India is growing on a faster pace banking on its infrastructure growth. The country has attracted global technology vendors to partner in its journey by sharing technologies or by investing in developing technologies. NVIDIA is one such company which has realized the potential of the country and therefore has invested to stay relevant.
Santa Clara based GPU company NVIDIA has repositioned the company from a mere GPU vendor to a complete platform vendor focusing on four special verticals including Gaming, Professional Visualization, Data Centers and Auto.
Shridhar Garge, Head – Strategy, Planning & Programs, NVIDIA says, “These are the four markets that we are deeply involved in on a global scale. Coming to India, our focus is same barring the Auto market. We are very much focused on the driverless cars and driver systems inbuilt cars. This market is not as mature in India as we are seeing globally.”
Although the mainstream market has been influenced by the overall economic slowdown, these specialized vertical markets are not; reason being these are niche areas with low volume size. However, the potential of growth in these vertical markets is high.
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“As a strategy, we are going to bring in more and more complete products from the NVIDIA stable, which will be used by the end users and that is where lies the growth potential of the partners and expand their business.”
Shridhar Garge
Head – Strategy
Planning & Programs
NVIDIA
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“As a platform company, our go to market is through the OEMs or through the channel partners. We are seeing a lot of cloud gaming happening in India. Therefore, we have put in place right infrastructure, which will start working over a period. US is a pilot market, where we launched it first; and we are taking it further to other countries. So, we are seeing a lot of cloud gaming also coming to India from NVIDIA stable,” Shridhar added. “We are also working on certain plan to bring cloud gaming as a service to India.” NVIDIA is the pioneer in bringing the graphic virtualization to the world. NVIDIA has GRID platform, which enables the engineers, designers and movie producers to virtualize their current work environment and have their creative people get access to build designs and work on those in any device at any location.
Shridhar added, “If I talk about deep learning as a market, we have an entire out of box solution, called DGX, which is a complete production system for any data scientist to work on and simulate them so that they can grow with it.” NVIDIA graphics are always key differentiators. Shridhar expands, “As the company, our drivers are the most stable graphics drivers in the market. That is where our users rely on us. What we are trying to bring is that we are bringing in allied software which keeps the users in the center, so that we can make the job of the user more and more easier.”
So, NVIDIA array is their rendering software solution. NVIDIA GRID is their graphics virtualization software solutions. These are, basically, the allied solutions that the company offers with NVIDIA hardware solutions. The entire play that NVIDIA has in the market is through the partners. NVIDIA has always been a formidable player as far as the visual computing platform is concerned. And, the company is being looked upon as the pioneer as far as visual computing and any technology that comes into the market.
Shridhar maintained, “Because we are transitioning from an earlier version of having graphic boards, which go into the systems, to more and more end-user based company, partnerships are becoming more critical to our success. We are realizing that as a company, the spectrum of the solutions that we are bringing in are extremely diverse. So, on the one hand, we work with gamers to buy GeForce graphics cards. Secondly there are cafes, which are completely NVIDIA based platforms. Besides we work with enterprise VARs, SIs and partners for higher end solutions.”
Therefore, NVIDIA works with various kinds of partners on different business models including service or reselling business model. These partners are covered under its NPN partner programme. NPN stands for NVIDIA Partner Network, which is about creating and nurturing the entire ecosystem of partners. Not only it is about accessing the entire solution set coming from the portfolio of NVIDIA but also to interact with each other. So, that they work more as a community rather than work in isolation.
He added, “Our network of partners works together to inspire and delight the customers with the entire piece of solution that we have. It is a competency based framework. Depending on the competency that the partner has or wants to get into, he can choose the partnership. It allows the partners to be more flexible as well and create that distinction for themselves within the ecosystem.” Under the NPN program, which is of three tiers, currently NVIDIA has 300-400 partners. Out of which the company is working with 35 – 40 odd partners with whom the company works very closely.
Finally…
There are two ways to grow with NVIDIA. The company is at a critical juncture.
Shridhar concluded, “Each of the market that we address is a multi -billion-dollar opportunity. Hence, when a partner comes on board in the NPN program, he can look at two vectors of growth. The first vector of growth is organic, whereas whatever he is doing today vs the scenario that is lying with NVIDIA, he can keep pursuing those opportunities and grow further. In addition, NVIDIA equips them and promotes them to get into other markets and other products, which is the inorganic or additional growth opportunity. Here they can get into new markets and new products. As a strategy, we are going to bring in more and more complete products from the NVIDIA stable, which will be used by the end users and that is where lies the growth potential of the partners and expand their business.”
