COVID-19, a new illness, caused by Coronavirus has a created global pandemic. The COVID-19 global pandemic has given rise to many questions about economy, health, leadership and many more.The world is reeling under COVID-19 crisis and the vulnerable segments of our society are at risk the most. Indian Prime Minister has taken tough decisions to ensure the fight against the virus. The prolonged lockdown may give rise to deaths from starvation as the lower stratum of the society is at risk. To fight against the virus, the industries have supported their employees and advised them to ‘work from home’.
COVID 19 pandemic has been a major disruption to supply chains. China is one of the largest manufacturer of technology products and solutions in the world and are hit hard as a large number of citizens contracted the disease. This led to partial and full shutdowns of industries, plants, and factories. Many enterprises have disruptions in their logistic hubs and delivery routes due to closures. These impacts have been felt by companies, from small third-tier suppliers to billion-dollar conglomerates. Not only this, the concern over the coronavirus, nationwide lockdown, and the rapid transition to work-from-home has created new avenues for cybercriminals to attack digital users who rely on the internet and digital services to work, transact, and communicate.
There are some powerful statements made by different industry leaders.
K R Naik, Chairman & Founder, Digisol Systems
“Keeping health and safety of our employees at the forefront, we have encouraged remote working and have asked employees to work from home. Our employees across India have been empowered with digital tools to continue to do their jobs, collaborate and support one another, and engage with our customers and partners to drive the best business outcomes possible.
Over the years, we have been working towards developing IT networking solutions to digitally empower your business and even in this unprecedented time, business continuity of our customers and partners is our priority. At present, our services to partners and customers are operating as usual, except in areas where official restrictions are in place. Even we plan to conduct online training programs for partners and SIs. I believe every challenge throws new opportunities, and together we can surely tackle such challenges.”
Prajit Nair, Director Sales- End User Computing, VMware India
“VMware is committed to providing our customers safe and seamless secure access to their work infrastructure and data. As leaders in the space of digital transformation, we enabled our employees with our digital workspace solution Workspace One and now are focussing on helping our customers continue business as usual. We have a Business Continuity Plan in place and are constantly working towards rapidly transforming the infrastructure of our customers to allow remote working without losing out on productivity, efficiency or security.
To ensure that businesses continue their normal operations, customers need to enable their employees to work remotely and maintain productivity, increase connectivity and provide for continuous, secure access to applications across endpoints. VMware continues to support our customers for business continuity, which is especially important in today’s fast-evolving situation, which has exacerbated the need for a remote workplace. The future of work has been changing for some time, and as we navigate this pandemic, the model for distributing work or work-from-home has accelerated. Our business is predicated on building the infrastructure and solutions optimized for the workplace of the future.
As solution providers, we have the advantage of supporting our customers virtually. Many of these offerings are providing special offers or extended trials, as we want to be focused on helping others at this time. We deliver digital workspaces that can access critical applications to any endpoint. We also protect all endpoints that are accessing organization assets remotely. VMware Carbon Black can also help protect remote workers against cyberattacks without any additional infrastructure. By deploying SD-WAN, VMware is also equipped to accelerate the performance of organizational assets that are now remote. VMware is also well positioned to provide the elastic capacity to scale new virtual desktop users instantly and on-demand on the global footprint of Microsoft Azure/WVD via our Horizon Cloud on Azure Solution or the VMware Cloud on AWS, which allows customers to leverage VMware-based elastic capacity in the cloud in less than 2 hours.”
U.B. Pravin Rao, Chief Operating Officer, Infosys
“We are doing all we can to be there for those employees and their families that need our support the most, while prioritizing the safety and wellbeing of our entire global workforce. We are monitoring the situation across countries and have prohibited or restricted business travel as appropriate. We are inviting medical professionals to inform and educate our workforce globally and implementing tightly regulated quarantining and contact tracing policies in compliance with local policymaker guidance. A 24-hour help desk supports employees in emergency and unfamiliar situations, while active communication channels keep us all – employees, clients, local authorities, health advisors, and our own leaders – connected and reliably well-informed.
A vast majority of our global workforce is now enabled to work from home leveraging collaboration technologies to stay connected with clients and colleagues. From mobilizing laptops for our workforce, desktop relocation to home environments, helping reimage personal devices for official use, with information security policies and the ability for us to minimize security risks, improving our virtual private network bandwidth and even facilitating high speed broadband connectivity at employee residences, we are accelerating overall employee readiness to be productive as they work remotely. We are also significantly and rapidly amplifying our technology landscape to support robust and secure remote collaboration at scale.”
