in 15 different categories across six key parameters â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Technology Solutions, Marketing Assistance, Training & Certification, Customer Support, Financial Terms, and Management Styles. Solution providers were asked to rate the performance of vendors in only those categories that they operated in and rate only those vendors that they worked with. Partners who did not deal in a particular category were not allowed to rate any vendor in that category. The ratings for all the parameters across categories were on a scale of 1-10 with 10 being the highest. For the overall analysis and to arrive at the final ranking, the ratings of only those respondents were taken who disclosed some basic information about themselves like name of the company, their name, designation, e-mail id, etc. All the ratings of partners who did not disclose their identities were ignored for the overall analysis. Besides, on a random basis about 10 percent of the respondents were contacted to verify and validate their ratings.

Oracle

SAS

Rank

Company

2010-11

IndIan ChannelWorld Apr Il 2011

Microsoft holds on to the top spot, but IBM is close behind

Technology Solutions

Marketing Assistance

Training & Certification

Customer Support

Financial Terms

Management Styles

Overall Score

Standing 2009

client security software

Websense

Symantec

Check Point

Quick Heal

Trend Micro

Rank

Company

Websense jumps to the top spot as symantec loses ground

Marketing Assistance

Training & Certification

Customer Support

Financial Terms

Management Styles

Overall Score

Standing 2009

desktops & notebooks Technology Solutions

Dell

Lenovo

Toshiba

Sony

Rank

Company

The top three continue to hold on to their positions

Weightage & Calculation

Rank

Company

Technology Solutions

Marketing Assistance

Training & Certification

Customer Support

Financial Terms

Management Styles

Overall Score

Standing 2009

enterprise networking - Hardware

Extreme

Cisco

HP/3Com

D-Link

Juniper

HP makes impressive gains as Extreme takes top spot

INCE some parameters are more important than others, to objectively calculate the final scores weightagweightag es have been assigned for each of the parameters. The weightweight ages for the various parameters were arrived at by conducting a sample survey of our past PrePre mier 100 awards winners. The weightages remain the same for all the categories.

relative iMportance Parameter

Overall Score

Standing 2009

Management Styles

Training & Certification

Financial Terms

Customer Support

Marketing assistance

Training & Certification

Marketing Assistance

Technology solutions

Technology Solutions

ip surveillance

Weightage (%)

Pelco

Customer support

Axis Comm.

Honeywell

Financial Terms

Siemens

Management styles

Cisco

Rank

Company

Pelco by schneider wins it hands down with axis a distant second

Technology Solutions

Marketing Assistance

Training & Certification

Customer Support

Financial Terms

Management Styles

Overall Score

Standing 2009

MultiMedia projectors

Canon

Epson

Sanyo

Sony

ViewSonic

Rank

Company

Training and management styles propel Canon to the top

A final weighted average score has been calculated for each vendor in every category by multiplying the average score that a vendor received for each of the parameters by its respecrespec tive weightage and then adding them up. This weighted average score was later converted to a base of 100. The ranking of the vendors in all the categories is based on the final weighted average score. Though the accompanying tata bles show the rounded off scores in whole numbers (for easy readability), decimals, however, have been taken into account for ranking purposes.

APrIl 2011

IndIan ChannelWorld

Most valued principals 2010-11

Marketing Assistance

Training & Certification

Customer Support

Financial Terms

Management Styles

Overall Score

Standing 2009

Check Point

Fortinet

Juniper

SonicWall

Cyberoam retains top spot as Check Point & Fortinet register impressive gains

Management Styles

Overall Score

Standing 2009

network security software Financial Terms

32% South

Customer Support

23% North

Cyberoam

Company

Training & Certification

4% East

36% West

Rank

Marketing Assistance

Regional split of Respondents

Technology Solutions

N ONE of the largest surveys of its kind, a total of 520 respondents from across the country participated and rated 85 different vendors across 15 categories. Since most solution providers deal in multiple categories and engage with multiple vendors, many respondents rated vendors in multiple categories and rated more than one vendor in each category. While the maximum number

network security appliance

Technology Solutions

survey Demographics

Websense

Check Point

Symantec

SonicWall

Rank

Company

Websense & Check Point jump up the order as symantec loses ground

IndIan ChannelWorld Apr Il 2011

Marketing Assistance

Training & Certification

Customer Support

Financial Terms

Management Styles

Overall Score

Standing 2009

network storage Technology Solutions

of respondents were from the western part of the country, the lowest number of respondents were unsurprisingly from the east. Also about 50 percent of the respondents were from the tier 1 cities. Apart from the four metros of Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, and Chennai, Bangalore & Hyderabad have been classified as tier 1 cities. Besides, suburbs that are outside the city limits of these metros have been included as being part of them. So, Gurgaon, Noida, & Faridabad are considered as part of Delhi and Navi Mumbai, Thane are considered as part of Mumbai.

NetApp

IBM

EMC

Hitachi

Rank

Company

netapp wins comfortably as IBM & HP fight for second spot

Vendor & Category selection Technology Solutions

Marketing Assistance

Training & Certification

Customer Support

Financial Terms

Management Styles

Overall Score

Standing 2009

servers

IBM

Dell

Oracle/Sun

Fujitsu

Rank

Company

HOUGH in the accompanying tables the number of vendors is restricted only to the top five, there were, on an average, between nine and ten vendors in each category. All vendors who have at least one product or solution in a category were included in that category. Of the 85 unique vendors, 34 of them were present in more than one category with 14 of

IBM comfortably retains the top spot as Oracle loses ground

Technology Solutions

Marketing Assistance

Training & Certification

Customer Support

Financial Terms

Management Styles

Overall Score

Standing 2009

storage ManageMent software

Symatec

NetApp

IBM/Tivoli

EMC

Rank

Company

a good overall showing helps Ca to the top spot

Technology Solutions

Marketing Assistance

Training & Certification

Customer Support

Financial Terms

Management Styles

Overall Score

Standing 2009

structured cabling

Tyco

DigiLink

Systimax

Molex

ADC Krone

Rank

Company

It is a virtual deadheat between Tyco & digilink as Tyco just about tops

vendors were present in wa the Client security software category, the highest across all categories. them being present in three or more categories. HewlettPackard was present in the maximum number categories at eight, followed by IBM, which was present in six categories. The systems & network management software category had the lowest number of vendors at seven, while client security softsoft ware had the highest number of vendors at 13. Categories were included based on the number of vendors present. Categories in which there were fewer than five venven dors (which essentially makes them monopolies or oligopolies) were not included as part of the survey. Hence, there are no categories for microprocessor, or mainframe, or virtualization, which have very few vendors. APrIl 2011

IndIan ChannelWorld

Most valued principals 2010-11

IndIan ChannelWorld Apr Il 2011

Marketing Assistance

Training & Certification

Customer Support

Financial Terms

Management Styles

Overall Score

Standing 2009

IBM/Tivoli

Quest Software

Microsoft

Standing 2009

Company

Technology & customer support help HP to the top

Company

Training & Certification

Customer Support

Financial Terms

Management Styles

Overall Score

wireless networking Marketing Assistance

Cisco

Extreme

Juniper

D-Link

Aruba

Rank

Cisco comfortably retains top spot as Extreme registers handsome gains

Customer Support

Financial Terms

Management Styles

Overall Score

Standing 2009

workgroup printers & Mfds Training & Certification

servation is the fact that partners in certain categories have rated their principals higher across all parameters compared to other categories. For instance, vendors in categories like storage management software, network storage, network security appliances, and systems & network management software received the higher average scores across parameters. On the other hand, vendors in categories like desktops & notebooks, client security software, and structured cabling, received low average scores across all parameters. Perhaps, there is a hidden message here for the principals present these categories.

