Mumbai: With an exponential generation of data the data management has gained a lot of importance among enterprises. Today, data is the most critical asset of any organization. Hence organizations are struggling to manage a vast amount of data generating from various sources. Data growth is ranked in the top three challenges faced by IT. Channel partners can play a critical role in the entire data management process of an organization. However, many partners are yet to understand the potentials of data management and associated services. Here technology distributors such as TechnoBind come in a big way.
TechnoBind is a specialist distributor offering a hybrid distribution model placed synergistically between broad-based and niche distribution. TechnoBind, which is majorly focused in Data management and cloud technology, provides domain specific solutions to its partners and vendors. The distribution house aims to build a strong channel eco-system, enabling partners to deliver industry leading solutions for their customers.
In a candid interaction with Channel Times, Prashanth GJ, CEO, TechnoBind sheds light on various components of data management and associated services.
What trends do you observe in the technology distribution space in India? What is TechnoBind’s market position in this space?
Technology is driving a key change within enterprises—a power shift towards the business, from the traditional stakeholders of IT. And the ‘business-first’ approach in turn is paving way for the emergence of a whole lot of alternative technologies that are disruptive in nature. We believe that technology distribution has key role to play in this transition. TechnoBind is thus committed to bring these emerging and disruptive technologies to the Indian marketplace. Our ability to focus on alternative technologies has ensured us significant market share in the segments we operate.
What business potentials do you see in the data management and the associated domains in India?
Data is the very lifeblood of an organization today. At the same time, organizations are struggling to manage the exponential growth in data. Data growth is ranked in the top three challenges faced by IT. Presently, the size of the data is ten times more than what it used to be a decade ago. Besides, business users are demanding better SLAs from their IT dept. Data is now residing more on mobile devices like laptops and smartphones, which means the probability of loss of data at the end-point is much higher.
Data management is thus becoming a huge market. According to the study by MarketsandMarkets, Enterprise Data Management Market will be worth $105 billion by 2020. Indian enterprises too have realized the need for employing data management solutions, and we see a tremendous potential in this segment.
While Data management is a wide term, which are the key components of it that are fueling the growth of the industry?
Today, data management is one of the major problems faced by most of the IT managers. This abundance of data creates the need for data management solutions, which can closely manage, monitor, process, summarize and secure company’s data. The key aspects of data management solutions include securing, protecting and storing the data.
Challenges arising out of adoption of mobility and cloud are one of the biggest drivers. Right from accessing the data on the cloud from multitude of devices including mobile devices, securing the data that is residing on the cloud and backing up data that is there on varied access points – all these form a part of the data management stack.
Additionally, our partners are seeing great demand around some of the unique aspects of data management. Secure data management solutions like preventing data loss due to abuse or accident, protecting confidentiality of data by having a process of checks and measures, timely backups, keeping an eye on redundancy of data etc are a few examples.
What are the business opportunities for channel partners in the area of Data Management? What kind of value chain TechnoBind is creating for channel partners in India?
Organizations today want accurate, and reliable information access. Their data management challenges need to be addressed from an ‘always on’ perspective. Today information requirements are expanding at an enormous pace; organizations simply cannot piece together their data sources randomly. They require a strong data management system to ensure that data is transformed into valuable and actionable information. While this presents a great opportunity for the partner ecosystem, they often find it challenging to tailor the right solution for the diverse requirements of their customers.
What we bring to the table is our strong partnerships with the right vendors in this space. Our focus is not only on joining hands with the market leaders, we have tie-ups with companies that have the most innovative and disruptive offerings. We have also started a community forum where in we are connecting a platform for exchanging ideas, putting up queries and getting them answered. We are seeing good traction on this, with many of partners already participating in this forum and sharing knowledge and thoughts.
According to you, what expertise partners need to grasp to create their niche in this segment? What are the pain points of partners in Data management field?
I think our industry has been grappling with issues such as the lack of technology knowledge, funds, ROIs and access to digital talent. This is applicable to the channel community as well. Implementation of new and emerging technologies is a challenge for both the business as well as the channel. It’s critical for us to address these challenges for the growth and development of partners.
A recent study by Gartner says that more than $1 trillion in IT spending will be directly or indirectly affected by the shift to cloud by 2020. What role do you see for partners in a cloud-enabled environment?
Today, Indian companies are shifting to cloud infrastructure and it has become a reality. We see a spike in the number of organizations that choose cloud for backup and DR. Cloud, especially backup and DR as a service, presents a huge opportunity for the channel partners in the market.
This year, cloud and associated services will be another big area of focus for us and our partners. We are building a set of services around cloud along with our partners, which will help them accelerate their customers’ cloud adoption.
TechnoBind has recently announced partnerships with American Megatrends India (AMI) and Seclore. What is your go to market plans for these collaborations?
We are exclusive distributor for AMI’s data storage product StorTrends and will be distributing Seclore’s Enterprise Digital Rights Management (EDRM) solutions. We are looking forward to leverage on the market opportunity emerging out of the radical shift that is happening in the storage and data-centric security solutions market. We believe that the lower-end segment of this market is a very large one. We want to focus on customers who are looking for cost-effective solutions, but are not ready to compromise on features or functionality.
Our goal is to target our potential customers with our ‘use-case’ based approach, where we pick a specific business problem/use-case and understand the set of customers to whom these technology solutions would be relevant. Then we impress upon our partners about this approach and jointly go behind these customers. We have been able to showcase specific values to our partners and customers through this strategy.
Apart from strategic tie ups, what are the other key thrust areas of TechnoBind for the year 2017?
We will continue to focus on data and related domains through relevant partnerships. Cloud and related services will be another crucial market for us in 2017.