Home grown value added distributor, iValue InfoSolutions which provides solutions around data, network and application (DNA) for businesses, has direct partnership with over 35 OEMs and has over 6000 customers through 700 plus partners. The company boosts of over 100 compelling and complimenting offerings in the digital transformation area and adds over 600 new customers every year, which are then leveraged for cross and up sale of other OEM offerings on an ongoing basis.
Yes, the customer and partner base numbers are conspicuous. But it’s not just the numbers which sets the distribution company apart. The brand power of iValue has made it possible to corner international investments, which is of course a rarity for distributors and hence a notable achievement. Recently, Sundara (Mauritius) Limited, an affiliate of Creador, has invested 18 million dollars for a significant minority stake in iValue. The investment will provide further momentum to iValue’s efforts in gaining superior market share in the cybersecurity market, by expanding to newer geographies, adding newer technology OEMs to their portfolio, executing larger projects for the current OEMs and growing inorganically through acquisitions.
iValue has grown four to five times the market growth rate in the last 10 years. “We have reached a critical stage wherein this investment would actually help us transform to the next level,” says Srinivasan Sriram, Co-Founder and CSO, iValue InfoSolutions.
Market position
iValue is a technology enabler in the DNA management area with skills for consulting, design, deployment and integration based on the partner needs to meet customer business and IT challenges.
“Our approach is consultative. We understand the key business and IT challenges and offer customised and optimised solutions in partnership with a partner as per the customer’s choice. The team at iValue have been focused in DNA management for the past 20 years. This focused approach has helped in building expertise across technologies, verticals, compliances and geographical needs. This helps develop industry contacts and relationship across the OEM, customer, partner and consultants base, resulting in over four times market growth rate consistently over the years,” claims Sriram.
“iValue’s unique GTM aligns business development activities in line with offerings maturity in product life cycle evolution, thus creating a scalable and sustainable business. Also, customer life cycle adoption through analytics provides a ready-made platform for current and new OEMs to target the right set of customers in all the geographies for specific set of solutions, across 6000 plus customers. This helps in focused and targeted business development leading to faster growth for both OEMs and partners with iValue,” he says.
Leveraging partnership with Creador
The partnership is aimed at five broad focused investment and growth areas.
The company is expanding its Data Network and Application offerings (DNA of every business) with greater focus on corporate and enterprise sector.
From a geography perspective, it is planning to further invest and expand to new geographies in India, SAARC, Middle East and Africa.
“The VAD also plans to invest in transforming internal capabilities on technology front, focusing around governance, risk and compliance areas, with an objective to complement the skill sets of our OEM and partner teams for effectively addressing emerging customer needs in their digital transformation areas. It focuses to build consulting and service revenues around its OEM and Partner needs,” Sriram adds.
iValue plans to strengthen its Go To Market team across locations, countries and verticals including BFSI, Enterprise and Government practices; partner focused teams; solution focused teams and technology focused teams with a view to maximise big ticket opportunities. It is also making its digital sales engine strong with a view to provide validated leads to its focused partners.
The company also plans for inorganic growth – it is actively looking at consulting and platform based cybersecurity service firms which will complement its capability and add to partner and customer needs in the DNA management area.
iValue’s solutions around DNA
iValue’s focus around DNA cover solutions around data protection and management, network protection and management and application protection and management.
“Predominantly customer buys IT for application. So from an application standpoint, we try to focus on the criticality of application, application availability, application performance, application security, and application scalability. Underlying the application is the network, which host the application. Now data has moved from text to video and due to this the networks are getting clogged and performance of application is getting impacted. So we put a lot of emphasis on how to optimise the network so that application performance doesn’t get impacted due to the underlying change in the type of data which is going through the application in the network. That is what we try and do at the network layering” comments Sriram.
“Since data is the new oil and the new intelligence, it is the only differentiator for any business. From a business perspective, customers are concerned about how well the data gets stored, managed, enriched, and leveraged for analytics purpose so that the business can leverage that for their growth and profitability,” he further adds.
iValue has also categorised the offerings from digital transformation initiatives of the customer such as security analytics, availability performance management from application and network perspective and next-gen security as the type of threats at the present scenario are tremendously high.
India has been growing very consistently in the last 20 years. Over the period, the customer network and security data centres have become complex through multiple initiatives, wherein some technologies become obsolete and new applications are being added with time. Datacentre refresh hence is an ongoing activity with most companies transitioning to a hybrid model for greater flexibility to leverage both private and public cloud.
“A hybrid scenario where data can be moved from private to public cloud or between public clouds or vice-versa. That is the architecture and flexibility customers want in their data centers and we work with them to fulfill that objective,” he says.
The company has already cemented its position in 10 locations in India. “In the East we have had presence for over seven years. So from India we are looking at SAARC, and beyond SAARC we are looking at Africa, where we already have established a presence for the last three years. And we are also adding Middle East to our geographical coverage,” Sriram concludes.