Rank

Marketing Assistance

was the average score received for Training & Certification, which was the lowest across all categories

Technology Solutions

systeMs & network ManageMent software

Technology Solutions

HOUGH the scores varied depending on the category, at an aggregate level, partners rated the technology solutions of vendors considerably higher than other parameters like marketing assistance or customer support. Training & certification came across as a sore point for solution providers with the parameter receiving the lowest average score across all categories. looking at the aggregate scores, another interesting ob-

Technology Solutions

scoring trends

Canon

Epson

Samsung

Brother

Rank

Company

HP & Canon swap places while Epson & Brother gain places

Illustration by Unnikrishnan A .V

StarWars

At the dawn of a new financial year, we take a look at six key battles that are likely to be fought in the coming months. By Radhika Nallayam Battles between technology firms are never ending. If one ends, another begins. They invoke interest, create new jargons, and most importantly end in improving the products. Yes, battles are good, especially when they involve the who’s who.

Unified Communication

Cisco vs Micrsoft vs Polycom vs Avaya Who wouldn’t want to be part of a thriving market? Unified communications, once a sole playground of Cisco, is now a hot target market for many. Competition is getting tougher for the networking giant in the UC space as companies like Microsoft and Avaya roll up their sleeves. Microsoft and Cisco in fact compete and collaborate 40

in this market. To be precise, their relationship can be called ‘co-opetition’. The story goes back to 2006, when Microsoft and Nortel formed the Innovative Communications Alliance. But after Nortel went bankrupt and ICA died, Microsoft went straight ahead and formed a UC alliance with HP -- Cisco’s networking and datacenter rival and in the process burning its bridges in a serious way. While Microsoft and Cisco would definitely make for a watch-worthy game, UC and collaboration is the very raison d’etre for a company like Avaya. The competition between Cisco and Avaya, thus, is more serious. The most recent battlefield for the firms is tablet computers tailored specifically for enterprise

collaboration and UC. With the acquisition of Tanberg, Cisco is also competing directly with Polycom in the low-end and mid-range enterprise videoconferencing. Polycom, in turn, aligned itself with Cisco rivals IBM and Juniper to drive sales of its own videoconferencing systems along with IBM servers and storage systems and Juniper routers. With competition raving gradually, UC is going to be an interesting space to keep an eye on.

Battle for the Cloud

Microsoft Vs Red Hat The cloud battlefield is a bit confusing as there are too many rivals who are not sure of who they are fighting with and for what. But there are two clear contenders who

stand-out from the rest of the crowd -- Microsoft and Red Hat. In Red Hat’s own words -- There are only two companies that can provide a stack of cloud-enabled enterprise software, Red Hat and Microsoft. And the former is positioning its Cloud Foundations as an open source alternative to Microsoft’s Azure platform. While Microsoft claims that it has designed Windows Azure grounds up to be the most open cloud platform available today, Red Hat begs to differ. It argues that Windows Azure requires that customers rewrite applications to use APIs that are specific to Microsoft’s hosted Azure service or large hosted services at a small number of Microsoft hosting partners.

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technology battles | FEATURE n Red Hat, by contrast, enables customers to run applications written in their choice of language and framework across physical servers, virtualized environments, and private and public clouds, clarifies the vendor. It has also gone one step further and submitted its cloud platform as a potential standard for interoperability. However, whether the open mantra alone will assure a happy ending for Red Hat is something that we need to wait and see. And discount Microsoft’s marketing potential at your own peril.

Datacenter

HP vs IBM vs Cisco Competition in the datacenter space has been heating up for quite some time now and in the process many old friends have turned foes. Though the market was always competitive, one entry has definitely upset the apple cart. Cisco entered the server market with its ‘Unified Computing System’ in 2009 and started competing with its long-standing partners like HP and IBM. Though Cisco CEO John Chambers made it clear that the company would ‘focus not on competition, but where the market is going’, its move has definitely raised a few eyebrows in the industry. However, what it also did was to accelerate the industry’s move towards the concept of a converged infrastructure -- of offering everything that goes into a datacenter instead offering bits and pieces. As a kneejerk reaction to Cisco’s UC architecture, HP launched its computing system named BladeSystem Matrix, exactly within a month. Though the vendor claimed that its architecture is completely

a different concept from that of Cisco, the intention behind the launch seemed to be no different -- to be the leader in the fast and evergrowing data center market. On the other side, IBM has made its move by getting very close to Cisco rivals Juniper and Brocade. IBM is OEMing switches and routers from both these companies and is trying to keep a safe distance from Cisco at every possible occasion. HP, on the other hand, refused to even acknowledge Cisco as a competitor. But who would emerge as a winner seems to be a tough thing to predict.

Virtual Reality

VMware vs Citrix The rivalry between Citrix and VMware in the virtualization space is not new for anybody. Over the years, it has been getting tougher and at the same time newer. Both the companies have been fighting over new topics every time. It started with VMware clearly becoming the leader in the server virtualization space with numbers that were way ahead of that of Citrix. At that stage, it clearly was one-horse race. However, as Citrix and Microsoft teamed up, things started changing. It was then Citrix’s turn to top VMware in the desktop virtualization market. The former clearly had a lead in this space, though VMware badly tried to pull alongside. While Citrix claimed to have technical superiority in the desktop virtualization, VMware came back with a ‘we invented VDI’ story. The battle between the two has now moved to a different level -- to the cloud. Though VMware seems to be more aggressive about pushing its ‘virtualization as a path to cloud’ story to

customers, Citrix seems to be equally excited about its Cloud App Delivery. The role that these two companies will play in accelerating the cloud adoption is definitely going to be worth a watch.

Lawsuit & Beyond

Oracle vs SAP Theft surely is a serious offense. But application giant SAP learned it the hard way. SAP’s now-shuttered TomorrowNow subsidiary, which provided software support services, downloaded software programs and thousands of support documents illegally from an Oracle website. Quite naturally, Oracle sued the German vendor and a jury awarded Oracle an eye-popping $1.3 billion (reportedly a third of SAP’s estimated 2011 free cash flow) in damages. It was in fact a blow to the German applications vendor, which had argued it should pay no more than $40 million. However, the verdict triggered a fierce war between the two application gorillas. At one stage, incidents turned almost surrealistic when Oracle wanted to grill HP’s Leo Apothekar on the stand, who was part of SAP when it bought TomorrowNow. After being bashed around by Oracle in many ways, the latest that we hear from SAP is its decision to fight Oracle’s $1.3 billion jury award, claiming that the ‘amount is disproportionately high for its offense’. The legal war between Oracle and SAP can also be considered as a reflection of the impending rivalry between the two companies in the market that they operate. But one thing is certain. We haven’t seen the end of this fight yet.

