Excellence in unprecedented times

To succeed in a fast-paced IT industry requires the mindset, agility, and flexibility of a champion. In line with this spirit, CRN India oganised thee Channel Leadership Summit & Awards 2020 with the theme, ‘Recognizing Excellence in Unprecedented Times’.

The first digital edition of CLS was organised on December 08, 09 and 10, 2020, which served as knowledge and business creating platform focusing on the latest technologies and trends, research, best practices and networking with the leading lights of the Indian Channel community. Featuring the IT industry’s leading players, domain experts, a pan-India audience, an innovative/showcase zone, trending topics, one-on-one meetings, power discussions, a unique Channel League interactive module and the Indian channel’s most coveted industry awards, and customized marketing initiatives, the summit served as a platform to build profitable channel relationships.

The CRN Excellence Awards honoured the solution providers who demonstrated innovative use of a particular technology or a combination of technologies to create a distinct business benefit for their customers. This includes deploying a completely new solution or an innovative use of an existing technology to give their customers a competitive edge, improve operations, become more responsive to customers and partners or, simply, to add to the top or bottom line.

Growing together

The summit kick-started with an industry keynote address by Navneet Singh Bindra, Vice President & Chief Country Executive, Ingram Micro India, who spoke on IT distribution and the road to recovery, wherein he emphasised that having a product is just not enough; it’s important that it reaches the people in need.

He said, “Businesses have evolved with times in the Covid era. The government has rolled out a diverse set of initiatives for recovery and the impact of these efforts is visible and we are moving towards recovery. Given the globalised nature, the entire world economy must recover simultaneously. In a digital economy, technology is the strongest driver and we must learn to leverage technology effectively. Digital interaction and engagement have become the norm and it will remain that way. IT services adoption model is changing with a consumption based approach. We are also helping our partners to transition with this change and I urge our channel partners to digitise their businesses.”

Getting businesses realigned with the new normal in the post Covid world as a major focus at this year’s summit. In a session titled, ‘The Future of Work’, Mathew Philip, Senior Director, Channels & GSI Business – LogMeIn India. He said, “The pandemic has resulted in the need for workforce flexibility. Organisations need to build the capabilities to engage and manage virtual teams. As more employees work remotely, identity management and security become paramount. There is an acceleration in movement to cloud and SaaS. LogMeIn has a legacy of 17 years of enabling remote working. The workplace revolution is here and global professionals want to continue working remotely. We need to ensure that we support our customers with the right set of tools. At LogMeIn, Modern, Super Simple and Secure are the underlying elements of our solutions.”

Speaking on ‘Delivering the future of data infrastructure: Technology trends by Western Digital’, Naresh Rana, Sr.Sales Manager, Western Digital stated, “The next three years will capture more data than the last 30 years. At Western Digital, we have 13,500 active patents and nearly 40 per cent of the world’s data resides in Western Digital devices. With vertical, horizontal and logical scaling, we will have terrabytes of storage in flash devices. Our customers should feel confident about our ability to build technologies.”

R S Shanbhag, Founder, Chairman & CEO, Valuepoint Systems gave a special address on learnings from Covid-19 and how we can build a better business, wherein in shared, “I have rediscovered myself for the new normal. We are truly blessed to be in this line of business which enables us to help and businesses in times like these. At Value Point, we have TAM in abundance; we are a purpose and passion driven organisation. Create customers who create customers for us – this is our ultimate mantra. We have adopted the VOOCA model in the pandemic times and we went back to our roots and re-engineered our processes. A lot of our clients are now moving to a services based model.”

In a session titled, ‘Partner and Grow with Aruba’, Pradeep Nair, Country Channel Head – Aruba India, Pradeep Nair said, “Our core belief is ‘customer first, customer last’ and in the last 15 years, we have been the leader in wired and wireless LAN access infrastructure. Aruba was the topmost enterprise class wireless LAN vendor in India throughout 2019. The Supreme Court of India runs on Aruba network and the Department of Post has the largest WAN network and it’s run by Aruba. Today, customers are looking at partners who can orchestrate the entire ecosystem. Partners have become accountable for the success of end user applications. Our partners are partnering with MSPs and creating their own ecosystem. Considering these trends, we have developed our landscape accordingly.”