Ankur Goel, Managing Director, Poly India
“Customers are relying on our solutions now more than ever. Poly’s video conferencing devices are being used by world leaders to discuss how they can mitigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic; leading hospitals and medical institutions are using our conferencing technologies to interact with their peers and provide consultation. Therefore, we’re going above and beyond to ensure that business continuity is not hampered.
At Poly, we are-
- Supporting employees to work remotely by providing them access to the best collaboration technologies– Thanks to advances in communications and collaborations technology over the last few years, we have reached a point where remote working can be virtually as impactful as being there in person.
- Prioritizing Communication– during tough times like these, communication is paramount be it internally amongst our employees or to our customers. Our managers are having daily check-ins with their teams to ensure that work continues to progress without any hiccups.
- Our sales team is engaging in the daily prioritization of shipments – for instance, when customers are identified as medical first responders, they are given top priority. Our product and operations teams have been driving the logistics of moving Poly products from our manufacturing points to our customers, including securing hard-to-find supply.”
Sunanya Hazarika, Marketing Manager, ATEN
“Workplace safety is a primary focus at ATEN and we solicited employees, partners, and customers to stay at home. ATEN is not new to the concept of remote working, we have teams working from various locations across India, and so the transition was smooth. By using a combination of technology, discipline, and timeliness, we have ensured that all our employees are safe and sound, while our customers; business infrastructure remains issue free and online all the time. We encourage virtual meetings and video conferencing to connect safely and effectively with our customers and partners. We are enabling Product Training, leanings and certifications for our associates and business partners to make the best of the safety lockdown.
ATEN has adopted digitalization much before this pandemic, and we have been impacted positively by digitalization. We are currently reaping the benefit of our investment in online marketing programs.
We had foreseen the benefits of the online channels and their impact on business continuity. ATEN is committed to supporting its customers’ business throughout this pandemic and to provide the continuity of service at all times. We are prepared to support and service our customers in this disastrous situation.”
Parvinder Walia, Director of Sales and Marketing, ESET -APJ
With the COVID-19 situation constantly evolving, ESET has had to put in place various measures aspart of our business continuity plan to keep ESET services working fully and ensuring the safety and health of our employees. We have empowered our employees from offices around the world to work from home by utilisingall available options for online collaboration in order to keep our staff safe whilst also serving our customers online. For our customers, we have been addressing the cybersecurity concerns and issues faced by companies regarding remote working. We have put in place several initiatives to support ourcustomers, resellers and the rest of the community during this time.
In light of the Covid-19 situation, we have extended the trial period of our products to enable potential and existing customers to work, study or teach safely from home. We are also regularly updating our website with additional measures to ensure that our customers are receiving the best protection. Additionally, our Customer Care and Technical teams continue to operate at full power and are ready to assist you, as always, through our Support Page.”
Surendra Singh, Senior Director & Country Manager, Forcepoint
“At Forcepoint, our primary concern is the health and safety of the community. Most of our offices are shut in accordance with the local government guidelines. Our employees are working from home. We have enacted our emergency preparedness plan and stand fully engaged to manage the current threat. As a subset of our Business Continuity Plan (BCP), we have end-to-end, remote Virtual Private Network (VPN) capabilities for all critical roles across the organization. Our work from home capability allows for comprehensive duplication of office capabilities. This includes our sales, professional services, technical support, core operations, and product engineering teams. Throughout this unfolding situation, we remain committed to our employees, customers and partners for their continued success.
Organizations today are trying to navigate through what is arguably unchartered business territory as their global workforces have shifted to a large-scale remote work model seemingly overnight. At Forcepoint, we have pivoted to a virtual strategy and already kicked off various marketing programs such as virtual events, online roundtables, and webinars, etc. to support our customers come out on the other side stronger and more secure than before.
We have stepped up to support our partners address the current needs of the customers to help them reduce the risks in the current environment. It is imperative to ensure that our customers have the tools and resources needed to enable large-scale remote work enablement that keeps employees productive without sacrificing security.”
