n COVER STORY
The overall numbers get balanced out through the extensive product portfolio of Dell and its partners from SMB to large enterprise to government. Thus, it becomes more yearly based than being a quarterly led pressure game. AJAY KAUL, GENERAL MANAGER, GLOBAL COMMERCIAL CHANNEL, DELL INDIA
vendor alliances. The recent association with FireEye, LogRhythm, and Go-Global has definitely helped the numbers and importantly enhanced the company’s value proposition at the customer end,” says Gojer. Incepted in 2007, Versatile Infosecurity which is 100 percent focused on security solutions adds one or two new vendors to its fold. “We added DLP, SIEM, content security and IRM in past few years than our core expertise around network security. These new products add to the numbers and further complement our existing portfolio,” says Sharma Syndrome ventured into collaboration two years back primarily to drive the bottom-lines. “But it now adds significantly to the top lines as well. Collaboration has been accepted by companies as people want to cut travel cost, see each other, converse fast and close deals,” reasons Mehta. Today one-fifth of the revenues for Syndrome Technologies emerges from unified 30
communication, video and telepresence. We work closely with multiple OEM’s in the collaboration space now than what we had earlier ventured with, he adds. Rao at Archon supports different BU in his company irrespective of the principal alliance. “The leads generated usually transform into a funnel in four to five weeks. Hence we work more on a half yearly target to justify our value-proposition at customerend. Two quarters is the typical period in enterprise segment for a good deal to prove beneficial to vendor, customer, and us,” says Rao. Syndrome added Palo Alto in its security portfolio few quarters ago. Many global customers were keen for this company’s offerings. When Palo Alto was aligning with partners last year, Syndrome saw this big opportunity for next generation security firewalls. “There was no great vendor who could turn tables in that space. The customer dependency becomes
INDIAN CHANNELWORLD FEBRUARY 2014
more on us and their (vendor) strategy of having limited partners helped win good deals and decent margins for us,” he says.
WINNING COMBINATION Enough work goes into the vendor team spending time in finalizing the quarterly or yearly numbers with their partners. “We revisit our entire view of the market, look at which customers and partners deserve deeper management, and how our sales and tech resources can be best combined with our partners to maximize impact. Typically these are frozen and locked well in advance so we can hit the ground running well in advance on day one,”says Parthasarathy at Avaya. Over the last six quarters, various OEMS collaborate at right time along with Syndrome team to close the opportunity. Earlier the engagement was need-based, says Mehta. “There are end of life and end of support products at the customer place and the