Anupam Nagar, Channels & Alliance, Director, Hitachi Vantara, India, shares the company’s channel strategies for 2019
Key highlights 2018 and opportunities for 2019
Looking back, 2018 witnessed a wider acceptance of digital transformation in India, with enterprises actively taking charge of the ecosystem in laying out strategies that directly aligned to their transformation journey. The channel community across industries, including banking, telecom, manufacturing, ITeS, healthcare and government sectors, adopted differentiated ways to address market gaps by leveraging advanced tools and processes to better understand their customers.
While the traditional channel ecosystem will continue to evolve, 2019 will be an important year for companies looking to expand business horizons to sustain in the industry. We feel that companies will shift from becoming ‘data generating’ to ‘data powered’ organisations. Data curation will be a big focus for channel partners looking to truly understand the meaning of data. Technologies like AI and ML will take control of unstructured data sources – such as text, video, audio, images, social media, clickstreams and log files – to allow leaders to drive business decisions through the power of data. Organisations will be looking for orchestration capabilities like Hitachi Vantara’s Pentaho’s data integration and machine learning orchestration tools, to streamline the machine learning workflow and enable smooth team collaboration.
Top tech trends for channel community
With increasing data requirements, the channel community will look at extending enterprise boundaries to the edge – where both data and users reside, and multiple clouds converge. Public cloud will provide the connection between edge and core data centres creating the need for a hybrid cloud approach based on open REST or S3 App integration. Edge computing is expected to be less of a trend and more of a necessity, as companies seek to cut costs and reduce network usage. The role of data centres will become more automated, with API-based architecture playing an important role to draw information in from various sources and create a more intelligent solution.
Channel directions for partners
As a company, we have a comprehensive portfolio of co-creation capabilities and proven methodologies with our established collaboration processes. We strongly believe that market transitions and opportunities can be delivered by companies that are focused on expanding channels to reach customers. With digital transformation playing such an integral role in today’s industry, both partners and channel are ready to bring about significant changes to their go-to-market strategy to stay ahead of their market peers.
For 2019, Hitachi Vantara is working closely with its partners to help them provide our customers with industry’s best solutions and tools for storing, curating and generating intelligence out of their data – both structured and unstructured. We plan to provide our partners access to untapped segments and solutions, leading to a good growth in their business and avenues to add tremendous value to their customers’ digital transformation journeys.
