Ramesh Mamgain, AVP India & SAARC, Commvault, 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?
While 2019 saw the vital integration of emerging technologies into the Indian IT ecosystem, 2020 started on a high note with almost all businesses adopting disruptive technologies like AI, cloud and IoT more aggressively than ever before. With IT budgets continuing to shrink in 2020, businesses will look to extract greater value from every technology product they purchase. Customer experience will become of utmost importance as channel partners will need to not only stand out, listen and understand their customer needs, but also deliver a solution that quantifies these needs while aligning with customers’ business goals.
Enterprises will increase their investment in cloud, infrastructure, and data analytics-based solution, but data fragmentation challenges will slow down their digital transformation initiatives and negatively impact business outcomes. Businesses will rely more and more on their channel partners to deliver a unified and comprehensive offering that can successfully consolidate data silos, enable data readiness while reducing risk and gain greater visibility and insight from their data.
What are the top three technology trends that channel community should be focusing on, and why?
The times that envelope us now, bring out a vital question – How can we reimagine our present to sail through our future? While we can’t predict the future, with the right technology tools at hand, partners can support their customers to keep the lights running, even in the time of adversity.
Cloud data strategy is now an essential part of the playbook: With entire economies being forced to switch to remote work culture, developing an overarching cloud data strategy will increasingly become a requirement to continue to be competitive for organisations. To optimise their cloud journeys while ensuring business continuity, companies will need to take the first steps towards getting better insight into their data in order to achieve maximum benefit from cloud deployment.
If there was ever a time for enterprises to rethink their secondary storage strategy, it is now: With plethora of data exploding on cloud storage from millions of endpoints, organisations are turning towards their secondary data to contribute to the growth and development of the business. In fact, many Indian organisations are already realising that it is time to go beyond traditional data protection and start focusing on how well they can leverage their secondary storage assets for both critical business continuity and risk prevention, and also to gain business insights and competitive advantage through more informed business decisions.
Achieving business readiness in a not-so-ready world: If anything that recent natural disasters have taught us, it is that enterprises need to always be ready – ready to recover from a sophisticated ransomware attack, ready to transfer backups of mission critical applications over to another cloud region or ready for unexpected power outages that require them to put their disaster recovery plans in motion. No wonder cloud disaster recovery is becoming top-of-mind for many organisations and rightly so.
Organisations who still have separate tools for on-premises backup and recovery, cloud backup and recovery or disaster recovery are the ones facing serious troubles keeping up with changing business needs. In today’s time, having the right disaster recovery solution could be the key differentiator in keeping the business up and running or going dark during an emergency.
What are the top channel directions your company has set for partners, and where should partners invest to be aligned with these directions?
‘Simplify, innovate and execute’ continues to be our mantra when it comes to working with our partners. The key objective for us is to make it easier and more beneficial for partners to do business with Commvault. We’re committed to our partner-first strategy and we continue to innovate our partner programme as per the evolving needs of our partners and their customers.
Having spent more than two decades developing a trusted, global partner network, our end goal is always on delivering success for our mutual customers. Today, digital businesses count heavily on their IT partners to deliver complex, real-world solutions for their business problems. To meet the evolving customer demands, the IT partners in turn need to work with vendors that not only provide innovative technologies, but that also are partner-led.
In 2020, we will to continue to enable our partners take a long term and financially beneficial journey together with Commvault while delivering the industry’s leading data software solutions to their customers.
