CRN India (Vol.2, No.5) August, 2019

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Vol 2. No. 5.

August, 2019 Chairman of the Board Viveck Goenka

INDIA’S NEW BUSINESS HUBS DRIVING CHANNEL GROWTH

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Sr. Vice President - BPD Neil Viegas Asst. Vice President - BPD Harit Mohanty Editor Srikanth RP* Sr. Associate Editor Sudipta Dev Sr. Assistant Editor Nivedan Prakash Delhi Sandhya Michu Mumbai Abhishek Raval Mohit Rathod Salvi Mittal

Nivedan Prakash nivedan.prakash@expressindia.com

Bengaluru Moumita Deb Choudhury DESIGN Asst. Art Director Pravin Temble Chief Designer Prasad Tate Senior Graphic Designer Rekha Bisht Layout Designer Vinayak Mestry Photo Editor Sandeep Patil DIGITALTEAM Head of Internet Viraj Mehta MARKETING Ravi Nair Prabhas Jha Durgaprasad Talithaya Debnarayan Dutta Ajanta Sengupta Deepak Patel Praveen Soman Vivek Thakur

n the current economic scenario, Tier II and Tier III cities of the country such as Pune, Chandigarh, Coimbatore, Kochi, Jaipur, Indore, Nagpur, and Patna among others have shown a growth rate of more than 40 per cent. This paradigm shift in these cities is quite evident, as we are witnessing an extensive number of startups emerging with the motive of solving more localised problems with the help of on-demand applications, consumer tech solutions, online delivery, ride sharing and more, thereby driving the growth of IT in these cities.

These changing market dynamics have opened up a plethora of opportunities for the IT channel partners operating out of these cities. Along with new age channel companies, the traditional partners are shifting gears wherein the focus is more on building their own IPs and embracing digital technologies.

Moreover, the channel partners in these cities are looking to work closely with a new set of vendors and startup companies in the areas of emerging technologies, which means that they are not only discovering collaborative ways to work with their

vendors but also identifying new growth areas and aligning with those technology players who have products and solutions that is poised to be in demand and assist them in framing their growth strategies.

For instance, Bhubaneshwar has become a software hub of Eastern India, as it is a base of startups (given the backing by the state government). Besides, with the rise in infrastructure projects, the partners here are also witnessing demand for data centres. Even for a city like Indore, the boom of startups and eGovernance projects has been generating immense channel business.

The growth story holds true for channel markets in Nashik, Thiruvananthapuram, and Vizag as well because these cities have emerged as investment destinations of various IT giants.

Meanwhile, like their counterparts in metro cities, these partners also make sure to upskill and re-skill themselves on a regular basis and take assistance from their OEMs/vendors in areas like deep technical sales skills, lead generation, sales transaction progression, training and certification in order to facilitate future growth.

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Content

Explore Bharat

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5 | Cover Story

CXO Speak 29 | ‘Critical national infrastructure is a tempting target for cyber threat actors’ Mike Sentonas, VP Technology of CrowdStrike

Bhubaneswar: An emerging destination for data and storage

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Pune presents big opportunities in cloud and data domains

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Guwahati: The emerging tech hub of North East India

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Amazing facts about Ranchi’s technology assertiveness

33 | Umbrella Infocare bets big on increasing enterprise efficiency Gurprit Singh, Managing Partner & Co-Founder, Umbrella Infocare 34 | Increasing cloud adoption is transforming traditional IT provisioning methods Keith Carter, VP, Channels – Asia Pacific, Palo Alto Networks

10 | Raipur: Growing from strength to strength in technology 11 | Patna embraces holistic technology for development 12 | Indore looks to become IT paradise of Central India 13 | Government projects providing big opportunities 14 | Infra progress ushers new business opportunities 15 | Local channel partners need push in the govt sector

EXPLORE BHARAT

CHANNELING DIGITAL PATHWAYS TO INDIA’S HINTERLANDS 18 | Jaipur IT partners combat Chinese cartridges issue

23 | Ports, defence, oil and steel industries drive growth of IT

19 | Channel market driven by corporates, education sector

24 | Coimbatore IT market garnering digital dividends

20 | Online-offline tussle deepens in Dehradun

25 | Why Mangalore reflects Bangalore in tech adoption

16 | Chandigarh IT partners look at online business

21 | Lack of government initiatives derailing IT growth in Jammu

17 | Riding on digital transformation of SMBs

22 | Thiruvanathapuram: A CoE for tech innovation

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26 | Mysore: A stronghold for data and network 27 | Kochi: A hotspot for technology

36 | ‘We have a big role to play in how CIOs and CTOs are looking at the architecture of big data’ Ganesh Guruswamy, Senior VP, Western Digital and Supria Dhanda, Country Manager & VP, Western Digital India

News Analysis 28 | HP redefines Laser printing for SMBs with Laser tank printer Leo Joseph, Senior Director – Printing Systems & Solutions, HP Inc India 30 | Automation Anywhere looks to scale up partners’ contribution in India Ganesh Thyagarajan, VP – Global Partner Enablement & Programs 32 | Why blockchain will be as impactful as the Internet Karthik Ramarao, Founder & CTO, Empirical Data

Startup Corner 38 | Cutting-edge tech solutions for law enforcement agencies Tarun Wig, Co-founder, Innefu Labs

Cover Story

EXPLORE BHARAT

CHANNELING DIGITAL PATHWAYS TO INDIA’S HINTERLANDS

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n the last few decades, several IT companies, e-commerce organisations, startups, and Central Government projects that have been concentrated in India’s metro cities, have now channelled a majority of investments and projects to Tier II and Tier III locations. Cities like Jaipur, Lucknow, Indore, Dehradun, Coimbatore, are now emerging as hubs for the respective regions.

The growing base of startups, urbanisation and digitisation of consumer services have opened new avenues for the local partners. As a

result, non-metros are coming into focus, the development of many IT parks, retail developments, warehousing facilities, etc., have been the result of IT penetration. Barring large distributors and stockists, several regional distributors and system integrators from large cities are setting up their base and developing channel ecosystems in these cities. The Smart Cities Mission, launched in 2015, has also paved the way to local IT channel markets to start participating in these upcoming projects and diversifying from pure-play box pushing to valueadded services.

Growth of favourable business ecosystems, IT and manufacturing sector jobs and improved social infrastructure — all factors have increased ICT requirement.

The local IT associations in these cities and regions have played a significant role in creating awareness and educating partners on emerging business threats and opportunities.

To understand the pulse of the IT channel in these emerging hubs, the CRN editorial team goes on a discovery mission in the first edition of the Explore Bharat series.

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Cover Story

BHUBANESWAR

BHUBANESWAR: AN EMERGING DESTINATION FOR DATA AND STORAGE

Moumita Deb Choudhury moumita.choudhury@expressindia.com

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he fact that IT giants are flocking to Bhubaneswar like moths to a flame, is testimony to understand the city’s demand for technology. Popularly known as the temple city of India, Bhubaneswar is base for around 60-70 IT channel partners; whereas, Odisha has around 500 partners, according to Srinivas Tripathy, President, Information Technology Association of Odisha.

Some of the leading companies in Bhubaneswar include Adobe, TCS, Wipro, Autodesk, Tech Mahindra, Infosys among many others. Today it is as much a software hub of Eastern India as it is a base for startups, given the backing by the government. The city ranks third in the country in terms of ease of doing business and potential

growth, according to the World Bank.

“A lot of work in the data centre space is taking place in Bhubaneswar. Also, the city is on its way to become a Smart City and work is undergoing in every phase. Surveillance projects are also coming up in a big way in Bhubaneswar, whereby surveillance cameras are being drawn up along the roads and several old and new buildings. As a result, there is a big chunk of requirement for network and storage,” says Tripathy.

Many products and solutions are outsourced from Bhubaneswar to other cities in the state like Puri, Cuttack, Balasore, etc.

Dhirendra Khandelwal, MD, E-Sqaure Systems and Technologies, informs, “Lately, there is a lot of demand for data centres. There are also establishments who come to us for infrastructure projects, network security, end-to-end system integration, etc.”

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“We have built two data centres last year – one for a university and the other for Odisha Secretariat. Demand for small data centres among SMBs is also mushrooming. Establishments which are running their core applications are having their own data centres, while non-core applications are moving to cloud,” states Khandelwal.

Today with data being the new currency and subsequently analytics happening in a big way, AI and ML infrastructure is coming to the core.

People have widely started using these technologies. “Data is becoming critical and protecting the data will be crucial – whether you move to public cloud or private cloud. We are already in talks with few manufacturing companies and they are considering AI and ML. There is immense demand for automation and digitisation from the government and eduction sectors,” adds Khandelwal.

Explore Bharat BHUBANESWAR

PUNE

PUNE PRESENTS BIG OPPORTUNITIES IN CLOUD AND DATA DOMAINS Mohit Rathod mohit.rathod@expressindia.com

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ruising in pace with some of the major Tier 1 cities in India, the IT industry in Pune has been booming rapidly, thereby providing a plethora of opportunities for ICT solution providers and the regional channel ecosystem.

While the city is largely known for the presence of numerous IT parks, Pune has been generating significant demand for trending enterprise technologies.

In terms of the nature of IT channel partners, Pune is home to the entire spectrum – including resellers, retailers, system integrators, solution providers, apart from key national, regional and sub-distributors such as Redington, Ingram Micro, Savex, Iris and Compuage.

Providing an overview of the city’s market and business for his company, Rahul Meher, CEO, Leon Computers, says, “Pune is dominated by manufacturing industry, automobiles, OEMs, ITeS, telecom, and insurance sectors. As data is one of the most important assets for everyone, we are coming across a number of Big Data projects, Data Lakes, etc. Every company wants to use Big Data to predict and prevent risks.”

Being one of the oldest players in the Pune market, Leon Computers has witnessed shifts in IT consumption in the region and the evolution of Pune’s IT channel ecosystem. The surge of new opportunities and growth areas could be reiterated by the fact that Leon Computers has now withdrawn itself from reselling of hardware and software.

The company is focused on building its

own IP in business intelligence and advance intelligence with modern data platforms. According to another citybased partner, Sarang Satarkar, Director, Ace Brain Systems & Software, the Top 3 IT segments in Pune include cloud, mobile and printing solutions. Whereas, the key months of purchase are January, February and March.

It must be noted that Pune, being one of the Smart Cities, acts as a catalyst in growing demands for ICT solutions in the government sector. Alongside, the Metro project also acts as an opportunity for channel partners, according to Satarkar.

Explaining some of the unique challenges, Satarkar says, “Service support provided by MNCs and Indian customer expectations are never complementing each other. The customer actually wants personal touch while providing after sales service, and MNC call centre are having an approach of ensuring that there is no or little cost involved to resolve the call. Call centre

numbers are always on hold or in queue and call centres representatives always provide monotonous information to the customer. National distributors or vendors don’t consider delays in payment happening because of holidays and other natural issues, I feel henceforth the credit offered should always be basis working days rather than number of days. I don’t see the national distributors or vendors trying to understand taxation concerns of channels.”

On the potential present in the city, Meher highlights Big Data / Data Lakes in the ITeS, telecom and insurance sectors; data migration and advance analytics across verticals.

Speaking on the role of channel associations, Satarkar informs, “Associations have a big role to play in keeping healthy relationships between vendors, distributors and the channel.