Speaking on ‘Acquiring the Edge with Vertiv’, Sanjay Zadoo, Country Manager – Channel Business, Vertiv India informed, Vertiv offers trusted solutions for critical IT infrastructure and caters to over 70 per cent of the Fortune 500 customers. Our customer service capabilities are 4x compared to any other competitor. The Edge is fundamentally driven by data and over a period of time, there will be data explosion at the Edge.”

In his special address titled, ‘A Journey of the Phenomenal Entrepreneur’, Tarun Seth, Managing Director, Hitachi Systems Micro Clinic, Tarun Seth shared important points from his entrepreneural journey. He shared, “IT business can’t be run by individuals, so we ensured that we had the right set of people. We built IPs which helped us cater to customers remotely. We must tune our business in line with the need of the hour. Services must be rendered in the way that customers want. The industry needs more distributors like Redington who stand by SIs in times of need.”

Speaking on ‘Transforming Today’s Business through Innovation’, Shantaram Shinde, National Head – Channel Business, NTT-Netmagic, Shantaram Shinde opined that efficiency, relevancy and cost effectiveness are the key drivers of digital transformation, and the biggest hindrance in adoption of new technology is cost of ownership. He said, “Cloud based applications’ adoption is the ideal way to embark on digital transformation journey. Organisations must spread their workloads across multiple servers and locations. Enterprises need to take the hybrid approach in order to gain flexibility.. Hybrid cloud, network, data continuity and security are the pillars of digital resiliency. Over 75 per cent organisations will have multi cloud deployed by the end of 2020.”

Sharing insights on the role of IAMCP in strengthening members’ ecosystems in challenging times, Suresh Ramani, Founder President – International Association of Microsoft Channel Partners (IAMCP) – INDIA, APAC, commented, “Connect, Learn and Grow are the three pillars of IAMCP. As the lockdown started, we did global survey and submitted it to Microsoft in order to provide insights into how the pandemic will affect partners globally. We activated IAMCP ISV Club which provided additional visibility to partners to cope with the pandemic. IAMCP conducted various educational virtual engagements with partners to guide them through the pandemic. In October, we organised IAMCP quarterly partner briefing to sensitise the global partner community. Exchange of partner-to-partner opportunities is one of our most important activities. In the future, we will continue to work towards a stronger alignment with Microsoft India. We will create a stronger APAC-wide partner community in the future. We want our partners to leverage our community in the best manner.”

The first day of the summit concluded with a session on ‘How to put IT stack on a smart power diet plan – Opportunities for ICT partners in Smart Power Business’ by Shreesha Nagar, Head – Channel Sales, Eaton Power Quality. Nagar said, “There have been a lot of profound changes in the IT landscape. The need to remote maintenance is now felt more than ever. There will be increased focus on reducing the cost of services. Enterprises need to address IT more holistically. The need for automation is being realised more in the current times. Organisations need to invest in a power infrastructure that moves along with IT trends.”

Winds of change

The second day of the virtual summit commenced with a keynote address on ‘The future of service automation in digital economy’ by Prateek Garg, Founder and CEO, Progressive Infotech. Garg opined, “Unhappy customers disrupt businesses, not technologies. The future of service automation will be the intersection of collaboration and delegation. Total experience, anywhere operations and hyper automation will be among the top technology trends in 2021. SLAs will move to become XLAs, with focus on end user experiences and utomation will be at the centre of all IT services. Whereas, customer has to be at the centre of an organisation’s automation initiatives. Organisations need to focus more on making the experiences on existing channels smarter.”

An insightful panel discussion highlighted Tthe role of ICT partners in overcoming challenges during Covid-19 and the road ahead. The discussion was moderated by NK Mehta, CEO & MD, Secure Network Solutions India and participated by Prashanth Subramanian, Co-Founder, Quadrasystems.net; Rinkesh Arora, Vice President & Country Lead for India, Bitscape; Siva S, Founder & CEO, Powerupcloud Technologies; Vishal Bindra, MD, ACPL; Chenthil Eswaran, Practice Head of Enterprise Solutions, Aspire Systems; Santosh Kulkarni, Country Manager – Data Centre Business, Vertiv India and Pradeep Nair, Country Channel Head – Aruba India.

