Tech Talk Expert Session

Monalisa Sahoo,
Sr. V.P-Marketing- Vodafone Business Services

“I believe the SMEs are the growth engine for India's economy. If we see the industry figures, there are about 50 million SMEs who contribute about 40% of India's export, 38% of our GDP and they are employing a staggering 117 million employees in the sector. And if you look, 68% of this Industry today is not even digital and a very small percentage of them actually do their business in a digital manner. We have this great mission of our prime minister about digital India and we believe that vision can be made a reality when we actually focus on this segment and actually make them go digital.”

Ruchin Kumar
Business Head (Govt. & Defence) - GEMALTO

“We are in Data Centric security and when I am talking about Data centric security we ensure that data is safe from unauthorised access. Data confidentiality is there in the system. We also ensure that Data integrity and things like granular access, authorization and similar type of security concepts are there in place. If we see in the organisations when we talk about security, some 70 to 80% budgets are spent on the parameters on the firewalls, on the IDS, IPS and other systems. By virtue we have concretized our parameters and it is almost impossible for outsiders to intrude in our systems.”

Rajeev Sreedhar
Director - Channels & Alliances (India & SAARC)- McAfee

“We have taken a step ahead in security and have integrated our technology which can protect, detect and also remediate, which means from a customer’s standpoint he/she does not need to invest in too much technology and skills and have that automation done where not only the viruses get detected but also protected against it that we are seeing in the recent times. Another key factor that we have come out with is 'data exchange layer' which is based on open protocol where the other security vendors can also integrate.”

Sunil Sharma
Managing Director- Sophos India

“Sophos started 35 years back, in 1982. It started on information and endpoint security and after 35 years it is a listed company on London stock exchange. Today we have 20,000 partners across the globe and in India itself we have 3000+ partners. India is contributing more than 5% to the overall worldwide business. There are 850 people involved in research and development, product development and support, based out of Ahmedabad and Bengaluru. In our sales team, we have 82+ people who are there to support our partners. Sophos has also done massive investments in terms of solutions; in fact we were the first company to come out with solution addressing WannaCry and Bad Rabbit.”

Sujit Panigrahi
Co-Founder & CTO- Convergent Technologies

“As the name suggests, 'smooth XRM' a product that we have, if you look at the typical CRMs that you find in the market they all cater to the end customers. Our smooth XRMs actually solve that particular problem; what we are looking at is extending that relationship to both partners and customers. So partners are extremely important for all the OEMs. Essentially when you look at the industry leading CRMs, they typically do 3 things - first, they do sales performance tracking, essentially the primary sales from the company to the distributors. But they do not capture the tertiary sales, the sales that actually happens in every stores. So, what we do is, we help companies and large OEMs to be able to capture the tertiary sales from every point of sale. Second thing is about marketing communication, typically it is either to customer or to the sales team and not necessarily to the channel partners and the third thing is about service and the support. Again either the sales team gets involved or the customer support is separate one.”