ChannelWorld July 2010

volume 4 issue 04 july 01

batting for a long innings: Data infosys found that ‘bigger the better’ is not always true Page 60

2010

ChannelWorld Strategic inSightS for Solution providerS | Cover PriCe rs.50

volume 4 issue 04 july 01

batting for a long innings: Data infosys found that ‘bigger the better’ is not always true Page 60

2010

Channelworld Channelworld world Strategic inSightS for Solution providerS | Cover PriCe rs.50

Desktop Virtualization

Server Virtualization

Cloud Computing Networking

Security

mid-year

review An InsIght Into 10 PromIsIng technologIes Page 24

Storage

Document Management

Business Intelligence

Datacenter Managed Services

Efficient Data Centres through

Effective Cabling • Halve your data centre real estate by reducing network footprint • Save space, time and money through managed density • Pay as you grow and save on OPEX • Improve network performance A well designed physical infrastructure can deliver a dramatic reduction in the floor space required in the data centre. With fibre optics as the medium of choice for 40/100Gig technologies, ADC is working with the world’s top organisations to engineer fibre networks designed for reliability, speed and performance.

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n Editor’s NotE

TM Arun Kumar the Certification Conundrum

E

ver wondered why many technologies take a

long time to gain wide-spread adoption? The first answer that would spring to anyone’s mind is end-user reluctance and the inherent resistance to change on people’s part. But if that were the case, why is it that some technologies take a good few years for wide-spread adoption, even after user acceptance (in terms of technology) is gained?

User acceptance, after all, can be gained only after proving that the technology actually works in a real life scenario and that it does indeed provide all the benefits it claims.

Here is where people come in again, though from a different angle. obviously, any new technology has to be implemented, managed, and maintained by people; it can’t do that on its own. And what happens when you don’t have the required quality of people to do that? Simple – it just delays the adoption.

Since most of the technologies that fit into this bracket are fairly sophisticated and complicated pieces of engineering that require some amount of skill sets; getting people

who can understand and learn such technologies is difficult in itself, leave alone the actual task of training them. what typically happens when a new cutting-edge technology comes up is that most companies end up investing most of their resources in gaining or earning user acceptance without making the commensurate investment that is required in developing the skill sets of people who will end up implementing and supporting it. The rationale for this is that once the user acceptance is gained, subsequent in-

vestments can be made in developing the talent base that will deliver on it. well, for most parts, it w may be a correct strategy since what is the point in having people trained to implement and support a technology when no one is using it. However, companies can’t afford to take the task of developing a talent base to implement and support the technology lightly. developing a technology and getting end user acceptance is just half the battle. when it comes to adoption of new technologies, lack of

trained and certified resources is one of the key stumbling blocks.

Companies dither from adoption of such technologies as they are not sure if they would be able to find the right people (or firms that have the right people) to implement and support them. And even if they are confident of attracting the talent or finding the right firm that has the talent, the potential cost of such an acquisition becomes a stumbling block.

The result is that the firms play a wait and watch game – wait till the market matures and enough talent is available to support the technology before committing to it. while it may take years in developing a new technology, it is also a fact that it takes more number of years in developing a talent base that can effectively work on it. without an army of trained and certified engineers who can properly implement and support a technology, companies risk facing the proposition of winning the battle of technologies, but losing the adoption war. n

Editor’s pick The working of a cio’s mind

Page 64

Vijay Ramachandran, Editor-in-Chief, IDG, on the inner workings of a CIO’s mind, what they really look for when negotiating and the reasons for failure.

It is not about the technology; but rather about the need and the nature of the organization.

The grill

Page 21

Tom Georgens, CEO, NetApp, talks on virtualization, cloud computing, and other company buyouts. Speaking on the Data Domain acquisition, he calls it as NetApp’s offensive strategy compared to the defensive move of EMC, which finally bought the company.

tM M Arun Kumar is Executive Editor of ChannelWorld.

Contact him at arun_k@ idgindia.com

jUly 01, 2010

Editor’s Note_Page 4.indd 1

iNdiAN ChANNElworld

1

6/29/2010 12:20:01 PM

PARTNER EVENT | SOUTH AFRICA

HP STORAGE C

2010

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This photo feature is brought to you by IDG Custom Solutions Group in association with HP Storageworks Division

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For Breaking newS, go to Channelworld.in

Inside indian Channelworld n july 01, 2009

n SpeCial report

26 Cloud Computing

Seeking opportunities for private clouds and SaaS

29 Managed Services

Cloud Computing Desktop Virtualization Networking

RIM is a cost-effective business model for enterprises

Business Intelligence Server Virtualization

34 Desktop Virtualization

This technology is gaining mindshare with enterprise customers

37 Datacenter

Can solution providers benefit from wcustomers’ requirements?

40 Business Intelligence Managed Services

Cloud will spread over BI in the next few years, say experts

Datacenter

43 Server Virtualization

Document Management

Has it lived up to the hype? We trace its transition from what could be to what is.

46 Storage Storage

How are vendors and partners riding the de-duplication wave?

50 Security

As we approach the half-distance mark in 2010, here is an in-depth look at 10 technologies and what the future holds for them. Read on to find out >> Pg. 24

Efforts to unify security and networking are gaining ground

53 Networking

The structured cabling market in India is all set to boom

56 Document Management Document Management emerges as a good to have solution

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Inside indian Channelworld n july 01, 2009

ChannelWorld

VP Sales Sudhir Argula

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

AGM Brands Siddharth Singh

Channelworld.in

■ trendLines 08 HP’s Convergence Evokes Lock-in Fears | Hewlett-Packard challenges many

enterprises’ dual vendor strategy 10 Dell to Engage in Talks Over Google Chrome OS | Dell’s addition could bring top four

manufacturers in US under Chrome OS tent

■ On Record 18 David Dzienciol, VP, Channel Sales, Asia

Pacific and Japan, Symantec, shares his comany’s plans for Indian SMBs

■ opinion 01 Editorial: TM Arun Kumar on why technologies take time to gain wide-spread adoption 16 Jason Westland: Here are five steps for

onboarding new project resources quickly and smoothly 59 Thornton A. May: If we do not do something, IT’s energy crisis will get worse

■ Fast Track 13 Prakash Vaswani, CEO of Crescent Tech-

nologies, wants to increase focus on virtualization 20 N K Mehta, CEO, Secure Network Solutions seeks to be a one-stop security solution for SMBs 63 Abhay Bhalerao, MD, eQuest Technologies, feels niche focus will ensure growth

■ The Grill 21 Tom Georgens, CEO, NetApp, talks about

n

GM Sales Parul Singh Asst. Manager Brands Disha Gaur Associate Marketing Dinesh P

MANAGEMENT

Publisher Louis D’Mello

Sr. Manager Client Marketing Rohan Chandhok

n EDITORIAL

Ad Sales Co-Ordinators Hema Saravanan, Nadira Hyder

Editor-in-Chief Vijay Ramachandran Executive Editor TM Arun Kumar Assistant Editor Yogesh Gupta Features Editor Diya Koshy Principal Correspondent Radhika Nallayam Correspondent Tasneem Balapurwala n CUSTOM

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Advertisers’ Index ADC India Communications Ltd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . IFC

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Pvt Ltd., India . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . IBC Neoteric Infomatique Ltd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . BC

21 virtualization, cloud computing, the post-downturn market, and adopting offensive strategies.

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Lexmark International (India) Pvt Ltd. . . . . . . . . . . . 31 This index is provided as an additional service. The publisher does not assume any liability for errors or omissions.

Cover Illustration by Unnikrishnan AV Cover Design by Jithesh CC

TOC_Page special.indd 6

6/29/2010 7:17:46 PM

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

What’s within PAGE 10: Dell in Talks Over Google Chrome OS PAGE 10: 40/100G Ethernet Standard Ratified PAGE 11: EU Seeks Outside Opinions on SAP-Sybase Deal PAGE 12: IPv4 Addresses May Exhaust Supply by December

I l l u s t r at i o n b y s a b r i n a n a r e s h

PAGE 12: Senate Approves Cyber Security Bill

Infrastructure

HP’s Convergence Evokes Lock-in Fears

W

hile HewlettPackard is

continuing with its effort to convince its enterprise customers to cross what may be IT’s Rubicon and embrace the idea that one vendor can meet all infrastructure needs, it challenges many enterprises’ dual vendor strategy to keep negotiating leverage. HP appears to be emphasizing the most are the efficiencies gained by the tight integration of these systems.

HP is aware that users fear single-vendor solutions. “If I go to a converged 8

infrastructure will I get locked in?” said Dave Donatelli, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking. He argued though, that HP’s infrastructure is built on open standards so customers “can change out whatever they like.”

Customers that use HP servers, storage and networking equipment get software tools with hooks into that won’t necessarily be as deep into the systems of rival products.

The benefits of HP’s “con-

verged infrastructure” may come from the sum total of the HP product set and a reduction of overall maintenance costs, particularly from automation. Customers who integrate other vendors in their infrastructure may have to make a series a trade-offs in capability.

For some people HP’s approach works who, though aware of concerns raised by convergence, ask how else are you ever going to do this? What is the alternate idea that you have to make this happen? There isn’t one.

“You can keep doing it the old way, which it to keep sticking all separate components in there, and each one of the those components is a fail point,” said an analyst.

However, others, though able to see the upside, point out the obvious downside.

They say that if they bury themselves into HP, they can’t move out. And if they have to, it’s extremely expensive, unless HP opens it up to work with everything.

Some even argue that they don’t see a reason to have one infrastructure vendor as they try and pick the best of breed products.

Ultimately, the problem that HP may have in selling its converge infrastructure may rest in the reality of the modern enterprise.

— Patrick Thibodeau Computerworld

HARDWARE

IDC: PC Sales to Grow 20% After a strong first quarter, global PC sales are expected to see nearly 20 percent growth in 2010, says IDC. Worldwide PC shipments in the first three months of the year were 27.1 percent higher than in the first quar-

20%

ter of 2009, reported IDC. IDC noted that an easing of economic troubles, coupled with renewed consumer and corporate buying is giving the PC industry a much-needed boost. “New devices like ereaders and media tablets will pose disruptive challenges to conventional usage models, while opening up intriguing possibilities in consumer and mobile business spaces,” said Jay Chou, Research Analyst with IDC. — Computerworld

Indian Channelworld JULY 01, 2010

trendlines_new.indd 8

6/29/2010 12:22:06 PM

n trendlInes oPeratInG system

I l l u s t r at I o n b y s a b r I n a n a r e s h

dell in talks t over Google Chrome os

t

aLkS are under

way between Google and dell to bring chrome OS, the search giant’s cloudcentric operating system, to dell’s computer lineup, according to a dell executive.

No official announcements have been made by either dell or Google, and despite the confirmation of talks by a dell executive it’s not clear when or if dell would actually produce a Google chrome OSbased computer.

Google recently an-

nounced that chrome OS devices would be launched at some point between the fall and the end of the year. when Google announced chrome OS, the company said it was working with a number of firms to produce chrome OS devices. dell’s addition to Google’s list of potential partners would bring four of the top five computer manufacturers in the US under the chrome OS tent, and all of the top five computer makers worldwide.

Nevertheless, the texast

networKInG

40/100G ethernet e s standard r ratified

The 40G/100G Ethernet standard has been ratified as the first specification to simultaneously specify two new Ethernet speeds.

The IEEE 802.3ba standard was ratified recently, which paves the way for a new wave of higher speed Ethernet server connectivity and core switching 10

products, the standards organization said.

Vendors like Cisco and Juniper Networks have already been trialing 100G Ethernet products since last year.

“Compliance is up to those [vendors] and where their products were up to that point,” says John D’Ambrosia, Chair of the

based manufacturer’s interest in chrome OS is hardly surprising. Shortly after Google announced chrome OS in July 2009, dell said it would consider testing chrome OS for future products. Several months later, a dell employee released a free download of chromium OS for dell Mini 10v computers on a company blog. chrome OS is essentially a version of Google’s chrome web browser and a set of device-specific hardware drivers. Unlike full-featured operating systems like windows or Mac OS X that primarily use desktop-based applications, chrome OS is capable only of accessing the web and web-based applications like Google docs or Microsoft’s Office web apps. however, in recent months several new features have appeared that may help chrome OS overcome at least part of its web-only limitations. in april, Google announced the cloud Print project that would give chrome OS devices wireless printing capability via the internet.

— Ian Paul

Short Takes  dell has reiterated

investments in the channel by bringing more resources and launching partner advisory council.“The Asian region has grown substantially and the channel business is worth more than $1 billion,” said Amit Midha, President,SMB, AsiaPacific.  d-link has announced

two channel programs – ‘Connection 2010’ and ‘Connecting the Dots’ for SI and reseller community respectively. Rajesh Sahore, Country Sales Head, India & SAARC said, these events will allow D-Link to reach out to more channel partners across India.  saas in India is likely to

reach a mark of $650 million by 2015. The market is expected to reach about $1,084 million by 2015, according to a study by Zinnov. Platform-as-aservice (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) markets cumulatively would touch $434 million each by then.

PC World

IEEE 802.3ba Task Force.

Juniper says it participated in the definition of the standard and that the 100G product it trialed needs no modification to be fully compliant with the recently ratified standard.

“It is based on the standard as it was at that stage,” said Luc Ceuppens, Vice President, Product Marketing, Juniper’s Infrastructure Products Group.

Pricing is also an issue with 40/100G Ethernet.

Participants at the recent Ethernet Technology Summit

said current price points were too high to spur mainstream adoption.

“It’s not the only thing that will make it take off, but it is an enabler,” D’Ambrosia said.

The IEEE collaborated with the International Telecommunication Union’s Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) Study Group 15 to ensure that the new Ethernet rates are transportable over optical transport networks, the IEEE said.

— IDG News Service

IndIan Channelworld JULY 01, 2010

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6/29/2010 12:22:07 PM

trendlInes n m&a

eu seeks outside opinions on saP-sybase s sybase deal

$5.8

I l l u s t r at I o n b y s a b r I n a n a r e s h

t

database and Java programming language. mission has not yet decided whether SaP is interested in SaP’s pending Sybase’s mobile platform and database technologies, acquisition of Sybase will which will help it extend fall under its merger rules, its core business of enteralthough a preliminary review suggests it may, acprise applications. SaP cording to recently released co-ceO Bill Mcdermott’s statements in the organizahad recently said that the tion’s official journal. company will one day of of“On prelimifer a full suite of nary examinaerP applications tion, the comand business billion acquisition mission finds intelligence tools of Sybase to be that the notified that can run on closed by July, transaction could “any device, at says SAP fall within the any place, at any scope [of] the ec time.” analysts Merger regulation. howsaid that’s an indication ever, the final decision on that SaP plans to quickly this point is reserved,” the move to integrate Sybase’s document states. mobile technologies with its own offerings. the commission, the european Union’s highest antitrust authority, is soliciting opinions on the deal from interested third parties, which have 10 days to respond, according to the document.

SaP has said it expects salesforce.com the $5.8 billion transaction to close in July, but that sues microsoft date could be pushed back if european authorities Salesforce.com has sued Microsoft for patent infringedecide to conduct an extensive review. ment against the on-demand CRM vendor. A number of Mi“we we still expect the w crosoft products, including its tender offer for Sybase to .NET platform and SharePoint close within the timeline we collaboration software, are in previously outlined,” SaP violation of Salesforce.com spokesman andy kendzie patents, according to the comsaid in a statement. Sybase plaint. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s could not immediately be earlier complaint against reached for comment.

Salesforce.com alleges that european regulators the company’s products indelayed Oracle’s recent fringe on nine of its patents. purchase of Sun MicrosysNeither company could be tems for months as they reached for comment at the weighed concerns over the time we went to print. fate of open-source technologies like the MySQL — IdG news service he eUrOPeaN com-

apart from that SaP executives have said little about their plans for Sybase products, leaving Sybase users and partners wondering about the fate of technology that many of them depend on.

Besides, the future of the various Sybase database products is less clear, said veteran database analyst curt Monash of Monash

Around

TheWorld

JULY 01, 2010

trendlines_new.indd 11

research. he suggested that SaP will eventually deemphasize its own MaxdB database for use with its erP applications in favor of Sybase’s adaptive Server enterprise. “that would be an incentive for further [SaP] investment” in Sybase’s flagship aSe, Monash added.

— Chris Kanaracus IDG News Service

It t seeks public and private cloud

red hat launches hybrid cloud

In a survey, IDC asked IT executives about their preference for using a private versus a public cloud. “Fifty-five percent said that a private cloud was more appealing than a public cloud, and 22 percent said they were equally appealing,” said Frank Gens, Chief Analyst at IDC. IDC’s research shows that many companies expect to use both public and private cloud services, with a preference for the latter. When asked about where they would run specific services, 75 percent of the rerespondents said that they’d run collaboration applications on a private cloud and 53 percent said they would run e-mail on a private cloud.

— IdG news service

Red Hat has launched Red Hat Cloud Foundations, that will allow organizations to run applications in both public and private clouds.The company has also added new partners to its Red Hat Certified Cloud Provider Program. It has released version 2.2 of its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) package, and has integrated Cisco’s Virtual Network Link (VN-Link) technology within the RHEV package.

— IdG news service

IndIan Channelworld

11

6/29/2010 12:22:15 PM

n Trendlines INTERNET

IPv4 Addresses Could Exhaust Supply by Dec

T

he remaining pool

Views & V ices Are vendor Channel partners, lead generation focusing programs on IT needs effective? of SMBs,Or are witnessing partners still huge haverevenue to do itgrowth. themselves?

ChannelWorld spoke to a few experts to understand recent trends.

Vendor lead generation programs need to Researches reveal that IT by be much more sustained andspending serious. We SMB market will increase toconduct Rs have inthe fact taken the initiative to jointly 26,709 crore by 2008. expect signifievents for customers.

ButWe most of theatime, cant portion of that budget to beexercise. focused on these events end up being a futile technologies...

Vendors wantvirtualization to harvest results without ‘seeding’ anything.

Shailesh Agarwal, VP - Business Systems, Systems & Madhu Madhavan, MD India/ &CEO,South CubicAsia.

Computing.

Technology Group, IBM

One reason that unalof unallocated IPv4 located IPv4 address space addresses could be could be depleted this year depleted as early as is that IANA has a policy December due to unprecthat when there are only edented levels of broadband five remaining /8s, it will and wireless adoption in the automatically give one to each of the registries and Asia Pacific region, experts say. The acceleration of IPv4 thereby deplete the free We have seenreveal that vendors the Researches that IT outsource spending by pool overnight. address depletion is putting lead generation to third-party the SMB marketactivity will increase to Rs more pressure on network There has been a huge agencies.

Mostby of 2008. the time, agencies are 26,709 crore Wethese expect a signifionly achieving operators to misurge in the decantinterested portion ofinthat budgettheir to benumbers focusedand on come back withtechnologies... leads that can be hardly grate to IPv6. mand for IPv4 virtualization converted into business.

IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses in Shailesh Agarwal, VP - Business Systems, Systems & of users say they will addresses and can IPv4 APAC this year.

Technology Group, IBM India/ Sudarsan Ranganathan, CEOSouth & MD,Asia.

Veeras Infotek adresses remain continue to use their support 4.3 bil“The Asia Pacific available to be existing OSes, rather lion devices conregion has very distributed by IANA Researches revealhave that effective IT spending than moving to Vista.

Vendors like Cisco, lead by nected directly. large economies the SMB market will increase to generation programs. Shell does notRs invest that are underIPv6, on the other 26,709 crore by 2008.

WeCisco expect a signifiin marketing Cisco products. visits their hand, uses 128-bit addresses served by IP addresses such cant portion that PoC. budget to be focused on customers andofgives Convertibility of leads and supports a virtually unas India, China and other virtualization technologies... is good.

This is not the case with all vendors. limited number of devicesplaces,” Jimmerson says.

Shailesh Agarwal, VP - Business Systems, Systems & 2 to the 128th power.

—Carolyn Duffy Marsan AL Srinath,Group, CEO, Shell Technology IBMNetworks India/ South Asia.

As of June 2010, only 6.25 Network World percent of IPv4 addresses remain available to be disSecurity tributed by the Internet Astelecommunications networks signed Numbers Authority and other critical infrastructure.

(IANA) to the five Regional The bill would allow the US Internet Registries (RIRs).