CMDA Pune works very actively in all regards about the concerns of the members.”

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GUWAHATI

GUWAHATI: THE EMERGING TECH HUB OF NORTH EAST INDIA Moumita Deb Choudhury moumita.choudhury@expressindia.com

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uwahati which is also known as the gateway of North East India, has been a significant commercial hub and rated as being among the swiftly developing cities.

The largest tech park of Northeast India has been set up in Bongara which is about 30 kilometers from Guwahati.

The facility will house global companies and will be an innovation centre for technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Solar PV, Photonics, Quantum Dot Nanocrystals, Smart Meter, and Internet of Things.

Subrajit Baruah, Director, Projects & Business Operation, SIQES (consulting and services firm) says, “IT parks are coming up in the region and technology adoption is accelerating. Although the scale is not as large as in metropolitan and tier-I cities, but there is a good traction. We look forward to the government to build a sturdy technology infrastructure. This will enable enhanced technology deployments.”

Several government projects like the State Data Centre, SSDC and state portal, SWF by e-Prastuti, Assam Wide Area Network, Common Service Centre, e-Assam and the all Assam encompassing colossal project National Register of Citizens of India (NRC) have leveraged technology in a big way in the state.

Abhijit Bhuyan, CEO, Bohniman Infosystems, says, “Several egovernment projects have sprung up especially under the present ruling state government. NRC is a giant

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project where we digitised data for crores of people with our software solutions and also enabled phonetic based search. There is immense opportunity in the state.”

There are many solution developers in the state who build solutions, applications and technologies like JAVA, OpenSource, Hybernate, Blockchain, etc., and have a substantial demand in the global market as well.

“There is a big demand for our solutions in other countries. Germany is a huge market for us. The vertical demands are for healthcare, finance and hospitality,” informs Bhuyan.

‘Digital North East 2022’ is a landmark technology initiative, which is shaping up in the North East India.

Software Technology Parks of India (STPI) Guwahati; Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY); and Ministry for Development of North Eastern Region (Ministry of DoNER) have joined hands to set-up

CoEs (Center of Excellence) for each headquarter of different states for different technologies.

Prabir Kumar Das, Director, STPIGuwahati says, “There is a spectrum of tech initiatives that we are working upon along with the government for the ‘Digital North East 2022’ project. These include, IoT for agriculture in Guwahati, IT in Healthcare in Gangtok, Data Analytics in Agartala, Gaming in Aiwzal, Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality in Imphal, Graphic designing in Kohima, drones applications in Itanagar and animation in Meghalaya.”

Technology in Guwahati is an ask for every vertical today. Ranjan Kalita, CEO, Terabyte Solution, who deals with network, and surveillance offerings informs that there is high demand in the city from all walks of establishments, including banks, museums and the education sector among others, one should only know and understand the channel to be leveraged.

Explore Bharat

RANCHI

AMAZING FACTS ABOUT RANCHI’S TECHNOLOGY ASSERTIVENESS Moumita Deb Choudhury moumita.choudhury@expressindia.com

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harkhand, one of India’s newest states, emerged from the Southern portion of Bihar in the year 2000. Although new, Jharkhand is one of the states which is prospering and has avenues for more progress. Its capital city Ranchi is a knowledge hub of Eastern India and is ever-evolving. CRN India, with its Explore Bharat initiative, finds out the technology requirement in the city.

The Ranchi IT market is driven by around 80-100 channel partners. “There is a big push for technology adoption from the government. A major project in the city is that where all the street lights have a centralised server that can be controlled from one location. Also, the public distribution system – also called Ration Distribution System – is being digitised as it is linked with Aadhaar, to stop fraudulent distribution of commodities. This practice enables transparency by automating the ration shops,” says Shyam Anurag, Proprietor, Shree Shyam Infotech.

The manufacturing vertical is also embracing technology for its growth.

Investments in digital technologies such as augmented reality, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and robotics among others, is being highly considered in manufacturing and other sectors. “The Ranchi market is ripe for technology enablement. Several projects are happening in different verticals including the government and corporate space,” says Naveen Kumar, Director, Peripherals Engineers.

“Technology is the requirement of the hour and it has rightly engulfed

almost all verticals, which include the police department, schools, healthcare, hospitality, etc,” says Sushil Kumar, Past President, Jharkhand Computer Traders Association (JCTA).

Breaking down the technology requirement, Sushil Kumar states, "In schools, we can see CCTV being installed and there are computers and projectors for students. There are data centres coming up for smart cities.

Additionally, when the health department enabled calling facility to number 108 for free ambulance, this brought about the need for data centres. Also, when the police department enabled emergency calling

numbers, 100 and 112, data centre is what they needed." He further informs that two to three hospitals are coming up in Jharkhand for which the IT budget is about `100 crores. Also, tenders are being floated for five to six star hotels in the state, which will have the basic IT requirements like Wi-Fi and security, bringing a lot of traction for storage.

The IT channel partners in the city reveal that there is still not much awareness about the benefits of cloud and they are not sure about its RoI. There is, however, a high demand from several establishments for small servers in Ranchi.

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RAIPUR

RAIPUR: GROWING FROM STRENGTH TO STRENGTH IN TECHNOLOGY Moumita Deb Choudhury moumita.choudhury@expressindia.com

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aipur, being geographically located almost at the centre in the state of Chhattisgarh, holds extreme potential for technology. From virtual reality (VR), to gaming, to cloud, all of these see a good traction in the city. There are over 1,000 partners in Chhatishgarh, of which 300 are in Raipur, driving the value chain. Like every other Smart City, Raipur has its own technology demands to become a Smart City itself. Also, in Raipur a hitech integrated command and control centre has been set-up by the Chhattisgarh government for better traffic management and surveillance in the city.

Manoj Bagdiya, Proprietor, Compute and Compile, who has seen the evolution of the Ranchi technology market for the last 25 years by virtue of being in the business for so long, informs that there is immense opportunity in the city. There are many steel and cement companies in Raipur, apart from the corporates and SMBs which have huge appetite for technology implementation. Unlike other cities, Raipur has played out well in terms of IT hardware as well.

“After GST roll-out, the demand for laptops and desktops have increased.

Small businesses are also procuring computers,” informs Devender Marwah, President, Chhattishgarh Computer and Media Dealers Association (CCMDA).

Marwah further says, “The demand for IT is not at par with the metros, but Raipur generates a big scale of demand.

There is demand for servers. People are

going for more and more gaming PCs. Computerisation in all government departments is happening rapidly.

Now-a-days, the High Courts and event smaller court judges are having proper PCs in their cabins. Also, school, colleges and universities are getting technologically upgraded.”

Various vertical markets in Ranchi bring in a spectrum of demand, where customers look for customised solutions.

“We do customised solutions for our customers, which include software and hardware. Companies are approaching us to get their offices automated, whereby apart from the general server, storage or network requirement there is requirement for video conferencing solutions, or access control for boss' cabin. Also if a company has four or five offices in different locations they want

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the network and the systems to merge at one central control location,” says Bagdiya.

“There are customers who want onsite mobile billing which facilitates onthe-spot app billing and data synchronisation on a common server.

There is also a lot of demand for VR, as there are big stores that want to give their customers a real-like experience.

There are home décor and furnishing showrooms that want to display the furnitures and products to their customers, but may not do so as many products only come on a back-to-back order basis. VR headsets are a big hit in these cases. On the cloud front, not proper awareness is prevalent and perhaps that is why people are not ready to invest in a big way. But accounting and billing now-a-days is cloud based,” sums up Bagdiya.

Explore Bharat

PATNA

PATNA EMBRACES HOLISTIC TECHNOLOGY FOR DEVELOPMENT

Moumita Deb Choudhury moumita.choudhury@expressindia.com

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echnology has always been a major driver for the city of Patna. Technology has been absorbed largely in areas of governance, business, hospitality, healthcare, education and others in Patna, which is one of the major IT markets in Bihar.

“The state of Bihar has about 300 partners, of which, approximately 120 are based out of Patna,” said Arun Rungta, President, Bihar IT Association.

Technologies such as machine learning, big data, augmented reality, virtual reality, among others have been instrumental in several verticals.

With the presence of top class technology education centres in Patna like the IIT, NIT and BIT, it is obvious that technology is way ahead in Patna.

Furthermore, an array of universities — old and new — are great technology absorbents.

“Most of the old universities use our services. IT services are not only meant for the students, but a lot of technology is also used by the university administration as well,” says Rajiv, a system integrator in Patna.

Realising the demand and requirement of technology in the region.

Bihar Entrepreneur Association has plans to set up East India’s first artificial intelligence (AI) centre in Patna. The endeavour is aimed at

building skills in the area of emerging technologies.

Focused efforts can be seen to digitise data for the common good of the citizens. “There are centres in Patna from where citizens can get information in digital formats like maps,” states Naveen, MD, Krishna Agencies.

“Data centres are quite a requirement for several organisations these days. We have deployes big data solutions for banks. We have also provided racks and servers to Patna Municipal Corporation,” mentions Naveen.

There is a clear indication that technology demand is varied and ranges across verticals in the city.

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INDORE

INDORE LOOKS TO BECOME IT PARADISE OF CENTRAL INDIA

Sourabh Sarkar sourabh.sarkar@expressindia.com

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ndore, the largest city and the commercial hub of Madhya Pradesh, is not only the ‘Cleanest City in India’ but also perhaps the most spontaneously developing IT market in central India, which caters to a significant number of surrounding cities and towns. With sustained efforts from the government as well as individual efforts from private companies, Indore promises a bright future for the IT industry in India. Silver Mall, the IT hub of Indore, is home to mid to large retailers, SIs, and service providers. Almost 18 distributors have a direct presence in the city; however, it is the regional distributors who are in charge of pushing and generating business in the market.

Being the first city to have both an IIT as well as IIM, Indore every year produces thousands of young and talented workforce, which further boost the demand for personal computers, tablets, servers, etc. The state government-run Super Corridor project has further accelerated the growth of the IT industry. Moreover, Indore has been listed among the first 20 smart cities. Overall, the city is witnessing a promising future for existing companies as well as for several startups. The e-governance projects and educational sector continue to see strong uptake of the IT business.

Rajkumar Jain, Director of Indore based Business Automation, has been in the IT business since 1989. He is a veteran in the IT market and knows the nitty gritty’s of the trade.

“Presently, we are working with the

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state government, Central Government, and corporates. We have undertaken various projects such as RAPDRP and commercial taxes security management. Large IT companies like Infosys and TCS are among the leading IT companies in the city, having huge campuses and workforce. The government plans to open more IT parks to ensure growth in this sector.

This will expand the IT sector in Indore and it will become a dominant player in the economy of this city. Apart from that, the education sector is showing a lot of potential that needs to be tapped.

We are looking at this area too, but are in need of skilled manpower. The market is doing well and I see a lot of opportunities that are either present or need to be explored. Indore is a highly price-sensitive market; however, we see customers willing to invest in the latest technologies,” says Jain.

The city is also witnessing an increasing number of startups day-by-day.

“There is a flurry of startups here in Indore, especially in the field of IT. Digital transformation is a welcome change and companies are adopting digital processes. The project ‘Digital India’ is proving to be successful, which is evident with the increasing number of internet users in the city. It has encouraged companies to provide free Wi-Fi in various areas,” says Alok Ranjan, CEO, Infobyd.

