Sanjai Gangadharan, Regional Director, SAARC, A10 Networks, shares the company’s channel strategies for 2020
What have been the key highlights of 2019 and how 2020 will be an important year for the IT channel industry?
A10 Networks EMEA/SAARC has experienced channel growth in 2019. It was a significant year in terms of partner engagement as we onboarded more than 10 new partners in the region. These partners were focused on providing security solutions – a segment of the market that A10 Networks wanted to penetrate. Enablement and trainings were done for the sales and technical teams of these partners, and ever since then, we have started field engagements. With the help of our channel partner ecosystem, we enable our customers to benefit from the agility of a hybrid cloud environment, without replacing their legacy infrastructure, all while ensuring their data is secure.
In 2020, we look to building this further and opening new doors with both application and service providers. Through these partnerships, we aim to build traction for the Secure Service Mesh solution and target customers across a variety of verticals. Our channel partners will play a fundamental role in A10 Networks’ go-to-market strategy. The channel community will provide business continuity by delivering security services to ensure applications and cloud platforms are secure and performing at optimal levels.
What are the top three technology trends that channel community should be focusing on, and why?
The channel industry will begin to see benefits and opportunities by embracing the top three technology trends that will drive a paradigm shift in the way they do business.
- The adoption of cloud and emerging technologies with gather pace in the channel industry: With customers increasingly adopting disruptive technologies, in 2020, the channel community is focusing on digital disruption to stay ahead of the competitive curve
- Everything-as-a-service will transform business models: Businesses are slowly shifting from traditional purchasing of software and hardware services to flexible consumption models The pay-per-use model allows businesses to save expenses, increases operational agility and business efficiency, leading to revenue growth
- More consolidations will occur, as the industry moves forward: From small deals to large acquisitions, vendors acquiring one another to expand their product offerings will increase. Channel partners will have to invest in new skills to deal with the market complexity.
What are the top channel directions your company has set for partners, and where should partners invest to be aligned with these directions?
A10 Networks is 100 per cent committed to selling through channel partners. As a core element of our company, our partners help our constant quest to deliver innovation for our customers. Our partner programmes encourage partners to deliver solutions which are aimed at revitalising the market. Our Affinity Global Partner Programme is designed to foster growth of channel partners who are leaders in the marketplace. Through this programme, we invest heavily in the development and training of our partners in order to ensure high levels of expertise, both from a technical and sales perspective. Partners can thus leverage our existing capabilities to meet the varying customer needs. Our partner community in India is built to provide high levels of pre- and post-sales expertise to ensure customers maximise their investment in A10 Networks solutions, and achieve their business goals.
