Covid19 has clearly made its way into the smallest hamlets of India after affecting close to 9 million people and devoured more than 400 thousand people globally. Along with crating indelible scar on the minds of people, it has paralyzed the financial and industrial growth. It has brough in a distrust among each other.

In this, situation respective governments had imposed restriction on the movement of citizens and services barring the essential services. It was far more difficult for people to survive. It continued for two months but during this period, there were partners and OEMs who supported each other to support their end customers.

When OEMs supported the partners in various ways and means including financially, partners responded to the call and opened their warehouses and made arrangements for the end customers to access the solutions with proper precaution of safety and security.

They enabled their internal resources to adapt to WFH and support the customer even in the pandemic. They did not care about their profitability and margin but went on extending supporting their own manpower so that there was no challenge for their customers.

Even there were OEMs who extended free products and licenses including compute, security, MDM, storage, cloud, collaboration platforms to the customers to support their WFH norms. Even there were OEMs who brought out customized products which are absolutely needed for the WFH and remote working conditions. There were OEMs who extended the license renewal and AMC dates to enable remote and WFH workers.

I salute those partners and OEMs who risked themselves and supported each other to support their customers. To me they are the unsung heroes. To honor these people and recognize their projects, we have instituted an award called ‘Covid19 Superhero Awards’, which will be conferred on the qualified partners and OEMs on 25th July. The partners and the OEMs would have to go through a meticulous nomination process created by us.

An entrepreneur & technocrat with over 27 years of experience, Ashok set up Futurenet Technologies in 1996 to focus on IT services. As an expert in IT Infrastructure and related services, Ashok assists customers in aligning IT with their business. He provides consulting services to corporates in areas such as bullet proofing IT Infrastructure (High Security & High Availability), blue print for cloud migration including business benefits, cost saving and risk mitigation. He lends his expertise to businesses with capacity to convert business/ functional requirements into bullet proof IT infrastructure and also advices on cyber forensics and information security

Lata Singh as the Director for IBM One Channel business across India/South Asia is responsible for leading the complete ISVs, SIs, GICs VARs and Reseller Partner community. In her role she is responsible for driving overall revenue growth for IBM in collaboration with brand channel teams with a specific focus to programmatically increase IBM’s business across key focus areas in Cloud, Cognitive, Security etc.

Lata specializes in Channel Management and Alliances. She has over 25 years of experience in building ecosystems comprising of Global system Integrators, Consulting organizations and ISVs to achieve business growth and break into new markets and account coverage models.

She has in her engagements with the Partner ecosystem focused on models which drives a 360-degree view with Indian IT Services companies to leverage the strengths of the partnership. Her experience in channel sales management and in developing sales strategy and partner models in India has been across multiple technologies. She has successfully onboarded partners and helped them in their journey from single solution partnership to multiple solution approach including cloud and managed services.

In her earlier roles, she has led the Public Sector and Communications sales and engagement to drive client success through IBM solutions and services.