Deepak Aggarwal, Director, Digital Solutions, another partner from Indore states, “The potential in this city is enormous. With this magnitude of growth in the IT industry, Indore can become the new Bangalore of India very soon.”

Explore Bharat

NASHIK

GOVERNMENT PROJECTS PROVIDING BIG OPPORTUNITIES Mohit Rathod mohit.rathod@expressindia.com

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he Wine Capital of India, Nashik is establishing its identity beyond vineyards and wineries. Nashik is known as one of the four places where the popular Kumbh Mela is held. However, the city is also emerging as an investment destination for IT giants. Identifying the business potential in the Nashik market, various IT vendors are planning to tap the city's market.

This foray by technology companies, thereby, provides a multitude of opportunities for local channel partners – not just in terms of selling products and solutions, but also build their own solutions around the offerings. For instance, from a growth perspective, one of the key strategies for Citrix this year is geo-expansion in Tier 3 and Tier 4 cities. As part of this, the company is also looking at Nashik, where new IT parks are opening-up, and areas with industrial presence.

Another company, NetApp is expanding beyond the existing cities where the company has its presence.

NetApp is looking at Tier 2 cities and evaluating whether the company can build its business in these cities, inclusing Nashik. The only reason being that there is demand in these cities.

Rajeev Papneja, Chief Growth Officer, ESDS Software Solution informs that the key purchase months in Nashik include March, July and December; whereas the top three IT segments include desktops, laptops, entry level servers and security products.

In terms of IT business in the government segments, various projects

in the city further catalyse the opportunities for IT vendors and the partner community. Nashik is also one of the cities identified under the Centre's Smart Cities mission.

Additionally, some of the other significant projects include Samruddhi Highway, Ashoka Buildcon and Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL).

Interestingly, the Indian Airforce's Sukhoi Su-30 fighter jet is manufactured in Nashik at the HAL facility. Citing the challenges in the city, Papneja says, "For demand for IT equipment on urgent basis, there still is dependency on Mumbai or Pune. Furthermore, there are several connectivity issues as well."

The Nashik market is home to a diverse range of partners including resellers, retailers, system integrators, solution providers, etc; however, most of them are resellers. Some of the national, regional and sub distributors

in the city include Redington, IngramMicro and Savex.

The city's local IT association, Nashik IT Association (NITA), is a nonprofit organisation, with around 164 IT companies as its members. NITA's objective is to persistently catalyse the IT industry in its journey towards structuring an innovative growth sector, including the transparent business modules process and expand the Nashik IT industry globally.

The association looks forward to make significant contribution in strengthening Nashik’s IT platform with employment opportunities, infrastructure and global visibility.

With an aim to unleash IT potentials, NITA is focusing on building the trust and help in setting up the strategic trend for the IT sector. NITA also organises events in the field of IT and its associated fields.

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NAGPUR

INFRA PROGRESS USHERS NEW BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES Sourabh Sarkar sourabh.sarkar@expressindia.com

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he Orange City, Nagpur has been proposed as one of the Smart Cities in Maharashtra and maintains the top ranking among 100 cities in India. The entry of national level education institutes like AIIMS, IIM, IIT, and NLU in the city has already brought the city on the national education map over a couple of years and made it as one of the sought after educational hub. On the flip side, the way infrastructure development has taken place in the city, but it failed to attract large companies to set up their base. Still for the large amount of procurement of materials, Mumbai and Pune are the first choice.

Furthermore, local companies have fear of payments while working with startup companies. Moreover, in the last five years, many IT and software companies such as GlobalLogic, Persistent Systems, Tech Mahindra, etc, have opened their offices in Nagpur.

This has resulted in faster growth of technology as majority of office and industrial work is carried out using digital processes.

Traditionally, Nagpur is home to large commercial, manufacturing industries and MSMEs. The growth of IT has been steady in these segments.

Nevertheless, the IT channel of Nagpur, a commercial and political centre of the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra, has many traditional hardware and reseller partners diversifying into services and solution integration of IT business. And to drive this change in the channel ecosystem, the regional association Vidarbha Computer & Media Dealer’s

Welfare Association (VCMDWA) has played a big role. Every year the association organises its largest computer exhibition COMP-EX, wherein all the major IT brands participate.

Rajesh Saboo, President, VCMDWA and Director of Shreyas Technosoft, says, “Nagpur is on an infrastructure drive, with new national institutes and hospitals coming up. Indirectly, there will be scope for IT. Hence, we are preparing our members and setting a roadmap for our 150 members to take on these new opportunities in the areas of mobility, cloud, application, value added services, etc. We have seen decent size of partners moving from pure hardware selling into solution building and integrating mobility, collaboration, applications and software-led services business. Today, we have a good mix of partners who are fulfilling the local need and taking up sub-contracting business from large global accounts.”

Ritesh Patil, General Manager, Silver solutions, comments, “Our company is involved in system integration and we

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have worked with many companies in the past years. Many offices are getting established in the city which has helped in our business. Companies are increasingly using Wi-Fi and other digital solutions.”

Another IT veteran Rita Budhay, Director – Finance at Business Algorithm, one of the largest HP distributors for laptops and printers in Vidarbha region, says “The IT channel business has been going slow due to the increasing number of new players, who operate in the channel for short period and sell products below the landing prices, which has eventually distributed the business of established distributors as well Tier 4 channel. We can’t operate and trust these new companies as there has been a growing number of payment issues with such companies.”

The setting up of airport project, Multi-modal International Cargo Hub and Airport at Nagpur (MIHAN) has not brought cheers to the local partners, due to the lack of required skill sets and funding capabilities.

Explore Bharat

AHMEDABAD

LOCAL CHANNEL PARTNERS NEED PUSH IN THE GOVT SECTOR Partner specialising in ERP solutions, there is also lack of awareness about the products, and lack of well-defined scope of work by the end client. Adding to that Biren Shah points out that long payment cycles is a key challenge.

Mohit Rathod mohit.rathod@expressindia.com

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ne of the major metropolis in India and the largest city in Gujarat, Ahmedabad has been rapidly evolving as an important IT market. Ahmedabad's selection among the Modi government's Smart Cities Mission further poses bigger potential in terms of opportunities, especially in the government sector, for IT vendors and the channel ecosystem.

Speaking on the government business, Biren Shah, Managing Director, Adit Microsys, informs, "We are associated with government projects, but most government projects provide opportunities to large system integrators and national channel players. The Smart City projects provide large volume business opportunity to such large channel partners."

He further informs that security, networking and cloud are the top three IT segments in the city. The storage market in Ahmedabad is good as well, but volumes are mostly for lower cost products, market for premium storage is limited. He says, "We don’t see any strong trend in any particular month for mostly SMB customers. Enterprise customer and government have a tendency to buy more in February and March. Some of the bestselling brands for us are HP, Dell, Microsoft, Adobe, Symantec, Kaspersky, QNAP, etc."

For another city-based player Bitscape Infotech, the top three IT segments includes pharma, manufacturing and retail; whereas, the key business period includes the months of March, June, September and December.

Diverse presence

Kartik Shah, Director, Bitscape Infotech, further informs, "Overall the market for storage in Ahmedabad is on growth trajectory as the data size is increasing with a mix of cloud storage also gaining good ground. As cloud is the buzzword in the industry, the solutions and services built around and over cloud platforms is gaining momentum. Due to the high data volume being generated, storage – cloud as well as on-premise – is also one of the fastest growing segments.

Challenges for partners Speaking on some of the challenges faced by the IT channel community in th city, Karthik Shah says, "In terms of service support, the situation is changing and people and organisations have started valuing the services/expertise and therefore resulted in they being ready-to-pay extra for the services. However, there is a long way to go on this front and as maturity increases, things will happen for good."

According to Anuja Parikh, Director, Intech Systems – a Microsoft Gold

There is a mix of all kinds of channel partners in Ahmedabad, with each one trying to carve their niche in the markets that they participate. Over the years, many resellers have been diversifying into system integration and are providing total solutions and services to their customers, trying to grab higher wallet share.

Some of the key national, regional and sub-distributors in the city include Ingram Micro, Regington, Compuage, MTech, RAH, Inflow, iValue, RPtech India and several others.

International Association for Microsoft Channel Partners (IAMCP) Ahmedabad Chapter is on growth trajectory and currently has a member strength of over 20 partners in the city.

Regular knowledge sharing meetings around best practices, partner-topartner collaboration, etc, is being carried out. Apart from this, Gujarat Electronics & Software Industries Association (GESIA) represents the ICT industry of the state. The association works in partnership with the Government of Gujarat for the promotion of IT, ITeS, electronics, telecom and networking in the state. "Another association that is active is Infotech Software Dealers Association (ISODA).

The local association Ahmedabad Computer Manufactures Association (ACMA) is also active in the region," states Kartik Shah.

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CHANDIGARH

CHANDIGARH IT PARTNERS LOOK AT ONLINE BUSINESS Sandhya Michu sandhya.michu@expressindia.com

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erturbed with the drop in offline sales owing to the increase in online sales and price undercutting, the distributors and resellers dominated IT market of Chandigarh partners are looking to take their offline business online. A large section of IT dealers and regional distributors are looking to shift their traditional box pushing business to digital. The growing online and gray channel has eaten away from the brick and mortar business, but it seems the shift to digital will not be an easy ride as finding skilled manpower to drive online business is another challenge which these first-time entrepreneurs are facing.

Sulalit Gupta, owner of Global Systems at Chandigarh says, “The growing digital payment and online buying trends are forcing us to start venturing into an online sale. We have gradually shifted to digital sales, but we are looking to hire new skillset for this business.”

Another big issue partners feel is, the market is getting flooded with cheap IT products such as laptops, hard drive, and printers. The price gap between the gray channel and authorised channel is 10-20 per cent cheaper. “Today, the pricing of products in bulk quantity is available on WhatsApp groups. There is nothing called ‘price or rate list’. The market is also seeing the movement of fly by night operators coming from neighboring cities and eroding the markets,” Gupta informs.

Gupta, who is also a President of

local IT association says, “We are aware of such malpractices which are creating lots of annoyance to our partners for the last six months. The menace of online sold material and return on delivery products available at throwaway pricing have impacted the offline partners business. We will be taking action to stop this practice.”

Sunil Gandhi of Zip Infotech is also looking to restart his online business.

Having own online portal is much more rewarding rather than selling on marketplaces like Amazon, Flipkart, etc. “We are revamping our Chandigarhmart.com there we will not sell IT but other multibranded products.

In the current scenarios, running just offline stores is not sustainable. The online presence is a must to stay competitive. We observe this presence of a dual business model is getting replicated across the IT partners in Chandigarh.”

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Sector 20 in Chandigarh has a huge array of the dealership as well as retail stores of several international computer brands like Dell, Apple, Lenovo, HP, ASUS, Acer, Toshiba, Samsung, SONY, LG, HCL and many more. The sector 20 market offers computer accessories, Anti Virus systems, software, printers, and scanners as well. Chandigarh IT Association has been an active body and also part of state IT associations like PACT and FAIITA. Soon, the association will go for an election and elect a new team.

Apart from Chandigarh, Panchkula, and Mohali are the other two mushrooming IT markets where the new IT projects and large corporates are located.

