IceWarp sees a big opportunity in India’s enterprise market

IceWarp had achieved a whopping 200% business growth in the last financial year. With a strong understanding of the Indian market dynamics and sensitivity, IceWarp growth was backed by significant deals in the enterprise sector coming from India. Sharing more about the company’s performance, Adam Paclt, Global CEO, IceWarp and Pramod Sharda, CEO (India & ME) – IceWarp talks to VARINDIA of how they feel they are different from their competitors - 

What are the key trendsthat are going to drive the IT industry and how decisively is IceWarp aligning with these trends?
It is crucially important for the IT Industry, especially for our customers and companies how they effectively manage them, effectively search for them, and effectively work with data, in terms of artificially intelligent & machine learning. So if you ask me what trends, then AI and machine learning are going to be the biggest trends. 

Talking about IceWarp, we maintain email, Calendar, contact, data, documents and chats in just a single platform. So when we have the data, we need to understand how effectively use it to drive growth for our customers. And I think this is one of the biggest trends in the market today. 

What are the key differentiation/benefits that IceWarp offer compared to G-Suite & Microsoft Office?
The biggest differentiator is in its user interface; IceWarp is a Single environment and working on a single platform and application. We have one simple user interface in which you can click through yourdocuments, Team chat, Voice Chat and Calendar in it.You can work in multiple windows simultaneously specially in a market where vendors have multiple interface. So this is a big differentiator for us. 

Another big differentiator is that Microsoft or Google does not have their datacenter in India, but IceWarp has its datacenter here. Which means that we started with our trust in Indian market and we went ahead with that and this gives us faster reliability and easy access to the data which is important. We are also able to give our customers options; they can choose whether to have on-premises or in cloud. India has a very different kind of scenario, where large organizations would not want to go on cloud. So IceWarp gives an advantage where companies can decide whether they want to book a Cloud or want to be on premises or a mix of both. If a customer wants to be on cloud and buy mailboxes, they are able to augment the entire capacity and redistribute it as per the work load, like if a senior employee needs more mail space and a junior employee needs less, they can do it while using IceWarp. This also leads to rise in the Total cost of ownership. 

What are the key role of C-Level executives in today’s digital era and how technology has changed the market for them?
IceWarp allows enterprises to effectively share data, collaborate, irrespective of which time zone they are working from. Any C-level executives would need a technology like us for better productivity and to run their daily business operations effectively.  Our product is suitable for companies of any size – from small to mid and large enterprises. We work in a very competitive market segment and so have to react to things very fast by taking hundreds of decisions in a day.
 

 
How IceWarp is redefining the collaboration market? 
We need the channel and resellers to reach our customers. We see our partner ecosystem not just to sell our products but also to teach our potential customers of how to use new technologies.Vice versa, we are also getting a feedback from our customers of what new we can bring out in our products. So we are continuously learning of how to improve our technology. We are able to shift our priorities very effectively the way our customers want. So channel for us is very important, but it is not only about sales but also constant learning and building a relationship with our customers. 

How long have you been in the Indian Market? 
We have been in this market since2014, commercially we launched our operation by September of that year. It is almost a 3 and a half years in this market now. We are a Czech Republican country and we Czechs see India as one of the great potential in a world.

As of date, we have dedicated partners in South (Bengaluru, Chennai) and West (Maharashtra, Gujarat) and they are helping us to grow in India.IceWarp encourages its partners to sell the product and we take the full ownership of pre-sales, implementation, migration and support.This helped us to move faster in the market. So proactively we give them margins but we took the entire responsibility on our shoulders so that they can have successful clients. We have partners today with us who have been associated with us for last 2 years. 

IceWarp does not follow a distribution model but we have a partner structure where we have partners and resellers and we sell directly to them. We had faced many challenges – the first challenge was to convince the partner; because when we first came to India the first question was who all our customers were. IceWarp is a global company that has a large customer base across the globe but still in India we had to struggle to sign our first partner.