| Change Agent |
Presented by
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Leading the transformation
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Kailash Shirodkar, Publisher, CRN, presenting the award to Girish Krishnamurthy, Managing Director, Kaseya India
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For the first time, CRN has instituted the Change Agent Award, with the winner being decided by the editorial team with recommendations from leading channel partners. The objective of the award is to recognize an individual who or a company which has acted as a catalyst to bring about transformational change in the channel business.
Girish Krishnamurthy, Managing Director, Kaseya India, has done exactly that. With his initiatives he has influenced and enabled many partners to adopt automated managed services (AMS).
Since the start of Kaseya’s India operations in October 2008, Krishnamurthy has convinced 93 tier-2 partners to rethink their break-fix infrastructure services delivery model and invest in what he believes is the future of IT management, AMS.
Today, Kaseya has emerged as the largest AMS platform provider in the country. India has already become the second largest market for Kaseya with over seven lakh licenses sold. This figure is more than 10 percent of the company’s global installed base.
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Catalyzing change
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» Krishnamurthy has convinced 93 tier-2 partners to invest in AMS in a short span of 18 months
» Kaseya has emerged as the largest AMS platform provider in the country, and India has already become the second largest market for Kaseya with over seven lakh licenses sold
» To win customers, Kaseya plotted a 3-year roadmap for each prospect to demonstrate how AMS could help them scale up their service delivery business
» Krishnamurthy put together three teams to help partners take AMS to the market
» He has plans to take AMS further by launching a SaaS product under Kaseya’s own brand
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However, getting partners to accept AMS wasn’t easy. “The current business approach of most partners is of reselling or trading through vendor representation and following their vendors’ policies to run their businesses. But now they can go to the market, define their charter, and take control of their businesses themselves,” explained Krishnamurthy.
However, Krishnamurthy understood that simply telling partners that the business model they had been following for the past 15-odd years was wrong would not work. He also understood that changing mindsets would require patience, and that his team would have to adopt a different approach.
Consequently, Kaseya undertook an exercise to study and analyze the challenges faced by each of the prospective partners on an individual basis.
The traditional break-fix service model employed by most partners has three broad variants: AMC, facility management and per-call support. All these models are resource-intensive, have lower efficiency, and hence lower profitability. The AMC model usually has a 10-15 percent gross margin, facility management services (FMS) provide 15-20 percent, while the per-call model can earn resellers up to 25 percent.
“In the traditional model, partners often have one engineer to manage 200 nodes though the ideal ratio is 1:100,” said Krishnamurthy. “This leaves the customer infrastructure either unmanaged or undermanaged. By contrast, in our estimate, a partner can manage 1,000 nodes per engineer using AMS. This means that partners can scale up their services business 10 times with almost the same number of field engineers. We shared this knowledge with prospects, and using the information about their existing AMC and FMS businesses we plotted a 3-year roadmap for each one of them to demonstrate how AMS could help them scale up their service delivery business.”
Krishnamurthy pursued his goals with the simple motto that customers can never be wrong. “If and when we realized that the partners (our prospective customers) weren’t getting the message, instead of blaming them we told ourselves that we weren’t doing a good job of communicating the benefits of AMS to them. We then changed our approach rather than expecting the partners to change,” said Krishnamurthy.
Once the partners were convinced and willing to invest in Kaseya’s AMS platform, Krishnamurthy had another challenge to overcome—that of developing a support mechanism to help the partners take AMS to the market.
For this purpose he put together three special teams. The first team was the sales advisory, which not only functioned as sales advisors to partners but also worked with the partners’ sales team on a daily basis to manage their pipeline and go on joint calls.
The second was the customer management team with an engagement manager assigned to every partner to help set up the AMS infrastructure, and also help with any technical or delivery-related issue on a daily basis.
Krishnamurthy also put together an additional pool of technical resources of Kaseya specialists. Whenever partners sign up, they have the option of leveraging this pool to get up to speed in minimum time instead of mastering the solution on their own which could take 6-9 months. Kaseya’s resources are assigned to the partner to make the partner a professional AMS provider in just one month.
Krishnamurthy believes that he has just scratched the surface of the AMS opportunity. “In India, there are two AMS market spaces—enterprises which are India-focused and those which are global-focused. The outsourcing market is expected to be worth around $26 billion in the next three years, while the domestic market remains largely untapped. But with increasing PC penetration and the growing importance of application management, performance management and automation, AMS will be a big domestic opportunity. In our estimate, it is currently as large as $5 billion.”
Over the next one year Krishnamurthy has plans to take AMS further by launching a SaaS product under Kaseya’s own brand. “There are about 1,000 tier-3 and tier-4 VARs across India who provide AMC and facility management services to smaller customers having 10-50 end-points. These VARs don’t have the means to deploy their own managed service operations center, but would be keen to leverage the benefits of AMS.”
Krishnamurthy believes that to be a change agent a person needs to rise above the sales and competition matrix and talk about the real benefits and transformation that a product or a concept can bring about for the entire industry ecosystem. “If you ask our partners they will tell you that we never talk about what the Kaseya AMS can deliver. I start with why they should invest in AMS, and the prospects are free to choose competing products if they find them more suitable to their needs. The bottomline is that AMS is a revolutionary concept which can benefit partners.”
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