Chandigarh is a hub for all the large and regional distributors/ stockist who cater to neighboring markets like Haryana, Punjab, and Himachal markets.

Explore Bharat

LUCKNOW

RIDING ON DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION OF SMBS Sandhya Michu sandhya.michu@expressindia.com

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he IT industry in Lucknow has undergone enormous growth and expansion in the last decade. Multiple IT and software companies have not only set up their base but are also creating job opportunities for the youth. Technology has been largely absorbed in areas of governance, healthcare, business, transportation, etc. Systematic efforts from the government towards development of IT industry has been a fruitful effort. This state capital is marching ahead for adopting new technologies, security surveillance and digital payments usage. Additionally, being a capital, Lucknow feeds several neighbouring cities and towns in terms of IT business.

The bustling Naza Market, the hub for all kinds of computers and their parts, is on a recovery path after demonetisation when online sales hit sales and business growth.

Nevertheless, the Naza Market in Lucknow, which has several shops of computers, laptops, CCTV cameras and tablets among other things, is optimistic that business will be better this year once the festive season is in full swing. The market is expected to mark a positive growth with festival times coming ahead.

There are around 300 shops in Naza Market, which is directly connected with all markets of computers in Uttar Pradesh. There are large retailers, distributors, retail outlets and company outlets. The regional IT body, Lucknow Computer Vyapar Mandal, Uttar Pradesh is expecting better business

this festive season and is exploring new areas such as security, networking, and analytics.

With online and digital becoming a new norm, mid-sized solution providers are helping SMB customers to take their businesses online. Anuj Sharma, Director, Anuj Tech Solutions, says, “Our company has been providing technology services since 2016.

Majority of our work includes website designing. We also serve companies from neighbouring cities such as Kanpur and Allahabad. In the last few years, a lot of regional companies have been set up in the field of IT services.

This has emerged as a response to the growing need for computer solutions.”

Seconding the thought, Sandeep Mishra, Managing Director, Technochez, says, “We have been into

application and website designing. We have worked for many local companies, assisting them with application development and websites. Many companies are increasingly using digital processes to boost their sales.”

Rajeev Garg, Proprietor, E Solution, who deals in hardware of computers and printers, comments, “With increased internet users in the city, we have started providing Wi-Fi services as well. Our customers are spread all over India. We see there is a rapid acceleration in our business.”

Big IT service providers like TCS and the HCL are giving impetus to the local partners for the implementations and servicing their large customers base. In light of these big firms, many small and medium IT companies are also finding their path into the city.

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JAIPUR

JAIPUR IT PARTNERS COMBAT CHINESE CARTRIDGES ISSUE Sandhya Michu sandhya.michu@expressindia.com

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aipur, the capital of Rajasthan, is considered to be one of the largest IT markets of the state.

This bustling market houses hundreds of IT partners, of which the large part of these partners operate out of Raisar Plaza, an IT market of Jaipur.

The partners of Pink City cater to home buyers, SMBs, corporates, and others as their main customers. In terms of IT channel classifications either they are dealing in multi-branded retail stores, services, and repair, reselling or mid to large system integrators who serve the IT demand coming from textile, jewelry, gem, artifacts, education institutes, and government departments.

Although frustrated with the inconvenience caused by demonetisation and the initial difficulty in comprehending GST procedures, traders in the Rajasthan capital’s business hubs seem to feel everything is back to normal after the initial shock of demonetisation. GST, they point out, is problematic only for those who do not have a transparent accounting systems.

IT traders in Jaipur see the market is reviving from slowdown and hope the market sales, which have dropped to 50 per cent in sales will get some stability now that the elections are over.

Mihir Sharma, the incumbent President of state IT association, Rajasthan Computer Traders Association (RCTA). who runs a multibranded retail store in Jaipur’s Raja Park, feels that GST has brought order and transparency to the way business is done. Due to the market slowdown, the stocking of material has been reduced to

half. The market is also battling with issues like price undercutting and online pricing. The changing distribution policies of IT vendors are also causing a big stress on IT partners.”

Talking about the role of the IT association, Sharma says, “The association has been dealing in solving in regular market disputes and back end issues of partners. The effect of demonetisation was temporary and GST has, in fact, streamlined financial and taxation processes. We now find it much easier to trade because system loopholes have been plugged,” Apart from a decade old IT association, RCTA. The city has recently formed another state association for Printing and Cartridge partners namedRajasthan Cartridge Recyclers Association, a year old body, with having 80 members from across Rajasthan, feel the market is flooded with cheap and spurious Chinese cartridges at throwaway pricing which is hurting the business of authorised printers and cartridges partners.

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“The main objective of this newly formed association is to educate customers on buying original and genuine cartridges and recycling of these cartridges over time. There is a need for this awareness and collectively we will overcome this challenge,” informs Daya Shankar Sharma, general secretary of the new association. The association is also planning to meet the state government for its intervention.

With the growing millennial and corporate sector, the retail market of Jaipur is booming. Today, all the major IT and printer brands are available in the market.

The local market of Jaipur is no longer dependent on neighboring bigger markets like Haryana and Delhi for stock and service. Daya, who is also running a multi-branded printing store in Jaipur shares, “We see close to 100200 footfall of customers on a regular basis and we close 10-12 sales every day with an average of ` 2000-25000 worth products.”

Explore Bharat

LUDHIANA

CHANNEL MARKET DRIVEN BY CORPORATES, EDUCATION SECTOR Sandhya Michu sandhya.michu@expressindia.com

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udhiana is an industrial center of northern India; the BBC has called it India’s Manchester.

Ludhiana was among the list of smart cities that will be developed by the government of India. According to World Bank Group Ludhiana is the best city in India to do business.

The IT market of Ludhiana is considered to be the largest IT market across Punjab state. The market boast of feeding or supplying material to smaller cities like Bhatinda, Amritsar, Sangrur, and Jalandhar. The city is home to the leading brands, distributors, regional distributors, and retailers.

It has more than 500 organised and unorganised partners, large

distributors and retailers. The channel partners are driven by sectors like corporate, home users and education institutes.

According to distributors like Ingram Micro, Supertron and Redington, Ludhiana is considered to be the largest and strongest IT market across Punjab after Delhi. Despite having a strong position in across Punjab. The market too has its set of local challenges like margin operating price, price undercutting, online and many more. The channel partners of Punjab have been hit due to the fact that they share their borders with states that have tax exemptions or lower taxes.

Talking about the burning issue of price undercutting and cross border infiltration, Gurpreet Singh Jagdev of Netline and Vice president of State IT

Association PACT informed, “Due to online buying and low entry barrier for an online sellers, the market has seen partners operating from other regions such as Bangalore, Jaipur, Telangana, and Delhi are selling laptops and consumer goods at a much cheaper price which has completely disturbed the local retail market. In such a scenario, how will the smaller markets become big and deliver more profitability, a distributor should make sure that price balance is there in the market, otherwise it creates a difficult situation for everybody,” he added.

With the opening of the new admission session at schools and colleges, retailers in Ludhiana are hoping to see the market recovery, however, with e-tailers offering ridiculous steep discounting on laptop and desktops, it is an uphill task. Retailers fear a further drop in sales. High-end laptops and desktops are bought by school and college students, but online sales is going to spoil the market for local partners to a large extent. Jagdev rues, “We have raised our concerns at PACT as well as with national IT body FAIITA and seeking some resolve of this online pricing issue. The IT business in Punjab is not just getting tough, it is fast getting non-feasible since the last one month.”

Besides online issues, the Ludhiana market has seen the IT demand coming from various sectors like corporates, educational institutes, and MSME. The market has seen 20 per cent new IT channel partners are being added in the last two years. This new channel is largely buying from small distributors, online and local distributors.

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JAIPUR

DEHRADUN

ONLINE-OFFLINE TUSSLE DEEPENS IN DEHRADUN Sandhya Michu sandhya.michu@expressindia.com

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he declining sales of local retailers and distributors of Dehradun city have been becoming major reasons of worry, owing to the online sales catching up fast. As the city is getting prepared to be among smart cities, the digitisation of services and digital payments has not only provided convenience to local customers, but has also reduced the footfalls to the local retail stores to half.

Despite several business projects announced by the government such as Namami Gange, Smart Cities Mission and many others, the digital push has not given much business opportunities to the local channel community.

“Being a major tourist city, Dehradun’s proximity to Mussoorie and other famous Himalayan shrines usually doesn’t bring business for us.

Our business is more centered on local purchase done by SMBs, home and small corporate and student clientele.

The recent launch of Udaan, a network centric B2B trade platform designed specifically for SMBs in India, has further hit the sales of local partners.

This portal has been selling computer and peripherals at cheaper rates.

Partners outside Dehradun have been selling in bulk at much lower rates,” laments Balbir Singh Rathore, Owner, Best Computers, which deals in networking and laptops selling.

Overall, Dehradun’s IT channel sells approximately 1,500 laptops and desktops per month. The market has 30-35 retailers and members of the local IT association – Uttarakhand

Information Technology Association (UITTA).

Vikas Dewan of Strategic Markets, one of the leading system integrators for the government projects, says, “We are getting involved in lots of government projects. This is very good for our business. We are getting more business opportunities from the number of government projects that are

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lined up, which are related to laptops and desktops for the education sector.”

UITTA has been active in the city and is working towards education and welfare of local partners. “The association has helped its partners in organising GST camps and they have very actively managed the situation.

We continue to expect the best from our association,” says Rathore.

Explore Bharat

JAMMU

LACK OF GOVERNMENT INITIATIVES DERAILING IT GROWTH IN JAMMU Sandhya Michu sandhya.michu@expressindia.com

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midst the troubled political atmosphere, the IT business in Jammu has been going flat. With stagnant growth in the IT industry and lowering profits, enterprises are not showing interest in investing in Jammu. Largely, the Jammu IT market is dependent on the government and retail business. Of which, government has been the biggest buyer of IT products. Since Government eMarketplace (GeM) was introduced, the local partners of Jammu feel the government business has come down to 50 per cent.

GeM is an online market platform to facilitate procurement of goods and services by various ministries and government agencies. Although the portal has its advantages, SMBs are finding it tough to list on the portal due to lack of experience. “We can't compete for pricing on GeM portal. In earlier times, we used to have healthy annual order business from the government, but with GeM, the same business has been reduced to half. The pricing in GeM is obnoxiously low only large volume partners can meet the pricing criteria. Moreover, the system has no minimum guarantee of government procuring goods locally.

Today, the market is flooded with Chinese and cheap products. The sustenance of local partners is getting challenging day-by-day,” says Arvind Kaul, one of the veteran IT partners in the city.

The servicing and AMC business in the government has been curtailed,

which used to give healthy margins to partners. The IT industry is considered an important business and it is a `500600 crore worth market in Jammu.

Similarly, on the retail business front, the offline business has been taken over by online marketplace like Flipkart and Amazon. The removal of entry tax after the GST rollout has further paved way for neighboring partners to operate and sell products.

While the local IT business lacks government support, the city is witnessing steady growth in the emergence of startup culture in the city.

Members of various startup firms have united to form Jammu Startup Community to assist startups and small businesses.

Ankush Jain and Kanav Gupta, CEO, Zonixsoft, and a member of the the startup community, says, “We started with just four members in 2017 and now it has expanded to over 100 members.

