“SUSE’s ambition and targets are realistic”

Venkatesh Swaminathan,
Country Head,
The Attachmate Group India

Over the last two years, the adoption of SUSE amongst enterprises has grown rapidly in India.  Numerous banks are adopting SUSE to handle core banking applications. Also, lots of SAP migrations from UNIX are happening on SUSE and it is increasing its customer base by almost double. SUSE is growing by over 25 per cent YoY. The Linux market share is growing at about 17 per cent, and SUSE is increasing by 25 per cent. 

SUSE after being acquired by Novel

SUSE has seen actually an increase in customers after the acquisition. As far as the quarter results are concerned, SUSE is announcing better results every time. It is enjoying year-over-year increase in revenue shares by almost 22 per cent, which is actually beyond expectations. Venkatesh Swaminathan, Country Head, The Attachmate Group India, says, “Our customer base since 2012 has been going up by at least 100s, and we have seen roughly 30–33-per cent increase in the customer base, which we are adding year on year. Presently, we are just double as customer base as we were in 2012. I mean the amount of growth that we saw is growing rapidly. The amount of partner ecosystem from India’s perspective has grown by over 200 per cent in two years. There are close-to 50–55 per cent partners who are actively deploying and selling SUSE platform.”

Expansion plans in India

The amount of partner base that SUSE is seeing is expanding continuously. Moreover, the amount of training and certification that SUSE is doing has also grown three-fold. SUSE already has a training and certification centre in Bangalore. The amount of training and certification that SUSE achieved last year was close-to 12,000. And this year, it is aiming to touch 18,000. Presently, SUSE has about 17–18 training partners across the country, who are offering training courses to students and enterprises. The Attachmate Group has kick-started with one of the Indian universities in South India, which is offering the SUSE certification in their curriculum in BE and ME. The students who will pass out from that university will be SUSE-certified persons. This program will immediately cater to 300 students in BE and 100 in ME. SUSE is expecting to finish the first initiative in April this year. This way, right from the college, students will be SUSE- ready.

Looking at 2014, SUSE will invest more on people facing partners.  Presently, it has the sales force and the pre-sales force around the enterprise segment. However, now it will make investment around people or specifically on partners like partner managers and channel managers. 

Initiatives for Channel Partners

SUSE basically offers SAP channel partners a special software to help them deploy SUSE offerings in the SAP environment; SUSE gives them pre-sales support as well as online academy program of ten weeks where they get a chance to learn remotely and also offer webinars for them. 

In India, The Attachmate Group has 300-plus channel partners who are working on SUSE, Novell and netIQ. Partners who are working specifically on SUSE solutioins, SUSE cloud, SUSE enterprise and SUSE virtualization are growing tremendously this year. In Q2, SUSE has announced a specific incentive scheme for both customers and partners. With the selling of around 200 server licences, the partners can earn close-to 20–25-per cent margin. In this particular scheme, SUSE has witnessed around 25 partner registrations in 15 days. Venkatesh Swaminathan further adds that they have added about 70-odd customers and around 22–25 new active partners with that particular scheme. 

Message for the partners

Venkatesh Swaminathan, Country Head, The Attachmate Group India, adds, “The market is going open source, the customers are looking at not being dependent on proprietary-based solutions. If partners will not catch on the wave of having enterprise adapting open source or having data centers moving on to the cloud, they are going to lag far behind. This is not specifically for SUSE, but this is a kind of technology which is readily available, which is far easier for them to deploy and sustain for a customer and they can make a good amount of revenue by using this particular technology.” 

satinder@varindia.com