Kartik Bakshi, Country Manager, India & SAARC, Belkin
“The number one priority for me as a leader was to ensure the safety and well-being of our employees in India. As soon as we saw that numbers of covid-19 cases were increasing globally we decided to ask our employees to work from home. All meetings with key customers, internal calls, and strategic discussions are being done remotely. Furthermore, we are conducting weekly calls to make certain that apart from work the employees are also using this time to keep themselves busy with household activities and exercise. Keeping them engaged and motivated is the key during this pandemic as they are the most valuable assets to our company.
Seeing that a large number of people will be spending their time online now, for a lot of industries such as ours, this channel is the key. We have already invested in aggressive A+ content for our online retail platforms and now we are working on creating unique content for Social Media Platforms and are also working on allocating budget towards SEO and Google ads. Product Awareness, Visibility and Education will be pivotal in this segment for our brands.
The positive thing about our brand in India is that we are present across all channels whether it is Brick and Mortar or Online Retail. E-commerce has been part of our core focus since early 2014 and has played an important role in our growth story for India. To say that we are prepared would be an understatement; however, there is always room for improvement. We are using this time to devise innovative strategies to win in areas where we have insignificant share and grow categories where we can win further.”
Muneer Ahmad, Business Head, ViewSonic India
“The first thing we realised after the outbreak of COVID19 pandemic was that there is a dire need to protect our employees and other people around. So, the first step we took was to provide work from home to our employees and shift all operations online, this way we are able to work every day without jeopardising the health of our workforces and without obstructing the business. And second step we took was to help the society in any way we can, therefore we are offering ‘myViewBoard’ premium subscription free of cost to support distance learning. It is easy to use and allows real-time collaboration through video audio conferencing, huddles and digital white boarding. The brand is also in the process of introducing Virtual classrooms with a capacity facilitate multiple students by allowing two-way audio communication, video streaming, Google classroom integration to help build and uplift the digitization of education in India.
The current scenario has definitely affected our marketing approach and we have adapted to these changes in the best possible way, we can at this time. We make sure that we maintain a clear line of communication between our partners and customers through various available sources. Since the education sector has taken a hit, we are supporting distance learning and setting up virtual classrooms as school and colleges are shut since over a month now.
We did observe, some drop in demand, mostly in government sectors due to financial year closing and pandemic crisis. The government is investing most of their time and resources to cope up with Covid-19 crisis in the country, as it should be. Our operational warehouse is in China, and since the country has recovered, the flow of our products is better than the past couple of months, so we are hopeful to get some good business in the near future. Moreover, at present we have listed some of our B2C products like LED Projectors and monitors at online marketplaces focusing more on e-commerce.”
Rajesh Goenka, Director, RP tech India
“Safety, Precaution and Business continuity are the key priorities at RP tech India. We have therefore, rolled out various policies to keep our employees and communities safe in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. In accordance with the Government’s directives, we have implemented remote working pan India. While we comply with the safety norms, we are taking immense care to minimize the impact of the lockdown on inventory supply. However, physical supply is on a standstill as the public transport is completely shut down. We are in constant touch with our employees, vendors and channel partners through video conferencing. We are constantly monitoring a situation and we hope the business will come to normalcy in coming days.
I do not see any measure impact of Digital Marketing as all organizations are moving on Digital platforms for business. Digital is the future direction for businesses.
The E-Commerce business is also on a hault as the logistics industry is on a standstill during the lockdown. E Commerce companies are fulfilling the demand of only essential commodities with limited capacity and the supply of other products including IT is currently blocked. We have seen a surge in demand of Notebooks and other IT products and solutions as Work from Home will become a regular practice in India and the Channel will continue to play a significant role in demand fulfilment.”
Prashanth G J, CEO ,TechnoBind
“As a security solution provider, we see the current scenario as a totally unprecedented one. COVID-19 pandemic has thrown almost everyone into an unprecedented crisis and most of the industries remain shut. Even before the 21-day lockdown began in India, our company had already begun allowing people to work from home to maintain a safe and secure remote working environment. We have been fully functional working from home, to ensure the full customers satisfaction so that they are assured of full support today and in the days to come. Our entire team has been very supportive in addressing the issues coming in from our customers. Most of the software issues are being handled by the technical team.
Marketing is impossible without great content as it helps establish you as a leading voice in the industry, and gives audiences useful, actionable content that they need to solve their problems. We are moving smoothly in the market as of now and the design of a good, secure business operating system cannot be done overnight; it requires creating the baseline and the willingness of the management to follow, and invest in security and digital transformation to ensure business continuity. We have been reaching out to our customers through digital and social media platforms.