Sharing his views, Subramaninan said, “Our team has worked day and night so our customers can continue their businesses. We enabled India’s first live virtual surgery conference during the pandemic. Covid has been an unfortunate catalyst. Cybersecurity has been fundamentally transformed in Covid times. Security has to be ensured in a way that doesn’t affect productivity: Prasanth Subramanian.”

Arora highighted it’s important to play the role of a consultant for our customers and having differentiated offerings for customers’ challenges is the key for every partner. Adding to that Siva S stated, “We kept sharing industry information with our customers to provide them more visibility into the pandemic’s impact. In the last 9 to 10 months, cloud adoption has advanced by several years.”

Sharig his perspective, Nair stated, “With our motto of ‘customer first, customer last’, we were able to meet customers’ expectations. Connect, protect and analyse are the three key focus areas of our offerings. We are simplifying customers’ IT infrastructure with cloud native applications.”

Sharing his approach during the pandemic Bindra informed that his company started deploying the solutions internally and showcased them to customers. Whereas, Eswaran urged cloud players to maximise the existing on-premise RoI. Adding to that, Kulkarni said that last mile user satisfaction will always depend on Edge infrastructure and Edge will be moving big way going forward.

In a session titled, ‘Enabling Channel Partners Adopt and Deliver New Technologies to Customers’, Pradeepan Veloo, CTO, Inflow Technologies, stated, “We work closely with 2,300 channel partners and we onboard and enable the right set of channel partners for our portfolio. Eighty per cent of our vendors are cloud-ready and 25 percent of our workforce is technical in nature. We have a dedicated virtual pre-sales team which is a unique proposition of ours. We have marked a surge in demand for mobility solutions among customers. Inflow CoE provides a great value addition to our partners.”

An interesting highlight of Day 2 was the fireside chat between Varoon D. Rajani, Co-Founder & CEO, Blazeclan Technologies and Srikanth RP, Editor, CRN India. The topic of the discussion was ‘Building Cloud Ready Enterprises’, wherein Rajani said, “Enterprises are no longer worried about data sovereignty as cloud companies are setting up their regions in India. We have invested a lot in building IP. The benefits of cloud are realised only with automation. We have built a SaaS platform to audit and manage their security posture on public cloud. We are currently working on a data ingestion framework. Customers have achieved increased cost efficiency by utilising the underlying framework of cloud. Partners must focus on their strength and niche.”

Another panel discussion focused on building resilience in the times of Covid-19 and beyond. The discussion was moderated by Saket Kapur, MD & Director, Green Vision and participated by Anirudh Shrotriya, Managing Director, Shro Systems; Manoj Kanodia, CEO, Inspira Enterprise; Jitesh Dave, Director, Systech Technocraft Services; Gurpreet Singh, Managing Director, Arrow PC Network Pvt Ltd; Sukeerthy M, Country Manager – SMB/MM, HPE and Khalid Wani, Sales Director – India, Western Digital.

Sharing his experience Dave informed, “We invested a lot of time in training our resources and provided a consistent support to customers. Partners have to invest in technologies and building competencies to cater to customers. Enterprise security touches upon every individual in an organisation. Security tools will be effective only if they are adopted at the last level.”

Sukeerthy M stated, “Partnership is in the DNA of our organisation. Real time decisions and actions are more important than ever before. We want our partners to leverage our innovations and become consultants for their customers. We are a partner-led company and we want to ensure that our partners are enabled. We expect partners to be relevant in this growing market.”

Sharing his observations, Wani informed, “People have started spending a lot more time on their devices. Building resiliency, not just from a technology perspective, but also from a personal perspective is important. The partner ecosystem is integral for us; partners must leverage vendor companies’ initiatives. Partners who equip themselves will be significantly successful in the market.”