Hurd, Hardware, & More

Oracle vs HP Mark Hurd (former HP-CEO and present Oracle CoPresident) made headlines for quite understandable reasons. He stepped down as CEO of HP following an investigation into claims that he sexually harassed a former contractor to the company. But what made more eyes roll are the incidents that followed Hurd’s resignation. It almost reminded us of a reality show when Oracle CEO Larry Ellison stepped in as Hurd’s most vocal supporters, criticizing HP’s board for its handling of the matter. Within a month, we saw Hurd as one of the copresidents of Oracle. ‘Mark did a brilliant job at HP and I expect he’ll do even better at Oracle,’ said CEO Larry Ellison in a statement, referring to his professional talent. HP obviously did not keep quiet and sued Hurd saying his hiring violates the terms of a severance agreement he signed with HP. “Despite being paid millions of dollars in cash, stock and stock options in exchange for Hurd’s agreements to protect HP’s trade secrets .... HP is informed and believes and thereon alleges that Hurd has put HP’s most valuable trade secrets and confidential information in peril,” stated the suit. Oracle called HewlettPackard’s lawsuit against its former CEO “vindictive” and said it threatened the two companies’ close relationship. Hurd still remains a happy employee of Oracle, while the rivalry between Oracle and HP went up multi-fold. And now with the former SAP man Leo Apotheker leading the show at HP, the rivalry only looks set to intensify further. 

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n Tagline

The journey between detecting a data breach to managing the entire customer IT is a challenging one which Locuz

Solutions completed with aplomb. By Kartik Sharma

Uttam Majumdar of Locuz Enterprises (left) and Xavier Augustin of Y-Axis

aligning the axis 42

P h o t o b y s u r e s h v a n g a p a l ly

othing is small and small is

big”. Hyderabad-based solution provider Locuz Enterprise Solutions exemplified this adage by valuing a call from immigration consultants Y-Axis for a small implementation and converting it into a big IT project for them. The story dates back to 2009 when a fast growing Y-Axis found itself in trouble when its crucial data got compromised and the company found itself helpless in sorting it out. Xavier Augustin, President & CEO, Y- Axis, recalls, “We came across a serious case in our Bangalore office, where our whole data got compromised, there was even no point in complaining to the police as they had no understanding of IT threats; they could not provide the data back to us.”

Competing with Competence It was at this crucial juncture that Y-Axis was looking for some large SI such as Sify and Microland but soon realized these large players do not look for comparatively smaller clients like Y-Axis. Thus Locuz came into the picture. Locuz CEO Uttam Majumdar personally ensured that there was no stone left unturned in clinching the Y Axis deal. He went to the client’s office with his core team for talks that worked as the clinching factor. Augustin observes, “Where all big SIs appointed some salesperson to do the talking, here the CEO came in to do the talking.” This personalized consultancy approach tilted the scales

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case study n in Locuz’s favor. Majumdar believes that being a local player was advantageous for Locuz. “We are local players with a national presence. Though we were comparatively smaller, I believe we have a forte in systems integration and that combined with a down-toearth approach helped us to bag the deal,” he recalls.

Key Parties: Y Axis Overseas Career,

towards transformation

Key Challenges: Fixing data breach,

Bagging the deal was just the beginning of the story. What started off as a mere solution to a data breach went on to become a complete IT transformation project. While spotting the data breach and solving the problem Locuz astutely investigated the whole network and understood that the client data was not safe even after mending it. It was time to persuade the customer to make big changes in its IT infrastructure. Majumdar explains, “Y Axis just wanted a quick fix of data breach but we realized the need for something more, post investigation. We went to the client asked them to sit with us and discuss.” Locuz soon pointed out that there was a lack of coordination between the business of company and the IT infrastructure. Majumdar reflects, “We analyzed each and every employee’s profile and convinced them that their business is not postured rightly and there is a need of higher level of automation. It needed technical as well as cultural change within the company to get rid of the problem on the whole.” A forensic investigation soon helped Locuz arrive at a comprehensive IT blueprint for Y Axis. It seemed quite evident that the client needed to offload its IT infrastructure management to an external service provider. The logic was quite simple -- the client’s locations were not suitable for building a datacenter. Hence Locuz decided to convince Y Axis to transfer the whole IT infrastructure from its location to Locuz’s datacenter and establish a private cloud. Thus, Locuz shaped a project worth an estimated $200, 000. However, things were easier said than done. Locuz had to counter with the skepticism of the client, who felt Locuz might not be equipped with prior experience to handle a project

Snapshot Locuz Enterprise Solutions

Location: Hyderabad Project Cost: $ 200,000 Competing with big SIs; Convincing the costumer to outsource its entire IT infrastructure.

Post Implementation ROI: Tripling of client’s user base with no significant IT investment.

Key Technologies: Virtualization, Networking, Firewall.

Client’s Locations: Bangalore, Pune, Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Hyderabad and Chennai

Project Time: 6 months of this kind. Augustin comments, “We were worried that our data protection was at stake. It was not an easy job to convince us.” Cost was also an issue as there were quite a few cheaper solutions available in the market and the technology proposed by Locuz was comparatively expensive. Undeterred, Locuz detailed to the client about its past expertise and the long term benefits of the solutions (private cloud on a highly virtualized platform) suggested. Y Axis soon saw reason in the case since Locuz was not only hosting the IT infrastructure on its premises but was also taking the onus of all the country-wide automation on itself. This meant that Locuz would depute people across locations in case of an exigency.

The Deal of Advantages Though an on premise implementation could have bagged Locuz a larger deal, earning them a handsome one time income and they could also have enjoyed recurring revenue on services for the datacenter, Majumdar believed that it was not the way to get the deal done. Majumdar explains, “We wanted a complete win-win situation for both Locuz as well as Y Axis.”

As part of the private cloud and outsourcing deal, the whole investment in new hardware and software consisted of 70 percent of the project cost, which the client invested as capex and the remaining 30 percent came in the form of infrastructure provided by Locuz. The solution provider also gained in terms of real estate by charging the client for the rack space and server they provided for the private cloud. Locuz and Y-Axis also agreed upon the commercial subscription model. Part of the SLA was that if the client grows in future, Locuz’ fee would be increased according to the increase in the efforts and resources to be deployed. “There is no fixed price engagement. This project also helps us in optimizing the use of our existing resources,” Majumdar says. Y Axis has seen tremendous benefits in the bargain too. There has been an increase in productivity with a lot of savings in terms of time, money and efforts. Augustin says, “We just wanted our employees to do what they have come into office for. Now we have blocked social networking which was hampering the work environment. Any foreign email address or keyword gets directly reported to us now. There is no interruption in internet services. And all this is going flawless since the implementation.” Y Axis’ user base has reportedly tripled since and the company has received accolades within the industry. Augustin informs, “We are getting recognized by media. People are looking at us as a model company in terms of IT infrastructure.” The Y Axis project had its fallouts in more ways than one. Locuz found a leeway into a new vertical with this deal. Majumdar states, “With Y-Axis endorsing us, we can now freely demonstrate our work in the field of complete transformation. We have bagged more such projects even bigger in last couple of years.” Besides Y-Axis has become a loyal customer with a promise of future IT business with Locuz as a well implied understanding. “Y Axis does not have a single IT staff on their premises to handle IT anymore; this is our biggest testimony,” concludes Majumdar.  April 2011

