IBM is deeply committed to the success of their Business Partners

Sandeep K. Dutta,
VP-Storage, Systems and Technology Group,
IBM India/South Asia

What type of trends do you see in the IT industry, especially in the Indian market when it comes to selling of storage?

IDC says that the world’s data already exceeds available storage space - and demand for storage capacity continues to grow at a compound annual growth rate of over 43% from 2008-2013. Data explosion is happening at an exponential rate across verticals and across market segments in India. The explosion of information created by e-business is making storage a strategic investment priority for companies of all sizes.

Key Trends based on Client Pain Points

• Storage Efficiency - Today, customers are looking at efficient storage infrastructure which can help them extract maximum business value from storage resources.
• Stop storing much - Data consolidation is also a very effective technique to simplify management, reduce administrative costs and improving cycle time. Storage consolidation can help support better business efficiency by improving storage capacity which leads to more efficient storage management. 
• Store more with the existing - customers are looking at options where instead of investing more to buy storage they are exploring alternatives to make maximum use of their existing storage infrastructure. This provisioning has proved to be one of the most effective technologies for optimizing utilization of available storage.

What is the overall market size? What is your market share?

IBM emerged as the leader in the India External Disk Storage market in terms of Factory Revenue in Q2 2010 (AMJ '10 quarter) with a 26.8% market share, as per the IDC's APAC Enterprise Disk Storage Tracker, Q2 2010, September 2010 release. IBM also maintained its #1 position for H1 2010 with a 24.1% share in revenue terms. At the same time, the overall disk storage market declined by 6.4% in H12010.

How different is your offering in India from your global range?

The Indian market is growing at a rapid pace. Customers are looking for growth and innovation and are increasingly getting competitive in the market. Clients are focussed on maximizing their existing resources and increasing their efficiency at minimum possible costs. Analyst inputs, client feedback and our market intelligence indicate that customers across the globe and in India are looking at growth and expansion in the coming years. 

What clients are looking for is a technology partner who can help offer them a robust technology roadmap, help capture definitive RoI for their technology investments and provide them with smarter solutions that assist them in achieving their business vision. 

IBMs focus areas for storage include: 

• Verticals: Tap the potential of emerging verticals such as Healthcare and Retail, laying focus on the key verticals like Telco and Public Sector
• Mid-Market Focus: With our mid-range storage offerings, strengthen channel outreach
• Solutions Focus: Focus on workload optimized systems rather than point products that are designed to reduce the cost and complexity of storing vast amounts of data while making it easier for clients to apply analytics and gain insight from the data.

Which all market verticals do your products cater to?

Our offerings cater to every segment of the market and across client sizes. From a traction standpoint, we have seen a significant adoption of our technologies, and clients from across industry verticals, including BFSI, Telecom, Retail, Government/Public Sector, have derived substantial benefits by the adoption resulting in better RoI and efficiencies. 

What is the Partner's role in the deployment of your Storage products and related services?

Business Partners are critical to IBM's success and our mutual goal of delivering superior client value, allows us to win. For IBM partners, smarter planet is about engaging clients in higher value discussions. To address this, we are working with our business partners for building and enhancing their skill levels to help them showcase the value proposition of our solutions to medium-sized businesses. We find that clients, especially in the mid-market segment, are increasingly conscious about “value”. Channel Partners continue to play a strategic role in the new market. They offer customers the breadth of solutions and attached services offerings which are not only best in class but also the best value.

What kind of margins do the partners get? Do you feel they have some pain points in a market like India? If yes, what?

The biggest challenge facing the partners is to move beyond their comfort zones. They need to look at new opportunities beyond their areas of expertise, focus on a solution-led approach and they need to focus on constantly enhancing their industry/market knowledge and skills. It is a competitive world. When there is an opportunity, it is there for everybody and there is contention and competition. IBM is working hard globally to develop plans that provide deeper skills, specializations and industry focus which will help Business Partners build out their capabilities to more effectively participate in high growth areas.

Which are the most popular products selling more in the market?

The three products which are receiving an overwhelmed response are:

a. The IBM Storwize V7000, which was launched this year, is designed to dramatically improve storage efficiency and costs while providing clients exceptional ease-of-use and performance in a midrange package. The V7000 marks the fifth significant storage innovation IBM had delivered through R&D in just a year, joining IBM's Scale-out Network Attached Storage (SONAS), IBM Information Archive, the IBM Long Term File System (LTFS) and IBM Easy Tier. Originally developed to enable IBM’s DS8000 family to prioritize data for high-performance workloads like analytics, Easy Tier is now being brought to midrange users via the Storwize V7000 to support the workloads they commonly use like transaction processing. With its low starting price and a well-integrated set of advanced software such as its external storage virtualization capabilities, the new system is very affordable to acquire and conducive for clients' future growth.

b. XIV Storage Systems: The IBM XIV Storage System is a next-generation high-end open disk storage system. Designed for exceptionally low Total Cost of Ownership, the XIV system aims to tackle almost every aspect related to owning, operating and maintaining a storage system, including backup and restore, acquisition, environmental, administration and downtime cost factors. Its ground-breaking architecture delivers these performance levels while innovatively leveraging the capacity and cost benefits of large SATA drives.

c. DS3500: It offers substantial performance and functionality starting at entry-level prices designed with key features and benefits for implementing storage consolidation and virtualization projects.      

