|
Sudhir Nayar
Director, Partner Sales Organization
Sun Microsystems India
Rapidly capturing the world’s imagination, the success of India’s IT industry has placed the country at the forefront of the emerging global knowledge economy.
In the first half of 2008, India’s domestic IT market overtook the export market in terms of growth. While the domestic IT market recorded a growth of 34 percent, exports grew about 27 percent.
Energy efficiency emerged as a key issue, with green becoming the most used marketing buzzword. Smarter, greener and cooler data centers appeared to be the underlining theme during the year, with solution providers positioning their products on these lines.
SMBs in India continued to display a big appetite for IT hardware and software. Virtualization became mainstream, and the technology is rapidly being deployed in server, storage, networking as well as client environments. The storage market in the country grew substantially, helped by growing demand from segments such as retail and BFSI.
The theme of storage efficiency intensified through 2008, increasing the industry’s focus on virtualization strategies and green initiatives, as well as information consolidation techniques like deduplication. High Performance Computing (HPC) was viewed as a competitive weapon enabling organizations to bring products to market faster and with greater precision.
Businesses face a range of challenges going into 2009. While cost-cutting moves may dominate the headlines, many companies will be focusing on making wise investments that both reduce costs and enable them to better leverage technology. Not surprisingly, Gartner recently ranked virtualization as the number one strategic technology for 2009.
Forecast 2009
Businesses will likely re-examine the IT assets they have, and look for ways to take full advantage of their capabilities. High performance, reliability and scalability will be the key, but we will continue to see developers and start-ups building on open source offerings because it is available without barriers and offers access to source code.
Stretching virtualization across the data center. There will be a growing recognition among businesses that virtualization cannot be limited to x86 environments. Companies will want to virtualize and manage their entire data center, and there will be virtualization management tools available that encompass both x86 and Unix-based machines.
Virtualizing desktops. While virtualizing servers is important, there are far more desktops than servers, and because they are dispersed, desktops are harder to manage effectively. To tackle this problem, companies are turning to virtualization to provide a desktop environment that is centralized in the data center. The potential for virtualizing desktops is enormous, and I think more companies will see the value in terms of power savings, increased flexibility and employee mobility.
Open storage adoption. Compa-nies will move toward adopting an open storage strategy which will accelerate business and market response times while saving up to 90 percent as compared to closed, proprietary storage.
Cloud computing. There will be a growing trend of businesses taking advantage of cloud computing, tapping the resources of remote, third-party infrastructure as they need it, and dynamically increasing their compute capacity to match their fluctuating IT demand. While people will gradually grow more confident in the security of cloud computing, we’re not likely to see companies outsourcing mission-critical applications in the short-term.
Green IT. The concept of green or eco computing gained more awareness and importance in India’s corporate world in 2008 with companies waking up to issues of energy, space and power. Increasingly, organizations are looking at the environmental impact of electricity usage.
Identity management and access management software. Identity management will play a significant role in enabling organizations to meet today’s demands for security and compliance. Businesses will continue to embrace authentication, access control and audit elements of the identity management infrastructure.
Software as a Service. SaaS is emerging as an exciting delivery model for software. SaaS applications provide customers with centralized, network-based access to data with fewer overheads than is possible when using a locally-installed application. Having software delivered as a service will reduce the overall spend of an enterprise.
Need for differentiation
The government’s spending on IT hardware, services and software is expected to continue irrespective of how the market scenario pans out.
In a growing economy like India’s, where the needs of customers are changing fast, partners have to understand these changing needs and modify their approach accordingly. They need to differentiate themselves in one or more of many ways i.e. geographical coverage, vertical focus, solutions portfolio or services offerings. This should be directly linked to the customer segments they want to focus on.
2009 will provide opportunities for partners to gain inroads into different segments in class A and B cities. There will be opportunities to take the help of different sales and marketing programs to identify addressable markets and plan new areas for future growth.
Our initiatives
Sun views the channel as being instrumental in helping both Sun and other companies drive revenue in adverse times. Channel confidence in us grew multi-fold. One of the things that contributed to this is the consolidation of all our existing channel programs under the Sun Partner Advantage (SPA) program. Under this, we offer partners sales enablement, growth and profitability, along with access to our technology and solutions. Consolidation of all our programs under one head brought more clarity and simplicity to our engagement with our partner community. An extension of the SPA program is the Partner Growth Fund for the utilization, management and tracking of investment funds for different partner levels.
Then there is Sun Catalyst, a partner loyalty program designed to deliver value and growth. Candidates from partner organizations are chosen to undergo advanced technology and leadership training to help evangelize and accelerate Sun’s growth.
<< back
|