Shrotiya underlined the role of Business Human Continuity Plan (BHCP), instead of just a business continuity approach. Kanodia was of the view that the demand for enterprise security has surged in Covid times and the pay-per-use model has helped him build business. Adding to that, Singh shared that his first priority was an internal action plan and reaching out to customers. He said, “For partners like us, software-driven solutions will provide a competitive edge.”

Community synergies

The role of channel associations have been critical in the pandemic times. Associations have provided the guidance and support to the partner ecosystem in order to help them cope with these unprecedented times. In a session titled, ‘Business Resiliency During Challenging times’, Rajeev Mamidanna, Chairman, ISODA and Jitesh Chauhan, Vice President, ISODA highlighted how ISODA’s initiatives are helping its members.

Chauhan stated, “Over the last 12 years, ISODA has evolved with focus on collaboration and mutual business. ISODA encourages members to position each other’s strengths. ISODA has over 200 partners spread across 9 chapters throughout India.”

Adding to that, Mamidanna said, “It’s time for us to research, realign and restructure our businesses. The new ‘long term’ is now one year, whereas the new ‘short term’ is one quarter. We have to be now communicative, creative and collaborative.”

In another association session titled, ‘Steering the winds of change in IT industry’, Tushar Parekh, Chairman, ASIRT and Chetan Shah, Founder, ASIRT shared how ASIRT has transformed the face of Mumbai’s partner ecosystem and fostered an environment of collaboration.

Parekh said, “The Covid disruption has resulted has accelerated remote working practices. IT has now truly become the backbone of businesses. We encouraged our members to share resources and work together in these unprecedented times. Going forward, we want to increase our strength to 500 partners in Mumbai. ASIRT is also planning to organise a technology conclave in India.”

Shah added, “We formed ASIRT with a vision to have an united SI community. ASIRT has transformed into the new face of the Mumbai SI community. ASIRT formed consortiums, which was a unique initiative in the Indian channel ecosystem. ASIRT has become a cohesive force of 200 SI and retail members. We have transformed our members from competitors to partners.”

Transforming with innovations

The third day of the three-day virtual summit kick-started with a keynote address titled, ‘How pandemic brought in a technology push of two decades at one go’. The keynote speaker Nitin Shah, Chairman, Allied Digital, shared, “In the last five years, the IT industry has evolved more than the last 30 years. Covid has resulted in a major reset of people’s lifestyle; remote working has witnessed higher efficiencies. Covid has pre-empted IT industry predictions; no business will survive without digitalisation in the current times. IT partners have to build their skillsets to help their customers move onto cloud. Cloud will also bring in managed services opportunities for IT partners. We have formed Special Interest Groups for Cloud, security and emerging technologies. We will also create a separate SIG for data science. We need to continue looking for new opportunities.”

An interesting highlight of Day 3 was the fireside chat between Vikram Kumar Yerram, Country Manager – GreenLake Cloud Services, HPE and Sudipta Dev, Senior Associate Editor, Express Computer & CRN India. Yerram shared, “The lockdown caused short term logistical challenges for our partners. We had to switch to other modes of engagement with customers. The pandemic has accelerated customers’ digital initiatives. The pandemic also changed the digital transformation priorities of organisations. We offered our customers the choice to pay-per-use and the ability to scale as the business grows. Every customer sees our offerings from unique perspectives. We are seeing a good traction for our offerings in the manufacturing sector, startups, public sector and BFSI. The market sentiment has become positive and businesses are regaining growth. The next 100 days are critical for our partners in terms of growth. I urge our partners to understand customers’ requirements and provide the right solution.”

In a session titled, ‘Understanding CEPH Storage Platform’, Cagatay Kilic, Manager, Business Development Enterprise EMEAI, Western Digital, said, “CEPH is the new enabler and the future of storage. CEPH is open source and hardware agnostic in nature. Western Digital is one of the founding members of CEPH. CEPH is also free of any type of vendor lock-in.” Adding to that Limton Xavier, Principal Engineer, Western Digital, said, “CEPH offers a software defined storage for any kind of environment. Western Digital also ensures hardware reliability for CEPH. Western Digital is an open, innovative company.”

