As we bid goodbye to 2018 and ring in the New Year with much fervour, it’s time to see what’s in store for the Indian channel community in 2019.
But before we get into the growth areas for the partners, it is really important to understand the business opportunities the Indian enterprises are creating for the channel partners. For example, Mahindra & Mahindra has launched an on-demand tractor service; ICICI Bank has introduced an instant digital credit offering with Paytm; HDFC Bank has created milk ATMs for milk producers; ICICI Lombard has replaced manual inception with AI-based processing, enabling immediate approval and policy issuance.
While these are just a few examples of digital transformation journeys, there are many more such stories in the market that has and would create more opportunities for partner firms who are reinventing themselves in the digital era. Furthermore, these use cases clearly show that apart from traditional areas, the solution partners can also build solutions for unexplored, but big markets.
Having said that, it’s really heartening to see the readiness of the channel partners who are betting big on digitaltechnologies to accelerate their business growth for 2019 and beyond. The way organisations are relooking at their business and IT consumption model, partners offering services around cloud will play a very critical role. Even the ‘cloudification of storage’, wherein the enterprises are utilising storage based on the purpose/requirements, will help the partners understand the customers better and deliver the best.
With the adoption of AI, IoT, and ML gradually picking up, the solution partners need to focus on providing end-to-end solutions to address the business problems. Besides, Augmented Analytics, gamification, and RPA are the few emerging tech areas that partners must closely look at to create a niche for themselves.
Looking at the transformational stories of the leading Indian enterprises, the solution partners must not only realign their go to market strategies but also upskill and reskill themselves to tap the opportunities lying out there. It’s also important for channel partners to learn from business models of different companies and tweak their solution offerings accordingly.
Nivedan Prakash
Senior Associate Editor, CRN India
[email protected]
