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The ISODA summit which started on an apprehensive note but concluded optimistically drew great attendance numbers, with more than 100 channel professionals representing their companies. VARINDIA was onsite to gauge the mood of the event, speaking with vendors and VARs, and in the process got an insight of what lay in store for the channel ecosystem.
The event was packed with technology sessions by vendor companies and different stakeholders of the industry. The gathering included more than 120 delegates-executives from vendor companies and more than 85 decision-makers of partner organizations from India.
The theme of this year’s Tech Summit was “Together we can”. This year’s edition had Oracle as the Platinum Sponsor, and VMware has participated as a Gold Sponsor. The silver partners included Vision Solutions / TechnoBind, Commvault, Microsoft, Websense and Kaspersky. Other vendor companies associated with the event include Software One, McAfee, Trend Micro, Tally Solutions and Kryptos.
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| Srikanth Doranadula Senior Director, Distribution - Alliances & Channels, Oracle India | Ganesan Arumugam Director-Partners, VMware India | Altaf Halde Managing Director, South Asia, Kaspersky Lab India | Biren Shah Chairman, ISODA, Managing Director, ADIT MICROSYS PVT LTD |
Vendors’ Sight
Vednors like Oracle, Kaspersky and VMware were on-hand to present their perspectives. Oracle as platinum sponsor and VMware as gold sponsor participated in the ISODA summit for the first time.
Delineating on the merit of ISODA, Altaf Halde, Managing Director, South Asia, Kaspersky Lab India, said, “I think this is a good platform for us as an organization. It has given us a good opportunity to meet up with the partners because we are not doing business with most of them. In fact, I would say 80% of them are like fresh partners. So this gives us immediate and big opening and opportunity to speak to partners who are having potential to sell Kaspersky in the market. So I think it’s a good experience to be here at the ISODA event.”
Srikanth Doranadula - Senior Director – Alliances & Channels Business, Oracle India, said, “The ISODA summit is an ideal platform for partners to get together and discuss the next big wave in technology trends and future roadmap for business growth. Our objective at the summit was to directly collaborate with partners and discuss how Oracle can add value to their business.” He further added, “Oracle is the only vendor that is uniquely positioned to offer products and solutions from applications to disk and the partners are free to choose piecemeal solutions or sell the entire One Red Stack of Oracle. Already, close to 40% of the partners are either part of Oracle Partner Network (OPN) or Remarketer partners. We expect that more partners will look to signing up a partnership with Oracle and start offering our range of solutions to their customers. The results so far have been quite encouraging. This was the expectation expressed to us by the ISODA committee and we are glad we were able to deliver the same”
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| K.Gunasegharan Director, eCAPS Computers India Private Limited | Sudarsan Ranganathan Secretary General, (ISODA), Veeras Infotek Private Limited, CEO & MD | Alok Gupta President ISODA, Softmart Solutions | Devesh Aggarwal CEO, COMPUSOFT |
Underscoring the need of a vigorous partner engagement, Ganesan Arumugam, Director-Partners, VMware India, said, “This forum provides us a right launching pad to break the ice in the form of making our partners abreast of all the happenings in VMware. The partners will come to know whom they can contact in VMware and thereby engage and do the business with us.”
Partners’ Excitement
The excitement of the partners, who play a pivotal role in the whole ecosystem, was palpable. Since its inception three years back, ISODA has a melting pot for different stakeholders of IT Industry. Those who are at the helm of affairs in organizing the Summit have pointed to the role of collaboration and co-operation.
In his inauguration speech Biren shah, Chairman, ISODA, Managing Director, ADIT MICROSYS PVT LTD said, “The main objective of this year’s ISODA summit was to strengthen brand ISODA, to strengthen relationships among ISODA members and improve collaboration.” Satisfied with the outcome of the event, he said, “The post event feedback from all participants gives us confidence to state that we have met our objectives. We had expected a summit of great content, great organization and fun but the summit exceeded our expectations on all parameters.”
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| K.V.Jagannath Managing Director, CHOICE SOLUTIONS LIMITED | Harinder Salwan Managing Director, TRICOM MULTIMEDIA PVT. LTD. | Kavita Singhal Director, KAMTRON SYSTEMS PVT. LTD. | Nilesh Kuvadia Managing Director, ITCG Solutions Pvt. Ltd. |
K.Gunasegharan, Director, eCAPS Computers India Private Limited, said, “Being the chairman for the tech summit, it was another life changing experience for me. It was awesome and everyday was a challenge and I thoroughly enjoyed doing it. The biggest challenge that I faced being the Chairman for the tech summit was finding a balance between work and the assignment given by ISODA, but I was able to do it due to support from my partners and my team.” He further added, “I wanted to create a life time experience for all delegates who had attended this event in terms of sharing and bonding among them along with loads of fun. Also wanted to take this event very professionally with low cost to ISODA as much as possible and I was able to meet 99% of expectations and all that happened because of ISODA.”
Sudarsan Ranganathan, CEO & MD, Veeras Infotek Private Limited, who is the Secretary of ISODA, said, “It was our endevour to help partners gain insight into market, technologies and demographics to rework on their strategies for the coming year and we are working towards that and we expect to have certain initiatives bearing fruit.”