Our mantra for survival during this period is “Moving Ahead with the Technology” as the companies who had ignored the adoption of technologies like cloud, collaboration, and taken security lightly with no strong identity management system are facing a roadblock in their business. We hope that enterprises and other SMB will realize and change once this crisis is over.
The industry demand has dropped substantially and has moved on to online channels. I believe each industry regulatory body should have a robust cybersecurity framework to continue business in such a situation once the companies truly adopt these practices. As their support requirements will come down and they can do business whatever may be the situation.”
Ritesh Deokar, Country Manager, Milestone System
“We are experiencing unprecedented challenges in the face of the COVID-19 virus worldwide. Milestone is closely monitoring COVID-19 developments and has taken actions to secure the well-being of our employees, and the business interest of our partners, and customers. We are following guidelines from local authorities and those of the World Health Organization and are taking all necessary precautions. In India, Milestone is in accordance with the nationwide lockdown to flatten the curve of local transmission of COVID-19, and as you know, most workplaces with the exception of those which provide essential services are closed starting March 24 until April 14, 2020, which may again get further extended. The vast majority of our teams and employees are now working from home. But as a global software company, we are used to working remotely. Our employees can continue their work and we expect minimal impact on the support and services we provide to our customers and partners. At Milestone, the safety and wellbeing of our employees and partner community has always been our priority, and we have taken steps in accordance with the local authorities’ safety measures regarding COVID-19 to ensure this.
To give our partner community a helping hand in this difficult time, we’ve also launched a new Care campaign. This includes upgrade offers, extra support, and lucrative offers for Care coverage to extend a helping hand. For more information, reach out to your local Milestone care contact. This includes upgrade offers, extra support, and lucrative offers for Care coverage to extend a helping hand.”
Satish Kumar V, CEO, EverestIMS Technologies
“When the Coronavirus hit the globe and India, most companies, communities andnations were totally unprepared for it. There was virtually no precedence for dealingwith such a healthcare disaster on a global scale.At EverestIMS, when word started trickling in about the possible curfew, we had amanagement meeting and discussed best-case and worst-case scenarios. We were firmon one aspect – the safety of our employees and business continuity for the customersthat relied on us. It was guerrilla mode time, and fast. We had to nimbly rejig ourselvesmuch like an army changing battle formation to face a new attack. Since all our work andbusiness run on computers (and servers) we needed to ensure that the managers wereable to transfer certain work files to their systems which they would take home. Wethen had one-on-one meetings with each employee to understand their livingpreferences for the next few weeks and ensured that they were safely and securelyrelocated as per their needs. We also provided them with all the necessary means towork remotely.
At the management level we focussed on project and people management to drivebusiness continuity for our clients. We cater to Telcos,broadband and data clients along with many other related industries that are formingthe Government’s survival backbone against the curfew. They rely on an important triadto work in conjunction – networks, servers and applications. We could not fail at anylevel.We were poised to take an active stance because many of the business issues that theshutdown permeates are something that we mitigate. We have always aimed at ITtechnology being driven to its maximum potential – this ethos resulted in us being akinto a quick first responder to the crisis – solely because our software helps manageagainst the main IT issues that plague companies when there is no one around to takecare of their IT Infrastructure, Networks, Datacentres, Helpdesk, etc.”
Neelesh Kripalani, Senior Vice President and Head, Center of Excellence (CoE), CloverInfotech
“COVID – 19 has been the most sudden and destructive pandemic that has taken enterprises across the globe by surprise. Businesses are realizing the importance of leveraging new-age technologies to ensure smooth functioning of daily operations. We have taken the following measures in our organization: We have enabled Work from Home for almost all our employees. Our technology team has ensured that our people have the required hardware, software and network connectivity to seamlessly function from home and the business continues without any hindrances.
The marketing team is using this lockdown period to create marketing collaterals and artefacts for our solutions, services and new projects. The team is also engaged in creating awareness to enable organizations to leverage technology for business continuity and planning during times of COVID-19 through various content-driven marketing channels. The team is preparing a comprehensive marketing arsenal and gearing up for a marketing blitzkrieg after normalcy returns.
We’re witnessing a paradigm shift in the industry; wherein building digital workplace has taken precedence. Organizations are increasingly realizing the importance of digitally transforming their business and empowering their people with digital technologies to facilitate their work, even in unforeseen circumstances.