Do you think Cloud Computing would have an impact on the current storage trends?

At the rate data is growing today, it is not surprising that cloud storage is also growing in popularity. The fastest-growing data is archive data, which is ideal for cloud storage given a number of factors, including cost, frequency of access, protection, and availability.

Cloud storage (or data storage as a service) is the abstraction of storage behind an interface where the storage can be administered on demand. Further, the interface abstracts the location of the storage such that it is irrelevant whether the storage is local or remote (or hybrid). Cloud storage infrastructures introduce new architectures that support varying levels of service over a potentially large set of users and geographically distributed storage capacity. Learn about the key architectural attributes of cloud storage architectures - from data protection and integrity to security and storage optimization.

What are the opportunities for channel partner?

As the world becomes more interconnected, instrumented and intelligent - and businesses become smarter, we have no choice but to stop perpetuating existing infrastructure inefficiencies, many of which are related to storage. And Information is driving this. In order to become smarter, governments must start relying on smarter information storage systems that can handle all of this information and manage it intelligently.

Let us take a look at some examples: There were over 2.5 m RFID tags sold in 2009. It is projected that over 900 million GPS devices will be sold annually by 2013. Text messages generate 400TB of data daily in the U.S. MRIs will generate Petabytes of data globally this year. Organizations of all sizes are under tremendous pressure to turn this data into insight, and grappling with how they are going to store and secure it all.  Hence, the opportunity for business partners is immense.

What kind of service support network do you have?

IBM has established a service delivery system to provide service and maintenance for its customers. IBM Managed Support Services is present in more than 160 countries, and has provided after-sales support services across the country for many years now. Drawing on an enormous pool of skills and experience, IBM Managed Support Services combines technological expertise with a deep understanding of each local market's expectations about customer service. IBM Managed Support Services provides and tailor the after-sales support infrastructure at a speed and cost that matches the business requirements, enabling faster time-to-market and greater flexibility. 

Yes, we have exclusive partners associated with IBM. Our partner community has always been a very integral part of our business as the mid-market business is completely driven by them. IBM plans are to strengthen their partner community as strong as we can by constantly training them through certification courses about our latest offerings. We also help them to move up the ladder from selling boxes to solutions and our goal is that our partner community should be perceived as consultants rather than sales representatives.

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Sanjay Patodia,
CEO,
Galaxy Office Automation 

I have been associated with IBM for around 10-11 years. We are the premium partner, which is the topmost in hierarchy. We almost cover most of the portfolios which IBM carries. We cover the entire STG portfolio. In the software group, we cover Tivoli and Lotus and a little bit of DB2. We are also a partner with IBM global finance. There are also other verticals like GTS (Global Technology Services). But the major contribution comes from IBM STG (Systems & Technology Group). 

IBM as a brand is one of the best brands to work with as far as the IT system integrators are concerned. It gives you a different level of prestige. It is really great to work with IBM for its quality products, business ethics, and the premium standard it maintains. 

Once you are associated with a brand like IBM and that too at this level, it automatically gets you that recognition and helps not only in building image within the market space as one of the leading system integrators but also helps in building your business, profitability and increasing portfolios of products and solutions.  

What we are today is because of IBM. When we initially started our journey way back in 1999, it was at a very basic level. We have grown year on year, month on month since the time we got associated with IBM. In 1999, we were a very small organization and what we are today is a very well-known reputed company. So, definitely IBM has played a very important role. Obviously, at times, things work differently. There was a stage in post 2007, when because of complexity of business year we had to get associated with other allied products or solutions which IBM doesn't cater to. As a policy, we do not deal in product categories which are in conflict with IBM, but even then we had to add lots of other things in our portfolio. 

Margins are hidden in sales and post sales. That is why I would say it is a combination. But obviously post-sales fetch better margins as compared to sales.

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Rajeev Mathur,
CEO,
Icon Integrated Services Private Limited

For this Rajasthan based IBM partner, the association has been very fruitful from day-1. We have been associated with IBM for over 12 years now. We were also given Warranty Service provider status for IBM in Rajasthan (the second company in the entire Rajasthan). The company was several times awarded as the BEST Business Partner status. Today Icon Integrated Services is selling and providing support to major IBM's corporate customers such as Reliance Infocomm, Airtel, Max Newyork Insurance, Tata AIG Insurance and now Tata Teleservices Ltd. 

IBM is a great brand and we sell almost the entire range of their products. We have had no concerns so far and IBM is always with us helping us build our brand in the market space. IBM is constantly supporting us by providing training, certification courses and latest offerings.  We are made to feel like consultants rather than representatives of IBM. Most of our profit is made post sales, though figures cant be shared.

We attribute almost 75% of our success to IBM.

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