Emphasizing the need for cooperation and communication, K.V.Jagannath, Managing Director, CHOICE SOLUTIONS LIMITED, said, “There is a need to do networking and leverage strengths from the acquaintance we got through this summit with partners and OEMs. Over all it’s a great time together.”
Potential Buyers
The Summit proved a fertile ground for the vendors and partners to make buying decisions. The networking among the different stakeholders went a long way in understanding the trends in the market.
Harinder Salwan says, “There is growing demand for graphics and anti-virus solutions in the Indian Market and these are some of the markets which have been growing year on year with healthy growth rates and this is seen in the case of Adobe where in the last 18 years partners have grown from 12 to 300 and revenues by a similar percentage.”
Kavita Singhal, Director, KAMTRON SYSTEMS PVT. LTD. says, “We find that Education Sector and Health care are always rich all the time but how many of them and how much they wish to shell out for software products is a big question.”
Gunasegharan says, “We are one of the National Distributors for Kaspersky Corporate Licenses. We find SME, SOHO, Education and Government Verticals are the potential buyer all the time for the software products.”
Jagannath says, “The potential buyers for the software products are divided into two parts, first being a matured customer organization that respects software publishing as innovation and need to pay for usage also being compliant, irrespective of customer organization size and second being ever growing enforcement market, which always have an issue with buying adequate software licenses for their respective organizations.”
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| Jitesh Chauhan Director, RUBIK Infotech Pvt. Ltd. |
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| Paresh Vikram Shah PARTNER, P.H.TEKNOW |
Challenges in selling Licensed Software
Indian market is maturing with time of buying licensed software buying patterns, as many customers are buying voluntarily and enforcement way from major vendors. The key challenges in this business are margins, taxation, cloud strategy adapted by many vendors to eliminate middlemen (VAR) and intense competition from Tier one vendors in mid-size and large deals.
Biren says, “The challenges that we face while selling the licensed products are in most cases, top management refuses to get involved in IT purchase decisions and CIO or Systems Managers are unable to communicate value of IT investments to their respective boards for purchase decisions.”
Paresh Vikram Shah, Treasurer, ISODA, Partner, P.H.TEKNOW says, “The Indian customers are still not ready to buy the licensed products. No doubt it is better than previous year. We have to explain to the customer the benefits of going for licensed products.”
Sudarsan says, “The challenges we are facing while selling the licensed products is that there is no value that the customer sees in us while selling pure licenses. We have to ensure that we meet certain critical IT pain points or Business objectives if we need to see value. Every partner looks at re-inventing their business operations, their strategies and thereby their expansion in both geographical, vertical and expertise levels to be relevant, valuable and therefore profitable in the market.
Alok Gupta, President, ISODA, Softmart Solutions says, “Affordability is the biggest challenge. Prices in India for International software products are greater than equal to USA / International prices while affordability is 20% of the International customer.”
Jitesh Chauhan, Director, RUBIK Infotech Pvt. Ltd. opines, “The major challenges which we face while selling Licensed software is the Customer is not aware of the Licensing terms of various software Vendors. The licensing policy differs from vendor to vendor; double taxation from Govt; and Customer is not able to differentiation between a product seller and a solution seller, and hence a solution seller does not get premium for the Solution and he ultimately ends up being a box seller.”
Winner of this year’s MP.Kinni award, Nilesh Kuvadia, Managi ng Director, ITCG Solutions Pvt. Ltd says, “Being a business partner with a lot of software companies, ITCG SPL is one of the largest software houses in Gujarat. We find that large corporates are usually potential buyer all the time for software products as they are constantly into expansion as well as have company policy to use only legal software.” He added, “The biggest challenge we face while selling Licensed software is the customer’s understanding on spending for software. Especially in the SMB segment, we find difficult to convince the customer to spend for licenses. Although the awareness has increased now, but still we see hesitance to procure licenses for each and every desktop they are using. Second challenge is cost of the products. Most of the products are US based and hence original value being in USD may be reasonable there but when converted in INR, small companies feel it unaffordable.
Kavita says, “There are many challenges we face while selling the licensed products, Starting with double taxation which is difficult even today to make our customer understand; increasing price of software ; changing trends in licensing policy of some companies; product activations; shifting towards e-license etc. Electronic Software download has replaced the physical software media which is a big challenge in Govt. sector and universities. The list of challenges would go on and on but we have to face them and find our way to work around in the best possible manner by putting the extra effort without expecting any extra reward.”
Mantra of Sales
Sales is one of the most important and challenging of a company’s function. Sales leads to growth and profitability for the company. Needless to say, the importance of sales must be taken in right earnest.
Devesh Aggarwal, CEO, COMPUSOFT, says, “The key mantra of sales is to Build relationships in existing customers to ensure you become a single stop software solution provider & grow with the customer by giving customer satisfactory value add services. We find that the segments of customers keep on changing depending on many economic & regulatory parameters for buying the software products.” Harinder Salwan, Managing Director, TRICOM MULTIMEDIA PVT, LTD says, “The Customer Comes First – Give him what he wants and support him by guiding him with the best purchase options and you have a customer who will trust you till the end.” Paresh says, “Maintaining a personalised customer relationship and always try to see that customer gets the products as per their needs only.” Jitesh says, “I was able to meet some new Principal Vendors and looking forward for signing them up and expanding the existing product portfolio. I signed up with Vision Solution to market their product “Double Take Availability” for the Gujarat Market.”