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n FAST TRACK

Kiosk Technologies

angalore has an uncanny ability to spawn IT entrepreneurs, mostly because it churns out thousands of professionals from its many engineering institutions. Rajesh Gupta, Founder and Director of Kolkata-based Kiosk Technologies is one among them. After graduating as an engineer, he realized that an IT solutions firm was his way ahead. “Along with a few friends of mine I set up Kiosk Technologies. IBM mainframes were selling like hotcakes at this point and we also got into corporate training. We also put a small team to market some of the solutions,” says Gupta. Soon after, the dotcom bust was a dampener for many fledgling companies. Kiosk too was affected by the bust even though they had a resource pool of students to help them position the company on development. “We were the first company to offer Java-based training in eastern India. We made functional portals in India. But with the bust the portals fell apart, but the IT industry rose again to by defining itself in the services sector,” adds Gupta.

ph o t o g r a p h by foto c o r p

A Fresh Beginning In 2002, Gupta had to start things afresh, this time focusing on software solutions. Kiosk was restructured and they looked at software licensing, integrating it with solutions. “As we had experience in training and marketing we were able to re-allocate responsibilities to the team for the new products. The people involved with training became part of the technical team and the marketing group focused

We don’t rely on OEMs for everything says Rajesh Gupta, Director, Kiosk Technologies 44

FT_Hari.indd 44

on sales of software products,” says Gupta. Their first order came from ITC for certain reports that they needed. We put in a few software solutions to work that out. But, the importance of software sales and licensing was apparent when a significant deal with BEL (Bharat Electricals Limited) did not go through because Kiosk’s revenue in the software vertical did not make the cut, even though their turnover was more than a crore. This was a defining moment, according to Gupta. “We have always looked for our customers independently and have not relied on the OEMs to set the ball rolling. That is the way we have positioned ourselves right from the start. We have different vendors for different products and made sure that it is not a monopolistic hold that they have on us. We don’t do any retail and the home user is not someone we target. I think another differentiator is that we have not restricted ourselves to the tier-1 cities. We make our presence felt in the remote locations too, especially with software being ubiquitous,” says Gupta. Kiosk estimates a turnover of Rs10.5 Crore for 2010-11 which has to be attributed to the quality of services they provide. “We have invested in infrastructure here. But the challenge we have is that most of the OEMs are based out of Delhi or some other location and not the East. Generally, if there is a product then we have training through the vendors. Also I have created small, separate business units within the organization so that they can take independent decisions relating to a project. This has been a gradual process,” adds Gupta. The company focuses on marketing storage and security. Although most of their effort goes into the data storage and backup, the sales comprises of only 15 percent. “We try to help the customer and help highlight something they are not aware of in their business. We had

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a few interesting projects with Cognizant and National Insurance. The one with Cognizant was particularly interesting in which we set up a POC for a back-up project. It eventually became so big that they sent it to their US office. We couldn’t win this deal because we not nationally present and this was taking an international scale, but our OEM did manage to broker a deal for the same,” claims Gupta. Even the National Insurance deal, which was related to security, required them to have hundred crore turnover. This too had to be passed over to another company, but for both of these projects Kiosk managed to get a commission for their efforts. In the first couple of years after setting up, Kiosk was not interested in a rebate which Gupta says may have created a few issues with the OEMs as some of the vendors were interested in helping out the company, but only according to their terms. Kiosk declined some of the offerings. Presently Kiosk has a number of partners across its verticals which include Microsoft, McAfee, Symantec, HP, Oracle, Cyberoam, Statsoft, IBM. Gupta believes that the targets set up by the OEMs are often too high. The expectations each year tend to rise, which is natural for these companies for emerging markets in the APAC. “Obviously everybody wants to make money, but I believe it shouldn’t be done at all cost. The path to be followed has to be feasible. So when a company approaches me saying these are your targets and benefits can be claimed only if you reach the specified targets, it sours the relationship between partners, at least for a company that has been in the market for more than a decade. So when a growth of 100 percent is expected year on year, then I think the goals often become unrealistic for the partners,” justifies Gupta.

Tackling Downturn Downturn had to be tackled differently and each organization during this period did it in its own inimita-

revenue split

vertical split 10%

15%

Manufacturing

10%

Oil & Gas

45% SMBs:

40%

Enterpise:

20% Utilities

10% Power

Source: Kiosk Technologies Pvt. Limited

ble way. Most companies in Kolkata did not lose a lot during the recession, maybe because the IT deployment is slow in the eastern region. Here companies maintained a static growth showing no decline in their growth. “Each company had its own formula. We were prepared to take a topline hit. What most companies expectedly did was to cut costs, lay-offs, etc. But we did not release people. We did not do anything much except for pulling down a fringe cost and stayed on course. But there is also opportunity during these times. When people were

Snapshot Headquarters: Kolkata Branch: Ranchi Year Founded: 2000 Key Business Activities: Software & Hardware Solutions Revenue - 2008-09: Rs 5.99 Core Revenue - 2009-10: Rs 7.54 Crore. Revenue – 2010-11: Rs 10.50 Crore (Est.) Key Principals: Microsoft, McAfee, Symantec, HP, Oracle, Cyberoam, Statsoft, IBM No of employees: 19 Key Technologies: Security & Storage Website: www.kiosktech.com

being released, we managed a clean chit in that respect,” says Gupta. “After the recession we have been bold enough to reach out to the customers. We have bagged two security projects with Calcutta Electric Supply Corporation and National Aluminium in Bhubaneswar. Both are similar projects lasting close to five months. We do not claim to know everything. It’s an ongoing process, we learn as we cope with the challenges,” says Gupta. Presently Kiosk does not have any plans to expand geographically. They had offices in different cities in the eastern sector, but Gupta decided to focus more on the Kolkata base. “I believe that the OEMs have only few people to push their products. So they engage with companies like us and if this engagement does not have a technology based relationship then that link is broken. So for kind of business we are in it doesn’t make sense to go around opening branches in different locations and competing for the same offerings,” says Gupta. Nearly 45 percent of the comapnys business revenue comes through SMBs and 40 percent through its enterprise customers They ventured into cloud services and virtualization in April of last year. “We are partnering with Microsoft and VMware for cloud and virtualization respectively. We are focusing on the cloud services and infact out new recruits are for these specializations and none of them are for our marketing part,” concludes Gupta.  — Shreehari Paliath April 2011

FT_Hari.indd 45

50%

Others

Others:

INDIAN Channelworld

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n FAST TRACK

Taashee Linux Services

Taashee Linux Services. How does Taashee clinch deals in competitive Indian marketplace with partner folks pitching open or proprietary architecture? “An enterprise today looks for lowest price, latest technology and experienced skill sets .If you understand customer pain points and their IT roadmap, you are cherry amongst the group of competitors,” says Abhishek Datt, CTO, Taashee Linux Services. “Our team clearly opens up challenges to the customer at the start as we conduct extensive research about each project,” he adds. The software sales (Red Hat & JBoss) including Red Hat subscription model, updates on certified products, telephone/web support contribute 60 percent of company revenues while services business (40 percent) comprises of implementation services, managed services and corporate training. Even for long-time UNIX users stuck with complexities of proprietary solutions, the company offers migration services to switch to enterprise-grade Red Hat.

