Rajarshi Bhattacharyya, Country Head, SUSE India, shares the company’s channel strategies for 2019
Key highlights 2018 and opportunities for 2019
2018 was a good year for SUSE. As a company, we announced back in last July that SUSE will become a fully independent company from Micro Focus, as we partner EQT a growth investor to continue and even accelerate our momentum as a leading provider of enterprise-grade, open source software-defined infrastructure and application delivery solutions. In India, our growth was also evident. We continue to maintain our leadership in manufacturing while growing our presence in BFSI, and private enterprise as well as public sector business opportunities also kept us busy last year. On the channel front, we have recruited over 100 partners in India in 2018 and more than 14 partners have become accredited partners of SUSE.
In 2019, we will expect to see channel investing more on open source technologies to support the emergence of two new paradigms – software defined infrastructure and application delivery platform – underpinned by customer’s digital transformation journey. There will also be greater adoption of IoT devices and upsurge of big data.
Top tech trends for channel community
- Software Defined Approach: In today’s business environment, companies look for digital transformation as a key strategic priority to change organisational processes and capabilities in order to deliver values to customers. Adoption of OpenStack and Software-Defined Storage (SDS) will be the key component as industry moves toward Software Defined Everything (SDx). We see Ceph will help change the economics of cloud storage and containerised or cloud-native applications like Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry will become more mainstream than ever.
- Internet of Things (IoT) and Edge Computing: There will be 26 billion IoT devices by 2020, according to a Gartner report, with IoT spending reaching nearly US$ 1.4 trillion by 2021, based on a IDC report. What’s interesting to know is that many IoT devices are using embedded Linux. This makes perfect sense when you are looking for a real-time OS that is simple, lightweight, lean on resources and low cost. OpenStack Cloud e.g. is a proven popular platform for a distributed cloud model when one is moving processing and compute to the edge of the IoT network.
- Big data and analytics: Big data analytics is another huge technology trend that can’t be ignored. Big data and analytics are forcing organisations to think carefully about storage variety, volume and velocity. Interestingly a quarter of all OpenStack cloud deployments are being used to run big data or data mining workloads. Ceph is the open source software-defined storage solution that is helping to solve this problem.
Channel directions for partners
SUSE’s new channel program is based on “Technology” certification. Partners need to get certified on SUSE products. Based on their certification, they will get “tier uplift” which will enable them to attain various channel benefits associated with their partner status. This will foster quicker adoption of technology and enhance the potential of cash in on the service revenue associated with product sales.
We believe channel partners should invest more on technology adoption in order stay relevant in the market. They must possess the relevant skillsets to partner businesses in their digital transformation initiatives.