President to take emergency In the first half of 2010, actions to protect critical parts IANA allocated more IPv4 of the Internet. The President addresses to the registries A US Senate closing of any than in all of 2009. facility or stations would need Congressional ap committee has proval to extend a cyber-emerapproved a widefor wire com“It’s moving so fast now gency beyond 120 days under ranging cyber munication” in that it’s hard for us to be an amendment to the legislation security bill that a time of war, as current on it any longer,” approved by the committee. some critics described in the says Richard Jimmerson, “Policymakers should reject have suggested Communications CIO at the American RegServer electricity use in such proposals to centralize cywould give the Act of 1934, they istry for Internet Numbers Asia Pac grew by 23% Attack: US President to ber security risk management,” US President the get Internet ‘kill switch’ said in a break(ARIN). At the beginning of Warren Crews, vice-president authority to shut down of the bill 2010, IANA had 26 /8s left. for policy and director of techdown parts of the Internet durpublished on the Senate HomeCurrently, IANA has 16/8s ing a cyberattack. land Security and Governmental nology Studies at the Competiremaining unallocated. tive Enterprise Institute said in Senator Joe Lieberman Affairs Committee website.

“We’ve gone through 10/ an e-mail. “The Internet that will and other bill sponsors have The bill would establish a 8s since the beginning of evolve if government can resort refuted the charges that the White House Office for Cyberthis year,” Jimmerson says. to a ‘kill switch’ will be vastly Protecting Cyberspace as a space Policy and a National “To put that in perspective, different from, and inferior to, National Asset Act gives the Center for Cyber Security and in all of 2009, we only went the safer one that will emerge President an Internet “kill Communications, which would through 8 /8s. It’s possible switch.” Instead, the bill puts work with private US companies otherwise.” that the IANA free pool - Grant Gross limits on the powers the Presito create cyber security requirewill deplete in December or IDG News Service dent already has to cause “the ments for the electrical grid, January at the earliest.”

37% 6.25%

Senate Approves Cyber Security Bill

12

Indian Channelworld JULY 01, 2010

trendlines_new.indd 12

6/29/2010 12:22:21 PM

n Fast Track

Crescent Technologies

Snapshot

Crescent Technologies Founded: 2004 Headquarter: Mumbai Revenue 2008–2009: Rs 8.5 Crore Revenue 2009–2010: Rs 15.32 Crore Key Executives: Prakash Vaswani, Founder; Augustine Gracious, Service Head; Shoeb Khan, Technology Head; Hitesh Kosambia, Sachin Prabhu, Sales & Marketing No. Of Employees: 36 Key Principals: IBM, Lenovo, APC, Microsoft, VMware, Oracle, Avocent, Checkpoint Key Technologies: Server Consolidation, Virtualization, Networking, Security Website: www.crescenttechnologies.net

We will be increasing our focus on virtualization, says Prakash Vaswani, Founder & CEO

I

t began in 1998 as a simple

interest in personal computers and the wonder that was the Internet. This slowly developed into the business of white boxing custom computers. In 2004, Crescent Communications shed this persona and emerged as Crescent Technologies to enter the server consolidation market. Prakash Vaswani, Founder, Crescent Technologies recalls, “The first implementation that came our way was a pure reseller offer but it opened the gates for a lot of other solutions in the future. It also established our relationship with the vendors who then went on to help us

in all our future implementations.”

The entry into the server consolidation market was made carefully by building custom servers instead of just deploying readymade servers, adds Vaswani. He says, “We built

We are willing to accept a challenge and invest in a customer.

Customer retention is the goal and this is evident in the fact that we cater to the smallest needs of our oldest customers.

the entire server ourselves with the chassis being outsourced. It was here that we built all our contacts and embarked on expanding our business.”

Catering to the needs of the SMB sector, Crescent believes that customer satisfaction is the top priority.

As Vaswani puts it, “We are willing to accept a challenge and invest in a customer. Customer retention is the goal and this is evident in the fact that we cater to the minimal needs of our oldest customers.”

While attrition has still not reared its face, Vaswani does see it as a problem in the future as they double in size from when they started off.

“Our people are our biggest asset as they have stood by each other right from the beginning. As we grow, attrition will follow but that is a problem for another day. Presently, most employees are here from the day we took off and we have shared everything together,” he adds.

In the future, Crescent plans to make a push in the area of virtualization with increased focus on solutions and services. Another step is setting up a separate services and an R&D facility to boost focus on individual services for present clients.  — Tasneem Balapurwala june 01, 2010

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6/29/2010 12:27:35 PM

DIGILINK Rolls Out 160 City Event to Tap Class C, D Markets DIGILINK, India’s leading Structured Cabling brand, has rolled out an exhaustive seminar series, FITS’10, for its dealers and reseller community covering 160 cities across the country. This unique one-day conference explores the journey of active and passive networking industry for the future.

FITS’10 is aimed to promote the DIGILINK and DIGISOL range of networking products in Class A, B, C and D markets, Pan-India and will also create awareness on latest trends and technologies existing in the market.

“The idea is to educate our channel partners on the DIGILINK and Digisol range of products in a very refreshing manner,” said Prabodh Vyas, Director, Sales and Marketing, DIGILINK. “The road shows will help us in networking with our partners, understanding their issues and resolving them – we aspire to create a stronger

bond with our partners to create a bigger DIGILINK Family.”

DIGILINK has always been aggressive in providing the best business environment for the

For the first time we intend to reach India’s untapped markets.

Every dealer is special to us, and one in a remote location must be just as well informed as any other A or B-class market. channel community, Vyas said, be it, providing best quality products, pre- and post-sales service or information and training.

“For the first time we intend to reach India’s untapped markets.

Every dealer is special to us, and one in a remote location must be

Case Study | ROLTA

A Future-ready structured cabling solution at today’s competitive price In the Enterprise IT field, there is a growing demand for the cabling infrastructure to be future proof – they should last beyond at least 15 years, prompting extreme caution in decision makers.

At Rolta, an Indian multinational organization that provides solutions for Geospatial, Defense, Homeland Security, Government, Utilities & Communications, Transportation, Process and Power and Enterprise IT sectors, demand for advanced applications, higher bandwidth and quick data transmission has been growing.

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Indian Channelworld

This in turn requires an optimal physical infrastructure.

For its new Structured Cabling System Infrastructure at the Gurgoan facility, Rolta wanted to provide for around 4000 Data and Voice nodes with high rate of data transmission with gigabit throughput. They required a cabling solution that would be more than just standards compliant. Rolta was looking for a high performance, tried and tested, reliable solution built with quality products. Saving on CapEx and achieving a high RoI was equally important.

JULY 01, 2010

DIGILINK invites partners to kites screening

just as well informed as any other A or B-class market.”

“Our proactive approach gets you to advanced technology that can be deployed today.” said Anand Mehta, vice president for marketing, at DIGILINK. “We always extend unconditional support and cooperation to our channel partners. We have always guided our business associates on their road to success by sharing our knowledge and know-how of the industry trends”.

The Company’s networking products include switches, wireless, broadband and other converged communications solutions. DIGILINK’s structured cabling systems expertise is manifested in its SCS product range, an end-to-end cabling solution, fulfilling the organization’s total connectivity needs, be it LAN, WAN or MAN.

In a first-of-its-kind gesture, DIGILINK organized an entertaining evening for its channel partners and customers by taking them along with their spouses to the latest Hrithik Roshan and Barbara Mori starrer – Kites, in eight major cities, booking theaters for sole purpose. More than 1,700 channel partners attended these shows. The partners enjoyed themselves thoroughly – snacks and gifts were also a part of the agenda.

DIGILINK’s G600 Cat6 Solution exceed the requirements. With a reputation for high quality and lower associated installed costs, DIGILINK G600 Cat6 provides punch-down modular solutions, where the same style of jack is used for both the panel & wall outlet exceeding the recommended channel Performance to double. High Performance, Reliability, Cost Effectiveness and Ease of Installation were the main reasons for choosing the DIGILINK brand against major competitors. A full 25-year Performance Warranty will be issued after completion of installation which will have high headroom due to use of DIGILINK Structured Cabling Solution.

DIGILINK’s advantage came from its latest technology; highbandwidth backbone, capable of handling future load; high reliability; and negligible down time. (Most important for online transactions/network).

Three implementation partners, Work Sphere Architects, Vector Projects (I) Pvt. Ltd, and Venire were given the responsibility for SCS, each partner handling the implementation work for two floors. The project was handled by a Mumbai local team comprising Debraj, Rakesh, Srikant, Imran and Anand with the help of N S Gadage – Consultant, Commercial and Tushar Mody, AVP corporate Infrastructure & Support from Rolta.

CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP DIGILINK

vIew FroM the top | MIlInd taMhane

DIGILINK (D-Link India’s Global Cabling brand since 2004) is Undisputed Industry Leader in SCS Brief us about the present status of DIGILINK India?

In 2009 our Company Demerged and erstwhile D-Link India Ltd. was renamed as Smartlink Network Systems Ltd. with SCS range of products under Brand name ‘DIGILINK’ as focused business and the new resultant company D-Link (India) Ltd. with D-Link Brand.

Market researcher IDC ranks DIGILINK the No. 2 brand in the Indian Structured Cabling Systems (SCSs) segment, with

and “Best Structured Cabling Brand 2010” by DQ Channel.

Which products will drive the DIGILINK market for 2010?

This year our focus is on developing products suitable for Datacenters, FTTH deployments and 10G over Copper. We would in parallel be working on products for Internet-ready homes.

We will focus on a few areas like Intelligent Patch Panels, Bigger Fiber Business in LAN/WAN and also in FTTH. In addition we

MR. MILIND TAMHANE, Vice President - ITS & Export, DIGILINK

an 18 percent share. DIGILINK (D-Link India’s Global Cabling brand since 2004) is the undisputed industry leader in entire end-to-end structured cabling solutions for enterprises, small and medium businesses since 1999. Today, DIGILINK accounts for 18% of the market share in the SCS marketplace, giving the DIGILINK Brand a premier position in the domestic market.

DIGILINK has received awards including the PC Quest Users Choice Awards 2009’ ranked No.1 in India’s Most Wanted IT Brands for Structured Cabling; CRN magazine’s “Channel Champion” in Network Cabling 2009

plan to add higher end products including high-density 48P Patch panels, Residential Equipment cabinets and so on.

How do you equip and empower your partners?

We have always been a channeldriven company and our endeavor is to constantly improve our channel policies. We ensure healthy margins for the channels and also introduce new products with newer applications to increase the scope of growth for the channels.

These new products and solutions enable the partner to value add and hence seek better margins from the customers.

Skill development in terms of solutions will be a key initiative, as in this age of fast changing technology one has to stay informed about the latest technological developments and trends. This is of importance to business partners who play a major role in advising the end-customer as to which is the best technological solution to opt for. DIGILINK understands these issues of our partners and has designed special training sessions to specifically serve this end objective.

Our Empower Partner Program has shown great results. Now we aim to build up on the program by launching schemes for the registered partners. One of the highlights of the program is the training on latest technology in Information Transport System Industry, which is provided to the partners along with demonstrations of products.

We have launched year end channel reward program ‘Zip Zap Zoom 3.’ The program was designed for DIGILINK Value Added Resellers and System Integrators. Last year DIGILINK launched Zip Zap Zoom 1 and 2 schemes. Channel partners showed immense enthusiasm and approximately 300 partners qualified under these schemes and won for themselves an all paid trip to Malaysia, Genting Bangkok/Pattaya and Kerala.

These trips were arranged in the month of July 2009 and February 2010.

How many distributors and dealers do you have?

We reach out to our customers with our nationwide network of 22 distributors, 6 National System Integrators (NSI), 200-plus Empower value system integrators (EVSI), 1,000-plus Empower value added re-sellers (EVAR) and more than 5,000 Empower Reseller (ER).

How do you focus on the service support?

Our high quality and reputable after-sales-services are strategically built to deliver customer JULY 01, 2010

DIGILINK @ Communicasia’ 10, Singapore

DIGILINK participated this year for the first time at the Communicasia’10 exhibition at Singapore.With a view to get the brand more global, the company has been consistently participating at various international exhibitions like GITEX in Dubai for the past few years; this year the focus is highly on the Asia-Pac market.

While the theme at the DIGILINK stall was ‘10G over Copper’ and ‘Datacenter’ an entire range of its products was displayed with two state-of-the-art racks showcasing its entire copper and fiber range.

satisfaction. We offer first-rate integrated service and support through our special service division, DIGICARE, which consists of RMA centres, DIGICARE Technical Assistance Centre (DTAC) and Direct Service Department (DSD).

DIGICARE has evolved most efficient, skilled and professional state of service infrastructure. It has 46 Direct RMA/Service centres across the country. 12 Locations has BGA Machines. All DIGICARE Centres are located in the Main IT Market of the town. DIGICARE has Unique Web based RMA Online System “iSMART” to Monitor the service activity, online repair status update, Automated Email and SMS alerts Facility and Warranty Tracking.

DIGICARE has exceptional Repair Yield of 98 percent local repairs and 96 percent cases are closed in seven working Days.

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

IndIan Channelworld

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n Opinion

Jason Westland

Onboarding New Resources

I

t’s always painful to lose resources during a project.

Just when the momentum is building and the entire project team seems to be operating as one unit, a more critical initiative comes up and management decides they need your technical lead and one of your key developers.

Ouch! Talk about throwing a wrench in your finely-tuned project management machinery. How do you deal with this problem? You really can’t plan for it, other than to have some good processes in place for bringing new staff up to speed on your existing project. Here are five steps for onboarding new project resources quickly and smoothly.

Brief the customer Bringing new resources onto a project midstream is something you can’t just slip past the customer. It’s a major event and will not pass unnoticed.

So be up front with the customer. Let them know what’s happening and why.

It’s important that you connect with your customer before any onboarding activities happen. Why? Because if the customer has a major issue with the change, you’ll need to bring their concerns or opposition to your management’s attention.

It’s better to keep an existing project running smoothly and give a new and unknown project different resources than it is to move good resources off of an existing project and risk losing all progress.

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Get your resources up to speed Once the customer has been briefed, get your new resources as much information as possible. Give them every status report, all meeting notes, all relevant project documentation and deliverables, and let them immerse themselves in this information for a week.

If possible, onboard the new resources for one to two weeks while the out-

n Be up front with the customer.

Let them know what’s happening and why. It’s important that you connect before any onboarding activities happen.

going resources are still on the project so there is time for knowledge transfer and mentoring. The customer will be much more comfortable with the transition if they know there is some hand-holding between the new and out-going resources.

explain resources to the customer Once your new resources have some knowledge of the project , they should be ready to meet the customer. It’s best to have them on a call-a status call or an adhoc call-with the outgoing resource they are replacing, if possible. If that’s not possible, you’ll need to proceed anyway. Have the new staff members introduce themselves, present their backgrounds and qualifications, and provide

some insight on where the project is going and how they’ll be functioning on the project. The project manager can introduce the new staff members, but it’s important for the new resources to do most of the talking. The customer needs to connect with them at this point.

Let the resources do their jobs Let the new resources perform their regular duties on the project for a certain period of time. If it’s a relatively long project, let them perform for one month.

Then move to step five and regroup with the customer (but without the resources this time) to get the customer’s take on how things are going.

Evaluate progress with the customer Customer satisfaction is an integral component of good project management.

Therefore, after one month with the new resources on the project, set up a oneon-one call or meeting with the customer to find out how they think the new resources are performing.

Don’t be afraid to give your own evaluation as well; the customer will definitely want to hear the project manager’s perspective.  Jason Westland has 16 years of experience in the project management industry. He is the author of the book, The Project Management Life Cycle and the owner of ProjectManager.com.

Indian Channelworld JULY 01, 2010

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CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP QUEST SOFTWARE

CHANNEL DIRECTIONS

Systems Management Poised for High Growth in India The current shift from manual practices to automation brings us an opportunity to talk to customers about the importance of the latest IT management practices.

KRISHNAN THYAGARAJAN Managing Director, India SubContinent, Quest Software India

A 23-year industry veteran, Thyagarajan has held leadership positions in business strategy, sales and marketing management, and new business incubation. Before joining Quest, he led Microsoft’s BFSI software business worldwide.

What trends should your partners especially pay attention to?

With every organization looking for greater business value from IT, it is imperative for partners to be able to respond to customers’ queries. Smart Systems Management is one way of ensuring that IT delivers business value. With rapid change in the way technologies are being delivered, as services and through pay-asyou-go models, our partners must be conversant with the latest changes.

Automation becomes an increasingly critical component of an organization’s IT as the need for efficient management of applications and data grows. An application that is being managed manually can cost a company millions if it goes down. Automation can help mitigate such risks.

In this context, what customer challenges can your partners effectively tackle with your expertise?

Managing and reducing operational cost is the primary issue for the CIOs. Quest looks at addressing issues on these

lines. Smart IT management helps manage and reduce operational cost, automating repetitive tasks, diagnostics and trouble shooting, managing complexities, mitigating risk that every IT project is vulnerable to. For example, when an organization implements a migration project there are lot of critical data that needs to be managed from one environment to the other. Quest has solutions to recover data, troubleshoot, get real time information on what is going on in the IT systems and address it from a single dashboard.

(OCS) and Microsoft Exchange. Quest can help make your migration faster and safer.

It also helps with reporting, diagnostics and recovery solutions. Archiving and discovery helps capture, retain, discover and manage critical business information to satisfy legal and regulatory requirements and control storage costs.

How would your partners develop your India market, and how would they benefit?

Quest would like to have a symbiotic relationship with its partners, where the partners play a key role in understanding the customer issues and addressing them. Quest holds regular training sessions for its partners and makes available to them global experts for a clear understanding of the products and solutions.

India is a big market for Quest’s products and Channel is a very critical part of our growth strategy. Partners will also get early access to technologies. We aim to expand our partner portfolio as we are a 100 percent channel-led business. All business done in the country is done through channels.

Further, Quest Software is looking at appointing more value-added resellers (VARs) and we need an extremely committed and capable partner network.

India is a big market for Quest’s products and Channel is a very critical part of our growth strategy.

How would your partners implement your ‘Smart Systems Management’ in a virtualized world?

Companies are looking at going into the virtualization mode. But the key thing is that once you have reached there, you need to manage that virtualized environment. We provide virtualization management software and solutions that help organizations manage their virtual environment in a very efficient manner. Quest has solutions to automate management across virtual servers. The task can be monitored from a single screen.

How will Quest help customers exploit converged infrastructures?

Quest helps enterprises archive and retrieve communication across multiple channels. Our Unified Communications Solutions enable simplified management of converged infrastructure and data to improve communications and align with business objectives.

Quest has expanded its UC product line of management tools to support both Microsoft Office Communication Server

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

n on ReCoRD | DaviD DzienCiol

SMBs align with one trusted vendor rather than multiple vendors for business challenges.

Combining security and storage solutions as a total protection story for SMBs is our key differentiator

Symantec Refocuses Synergy on SMB Market David Dzienciol, VP, Channel Sales, Asia Pacific and Japan, Symantec, on plans for Indian SMBs. CW : Most vendors want a piece of the SMB pie through various initiatives.

What is Symantec’s strategy for indian SMBs? DzienCiol: The scope of SMBs is widespread but well gelled with our channel strategy of reaching them through a partner community of distributors and resellers. SMBs are not new a segment for us.

Now, it is a more deliberate focus which quantifies our strategy and justifies our value proposition for 18

this segment. According to Symantec APJ, the SMB segment consists of small (from 5 to 99 user) and medium (100 to 500) organizations. Our studies indicate similar characteristics between them. However, their IT staff, buying decisions and other issues dif differ to an extent. We have to understand buying centers, risks and pain points for different customers to ensure availability of the right solutions for partners and customers.

CW : What is the differentiator factor from Symantec to address the threats looming large on SMBs? DzienCiol: The SMB portfolio includes Symantec protection suite for small business which offers comprehensive security features. Another offering– Symantec Protection Suite Advanced Business Edition – provides SMBs with complete protection including endpoint and messaging security as well as desktop, laptop and server backup and recovery to ensure business continuity. The key differentiator is the combination of security and storage solutions to offer a more complete protection story for SMBs. The ability to address

security threats is crucial but addressing data issues like data loss is also important. In addition, we are also enabling customers to access certain solutions on the cloud through add on SKUs on these suites which enable technologies like dedpulication, virtualization and archival.

