Channel Chief
“We Are Looking At A 50 Percent Growth By 2010”
 CA India has set an aggressive growth target. To achieve that, the company is building its channel capacity. Managing Director Amit Chatterjee shared details of his company’s market strategy with Tabrez Khan
You have set an ambitious target. How do you plan to achieve 50 percent growth by March 2010?
CA India focuses on four key areas—Backup, Restore, Threat Management and Data Modelling. With strong products such as Arcserve and XOSoft, we expect Backup and Restore to contribute the most to our growth. Highly interoperable, XOSoft can work with any backup software and not just CA Arcserve. We believe, this product will help us make inroads into the recovery management market and create avenues for incremental Arcserve deployments.
Other contributor to company’s growth is our Data Modelling product Erwin. It is a market leading solution with a 35 percent global market share. Though revenues from Erwin were negatively impacted during the recent economic slowdown, we now expect it to emerge even stronger as the IT & ITES sectors resume their IT spending.
On the Threat Management front, we will be launching the latest version of our antivirus software R12 soon. We are working jointly with OEMs to bundle our products with their hardware. We have introduced a retail product and initial sales numbers look promising.
What partner initiatives have you introduced to grow your business through tier-2 channels?
In the mid-market, which we call volume business, we have done two key things. Firstly, we decided to focus on partner enablement. We introduced a new program called Friday Partner Clinic. During the second half of the day, on any working Friday, partners can walk into our offices in Mumbai, Delhi or Bengaluru and attend a session on our product positioning. We also conduct a live demonstration of our solutions.
Though we provide a robust online training program for partners via our partner portal, we believe nothing can replace an actual face-to-face interaction between our channel sales and technical teams and partners.
Secondly, we are in the process of growing our channel network. We are looking at a 50 percent channel expansion by March next year. We have also appointed a new distribution manager, who would be solely focused on growing the channel.
We plan to have more feet on the ground to enable our volume business to grow by 50 percent by the end of next year.
We realize that we have lost market share in the last five to seven years in the storage backup space. We were very strong earlier with products like Arcserve. Our focus, therefore, will be to regain market share and consolidate our position as a leading player in that segment.
Has your product strategy evolved over time?
Infrastructure management solutions continue to be the biggest chunk of our business. We would like to scale up our security solutions business and have formed a separate team to drive that initiative.
Overall, we have five pillars of growth today—cloud computing, virtualization, security solutions, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and mainframe computing.
Tell us more about your SaaS offerings. Will channel partners have an opportunity to benefit from it?
As one of our five pillars of growth, SaaS is an important part of our business strategy. We already offer a number of our solutions as SaaS offerings.
We route 80 percent of our business through partners. So obviously, partners are key to us.
As for SaaS, there are limited implementation opportunities for SI partners due to the service-oriented nature of the business. However, customization of SaaS offerings, handholding during the initial phases of deployment and support later on will be key areas where our partners can have a strong play. Even the core SaaS business, including licensing, can be routed through partners.
What are the key trends you foresee in your business over the next three to four quarters?
For us, Government remains the single largest vertical contributing to 40 percent of our business. Government projects have long gestation periods and not much is likely to change over a year. So, for this vertical, our outlook is relatively stable.
We foresee a lot of growth opportunities in telecom sector. Currently, government’s focus is on increasing telecom penetration from the current 35 percent to 65-70 percent over the next two to three years. The advent of 3G and Mobile Number Portability (MNP) will add to this basket of opportunities, as customer churn becomes a key issue for telecom companies.
MNP is our sweet spot. We have the expertise in solutions for managing the overall customer experience.
Our product Wily is a market leading solution in application performance management for 3G networks across the globe. As 3G is rolled out in India, telecom operators can greatly benefit from our expertise.
CA has been highlighting the criticality of infrastructure management solutions to an organization’s virtualization strategy. What are some of your recent initiatives in the virtualization space?
We have taken several new initiatives to enhance our virtualization-related offerings. Firstly, we have introduced a vertical-focused strategy to understand the needs of specific industry verticals better and drive more value for end-users.
Secondly, we are partnering with VMware to offer our infrastructure management solutions along with their virtualization solutions portfolio. This will provide us more leverage and enhance customer relationships in this segment.
Also, we are conducting a number of road shows with customers and partners over the next several months to help them understand our solutions better, which includes virtualization-related offerings.
Post our recruitment drive in December, we have added 20 percent more workforce to our overall capacity in India. Our focus on system integrators such as Wipro, TCS, and IBM keeps getting stronger.
All in all, more capacity, more industry expertise and stronger partner relationships are the key initiatives that we have focused on. |