A leading provider of data protection and recovery software, Arcserve, has undergone multiple name changes and acquisitions (came to life as Cheyenne Software in 1990; acquired by CA Technologies in 1996; then struck out as a separate entity named Arcserve under the ownership of Merlin Equity Partners in 2014) in the past 25 years. Today, in the digital era, it is seeking to establish its product as a comprehensive offering across cloud, virtual and physical environments. Nikhil Korgaonkar, Regional Sales Director India & SAARC, Arcserve shares with CRN, on how the company plans to leverage the channel for growth
What are some of the key initiatives planned for 2018?
The 3 strategic pillars for Arcserve in 2018 will be greater focus on cloud based offerings, optimizing customer experience and making significant investments in our partner program to better enable our channel partners.
How significant will be the role of the channel in building the company’s growth story?
Arcserve is a channel-centric company with a robust partner base in India who chose us for some of their most prestigious accounts in the country. We offer the best incentives in our space to our partners and work very closely with them and customers to bring in value for all the stakeholders in the ecosystem. We also continuously invest in training new and existing partners on our suite of offerings. We have some of the largest distributors in the country who help us expand base with new partners. Indian SIs are the second pillar for expansion. For our recently announced UDP Appliances in India, we have a new set of partners who are seeing some of the most lucrative incentives schemes. Later this year, we will officially launch our revamped partner program that will feature exciting incentives& rebates for our key partners.
How much focus will be on building skill-sets of partners? What sort of efforts being put in this endeavor?
As a part of our partner outreach plan, we regularly conduct road shows & product launch events in major cities across India. Partner enablement continues to be a key focus for us hence we continuously invest in training new and existing partners on our suite of offerings through classroom and digital platforms. This year, we’re planning to further strengthen the pre-sales & technical team of our partners through hands on training so that they can ably demonstrate the strength of Arcserve offerings in data protection domain & its ease to use to our prospective customers. We’ve committed additional investments in this year for Arcserve Partner portal bringing in new modules& self-paced trainings for partners.
In this era of digital disruption, how do you envisage the role of partners evolving with the changing market dynamics?
CIOs are challenged by an unprecedented growth of data. According to experts, trends like mobility, IoT, social & digitalisation seem to fuel it further. Today organisations are spending a lot of money, time and efforts on Data Protection. It is crucially important for companies to meet customer expectations, maintain high level of productivity, refrain from financial loss, as well as comply with regulatory requirements. Such organisations depend heavily on their IT partners for solving these challenges. Such evolving scenarios will lead to partners playing a key role by adding a long-term business value to these organisations through their domain expertise& having deep understanding of customer’s business. For OEMs, partners will play a key role in managing customer experience.
What are your expectations from the partners?
Customer centric approach with deep understanding of customer pain points is a basic expectation. Partners also have to evolve themselves with newer solutions that are simple to implement, robust and affordable.
What’s the bigger message for the channel community?
Business Continuity /Data protection is one of the fastest growing markets in the world. Businesses are leaning on backup & recovery and security vendors to protect from downtime, data loss, ransomware, and to enable compliance. Arcserve with its 100 % channel centric approach gives its partners unique capabilities to address their customer’s pain points related to data protection. Upcoming launch of our revamped partner program will further reinforce our commitment to the long-term success of our partner community. In addition, to that our partners will continue to benefit from compelling incentives aimed at boosting their bottom line, helping them achieve solid YOY growth rate.
