Sanjay Zadoo, Country Head – Channel Business, Vertiv India, shares the company’s channel strategies for 2019
Key highlights of 2018 and opportunities for 2019
Emerging technologies are reshaping the future of businesses across the globe and 2018 witnessed a major uptake towards digital transformation. The latest technologies gaining momentum in the market have been AI, IoT, 5G, robotics and Edge Computing as businesses begin to recognise innovative deployments that can be used to enhance efficiency and make businesses operations simpler.
From a data centre standpoint, Edge Computing was one of the leading trends where we experienced some of the innovations taking place as companies began to understand the importance of it with increasing proliferation of Industrial IoT (IIoT) devices. This transition and adoption will be a big part of IT strategies even in 2019. As per recent a report by Statistics, market opportunity for Edge Computing is expected to be at US$ 20,495.24 million by 2026.
Top technology trends for channel community
Edge Computing will continue to be the epicentre of innovation in the data centre space in 2019, with focus on advanced intelligence programs to simplify operations and bridge the skill gap. Some of the leading trends for this year would be – simplifying the edge, AI, workforce revolution.
For most of the businesses in India, Edge has become a critical part of their digital ecosystem. Intelligent infrastructure systems with machine learning capabilities working in tandem with cloud-based analytics are fundamentally changing the way we think about Edge Computing and Edge services. A smarter, simpler, more self-sufficient edge of the network is converging with broader industry and consumer trends, including IoT and the looming rollout of 5G networks, to drive powerful, low-latency computing closer to the end-user. This will result in a more robust, efficient edge of the network with enhanced visibility and self-healing capabilities requiring limited active management. We are seeing increasing use cases of Edge Computing in retail, warehousing, manufacturing and healthcare space. We at Vertiv are aligning and developing solutions to meet these expectations of customers and we expect our partners to be ready to take these developments to the customers.
A recent Gartner survey showed that 59 per cent of organisations are still gathering information to build their AI strategies, while the remainder have already made progress in piloting or adopting AI solutions. AI has become an inseparable part of most of the businesses across the globe, bringing in advanced technology, providing businesses a competitive edge and better results in terms of performance. Leading technology companies have already started to move their AI models into production, where they are running operations to enhance decision-making and provide forward-looking intelligence to people in every function. In 2019, several non-technology companies will also start building AI capabilities which will see the focus shift from “AI strategy” to “AI-driven” results for real business impact.
In 2019, organisations are expected to change the way they hire data centre personnel, moving away from traditional training programs, towards more agile, job-specific instruction with an eye toward the Edge. Businesses will turn to intelligent systems such as AI and machine learning to simplify operations, preserve institutional knowledge, and enable more predictive and efficient service as well as maintenance. With these changes, customers will expect the IT infrastructure products to have self-diagnosis and predictive service capabilities.
Channel direction for partners
Vertiv considers India as an important market as the region holds lot of opportunities with the ongoing digital transformation. The company looks forward to growing with its partner network as it plays a critical role in our go-to-market strategy. We invest in educating our partners on technology applications and set a direction for them to approach prospective or existing customers.
It’s important for this group to have complete insight about its customers’ businesses by spending more time with them to understand their business needs and challenges. This helps in building stronger alliances in the long term. The second direction is to build the right capabilities which are aligned to the newer technology developments in the ecosystem.
Customer today is more informative and expects OEM and the partner to recommend a solution which integrates it in heterogenous environment. This demands a lot of consultative skills and knowledge at the partner’s end to anticipate future scope and suggest a comprehensive solution.
