Channel Chief
“We’ve acquired 150 customers in 2010”
 Ramprasad Lakshminarayanan, General Manager, Channel and Volume Business, Fujitsu India, spoke to Dhaval Valia about the progress made by the company in the mid-market and channels
It’s been over a year since you began the channel push for mid-market segment. What’s been the progress?
The progress has been steady and as per expectations. We have been doing consistent business with our tier-2 partners over the past three quarters, and the results are showing.
In the past three quarters, we have acquired 150 mid-market customers with an average deal size of Rs. 45 lakh. Nearly 95 percent of these projects have been executed by tier-2 partners. Some of the partners who have executed the maximum number of projects are CCS Infotech, Progressive, Chintech, Relitronics and Sabre.
Media has been the best vertical for us, followed by auto and auto ancillaries. In the government and public sector it’s been railways, and to an extent, defense. We have done well in the auto sector because of our Japanese and German parentage. This has also won us large deals from Japanese and German conglomerates.
Another indication of Fujitsu doing well is that we have risen to the No 3 position in the workstation segment for India, and, according to Gartner, our x86 server business in the country has grown three-fold during the first nine months.
All this is proof and acknowledgement that Fujitsu’s go-to-market is working well, and that we are finding traction among partners and customers.
What is heartening is that 50 percent of the deals struck by our Select partners have been solutions-centric. In the process, we have managed to win a few strategic accounts from our competitors.
From both a partner and customer perspective, we have emerged as a strong and viable alternative to the other IT infrastructure companies with our complete portfolio of servers, storage and clients, and the right set of solutions and services.
What’s your distribution model and partner network?
We have three distributors—Redington, Rashi Peripherals and Cyberstar. Redington is focused completely on servers and storage products. Rashi concentrates on volume servers and the storage portfolio, workstations, notebooks and TFT displays. Cyberstar has been recently added to primarily distribute notebooks and TFTs, but they can potentially also sell volume servers and storage.
At present, we have 28 regional systems integrators enrolled under our Select partners, who have been doing consistent business with us and have invested significantly in Fujitsu skill sets.
For volume products, notebooks and TFTs, we recently rolled out a regional distribution model. We have divided the country into 12 regions and have appointed eight regional distributors, one each for Karnataka, Chennai, Mumbai, Pune, Kerala, Delhi, UP and Kolkata.
We have the following sub-distributors: Apollo Peripherals for Chennai, Modi Peripherals in Delhi, Geeta Monitors in Bengaluru and Solutions for Pune (which includes the rest of Maharashtra, except Mumbai). Over the next quarter, we will add four more regional distributors.
What is Fujitsu’s strategy in the server and storage segments?
On the server front we have a strong x86 product offering under the Primergy brand, including rack servers ranging from the single-socket RX100 to the top-of-the-line eight-socket RX900. On the blade front, we have two key products—the BX900, which has been a solid performer for us in the Indian market, and the recently-launched BX400, which has been designed specifically for mid-market customers. In short, we have offerings at every price-performance point vis-à-vis the competition.
The same is the case with our storage portfolio. Under the Eternus brand, we have products ranging from entry-level offerings that compete with Iomega to SAN for large enterprises. This is backed by strong storage management software. With storage being recently added to the DGS&D list, and a few of our products already approved, we see considerable growth from the government segment for storage.
Our focus is to drive the solutions-centric business. We have built strong solutions offerings around consolidation and virtualization, de-dupe backup and recovery, and providing optimized infrastructure for SAP and Oracle deployments. We have an alliance with VMware whereby our servers come bundled with a VMware license. Similarly, we have alliances with Oracle and SAP, and for backup and recovery we work closely with Symantec.
As I said earlier, 50 percent of the deals done YTD in 2010 have been solutions-led.
What about the strategy for LifeBook?
With the new regional distribution model our aim is to accelerate the LifeBook business.
As you know, LifeBooks are targeted at professionals and businesses. We do not yet have a consumer portfolio, hence our focus will be to reach the target customer segments through corporate resellers and even retailers.
On the product front, we have a good line-up at every price-point starting from Rs. 35,000 and going up to Rs. 1,30,000 for ultra-light and small form factor models which are 3G ready. From a technology and quality perspective, Fujitsu notebooks have a strong image among customers, and are considered among the most robust products. Most models of LifeBook come with an EnergyStar rating, and all are 100 percent bio-degradable. These are strong selling points with several large and mid-market customers.
Your plans for 2011?
We have set the ambitious target of becoming the No 3 vendor in storage and No 5 vendor in servers by the end of 2011. Looking at the growth so far, we are well on our way to achieving this target. On the workstation front, we have already achieved the No 3 position. Now the target is to grow our share further. Driving the notebook business is a big priority as well.
From the product perspective, we will soon launch a blade server which will be the most compact one available in the market. We have also lined up the launch of Zero Client devices that have no operating system, applications, data, processors, memory, fan or other moving parts. The patented technology works well as a desktop virtual machine, and will make our offering around desktop virtualization stronger.
Finally, what’s in store for partners?
Over the past 12 months, our focus has been on training partners and conducting solutions-specific programs. We want our partners to be self-sufficient in all aspects, from pre-sales to implementation to support. Going forward, we will optimally increase our partner base; we plan to take the Select partner base from existing 28 to 50.
The primary focus will be on increasing the yield from each partner by having a deeper engagement. To enable partners to do, so we are setting up a solutions center at Bengaluru where we will display our entire stack of technology and products. Partners can use this to demonstrate our offerings to customers.
The plan is also to expand customer support by enrolling some Select partners as service providers. However, this plan is still in the works, and will be rolled out in the next quarter. |