Converting into open source is easier in enterpises says Manojkummar Garg, COO, Taashee Linux Services

100 percent Linux and

open source software company, Taashee Linux Services has clinched large deals in Indian enterprise space in past eighteen months. The commitment and skills have helped the company to earn the coveted advance partner status of Red Hat for its platform and middleware products. Today, while most

partners align with different vendors to suffice customer demands; Taashee is content with the one vendor plan. “We help enterprises to fully utilize the power of Linux and open source technologies to deliver higher stability, higher security and higher performance with lower cost and lesser administrative overheads compared to proprietary solutions,” says Manojkummar Garg, COO,

P h o t o b y s u r e s h v a n g a p a l ly

Loyal to Red Hat Founders of Taashee –Manojkummar Garg and Abhishek Datt started EXL (open source solutions on desktop) in 2002. Garg recalls, “At one time, we were competitors to Red Hat. A lot of funding is needed for product sales and somehow the company could not survive.” Anticipating open source to take off in years to come, they ventured with services and selling of Red Hat subscription. There were very few partners in the services space, justifies Garg about their second venture. The duo has nine year experience in open source industry. A contract from Red Hat for implementation for desktop clustering for Andhra Pradesh Tourism Department in 2008 was the first order for Taashee. The company executed country’s first Red Hat virtualization project on XEN for Bilcare and first Red Hat HPC project for IIT Chennai. “Red Hat had support centers in major metros with development centre at Pune. Hence we opted for Red Hat than Novell and others, he says. By sticking to one principal, Red Hat also supports us

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as loyal partner, says Garg. Last year Taashee Linux Services was recognized as the most committed partner for Red Hat in APAC. “Interaction with one principal is easy as we are more committed with a legacy of strong technical skill sets since past nine years. Most customers have come back for services and they have even referred us to other customers. Even principal knows we get good references due to our skill sets in the marketplace,” says Garg. Taashee technical team understands customers’ infrastructure in terms of servers, total database, and consolidation roadmap and then gives proposal for virtualization, etc. Red Hat Virtualization (RHEV) is now competing with VMware for its performance and user interface, says Garg about the value proposition of extensive bouquet of Red Hat offerings. Capex is also much less than VMware, he points out.

onuS S on teCH e nICa eCH IC L expeRtISe ICa Taashee keeps abreast with new technology trends like cloud. “We invest heavily in IT infrastructure like enterprise class blade servers, blade servers from hardware side. Taashee Research Lab is an internal lab where technical people are expected to deliver research work including digging new open source tools and gaining expertise,” says Datt. The second team is implementation and testing which simulate customer environment, inject problems and try to find solutions. Stay at edge of Red Hat and OSS is the company’s mantra. The solutions would be Red Hat but we use other OSS to bridge the gaps and we become one point contact for the customer of open source, he adds.

Snapshot Founded: 2008 Headquarter: Hyderabad Branch: Mumbai Revenue 2010-11: Rs 10 Crore (Est.) Revenue 2009-2010: Rs 3 Crore Key Executives: Manojkummar Garg (COO), Abhishek Datt (CTO), Amit Kulkarni (GM - Sales), Kalpa Gondhalekar (Principal Advisor) Employees: 25 Key Principals: Red Hat Key Technologies: HA & HPC clustering, Migration to Red Hat, Virtualization & Cloud Computing, Remote & on-site system management, Datacenter setup, Security & Optimization Key Business Activities: Open Source Solutions & Support, Red Hat Sales & Training Web Site: www.taashee.com

Most enterprise customers start with conservative requirements like JBoss and then they slowly unleash other aspects of business to Taashee. “The technical staff then offers them the entire suite of open source solutions from Red Hat. Most are repeat customers as they can expect less price points, good service, and high skill sets,” he says. In India, enterprise customers want partners to diagnose their problems and seek good solutions from partners, which take time. From

VERTiCAl SPliT 5% 10%

government

REVEnuE SPliT 5%

education

30% sMb

15%

logistics

20% bFsi

45% it/ites

40%

enterprise

retail & utilities

30%

Mid-Market

2007, lot of people took self initiatives as even CIOs did their in house projects on open source.Companies look for partners who could hand hold them and a mature partner can take forward. “Converting into open source is easier in enterprises, though the industry including us thought SMBs will drive it. Also many SMBs do not follow compliance model strongly, hence renewals is more prevalent for enterprises,” reasons Datt. Most companies who installed open source earlier are facing roadblock or less performance for production applications on Linux or JBoss. “We have received many such queries from past few months. The industry is looking for open source specialists and we aim to make Taashee a power house for open solutions in India,”says Datt.

FutuRe LooKS KS Good In next fiscal year, Taashee will add branches at Delhi and Bangalore and increase employee strength by at least 50 percent. The company is contemplating offices outside India. “We are building a special team to enhance focus on technologies of virtualization and Cloud, says Garg. IPO by 2015 is also on the agenda,” he says. Aiming to double the revenues for 2011-2012, Taashee will increase open source solutions across Government. At present, the revenues from this vertical are around 5 percent. “We want to address Government in planned and full fledged manner than rely on sub contracts. As we complete three years of inception this March, we will register with NICSI and hence bid aggressively for Government projects,” says Garg. IT projects are beyond transactions as we ensure fixable solutions to address the customer pain points. “Not in every deal can you make money but you make loyal customer base which trusts you as a reliable solution provider,” says Garg. Now, is best time for open source technology according to Datt. “The next big thing is cloud computing addressed by Red Hat Cloud foundations. Red Hat is great source to open doors of customers for us,” he concludes. n —y yogesh Gupta

Source: taashee t linux services

APRIL 2011

IndIan CHanneLwoRLd

â&#x2013; mACRO VIEW | mAnpREEt SIngh SIdhu

Focusing on core competence and delivering seamless solutions are the winning strategies to move to the next level. By Shantheri Mallaya

Buildon core Strength 48

IndIA Ind IAn n ChA Ch A nn nnE E lWOR WORld ld Apr il 2011

P h oto by s uj i t h s uj a n

Manpreet Singh Sidhu, Founder and CEO, Apara Networks says the company differs from the other SI s in the space in terms of depth of the competencies it delivers. Apara has been around for sometime now. So, how would you define your core competence? We have been pioneers in the data storage space. Right from our early years, we have brought in technology to the country that had hitherto not been used, serviced or supported in India. We moved onto the one appliance, one service concept. Largely, if you service data, you can have a big or small appliance then connectiv connectivity comes into the picture through ports with Gigabit, Fiber Channel or Ethernet. Mission critical challenges can be met without compromising speed. As data grows, it eventually builds into being a very complex and sophisticated solution. We are very good at the data storage driven space, which is about enabling infor information that allows organizations to

focus on their core businesses. If information is available and moving from the core to the edge in a very secure way, that’s what organizations aspire. Applications, servers and the network are tangibles, it is the people who add value and make it unique and create processes. Having come this far, we compete with the top vendors and leading organizations; our customers are the who’s who in the country. Is it a conscious decision to look at only the larger customers? Having said that larger the customer, the more value he derives out of the engagement, I do believe it is the mission criticality of the information that takes precedence over anything else. Large organizations have huge volumes in data, in terabytes and petabytes. Sometimes, it is also about smaller volumes of data in a highly mission critical situation. For instance, if it sits on Oracle or SAP, it is sensitive, while if it is SQL or email related data, it may not be so critical. We are able to do tiering, understand how to purge the data, take backups to ensure business continuity. We are strengthening our core competence and continue to remain focused on these areas. What are the key challenges and differentiators for Apara, since the company is in competition with some very large players in the SI space? Technology neutrality rather an allegiance with a vendor is what we stand for. We also differ from the other SIs in our space in terms of depth of the competencies we deliver. They are more fulfillment agents with specialization in the application space, but our competence is more in the core of the infrastructure layer. Our ability to handle this piece makes us unique and formidable. Largely if you compare the technology owners such as the IBMs, Dells or the Ciscos, they do not own the complete states involving data and technology, and they need to resort to acquisitions, rebranding or tie up as OEMs. Whenever any of these three things happen, it can be quite taxing for the customer.

