As part of its global restructuring strategy, Intel Security has announced crucial changes in its India leadership. Jagdish Mahapatra, who was leading India and SAARC operations of the company, has been elevated to the role of APAC Channel head.
Mahapatra will be reporting to Gavin Struthers, President, Asia Pacific for Intel Security Group. Intel Security has not yet revealed the name of the new India and SAARC head, but the company is expected to make an official announcement soon.
In his new role, Mahapatra will lead the Channel and Alliances business in the APAC region and he will be located in Singapore. “I am moving to the new role and I will be relocated to Singapore to lead APAC operations. We have already identified the new India head for Intel Security business and we will make official announcements in a couple of weeks”, Mahapatra said in an exclusive interaction with Channel Times.
Mahapatra said that in his new role he would focus on building a robust channel ecosystem of Intel Security in India. He said that the company intends to expand its channel base in the coming months and also associate with specialized solution partners.
“India is a very strong market for us in enterprise security. We are leading in market share, wallet share and mind share across all the segments. Our consumer business has also grown significantly over the last 2-3 years. But I feel that in India we still have a long way to go. As we intend to grow our entire commercial market, we want our distributors to play a key role to help us scale and reach out to more number of partners”, Mahapatra said.
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Mahapatra said that as the company is now moving from a product offering to being an outcome based player, major emphasis would be given for partner training, certification and specialization. The company has come up with certification of service delivery, which enables partners to become specialists in the specific service delivery.
“As we are moving from a product offering to becoming an outcome based player, we want our partners to deliver the promise of threat defense life cycle. All our programs and benefits are directed towards this vision. We want to start engaging with the lesser set of partners but want to go deeper with them. We want our partners to drive the entire commercial market”, he said.
Talking about the impact of the global restructuring of Intel Corporation on India, Mahapatra said that there was no direct impact of global changes on Intel Security India and the efforts were made to bring rationalization in the business.
“The global restructuring was done looking at where does the security market mature. Today, we are at a stage where customers are looking at better outcomes from the security investments they make. So our entire restructuring of product optimization was done looking at the future strategy of managing the threat defense life cycle of our customers. By navigating the whole life cycle of protect, detect and correct, we are able to partner with our peers in the industry and get our entire partner ecosystem together to deliver better outcomes”, Mahapatra said.