Our basic function includes providing suggestions to various young entrepreneurs regarding their business

strategies. We do not provide any financial help directly, but we help the startups tie-up with investors from where they get monetary help. Startups here are emerging in various sectors including IT, healthcare, textiles, etc.”

Speaking on behalf of the local association Naveen Gupta, President, Jammu Computer Dealers Association (JCDA), comments, “The IT market in Jammu is in doldrums. Barring a few big partners, the business of small and mid-sized partners is slow and sluggish. In the absence of a stable government, the sentiments of the market are on an all-time low. It is essential to have government initiatives to keep the IT market spirited.”

Vikas Baru, Managing Partner, Black Cap IT, adds, “The IT industry is stagnant. Various companies are shifting to metro cities to seek better opportunities and assistance from the government and the new companies are finding it difficult to sustain.”

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THIRUVANANTHAPURAM

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: A COE FOR TECH INNOVATION

Moumita Deb Choudhury moumita choudhury@expressindia.com

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erala, as a state, has maintained its competitiveness as an IT destination, while Thiruvananthapuram has significantly enhanced the value addition to the state’s economy. The advances in modern technology have been seeping in Thiruvanthapuram since a long time.

It has been catalysing domestic growth and has also outsourced technology in parts of the state.

“There are around 2,000 channel partners in Kerala, of which, 200-250 are based in Thiruvanthapuram,” says Toshy Matthew of All Kerala IT Dealers Association (AKITDA).

AKITDA is dedicated to ensure a

harmonious vendor-dealer connect. The association helps by providing an easyto-access and utilise platform for IT and ITEeS vendors, whereby vendors can easily find and appoint dealers, distributors and retailers.

“There are several e-governance projects happening in Thiruvanthapuram. Several projects are driven by Kerala State Electronics Development Corporation Limited (KELTRON),” says Matthew.

The city has been a facilitator in the adoption of IT, ICT and ITeS in SMB, enterprise and the government sectors.

Also the space centre in Thiruvanthapuram is a landmark technology hub.

“The Department of Space under the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, is working on a super computer. When

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this comes to life, it is going to be a revolutionary technology achievement for the state, housing the biggest supercomputer in India. Also, several schools in the city are technologically upgrading themselves with projectors, computers, network systems and others,” informs Binoy A Pazhoor, MD, Pazhoor Ideal Systems.

“Small businesses also come up with a lot of demand for technology. For instance, German Bakery recently went through an IT revamp. Also, the technopark in the city churns a big market for servers, storage and cloud.

Based on the projects that the companies in the technopark get, the demand springs up,” adds Pazhoor.

The technopark in Thiruvanthapuram has garnered ‘A’ rating from the research firm CRISIL.

Explore Bharat

VISAKHAPATNAM

PORTS, DEFENCE, OIL AND STEEL INDUSTRIES DRIVE GROWTH OF IT Moumita Deb Choudhury moumita choudhury@expressindia.com

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isakhapatnam, popularly called Vizag, possess excellent connectivity and a strong infrastructure, although post bifurcation, due to lack of cohesive ecosystem development, the city is still to perform upto its potential. The major industrial names in the city include Hindustan Petroleum Corp, Bharat Heavy Plates and Vessels, Hindustan Zinc, Port Trust and Hindustan Ship Yard, among others.

"The Visakhapatnam market is an evolving one. The Defence Department implements IT for various processes.

Also, the oil and steel companies and ports have huge demand for technology. We do storage and network solutions for them, apart from other automation," says Crinadha Kumar, Proprietor, IP Tech Networks.

Furthermore, presence of IT companies such as Wipro, Tech Mahindra, Concentrix, IBM, Cyient among others holds for a greater development. However, the city needs to pull in more big ticket IT firms for a flamboyant growth.

"Even though there are several IT companies here, they do not mark an elaborate presence. The companies house a low seating capacity. Hardly, there are companies having more than 200 work stations," informs Crinadha.

The IT sector churns out a decent revenue each year. The major IT business happens in medium and small business, education sector and the government space. Top educational institutions like Indian Institute of Management, Indian Institute of petroleum and Energy, Indian Maritime

University, Kalam Institute of Health Technology, National Institute of Oceanography, make the city a destination which cannot go unnoticed in the education landscape.

“The education sector is also going through rapid digitisation in the city, although I do not specifically cater to the education sector,” says Crinadha, adding, “There is also a demand for cloud that is evolving steadily. Several startups are going with cloud servers in their organisations.”

The BFSI sector is, however, prospering in the city and it has its own demand for technology which is voluminous.

"The government is putting IT into its day-to-day usage for various departments. Also, BFSI is the sector which is doing very well in the city and uses large scale technology for its operations,” states Murali Venkata Krishna, President, Confederation of Andhra Pradesh Information Technology Associations (CAPITA).

Visakhapatnam has around 150 IT channel partners in the city, while the state of Andhra Pradesh has around 1,000 partners, informs Murali.

Visakhapatnam is thus, well positioned for accelerated growth in various sectors with the aid of IT, ITeS and ICT and further contribute to the state’s economy.

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COIMBATORE

COIMBATORE IT MARKET GARNERING DIGITAL DIVIDENDS

Moumita Deb Choudhury moumita.choudhury@expressindia.com

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s technology is becoming the new lingo of India, we are set to sense the IT markets and more so, the channel partners’ pulse of the Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities with the Explore Bharat initiative. And here is the narrative of Coimbatore.

There are about 130 channel partners in the city. About 70 partners are registered with the Coimbatore

Information Technology Association, and there are another 50 to 60 partners doing business in the city.

M Natarajan, President, Coimbatore Information Technology Association, who is also a regional distributor says, “There is a good demand for major brands including HP, Lenovo, Dell, ASUS, IBM and Acer.”

There is a rapid technology adoption in Coimbatore and various industries and market verticals are resorting to IT to get their business going. With businesses thriving in the city different

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technology solutions are doing the rounds to furnish varied designs of each establishment.

Vasanth Chellappa, CEO, ChellSoft Technologies, says, “The system integration business is prospering in the city. We deal in network security, facility management, data leak prevention and disaster recovery and offer Fortinet, Microsoft Azure cloud, AWS Cloud solutions. Industries including manufacturing, healthcare, and small and medium businesses are giving us good traction and from that we incur about eight to ten per cent profit margin.”

Kumar Govind Raj, who is a laptop dealer, sells almost all brands in his store, Systech. He informs that Coimbatore is becoming a busy IT hub now.

Its not just laptops, desktops, printers or software that Coimbatore is abuzz with. Surveillance, networking and home-automation technologies are also catching up at rapid pace.

N Karthik Narain, CEO, Phoenix Security Systems, states, “We deal in biometrics, home automation and other security products. Home automation is coming up in a big way. It is based on IoT technology and all the devices at home can be operated from mobile. For this segment we get solutions from eGlu and Schneider.”

“Today the demand for surveillance solutions are ever soaring. Good surveillance needs good network systems as well and that we are able to make available to the consumers here in Coimbatore,” he adds. Large format retail stores in the city is resulting in an accelerated digital adoption.

Explore Bharat

MANGALORE

WHY MANGALORE REFLECTS BANGALORE IN TECH ADOPTION Moumita Deb Choudhury moumita.choudhury@expressindia.com

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arnataka has been synonymous with technology.

Over the past couple of years, along with the Silicon Valley of India – Bangalore – other cities in the state have gained prominence as well.

The Explore Bharat initiative took us to Mangalore to get the tech flavours of the city, which has seen a major upward thrust in several areas. The Tier 2 city was declared a start-up district sometime ago to encourage the vibrant student base and push them towards start-up entrepreneurship.

Mangalore, with a hang for technology, has built a reputation for itself as various sectors have been absorbing solutions and products from legacy as well as new technology providers. In Karnataka, there are around 2,000 channel partners, of which around 250 are based out of Mangalore.

“We have been deploying storage solutions in different market verticals in Mangalore. We started with solutions from storage vendor Emerson which is today known as Vertiv,” said, Jeyalakshmi Venkatanarayanan, Founder & Proprietor, Universe Power Systems & Universe Business Solutions.

She is also the Vice President of AIT & FITDAK. “Although we are based out of Bangalore, but due to demand from Mangalore, we have done a lot of work there. We have done a huge system integration at the LIC office in Mangalore. We are also involved with the APDRP (Accelerated Power Development and Reforms Programme) project under the Department of IT. We

deal in networking, CCTV cameras, and server racks among others. I have noticed over a period of time that consumers have become extremely value conscious which is unlike the erstwhile notion of price sensitiveness.

If you can give value to the customers there is no dearth of takers,” Venkatanarayanan added.

The presence of quality technology education and establishments like the STPI and Centre for Entrepreneurship Opportunities and Learning (CEOL) is marking new standards for the city.

CEOL’s major focus is on engineering apart from medical, agriculture, defense and others.

“In many ways, Mangalore is smaller reflection of Bangalore. The city is dotted with technology institutes which speaks volumes about its techsavviness. Although, when it comes to selling hardware, there is a softness in the market for dealers and distributors, but for solutions and system integration as a total package, the market is catching up well,” said Sai Baba Rao,

President, FITDAK (Federation of IT Dealers’ Association- Karnataka).

The technology market in Mangalore is a view from the kaleidoscope. There are just too many shades to cater to.

Sadashiv Bhandary, Proprietor, Alpha Systems, said, “There are various verticals which have high demand to furnish to. Healthcare, hospitality, BFSI and educational institutions are the most prominent. Business opportunity in Mangalore has many phases. The annual maintenance contract, and parts servicing are also very profitable business. Now, considering the hardware part of IT, today refurbished PCs have a great demand too. Generally it comes in one-fourth the price and a decent warranty, while the profit margin is the same as that for the original.”

Traction for technology is evident in different verticals and sectors in Mangalore. The spectrum is wide and the time is ripe for new ideas and experiments. “Be it home or walk-in, the demand for technology in Mangalore is ever present,” summed up Bhandary.

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Cover Story

MYSORE

MYSORE: A STRONGHOLD FOR DATA AND NETWORK

Moumita Deb Choudhury moumita.choudhury@expressindia.com

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lthough the princely city of Mysore is an attraction in Karnataka for its royal legacy, the city is also totally cut out for all things tech. Just around 130 kilometres from Bangalore, Mysore has well connected roadways, railways and a decent airport. The city, with its excellent educational and research centres, is hitherto positioned as the emergent hub for IT, ITeS and ICT industry.

Along with IT giants including Infosys, Wipro, L&T, Kaynes Technology, CYIENT DLM, SPI, the city houses small and medium scale businesses. This is why Mysore is also a lucrative destination for the IT channel ecosystem. “There are about 110 channel partners in Mysore, of which, 75 are registered with the association,” says Arun Najaraj, Past President, FITDAK. “Mysore is an educational centre.

Several technological activities are happening in this domain. When we look at selling our solutions, education is a big market for us – and it is not just the higher education space. The government is laying a lot of emphasis on modernising school level education as well. Under the government run Morarji Desai Scheme, schools are going through a major technological upgradation, wherein these schools have PCs, UPS, CCTVs, etc. There are about 38 Talukas in Mysore which implemented this scheme. Apart from the government and Deputy Director of Public Instruction (DDPI), rare material plants procure a lot of technology locally,” says Najaraj, who is also the proprietor of New Computronics.