Since we are the leading IT services and consulting enterprise with a legacy in fostering digital transformation and business efficiency through our in-depth knowledge and robust experience in Enterprise Application Services, Digital Experience Management, Automation solutions and Cloud services, we are prepared to address this new demand and opportunity by working closely with our OEM partners. We have supported many of our customer’s digital transformation journeys.I am confident that as a society, we will innovate our way out of this crisis, and the cloud will continue to be a fundamental enabler for decades to come.”
Vipin Pungalia, Director, Professional Segment, Sennheiser India
“During this unprecedented time, Sennheiser has been ensuring that the employees are safe andhealthy. We have shut down our warehouse operations across India until lockdown. All our officeshave been sanitised and completely closed. We started with a partial work from home from 2ndMarch onwards and went on complete work from home from 16 th March 2020. At Sennheiser, webelieve in encouraging and guiding employees to focus on self-development and learning. This timeis an opportunity for us to grow and educate ourselves so we can add value and prepare ourselvesfor the future.To engage our customers and partners, Sennheiser took the initiative of arranging technical producttrainings through various webinar sessions under #DontStopTheEducation campaign.
At Sennheiser, we have a strong network of distributors and channel partners PAN India which playan extremely crucial role. We have a holistic mix of traditional channels and online channels to caterto the needs of our diverse customers.In these challenging times, companies and communities are taking measures for supporting eachother. It is wonderful to witness people displaying strong solidarity and cooperation and help thosein need. We are sure that as a community, as employees, companies, or brands- we will come outstronger, better and united than ever.”
Arun Kumar J, Regional Sales Director, Asia-Pacific, ManageEngine
“ManageEngine, the IT management division of Zoho Corporation, made a decision early on and asked for its 8,000+ employees, spread across 12 offices in several countries and serving over 180,000 organizations worldwide, to work from home. We handle all our operations, sales, marketing, customer support and accounts using Zoho.com’s suite of 45+ business applications, which are hosted on the cloud. Hence, the switch to working from home was straightforward and seamless for us. As a company, we like to meet people and interact personally. Due to the outbreak, visiting them and having the usual meetings became an issue. However, Zoho's tools have enabled our teams to collaborate internally, as well as with our customers and channel partners.
For a lot of our salespeople, presales people, customer support, there was not a lot of disruption because the calls that were supposed to land at their desk, we were very quick to divert them to their laptops and that minimized the disruption. We are now in the process of assisting our customers and channel partners to work remotely and simultaneously helping run their business operations without much disruption using our IT management products. Our online/digital engagements, including webinars, are running full throttle. We are also stepping up our SEO and SEM activities.
ManageEngine provides a wide range of products for IT teams to manage their infrastructure and operations remotely and also manage end-user devices like laptops, desktops and mobile devices used by employees at home. We have seen substantial demand for these products over the last few weeks.
In fact, we are offering fully functional versions of our secure remote work toolkit, comprising Remote Access Plus and Access Manager Plus, free until July 1, 2020. This has been extended as a goodwill gesture to our customers by supporting them during these difficult times and also builds a long-term and sustainable partnership in the coming years.”
Raman Singh, Co Founder and Chief Revenue Officer,CloudConnect
“Just like several organizations, we are relying on remote working during this period.Fortunately, our solutions are tailor-made for business continuity during such unprecedented situations.Since most companies are moving on cloud-based communication systems to ensure businesscontinuity, we are seeing an increased demand for our services.To ensure uninterrupted solutions for our clients, we are ramping up our stack and offeringrobust enterprise connectivity solutions such as virtual mobile and fixed-line, full EPABXfeature-rich telephony, presence, secured instant messaging, multi-file attachment, videoconferencing, remote collaboration, and more.
In this scenario, cloud-based communication is the only mantra to ensure business continuity.While the initial idea, during our inception, was to bring an enterprise connectivity suite ofsolutions in a much more agile environment, with the recent outbreak of COVID-19, the stack isproving to be a critical tool for business continuity.Businesses are looking for effective remote working solutions that help them ensure that theirbusiness runs as usual, even amid the global crisis. CloudConnect’s robust services ensure thatbusinesses run seamlessly with the same level of security even when the employees areworking from the safety of their homes.
As mentioned above, as India’s first and only end-to-end cloud; mobile app-based PBX and unified communication (UC); Professional Teleworking services company, we are seeing anincrease in the demand for our solutions. We are looking at revenues of 10 crore by end of2020 and are all geared up for that. Due to this unfortunate event of COVID-19, businesses have realized the importance ofremote and collaborative working which is essentially what CloudConnect Communicationsoffers. Business continuity, seamless scalability, and pay as you grow are our core pillars.”