CW : What are you doing to emerge as a holistic vendor for end customers?

DzienCiol: SMB customers align with one trusted vendor than multiple vendor relationships for business challenges. First of all, we are creating more awareness around the segment itself. Apart from key challenge of building right solutions, we are customizing right partner programs. The addition of back up and recovery is beneficial for SMBs. This story continues across enterprises with need for compliance, high availability, and compliance. No

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David Dzienciol | On Record n other vendor encompasses a complete protection story for SMBs than us.

CW : What is in store for Symantec partners?

Dzienciol: SMBs usually do not give partners a second chance if there is a security breach or system failure. Preparing competent and educated partners to address this segment is crucial. The total solution story through SPS business advanced suite is the first step to help partners talk to our installed base.

Symantec will fuel the marketplace as partners leverage this compelling proposition to SMBs. We have a large group of customers in the data protection business through Backup Exec, net back up and a strong customer base in security. Partners

On Record_With Half Page AD.indd 19

can take joint solutions as there is a tremendous upside for them across security and storage. A larger solution stack equals more profits for a partner.

CW : What kind of channel communities will help Symantec dominate the SMB marketplace?

Dzienciol: To get to a mass reseller community, distributors Ingram and Redington are an important link. Symantec drives SMB specialization programs for channel partners with rewards specific to this program. We are creating a large community of SMB specialist partner organizations who will address the segment – geographically and vertically. The existing partners are first preference but we also engage with a complete

Partners can take joint solutions as there is a tremendous upside for them across security and storage. set of new partners. We have launched Campaign creator which provides the ability to leverage a software package across business needs or pain points.

The market is evolving with need for solutions around security and storage. As a total protection suite, partners can take up that opportunity.

CW : Is Symantec engaging with MSPs or adopting the cloud route?

Dzienciol: Our software suites are sold as On Premise Licensing. We will be releasing Service Provider licensing so partners and customers can opt for a subscription-based model. A hybrid model could become a backup solution on premise while security is addressed by the service provider.

There are add-on SKUs which helps organizations do mail and Web security in the cloud or on premise.

We would also align with Tier 1 /Tier 2 MSPs which target SMBs. End customers should not think that Symantec is only about on premise or MSP, but a vendor with flexible ‘routes to market’.  — Yogesh Gupta

8/10/2011 12:28:59 PM

n Fast Track

Secure Network Solutions

P h o t o b y S r i v at s a S h a n d i lya

W

ith close to 90 percent revenue coming from security and the remaining from networking Secure Network Solutions has secured its place as a specialist network security company. “We feel top level enterprise customers work with Tier 1 partners and that market is a bit crowded compared to the emergent SMB and mid-market. We focused here where the customer really appreciates our personalized support services,” says N K Mehta, CEO, Secure Network Solutions. The Chennai-based company’s revenue pie chart shows the mid-market and SMB comprised 80 percent of the revenue (40 percent each) and enterprise -15percent. “We have grown with SOHOs who are now SMB customers and SMBs who are today mid-size enterprises. They consider us when they open other offices, as we cater to their multi locations as a single security partner, says Mehta.

“Most people can do selling but good on-going support in an ever changing network security area is tough”, says a candid Mehta. The company drives initiatives like constantly upgrading skill sets of engineers, in-house test laboratory, regular training and latest certifications. “Tier 1 partners, SIs and vendors talk of NBD shipment for Firewall replacement, but we can offer NBH (Next Business Hour) services.

Around 60 – 70 percent of business comes from existing customers as we receive more than 95 percent customers’ renewal of services,” he says.

Is it a problem working with various security brands? Mehta replies, “As top vendors are in touch with

We want to be a one stop solution for security needs for mid-size firms and SMBs, says N K Mehta, CEO

Snapshot

Secure Network Solutions Founded: 2000 Headquarter: Chennai Branches: Bangalore, Bhubaneshwar, Cochin, Coimbatore, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Mumbai Key Executives: N K Mehta -CEO; Madhumita Mehta-Dir (Operations & HR) ; S.Subramanian - Head (Customer Support & Consulting) Revenues 2009-10: Rs 9 Crore Revenues 2008-09: Rs7.5 Crore Principals: Astaro,Aruba,BlueCoat,Check point,Fortigate,F5,Ironport,Juniper, McAfee,RSA, Symantec, Sonicwall, Trend Micro,Watchguard, Websense Key Business Activities: Network Security Solutions Web Site: www.snsin.com

revenue split n IT/ITes 10%

n Government

5%

n Education

5% 40%

10%

n BFSI n Retail & utilities

10%

n Logistics 10%

10%

n Hospitality n Others

S o u r c e : S e c u r e N e t w o r k S o lu t i o n s

customers directly, if they need an urgent POC or if a dissatisfied customer needs support, we help. We bridge the gap between vendors and customers through our strong technical skill set and quick support.”.

With prime focus on UTM and Internet gateway security, the company will explore areas of end point security, SSL VPN and DLP and open offices across Ahmedabad, Pune, Trivandrum, Chandigarh and other locations. “Our vision to become the best network security company in the South three years ago has been refined to become India’s best security company,” he sums up.  — Yogesh Gupta

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Dossier Name: Tom Georgens Designation: President and CEO Organization: NetApp Previous Role: As President and COO he was responsible for all product operations and field operations worldwide Career Graph: He spent nine years at Engenio, a subsidiary of LSI Logic, the last two years as CEO. At Engenio, he built the business into a successful OEM storage provider for companies such as IBM, NCR, StorageTek, Silicon Graphics, and Sun. Prior to Engenio, he spent 11 years at EMC in a variety of engineering and marketing positions. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree and a Master of Engineering degree in computer and systems engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

n The Grill

Tom Georgens

CEO, NetApp, on virtualization, cloud computing, and other company buyouts Why the recent change of leadership at NetApp? Georgens: I think there are a couple of factors. I think Dan Warmenhoven (the current Chairman who had led the data storage vendor since 1994)

had made it clear for quite some time that he was not going to be doing this past [age] 60. And I think as we went through this difficult period one of the messages was that he clearly didn’t want to make

the transition in the middle of a storm, so he was looking for a period of relative calm.

While the overall environment is hardly euphoric at this point, we’ve at least gotten to a point of stabilization, where the transfer [of power] can be positive. I’d say the other side is that as with any downturn, the market emerges different from when it went in. There are technology implications for us, in terms of go-to-market [strategies], and we’re trying to drive a bunch of priorities in the company around those.

I think making the transition now is symbolic that those things are now priorities and we need to change some of the things we were doing in the past. The way [Warmenhoven] describes it internally is that this is a new era for NetApp. The new era applies to products, go-to-market, and apparently leadership as well.

When you say “storm,” are you talking strictly about the economy or NetApp specifically?

Georgens: I think overall, from our Continued on page 22 july 01, 2010

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n The Grill | Tom Georgens expected to be and not where we expect to be in the future.

But if you look at our business, our top 100 accounts are the most economically sensitive almost by definition and, in our case, concentrated in a couple of industries. But once you get out of those accounts, we acquired more new accounts than at any year in our history.

For NetApp, the Data Domain acquisition was an offensive strategy.

However, EMC saw it as a defensive move and they arrived at a different valuation than we did.

Continued from page 21 competitive position, we feel pretty good. Over the past five years, we’ve experienced a 25 percent compound annual growth; very few companies have been able to do that. And we did 7 percent in 2008, which is certainly better than most, but not where we 22

NetApp brokered an acquisition of Data Domain, but EMC wound up buying that company out from under you.

What kind of impact does that have on NetApp? Georgens: It would be really easy for me to say we dodged the bullet [and] we shouldn’t have gone after it in the first place. I’m not going to say that. Obviously, we would have loved to have had Data Domain as part of our portfolio. It’s a good company, and it has good products.

What we were looking to buy is a backup solution for disk-todisk. This was a clear opportunity for us to enter a new market that has a fair amount of growth, with a company that has some traction and some scale, and it was a very opportunistic transaction for us.

Frankly, I think our opportunity with Data Domain was going to come at the expense of some other players in the market, and I think EMC was concerned that might be them.

But for NetApp, this was primarily an offensive strategy to enter a new market and use that to augment the growth of our core business. However, EMC saw it as a defensive move, and they arrived at a different valuation than we did. Eventually, we drew the line and determined it wasn’t worth it to us anymore.

How will NetApp approach cloud computing?

Georgens: I think it’s unlikely that NetApp will be a cloud [infrastruc-

ture] provider. I don’t see us as a data center operator. I don’t think that’s our skill set. I think our strategy will be to enable companies that want to build cloud infrastructures [for other companies].

I think the external cloud is very interesting to NetApp. If you look at NetApp’s business, we’re still a 12 or 13 percent marketplace player. And [of the] 5,000 largest storage buyers in the world, roughly only one-third of those are NetApp customers. So strategy-wise, or market-share-wise, there’s plenty of opportunity for us to gain share. If we think about what it would take to double this firm, I think the go-to-market side is the bigger challenge.

If you believe there will be this class of providers called cloud service providers in the market and they are going to aggregate large amounts of end-user demand in one single place, then winning those accounts gives us a tremendous amount of sales leverage.

What will drive growth in the data storage marketplace as the recession ends?

Georgens: Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen more and more oneyear renewals of service and maintenance contracts. That tells me that people are trying to wring one more year out of their equipment in these difficult times.

So, when this technology refresh happens, it’s clear to me that it isn’t going to be like the last refresh in terms of people buying new versions of what they already have in place. I think they have a very different architecture in mind, and that includes virtualization. And those [vendors] that haven’t advanced much, particularly in the midrange SAN space, are going to suffer in this coming technology refresh.

When you consider our integration with the virtualization tools, provisioning technologies, our deduplication for primary storage, and our zero-space cloning for provisioning new virtual machines, we really have a very strong and compelling offering.  — Lucas Mearian Computerworld

Indian Channelworld JULY 01, 2010

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CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP HP STORAGEWORKS DIVISION

Principal Speak | Channel Strategy

Prakash Krishnamoorthy Country Manager India, HP StorageWorks Division

We Help Partners Become Trusted Advisors to Customers Our focus clearly is to help our partners leverage customer data to build a blue print for consolidation, a blue print for virtualization and a blue print for disaster recovery and business continuity.

Tell us about the specific initiatives you are taking at HP StorageWorks in 2010 that your channel partners are closely involved in?

At HP we feel that skill development is the key for partners to succeed and our priority is to enhance the partners with the right skills to address customer requirements. All our initiatives are aimed and enhancing the skills of our partner’s sales organization.

Our initiatives include StorageWorks Certifi cation for our channel partners, Product Training, Solution Development Workshop and Pre Sales Training around business applications.

As our portfolio is one of the richest is the industry we are able to train our partners to address most of the needs of the customers using our portfolio so that they are able to provide the right solution and not attempt to address all the needs thru one single approach.

How do your partners benefit from these initiatives?

Our partners truly become trusted advisors to our customers. They are able to right size solutions and are able to provide comprehensive solutions for our

customers. Every storage array that our partners recommend to our customers is based on a detailed understanding of the type of data, the growth rate of this data, the I/O characteristics. Not only do they recommend the right array they also advice the right interconnect infrastructure and the right backup strategy. Our partners become one stop technology consultant to our customers. Our partners can provide frame work that can address database, messaging and file services and in each of them provide the right framework to manage the data as well as protect the data.

Our partners with improved skills actually own the customer’s infrastructure design and be a part of their organization.

What are you doing today that will equip your partners with the tools they need to play an integral role in your strategy for India in the medium-term future?

At HP we have developed a lot of simple and effective sizing tools.

These tools are available online on our portals for our partners to have access any time they need. Once we train our partners they can cees these tools from any place and use the data points collected thru discussions with customers into drawing

the right inference. Be it sizing a file server based on nos of users or sizing a backup solution based on the backup window, restore window and data size, the partner will be able to do it all by himself and get it right for the customer.

Which technology areas are you encouraging your partners to gain more expertise in?

Consolidation, Virtualization and Business Continuity are the three key imperatives for our customers and so our focus clearly is to help our partners conduct studies on the customer environment and use the data to build a blue print for consolidation, a blue print for virtualization and a blue print for disaster recovery and business continuity.

From the technology areas our partners are encouraged to build a complete framework using our EVA technology, P4000 technology, P2000 technology, Tape Automation, Replication and File services.ď Ž

This Interview is brought to you

by IDG Custom Solutions Group in association with HP StorageWorks Division

Cloud Computing

Security

Desktop Virtualization Networking

mid-year

review As we approach the half-distance mark in 2010, here is an in-depth

Business Intelligence

look at 10 promising technologies with perspectives on what the future holds for them. Read on to find out >> Managed Services

Document Management

Server Virtualization

Inside 26 | Cloud Computing Seeking Fortune

Datacenter

29 | mAnAged SeRviCeS Remote Control

34 | deSktop viRtuAlizAtion getting Real, Albeit Slowly

37 | dAtACenteR Breaking Free

40 | BuSineSS intelligenCe Cloud Calling

43 | SeRveR viRtuAlizAtion virtual existence, visible earnings

46 | StoRAge

Separate, Shrink & Store

50 | SeCuRity Beyond Security

53 | netwoRking wired

56 | doCument mAnAgement distinguish, manage, Search

Storage

Seeking Fortune

Partners do see opportunities in cloud, especially for private clouds and SaaS

By Radhika Nallayam Illustration by Unnikrishnan AV

t

he newest buzz word in the

It t industry, cloud computing, has been evolving gradually over the past two years as a delivery model. while there are a considerable amount of takers for cloud, a large number of companies still shy away from this concept. however, it’s fact that most organizations will start using cloud offerings on one day, 26

indian channelworld JULY 01, 2010

in one form or the other. Considering cloud is a trend that can’t be avoided, what are the channel partners doing about it? Do they think cloud is a big opportunity, as projected by many in the industry? worldwide, cloud services revenue w is forecast to reach $68.3 billion in 2010, a 16.6 percent increase from 2009 revenue of $58.6 billion, according to Gart-

ner. the industry is poised for strong growth through 2014, when worldwide cloud services revenue is projected to reach $148.8 billion.

ShiFt to ServiceS During the last one year, a lot of systems integrators in the county increased their focus towards services business, for a variety of reasons. they

Cloud Computing | special report n moved further away from box-pushing and started to adopt different models that offered them better margins. Cloud thus became a sensible option for them to bank on. One of the recent online surveys conducted by ChannelWorld witnessed an overwhelming number of partners who believed that cloud is going to be a huge opportunity in 2010.

We went back to some of them to find out where they have reached in their cloud road map and received mixed feedback.

While a few of them have made investments on expanding their infrastructure and skill sets, others have started with ‘reselling’ the cloud offers of their principals. They also believe that cloud is currently in its nascent stage in India and it would offer more opportunities in the coming days.

“A lot of people in the industry are talking about cloud and we believe it’s the new buzz word in the industry.

We didn’t want to stay away from this new trend and have thus invested on infrastructure and created the required skills sets. The results have been on the expected lines and we do see an increased demand for cloud-based services in the last 2-3 months,” says Sandeep Salman, Senior VP-Consulting and Managed services, Futuresoft Solutions.

“In India, we are witnessing that ‘Cloud’ adoption is still in its infancy and it is early days yet to comment on how it pans out vis-à-vis various technologies and the market. “I am confident that the Partner Community will play a crucial role as and when this market matures,” agrees Vijayant Rai, Director Channels, CA Technologies India.

Sanjay Agarwal, Director of Momentum Infocare says, “Cloud definitely seems to be the future for companies like us who have a strong focus on SMBs. We see that these companies would use cloud service in a very large manner in the net 4-5 years for various reasons like IT refresh and complexity.”

Some partners are however a bit cautious about new investments in the cloud. “Cloud seems to be more of hype as of now. We have seen some applications like CRM on demand becoming popular. However, broadband is definitely concern in the further growth of cloud,” says Subbaram Gowra, Manag-

ing Partner, Gowra Bits & Bytes.

Public Vs Private The biggest challenge for the partners is to identify where the opportunities in cloud are and act accordingly. Currently, most of them seem to be quite upbeat about private clouds. They help customers set up private clouds within their premises and also in hosting various applications on it. Partners opine that most of the companies are still reluctant to the idea of using a public cloud and they site security as the major concern. As a reason, private cloud has become an easier concept to sell.

“Customers are looking at setting up private clouds within the company premises. We are not very sure about the public cloud model and its potential, because when we suggest tha they shift to a public cloud model, they appear to be extremely concerned about their business data. Migration might happen eventually, but now the opportunity

lies within private clouds” says Ajay Pathare, MD of BrainPower Technologies. Brain has seen more demand coming from large companies. The company currently offers various applications like ERP, retail system and sales force automation as services to its customers.

Accel Frontline also bets big on private clouds and the related opportunities. Though the company is not into offering cloud services, it taps this market through offering infrastructure for setting up clouds. The company has partnered with VMware to help set up private clouds for customers. When the customer adopts cloud, it results in further requirements in computing and storage. Accel Frontline utilizes its association with companies like IBM, Sun, Oracle and HP to tap these related opportunities. “A shift to public cloud will still take time. It’s in fact due to the conservatism of companies about their business data. Though there is going to be migration towards public cloud, it’s

What’s your cloud strategy?

A

midst the overwhelming buzz of cloud computing, IT decisionmakers must sort the reality from the hype to determine where cloud might provide business value for their organizations. Cloud is an important development in the landscape of computing options-to the point that most organizations will one day use cloud or cloud-like offerings-but there’s no guarantee that cloud is right for your organization right now. For example, many of the most-talked-about usage scenarios for infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) entail specialized situations that few enterprises can relate to. On the other hand, there is real value, and your business may be able to achieve substantial benefit from cloud computing.

When any wave of industry hype gets fevered and loud, CIOs often ask architects to create a strategy for the new industry darlingin this case, cloud. The problem with creating a “cloud strategy” is that, by placing your strategy focus on the technology rather than on your business, it’s easy to lose focus and assume that adopting cloud-based offerings is a sure path to business benefit. In reality, there are numerous tradeoffs between cloud options and traditional computing options.

Nearly every cloud solution has a functionally equivalent non-cloud alternative, so to main-

tain focus on your business, it is best to build your strategy around the business decisions to which each type of cloud offering is directed.

This approach fosters more level-headed consideration and comparison of cloud and noncloud options, and it establishes a stronger foundation for a long-term evolution toward cloud and cloud-like options as they mature.

The three major categories of cloud computing-IaaS, platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and software-as-a-service (SaaS)-correspond to three major business decisions addressed by an organization’s architecture strategies: (a) On what computing resources will I run my business?-computing infrastructure strategy / IaaS (b) With what tools will I build and run custom solutions?-application platform strategy / PaaS (c) How should I mix custom and off-the-shelf solutions?-solution portfolio management / SaaS Rather than developing a siloed strategy, a business approach will integrate analysis of cloud and cloud-like options into each of these three strategies. Rather than asking architects to create a cloud strategy, CIOs should direct them to enhance existing ones. This will include the development, within each strategy, of plans for evolving over the long-term as cloud offerings mature.

— Randy Heffner, VP, Forrester Research july 01, 2010

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n special report | Cloud Computing going to be a gradual and slow process,” says Sriram Narayanan, GM-Marketing, Accel Frontline.

HaaS, Hard to Sell Hardware as a service is a different game al together, say partners. At the same time, software as a service or application as a service offers huge opportunities to them. By the end of 2010, 75 percent of Asia Pacific organizations will increase their SaaS investments, according to a survey conducted by Gartner, Inc. Of the organizations surveyed, 80 percent were currently using SaaS for enterprise applications such as ERP and CRM, with the remaining 20 percent planning to use it in the next 12 months.

Team Computers has partnered with

There are many opportunities for channel partners. There are very low overheads as they don’t get any goods in hand, it’s all a virtual transaction.

Anil Menon, Vice-president, software group channels, IBM, India/ South Asia

Google and Microsoft to offer services like internal work flow to its customers.

The company has also set up its own data center to offer disaster recovery on cloud. The company expects to offer ERP and CRM as well on cloud in the coming days. It is seeing demand for cloud from both large and small businesses. “Cloud is a good option for small companies as it allows them to avoid upfront investments and go for cost-effective solutions. Large companies are looking at cloud to reduce their operating costs. But mid-sized companies are still not moving towards cloud as their requirements are different,” says Satya Prakash Sharma, Regional Sales manager-West, Team Computers.