Some important technology and services industries operating in Mysore include, telecommunication, software, VLSI design, electronic manufacturing, e-commerce, banking and financial services, web-enabled services, knowledge process outsourcing, legal

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process outsourcing, central PSUs and many more. The city also houses central research institutes like Central Food Technological Research Institute, Central Institute of Indian Languages, Defense Food Research Laboratory and All India Institute of Speech and Hearing, among others.

Since establishments are mushrooming in the city, data is invariably the new currency. And to secure the data, the need for storage is shooting up.

“Recently we have done a data center project of ` 1.25 crore for one of the banks in Mysore. Since RBI has issued guidelines for banks to have dedicated data centres for securing data against global threats. The demand for storage has increased manifold,” states Vikas Chopra, Partner, Systems Needs.

This demand for storage is not just restricted to corporates; SMBs also have a big technology absorption now-adays.“Since Mysore is a Tier II city, it remained three or four years slower than Bangalore. But it is catching up swiftly.

There is a huge requirement of security and surveillance solutions which needs to blend with big capacity cameras.

Under a government project, we installed surveillance systems along the ports of Karwar to Mangalore. The bandwidth for this is so high that we had to create our own power supply with solar efficiency,” states Harish Raman, Managing Director, Raman IT Solutions.

“Undoubtedly, medium and small scale industries look for bigger storage today. Earlier, they used to save data in some hardware, but now they want proper storage solutions,” adds Raman.

Explore Bharat

KOCHI

KOCHI: A HOTSPOT FOR TECHNOLOGY

Moumita Deb Choudhury moumita.choudhury@expressindia.com

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erala creates good headlines in many more areas apart from tourism — technology being one of them. The state is the eight largest economy in India, with growing business sectors and good road network. Through the Explore Bharat initiative, we are trying to understand the technology engagement in Kochi, which is one of the most flourishing cities in Kerala.

There are about 2000 IT channel partners in Kerala, of which a bounty of 500 are housed in Kochi.

“Kerala’s major technology hub is Kochi. Here the big boom is in the gaming segment and the demand is increasing by the day. Previously PCs were primarily designed for general purpose, catering to usage at office or by students. But now, people look for PCs with enhanced gaming capabilities and features,” states Toshy Matthew of All

Kerala IT Dealers Association (AKITDA).

AKITDA is dedicated to ensure a harmonious vendor-dealer connect. The association helps by providing an easy to access and utilise platform for IT and ITeS players, whereby vendors can easily find and appoint dealers, distributors and retailers.

Unlike before, when IT was used for accounting or billing purpose in hospitals, now-a-days a complete solution implementation — including ERP and CRM — is taking place in healthcare, informs Matthew.

Although, IT adoption is progressing in its charted pace, but rapid adoption is still not happening due to lack of awareness. Once this falls in perspective, adoption will catch scale.

“The paramount hurdle is to convince customers about good RoI. It is only the fear of investing which has shackled most of them,” informs Sijo Alex, Proprietor, Corrigo Technologies, who is also the state executive web and media promotions head at AKITDA.

The demand for storage is on the rise in the city and there are new initiatives which are coming up.

“The massive flood in Kerala last year acted as an alert for various establishments to migrate their onpremise data to cloud. Till then not many were aware of the advantages of cloud infrastructure. Also for disaster recovery it is always better to migrate to cloud than it is on-premise,” says Jobin Pallisseril, Account Director (Kerala), Pi Datacenters.

Pi Datacentres, a data centre and enterprise cloud organisation is setting up Kerala’s first Uptime Institute tier-4 certified data centre in Infopark – Pi-Kochi.

Kochi is the India headquarter destination of several national distributors including Redington, Ingram Micro, Rashi Peripherals among others. Also, regional distributors like ForeRun Computers and Systems Pvt.Ltd., Roditte, Aldous Glare Trade & Exports and Pooja Tech among others are housed in Kochi.

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News Analysis

HP India

HP REDEFINES LASER PRINTING FOR SMBS WITH LASER TANK PRINTER HP India introduces a high capacity and cost-effective printer to meet the growing demands of SMB customers Sandhya Michu sandhya.michu@expressindia.com

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n an attempt to increase the adoption of printing in the SMB segment, HP India has introduced high capacity and cost-effective, Laser Tank printer ‘Neverstop’, specially designed for this segment of customers. Post the GST implementation, the printing needs of SMBs have surged significantly, thereby to meet this growing demand and address the pinpoints coming from the burgeoning SMBs, HP has introduced Laser Tank printer.

In the Indian market, HP has a strong legacy in the printing business since 1989. It is safe to say that one out of every two printers sold in India is from HP. From the strategy perspective, HP continues to innovate from the core printing requirement as well as redefine and disrupt the printing category. In line with its plan to expand the laser printer portfolio, the company looks to redefine the SMB segment’s printing need.

Talking about the current trends in the printing industry, Leo Joseph, Senior Director – Printing Systems and Solutions, HP India, says, “We have been constantly working towards making our products relevant in the future. We are seeing a lot of shifts in the industry, the way we live and work.

We call it the ‘One Life’ which is basically the same device we have at home or in the office. There are a few things happening as a trend; one is obviously the rapid urbanisation where we are witnessing a lot of small cities

Leo Joseph, Senior Director – Printing Systems and Solutions, HP India getting bigger in size. There are now a lot of opportunities in the cities and migration rates are getting high. The second one is the changing demographics in the country. The third one is innovation accelerator. For example, an innovation which used to happen once in every 20 years now happens in every two-three years.

These are being driven by startups and SMB customers. They play a big role in day-to-day innovations.”

While sharing the printing need of SMB customers, Joseph says, “SMBs or startups need simple, yet affordable printing solutions. We came up with a product called ‘Neverstop Laser’ which reaffirms the old belief of the SMB customers that it will never be off and

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the business will keep running. This printer has the world’s first laser tank technology. The highlight is that this printer has more printing capacity than other printers. Normally, a laser printer prints 2,000 pages, but we have provided 5,000 pages. The biggest change is instead of replacing the toner, we have come up with on-field replacement, HP toner reload kit. The biggest benefit is that we are further reducing the cost of printing by 80-85 per cent. Today the price of laser printing is around one-and-a-half paise per page, but the HP Laser Tank will reduce it to 29 paise. It satisfies all the demands that an SMB customer would make.”

“The adoption of printing is increasing among Indian SMBs. We are breaking the biggest barrier in printing – affordability. Others often focus more on technology, product, quality, etc.

Now we have made an affordable product with best ever quality of printing,” he says.

Overall, 1.6 million units of laser printers sell in a year and HP claims to have over 60 per cent share in it. With the new range of printers, the company is also looking to address the refill and fake cartridges issue to a large extent.

Today, HP has a large portfolio of printing solutions; be it inkjet, laser, and large format. The company is also catching up fast in A3 printers segment after it acquired Samsung printers.

Today, HP printers command a significant position, be it home, enterprise and commercial segments.

The Neverstop printers range starts from `15,846 and the toner kit-single pack comes at `849.

CXO Speak

CrowdStrike

‘CRITICAL NATIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE IS A TEMPTING TARGET FOR CYBER THREAT ACTORS’ Cybersecurity company CrowdStrike effectively tackles the most modern-day and malicious cyber threats. Mike Sentonas, VP Technology of CrowdStrike, claims that none of the establishments which are under Crowdstrike shelter, fell to prey to any internet crime

By Moumita Deb Choudhury What issues and challenges does India face today when it comes to cybersecurity?

Digital India is a significant opportunity that can generate huge economic value for the country. Cyber attacks, however, remain a significant risk, and major incidents over the last 12 to 18 months have demonstrated inadequate protection in a number of organisations across India. As India is aggressively building its digital economy, cyber security needs to become a critical phase in the design process. Basic hygiene remains a significant challenge, with numerous cases reflecting patching deficiencies that have led to significant breaches.

Attackers are finding it easy to exploit vulnerabilities that have not been mitigated with patches, which at times have already been available for a significant amount of time. This is a pressing issue in India:

SMBs are especially vulnerable to data breaches and cyber attacks.

How do you think this situation can be tackled?

SMBs unfortunately have the perception that tackling cybersecurity challenges is expensive. This is far from the truth, as there are pragmatic measures SMBs can implement to

including government services and defence, is becoming an increasingly tempting target for all kinds of malicious actors. There are three motivations for attacking critical national infrastructure: disruption, financial gain, and espionage. These motives can apply to all kinds of attackers, from nation states to individuals.

secure the organisation— which do not necessarily involve buying technology and which do not really cost much.

These are around basic user awareness, patch management and hygiene, doing basic things like keeping your operating system up to date—a feature in every operating system. By turning updates on and rolling out new operating systems or application patches, organisations can be assured of the remediation of vulnerabilities and insecure configurations. Multifactor authentication is also crucial—as this ensures that a scammer does not easily get access to credentials.

Critical national infrastructure,

How is AI / ML used in cybersecurity?

Artificial intelligence and machine learning have a critical role in cybersecurity. Effectively used, AI can better detect new and unknown threats in real time, providing higher efficacy levels to protect organisations.

The sheer number of attacks seen on a daily basis is beyond the capability of traditional signature-based detection.

Many of the attacks that have devastated organisations over the last few years are simply due to failed detections. While improving the ability to detect new threats, AI and ML alone do not simply fix the cybersecurity challenge. Having comprehensive endpoint protection – not only including AI and ML but also offering exploit prevention and behavioural analysis – should be an integral part of any solution used in organisations.

(Read full interview in CRN Online)

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News Analysis

AUTOMATION ANYWHERE LOOKS TO SCALE UP PARTNERS’ CONTRIBUTION IN INDIA India is the second biggest market for Automation Anywhere, with more than 850 of the 3,000 customers globally. Ganesh Thyagarajan, VP – Partner Enablement, Automation Anywhere shares how the company is looking at increasing contribution from channel Sandhya Michu sandhya.michu@expressindia.com

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utomation Anywhere is an RPA evangelist, which is looking to further increase the contribution made by its indirect channel, from the present 50 per cent to 70 per cent by the next financial year. The company is gaining strong headway in all sectors including BFSI, manufacturing and healthcare segments for its RPA and digital workforce solution. It intends to pass on the lucrative professional services and solution architecture opportunities to its partners. In the last three years, Automation Anywhere has not only formed its strong channel base covering ‘Sell to and Sell through’ partners, but also firmed up its channel enablement programs.

Speaking exclusively to CRN India, Ganesh Thyagarajan, VP – Partner Enablement, Automation Anywhere, informs that professional service capabilities for building bots is an area where partners can make 10x revenue over product selling. For Automation Anywhere, the biggest market currently is the US; whereas, India stands at the second spot globally. Overall, it has 3,000 customers, of which, 850+ are in India.

The channel ecosystem Automation Anywhere has divided

THE COMPANY FIRST INITIATED ITS CHANNEL BUSINESS IN INDIA WITH ‘SELL TO’ PARTNERS – THOSE WHO BUY LARGE AMOUNT OF LICENSES AND DEPLOY IT FOR THEIR CUSTOMERS IN THE BACK OFFICE SUCH AS INFOSYS, GENPACT AND MANY MORE its channel landscape into several large buckets of partners. The company first initiated its channel business in India with ‘Sell To’ partners – those who buy large amount of licenses and deploy it for their customers in the back office such as Infosys, Genpact and many more. The second bucket is alliances and advisories such as the PWC, KPMG, EY and Deloitte and their fortune 100500 customers.