Kunal Aman, Head Marketing, SAS India and Japan
“The COVID-19 pandemic has upended the way every organization does business, including ours. We are evaluating and changing our plans in response to COVID-19.We are putting the challenges of our customers and their businesses first in this scenario.To ensure we have a smooth customer-facing response, globally we have created a COVIDIncident Management Team.
While for our employees, their health and safety is our top priority and we have ensured theywork from home. We have made all the checks to ensure employees are equipped to supportcustomers from home. And we are leveraging best in class tools for calls, video conferencing tostay in touch with each other as well as with our customers and partners
The current situation has definitely changed the way our online/ content marketing programs wouldotherwise run in a Business as Usual (BAU) situation. With change comes opportunity, and we have atremendous opportunity to make a difference, not just through our traditional business activities, but aswe put our humanitarian instincts above anything else. We are reaching out to our customers withmeaningful solutions that help address their critical business challenges.Over the past few weeks, we’ve had the opportunity to explore new ways to help our customersincluding Government overcome challenges exacerbated by COVID-19. Cost control and optimizationare high priorities for customers right now. We’re taking a targeted approach with customers whoare expressing interest in cost reduction.We’ve also created a list of new SAS use cases, including hospital bed optimization, public healthdashboards, airline routing optimization, anti-money laundering health checks for banking and apopulation movement index for telco. To encourage SAS learners to stay engaged, globally, we have also rolled out Free e-Learning for SASLearners including live web classes, certifications and learning subscriptions.
SAS is focusing on helping customers during this crisis. SAS has already created a publiclyavailable report that depicts the status, location, spread and trend analysis of the coronavirusand we are engaged on several projects around the world helping customers use data andanalytics in the fight against the virus.”
Anant Raj Kanoria, CEO, iQuippo
“The spread of the pandemic has been very surprising as things changed pretty quickly and there was hardly any time to plan, but just react. Our first priority has been the health and safety of our employees and all our partners working with us. So when we first learnt of cases in India we started to sanitize our offices and advise our people on how to deal with the pandemic. After some time we introduced our work from home policy and advised our people to maintain social distancing. Also after the nationwide lockdown, we have ensured that all our employees are safe and reached their homes or provide them with appropriate accommodation or logistics.
We have seen that a lot of people are looking at assets online and gathering more information to understand and plan them once the lockdown opens up. Being an online marketplace has helped us in that respect that our presence helps our customers and partners to work online and also register or provides leads online. Through digital marketing we are engaging the client but as the activity is very low and due to logistical challenges in delivering the assets there is no decisions making happening but just engagement. To be honest we are not fully prepared for it as we do not know when the lockdown will get over and when will activity start. But our mantra is that we need to be engaged with our partners and customers during this time and need to reflect and focus on our internal process and strategy to build a more agile and robust organisation.
Being an online marketplace has helped us in staying connected with our customers and partners but the activity levels at the sites have come to a halt, the decision making has stopped, thereby transactions on the website has virtually stopped. This has been a shock to us and the only way to deal with it economically is to look at our processes and make it more efficient.”
“We’re a people first company and in this unprecedented crisis of COVID-19, our top priority is the safety and well-being of our employees, clients, prospects and candidates. For the welfare of our employees and to ensure we can continue to serve our clients in these challenging circumstances, we have begun migrating our workforce, including our agent groups, to remote working environments as a way to enforce social distancing. Additionally, we have increased the capacity of our IT network, and expanded technology capabilities to facilitate work from home practices.”
Kaustubh Patki, Country Marketing Head - India, Micro Focus
“As a global enterprise software company, Micro Focus is no different and we are waking up every day to new information about how COVID-19 is affecting our communities, our employees, our customers and our partners. We stand firm in our company values - putting customers first; working jointly for best results; deciding and acting in a way that is impactful; learning and adapting, so that we can help our employees and customers adjust to this new way of functioning. Our primary concern is always the health and safety of employees, customers and partners. That commitment covers everything - from ensuring that we follow “stop the spread”, to maintaining business continuity, so that nobody faces an adverse effect. Like most companies and institutions, we are closely monitoring the latest information provided by World Health Organization (WHO), Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and local governments (central & state).