Futuresoft’s focus is on offering hosted applications to customers, es28

pecially to enterprises. The company has partnered with Microsoft to offer messaging solutions and sharepoint as a service.

The company expects to sell disaster recovery services and infrastructure management on cloud. It also sells its own product for HR and payroll through cloud.

Momentum Infocare offers remote support to customers through cloud, besides offering ERP, CRM and messaging. The company has invested on setting up a data center to offer back-up services as well. The company also hopes that it will be able to offer to hardware as a service or lease out data center for customers in the near future.

Gowra Bits & Bytes, though a hardware players, plans to offer its own

Cloud seems to be more hype as of now. We have seen some applications becoming popular. However, broadband is definitely a concern.

Subbaram Gowra, Managing Partner, Gowra Bits & Bytes

branded software as a service to its customers. “Hardware as a service has to still evolve as a delivery model. It requires a lot of invest from our end and seems to be a different business proposition altogether,” says Gowra.

Opportunity or challenge Cloud is all about how you deliver IT to your customers. Since it’s a completely new delivery, there is a notion cloud will eventually cut out the middlemen- the channels. However, both the vendors and channel partners disagree to this.

Partners have already proved this wrong by coming up with successful cloud model, with and without the help of their principals, at the same time, vendors reiterate that channels will continue to play the most criti-

cal role in cloud.

“Channel Partners will continue to play a vital role in delivering the value of IT to the end users in the Indian Market. Over the years, as the Internet as well as related technologies have grown and changed the way businesses buy and use Information Technology, channel partners have always kept in-step and have added value in ever increasing measure.

“Besides the technology buying process, the partner community adds huge value by way of on site deployment and support presence as well as by acting as a ‘trusted advisor’ to the end user,” says Rai, Director Channels, CA Technologies India.

Anil Menon, VP- Software Group Channels, IBM India/South Asia agrees, “Cloud computing is considered the wave of the future as businesses look to outsource some or all of their IT responsibilities to the cloud, maybe that’s why the cloud computing market is expected to reach $160 billion by next year.

“This doesn’t mean there aren’t opportunities for channel partners, both in reselling those apps and in providing the IT integration and customization services to make them work for a particular business. In fact, IBM is looking to help partners capture these cloud deals with a host of new IT certifications aimed at demonstrating their expertise in this new specialty.

There are opportunities waiting for channel partners to wrap services around cloud computing. In addition, there is very low overhead for channel partners because they are not receiving goods in hand– it’s all a virtual transaction.”

“Cloud offers different options to partners. They can add cloud to their portfolio and start offering services to customers. They can also white label various services and offer them as their own brands. This way, cloud is actually widening the horizon for partners,” says Nitin Mishra, Head, Product Marketing, Netmagic Solutions.

Cloud can definitely be a win-win for vendors and channel partners. Partner enablement will always be the key to make this ecosystem work. In addition, cloud offers recurring revenue stream for partners, no matter how big or small they are. 

Indian Channelworld JULY 01, 2010

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RemoTe ConTRol Remote Infrastructure Management is turning out as a formidable and cost effective business model for enterprises

By Yogesh Gupta Illustration by Unnikrishnan AV

T

he IndIa Managed Services

market growing at 25 percent CaGR is expected to touch $2.2 billion by 2010 according to IdC India 2010. “The contribution of RIM (Remote Infrastructure Management) would be 16-18 percent of the overall market,” says Kamal Vohra, Manager, Software and

Services Research Practice, IdC India.

These figures mean a colossal market for solution providers to ride the wave. eric Samuel, Research analyst, IT Services, Springboard Research reasons, “as customer preference for IT change from Opex to Capex, vendors are targeting the managed services market with attractive outcome based and

pay-so-you-grow pricing models, along with the traditional SLa-based fixed pricing and resource-based pricing strategies. We believe that the current $1.6 billion managed services business in India will grow by over 20 percent during 2010-11,” says Vohra.

“The customer’s focus is now swiftly changing from hardware utilization, juLy 01, 2010

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n special report | Managed Services procurement and financing capabilities to architecture flexibility, device and labour productivity, Hence evolution in technologies, changes in customer behavior and demand patterns, and development in the vendor and offshore supply environment have propelled the increasing demand for RIM,” says comments George Paul, Executive Vice-President, HCL Infosystems.

Saying that managed services help give a quick and rational jumpstart to their growing enterprise business needs, Paresh Shah, VP, Technologies, Allied Digital says, “The specific trend in terms of customer segments is that organizations with younger management in the CFO/CEO positions are becoming early adopters to outsource their infrastructure services.”

Avinash Pitale, Co-Founder and Executive Director, Omnitech InfoSolutions says, “The biggest factor pushing the managed services market has been advances in telecommunications and Internet; many of the processes can now be automated over the Web, something that was not possible before.”

RISE OF RIM With complexity of managing IT operations amongst Indian enterprises amplifying on a daily basis. “Corporate houses are increasingly viewing RIM as an alternative to in-house management of IT. “Allied Digital pitches RIM to CIOs in complete offshore or hybrid models to make valuable business decisions due to our comprehensive service capability in RIM,” says Samuel.

Shah at Allied Digital feels this will really take off in India. “There will be a huge demand for refreshed infrastructure, scalability and comprehensive industry-standard infrastructure solutions. All of these require costeffectiveness, better governance and SLA-driven operations.”

Cost-effectiveness will become key and organizations will need a secure way to manage their networks, systems, and applications, as well as their intellectual property. “RIM will gain importance while they stay focused on their primary business,” adds Vohra at IDC India.

Towards total solutions

T

o capitalize on burgeoning market interest, managed service providers must differentiate themselves by demonstrating their ability to improve business results and deliver total solutions, providing a single hand to shake to negotiate and manage the relationship. Managed services vendors must: n Offer bundles of services that solve business problems. Buyers want to work with a single reliable, capable vendor. There is still a healthy market for simple applications and network management as a way to augment specific, well-defined deficiencies in the IT capabilities of a potential customer. Providing network connectivity, applications configuration and management, and data center services in flexible bundles that augment a customer’s capabilities will be table stakes in this market. n Lead with services that extend and augment customer capabilities. Offer services that augment the skills of your customers.

IT professionals are wary of vendors offering to do everything for them because they worry about their jobs. Don’t try to sell managed security services to a financial 30

institution with a dozen certified IT security experts on staff. n Sell the total value of service. Emphasize both savings and improved IT / business performance in your marketing and sales activities. Vendors deliver more effective marketing and sales messages when they lead with statements about the total business value of managed services - both to the business decision-maker and to the IT decision-maker - and close with IT value to streamline and optimize management and operations activities. n Act as a strategic partner by helping clients migrate from IT to business technology (BT). Enabling IT professionals to concentrate on transforming the business while giving them sage advice about how to implement and execute changes will earn you the right to revisit your clients and discuss their progress and their future plans.

This creates a virtuous cycle where you are improving your long-term opportunities to satisfy your customer’s needs and grow your revenue.

Source : By Henry Dewing, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research

The boom in the organized retail and banking sector is driven by costeffective technology. “If this is implemented efficiently, it puts the control back on the CFO’s table. RIM is market reality and gels well with economic scenario, where CFOs are compelled to reduce OPEX cost,” says Kamal Vahi, Director, Compton Computers.

According to Samuel, “Early RIM adopters are witnessing a reduction of almost 25 percent to 35 percent in their operational IT budgets.”

“In the domestic market, customers are increasingly moving towards umbrella contracts wherein they outsource all their activities to a single service provider who not only supports their hardware infrastructure but also software/application infrastructure.

“Verticals like insurance, airlines, microfinance, share brokers are increasingly experimenting RIM to reduce their cost of operation while improving the SLAs with their internal customers,” says Pitale .

RIM FOR INDIA INC: YES OR NO? HCL Infinet, a networking arm and 100 percent subsidiary of HCL Infosystems Ltd offers complete end-to-end network management solution and RIM is a part of network solutions. “A CIO likes to have IT assets managed which are spread out across multiple locations, on a proactive basis rather than on reactive basis,” says Paul. “With the adoption of RIM, organizations now perceive IT as a growth enabler and innovation center rather than a mere profit/cost center,” says Samuel at Springboard Research. “However, Indian organizations are reluctant to outsource their entire IT infrastructure to third-party vendors. Nevertheless, openness towards hybrid (combination of RIM and on-side managed services) model is growing,” he adds.

According to IDC India, challenges facing CIOs are privacy concerns, increased dependency on a third party service provider and fear of IT staff losing their jobs.

“The high cost of providing services using traditional models, Capex involved in procuring tools, building and retaining the skills of these tools, difficulty to provide follow-the-sun model in a cost-effective manner are key

Indian Channelworld JULY 01, 2010

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CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP LEXMARK

CHANNEL DIRECTIONS

Our Partners Act as Consultants on Printing Less and Smart What differentiates a great partner from his peers is the ability to speak the language of the customer, highlighting the user’s concerns. Today that includes advising customers on their carbon footprint.

KUMAR PRIYA RANJAN Country Manager, Lexmark International India Pvt. Ltd.

Ranjan, with 18 years of experience, is responsible for the pan-India operations of Lexmark in India, including the distribution network, channel business and partner alliance. Ranjan has previously worked for corporations including Xerox.

Tell us about printing trends your partners must track.

Customers are increasingly looking at the environment, the total cost of printing, e-waste management, rationalization of devices, monitoring the devices and ways to reduce the use of paper.

This is where the channel partners play a very integral part in driving the business forward: They have to work as consultants for our solutions. Good channel partners speak the language of the customer.

How do partners tap into your expertise to expand your market reach?

We are a 100-percent channel driven company, with solutions around our products. Our partners talk differently in the market – We say to customers ‘Print Less Save More.’ We are the only printing company that promotes the strategy of printing less.

When you look at the environment factor, our partners propose customers for multifunction device, so they can

rationalize the number of machines. A multifunction device that uses size A4 paper, cuts power usage drastically and also saves premium space.

We also have a mechanism of e-waste management where we pick up cartridges from customers for disposal at our certified e-waste management sites.

While paper documents are necessary, monitoring the devices can help save on costs. We offer access-card integration on our machines so that one can print on any machine in any location within the office. This gives 100% uptime to customers.

When you look at the life cycle of a printing device, 80 percent of the carbon footprint is from the use of paper and not toner or power. So a customer buys a printing device, we insist they buy the ones printing back to back, they have to be on a network, now you are saving a lot of paper. Further, we provide solutions which monitor the print volume, which client is printing how much. With our embedded eSF applicatioins on MFD one can seamless integrate hard document with soft and save substantial paper. We have solutions around different verticals such as BFSI, Education station, Health solutions and Retail. So when we talk about printing less, we are actually talking about how to reduce the consumption of paper. That’s the biggest eco culprit. Our partners evangelize such solutions.

We are revamping our distribution network very strongly. Now we have three strong national distributors – HCL, CMS Infosystems and Cyberstar. Each caters to different verticals. Cyberstar caters to small offices; HCL to the government business and to the large enterprise, CMS is more on the IT integration part and more in terms of management. These distributors cover all the segments of the business. We have just opened the Diamond and Platinum partner relationship opportunities for supplies and hardware. We have added 25 partners so far and work very closely with them.

What are you doing in 2010 that will have an impact much beyond?

One constant thing we are doing is developing our partner base. We have got a new distributor HCL into our system.

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

Our partners talk differently in the market – We say to customers ‘Print Less Save More.’

How do you ensure that your partners are in sync with Lexmark?

We have developed a Web portal for our Diamond and Platinum partners so they have access to the website and are always updated on the key trends in the market. We have also appointed a lot of area managers in different regions, and it’s their Key Responsibility to train these partners not on the products but also on how to sell, and how to differentiate them in the market.

We share with the par tners our knowledge base. We also have the provision for partners to engage with us as Diamond and Platinum partners – they get access to our websites and our database. 

n special report | Managed Services challenges compelling CIOs to explore adopting RIM,” says Pitale.

In addition, with vendors portraying cost advantage as the primary benefit, they are losing grounds from CIOs looking for high-end technical and delivery support. “As CIOs battle with legacy systems at disperse locations, RIM does not sound a good solution.

A hybrid delivery model is a better fit,” says Samuel.

FOR SOLUTION PROVIDERS HCL Infinet deals directly with customers. “We are witnessing proactiveness from the SMB segment in acquiring new technologies and business applications be it e-mail security, intrusion detection, virtual private networking, storage, desktop or remote management. SMBs are becoming more comfortable with suppliers who are continuously monitoring their IT or communications operations remotely,” says Paul. Simultaneously, the sales/technical team delivers the uniquely designed managed services solution by HCL Infinet.

Omnitech’s RIMS is a one-stop shop to cater to all IT infrastructure needs.

“We are focusing on managed services based on hybrid approach with 60 to 70 percent support offered through NOC as RIMS and balance as critical support through onsite.

As a matter of optimization, we continue to increase RIMs component and reduce dependency over the physical resources over the period of maturity,” adds Pitale.

According to Vahi at Compton, the IT Channel has a huge opportunity to bundle a RIM pack with sale of every IT product like, Laptops/ Desktops/ Printers/ Routers/ Switches and Servers. Besides a good margin of about 20 to 25 percent on RIM pack sale, the cross sales opportunity is enormous, he informs.

“Partners have various opportunities to upscale current contracts by adding additional devices for monitoring.

The shear capabilities in RIMS shall enhance the status in front of new customers,” says Pitale.

VENDOR – PARTNER ECOSYSTEM In recent months, an increased traction towards high-value professional 32

services has been observed in the market. “Hence, channel partners should focus on these services and tie up with the right vendor providing services on specific engagements, in the security, server, networking and enterprise storage segments,” says Vohra.

Quality of service delivered will play a major role for success of a vendor in the RIM space, say industry analysts. “With a majority of the firms requiring more than 99 percent uptime SLAs, and with evidence available of Indian firms penalizing vendors in case of default, channel engagement will hold the key for the vendor,” says Samuel.

Prior to pitching for a new deal, vendors and business partners should

Shah at Allied.

VIRTUALISATION TO DRIVE RIM Adoption of RIM is being led by infrastructure managed services. Nevertheless, network management services, database management services, and datacenter services are all set to contribute to this growth. “Also, new services such as those around cloud and virtualization will enable RIM to have deeper grounds,” says Samuel.

In 2010, virtualization will continue to extend further into the enterprise with desktop, sever virtualization and application virtualization set for rapid growth. “RIM still plays a key role in monitoring and managing the virtualized environment,” says Paul at HCL.

Partners have the opportunity to upscale contracts by adding devices for monitoring. The capabilities in RIM enhances the status in front of new customers.

The cost of Internet here is high compared to places where managed services have high acceptance. Cloud computing will fire demand for RIM.

Avinash pitale, co-founder, Omintech infosolutions

kamal vahi, Director, Compton Computers

understand prospects in totality to consult the customer as to which information is mission critical and needs to be maintained at the client site, while it makes more sense in having the nonmission critical information managed remotely,” he adds.

Arup Roy, Senior Research Analyst, Gartner India says, “Solution providers need to get their process in place including six sigma practices to emerge successful in this matured technology space.”

“In remote desktop management, database management and ERPs, it is very cost-effective and more efficient to take a RIM offering for SMBs. There are specialized offerings packaged recently in the SMB space for Desktop management as PC-as-a-service and Platform-as-a-service,” says

According to Allied Digital, key trends are automated RIM and integrated services offerings, infrastructure-as-a-service services. “Cloud will be a driving factor too,” says Shah.

“Application management is the new trend to drive RIM. After 3G gets popular, we can expect more applications on mobile platforms and hence a huge opportunity in managing mobile devices,” says Pitale. New technologies like utility computing, convergence, and virtualization, are bringing more momentum to the market. Specialized point services based on technologies such as unified communications, security, BI are helping to increase demand,” says Vohra at IDC. “RIM is an evolution of contract. Vendors try to revolutionize the market through RIM which may not pays-off, says Samuel. 

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Getting Real Albeit Slowly

As the technology matures, desktop virtualization is slowly gaining mindshare among enterprise customers

By Tasneem Balapurwala Illustration by Unnikrishnan AV

A

s the recession becomes

news of the past and people look to move ahead with investments that were previously held up, desktop virtualization is one of the technologies begging for attention. While many agree that the technology has proven benefits, naysayers persist, clamoring to draw attention to desktop virtualization’s obvious pitfalls.

Desktop virtualization rose to prominence in the past two years as the thin client vendors beat drums to call attention to the potential of the new technology which claimed to reduce It wastage. Described as a computing environment that is abstracted from the end user’s PC, it consists of an operating system, applications and associated data, all set up on a thin client and stored in a central server, thus claiming to increase the computing capacity of every CPU. the ambitions of desktop virtualization are yet to be realized as it faces many challenges despite being more or less accepted as a technology which will make its mark in the near future once its impending loopholes and pitfalls are successfully dealt with. Desk Desktop virtualization has made its appearance on the agenda for CIOs because of the various benefits like added security of the data which remains on a central server, manageability and compliance 34

IndIAn ChAnnelwoRld JULY 01, 2010

Desktop Virtualization | Special report n capabilities delivery.

With the imminent proliferation of Windows 7, as organizations that skipped Vista are high on the list of refresh cycles, and the blessing of Microsoft to the technology, the time is opportune for desktop virtualization to make its mark and establish itself in the organizations.

Most vendors agree that while desktop virtualization is yet to make a sizable dent in the market, organizations are slowly taking it up and implementing it in a planned manner. They also agree that while most organizations will never fully move onto a virtual environment, the aim is to maximize the level of migration in the targeted verticals.”

AL Jagannath, Marketing Head, VMware says, “Indian businesses are keen to transform their desktops by replacing traditional PCs with virtual

15%

of current traditional professional desktop PCs worldwide will migrate to HVDs by 2014, says Gartner desktops that can be cost effectively managed and controlled while providing unmatched levels of flexibility.

While the adoption curve has not been steep, we hope to see better acceptance in the coming year.”

The Challenges According to S. Ramanujam, Business Unit Head of Hewlett Packard, Dreamquest InfoQuest, there are many reasons why the adoption of desktop virtualization is slow -- prominent among which is the idea that it is a low hanging fruit whose adoption only makes sense for large organizations with more than 500 employees. “One of the biggest challenges that CIOs face today is the pressure on reducing operating expenditures and minimizing costs.

Though there is adequate knowledge on the benefits of virtualization, direction in terms of actual implementation in scenarios is lacking,” adds Pallavi Kathuria, Director, Server Business Group, Microsoft India.

While several issues have been cited by solution providers, most mainly point towards the high costs of implementation, insufficient user experience and scalability issues. Other issues that have been pointed out are the storage requirements that suddenly alter with the change from personal machines storage to the central server storage putting a strain on resources if the project is not planned sufficiently. The pressure on the network is also considered a major setback to the successful deployment of a virtualized desktop environment. “While the buzz around

desktop virtualization is very high and it shows great promise in terms of being accepted the same way as server virtualization is today, there are certain things (like the end user experience) that are holding back organizations from moving ahead full steam on desktop virtualization. The networks are also ill-equipped to handle the load and a successful implementation can only happen when there is sufficient planning in resources allocation.

Where most implementations could also go wrong is in acknowledging the fact that every user profile in an organization cannot be the same and a single shell cannot be applicable to all virtual users,” adds Sanjay Deskmukh, Area Vice President, Citrix.

Additionally, according to Gartner, while most vendors tout nine-months to a year as the optimum time for ROI, it actually may be more like three or four years, because the upfront infrastructure and licensing costs far outweigh the upfront benefits.

The most important drawback at play here can be the simple aspect of perception as people take time to accept any new technology and till the time there are sufficient successful stories, organizations will withhold all large implementations in that direction. Jagannath of VMware says, “In our minds, with more and more customer success stories hitting the market, the adoption of desktop virtualization will soon start to hit a rapid curve upwards.”

