Rajarshi Bhattacharyya, SUSE India Country Manager, 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?
Last year, our certified partners grew by 56 per cent worldwide as a result of a targeted recruitment programme. This growth can also be attributed to the increased adoption of open source technologies from customers across industries like BFSI, government and manufacturing. We are seeing channel partners becoming more aware of the benefits that open source can bring to their customers as many also offer their customers solutions with add-on hardware and services based on open source technologies.
With the current economic uncertainty brought by COVID-19, businesses will need to look for ways to sustain. Together with our channel partners, SUSE looks to help enterprises overcome their challenges by offering open source technologies and solutions that are cost-effective with no vendor lock-in and flexibility to innovate and respond to market faster.
What are the top three technology trends that channel community should be focusing on, and why?
Companies will continue to look for ways to transform and innovate themselves in order to ride the wave of the current crisis and remain sustainable in their business. During this global pandemic where social distancing is implemented, consumption of cloud-based services is increasing. We are working closely with our channel partners to address the market needs for on-premise, public or hybrid cloud deployment.
Open source cloud application platform that allows companies to scale with agility, reduce complexity to address rapid application delivery, and most importantly continue to innovate without vendor lock-in while addressing cost efficiency, can become part of IT stack to help accelerate digital transformation within the enterprise.
The world will continue to consume a lot of data – unstructured and structured. To deal with massive data across organisation and turning data into business values, software defined storage such as Ceph-storage not only provides customers the freedom of choice with no vendor lock-in, but also the flexibility to scale infinitely at a fraction of the cost of traditional storage or hyper-converged infrastructure.
What are the top channel directions your company has set for partners, and where should partners invest to be aligned with these directions?
SUSE is building out an extended partner ecosystem that leverages the unique capabilities and expertise of our partners across the ecosystem. We’re always interested to hear from partners with vertical expertise or those who are interested in developing end-to-end solutions powered by open source technologies to work with us and the other partners in our network.
We believe that this level of open and cross collaboration will help our mutual customers accelerate innovation while ensuring they have freedom of choice in technology adoption and vendor selection. Our updated partner programme is expected to be unveiled in early fall.