The third bucket is comprised of ‘Sell Through’ partners or resellers for the volume business, followed by valueadded distributors (VADs) such as Techdata and Ingram Micro. Another segment of the channel is technology alliances, wherein the company

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integrates its solutions with third-party vendors like IBM, Microsoft & AWS for their cloud capabilities. The last bucket includes training partners. In this ecosystem, globally, the company has around 840 partners today and it has set a great ambition to sign around 1500 to 2000 partners by the end of this year.

For Automation Anywhere, the top 26 bunch of service provider/BPO partners are its biggest revenue generators as they buy licenses worth millions of dollars.

“With the existing 2,000+ direct workforce, we can only hit new markets, regions, and segments, globally through our channels. We are a customer-first company, but yet we are partner preferred, we want our channels to drive more revenues for us. Being a customer first and selling direct, we changed our approach and started stressing more on our channel business in 2016. Today, combining our direct sales and indirect business, these large buckets contribute to about 50 per cent of the company’s revenue. But we are aiming to scale it up to 70-30 in favour of the channels, because that is how we will scale as a company,” he says.

Today, the company has a successful channel program – Automation Anywhere Advantage. Based on the channel revenue commitment, it allows the channels to decide which role they want to play on the ladder.

On the customer front, in the BFSI

Automation Anywhere

space, 70 per cent of the top 200 are its customers and more than 10 per cent are doing PoC. Currently, 22+ of the top 50 named accounts are its customers.

When asked where the mid segment of channel fits in, Thyagarajan explains, “We are barely scratching the mid segment or the SMB space. A lot of enterprises are now jumping into the RPA bandwagon. Not confined to RPA, some are looking beyond RPA for analytics and cognitive solutions, given that processing semi structured and unstructured data poses a significant challenge. There are hundreds of companies where operations and their process are yet to become digital. We work with them as part of our transformation and consulting approach.

We start with RPA alone and make sure we scale within six months to one year.

The journey is not very easy. It’s all about converting operations into a digital mindset and implementing our digital workforce. Our focus is heavy on the Indian market, be it PSUs, corporates, public sector, and state governments.”

Services promise big buck for channels Since the sales cycle and PoC takes 30-60 days of a waiting period for the partners when they pitch RPA solutions to mid-segment customers, it is logical for partners to invest in the

“

WE WANT OUR CHANNELS TO DRIVE MORE REVENUES FOR US.BEING A CUSTOMER FIRST AND SELLING DIRECT,WE CHANGED OUR APPROACH AND STARTED STRESSING MORE ON OUR CHANNEL BUSINESS IN 2016 GANESH THYAGARAJAN, VICE PRESIDENT – GLOBAL PARTNER ENABLEMENTAND PROGRAMS

services business. “We don’t have offthe-shelf products. Hence, you need professional services developers and process architects to write a bot.

Today, in terms of the market size of services, India alone will contribute about a billion dollars in professional services revenue. For partners, the licenses to services ratio is around 1:5.

Every dollar worth of license that a partner sells can translate into 5-10x of the services revenue. The name of the game for partners is on professional services. We encourage our partners to have a small implementation army and do the deployment. Partners make more money than license margins,” he states.

Training and certification is another big area the company wants its partners to focus on. It provides 360 enablement programs and 80 per cent of the training is around building robust bots. It enables partners to set up Centers of Excellence (CoEs) for better customer services. It has around 120 CoEs in India alone.

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News Analysis

Empirical Data

WHY BLOCKCHAIN WILL BE AS IMPACTFUL AS THE INTERNET Blockchain solution provider Empirical Data is helping organisations grow their business and enhance customer experience throught its flagship product Fusion-Core government has put a big bet on blockchain and is trying to ensure that everything is running on blockchain for them,” says Ramarao.

He further points out that blockchain will go beyond finance, “Blockchain technology has come a long way since its inception and is now being adopted by enterprises for day-to-day functions like invoice automation, fraud control, patent tracking, etc. Government, healthcare, entertainment, education and IT industries are all experimenting with the advanced blockchain solutions.

Blockchain outside cryptocurrency is going to see major uptake in 2019.”

Moumita Deb Choudhury moumita.choudhury@expressindia.com

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hennai headquartered blockchain solution provider Empirical Data is a subsidiary of trANa Technologies Singapore. Its flagship product, Fusion-Core, is a permissioned blockchain core, which is based on open source framework and comes with several enhancements that the company’s engineers have added. This makes it a unique, feature rich, and enterprise-ready private blockchain core. Combining Fusion-Core with sensors, IoT and machine learning, Empirical Data today helps organisations grow their business, enhance their customer experience and bring the best services and innovative products to the market.

“Besides, we have launched two new solutions built on Fusion-Core, namely, Comet and RedShift. Comet is our private blockchain for the supply chain industry, whereas RedShift is a robust platform for corporates to ensure smooth CSR project execution. RedShift brings a simple, efficient and affordable enterprise solution that helps corporates to focus and execute humanitarian and social projects,” says Karthik Ramarao, Founder & CTO, Empirical Data.

Future of blockchain and its impact on businesses Blockchain is expected to be as impactful as the internet. It is going to make some fundamental changes to the

way we live and conduct business. This technology is paving the way for several transformational changes.

“It is an infrastructural solution that brings many new and distinctive features that are not available in any contemporary technology. However, it is only useful if applications and use cases, specifically for businesses and enterprise, get built on the platform that uses these features and functionalities,” informs Ramarao.

Blockchain trends to watch for in 2019 Blockchain is going to see a good adoption in the enterprise space in 2019.

It has the potential to streamline business processes, enable new business models and will help in reshaping almost all the industries.

“Even the governments are looking seriously at blockchain to deliver better citizen services. Interestingly, the Dubai

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Blockchain in digitisation of government services Blockchain is going to play a huge role in the government sector due to its immutability, audit and tracking provenance features as well as its ability to collaborate with multiple organisations.

“These are inherent features of blockchain. For example, Dubai government is looking at how blockchain can fundamentally be the platform on which a lot of their services can be built. Any government service which is going to be dependent on multiple organisations is perhaps best built on blockchain. Self-sovereign identity and identity management of citizens is an example of such use case,” he says.

The company is further planning to build two more solutions. One for the healthcare sector and another for manufacturing.

Umbrella Infocare

CXO Speak

UMBRELLA INFOCARE BETS BIG ON INCREASING ENTERPRISE EFFICIENCY Gurprit Singh, Managing Partner and Co-Founder at Umbrella Infocare, in an interaction with CRN India shares how the company has grown from strength to strength – building a robust team and offices across Delhi, Noida, Gurgaon, and Mumbai

By Moumita Deb Choudhury How is the company helping big enterprises in increasing efficiencies and quickly scaling up business through customised, technology-driven solutions?

Set up in 2013, Umbrella Infocare aids organisations achieve speed at scale by helping them in their cloud journey. In the last five years, the company has added various lines of cloud businesses, catering to its customers’ changing requirements.

Umbrella Infocare, thus, started with providing migration services to its customers, moved to cloud managed services, and today it is helping large organisations in their journey of cloud analytics, automation/DevOps and modernising their applications to effectively take advantage of the cloud.

We provide managed services to customers and help them automate, so they can focus on business, rather than managing their cloud environment.

This will improve their efficiency and ease their worries. Secondly, businesses are growing and customers are looking to build IT infrastructure that can scale to their needs. We help organisations design, develop and deploy highly scalable IT infrastructure to meet their current and future needs.

Thirdly, organisations want to optimise their cost. So, we continuously engage with the customer to optimise their costs. They save on resources and spend them more efficiently somewhere else.

like data mining and analysis to map relevant business information for the clients?

Data mining and data analytics were not picked up because they were very expensive, and it took a lot of effort to build a data warehouse within an organisation. Data mining is now available as a service on cloud, so you can simply use it. Even smaller enterprises can afford it.Umbrella Infocare is also venturing into DevOps, cloud analytics, machine learning, and cloud security.

Please shed light on the growth of cloud computing market in India and its impact on business RoI

What are the solutions that the company has customised for big enterprises like Kent RO, Panasonic, Dr Lal Path Labs and others?

As an AWS Advance Consulting, Managed Services and DevOps Competency partner, we have helped more than 200 organisations innovate using cloud transformation. We have also helped them achieve a higher level of agility, operational efficiency and cost optimisation. Some of our services include building cloud native application, achieving higher automation using DevOps principles, and using cloud analytics to bring data closer to decision makers.

What are the ways in which cloud can be integrated with allied fields

The growth is tremendous, but I feel that we have seen only the tip of the iceberg. Enterprises in the last two years have only tested cloud by putting some workloads there, but the feedback which we have received is quite positive. So, in the next three years, we will see more growth as enterprises start shifting larger amount of workload to the cloud.

What is the roadmap for the future?

We see more than double growth, both in terms of people and turnover; every year for another five years. We are also going to expand to the southern part of the country, and look for markets outside India to export our cloud services.

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CXO Speak

INCREASING CLOUD ADOPTION IS TRANSFORMING TRADITIONAL IT PROVISIONING METHODS Global cybersecurity company Palo Alto Networks has made several refinements in its NextWave partner program. The company has introduced new options for partners to grow their businesses with streamlined program levels, tiered discount structures, and new partner incentives, aimed at boosting margins and profitability. Keith Carter, VP, Channels – Asia Pacific at Palo Alto Networks explains how the company, along with its cloud providers, is now building a new pool of born-in-the-cloud set of partners

By Sandhya Michu How are partners accepting cloud adoption in India and across the APAC region?

Cloud adoption in India is growing by leaps and bounds, especially with startups whose business model is entirely cloud delivered. These digital native companies rely extensively on public cloud environment to deliver services to their customers. The partner landscape is also accordingly adapting to this change. We collaborate with a whole new set of born-in-cloud partners who are helping customers with services capabilities to move their workloads on the cloud. These partners have built their businesses entirely on the cloud and are extremely successful today. Our traditional IT infrastructure partners have also recognised that a significant part of customer budgets is going towards cloud and have accordingly adapted to this change by building a separate cloud practise within their organisation.

Moving to the cloud throws up a

OUR CHANNEL PROGRAM OFFERS RENEWAL PROTECTION, REBATES AND INCENTIVES, ESPECIALLY FOR PARTNERS WHO ARE TECHNICALLY SOUND TO SUPPORT AND SERVICE OUR CUSTOMERS unique set of security challenges like visibility, maintaining regulatory compliance and inadvertent manual errors due to misconfigurations or weak passwords. Our partners see this as a great opportunity to position our new cloud security suite, Prisma, to help solve these challenges.

With NextWave Partner Program enhancements, how has the channel growth impacted Palo Alto Networks?

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NextWave partners play a critical role to help prevent successful cyber attacks. They have an ever-expanding need for a trusted advisor to successfully integrate cybersecurity offerings into a hybrid cloud infrastructure, optimise security features, and secure the network from the endpoint to the cloud. The recent enhancements below will boost program flexibility, fuel long-term growth and enable the expansion of partner-led services.