The Market Reality Vendors like VMware, Microsoft and Citrix have been attempting to promote the benefits of desktop virtualization for some time — including the additional security and flexibility that it offers along with the savings in terms of wear and tear costs that come with a traditional PC setup. With Microsoft’s launch of Windows 7, and HP’s consolidated desktop virtualization offering, solution providers believe the time for desktop virtualization is upon the industry and organizations that are large and can afford the initial investment will soon jump headlong into it. While SMBs are not as excited about desktop virtualization on account of initial costs and the subsequent returns, large july 01, 2010

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n special report | Desktop Virtualization

Virtual Desktop Pitfalls

Most CIOs have started considering virtual desktop infrastructure and other types of desktop virtualization, but only a minority has reached the deployment stage. Virtual desktops can potentially provide more flexibility for users, make it easier to apply patches and reduce IT help desk calls, but there are still numerous problems that keep desktop pros up at night. Here are five pitfalls to watch out for. n Cost There are certainly companies that have saved money by adopting desktop virtualization, but the majority won’t see any ROI for at least a few years, if ever, analysts say. IT pros trying to convince management should not use cost as the main selling point, the analyst firm Forrester Research said in findings released last year.

“The nine-month ROI that vendors might advertise for their latest and greatest technologies can actually average three or four years, according to our clients that have crunched the numbers for their hosted desktop virtualization deployments,” Forrester wrote.

enterprises like BPOs are ready to embrace it.

The fact that some companies are unwilling to upgrade their PC hardware so that it’s capable of supporting Windows 7 could also help make virtual desktops more popular, according to Chris Wolf, an analyst at Burton Group, now part of Gartner.

For its part, Microsoft seems to be playing both sides of the issue. The vendor supports desktop virtualization but is leery of anything that would threaten the primacy of the standalone PC as the main business computing platform.

“We expect to see a significant amount of deployment of virtual desktops on Windows 7 from CIOs looking for reduced costs in deploying applications on Windows 7,” says Scott Woodgate, the Director of Windows Product Management, who is leading the development of Microsoft’s desktop virtualization technology.

While Microsoft is “excited to have an offering” in the virtual desktop market, the company believes custom36

n Storage Moving desktop images and associated data from user devices to the data center creates more stress on centralized storage systems, particularly if a project isn’t planned sufficiently.

A “huge influx of data that was stored on local machines … now needs to be stored and administered centrally” because of desktop virtualization, Gartner notes in a February 2010 report. n Network If you’re a typical worker who uses Microsoft Office and not much else, “200 kilobits of network bandwidth is probably enough,” Gartner says.

But for workers who need video streaming and 3D graphics rendering, “those network requirements can scale to the hundreds of megabits and that’s not often discussed,” Gartner says. The problem isn’t caused solely by desktop virtualization software makers. Most of the servers built

by IBM, HP and other hardware vendors are limited in the number of slots for graphics adapters, making it difficult to scale out.

ers “should virtualize for the right reasons — for the flexibility it offers — not just focus on the potential cost savings,” Woodgate says.

On the negative side, VDI implementations are more complex to configure than more standard PC-based networks, he contends. VDI networks require administrators to create virtual machines, permissions and policies governing how the VMs behave and the images from which VMs are

40%

of worldwide PC market in 2013 will be comprised of hosted virtual desktop, says a Gartner study

n Multimedia Support In addition to network concerns, a lack of good multimedia support has so far prevented desktop virtualization from being useful for employees with needs beyond the usual office tools. Citrix promises rich graphics for virtual desktops with its HDX technology, and VMware has tried to catch up on that front by using Teradici’s PCoIP protocol. Microsoft has also improved multimedia support with Remote Desktop Protocol version 7, but in general virtual desktops still don’t provide as good an experience as dedicated desktops and laptops. n User Experience Analysts and IT pros say virtual desktop projects too often ignore the user experience during planning phases. General task workers, perhaps 40% of all users, are pretty good targets for virtual desktop projects, says Phil Grove, Global Director Of End User Services at CSC. The rest will require specialized attention, or may not be candidates for a VDI deployment.

— Infoworld

launched, in addition to configuring and managing a standard PC network.

The Road Ahead

Jagannath of VMware says, “Lately there have been a number of developments in areas like seamless user experience, the rich PCoIP protocol, robust feature set and platform integration that are changing the way people deploy and interact with desktops.”

“For customers to get the true benefit of virtualization, software and license model along with bandwidth cost reduction will be required. Application and software licensing relook for virtual environment can fasten the pace of adoption,” says Sriram S, CEO, iValue Solutions. “Since most customers are unable to see the tangible benefit of virtualization as seen with hardware, making bandwidth cost affordable along with reliability will help in expediting the adoption. The technology is already gaining mindshare in the enterprise side and emerging businesses have started showing keen interest,” he adds. 

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Breaking Free

Every vendor is eyeing a share of the datacenter market pie.

How can solution providers benefit from customers’ new age datacenter requirements?

By Yogesh Gupta Illustration by Unnikrishnan AV

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he IndIan datacenter services market is expected to touch $2.1 billion by 2011 from $1.4 billion in 2009 according to IdC India. “The captive datacenter services market in India is estimated to be around $1.17 billion in 2009 and is expected to touch $1.68 billion by 2011, growing at

a CaGR of 19.9 percent,” says Kamal Vohra, Manager, Software & Services Research Practice, IdC India. “For the last two years, the datacenter market on an average has been growing at twice the overall IT market in India.

The majority of the growth will be contributed by third party datacenter service providers whilst captive data-

centers grow at an average of 1.6x the IT market,” says Sudip Saha, Senior analyst – IT Services, Springboard Research.

The third party datacenter services market in 2009 was pegged at $266 million, which is expected to reach $481 million by the year 2011, growing at a CaGR of 34.5 percent, according july 01, 2010

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n special report | datacenter to IDC India. “With complexities involved in running datacenters, more customers are looking towards datacenter outsourcing from a third-party service provider, either in co-location or hosting model. This helps reduce the upfront capital expenditures with better business continuity and disaster recovery plans,” says Saha.

Sanjay Jotshi, Director - Enterprise, India and SAARC, Juniper Networks, says, “The multiple datacenter scenario that previously existed, has now been reversed. New datacenters are expensive to start and hence consolidation of datacenters becomes a viable option in light of the cheap bandwidth available,” he adds.

The New Age Datacenter According to IDC India, the market is witnessing an increase in the demand for new age datacenters, primarily on account of increased deployment of enterprise applications like ERP, financial applications, DR and remote backup solutions. “Prior to economic downturn, Indian firms were primarily following an approach of setting up one datacenter and then expanding it with growing requirements. However, an absence of long term planning has triggered a number of challenges, ranging from lower utilization of servers, lack of efficiency in terms of power and cooling, to framing proper business continuity and DR plans and faulty data archiving practices,” says Saha.

Samir Kumar Mishra, Regional Manager, Advanced Technologies Channels, Cisco India and SAARC, says, “Virtualization architectures today are very

No long term planning has triggered off challenges like lower utilization of servers, lack of efficiency, continuity, DR plans & faulty data archiving Sudip Saha, Senior Analyst – IT Services, Springboard Research

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KEY GROWTH DRIVERS FOR DATACENTERS Sanjeev Gupta, Country Leader, Site & Facilities Services, IBM India/South Asia, lists principal drivers that have increased the demand for datacenters in the past five years, a market trend which is likely to continue for the next decade.

Increased Computing Demand Every piece of server and storage equipment drives the need for more energy. If you look at the amount of energy used per square foot, the annual cost of datacenter energy is 10 to 30 times that of a typical office building.

Changing Cost Dynamics As energy usage and energy costs are increasing, companies have been seeing the combined effects on their operational IT budgets.

Datacenter Lifecycle Mismatch Datacenters were built for 10–20 years of life, trying to support technologies which turn over every 2–4 years. This mismatch can put tremendous stress on the infrastructure, which is called on to support the differences in the capabilities of the datacenter and the equipment being installed.

much ‘assembly required’ silos where the burden of systems integration is on the customer, increasing costs and delaying deployment while decreasing efficiency.” Sanjeev Gupta, Country Leader – Site & Facilities Services, IBM India/South Asia, agrees adding, “Firms are looking to reduce operational costs in response to the increasing demand for datacenter capacity thus enabling continuous technology change and thereby improving the resilience and security of their infrastructure.”

Smarter, Greener & Compact CIOs in India are actually struggling to find a balance between requirements of undertaking new initiatives

We are aligning with key SIs capable of providing end-toend solutions, especially those that have dedicated teams for virtualization and cloud Sanjay Jotshi, Director Enterprise, India and SAARC, Juniper Networks

versus managing costs from their existing datacenter setup. Services such as virtualization and infrastructure consolidation, energy efficiency assessments and datacenter health checks are a priority for enterprises.

“Also, multiple product vendors can be confusing while they make decisions on datacenter design roadmap and its future proofing. Datacenter power and cooling still remains an issue,” says Gupta at IBM. “There is an increased demand for energy efficient datacenters from enterprise customers which helps reduce power costs by 15 to 20 percent,” says Vohra at IDC. Most datacenters are about fifteen years old or more, and this coupled with the changing regulatory guidelines have been driving resilience. “Hence CIOs may opt to build new datacenters, designed to host more equipment, with a greater amount of storage space and is more resilient,” says Gupta.

There is a significant transformation in the size of a datacenter. Elliptical Mobile Solutions launched its full range of Datacenter-in-a-Box for the Indian market. According to Don Kennedy, Senior VP, International Sales, “Micro-modular datacenter reduces the cost of planning, building, and implementing a new facility by up to 80 percent versus a traditional datacenter.

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datacenter | special report n They have one fourth the footprint and reduce cooling and power consumption costs by over 50 percent, which is the perfect green alternative.”

Pratik Chube, Country General Manager, Product Management and Marketing, Emerson Network Power, says, “Blades invading datacenters reduce form factor by increasing the heat density. Monitoring is critical as one can control costs only when they measure power consumption on a micro basis.”

Vohra of IDC adds, “Virtualization in datacenters is moving beyond just server virtualization, and now includes a new concept called I/O virtualization technology, which pares down the hardware requirement at a datacenter, thus helping datacenters become smarter.”

IBM’s Scalable Modular Datacenters are pre-configured solutions that can include servers and storage along with power, cooling, and management architecture. Clients can scale up the datacenters as their business needs grow and use the ‘pay-as-you-grow’ model.

“Cisco UCS Manager’s integrated management model will enable IT managers to automatically and transparently use power management without having a negative impact on business critical applications,” claims Mishra at Cisco.

The Holistic Approach Virtualization is a key trend that drives the efficiency levels of servers on the hardware and software side, according to Jotshi at Juniper Networks. As this architecture fabric is common, Juniper is collaborating with vendors in the server space and virtual machine.

The compute capacity of servers, and optimization of datacenters hugely benefits through virtualization, agrees Chube. “Emerson’s acquisition of Aperture and Avocent transforms the vendor into a complete provider of technology for datacenters. Apart from cooling solutions and basic building blocks of datacenters physical infrastructure, we are now more of an IT vendor,” says Chube.

“Cisco provides value creation by extending network intelligence into the datacenter to meet customer requirements of operational cost reduction and simplified management. This is what commands a premium in the market,” says Mishra. “The features

Brocade Throws Hat in the Ring

B

rocade unveiled its converged datacenter architecture, and a slew of new products to support it. Brocade One is intended to simplify datacenter operations and lower costs by converging all operations onto the network. “The entire network is your datacenter,” said Brocade Chief Marketing Officer John McHugh.

Brocade One emphasizes simplicity, information protection, non-stop networking and optimized applications. It will face stiff competition from Juniper’s upcoming Project Stratus datacenter fabric and Cisco’s Unified Computing strategies.

Brocade One seeks to transform physical datacenter assets and resources into virtual services allocated via software commands rather than physical relocation or deployment of systems. Its components include a Virtual Access Layer (VAL), which provides and pricing of Scalable Modular Server Room provides an extremely compelling value proposition for SMBs and mid market as they are looking to migrate from a server room scenario to smaller datacenters, which can ensure high availability and security of IT infrastructure,” says Gupta at IBM.

Specialized Partners in play In the last six quarters, IBM’s site and facilities services organization has rolled out several service offerings.

This provides IBM’s channel partners a great opportunity to engage and service with their customer base, says Gupta. A ‘consortium’ amongst SIs, power and cooling players, content providers and third party service providers is likely to emerge as a model to manage the continuously changing demands of customers,” says Vohra at IDC India.

Cisco will initially work with a targeted set of datacenter partners that already have successful networking, virtualization, storage, and integrated services. Through Authorized Technology Provider Program for Unified Computing, the vendor is working with partners to dominate the datacenter market.

“Emerson’s enhanced portfolio of

per virtual machine QoS on Brocade and third-party server adapters; and Virtual Cluster Switching (VCS), which provides lossless, low latency, deterministic multipath Ethernet networking.VAL will eventually support IEEE Edge Virtual Bridging standards, including Virtual Ethernet Port Aggregation, or VEPA, in two years, says Brocade CTO Dave Stevens.

Brocade will also ship a new element management system for the Brocade One environment in the third quarter. This system will provide integrated Ethernet, Fibre Channel and Datacenter Bridging management with northbound interfaces to IBM, HP, Dell, EMC, Microsoft and VMware server, storage and hypervisor management. “The element manager will provide network wide visibility into the VCS cluster,” Stevens said.

— Network World

Avocent and Aperture is a huge opportunity for system integrators. The convergence of IT monitoring software and power solutions will help partners of Avocent and Emerson to cross sell,” says Chube.

Adoption of Green IT and sustainability planning is very important for datacenters especially in enterprise and mid market says Rahul Meher, MD, Leon Computers. “Converged Infrastructure provides a blueprint for the datacenter of the future that eliminates costly and rigid IT silos so you can spend much more of your IT budget on business innovation,” he adds.

“Our customers play a key role in driving us to work with hypervisor companies (like VMware and Microsoft) to deliver a consistent set of networking capabilities on their server virtualization platforms (e.g., Nexus 1000V), to enable intelligent networking capabilities down to the server,“ says Mishra. “Cloud computing is gaining traction with organizations putting their non-core applications on to a virtualized platform. With organizations pursuing outsourcing for greater cost realization, in the long term, the market is expected to be ruled by third party datacenter service providers,” concludes Vohra at IDC.  july 01, 2010

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Cloud Calling Will the Cloud spread over Business Intelligence? If not now, then surely in the next few years, say industry experts.

By Radhika Nallayam Illustration by Unnikrishnan AV

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been a little different had somebody predicted the advent of such ruthless economic fluctuation. the importance of ‘predictions’ was thus felt and understood, by all types of companies, during the recession. And, it was no surprise that the Bi market grew during this period, when most it markets fell. As a tool that helps organizations take informed decisions and forecast things, Bi has a larger role to play.

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indian Channelworld JULY 01, 2010

hings might have

business intellegence | special report n Interestingly, the same factors like strained budgets and need for improved efficiency, are driving a new trend in the BI market-SaaS BI. IDC predicts that this new market will experience triple the growth of the overall BI market, at a CAGR of 22.4 percent through 2013. However, the agency further clarifies that the actual revenue totals will remain small compared to on-premise BI applications.

Cloud has proven to be an attractive option for application hosting as well, since the services are based on the Cloud’s “unlimited” scalability and the ‘pay-as-you-go’ approach.

Why move to the Cloud Mukund Deshpande, Senior Architect, Business Intelligence Competency Center at Persistent Systems says, “We are gung-ho about BI on the cloud, especially in the Indian market. There are multiple reasons for us to be buoyant about this market. Setting up a BI infrastructure is a strategic decision and it requires management as well as executive backing. We have found that Indian companies here are more tactic-focused. Besides, setting up a technical team for BI is no mean task, especially because every domain has its unique needs. SaaS BI has the potential to solve all these issues.”

In addition, the cloud model helps companies in avoiding huge capex investments in BI. “For many organizations today, the conventional on-premise approach is increasingly becoming impractical and less attractive on an ongoing basis, as this has begun to entail heavy investments. Especially in noncritical areas where data security and criticality concerns are fairly lowkey, organizations are beginning to find that a cloud-based environment is a more viable option to create data marts, data warehouses, and BI solutions on-demand.

“Cloud’s scalable and usage-based fee structure provide the perfect foil for the kind of space and run-time required by data warehousing and business intelligence solutions,” N. Veeraraghavan, Senior Vice President, Data Warehousing, Business

23%

of Indian CIOs expect cloud or SaaS to be their main BI solution within three years, according to a survey

by CIO Magazine Intelligence & Performance Management Practice, Cognizant.

Another major driver for SaaS BI is the concept of pervasive BI and its importance in the current scenario.

As BI becomes a critical component of businesses today, companies are now trying to take it beyond the ‘IT power users’ and also make it available to some of the more traditional under-served users like the front office. Additionally, data warehousing and BI environments typically involve large volumes of data and thus scalability is a vital consideration. Cloud is an effective way out as it provides an unlimited pool of computing resources virtually. As a result, it makes for a favorable BI and analytics environment, enabling enterprises to analyze their data faster and cheaper.

Companies would also consider SaaS BI because of the increasing need for specialization in applications and the ability to improve overall quality in analytics.

“Specialization is a critical factor in BI as it helps companies to align technology with their business goals.

However, specialization is not an easy thing to do for many companies as it requires more investment and technical expertise. SaaS BI would allow companies in acquiring these specific BI applications at a much lower cost, without having the need to invest heavily in areas that are not their core competencies,” says Heman Goswami, CTO, Infogain.

“Apart from improving ROI for all BI investments with reduced upfront investments in infrastructure, SaaS facilitates new consumption behavior for BI reports and dashboards,” says Veeraraghavan of Cognizant. Saas BI also enables businesses to implement short-lived projects (such as a one-time analysis need), in addition to allowing them to leverage large computational resources on-the-go to carry out more sophisticated and detailed analytics.

Another key reason for the expected opportunities in the BI-Cloud space is the interoperability it offers to users.

“The ability of cloud-based service providers to create built-in communication, application and data portability between multiple providers greatly enhances the users’ confidence in this

Cloud’s scalable and usagebased fee structure is the perfect foil for the kind of space and run-time required by data warehousing and BI solutions

Companies have already gone for basic automation and have their ERP and CRM systems in place. The next step would be the adoption of BI and SaaS BI

N. veeraraghavan, senior VP, data warehousing, BI & performance management practice, Cognizant

Maneesh Sharma, Head-Business User & Platform group, SAP India

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n special report | business intellegence new form of architecture thinking.

Seamless interoperability will assure the users that an investment in one service will not mean a complete lock-in with that provider.

“This is especially important in the BI environment where every organization has a plethora of technologies, solutions, and stakeholders,” says Cognizant’s Veeraraghavan.

Anil Menon, VP-Software Group Channels, IBM says, “This trend is increasingly driven by the fact that Cloud computing is massively scalable, provides a superior user experience, and is characterized by new, internet-driven economics.”

Intelligent Coexistence Though BI on cloud seems to be one of the hot topics, adoption of this model has not really picked up. Most of the companies in the field today are in the stage of exploring this concept and understanding whether it would make business sense to them.

“Companies have already gone for the basic level of automation and have their ERP and CRM systems in place. The next step would be the adoption of BI and we do see a lot of play around SaaS BI,” says Maneesh Sharma, Head-Business User & Platform group, SAP India.

93%

of the respondents in the CIO survey said they currently use on-premise BI tools for their business Vendors however like to believe that there would not be a complete transition to BI on cloud and only some ‘small pieces’ of BI will go online in the initial stage. The change is definitely going to be incremental and not sudden, according to the industry experts.

“We do see the possibility of analytics tools going to the cloud. Companies that have already invested in BI or analytics tools would definitely evaluate their further investments in the cloud context. In that case, we would increasingly see on-premise and cloud BI co-existing,” says Goswami of Infogain.

A survey conducted by the CIO

Stacking up Parameter

On-Premise

On Cloud

Start-up cost

Huge (Buying assets such as servers, DBMS, hardware and software)

Metered fee

Timeline

Heavy (Purchase, install, configure hardware and software)

Service oriented and instantly available

Ongoing cost

High (Maintenance fees, depreciation cost)

Monthly charge

Data center overheads

High (Floor space, cooling and power costs)

Nil

Scalability

Painful and involves overbuying to accommodate future growth

Scaling occurs seamlessly as and when demand arises

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magazine confirms these trends.