Our value added and tansparent approach helps us gain trust and establish comfort levels with our customers

One, integration of legacy technology in a seamless manner is a challenge when acquisitions happen. And if there is a vendor foraying into any of these three areas such as Intelligent Networking, Storage or Security, there are independent technology owners already existing in the space. No one big vendor owns any of these. So, a solution provider like Apara should know how these technologies talk to one another and build them into a seamless solution that works transparently, in an open manner for the enterprise customer. A transparent and value added approach help us gain trust and establish comfort levels. How do you deal with competition and undercutting? While funding for customer acquisition does remain a challenge, we have never faced any challenge in retaining customers. Once a customer engages with us, we typically win; there is never an exit, no matter what. It is a well thought out pace at which we are moving at

the moment. We have a clean record which has stood the test of time even when in a phase of slow growth. After data storage, what is next on the anvil? Well, the next step would be private and public clouds. So we start delivering on these technologies. We are also looking at servers and additional services, driven by customer requirements. The discussion on cloud remains quite dynamic. But, it all depends on how and what services the customer wants to deploy. There are services which do not put the risk or threat of brining the customer site down. In such cases, there are fewer challenges in wanting a public cloud. In a private cloud, he would look at greater control. There is a lot of keenness among software developers, semiconductor industry, financial institutions, insurance, amongst others who want to cut down costs and the cloud is the most logical step for these entities. Apara as a company has been around for close to two decades. Do you think the company has enjoyed the kind of growth it should have? The first decade of business was good; the last decade not so good, since we got into a project that was not our core competence, at the turn of the millennium. This resulted in setbacks. It has taken a decade to stabilize and offset some of the losses that happened. Going forward, it is all about growing and rebuilding. We have set a growth rate of 30-40 percent yearon-year. We are exploring alliances in terms of venture capitalists that will pump in money. Will domestic business continue to be Apara’s mainstay? We have addressed almost all the corners of the world. We have had offices in Germany, London, Belgium, Netherlands, US, Middle East and Singapore. But, we are largely focused on our India business. Anything that is India-centric and takes us to locations across the world is most welcome; we are very open to collaborations. Domestic business is very lucrative and contributes to the best part of our revenues.  April 2011

Macroview.indd 49

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4/13/2011 3:35:45 PM

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everything about BACKup

Modernize Your Backup Infrastructure

How to adopt the latest back up and recovery technologies. By W Curtis Preston

VER GET THE FEELING that your backup system is behind the times? Do you read trade magazines and wonder if you’re the only one still using an antiquated backup system? The first thing you should know is that you’re not the only one. But your backup system could probably use

Focul_Point-new2.indd 51

some modernization. New technologies have changed the nature of the backup game in a fundamental way, with disk playing an increasingly important role and tape moving further into the background. Many of the liabilities and performance issues that have dogged datacenter backups forever

I l l u s t r a t i o n s by U n n i k r i s h n a n AV

Focal Point

now have plausible technology solutions, provided those solutions are applied carefully and dovetail with primary storage strategy. Before you contemplate a modernization plan, you need a working understanding of new high-speed disk- based solutions; schemes that reduce the volume of data being replicated; and how real-time data protection techniques actually work.

THE DISK IN THE MIDDLE D2D2T (disk-to-disk-totape) strategies have gained popularity in recent years due to the great disparity between the devices being backed up (disks), the network carrying the backup, and the devices receiving the backup (tape).

The average throughput of a disk drive 15 years ago was approximately 4MBps to 5MBps, and the most popular tape drive was 256KBps, so the bottleneck was the tape drive. Fastforward to today, and we have 70MBps disk drives, but tape drives that want 120MBps. Disks got 15 to 20 times faster, but tape drives got almost 500 times faster! Tape is no longer the bottleneck; it’s starving to death. This is especially true when you realize that most backups are incremental and hold on to a tape drive for hours on end – all the while moving only a few gigabytes of data. D2D2T strategies solve this problem by placing a high-speed buffer between the fragmented, disk-based

4/13/2011 3:33:30 PM

n focal point | BACKUP file systems and databases being backed up and the hungry tape drive. This buffer is a disk-based storage system designed to receive slow backups and supply them very quickly to a high-speed tape drive. The challenge faced by some customers (especially large ones) was that many backup systems didn’t know how to share a large disk system and use it for backups. Sure, they could back up to a disk drive, but what if you needed to share that disk drive among multiple backup servers? Many backup products still can’t do that, especially Fibre-Channel-connected disk drives. Enter the virtual tape library, or VTL. It solved this sharing problem by presenting the disk drives as tape libraries, which the backup software products have already learned how to share. Now you could share a large disk system among multiple servers. In addition, customers more familiar with a tape interface were presented with a very easy transition to backing up to disk. Another approach to creating a shareable disk target is the intelligent disk target, or IDT. Vendors of IDT systems felt the best approach was to use the NFS or CIFS protocol to present the disk system to the backup system. These protocols also allowed for easy sharing among multiple backup servers. But both VTL and IDT vendors had a fundamental problem: The cost of disk made their systems cost effective as staging devices only. Customers stored a single night’s backups on disk and then quickly streamed them off to tape. They wanted to store more backups on disk, but they couldn’t afford 52

REDUCING RISK WITH ENCRYPTION

hile encryption is not a new technology, high-speed encryption for large-volume backup systems is new. Today’s backup encryption systems can encrypt as fast as the backup target can run, and include a variety of key management systems to meet a number of different environments’ needs. Everyone has heard tales of woe about unencrypted backup tapes being lost or stolen. While this has always been a problem, it’s a bigger issue now, because government regulations won’t let you sweep it. Enter deduplication.