As the COVID-19 scenario and economic disruption continues to evolve, and the information marketplace continues to crowd, one can differentiate their brand by staying focused on deploying online content that helps customers more confidently navigate their business through disruption. We are extensively focused on online content marketing in order to gain traction. Brands should create and deploy online content that helps customers navigate through times of uncertainty with greater confidence. Owing to the novel pandemic, organizations are facing some levels of business disruption. A recent Gartner study revealed that only 12% of organizations are highly prepared for such a pandemic and a majority of organizations are facing this due to COVID-19.
There are great benefits to adopting social selling and the ongoing situations have bolstered these initiatives – lead generation accelerates, networking expands relentlessly, brand-focused content becomes imperative and a future-proof strategy is right there. Our employees are empowered with digital tools to continue to do their jobs, collaborate and support each other, and engage with our customers and partners to drive the best outcomes possible.”
Bhavin Turakhia, CEO and Co-Founder, Zeta
“COVID-19 is impacting everyone around the world and every aspect of our daily lives: our socialinteractions, our family life, and our communities. With the rise of COVID 19, all the companies are having amandatory remote working policy. During this time of crisis, we here at Zeta is trying to provide as muchsupport to our employees to be more productive and engaged. We are also promoting our employeesand teams to maintain social distancing and take all precautions to keep themselves & their familiessafe. The work from home policy at Zeta began from 11th March 2020 and we gave a master advisorytoall our employees.
To make sure that all our employees are working smoothly, our HR team has come up with someamazing ideas to keep everyone well-motivated and productive during the lockdown.
● In order to ensure that employees at Zeta are well engaged while working from home, the HRteam at Zeta are organizing virtual team bonding activities like- Online Games, Virtual TeamLunch/Tea breaks, VC enabled fun activities
● Communication around effective ways to work from home and released microlearning guides onWFH and effective Virtual Meetings are few other initiatives that we have taken to ensure that employees at Zeta are well educated on how to effectively work from home while maintainingwork-life balance. We also carried out specific webinar sessions for our sales folks around howto handle sales in times of COVID-19 situation
● The team-building exercise capture weekly feedback from our employees around their WFHexperience, challenges and if they require any support/advice in order to get work carried outsmoothly”
Akshat Jain, Cofounder & CTO, Cyware Labs
"As organisations continue to adopt remote working conditions under the COVID-19 quarantine, hackers have deployed new types of malware, exploits, phishing attacks, and scams to infect employees’ devices and snoop on their confidential data. Companies should educate their employees to take security precautions such as using strong passwords, two-factor authentication, and using a VPN connection to access their company networks. The use of unsecured public WiFi networks should be avoided as it can allow hackers to deploy malicious exploits to intercept the private communication of employees. Employees should also avoid the use of personal devices or online accounts for work purposes, ensure the physical safety of their devices, and be vigilant about phishing attempts. In these precarious times, it is imperative that organizations and individuals adopt a proactive stance on cybersecurity to avoid falling prey to malicious attacks and ensure business continuity.
Cyware’s cyber fusion solutions have empowered organisations to foster information sharing with their employees. Organisations can leverage Cyware’s advanced threat intelligence sharing solutions to collect threat alerts and information on attacks taking place on remote workers from multiple sources and share actionable security alerts with their employees in real-time on their mobile devices."
"Most organizations, big and small, are not ready to have their employees work from home in large numbers. COVID -19 has forced organizations to transit to a new work paradigm with minimal preparation time. This has tested the IT infrastructure and VPN gateways really hard. Additionally, the bad guys continue to mine this unfortunate situation for their own personal gains. It is of extreme importance at this point to avert the risk of exploitation by hackers every time an employee connects to his/her corporate network from home. Such unmonitored connections are the most sought after access points for the hackers.
Uniken’s award winning REL-ID platform continues to ensure only screened employees can connect with authorized enterprise applications in a remote set-up. Our award winning Verify solution ensures that mobile devices can be safely used to validate and authenticate transactions. Good technology needs to stand the test of time. We continue to support all of our banking and other fin-tech customers 24x7 by enabling our employees with all the right remote tools and technologies."
Rahul Sasi, Founder and CTO, CloudSEK
"In an unprecedented show of solidarity, companies across the world are working remotely. With employees using unsecured home wi-fi networks and personal computers, there is a heightened risk of data leakage and other cyber-attacks. Cyber criminals are always on the lookout of such vulnerable situations to prey on big organisations for data breach and make financial gains. Teams needs to be particularly cautious when sharing files with their remote team, be wary of suspicious emails, downloads, and anything new that can potentially introduce malicious software in your system and network. If employees could fully depend on email for such purposes a lot of the risk would come down.