The survey, conducted among 335 IT leaders whose organizations use BI and analytics tools, found that one in five respondents (23 percent) expect cloud or software as a service to be their main BI solution within the next three years.

Presently, 93 percent of respondents use on-premise BI tools for their businesses, and 77 percent expect to continue with in-house solutions during the next one to three years. This again points out to the possibility of on-premise and cloud BIs co-existing.

“While certain applications would move on to the cloud, companies would continue with on-premise BI for requirements like real-time monitoring,” adds Sharma of SAP. There are dissimilar opinions as well. “In the next 2-3 years, cloudbased BI products will grow at the expense of the on-premise market.

In 2009, SaaS-based offerings really came to the fore and this was further proven by the significant uptake among customers and increased market visibility,” opines Veeraraghavan of Cognizant.

Though the future is unpredictable, most of the leading BI vendors are preparing for the new trend. Apart from the traditional BI players, the market is going to open doors for many niche cloud BI players.

Some of the leading on-premise BI vendors today have already made their entry into the cloud space. SAP recently launched its Business Intelligence on Demand and they have already managed to get 25,000 customers worldwide.

IBM’s Smart Analytics Cloud helps companies create a standard private cloud business intelligence solution at the on mainframe capability.

SAS, though does see better growth areas other than SaaS BI, has already invested in setting up an infrastructure for offering solutions through the cloud.

In other words, SaaS BI is where the concept of cloud computing was three years ago — spoken about widely and yet to become a reality. And if we can go by history, it’s only a matter of time before SaaS BI hits it off. 

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Virtual ExistEncE, VisiblE Earnings

Server virtualization has lived up to all the hype. We trace its journey from ‘what could be’ to ‘what is’

By Tasneem Balapurwala Illustration by Unnikrishnan AV

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aking its waves

years ago, server virtualization is now a formally accepted technology that has proven itself and presented its benefits. it is not about second guessing anymore and has backers amongst all vendors and customers. the initial hoopla

around it has ended and it has lived up to all that had been touted about it. it even lived up to the high sales figures in the hype period that are otherwise difficult to achieve. What then is a matter of wonder is the actual conversion of ‘what could be’ to ‘what is’.

VMware introduced its first x86 server virtualization products in 2001. it wasn’t until a few years later that the first commercial versions of the open source Xen virtualization hypervisor hit the market, and Microsoft’s release of Hyper-V followed in 2008. july 01, 2010

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n special report | server virtualization With its generous head start, VMware started winning customers, particularly among large enterprises looking to save money and gain efficiencies by consolidating data center assets. As interest in the technology rose, so did VMware’s marketshare.

In early 2008, researchers estimated that at least 50 percent and as many as 80 percent of enterprise customers were using its hypervisor.

Worldwide server revenues haveclimbed 6 percent from the previous year to $10.8 billion. Unit shipments have climbed 23 percent to 2.1 million. These are latest statistics that are presently making the rounds.

According to an IDC survey, by 2008-09, only 19.7 percent of the surveyed organizations reported having adopted server virtualization, large organizations lead the way with 30.3 percent adoption whereas only 15.9 percent mid-size organizations had virtualized their servers.

A Gartner research follows on similar lines and indicates that at the end of 2009, only 18 percent of enterprise datacenter workloads that could be virtualized had been virtualized. That share will grow to 28 percent next year and reach almost half by 2012.

But growth is anticipated among the small-to-midsize businesses (SMB), and it’s in this segment that Microsoft has a good chance to build a customer base. By 2012, VMware’s share is expected to shrink to 65 percent but the base of VMs will have grown to 58 million, a 10-fold leap. By that time, Gartner believes, Microsoft will hold 27 percent share, Citrix 6 percent, Red Hat 2 percent and others about 1 percent.

“The economy is on the mend and organizations are upgrading older servers,” said Jeffrey Hewitt, Research Vice President at Gartner, but the industry hasn’t returned yet to the quarterly highs it posted in 2008.

Revenue from servers based on x86 chips was $7.18 billion, up 32 percent, while unit shipments climbed to 2.06 million. This is another indication of the potential of virtualization since typically x86 is extremely supportive of virtualization.

A recent report by Springboard 44

32%

was the growth in revenue ($7.8 bn) from servers based on x86 chips from the previous year Research also concludes that the virtualization software and services market in Asia Pacific is estimated to grow at an estimated CAGR of 42 percent to reach $1.35 billion by 2010.

What’s Missing?

While the initial cries of evangelists die out and the technology sets out to prove itself, there is a chasm in the possibilities to the practicality. Solution providers believe that organizations are still wary of putting their core data on a virtual platform and prefer to hold on to it in the physical server. Atul Gosar, Director, Network Techlab, says, “There is an inherent resistance in putting their critical data on a server which is not physical. It would be unrealistic to expect to convert all possibilities since a 100 percent conversion of any organization is never a viable possibility.” S. Ramanujam, Business Unit Head of Hewlett Packard DreamQuest Info-

tech adds, “It’s a simple question of avoiding putting all eggs in the same basket. Organizations will not take the risk of putting their ERPs and high computing capacities on a virtual server. The production servers are still revered and remain untouched.”

Pallavi Kathuria, Director, Server Business Group, Microsoft India, says, “Like any new technology, virtualization too has taken some time to land in the market. While enterprises have largely grown to realize and acknowledge the importance of virtualization technologies, only 4 percent – 5 percent of servers are virtualized and almost 90 percent of the market lies untapped. The primary reason behind this gap between awareness and actual implementation of virtualization is the fact that this technology is yet to be made “real” for CIOs. While there is awareness, the actual adoption has so far been slow due to the overpriced options available in the market.”

AL Jagannath, Marketing Director, VMware accepts the slow uptake of virtualization but still stakes claim on the largest share in the virtualization pie. “From a market standpoint, we are seeing the first phase of virtualization, that is, server consolidation. We need to move onto business agility, mobile applications and into the cloud. Customers are now realizing that there are a number of other benefits from virtualization, including the ability to implement business continuity, high availability and disaster recovery. In addition to benefits like ease of management,

There is an inherent resistance on part of companies from putting their mission-critical data on a server which is not physical.

While firms realize the importance of virtualization, only 4–5 percent of servers are virtualized and almost 90 percent of the market still remains untapped.

Atul Gosar, Director, Network Techlab

pallavi kathuria, Director, server business group microsoft india

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server virtualization | special report n better resource utilization, disaster recovery, business continuity, Indian businesses are increasingly becoming aware of additional benefits like design densities, power and cooling,” he adds.

Citrix’s take on this remains that while a lot of the market is untapped, the potential is hyped in light of the vast difference between the number of servers that can be virtualized and actual conversion possibilities. Sanjay Deshmukh, Area Vice President, Citrix, says, “There are two phenomena at play here. One is the fact that all organizations will virtualize in a phased manner so if there are 300 servers that can be virtualized, not more than a 100 will actually be virtualized. Even with full acceptance of the technology, a completely virtualized organization is hard to come by. The other thing is that SMEs are still not onboard due to the initial cost of implementation. As the SMEs mature, we will see an upsurge in the demand for virtualization. The one thing that does work in our favor is the fact that virtualization brings down the total cost of ownership by one fifth, thus resulting in savings for an organization and becomes our calling card to other organizations.”

Solution providers also agree that till the time the technology makes its way to the B Class and C class cities, the growth will remain stunted. Vendors say that investments are being made in the direction of furthering the technology. Microsoft’s Kathuria says, “Broad investments are being made to offer customers a set of virtualization products that will be more dynamic. These investments will span multiple disciplines, ranging from the desktop to the datacenter and will fuel Microsoft’s overall virtualization strategy.”

The Security Concern Through 2012, 60 percent of virtualized servers will be less secure than the physical servers they replace, according to Gartner. Although Gartner expects this figure to fall to 30 percent by the end of 2015, analysts warned that many virtualization deployment projects are being undertaken without involving the informa-

The race to virtualization

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Mware has enjoyed a long run as king of x86 server virtualization, and the pioneering vendor remains the one to beat when tallying enterprise market share.

But its competitors, particularly Microsoft and Citrix Systems, are gaining ground as IT executives begin to view server virtualization not only as a means to cut costs in the datacenter but also as a baseline technology for enabling cloud computing.

But the race to virtualization is by no means over. Virtualization deployments have been expanding over the past several years, but plenty of workloads remain to be virtualized. At the end of 2009, only 18 percent of enterprise datacenter workloads that could be virtualized had been virtualized, according to Gartner.

The number is expected to grow to more than 50 percent by the close of 2012.

Vendors including Microsoft, Citrix (which acquired XenSource in 2007), Oracle (which acquired Virtual Iron in 2009), Parallels, Novell and others are gunning for new virtualized workloads, and they’re using management capabilities, automation technologies and vendor partnerships to sweeten and differentiate their offerings.

These tactics are timely. As today’s IT buyers mull virtualization technologies, they’re considering a lot more than just the hypervisor used to create virtual machines.

IT teams need tools to manage virtual server technologies from x86 environments back to the mainframe, across multi-platform hyper-

tion security team in the initial architecture and planning stages.

“Virtualization is not inherently insecure,” said Neil MacDonald, Vice President & Gartner Fellow.

“However, most virtualized workloads are being deployed insecurely.

The latter is a result of the immaturity of tools and processes and the limited training of staff, resellers and consultants.”

As more workloads are virtualized, as workloads of different trust levels are combined and as virtualized workloads become more mobile, the security issues associated with virtualization become more critical to address.

visors and consistently alongside physical machines.

They also need security and monitoring tools, and capabilities such as live migration to maintain business continuity.

Enterprises have learned they need to carefully track the configuration of virtual machines to ensure compliance with business policies and prevent virtual server sprawl – particularly as they get their IT infrastructures ready for cloud computing.

Virtualization is a critical step in the journey to the private cloud, according to Matt Eastwood, Group Vice President Of Enterprise Platforms at IDC. “Customers are quickly moving beyond the core hypervisor and focusing on mobility, self-provisioning, and metering and chargeback capabilities,” Eastwood said. “As a result, IDC believes that automation tools increasingly represent the battleground in determining the winners and losers in a marketplace which is rapidly reshaping itself.”

For its part, VMware has been beefing up its management and automation capabilities, most recently by acquiring IT management technologies from EMC’s Ionix portfolio for about $200 million. It also is part of a three-way partnership with Cisco and EMC to develop a series of cloud-computing platforms, called Vblocks, that are based on servers and networking gear from Cisco, EMC’s storage, and VMware’s VSphere virtualization software.

— NetworkWorld

According to a recent IDC user survey, the acceptance of server virtualization is gradually seeping through the mindsets of Indian enterprise managements. While the large organizations lead the way, mid-size organizations are bringing up the rear at a noticeable pace.

Server virtualization was seen as a cost saving measure in terms of hardware, space and employee investments by 66.1 percent of the users. While the growth graph is definite, there are may be issues that the industry needs to address as a whole before end-users feelw confident about investing in virtualization solutions, IDC concludes.  july 01, 2010

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Separate, Shrink &

Store How are vendors and partners riding the de-duplication wave?

By Yogesh Gupta Illustration by Unnikrishnan AV

e

xplosive data growth is transforming enterprise infrastructure into a more complex environment. emerging technologies like storage virtualization and compliance issues further compel customers to archive, save and protect their ‘data’ for longer spells. an idC report indicated that worldwide volumes of digital data grew by 62 percent between 2008 and 2009 to nearly 800,000 petabytes. the gap is constantly widening between the amount of

46

indian Channelworld JUlY 01, 2010

digital data being created and the amount of available storage. storage growth is mainly driven by consumer-generated content and regulatory compliance. “the key factor aggressively pushing the demand for data deduplication solutions is the explosion of data everywhere. Unstructured data is growing at an alarming rate and management of this data is recognized as one of the major unsolved problems in the industry,” says vijay Mhaskar, vice president, information Management Group, symantec india.

storage | special report n With shrinking storage capacity and exploding data growth, de-duplication comes as a compelling solution with powerful benefits. “Today, increased dependency of businesses on automation has resulted in burgeoning volumes of data, which need to be stored, managed, protected and retrieved based on business demands.

Over the last one year, due to the prevailing economic scenario, enterprises have been forced to re-structure their businesses,” says Surajit Sen, Director –Marketing and Alliances, NetApp India. The vendor has been witnessing significant uptake across almost 400 systems in India where customers are taking advantage of NetApp de-duplication technology.

“There is an increased momentum in the market for technologies like virtualization and cloud computing,” he says.

De-duplication Demand Grows “Data duplication along with transparency of usage for data of laptop / desktop is also gaining prominence (where the same file can exist in 1000s of PC thereby increasing ratio of de-duplication), which is adding other segments to the deduplication market,” says Arvind Singh Chauhan, lead technical consultant, Atempo India. As India is expected to be a country with one of the biggest datacenters, the de-duplication industry would be one of the largest in India,” he says. Singh adds that the early adopters include retail, print media and manufacturing facilities with remote locations in terms of server storage de-duplication and its backup.

Government would also emerge as a real big segment.

CA Technologies sees a clear trend which indicates that end-users are looking for solutions which are ‘ More Than Backup.’ “Basically the customer wants a comprehensive solution which delivers total protection, recovery and availability for systems, applications and data,” says Vijayant Rai, Director Channels , CA Technologies. The explosion of email, power point and Internet downloads means that there is more data to backup.

“They need to backup more data in the same backup window time and

without de-duplication technology.

This would mean companies would have to buy more storage to keep multiple copies of data backups available for rapid recovery,” he says.

Atempo Live Backup continuously captures all data, including any modifications, from the moment it is created thus offering more flexible Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and faster Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) than the traditional data protection solutions that were designed to create, manage and store singlepoint-in-time copies of data points.

NetApp technologies like SnapShots, SnapMirror, FlexClone and SnapVault have inherent deduplication capabilities. “For organizations that deal with customer data, de-duplication of data is going to be a key requirement in years to come. This includes banking, insurance, telecom, credit bureaus, and travel among others. The key

areas include risk management, customer service and sales and marketing,” says Sen.

A Top Priority for CIOs CIOs and IT organizations are challenged today to manage the explosive data growth which needs to be backed up, protected, made available for applications and recovered in case of any eventuality. “Needless to say, the demands on physical and in a lot of cases virtual storage capacity is ever growing as well. De-duplication helps save on precious storage capacity besides making the whole process a lot more efficient,” says Rai at CA Technologies.

According to Mhaskar at Symantec, archiving takes infrequently used unstructured data off primary storage, indexes it, and moves it into less expensive, slower disk arrays for longerterm retention. “The need of the hour

Quick ROI by De-duplication is a huge USP Understanding and evangelizing deduplication solutions at EMC (Amavar and Data Domain) since past 4 years, P K Gupta, Director and Chief Architect, BRS Practice – APJ, EMC, elaborates on this emerging technology trend amongst enterprises.

Is de-duplication becoming an important part of a CIO’s storage agenda? In an age of optimization de-duplication is a great technology available on primary and secondary storage, not only just for backup, but on the archival front. It is one of top three considerations for CIOs/CTOs looking for storage optimization. Across APAC, tape management and its recovery is tough. Customers should look at established brands as information is the lifeline for enterprises today.

Has de-duplication matured across India? Is compliance a major catalyst for de-duplication? According to reports, India’s backup recovery software market is around $36 million. We believe the de-duplication storage and disk based market is bigger at almost twice that figure. Worldwide, as of

2009, the penetration of deduplication was only 8 percent and in India, it was probably 5 percent.

A key requirement of compliance is to maintain another copy of your data or DR file in a different location. With tonnes of data, after de-duplication, there is almost a 10x bandwidth requirement.

Do you feel de-duplication will be accelerated by emerging trends like Cloud? De-dupe makes sense in a virtualized environment. De-dupe will help customers derive virtualization ratio and consolidation ratio for a good RoI on their cloud journey.

Do you have any suggestions for solution providers to maximize their revenues in the de-duplication arena? They should understand customer pain points like bandwidth choking, recovery time objective, restoration problem, backup failure before pitching source or target level deduplication.

De-duplication should be a part of their discussions with CIO and CTOs. It is a technology which can give ROI within a year. july 01, 2010

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n special report | storage is for integrated solutions that let the CIO cut costs as well as manage the data effectively. Our key approach is unique which is information-led one rather than being infrastructure-led,” he adds.

Atempo firmly believe that deduplication is becoming important by the day for the CIOs from storage management point of view. Especially for CIOs of large and distributed enterprises or those who have mobile or critical PC users, says Chauhan at Atempo India. The vendor is training their partners extensively to further impart the knowledge to the CIO community. CA partners have been educating the end user community on the benefits of deploying a comprehensive ‘Recovery Management’ solu-

Technologies. We have been working closely with partners to ensure that they are enabled sales and technical perspective to deliver the full value of CA Arcserve Recovery Management solutions, he adds. “Atempo has high niche backup focus for specific verticals. Aligning with partners having focus on these industries ensures higher margins even when the end-user price drops,” says Singh.

F1 Infotech is concentrating on Atempo Live Backup and CA BAB (De Duplication feature included in latest version) as both solutions gives de-duplication a higher rate. “Our team has been trained with the products in respect to this technology or solution,” says Sunil Gupta, Director - Business Development, F1 InfoTech.

Customers are basically looking for solutions which are comprehensive and deliver total protection, recovery, and availability for systems, applications, and data.

With our products the benefits to the client encompass all storage protocols and services. It allows them to move to disk based data backup in an affordable way.

Vijayant Rai, Director, channels, CA Technologies

Surajit Sen, Director, Marketing & Alliances, NetApp India

tion like CA Arcserve and utilizing cutting edge features like ‘De-Duplication’ and ‘Storage Resource Manager (SRM)’ which besides providing substantial saving, will give them better manageability of their Backup Environment.

The Channel Roadmap According to CA Technologies, channel partners are crucial to delivering the benefits of features like ‘Deduplication’ & ‘SRM’ to end-users. “By selling and implementing features like ‘Deduplication’ partners can easily display ‘Value / Benefit / Savings’ which the customer accrues by deploying such features. This represents an opportunity for partners to increase his services footprint,” says Rai at CA 48

He adds that they do pitch the dedupe solution along with storage as it adds value to the proposed solution.

Delhi-based Zephyr Info Solutions are pitching dedupe to enterprises, but its adoption depends upon the vision and strategy of individual decision makers. “Market trends like economic benefit (in terms of floor space, cost of power and cooling), value of increased retention, value of operational efficiencies and time to protection are the factors to increase demand for dedupe,” says Ajit K Jha, Technical Director, Zephyr.

“We are focusing on EMC’s product namely Data Domain and Avamar which facilitates de-dupe on target and source level respectively; in turn giving us the leverage to provide

purpose-built solution,” he says.

Beyond Enterprise Accounts According to Net App. mid-sized businesses are likely to be one of the biggest drivers in the growth of deduplication in the near future. More often than not, the SMBs do not possess an elaborate IT infrastructure to manage data recovery. Block level implementations of this technology allows the benefits to encompass all storage protocols and services. “It allows them to move to disk-based data backup in an affordable way and is likely to be the hottest technology for this segment,” says Sen at Netapp.

“Those SMBs that have distributed and critical information residing at remote locations and/or those with mobile working force shall be the early adopters for de-duplication,” says Singh at Atempo.

According to Symantec 2010 State of the Data Center Study, mid-sized enterprises are more aggressive and pioneering than either small or large enterprises. They are adopting new technology initiatives such as cloud computing, replication, and de-duplication at 10-15 percent higher rates than small or large enterprises, says Mhaskar. By providing an interface between sophisticated backup and recovery software and advanced diskbased storage appliances, we have obviated the need to choose between deduplication approaches. SMBs can leverage an integrated platform that not only supports both software- and hardware-based de-duplication, but is also easy to manage, says Mhaskar at Symantec. Rai concurs saying, “Mid market is showing a lot of traction for de-duplication.”

SMBs are bound to adopt technology tools to reduce cost of operation and site-loss protection. “To push de-dupe in SMB, our sales team have to align themselves with their technical team significantly so that they synchronize and in turn strategize their solution correctly,” says Jha at Zephyr Info Solutions. The requirement to have data at the central/DR infrastructure at very optimum price and a strong focus on RoI in this difficult economic scenario will be other catalysts for this technology,” feels Singh from Atempo. 

