Channel is the key for our success

Manish Sharma
Vice President, APAC, NComputing

Now that you have a remarkable India presence, which major verticals are you targeting? 

Education would remain our major focus area in the coming years. We enable educational institutions with limited funds to use their existing budget and double or triple the number of students who can have computer access for the same cost. In the manufacturing sector, a PC on the factory floor is subject to heat, vibrations, and dust and can easily get damaged or its life gets shortened. With NComputing, since our access devices are extremely rugged, they can withstand heat, dust and vibrations of a factory. In the business sector, there are many SMBs that have very limited funds. With NComputing shared computing solutions, we help these businesses to share the computer's excess capacity with many more users and therefore maintain far fewer PCs than before.

In government, we provide affordable computing for government offices (municipal, state, central) in the urban and rural areas. In addition to government offices, NComputing is also a great fit for community computing centres and e-government projects. So, education, government, manufacturing hubs and small businesses are some of the verticals we focuss on. 

How do you foresee the current financial year?

2011 looks quite promising to us. We hope to close many major business deals in India. Quite a number of state governments have initiated measures to introduce IT and its tools in the governance process. They are moving from manual processes to online delivery by using conveniently located service centres in public places. 

Private enterprises also equally want to leverage the power of virtualization. Some large BPO companies in India which were facing challenges in terms of underutilized desktops and high maintenance costs have been able to save significantly on per agent per year costs by deploying desktop virtualization. Desktop virtualization is increasingly being used across all customer segments like Education, Manufacturing, Hospitals, branch offices, IT/ITeS. We are expecting high interest and adoption from SMBs.

What about your distribution and after-sales support?

We strongly believe that channel is the key to our success. We are a 100-per cent channel-focussed company and we believe that the best way to go to the market is with local partners, who are experts and specialists in the local geographies. We have Redington as our national distributor and also work with OEMs and some large SIs. We have over a 500-plus strong channel partner base in India, and the company is actively investing to expand its partner base. NComputing invests on enabling, training and motivating partners across the country on a regular basis, besides joint marketing activities and MDF and demo programmes. 

NComputing also has a dedicated team of senior Channel managers who carry with them valuable experience from leading IT organizations. They work with the distributors to identify the right dealers and equip them with sales and technical training and support.

Can you share some successful deployments of your solutions?

NComputing has proposed its shared computing technology to accomplish a massive computer education program comprising 600 government schools across Bihar state. Each of 600 government schools will have a 10-seat computing lab with 2 desktop PCs and 8 NComputing systems and provide computer access to around 5 lakhs students. 

NComputing has also partnered with Maharastra Knowledge Corporation to computerize 1000 learning centers. The MKCL mission is to help the people of Maharastra join the knowledge economy by providing world-class IT literacy and skills through a network of more than 5,000 learning centers. Besides this, NComputing completed the deployment of products in 5000 government schools thereby bringing computer accessibility to 1.8 million schools and was funded by the Andhra Pradesh state government with additional support from the central government. 

What are your expansion plans for your channel base in the country?

We are certainly looking to expand our channel network, especially in tier-2 and tier-3 cities, across the country. Channel partners who are committed and have a certain level of understanding of networking, desktop virtualization, and make product demonstrations are welcome to join us. We want to grow carefully and select committed dealers who understand the value of our solution for their customers and are willing to invest in the training and marketing of the product in their regions.

Are your products ready for cloud computing?

Our products are very much compatible to could computing infrastructure. ESIC and Wipro selected NComputing's proven virtual desktops for 'Project Panchdeep', the largest e-Governance project in India. The NComputing thin-clients are the greenest computers on earth as they use just 5 watts of electricity - a major benefit in India where electricity is unreliable and require expensive UPS and back up generators. For the Panchdeep project, ESIC has chosen to deploy NComputing's L130 thin clients. Over 31,000 L130s will connect to Wipro desktop PCs which then connect to the largest Cloud Computing environment in India at ESIC data centers.

For more contact:
mohini@varindia.com