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NextWave enhancements include: Profitability initiatives: It has introduced new options for partners to grow their businesses with streamlined program levels, tiered discount structures, and new partner incentives aimed at boosting margins and profitability Partner-led services opportunities: A new dedicated Managed Services Program, providing partners a clear path for capitalising on the rapidly

Palo Alto Networks

“

WE COLLABORATE WITH AWHOLE NEW SET OF BORN-IN-CLOUD PARTNERS WHO ARE HELPING CUSTOMERS WITH SERVICES CAPABILITIES TO MOVE THEIR WORKLOADS ON THE CLOUD. THESE PARTNERS HAVE BUILT THEIR BUSINESSES ENTIRELY ON THE CLOUD AND ARE EXTREMELY SUCCESSFULTODAY

❑

growing managed services opportunity Systems and processes: The company has automated systems and processes to ensure business can be conducted efficiently. These advancements simplify the quoting and approval process to accelerate the sales cycle and improve the overall partner experience.

What role does Palo Alto Networks play in working with channel partners to provide the relevant skills and technology?

Our channel program offers renewal protection, rebates and incentives, especially for partners who are technically sound to support and service our customers. Subscriptions and services make up 60 per cent of our business, and it is continuously growing.

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) shows the most significant growth among software segments. Enterprises are shifting to payfor-use models that offer flexibility. Our customers have an ever-expanding need for partner services to successfully integrate cybersecurity offerings into a hybrid infrastructure, optimise security features, and secure the network from end-point to the cloud. Along with our cloud providers, we are now building a new pool of born-on-cloud set of partners.

How is Palo Alto Networks helping partners in maximising profitability by delivering more

service offerings, especially cloud services?

This year we have seen the channel community betting big on cloud services and realigning its key partners for opportunities. The prolific preference for cloud and SaaS has created a shift in customer consumption habits for ‘everything-asa-service’. SaaS cybersecurity offerings provide customers the ease and speed they have become accustomed to. It also allows vendors to automatically deploy updates and patches to protect against newly detected vulnerabilities.

With recent enhancements to our NextWave partner program, we have introduced new options for partners to grow their businesses with streamlined program levels, tiered discount structures, and new partner incentives aimed at boosting margins and profitability. We have also rolled out a new dedicated Managed Services Program, providing partners a clear path for capitalising on the rapidly growing managed services opportunity and automated systems and processes to make doing business easier. These advancements simplify the quoting and approval process to accelerate the sales cycle and improve the overall partner experience.

Do you also provide a full range of services: pre-sales, planning, implementation, post-sales and managed services?

Increasing cloud adoption is transforming traditional IT provisioning methods, increasing the breadth of cybersecurity risks and creating new opportunities for cybersecurity services. These industry changes have opened vast opportunities for our NextWave partners to maximise their profitability by delivering more service offerings, especially cloud services. Our customers need a full range of services: pre-sales, planning, implementation, post-sales, and managed services. They want a trusted advisor to help them build and manage a secure unified hybrid cloud model. Our mutual success depends on adapting and enhancing our NextWave Partner Program in response to the market and to help our partners capitalise on these new opportunities.

We also provide Business Transformational Services to our partners to leverage and complement their proprietary services offerings.

These transformation services help define and implement a preventionfocused security strategy that delivers measurable outcomes. Using automation and a Zero Trust approach, the services help streamline and simplify operations while strengthening security posture. This helps in aligning people, processes, and procedures with business needs, elevating confidence and control to a whole new level.

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CXO Speak

‘WE HAVE A BIG ROLE TO PLAY IN HOW CIOS AND CTOS ARE LOOKING AT THE ARCHITECTURE OF BIG DATA’ With the exponential growth of data happening across the cloud, at the Edge and at the endpoint, storage companies like Western Digital are gearing up to play a much bigger role in meeting the growing need for data. Speaking exclusively to CRN India, Ganesh Guruswamy, Senior Vice President, Western Digital and Supria Dhanda, Country Manager and Vice President, Western Digital India share the global trends and India’s contribution to the business

By Sandhya Michu Can you give us an overview after Western digital acquired strong storage brands like HGST and Sandisk, in terms of product integration, customers and partners?

Ganesh Guruswamy: Western Digital acquired HGST around 2012 and while we were integrating HGST in 2015, we acquired SanDisk. The key reason behind the acquisition of SanDisk was to become the largest provider of persistent storage. With the acquisition of SanDisk, Western Digital can offer both hard drives and flash storage. With the growth of data that is happening at different levels, at the cloud, Edge, and endpoint, we are seeing a lot of industry segments now relying on data to make a lot of decisions.

Supria Dhanda: Now everybody relies on data to make decisions and how you access data based on all the analysis is key, because a lot of data

WE HAVE A HUGE ROLE TO PLAY IN HOW CIOS AND CTOS ARE LOOKING AT THE ENTIRE ARCHITECTURE OF BIG DATA. A LOT OF THINGS ARE IMPORTANT TO THEM – CAPACITY, EFFICIENCY, TOTAL COST OPTIMISATION gets generated as cold data. Then there is hot data where data is realtime, wherein the data needs to be connected to the user as fast as they want, as soon as they can get it. From a global perspective, Western Digital has been able to scale both the hardware on the flash side and is able to provide storage across all these platforms.

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Today, we have around 70,000 people worldwide, and we have design centers and manufacturing operations world over. Additionally, we have more than 14,000 powerful patents. Half the world’s data is stored on our devices.

We will continue to look at India uniquely, because data gets generated where there are people.

With data becoming the new currency, what sort of transformation are you undergoing on technology and products front?

Supria Dhanda: We were earlier a traditional investment storage company, but we are now choosing to call ourselves as the one that enables data infrastructure, the entire value generation and storing the data. We want to be at each point, right from the core to cloud – from hybrid to Edge.

Western Digital India

How do you look at the data generation in India; do you see any unique challenges?

Ganesh Guruswamy: The journey is starting. The government is trying to figure out what policies to put in. Data is very sensitive, so companies are concerned about how data is going to be used and it is stored. Each country is different, hence architectures are going to be different as well. However, we are positioned to cater to every architecture. We provide thought leadership and guidance.

Monetising data is one of the biggest challenges of CIO and CTOs. How are you addressing this?

Ganesh Guruswamy: Each customer is unique and have their own way of architecting their infrastructure. We provide the solutions that are customised to them. We guide them and figure out how to make the right solution for them. We also show them the limitations of technology, storage and then guide how the architecture needs to be built.

Supria Dhanda: We have a huge role to play in how CIOs and CTOs are looking at the entire architecture of big data. A lot of things are important to them –

capacity, efficiency, total cost optimisation. Now customers need our help in defining their data strategy. We are in a unique position to be able to guide on that, because we know how their entire data flows.

Over the years, how have storage products evolved?

Ganesh Guruswamy: We went from two-dimensional to three-dimensional flash because we need to ge nerate more density. We figured out the

technology to go to 3D flash and now we are able to scale 3D flash for higher storage capacities. The hard drive industry has placed a similar challenge.

They were going with CMR technology and the aerial density started to be a challenge and now we come with SMR technology.

We believe that zettabyte is almost gone; you will see yottabyte data centres, and this is basically 10 to the power of 23 zeroes for storage.

What are your expansion plans for the Indian market?

“

WE WERE EARLIER A TRADITIONAL INVESTMENT STORAGE COMPANY, BUTWE ARE NOW CHOOSING TO CALL OURSELVES AS THE ONE THAT ENABLES DATA INFRASTRUCTURE,THE ENTIRE VALUE GENERATION AND STORING THE DATA

Supria Dhanda: We have a significant presence in India. We have the entire design development across all the products, we are 2,700 people strong and still growing. The investment largely is about US$ 200 million and growing, which is significant. We have looked at India traditionally as an R&D capability design.

We see a lot of opportunities for data centre infrastructure to grow. Thus, we are partnering with the entire ecosystem of the industry as well as with the government. As India exponentially grows, we also tend to increase our footprint. India as a market is a journey that we are looking at in the next three to five years.

COMPUTER RESELLER NEWS I AUGUST, 2019 I crn.in I 37

Startup Corner

Innefu Labs

CUTTING-EDGE TECH SOLUTIONS FOR LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCIES AI-driven tech startup, Innefu Labs, which offers predictive intelligence and cybersecurity solutions to law enforcement agencies and intelligence organisations, is looking at focused engagements with channel partners across the country Sudipta Dev sudipta.dev@expressindia.com

D

elhi based Innefu Labs is an AIdriven company whose clientele ranges from paramilitary forces to wings of the Indian Army, from multiple state police departments to the largest central intelligence organisation in the country. The R&D startup is focused on cybersecurity product development with capabilities in data analytics/information security/video and image analytics.

Innefu Labs is an AI-driven company developing cutting edge technology to carry out predictive intelligence and cyber security solutions. The company which started with a team of ten people working out of the living room of a house is today more than 100 people strong with clients spread across three different continents. “Innefu today serves four out of top 10 corporates in the country apart from serving some of the largest and most critical law enforcement and intelligence organisations in South East Asia,” states Tarun Wig, Co-founder, Innefu Labs, Pointing out that a lot of results they produce is confidential, Wig recounts a significant milestone in 2018. “Our biggest achievement was when Delhi Police used our video and image analytics solutions to identify 3000 missing children from Lost & Found Database of 100k+ within four days of deployment. A case study which was touted all over the world as a first actual use case of AI for social welfare.”

Speaking about the key products and solutions for law enforcement agencies and intelligence organisations, Wig informs that at Innefu, there is a same underlying AI framework used across their three different products – Prophecy – Big Data Analytics, Vision – Video and Image Analytics, and AuthShield – Authentication Security. “We are also looking at taking our existing solutions in different geographies and in verticals other than LEA and intelligence agencies,” reveals Wig. The key channel marketing strategy for the company is to drive marketing engagement, increase coverage and build mindshare with its partners through regular marketing interlock.

“We as Innefu are participating in some very key specific end customer events wherein some top CIO/CISO are present so that we can reach out to end customers directly. Also, we have

38 I COMPUTER RESELLER NEWS I AUGUST, 2019 I crn.in

conducted a three-city partner enablement workshop in JFM FY’19 wherein we had more than 200 plus unique partners who participated and attended the event,” says Wig. The company also runs a channel partner sales incentive program for partner sales leads and partner incentive program for the partner’s CEO/MD and their organisation. “This is to ensure that we encourage our partners to engage in many opportunities with us for our AuthShield and AI Vision products,” states Wig, adding that they have enabled their VAD by training them both for sales and pre-sales to go and position the solution to their partners and VARs. Future plans include re-launching a new partner incentive program plan, conducting a series of partner enablement workshops in metro and Class B cities. “We will be launching a partner sign up campaign to onboard new cybersecurity focused partners, and most importantly, we are aligning with the top SI partners e.g.

Wipro/TCS/Infosys/LTI/TechM for driving our AI business, specifically in the state and Central Govt projects, Smart Cities and law enforcement in upcoming IT projects,” he mentions.

Wig believes that for any tech startup, the partner GTM strategy is by far the most effective strategy to reach out to a wider customer base as most of the security and analytics partners are spread across many Tier I, II and III cities.

REGD.NO.MCS/220/2018-20, PUBLISHED ON 7TH OF EVERY MONTH & POSTED AT MUMBAI PATRIKA CHANNEL SORTING OFFICE, DUE DATE 8TH, 9TH & 10TH OF EVERY MONTH, REGD. WITH RNI UNDER NO. MAHENG/75607/2018.