Unlike traditional cyber-security players, CloudSek offers real-time information to prevent and monitor cyber threats through its unique SAAS platform, thereby significantly improving the monitoring levels and reducing costs for its customers. CloudSEKXvigil has discovered an increased number of security incidents associated with partners and employees leaking data in the last 2 weeks. We had observed an increase in the number of Source Code Leak and Confidential Data."
Atul Bhatnagar, President and CEO, Cambium Networks
The pandemic have forced some changes which are very likely to be permanent as people live in the post-COVID era. Connectivity has emerged as key consideration. The pandemic has shown the undeniable value of wireless connectivity to connect people in their residences. Wireless connectivity enables people to work at home, to move education classes online and to enable hospitals to rapidly expand facilities. Here are some of the changes that will likely become permanent:
- Video connects people and teams – Video has proven to be effective and efficient in uniting people for business and personal matters. Large and small groups equipped with devices will continue to consider this as an option for any meeting.
- The office is where you are – The work environment is now fully transportable. Secure wireless communications enable workers to have immediate contact to collaborate and improve decision making. While this has permanently blurred the line between home and office, a social protocol will be developed in the interest of balancing precious time.
- Sensors will monitor people and things – To provide business continuity and public safety, key factors will be monitored, and data will be passed to automated analysis systems. Trends will be spotted earlier. Public safety systems will measure crowd density and traffic patterns. Wireless communications infrastructure will enable sensors and cameras to be placed exactly where they are needed at a fraction of the cost and time when compared to fiber infrastructure.
- Networks will reach all places – Wireless networks will constantly evolve. They have proven to be a lifeline for people and businesses, and they can easily and efficiently connect the last 30 kilometers from the fiber backbone to the device. The performance and reliability of wireless is proven; the next step is to focus on improving the economics so that all developing communities can be connected.
- Network management will be remote – Networks will be automated to perform monitoring and healing functions without physical human intervention. Scalability is the key, and automated access points with a cloud-managed infrastructure provide the ability for self-healing networks that can be managed from a cell phone or other device.
Kingston Technology:
“As has been posted in the news recently, the Coronavirus (initiated from Wuhan, China) has spread widely throughout the China region during the Chinese New Year holiday. Kingston Technology acknowledges that this situation is very serious and has taken the appropriate actions to protect all our employees to the fullest. Kingston followed the China government’s decision to extend the Chinese New Year holiday (in our China facilities) through February 10 and delayed all shipments to and from the region.
Moving forward, Kingston continues to closely monitor the situation facility by facility with our Asia-Pacific (APAC) employees returning to work on a controlled schedule as conditions permit. Additionally, Kingston continues to suspend travel between our corporate headquarters in the United States and our facilities and countries in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region. This current suspension also extends to travel within APAC for our employees who are based there. These decisions are made out of an abundance of caution in keeping with the best interests of our Kingston family.”
Edgar Dias Managing Director India & SAARC F5 networks
“F5 Networks is committed to providingits customers safe and seamless secure access for their work infrastructure and data. With the COVID-19 outbreak, we are following guidance from the Indian government and doing our part to protect the health of everyone in the F5 ecosystem to reduce the risk of infection or inadvertently spread the virus.
We emphasize on a "Human first" approach todo the right thing for each other, our customers, our shareholders, our community, and the worldas our employee's health and wellbeing are our topmost priority.We are encouraging our employees to take advantage of F5’s work from home guidelines, as well as employee assistance programs. We are also giving them access to new training materials on stress management and virtual work best practices during such a global pandemic.
F5 is fully committed to helping our customers and the global community through this crisis. We’re doing our part to make sure all F5 services are fully available to our customers and most notably those having to rapidly scale remote operations in a secureway. Any crisis requires clear and constant communication with your stakeholders both internal and external, especially amidst uncertain and fast-changing conditions.
In this crisis, F5 is empowering its customers around the world by taking bold action to keep employees safe while continuing to provide essential services.We have helped numerous customers’increased VPN capacity to support remote working to help organizations weather this storm. From uninterrupted financial services to saving lives while protecting staff, we are proud to be able to support our customers efforts.”
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