Q. What has been the traction of CA’s solution in the SMEs?
Sharma: CA Technologies has a high quality product portfolio for SMB segment which is designed by understating their pattern to evaluate, acquire and adapt the technology. While we offer useful, practical and distinguished technology, we also emphasize on packaging and licensing that make sense for customers and partners.
To give an example, CA Technologies ARCserve D2D, which caters to the business needs of SMBs by enabling extensive data protection and quickly recover from interferences and data loss before downtime negatively affects business operations or customer relations. The key point which is vital to SMBs is that the solution helps them recover, quickly and simply. SMB customers are able to easily install, use & maintain this solution without spending a large amount of resource. Since their IT resources are limited this solution works for them perfectly.
Also, we recently announced the launch of CA Nimsoft Monitor Snap. It is a product which is definitely of enterprise grade but also available free of cost for the small enterprises with up to 30 monitored devices at present which these customers were acquiring from open source.CA Monitor Snap comes as a definitive support for IT monitoring solution for organizations.
Q. This is considered to be expensive software IT management tool. How do you propose to demystify this with Snap.
Sharma: CA Nimsoft Monitor Snap caters to the needs of growing enterprises who do not afford the luxury of large resources. Additionally, It also offers large enterprise IT organizations and departmental IT service teams an opportunity to adopt best in class management technology without any large financial investments or risk. This enables them to more aggressively optimize the relation between capex and opex while offering better protection service delivery.
Q. How important is the channel ecosystem for CA’s growth in India?
Sharma: Partner ecosystem plays a crucial role for organizations to sell to the right customers. As partners work more closely with these customers, they offer advantage to organizations in terms of better market knowledge. This is especially important when you are working with SMB customers, who are spread across geographies and have different set technological requirements. This enables CA in aptly promoting their solutions through partners. Additionally, partners work as an extension for the organizations.
Q.What are the new partners program in the offing and with Nimsoft are you building up your existing channel base?
Sharma: We have premier, advanced and member partners. They are distinguished with respect to financial requirement, business plan and enablement requirements. We have seen huge successes around this from partners monetization and enablement (sales, presales and delivery) standpoint. With Nimsoft coming in, we are having incremental focus on Managed Service Providers as this is a key to success for Nimsoft business acquisition. They use it for their internal IT as well as for managing their customer base as well.
Q. Recently, CA has got its global CEO. What has been the commitment to the channel partners?
Sharma: At CA Technologies, partners form an important part of our ecosystem. Therefore, we undertake various initiatives for our channel partners. For instance, CA Technologies emphasizes on pre-sales executives from partner organizations as we are preparing them for opportunities to up-sell and cross-sell CA’s solutions to enterprises and in-turn amplify the revenue of the partner organizations. The company is also involving the pre-sales executives from tier-2 partner organizations with its team for architecting products and mapping the architecture to address business challenges of their customers.
Q. Could you highlight existing distribution and channel base in India?
Sharma: We revamped channel partner program to bring together the various areas within CA Technologies. This has significantly helped partners by making it easy to sell across the portfolio. The operational changes at CA include a new channel business model structure, with simplified partner levels (Premier and Advanced), and a new way of involving the CA direct sales force in new and existing enterprise accounts. Also our CA Global Partner Program caters to the changing needs of solutions providers, cloud and managed services providers (CSPs and MSPs), alliance partners and resellers.