THE MAGIC OF DATA DEDUPLICATION Typical backups create duplicate data in two ways: repeated full backups and repeated incrementals of the same file when it changes multiple times. A deduplication system identifies both situations and eliminates redundant files, reducing the amount of disk necessary to store your backups anywhere from 10:1 to 50:1 and beyond, depending on the level of redundancy in your data. Deduplication systems also work their magic at the subfile level. To do so, they identify segments of data (a segment is typically

such incidents under the rug. Instead, you are required by law to notify customers when their data goes AWOL – except if that data has been encrypted. The strategy is simple: Either encrypt tapes or don’t send them anywhere. There are a number of encryption options, including backup software encryption, SAN appliance encryption, and tape drive encryption. Pick one of these methods, and if a tape is stolen or lost, it won’t be readable – and you won’t have to notify anyone (with most laws on the books, anyway). Alternatively, if deduplicasmaller than a file but bigger than one byte) that are redundant with other segments and eliminate them. The most obvious use for this technology is to allow users to switch from disk staging strategies (where they’re storing only one night’s worth of backups) to disk backup strategies (where they’re storing all onsite backups on disk). There are two main types of deduplication. Target dedupe systems allow customers to send traditional backups to a storage system that will then dedupe them; they are typically used in medium to large datacenters and perform at high speed. Source dedupe systems use

Before you contemplate a modernization plan, you need a working understanding of new high-speed disk- based solutions; schemes that reduce the volume of data being replicated; and how real-time data protection techniques actually work.

tion and replication are in place, you can forgo sending tapes anywhere at all. Just back up to a dedupe system – and replicate over a highspeed connection to another dedupe system off-site. Now you have on-site and off-site backups and you haven’t touched a tape. If you want to make tapes, you can do so at the off-site facility, so the tape never needs to be shipped. It can be locked in a tape library, a locked cage, a locked datacenter, or a locked building. With the right rules in place, those tapes don’t even need to be encrypted. different backup software to eliminate the redundant data from the very beginning of the process and serve to back up remote offices and mobile users.

PROTECTING TRANSACTION SYSTEMS Disk-to-disk backup systems, deduplication, and CDP were all developed to solve specific problems. So let’s have a look at the challenges of today’s datacenters to see how these technologies can help. The first challenge: highvolume transaction systems that are intolerant of data loss. Most industries experience double-digit increases in the volume of transactions every year. That’s just the nature of computing. And along the way, organizations have grown increasingly worried about data loss, thanks to high-profile customer data debacles that have created one public relations nightmare after another. Depending on the volume of transactions and

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tolerance of downtime, companies that want to minimize risk turn to internal disk-based systems rather than tape (which has an unfortunate tendency to escape the datacenter) as their primary backup target. The question is whether or not they use traditional backup software to get there. Switching from tape to disk as the primary target – while still using traditional backup software – makes it easier to create backups of transaction logs that can be used to rebuild those transactions easily in case of data loss. In addition, the use of disk allows those transaction log backups to be replicated offsite so they can be used even in the case of disaster. Using disk as the primary target for backups can also help in full recovery of large databases, as the aggregate performance of the disk system can be easily matched to the recovery time objective (RTO) of the restores you are likely to perform. But the true power of disk in a recovery system can be realized only by switching from a traditional backup system to CDP or near-CDP. Traditional backup still suffers from the laws of physics. If

Focul_Point-new2.indd 53

you’ve got a 20TB database to restore and a five-hour RTO, you need to be able to restore more than 4TB per hour, leaving a little time to replay the appropriate amount of transaction logs. A CDP or near-CDP system solves this by presenting an already-recovered image during an outage. Both CDP and near-CDP systems can present to a recovery server a read-write image of the most recent backup of the system to be recovered. This includes presenting a read-write image of the latest version of the operating system and application to the server or virtual server that will be used in a recovery scenario. In fact, some CDP

software systems even use incremental restore capabilities to continually keep a VMware image up to date to be used in a recovery. The number of lost transactions a business can tolerate in a recovery scenario will determine the recovery point objective (RPO), and the amount of downtime it can afford will determine the RTO. The more aggressive a business’s RTO, the more it will be led to choose CDP or near-CDP. The more aggressive its RPO, the more it will need to choose CDP over near-CDP. Many nearCDP systems cannot do any better than a one- hour RPO, because that’s how often they can take a snap-

BACKING UP AS YOU GO

DP (continuous data protection) is another increasingly popular disk-based backup technology. Think of it as replication with an Undo button. Every time a block of data changes on the system being backed up, it is transferred to the CDP system. However, unlike replication, CDP stores changes in a log, so you can undo those changes at a very granular level. In fact, you can recover the system to literally any point in time at which data was stored within the CDP system. A near-CDP system works in similar fashion except that it has discrete points in time to which it can recover. To put it another way, near-CDP combines snapshots with replication. Typically, a snapshot is taken on the system being backed up, whereupon that snapshot is replicated to another system that holds the backup. Why take the snapshot on the source before replication? Because only at the source can you typically quiesce the application writing to the storage so that the snapshot will be a meaningful one.

shot; customers looking for a one-minute RPO are usually forced to choose a true CDP solution that does not rely on snapshots.

PROTECTING E-MAIL SYSTEMS The next challenge we’ll take a look at is backing up and recovering e-mail systems. Most modern email systems are at their heart database systems, so the backup systems work in similar ways. But the typical recovery request of an e-mail system differs markedly from that of a database. Databases are rarely recovered, but when they are, they are fully recovered up to the point of failure. Rarely are databases restored in part; that is, rarely do you restore a single table in a database (database recovery mechanisms do not even have that ability). Usually, your only choice is to restore the entire database to an alternate location and then export the table you need to restore. E-mail systems, on the other hand, often receive recovery requests for a single table or even a single row in that table. In other words, they are often asked to restore an individual user’s mailbox, folder, or even a single e-mail message.

4/13/2011 3:33:32 PM

n focal point | BACKUp Oddly enough, in the first half of the current decade, the only way to restore at this granular level mirrored what you did with databases: Restore the e-mail application to an alternate location, and then drag and drop the mailbox, folder, or e-mail that you needed to the appropriate server. The advent of recovery storage groups in Exchange changed all that. With recovery groups, admins can restore only the storage group containing the affected user or e-mail, then drag and drop what they need. To take advantage of this feature, however, you must ensure that Exchange admins split their servers into multiple storage groups from the start. Other advancements in the e-mail department include the ability of some backup software to extract user-level information from Exchange Information Store backups. This is another benefit of using disk-based backups. Placing all e-mail backups on disk allows the backup software to do its own querying and extraction of parts of the backup, facilitating quick restores of users and folders. Unfortunately, these advancements in e-mail backup and recovery are unlikely to help you with electronic discovery. As you know, companies now commonly receive electronic discovery requests as part of a lawsuit or government investigation. Install an e-mail archive system. These systems make it much easier to extract all kinds of information from your e-mail system. This is especially true when you are asked for e-mails with various search criteria over long periods of time. Take, 54

Regulatory Compliance Should be a Byproduct

ince the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, government agencies and industry groups have issued at least 22 regulations or industry standards to address business continuity and disaster recovery, according to a Forrester Research report. Although many of the programs are voluntary, they nevertheless have prompted some companies to fund additional business continuity and disaster recovery projects. But companies that make investments just to comply with a regulation or industry standard are missing the point, experts say. “Unfortunately, they really just want to check the box” and spend as little as possible on business continuity in order to be compliant, says Rachel Dines, a Forrester analyst. On the other hand, she says, regulations “at least make people think about it.” For most IT managers, however, it takes more than for example, a request to create a PST file of all emails containing the words “square,” “circle,” “rectangle,” or “triangle” that were sent by Joe Smith to Fred Barney between February 2005 and March 2009. Satisfying that request with backup software would be nearly impossible; doing it with e-mail archive software is a piece of cake.

VIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENTS Virtual servers can be a big help in recovery scenarios. They make it much easier to create a set of recovery servers at the recovery site

a well-timed act of nature to convince executives to invest more in business continuity and disaster recovery. It takes a compelling story that’s full of the hard numbers that executives appreciate. In the past, it was hard to make a business case for disaster recovery systems because they were viewed as expensive insurance policies against things that might not happen. But a Forrester Research report says that’s changing because IT managers are getting better at quantifying risks and assessing the impact of a disruption. “It’s more of an art than a science,” says Dines. “Most executives don’t realize how much it costs. We’re talking about millions of dollars. So it’s really all about how you pitch it.” Ideally, regulatory compliance is merely a byproduct of a sound business continuity or disaster recovery plan. By Stacy Collett Computerworld that match the computing capabilities in the datacenter. The recovery servers may not be as fast, but they will have the same operating system, and they will at least think they have the same hardware, which solves an important part of the recovery problem. To modernize backup infrastructure to support virtual environments, organizations running VMware should upgrade to vSphere and look for a backup product that supports its vStorage API. This removes the need for a physical proxy server, a staging area, twostep backups, two-step

restores, and full backups in order to get incremental backups. You can use a VM as your proxy server, you don’t need a staging disk, and you get change block tracking, which allows the backup app to ask a VM what blocks have changed since the last backup.

BACK up: HARD TO DO One of the biggest challenges of managing a backup infrastructure is that no one wants the job. In large companies, the backup admin position is an everrevolving door staffed time and time again with junior people. In smaller companies, backing up the infrastructure is a peripheral duty that is often ignored. The result is the same in both cases: bad backups. One solution to this problem is cloud backup services – or managed backup services, depending on your preferred terminology. The idea is simple: Outsource this undesirable part of IT to a company whose staff specializes in it and you’ll never look back. Cloud backup services take advantage of many of the technologies mentioned here, but allow customers to use the service without having to manage the process. Instead, customers simply install a piece of software on the systems being backed up, and the cloud backup service does the rest. Modernizing your infrastructure, when planned and executed carefully, can reduce your liability dramatically. But as you make those improvements, remember the backup mantra: Test everything and believe nothing.  — Infoworld

Indian Channelworld Apr il 2011

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BACKUp | focal point n

Building a Better Backup System Backup is becoming more affordable, automated and painless. By Elsa Wenzel

s with buying in-

surance or taking vitamins, committing to data backup is a hard sell. Everyone knows that storing records safely in more than one place protects the health of a business, but many companies fail to establish backup systems that will keep them running if disaster strikes. Realizing that you need a new storage strategy sometimes comes less dramatically and more gradually. Very small companies are often unprepared for success, relying on backup products that are fine for individual consumers but incapable of adjusting as several months’ or years’ worth of records pile up. Less than 20 percent of small to midsize businesses polled by Gartner research named storage as a top spending priority for 2011. Gartner also points out that one-fifth of organizations will change the brand they

Focul_Point-new2.indd 55

lean on for backup this year. Backup systems ideally run in the background without much human effort and let you restore data to specific points in time. Look for backup behind a backup system, such as a disk-to-disk-to-cloud setup, composed essentially of Web-based storage tied to hardware in more than one location. And make sure that a cloud-storage service offers redundant servers in different geographic locations. Among the many options, easily expandable storage area networks have come down in price, but still cost thousands of dollars. Many small businesses are increasingly finding that network-attached storage boxes, whether off the shelf or customized by an IT pro, fit their budget and are small enough to sit on a desk. “The main benefits of going to NAS is that it will be much faster,” says Rachel

Dines, an analyst with Forrester Research. Look for deduplication and server virtualization for lower costs and more flexibility in managing data over the long haul, she says. Whether you buy a backup product from a big retailer or one customized by a reseller that tailors tech support to your business, ongoing troubleshooting should be included in addition to help with setup. Purely cloud-based storage often appeals to small businesses with very limited IT support. This kind of backup arrangement can be easier to get off the ground than a backup system involving new hardware, as it requires only uploading data from your local machines directly to faraway servers that the service provider hosts. However, moving data across an Internet connection can be slow. You can find hundreds of Web-based backup services,

so shop wisely before turning over your data to a third party. When choosing any backup provider, look for signs that it will be around for years to come, and ask what would happen if the company were to go out of business. What level of service can it guarantee? Does the provider promise a specific datarecovery time, or pledge that your data will be available whenever you demand it? If you don’t use the service for a certain period of time, could the company cancel your service? Harder to determine is knowing where your data lives. Is it lumped in with records from the provider’s other customers? How does the cloud service ensure privacy? Don’t leave data strictly in their hands, either; again, back it up on hardware in multiple locations. And before you change your backup strategy, step back and create a backup plan. Start with understanding how much data you currently need to access: How many applications, databases, virtual machines, e-mail records, and files are you dealing with? And rather than throwing out your old backup system, consider stashing it as an archive of the dusty records you rarely access anymore.  — PC World

4/13/2011 3:33:33 PM

n fAC f e off

Canon vs. Xerox

MArk Pettit,

k BhAShkAr,

Exec. Director, GDO, Xerox

Director, OIS, Canon India

My Solution is Cheaper

Both Canon and Xerox back their managed print services to save IT costs. Which is the better bet and why?

New PArADiGM shift is sweeping across india inc

and is calling for smarter approaches in print. Companies have started to realize that printing is one of the few remaining areas of iT spending where substantial savings can be realized with little risk. Though print management is the last grey area of uncontrolled costs, if handled efficiently and strategically by companies there are huge opportunities wherein they can save up to 30 percent of these costs with effectively managed document services. Canon MDs provide optimum fleet management which in turn help to reduce cost significantly and give more convenience to the users by taking prints at any printer, providing job accounting, and rule-based printing which significantly help in cost saving. innovative features like pop up screen on number of color prints shot and print accounting help in 25 percent reduction in costs for consumables. The other reduction is the 20 percent in costs for print/copy/fax/scan repairs, 10 percent in costs to install/upgrade print/copy/fax/scan devices and 5 percent in print/copy/fax/scan equipment costs. MPs provides anywhere and anyplace printing providing 40 percent reduction in iT support costs for print/ copy/fax/scan user issues, besides helping reduce fleet management by saving electricity, real estate and manpower. This helps in a 52 percent reduction of print-related help desk calls that brings iT related costs down from 23 percent to 11 percent. The machines provided by Canon consume least electricity even when in a sleep mode in comparison to industry standards.

erox is a pioneer in Document Management ser-

vices, offering an integrated range of products and solutions as well as consulting services to optimize office document management services, improve productivity, reduce the output costs, and create value by making smarter connections between people processes and technology. xerox Print services can enable organizations save up to 25–35 percent of direct costs of the new xerox solution versus the previous old fleet costs of equipment. This is through unique solutions offerings such as office Document Assessment, Device Management, Asset Management, Asset optimization. This approach replaces the Fax, Copier, Printer, scanner footprints with that of a four in one Multi functional device. These cutting edge xerox devices are also supported and underpinned by a xerox Device software management platform that enables a company to control output volumes. These xerox devices are the key to unlock even further savings in terms of costs and business processing time. They utilise a unique embedded xerox technology called eiP that unleashes the processing power of the equipment and enables direct connectivity to the clients’ office work workflows, applications and services. our ur customers can ex expect us to deliver business solutions that would help them to become more competitive with more profits. Gartner in November 2010 positioned xerox as a ‘visionary’ in the content management and Printing suite. This is a major achievement for xerox as it extended the range of these resources for businesses of all sizes and industries. — As told to Shantheri Mallaya

indiAn ChAnnelworld Apr il 2011

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