In a session titled, ‘AI Platform for your Intelligent Automation Journey’, Ganesh Thyagarajan, Vice President & Global Head of Cloud Channels, Automation Anywhere, stated, “Digital native companies are disrupting industries after industries. Digital transformation without automation is hallucination. Only an end-to-end solution will help enterprises to eliminate the silos. Islands of applications can’t be connected with islands of automation; a single automation platform is required. As the needs evolve, businesses will require to scale rapidly. We have around 2000 channel partners. We rely on our channel partners to help customers transform their digital transformation journeys. We have to think about moving from productivity to progress.”

Another highlight of the third day of the summit was the panel discussion on building a cloud strategy that delivers agility and cost optimisation, moderated by Suresh Ramani, CEO, TechGyan and participated by Chetan Shah, Managing Director, Xpress Computers; Vishal Vasu, Director & CTO, DEV IT; Nazmeen Ansari, CEO, Matrix3D Infocom; Debasish Pramanik, CEO, Cloudcodes

Umesh Shah, Director,Orient Technologies Pvt Ltd and Prasad Tilve, AVP – Business Development (Channels & Government), NTT-Netmagic.

Tilve shared that his company has built specific expertise for all of their partners, and the company is helping partners to diversify. Whereas, Umesh Shah pointed out that SMBs and corporates have different needs; SMBs want to move completely to cloud, whereas corporates are selective about cloud. He also said that customers are looking at DevOps skills in partners.

Chetan Shah was of the view that there has been huge awareness and demand for collaboration and productivity apps on cloud. Adding to that, Vasu opined that 2021 will start turning hybrid cloud into reality and organisations are considering containers for diversifying applications on hybrid cloud. Sharing her perspective on cloud adoption, Ansari said that cloud has become the primary requirements for all businesses. However, legacy businesses are moving to cloud in a phased manner and the hybrid cloud approach is helping legacy businesses move to cloud.

With growing cloud adoption, there’s also a concern for security among customers. Addressing this, Pramanik informed that his company provides a SaaS based security solution for cloud applications.

In a session titled, ‘Paradigm Shift in IT Business’, Kaushik Pandya, President, FAIITA; Navin Gupta, Secretary, FAIITA and S Kartikeyan, VP, FAIITA elaborated on FAIITA’s initiative and focus areas. Gupta informed, “Over 100 associations are part of FAIITA. Flourish, Knowledge, Networking, Strength and Protection form our 5-point agenda. We have formed 12 different committees to address various topics.”

Adding to that Rastogi informed that FAIITA has a total membership of around 50,000 and the federation aims to reach to the last mile partner and establish a live wire with the government. Whereas, Pandya pointed out that FAIITA has a clearly laid out roadmap until October 2021. The paradigm shift in the IT industry signifies the shift in thought processes, Pandya said, adding that business security is a bigger concern for organisations than cybersecurity.

Another panel discussion focused ont the future of work, which was moderated by Sudipta Dev, Senior Associate Editor, Express Computer & CRN India and participated by Vimesh Avlani, Managing Director, Graftronics; Jiten Mehta, Director, Magnamious Systems Pvt. Ltd.; Krupashankar Chaube, Director, Kaltech Digital Pvt. Ltd and Mathew Philip, Senior Director, Channels & GSI Business, LogMeIn India.

Sharing his views, Philip said, “After transition to remote working, the next focus was on productivity and employee enablement. We created Emergency Remote Work Kits to our partners and customers to ensure their business continuity. Employees are now demanding remote working option. Seventy seven per cent of organisations reported higher productivity in a WFH environment. A hybrid approach will be the future of working.”

Mehtas said, “By the first week of April, we moved all of our customers to cloud. There are improved productivity levels in a WFH environment. We will continue with the hybrid working model. However, employee engagement is the biggest challenge in a virtual environment.”

Chaube was of the view that the role of employers has changed completely; they have to think in a holistic and inclusive manner. Whereas Avlani opined that soon, there may be 90 percent of the workforce working from home.

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