By: Karma Negi
[quote font=”tahoma” font_size=”14″ font_style=”italic” color=”#262626″ bgcolor=”#f2f2f2″ arrow=”yes”]India is a key growth market for Arcserve in Asia Pacific and we are going to invest heavily in this market by increasing headcounts, recruiting more partners and growing the market share in the next 12 months[/quote].
Post its split from CA Technologies data protection company Arcserve aims to speed-up its pace into the India SMB market
According to NASSCOM, Indian SMB market will grow by 15 percent annually; which will propel the IT spending in the sector to over $18.5 billion by 2018. It says the Indian SMBs are rapidly innovating and adopting technology solutions to enhance competitiveness in the global and domestic business environment.
The results from a recent survey commissioned by Arcserve indicated that APAC market including India is slightly slower in adopting newer data protection technologies and practices that are being adopted in Europe and North America.
Arcserve, which split from CA Technologies last year, is really hungry to tap into the huge data protection India market. While under CA it still was channel driven but there was no SMB focus, with the split it has given Arcserve the ammunitions and the flexibility to divert its attention on the gargantuan SME market.
“India is a key growth market for Arcserve in Asia Pacific and we are going to invest heavily in this market by increasing headcounts, recruiting more partners and growing the market share in the next 12 months,” says Ganesh Kuppuswamy, Director (India & SAARC), Arcserve.
Since the announcement of the split (that’s in the last 10 months), Arcserve boasts of witnessing a double digit growth (50% growth in India), and intends to keep this growth every year. They also reaped benefits from their SMB focus which showed 63% growth.
“Earlier too we were 100% channel driven but our focus was more on government and enterprise sector; but now we are SMB focused, and are free to spread anywhere. And as India market is very significant for us, and we are expecting similar kind of growth for the next year,” says Kuppuswamy.
After the spin-off Arcserve has doubled its India sales team, are more partner driven, and planning to launch new schemes.
As per IDC last year the market was close to a billion dollar and India’s contribution is close to 10% of the APAC market (about $100 million from software perspective). Data protection is of two types: hardware based data protection and software based data protection. The former is dominated by EMC, IBM, HP etc. who command major portion of the pie.
When a part of CA Technologies Arcserve was strong in government sector too, and is planning to expand on that strength, though currently this focus has taken a backseat due to the absence of strong partners. “Government market is long term strategy and we are looking towards that. But government projects may take years to get implemented hence right now our focus is to grab the easily available market first,” informs Kuppuswamy.
Manufacturing is another vertical that Arcserve hopes to get strong foothold but it’s not the marquee manufacturers they are targeting (as they already have some solution in place and displacing them will be tough) but will be going after tier 2 manufacturing companies.
With an experienced team, Arcserve also plans to expand into new verticals including BFSI and IT/ITES to increase its foothold across India and SAARC region.
“We are identifying partners who have the strength in this segment and are working on strategies with partners and also doing end-customer manufacturing summit with those partners. These are some of the investments we are doing,” he adds.
Arcserve India is headquartered in Bangalore with sales representatives across Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai; its India Development Center is located in Hyderabad.
Trainings are provided to its channel partners on a quarterly basis in all these cities – Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune, Delhi and Mumbai – with the capability to install, manage and handover to the customer whether it’s on premise or on cloud. On-site training is also provided to the customers through their partners.
Helping to drive Arcserve’s channel ecosystem is the newly launched Partner Program in July which offers a rewarding framework that channel partners can easily use to build and scale a successful data protection solution and services that customers will value. “The success of our partner program can be gauged from the fact that we have 100% success on our partner program registration. Not only this it’s also giving affront 15-20% margin to the partner,” claims Kuppuswamy.
