Vikas Bhonsle, CEO, Crayon Software Experts 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?
From winning unprecedented awards to record-breaking financial results, 2019 has been quite the whirlwind at Crayon. We achieved an exponential topline growth of 72 per cent and enhanced our customer base by two folds. To address the growing demand and to drive our next set of business goals, we recently expanded our leadership team.
As we head further into 2020, we expect more and more disruption in technologies, market demands and channel community. There is no second thought on the positive impact of the above technologies on the IT Industry and beyond. With a mission to help customers and partners navigate a complex, hazardous technology landscape, Crayon works closely with its stakeholders to release value from existing and new data by utilising newer technologies.
What are the top three technology trends that channel community should be focusing on, and why?
Newer technologies such as AI and IoT are paving their ways into industrial and consumer-oriented companies. Technology innovations are moving at a speedier pace than expected. The year 2019 was more on the lines of laying the groundwork for these massive tectonic shifts in the IT industry. We shall all agree to the fact that the revolution in digital space has encouraged and led organisations to innumerable innovations and improved business outcomes. These new innovations are becoming more mature and are driving advancements and creating new paradigms across all sectors in an interconnected world. Here are top trends channel community should watch out for:
- AI-driven developments: Technologies like AI and ML are empowering almost all industries and organisations of all sizes with different impact and business value extraction. In the coming year, AI is expected to bring drastic changes in many aspects like organisations, business models, innovation, and cultures.
- Augmented analytics: The rising need and importance of data has paved a way for many of next generation technologies and data processing tools. By expanding traditional business intelligence systems with new actionable insights, automating existing lines of business process, and enhancing existing products with intelligent services, augmented analytics is becoming an exciting and disruptive technology with a promising future.
- Edge computing solutions: To help eliminate drawbacks like latency, cost and bandwidth in cloud computing, companies are moving towards edge computing – an alternative approach to the cloud environment. Edge computing can lower the dependency on the cloud and can simultaneously improve the speed of data processing as a result. With numerous applications in smart cities, autonomous vehicles, AR and VR, and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), the future of edge computing, looks bright.
What are the top channel directions your company has set for partners, and where should partners invest to be aligned with these directions?
The world is fast embracing the need to go digital and as a result ‘cloud-first’ is a strategy that is inherently embedded in most customer organisations. Across market segments, customers are adopting cloud and next generation technologies and hence there are opportunities galore for the channel partners to reinvent themselves and be successful in this digitally transforming environment. A few important things to look out for will be:
- Focus on cloud platform for end-to-end channel management: The need of the hour is to have cloud platform that does not need investments in infrastructure and integration, but which can out of the box and support all current and expected future requirements.
- AI will need to increasingly become a de facto requirement: As more data becomes available, coming from the IoT devices and with the line of business having less financial capital, AI will start to supplement existing resources to make recommendations. Eventually companies that use AI effectively will uncover prospects and grow margins, market share and returns on investment at a higher pace than those organisations who don’t. This will reinforce the cycle and further support to expanding AI footprint to drive process automation and decision optimisation in the channel community.
- Expanding the Crayon channel ecosystems and making Investments in the partners’ marketing enablement technology: The current adoption is to prioritise an ecosystem-based distribution, where most of the partners involved are not doing transactional business, but influencing the buying pattern and market demands such that all partners can communicate and bring in the brand value to a scale, much accurately and effectively. We are making significant investments in helping channel partners build the marketing muscle to build their brands and be successful. Solutions for Channel Marketing Automation and Partner Relationship Management will experience accelerated growth.