Indian Channelworld JULY 01, 2010

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Beyond Security

The lines between security and networking are blurring and collaborations to unify the two are gaining ground

By Tasneem Balapurwala Illustration by Unnikrishnan AV

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security | special report n

S

ecurity and networking

are generally considered two different ball games that don’t ideally play in each others fields but lately the lines are blurring and collaborations to unify the two haven’t gone unnoticed. Last month, a clear indication in this direction came in the form of the launch of a UTM in a switch by Fortinet and HP in collaboration. The switch claims to eliminate the need for a separate UTM device taking care within the switch of all the UTM duties.

UTM has not made much headway in the large enterprise sectors due to issues of reliability and the fact that most enterprises prefer to go for the best in all segments rather than take on a combined solution which is a one size fit all solution. The only sector that has taken on UTM is the SMB that is looking for a quick fix solution to the security problem rather than address it as a core issue.

The Market Opportunity “The network security market is undergoing a variety of transitions within the subsegments and is still growing despite slowing economies worldwide.

As UTM and IDP devices continue to gain market share on the former goliath, firewall/VPN, XTM solutions are already moving past the capabilities of UTM appliances with networking and management features,” says Charles Kolodgy, Research Director for Security Products at IDC. “Network security products remain popular because they offer comprehensive security with strong performance advantages and convenience to customers. Network security vendors will need to integrate better performance, management, and networking functionality with strong security architecture to remain competitive in a market that is seeing more comprehensive solutions taking hold in larger businesses.”

While some agree that this integration may be a step ahead in a new direction, most are skeptical of the capacity of a device that attempts to be all inclusive and feel that it may end up underachieving its targets. Solutions providers also feel that while there may be a market for this in some Tier II and Tier III cities, most

$2 bn

was the estimated global market for UTMs in 2008 according to IDC and Gartner says that this market will grow at a CAGR of 20-25 through 2012 organizations will still need separate security services to fully secure themselves and will not completely rely on the dual purpose device.

Jatin Sachdeva, Information Security Advisor, Cisco Asia Pacific says, “Integrating security into network infrastructure has been done for years and this is not a new trend. There are dozens of examples of firewalls, intrusion prevention systems and content security capabilities integrated within networking gear. The question of whether it can be done well enough depends on the vendor and whether technology being integrated is in-house or externally sourced, as that decides the level of collaboration that can be achieved between the security technology and the network device.”

Anantharam VV, Director, Webcom believes that the market for this integration is most suitably in the remote SMB sector but a full scale uptake is not on the cards. He says, “While this technology theoretically sounds like

it has a lot of potential, the issue is that it is an extension of the concept of UTM which itself hasn’t made a dent in the market. While bundling it with networking sounds like a good idea, it only serves as an additional layer of security rather than a complete solution to the security woes.”

Manish Bharti, VP, Technology at Futuresoft Solutions suggests another view to the appliance as he believes that while the concept may work in theory, it lacks practical implementation since CPU utilization is strong for software of this kind. “Appliance may not be difficult to come up with but the software to support it is not stable yet.

Unless there are enough success stories in the market, it will be difficult to sell this idea to a prospective customer.

UTM appliance can’t be discarded yet as dedicated resources are needed that don’t put the pressure on a single appliance for all purposes. Till the time the technology matures enough to support these demands, UTMs are here to stay,”

There are dozens of examples of firewalls, intrusion prevention systems and security capabilities integrated within networking gear.

The issue is that it is an extension of the concept of UTM, which itself hasn’t made a dent in the market. It serves as an additional layer and not a complete solution.

Jatin Sahdeva, information security advisor, Cisco Asia-pacific

Anatharam VV, Director, webcom

july 01, 2010

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n special report | security

The Impact Of Collaboration Even on the idea of collaboration, there are varied opinions on how these can impact the respective organizations. Bharti of Futuresoft believes that while this does not really play up anything in the market, what it does for an individual organization is open new doors within the channel. Most players work on the tangent that once a technology picks up enough customers, more and more solutions providers may line up to take it up as well.

Sighat from Cyberoam concurs that a collaboration of this kind may work since the companies are in complimentary fields rather than competing 52

Magic Quadrant: Who Stacks up Where Challengers

Leaders

Fortinet Sonic Wall Watch Guard

Cisco Ability to Execute

Bharti suggests.

Vishak Raman, Regional Director – SAARC & Saudi Arabia, Fortinet, on the question of whether this integration will cannibalize its present market by eliminating the need for a separate UTM appliance, says, “It is a new market opportunity that will bring more customers under the purview of UTM than before. Fortinet also believes that in collaboration with HP partners, we will even be able to expand our market share. While we are not reselling each other’s products, the bundling of the two gives the partners of either HP or Fortinet an opportunity to expand their horizons.”

Another interesting take on the situation is provided by Tushar Sighat, VP Operations, Cyberoam who looks at this integration and selling as something that is re-bundled over and over again in new ways. According to him, while UTM is an implementation only over the router, switches are a more widespread implementation, thus piggybacking UTM on a switch is a fruitless activity. It may be an attempt to create a new market niche, he adds. “It is how you choose to look at it at the end of the day. The integration can also be looked at in another way where UTM appliances now come with 16- 24 ports alongside. Then do you call it a switch in a UTM? It is a selling point at the end of the day and there is a market for everything. This integration may also be considered a way of using channels via collaboration to reach a larger market than your channel alone,” Sighat reasons.

Juniper Networks

IBM Internet Security Systems

McAfee Check Point Software Technologies

NetASQ

Astaro

Cyberoam Clavister

Niche Players

Visionaries Completeness of Vision S o u r c e : G AR T NER

thus making it a win-win deal for both.

Fortinet’s Raman refutes the idea that by getting in deals they are alienating a market or making enemies. According to him, the market is mature enough to decide what it needs and an unsuccessful collaboration will die out either way and competition only occurs in noncomplimentary fields.

“Collaborations while good can never achieve the level of integration possible if a single vendor was involved in the process of bringing together security and networking technologies. The future of any such collaboration is then decided by how well the 2 or more vendors involved can work together. If they get it right, it could be the integration of 2 best of breed worlds, but if not, it can leave customers with a slew of support issues and bugs and eventually in the lurch when the 2 vendors

part ways,” opines Cisco’s Sachdeva.

The Road Ahead As the Fortinet and HP deal looks to make inroads in the newly opened market segment, whether an opportunity or not, other vendors are also preparing to make their move if it does open up. While Cyberoam has no immediate plans, they are looking at it as an opportunity as and when it opens up. Cisco also has significant investments in continuing to do this with next generation switches like the Nexus as well as routers like ISRG2.

Alongside, as part of the Secure Borderless Networks architecture, Cisco presently offers Adaptive Threat Defense (ATD) solution that helps minimize network security risks by addressing threats at multiple layers, enabling tighter control of network traffic, endpoints, users, and applications. 

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Wired

Structured cabling market in India is all set to boom, with new opportunities in datacenter and infrastructure projects

By Radhika Nallayam Illustration by Unnikrishnan AV

A

strong backbone is

definitely an invaluable possession. structured cabling, thus, is being looked upon as the most critical component of any network. companies of all sizes are investing on making their cabling system more robust so that it becomes reliable at all times. India, true to form, is one of the fastest growing market for structured cabling, with all the leading vendors betting big on the various opportunities from different industry verticals. after going through a tough period during the recession, the structured cabling market in India is all set to boom. the structured cabling market in asia Pacific (including Japan) was predicted to hit $1.53 billion in 2010, according to an aMI Partners’ research. the fastest growing market in the region is India, with a cagr of 46 percent in the datacenter structured cabling market according to the agency. there is going to a hugesized opportunity for the vendors and partners in this market. the size of the structured cabling July 01, 2010

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n special report | networking market in India is estimated to have reached about $248 million in 2009, according to IDC reports, and is growing at a rapid pace of 35 percent CAGR. According to the research firm, this figure is expected to touch $327 million in 2010. An estimated 80 percent of the market is still copperbased, while the rest of it is driven by fiber. Within copper, 40 percent is CAT 5E and 55 percent is CAT 6 and 5 percent is CAT 6A. There are however different types of estimates. Alamuri Sitaramaiah, Director Sales and Marketing, Fluke Networks India says, “There are various counts on this in the market, depending on what you include to be part of passive networking market.

The data could include just the cable and cable assemblies, connectors and connecting hardware. Other counts could include racks and panels, pathways and panels, labeling and documentation as well as testing services.

It is estimated to be a Rs 800 crore market for the cable and cable assemblies, connectors and connecting hardware.”

Vendors are expecting that the growth rate will go up further, fueled by the deep infrastructural investment happening in the country.

“There are huge investments being made across all the verticals and sectors. We believe that this will result in rapid technology adoption and IT penetration. This will definitely call for investments in structured cabling,” says Mohit Anand, Managing Director, Belkin India.

Drivers The booming infrastructure segment in India is definitely a huge opportunity for the structured cabling players. Every new building and commercial complexes are now insisting on the need to have a robust structured cabling backbone. Besides, the government and education sectors are the other drivers. Millions of government schools are now being computerized and it calls for investments in cabling and networking.

“The main driver for the structured cabling market is the need and therefore the investments by enterprises as well as the government 54

35% is the CAGR of the Indian structured cabling market and it is expected to touch $327 million in 2010

leverage Information Technology for competitive advantage as well as cost reduction. Such investments in IT are also being aided by rapid and massive advances and penetration by telecommunication infrastructure,” says Alamuri Sitaramaiah of Fluke Networks. Besides, increasing investments in new data centers in terms of upgradation and consolidation and disaster recovery centers, leads to the need for better cabling systems and solutions.

Sectors like BFSI, telecom, healthcare and many more are going for expansion and are coming up with more branch offices. Also, there are massive investments in IT in government-initiated projects such as UID and also in creating national backbone for Defense for vacating the spectrum for 3G and BWA applications. These are some of the highvisibility projects that are driving demand in the market.

The fact that penetration of data

centres is still quite low will further drive this market. At the enterprise segment, more and more new data centers are coming up. Companies are waking up to the reality of owning a datacentre, regardless of the size.

Besides, companies that already own a data centre are now on the verge of expanding their infrastructure and are thus fueling the growth of this market. “As companies go into expansion mode, they are going to require more people and thus more space. This will result in increased number of serves and expansion of data centers, which eventually necessitate the need to invest in structured cabling.

TRENDS The new age data centres are stimulating the need for better technologies in structured cabling. For example, as the new data centers become more ‘green’, the cabling solutions are becoming compliant with the new safety and green standards. The use ‘intelligent patch panels’ in data centres has gone up in last few years.

“Enterprises are now looking at centrally monitoring and controlling the networks as it reduces the manpower required,” says Subhashini Prabhakar, CTO, Dax Networks.

Another driver for this market is the ‘bandwidth hungry’ applications that are running at the front-end. Today’s networks are expected to have the robustness to carry huge amount of data, voice and video. In addition, companies want to access them at

Most firms will now be looking at how they can centrally monitor and control the networks as this will reduce the manpower required

The main driver for the structured cabling market is the need and therefore the investments by enterprises and government to leverage Information Technology for competitive advantage

subhashini prabhakar, CTO, Dax Networks

Alamuri Sitaramaiah, Director, Sales & Marketing, Fluke Networks

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networking | special report n

Indian Structured Cabling Market Copper is still king

Copper-Based Structured Cabling Market CAT 6A

350 300

CAT 5E

5%

63

l Molex

40%

200 150

l Digilink l Sterlite Technologies

42

230

l Tyco l Systimax Commscope

40

250

Crowded Market with many Players

206

264

l Reichle & De-Massari l ADC Krone l CDT Belden

55%

l Schneider Electrics l Dax Networks

100

l Panduit 50 0

l Leviton

2008

2009

2010

CAT 6

l Siemon l Nexans

n Copper-based n Fiber-Based So u r c e : I D C

any time from anywhere.

“Consequently, the network has to be robust enough to give high throughput and lower response time. Only then the users can access real time data in a fast and secure manner. This drives the structured cabling market upward in terms of ‘spec’ and higher in terms of volume,” says Anand of Belkin. “Convergence of industrial and security applications to IP will drive more deployments of structured cabling and wireless LAN ,” adds Sitaramaiah, of Fluke Networks.

On the copper side, companies are now increasingly graduating to CAT 6 and CAT 6 A. Currently, the CAT 5 A is a smaller pie in the market while comparing with CAT 6. “Companies are insisting on having Cat 6 as a minimum,” says Prabhakar of Dax. At the same time, more and more companies are expected to graduate to fibre based networks. The only hindrance for the adoption of fibre has been the cost.

“A fibre solution is still much more expensive than a copper solution.

Besides, as fibre is extremely tough to deploy, companies are facing the lack of technical resources who can do the job well,” says Anand of Belkin. However, this is considered as

the initial challenge that any new technology would face in the market. As fibre technology picks up, the difference between the prices of fibre and copper would become smaller, further intensifying the growth of fibre.

Prabhakar of Dax adds, “Though fibre would not completely replace copper, we do see a strong trend towards fribre among our customers.”

In spite of everything, companies can’t ignore the need to have a network that can assure speed, safety and reliability and thus fibre is eventually going to pick up in a big way.

Within the fibre space, new promising concepts like ‘fibre to the desk’

80%

of the structured cabling market is still copper based, while the rest is fiber, according to IDC

are picking up pace.

10G is predicted to be another game changer in the structured cabling industry. “Increasing deployment of 10G Ethernet especially in data centers as well as in campus is going to be trend worth watching,” says Sitaramaiah of Fluke Networks.

However, there are conflicting observations in the industry. “If you ask me, 10G is what is popularly referred to as Cat 6A,”says Anand of Belkin. “Because, Cat 5E is piping data at 100 Mbps, while Cat 6 pipes data at 1 Gbps and Cat 6A does it at 10 Gbps, which precisely means 10G,” he adds.

The recession had made a lot of companies to put their expansion plans on hold. With the economy rebounding, the growth drivers of the market are back.

Fluctuating copper prices have been a big concern for the players in the structured cabling market over the last few years. “Copper price fluctuation is big challenge and it has made forward pricing impossible,” says Prabhakar of Dax. While this market is predicted to witness an upward curve, one thing is sure.

New technologies and newer customer demands would create faster and reliable networks that can support heavier applications and cater to the needs of diversified users.  july 01, 2010

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Distinguish Manage search D

ocument management

has evolved as a technology in India. “Voluminous growth in data, compliance and regulatory issues, the need for a faster decision-making process the and requirement for a contingency plan for any disaster and security issues are the factors driving the adoption of DmS.” according to Vishal tripathi , Principal Research analyst, t gartner. the he key benefits of implement implementing DmS are controlled and improved document distribution, flexible index indexing and search, easy retrieval, improved security and disaster recovery, he adds. according to estimates, the DmS market worldwide is expected to have grown by 16.3 percent to $43 million in the past 2 years. By 2012, it is expected to grow at a cagR of 13.2 percent to reach $75 million.

Xerox global Services, a division of Xerox works with clients to streamline and simplify everyday processes like customer communication, billing, training and records management. “most medium and large organizations are continuously trying to cut costs and increase profits. Very few of these enterprises access and manage documents,” says Vipin tuteja, t executive Director, marketing and Business Support, Xerox India. “there is a positive relationship between effective document manage56

inDian channelworlD JuLY 01, 2010

Document Management is steadily climbing the maturity curve as a good to have solution for Indian enterprises

By Yogesh Gupta Illustration by Unnikrishnan AV

Document Management | special report n ment and two factors -average profit growth and an organization’s ability to respond to changing market conditions,” he says. Xerox Global Services has services offerings for BFSI, telecom and retail which offer great scope for augmenting, managing and sustaining the growth. According to Seclore Technology, the DMS market is growing at around 20 percent CAGR. “The time has come when firms realize the benefits of implementing DMS, as it brings in a lot of automation and streamlines the business processes,” says Rahul Kopikar, Co-Founder and Head of Business Development, Seclore Technology.

Key BENEFITS Reduced Storage: Enterprises can benefit hugely by reducing the amount of storage by using DMS. Digitizing information will result in reduction on paper storage.

Flexible and Quick Retrieval: Data can be searched and retrieved very quickly at your finger tips Controlled Document Distribution: The distribution of information can be controlled very easily by DMS Improved Regulatory Compliance: Firms can be regulatory complied by using DMS because they help in getting the audit trail Better security: DMS with inbuilt security allows only authorized users to download the document. This clubbed together with Information Rights Management (IRM) allows organizations to control the usage (view, edit, print, copy/paste) of the downloaded documents.

“With globalization, paper document flow is increasing alongwith electronic document management,” says Eugeniya Popova, Director, ABBYY. “Both ABBYY Recognition Server and ABBYY FlexiCapture technologies allow classifying documents according to their types, mark necessary document fields and carry out automatic data capture,” she says.

GROWTH DRIVERS, ROADBLOCKS According to Virender Jeet, Senior VP, Technology, Newgen Software, the market trends increasing demand for DMS are Compliance, Governance and Risk reduction. He adds, “Other reasons are streamlining content centric processes to increase productivity and reduce cost, enhance collaboration between geographically dispersed teams and capturing and leveraging unstructured and semi structured data in a similar way as that of structured data. Newgen Print Center is a Centralized Document Print Management and Distribution Solution for organizations, which powers an organization to effectively control and optimize the printing assets, reduce wastage by print cost reduction.

Seclore Technology is an Information Rights Management (IRM) company providing risk mitigation from information leakages whilst enhancing collaboration and Data Security. “DMS need such infrastructure to protect ‘downloaded’ content against printing, editing or other misuse. Today diversity of information (i.e. different types of documents) in any organization is prime catalyst for increased demand for DMS,” says Kopikar.

Today, the optimization of storage, bandwidth, readiness and accuracy of data are the latest trends in DMS as per Tuteja. “There are few challenges in Indian market like adaptability towards technology, local infrastructure incompetence, adherence to traditional and conventional business patterns, lack of awareness and accountability towards indirect costs involved in business process and Capex.”

Any new system in an organization is often looked upon as an overhead.

“Change management and overcoming the initial inertia of people is the biggest problem that implementers of DMS have to face. Migration of old systems and paper files into a DMS is a mammoth task,” says Kopikar at Seclore Technology. Gaining order approval on time becomes a problem at times as organizations do not realize immediate ROI of DMS, he cites.

THE VENDOR GAMEPLAN Many industry players have joined hands to offer a more holistic DMS solution to end customer. Lexmark’s acquisition of Perceptive Software (which is into document management) highlights the former’s roadmap in printing landscape. “We offer niche solutions with banking, pharma, education and logistics which are not limited to printers but document flow of a customer.

We are different in market than other printing companies who garner huge revenues mainly out of box push sales,” says KP Ranjan, Country Manager –India, Lexmark.DMS is mainly popular across IT/ITes, banking, and education according to him.

Canon’s new advanced multifunctional print architecture platform has been designed to seamlessly integrate with Microsoft’s popular business collaboration platform Microsoft Sharejuly 01, 2010

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n special report | Document Management

selling DMS: The challenges Standardization: The biggest challenge for a CIO regarding Document Management is procurement. Should they buy a platform solution for the enterprise and then get specific solutions built over it through SIs or should they look for specific business solutions with quicker ROI ? In the former case, there is standardization across the enterprise but the timelines to solve specific business problems are very long. Alternatively, with a quick ROI in the long run, the enterprise ends up with a portfolio of island applications that don’t integrate with each other seamlessly. The best approach is to look for a specific business solution with quick ROI and scalable capability to meet future business requirements.

Complex pricing: Most document management solutions come with complex pricing Point to create a better collaborative work space.

The vendor is testing the waters through its direct sales team to large enterprise and Government. “The solution is based on an Opex model to the end customer as most organizations are now adopting MPS mode for their printing infrastrcuture,”says Puneet Datta, Assistant Director, Marketing, BIS, Canon India.

Microsoft partners and Canon partners will sell this unique DMS solution to existing wide base of SharePoint Users and Greenfield projects, he says.

Seclore Technology and Newgen Software announced a strategic partnership to provide a combined ECM and IRM system to customers. With Seclore FileSecure connector for Newgen Omnidocs, it will be possible for organizations to define information ‘usage’ policies centrally and ensure that these policies are applied to information even when it goes out of the ECM system and outside of organization perimeters. “Vendors need to aggressively pursue technology partnerships, acquisitions or geographic expansion through channels,” agrees Tripathi at Gartner. Vendors should also increase professional services support with deep product familiarity. “They should build on the sales force or channel, which understands solution selling and knows 58

that is predictably heavily discounted in the first year, as volume of usage rises, cost also rises exponentially. The decision maker should consider at least a 5 year TCO before making the final decision.

