Anupam Nagar, Senior Director, India Alliances and Channels, Hitachi Vantara shares how the company is intensifying its focus on partners and profitability
What have been the key highlights of 2019 and how will 2020 be an important year for the IT channel industry?
2019 has been an amazing growth year for Hitachi Vantara in India and SAARC. We have increased our market share in various segments, won major marquee deals and increased our coverage and expansion across the region with active help from all our partners. With the base that has been built this year and with several innovations in our product portfolio, we are confident that 2020 will be another year of growth for us and our partners.
At Hitachi Vantara we are extremely proud of how closely we are aligning our technology efforts with our key partners, both on the technology side as well as the Go-To-Market side. We have a strong ecosystem of partners in India who can take our solutions, integrate them with their IPs and accelerate the rollout of IoT solutions locally and support the government’s vision of digitally empowered citizens. Hitachi-Vantara’s market focus is helping customers to improve their business outcomes with innovative tech solutions that will not only change the way companies operate, but also how the world works.
We have highly structured academy-led training courses and certification programs for our partners. Hitachi Vantara recently introduced its entry-level storage system, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G130, for the India market. VSP G130 is an extension of the hybrid-flash VSP G series systems that supports smaller data centre modernisation initiatives and provides agile data infrastructure with minimal costs for SMBs, remote or branch offices that need local backup capabilities, Direct Attached Storage (DAS) environments, and simplified virtual server deployments. Clubbed with the recent launches of new family of storage – VSP 5000 family and VSP 990 family and a slew of digital serrvices offerings, we have a vast portfolio that our partners can take to their customers and win big.
Can you tell us about the top three technology trends that the channel community should be betting on and why?
By 2020, an estimated 50 billion physical objects will be consuming, generating and communicating data: thus, turning the world into a giant data centre. The digital transformation of businesses, the advent of 3rd platform technologies and rapid digitisation of services is leading this significant increase in the creation and consumption of data. The demand for storage solutions will continue to rise rapidly always. Ever since the COVID-19 crisis started, businesses have been scrambling to get their workforce online from wherever they are safe, putting immense pressure on IT managers to make data and applications available securely and reliably.
In the foreseeable future, these are significant opportunities for our channel partners to build their business by developing a long-term business strategy, skills and complementary services capabilities that will enable them to win.
Our partner ecosystem is highly critical to our success. As we look to broaden our ecosystem expertise and deepen our cloud, analytics, and IoT services and offerings, we will continue to expand our solution-capable partner ecosystem to accelerate co-creation and innovation and to help our customers fully leverage their data to drive extraordinary outcomes.
What are the top channel directions your company has set for your partners and where should they invest to be aligned with these directions?
No company on the planet has a combination of IT and OT expertise, along with the existing technology assets and domain expertise as Hitachi. With more than 119,00 patents, an annual R&D budget of US$ 2.9 billion and more than 2,700 employees dedicated to innovation, our solutions provide superior data management, data governance, data mobility, data analytics and IoT technologies. Hitachi Vantara is a dataops company. We remain committed to innovating in our infrastructure portfolio to help our customers manage their data while we chart a path into the world of analytics and IoT to maximise data residing at the edge. We have a stated position of acquiring #1 position in the enterprise segment of the external storage market and gaining market share in the mid-market and mid-sized enterprise segment. Our new product announcements and investments in the partner ecosystem, give us a clear sight of the goal. We expect our partners to grow together with us on skill, coverage and hence revenue and branding.
Our vision is to create a self-sustaining, value selling and profitable ecosystem of partners which forms the crux of our channel strategy in India. In order to achieve this, we encourage our partners to invest in skilled solution selling resources and provide deep and meaningful engagement with their customers using their reach and complementary services and skills. We have significant and attractive investments lined up for our partners who drive our growth in midrange and mid-market segments in terms of focused marketing, tele-calling and enablement trainings apart from commercial incentives.
