Storage
2017 is expected to witness technology innovation and the storage industry will specifically benefit from the enormous growth of smartphone consumption in India. Smartphones today have become an omnipresent tool to make calls, share messages, and connect on social media networks.
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“We work closely with our retail partners in the smaller markets and provide them with necessary training, sales aids and consumer offers to educate the consumers.”
Rajesh Gupta
Country Manager of SanDisk India
and SAARC Retail Sales and Marketing
Western Digital Corporation
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They are the all in one screen for professional purposes, entertainment system, our gaming partner. The smartphone market has evolved immensely in recent times with advanced technologies like 4K, Ultra HD becoming the new norm. Today smartphones have replaced computers and have emerged as the primary device for content consumption, creation & sharing. According to a recent survey conducted by Western Digital, more than 84 percent of consumers spend more than four hours using applications on their mobile devices, and apps account for a large footprint of internal memory. The survey further highlights that over 90% of the respondents expect time spent on smart phones usage to increase by 20-60%, and over 67% expect an increase between 60 – 80% in content quality (Full HD, 4K. etc.) on mobile phones within six months to a year.
Big Data as a new wave of Growth in Tier 2 & 3 Cities
Western Digital is actively widening its reach in Tier 2 and 3 cities through strong channel partner association. It work closely with our retail partners in the smaller markets and provide them with necessary training, sales aids and consumer offers to educate the consumers. Company’s retail strategy is to be present in every nook and corner of the country so that its products are available and accessible for consumers.
Data centre
Demand for High Performance Computing solutions is seen increasing across the entire IT spectrum. Till now we saw research labs, higher education institutions, and defence labs investing in state of the art HPC infrastructure to develop the latest and best products in their respective domains. With the government’s focus on these areas, we such investments further going up in 2017 and beyond. The National Supercomputing Mission of the Govt. of India too will drive huge investments in HPC solutions.
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“we see many private corporates harnessing the power of HPC solutions for various business needs. These are extensively used in the fields of industrial and auto design, financial analytics, EDA, Oil & Gas, and even in sectors like insurance.”
Vikram Mulye
Head
Enterprise Business Group
Lenovo India
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Software-Defined storage and network
Customers are now looking for more open and secured solution and move away from products that bind them to legacy systems and lead to high TCO. In line with this trend, we see the emergence of Software Defined Storage (SDS).
With SDS, customers can depend on powerful software stacks and industry-standard servers to gain enterprise storage functionalities. While reducing TCO, SDS doesn’t compromise on any of the enterprise storage needs.
Additionally, at contemporary capacity levels, traditional storage architectures once thought to be scalable are no longer sufficient. Software-defined storage (SDS) solutions, have emerged to offer not just enhanced scalability, but also agility, flexibility, and efficiency.
Hyper-convergence
With Hyper-convergence, enterprises now have an exciting new infrastructure choice to break down IT silos and reduce data centre complexity and cost, while elevating IT to enable the business. Data centre customers face unprecedented levels of infrastructure complexity due to cloud, analytics and mobility trends and the associated rise of data.
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“Businesses will look for greater value in network virtualization; moving towards bring your own license & pay as you go models supporting cloud-based infrastructures for different application needs.”
Sajan Paul
Director systems engineering
India & SAARC
Juniper Networks
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Hyper-convergence allows customers to start with “right-sized but scalable” IT investments without committing to a higher cost solution upfront. This technology allows customers to condense the typical 3-tier architecture and gives them building blocks which can be added on the fly to support business growth.
Enterprise Mobility
High growth of Open Source software, collaborative technologies, the usage of social media for marketing and customer service, virtual and augmented reality are few of the enterprise technologies that will drive digital disruption in 2017. We will see many other technologies opening exciting greenfield opportunities for businesses and enterprises. The only thing constant is change.
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“Vendors therefore need to provide their partners with the required deliverables, tools, and training, to make this change successfully.”
Anish Kanaran
Channel Director Middle East
India and Africa
Epicor Software
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This year a lot of technologies such as cloud scalability, containers, DevOps, open source created a huge impact in advancing an organizations’ success. 2017 will be all about Artificial Intelligence, IoT, Machine Learning, Kubernetes etc. – the next phase of enterprise IT. These technologies are emerging and stand to have substantial potential for enterprises across industries.
Enterprise Mobility as a new wave of Growth in Tier 2 & 3 Cities
Tier 2 and tier 3 cities are growth drivers for the Indian market. Well-developed city infrastructure, skilled labour, investor friendly policies and proactive state governments make these cities a preferred investment destination. Companies are also migrating to smaller cities because of the significant cost advantages.Small cities are India’s emerging business locations and some are developing into manufacturing hubs.
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“We are looking to actively work with our partners, universities to develop more skilled, trained and accredited people on Red Hat technologies. And the last part of course is our community engagement which continues to thrive.”
Neeraj Bhatia
Director Partner
Alliances & Commercial Sales
Red Hat
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Partners expectations from Enterprise Mobility in 2017
One of the challenges faced by today’s channel partners is selling to business decision makers rather than the IT department. This requires partners to engage with business/C-level executives and to have the ability to empathise with their goals of business growth. This requires vendors, such as Epicor, to focus more on enabling their partners to demonstrate the real business benefits of their enterprise solutions.
As newer technologies take the center stage, partners will need to develop proper knowledge and skills to stay relevant. Organisations cannot just deliver one time training and hope that the partners are well versed with their technologies and ready to move their services in the market. It is important for organisations to put proper training and certifications in place and incentivize and recognize partner performance and success.
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“We are witnessing a significant uptake of virtualization, cloud and end user computing technologies by various departments of both the central and state governments. We hope to see further adoption of the latest technology by the government in 2017.”
Sundar Balasubramanian
Senior Director
General Business (Commercial Sales & Partners)
VMware
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As applications become more intricate and customers’ needs change, partners are required to become trusted business advisors.
The key challenges that channel partners now face is to upgrade their sales, presales and implementation skills for these emerging solution areas and prepare themselves for the ever-evolving go-to-market strategy around these portfolios. We are living in an era where the established products are soon being commoditized and emerging solutions are creating a first-mover advantage for companies. The success of today’s channel partners will be defined by their speed of adoption of these emerging technologies.