Support: Support is very critical for companies as in most cases document management technology empowers their mission critical processes. It is crucial to ensure access of direct local support and also have a long standing agreement with product principal to support your growth in future.

Promised Delivery: To ensure you get what was promised at the start, have POC as part of your evaluation process. This will allow you to keep a tab on what will be delivered and any variations as they occur.

Source : Newgen Software

what it takes to create the real value to the end-user customer,” he says.

PLAYFIELD FOR PARTNERS “DMS is emerging as a huge opportunity for vendors/channel partners as large businesses continue to use paper and traditional means of storage,” agrees Xerox’s Tuteja. Growth has been primarily triggered by the increasing need for automation in the enterprise as a vast amount of information stored in physical files is now digitized. “This has opened a floodgate of opportunities for document management solution providers,” he reasons.

Newgen is aligning with channel partners to provide their DMS on a hosted platform. “We have engaged with a few of them to bring out a cloud based offering. There is an upside for large SI as well as value added partners,” says Jeet.

VARs can grow by moving beyond pushing boxes (hardware selling) to solution selling and DMS. “Being a simple solution, it is an ideal stepping stone for them to both up sell to as well mine their existing customer base,” he adds.

Imaging, optical character recognition (OCR), and content integration technology have improved dramatically in the past few years. They’re faster, more accurate, easier to integrate, easier to use, and work at higher volume.

Yet it’s hard to call the advancements revolutionary. This presents an opportunity for ISV and small companies to develop, position and market their products well in a cost-sensitive Indian market where DMS is seen as a “good to have” solution than a “must to have” one, says Tripathi at Gartner.

ABBYY usually passes all technical, marketing and sales information to the partners to inform about the latest developments. “It helps to raise the partner’s capacity on the local market. The built system helps partners to increase its presence in the region relying on the knowledge received from ABBYY,” says Popova at ABBYY. Lexmark has tied with HCL Infosystems and CMS who offer a bundled printing solution (software and hardware) on MPS model to enterprises. “A total document management solution often changes the deal as it is not only upfront cost but the savings on maintenance, power and other factors. DMS solution emerges as a deal clincher not on just price but its ability to ease customer pain points and enhancing efficiency of the organization,” says Ranjan at Lexmark.

INTO THE FUTURE Collaboration and Document Management are gaining impetus across enterprises. With DMS, enterprises are looking at streamlining and simplifying everyday processes such as customer communication, billing, training and records management.

“Vertical such as telecom, healthcare, manufacturing, government, PSUs, IT/ ITES is opting for DMS. Administration and maintenance are however perceived to be the main challenges that lie ahead of companies to manage and maintain DMS,” says Tripathi at Gartner. ABBYY is currently focused on the integration of recognition technologies and software for text translation. There are market requirements’ growth for DMS as well as unique software for translation of captured documents, reasons Popova at ABBYY. Traditional hardware printing companies have become aggressive, forging alliances, and commenced talking software language and integration of document related activities. This is a signal for enterprises and especially partners to explore emerging DMS market. 

Indian Channelworld JULY 01, 2010

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n Opinion

Thornton A. May

On IT’s Human Energy Crisis

W

ord association time: When I say “IT

energy,” what do you think of? After everything that’s been written about green IT and the amount of electricity that’s needed to power data centers, you probably think first about the cost of our profligate energy consumption. That’s a worthy concern, but I propose that the phrase “IT energy” should make you think instead about something evenmore important: the vital

human energy level of IT leaders, managers and workers. An essential question for all IT leaders to ponder is whether their organization is exothermic (one that releases positive energy) or endothermic (one that sucks energy out of the enterprise). Research being conducted at the IT Leadership Academy and the CIO Solutions Gallery at the Fisher College of Business at Ohio State University indicates that many North American and European companies are facing a major human energy crisis in IT.

ing). It is understandable that IT people are tired.

And tired is not good in the hyperaccelerated world we are heading into.

If we do not do something, this will get worse.

An emerging trend is for world-class organizations to benchmark IT not against line-of-sight competitors in the same vertical market, but against “best imaginable” practitioners. The bar is being raised. The question is will IT have the energy to respond?

Best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell recently

Many of the IT people I meet are exhausted. Head count is decreasing, and workload increasing. User expectations and regulatory requirements are expanding exponentially. A study analyzed the impact of multitasking and determined that most digitally aware people now work 43 hours a day (that’s not a typo; it’s serious multitask-

n It is perfectly understandable that IT people are tired. And tired is not good in the accelerated world we are heading into. If we do not do something, this will get worse.

took a look at successful people in all disciplines.

He concluded, “If you look closely at CEOs the thing that is most striking about them is their physical stamina. At the end of the day, it is that quality, perhaps more than anything else, that is separating them from us.”

Re-energizing IT Next-generation CIOs will have to manage and increase the human energy levels of their teams. Just as we meter devices to determine their energy consumption, so too will IT leaders meter the people, processes and technology sets deployed in the enterprise to determine impact on IT energy level.

Job 1 is to take advantage of the economic downturn and remove from the enterprise energy vampires -- people who are always negative. Every organization has them. One way energy vampires suck the energy out of others is that july 01, 2010

Opinion_Thornton A.indd 59

they are so negative, more positive people expend energy trying not to spend time with them.

Job 2, on the process side, is to rationalize IT finances. A major energy sink and morale-buster in many IT organizations is the lack of a decent IT accounting system. World-class IT accounting is very exothermic. Knowing your costs and the value that IT generates for the business releases all kinds of positive energy. William Miller, the controller at Nationwide Services Co., has created a second-to-none IT accounting system. Diane Bryant and her team at Intel annually publish a report of the value that IT delivers.

And Charlie Feld, former CIO at Frito-Lay, Delta Airlines and Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad and author of Blind Spot: A Leader’s Guide to IT-Enabled Business Transformation, sees another problem. He believes that IT has become dangerously overspecialized.

Having to work through multiple noncommunicating silos of IT expertise consumes a lot of energy.

And excessive energy consumption is as detrimental in the IT department as it is in the data center . Thornton May is the author of ‘The New Know: Innovation Powered by Analytics’ and executive director of the IT Leadership Academy at Florida State College INDIAN Channelworld

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n case study

Batting for a

long

innings

Data Infosys found that ‘bigger the better’ is not always true

By Radhika Nallayam Illustration by Unnikrishnan AV 60

Case Study.indd 60

I

s a bigger margin the only factor that decides the merit of a project? For Jaipur-based Data Infosys, that definitely was not the case. And, it was this mindset that helped the company bag one of the highest-profile projects in the history of Indian cricket — the revolutionary online ticketing system for Rajasthan Cricket Association (RCA), which helped boost the image and overall standing of the SI. The competition for bagging this deal was fierce as large national SIs aspired to be a part of such a project.

But the story had an unpredictable ending with Data Infosys easily clinching the deal. Today, the SI is content about its decision to look beyond mere short-term monetary

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case study n benefits of a project.

When RCA decided to have an IT implementation partner, their requirements were not very unusual.

They wanted a company that could set up a Wi-Fi network within the stadium and also provide connectivity in RCA’s offices. However, the association did not offer a great remuneration for its IT partner. RCA wanted to have some sort of a barter system, wherein they offered their IT partner an opportunity to showcase its brand outside the stadium.

They were also ready to offer the partner facilities within the stadium, along with a few complimentary passes for cricket matches.

While this was not an attractive deal for many, Data Infosys found value associated with it. And because of the relative unattractiveness of the deal, the company didn’t have to face competition from larger SIs, who otherwise would have won this deal at any cost, due to the sheer allure of the game. Besides, the initial requirements of RCA matched up with the core expertise of Data Infosys. The SI is one of the largest ISPs in the country. “We are the eighth largest ISP in the country and moreover we had the track record of executing many major projects in Rajasthan. Our eligibility and credentials were much better when compared to other players who bid for the project.

We also had the required infrastructure and resources,” says Nitin Walia, Director of Data Infosys.

However, Data Infosys knew that things were not going to be easy.

“We knew that we were going to take a huge business risk, as we were sure our margins would almost be nil. But it offered us many other benefits in terms of greater visibility, reputation, and improved foothold in the market. RCA promised us an opportunity to display our logo at the premises of the stadium. The fact that all 30,000 spectators would see our branding and would know about Data Infosys was exciting. It was in fact a priceless deal.”

Data Infosys signed a memorandum of understanding with RCA as its IT implementation partner for the next four years with an assurance

Case File

Key parties: Rajasthan Cricket Association, Data Infosys

Major activities: Website designing, Online ticketing system, RFID integration, Authentication and access control system, Building database

Location: Jaipur, Rajasthan Total Cost of implementation: Rs 30 lakh

Returns: Improved visibility, better branding, ensured business for four years Key people involved: Nitin Walia, Director, Ajay Data, CEO-Data Infosys, K. Narasimha Rao (IPS) and Security Advisor RCA, Sanjay Dixit, Secretary of RCA, C P Joshi, RCA president

that the SI would be used for all the upcoming IT projects that would be taken up by RCA during that period.

More in Store What seemed to be just another networking project turned out to be a one of its kind project in the history of Indian cricket. Sanjay Dixit, Secretary of RCA, had more plans for the ODI match between India and South Africa which was to be held in Jaipur in February 2010. He wanted to stop the black marketing and fake generation of tickets. Besides, there were threats of terrorist-attacks during the match and RCA had the biggest responsibility of ensuring the security of all the spectators.

Though RCA did not have a clear idea on how these issues can be tackled, Dixit was sure about ‘going online’. RCA put forth its requirements to Data Infosys and the SI came back with a very innovative blue-print.

“We proposed a plan to overcome these issues and came up with a unique model that probably no cricket association had done so far,” says Walia. “Data Infosys had a very good understanding about our requirements. They put in more effort in studying our needs and coming up with a cost-effective solution,” adds Dixit approves.

The SI developed a completely new website for RCA and came up with a unique online booking engine integrated with an online payment gateway, through which all the tickets were to be sold. “For the first time in the history of Indian cricket, no counters were opened for selling tickets. RCA started selling tickets as early as 21 days prior to the match. It was a record as sales would usually open two or three days prior to the match,” adds Walia. The SI also had the responsibility of managing the online bookings and sending across the tickets to people. The system also ensured authenticity of tickets and helped RCA in curbing some of the long-standing issues like black marketing as the tickets were made non-transferable.

Another challenge was to ensure security and Data Infosys played a key role in designing a new authentication and access control system.

The company introduced RFID technology and integrated RFID cards to each ticket. This ensured that only people with valid tickets would be allowed inside the stadium. Besides, the online ticketing system allowed

Our eligibility and credentials were much better when compared to other players who were bidding for the project. We also had the required infrastructure and resources.

Nitin Walia, Director, Data infosys

JULY 01, 2010

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n case study RCA to have a huge database that contains the details of each viewer as Data Infosys went one step further and made it mandatory for people who book tickets online to share their identity and mobile phone numbers. Besides, the online ticketing system allowed RCA to have a huge database that contained the details of each spectator. To ensure better security, the visuals from the CCTV cameras that were installed inside the stadium were integrated to the database of viewers. Thus, Data Infosys had the huge task of literally managing the whole event without any loopholes.

New challenges, New Learning “New challenges, New Learning It was one of the most challenging projects for Data Infosys for many reasons, says Walia. The SI had to do a lot of things that it had never done.

“It was a project of huge scale and we had to stretch ourselves to the limit.

The first challenge was the timely delivery of tickets to people, because online booking was happening for the first time,” says Walia. The company allotted more manpower to carry out this work effectively.

Besides, Data Infosys had the task of setting up the access control system and managing the entry gates to ensure smooth entry of all the 30000 people into the stadium. “All we got was just 48 hours to set up the access control systems and other equipments within the stadium. On the day of the match, we were more hard-pressed of time. We just had three hours in hand to make the entry of 30,000 people, and that too, without any lines and stoppages.

Most of us in Data Infosys worked sleeplessly for three continuous days,” adds Walia.

The company did require a lot of manpower to make this possible and it decided to take help from RCA’s security agency. It took on a few people from the agency and jointly formed a team of 80 people to perform the chores. Data Infosys trained the team members, especially the RCA agency members, on the access control system and how 62

Defying Resistance

N

ew ideas are not always easily accepted, especially when they have the power to change existing systems. When Data Infosys took up the project for RCA, Nitin Walia knew that he might be facing his toughest customer yet. “The committee had about 50 members and none of them supported the idea of an online ticketing system. Some of them were of the opinion that a few tickets should be sold offline. They also insisted on making the tickets transferable. But that would not have served the purpose of curbing black marketing,” says Walia.

Sanjay Dixit and Data Infosys also had to face the wrath of people who did not want to let go of the ‘opportunity’ associated with black marketing and fake ticketing. They were subjected to bad mouthing from many sides, including the negative reports in some sections of the media against the project. As a result, the issue even gained national attention. the RFID cards can be read using the readers. They were also trained on collecting back the RFID tags without any damage and how all of these can be done without any time lag. On the day of the match, a team that had a few RCA agency members and an employee of Data Infosys was appointed at each entry gate to manage the admission of spectators. This

They took time to understand what our requirements were and put more efforts into studying our needs and reaching a costeffective solution. sanjay Dixit, Secretary, Rajasthan Cricket Association

Fortunately for Data Infosys, it had the strong support from Dixit and CP Joshi, RCA President and Union Minister. “Joshi went through each and every detail of the project and was convinced about its advantages. With the support of RCA’s top officials, we decided to go ahead with the project,” explains Walia.

However, Walia and his team then had to take up the huge responsibility of creating an unfailing system. They decided to leave no stone unturned and thus prepared to give an errorless pilot project of all the technologies that would be used in the final match.

“We did the pilot during a state cricket tournament where we gave out RFID integrated tickets to 1,000 invited guests.

Thus, we were able to prove that the entire RFID access control system was efficient enough and could handle 30,000 people,” says Walia. With improved confidence and support of the RCA members, Data Infosys managed to come out with a high score. way, Data Infosys ensured all the gates were managed effectively.

Systematic approach helped the company in doing something that initially seemed ‘impossible. The project necessitated an investment of Rs 16 Lakh from Data Infosys. “The total cost of the end-to-end project was only Rs 30 lakhs, which included the RFID cards and readers that were bought by RCA. I can confidently declare that a large national SI would not have done this project without offering a few Crores!,” says Walia.

He, however, is happy that the project helped them learn a lot of new things and get greater visibility in the market. “Our association with Data Infosys has been excellent so far.

They are very proactive and go out of they way to complete a work. They never did penny-pinching and went ahead to invest money whenever it was required,” Dixit endorses. RCA has further plans to enhance the authentication and access control system and is confident that it would be safe in the hands of Data Infosys. 

Indian Channelworld JULY 01, 2010

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n Fast Track

eQuest Technologies

Snapshot

eQuest Technologies Founded: 2005 Headquarter: Mumbai Branch offices: Pune and Bangalore Key executives: Nilesh Divekar –Sales Manager; Madhavan Menon – CFO; Amrut Bhonsale - Software Services Manager; Jayashri Benjamin – Lead Generation Services Manager Revenue 2008-09: Rs 3 Crore Revenue 2009-10: Rs 6 Crore Key verticals: ITES, Education, BPO / telecom / virtual software users Key principals: Quest, Flexera, Codegear, Sanbolic, Microfocus, Embarcadero, Atlassian

Abhay Bhalerao, Managing Director, feels that niche focus is what will ensure growth

B

eing just another soft-

ware solution provider was not on eQuest Technologies’ agenda. The company set its goals right from its inception in 2005. “We decided to have a niche focus rather than addressing multiple industry verticals. Our experience showed there a huge market for specific solutions designed for the needs of IT and ITES companies,” says Abhay Bhalerao, Managing Director.

Today, eQuest likes to be the ‘software provider for the software providers of India’. The company has a rich portfolio that addresses

many areas including requirement management, design needs, configuration management, code management, and data generation for IT and ITES companies. Bhalerao also understands the importance of add-

REVENUE SPLIT n ITES 30%

n Education 50%

nB PO / telecom /

virtual software users 20%

S o u r c e : e Q u e st T ec h n o lo g i e s

ing value to solutions that eQuest offers. The company also focuses on consulting services, project management and training along with implementation. “These services are an integral part of our solution offerings and this has helped us have longstanding relationships with all our customers” adds Bhalerao. eQuest is excited about its partnership with Quest Software and the opportunities in database management market. It is betting big on virtualized environments and its association with Sanbolic, a vendor who enables shared storage for virtual and cloud computing environments. “A lot of our customers now have virtualized environments and it’s important to address their needs differently,” says Bhalerao.

The company has dedicated technical and sales teams for each product line. “Our solutions require highend technical skills. The sales team needs to be trained for long salescircles involved,” says Bhalerao. eQuest has identified education as a target vertical and is bullish about growth. With a customer-base of 500 companies, Bhalerao is confident of maintaining a winning momentum. 

july 01, 2010

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— Radhika Nallayam INDIAN Channelworld

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n Opinion

Vijay Ramachandran

The Working Of A CIO’s Mind

I

t’s been a fascinating journey, since in this time I’ve

seen a quantum shift in the way enterprises view IT — from ‘IT doesn’t matter’ to ‘IT is a support function’ to ‘IT is a business enabler’ to even ‘IT facilitates new business opportunities’. The increasing recognition that IT confers not only a competitive edge but is also a tool to reduce operational cost and improve productivity; is responsible for this change in perspective.

Business leaders in medium to large enterprises require their IT heads to extend their role beyond technology to deliver ubiquitous and cross-functional IT solutions. Of course, an understanding of business imperatives goes a long way in convincing business leaders to invest in technology.

The interesting thing is that while buzzwords change, overall themes don’t. That’s why CIOs tell me that over this year and the next, they expect to focus on driving business growth, managing customer expectations, tackling regulatory compliance, improving operational efficiencies and doing more with less.

Note that there’s little mention of jargon like BI, SOA, SaaS, DLP …

And, why should there be? A CIO’s biggest concern these days revolves around issues of business alignment, people leader64

ship, change management and security.

Yet they seem to be bombarded with “solutions” that go little beyond the technology. That too is an interesting, and rather brave tack to take, since I’ve yet to see a single project fail because of a technology glitch. However, the lack of end-user adoption and inadequate process change has been at the bottom of every single failed IT deployment.

Let’s also look at how CIOs and their teams are

n I’ve yet to see a single project fail because of a technology glitch.

The lack of enduser adoption and process change has been at the bottom of every failed IT deployment.

approached by vendors or their partners. According to a recent research

by CIO magazine, Indian Channelworld’s sister publication, on an average a head of IT receives 61 unsolicited emails, 24 phone calls, and 8 visits from potential suppliers a week!

Just imagine how tough it must be for them to separate the cheese from the chalk and identify a relationship of value.

On asking what was the most important criteria for judging a supplier, the study found that 97 percent of CIOs wanted vendors, SIs and VARs to first gain basic background knowledge about their organization, their nature of business, and the challenges they faced.

Astounded? This just points to how “solutions” can be so tightly woven around a ‘hot’ technology that it’s easy to lose sight of the nature of the company where it would be

potentially of use.

IT leaders told us, that what came next when it came to choosing a technology provider was whether they had experience in a specific area; whether they had demonstrable solutions in the domain; and how much they were thinking on the lines of the user organization.

What IT leaders are looking for, far more than positions in magic quadrants, are case studies of organizations that have adopted a solution, what business need led them to it, and the strategic business benefit of aligning with a product or service or solution.

Do brands matter? Yes, said CIOs for infrastructure and not so for solutions — domain expertise scored there.

So what does this mean for you? What will thus give you an edge over competition is to do your homework on the company and prepare to listen rather than sell. Why else would an IT leader change his existing relationship with another supplier?

What else will change for him if he does business with you?

Deliver on your promises and stay away from over-committing and you’ll establish a relationship that’s mutuallybeneficial.  Vijay Ramachandran is Editor-in-Chief of CIO and ChannelWorld. Contact him at vijay_r@cio.in

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