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Having recently joined F5 Networks as Country Manager, Harvinder Singh’s mandate is to make the company a leading player in the application delivery solutions market. In an interview with CRN’s Executive Editor Dhaval Valia, Singh discusses the company’s plans and strategies.
 What’s the outlook for application delivery market in India? What are the drivers for increasing investment in these solutions?
The market for application delivery in India is definitely on the rise. Data center consolidation, mergers and acquisitions, outsourcing, and webification of critical business applications such as CRM and ERP (which have created more mobile and remote office users) have resulted in situations wherein IT architects face the challenge of delivering secure and optimized access to applications.
The main driver for the increasing investment in application delivery solutions is the fact that these applications are becoming more web-enabled. As web-based and web-enabled applications become more sophisticated and more frequently employed, application infrastructure plays an increasingly significant role within the enterprise. Corporations are opening up their applications to not only to their internal stakeholders but also to their external stakeholders, and this has led to the build-up of latencies that is being witnessed by enterprises.
According to Gartner, Asia Pacific’s application delivery market was worth $400 million in CY07, and is expected to grow to $575 million in CY08 and $775 million in CY09.
Cisco and Juniper have built application acceleration, security and availability tools at the router level, so how difficult is it for an independent vendor like you to differentiate?
F5 is a pure application player. While our competition still looks at traffic at layer 4, F5 looks at traffic from layer 4 to layer 7.
Lots of companies may claim to improve application performance and speed, but unless they integrate the three key areas of application delivery networking—security, speed and availability—it’s not a complete solution. Gartner has positioned F5 in the Leadership Quadrant for the application delivery market.
You have come on board only recently, so what’s your agenda for the next 6-12 months?
The focus, that F5 Networks currently has in India, is to build awareness about the brand and its offerings by investing in customer and channel events and seminars, and to strengthen our position by growing our market and network.
We have grown not only directly but also by means of partners and support infrastructure. F5 will continue to invest in India because we see the country as a strategic and high-growth market.
What’s your channel strategy?
We currently have Transition Systems as our sole VAD. We are focused on ramping up our channel network for wider and deeper market penetration. We are also focused on offering the necessary support required to achieve this. We invest in the region by training partners to use, install and support our products and services, and also provide sales and pre-sales assistance.
In India, F5 follows a three-tier channel architecture: tier-1 partners, tier-2 partners, and distributors. Our tier-1 comprises 5-6 partners, Datacraft being among them. Tier-2 comprises 15-20 partners. Some of the partners that we have in India are also the regional partners of F5.
We intend to grow our presence in tier-1 and tier-2 cities. However, we do not wish to be over-distributed. Once we have strengthened our position in our current markets, we would probably consider targeting the next tier of cities.
What kind of pre- and post-sales support do you presently have? Are you looking to strengthen it?
We are a 100 percent channel-oriented company. Over here, apart from having an F5 direct sales and pre-sales team, we have an extended team through our committed partners. Our professional services team offers post-sales support. Most often the post-sales team is supported by our partners who have dedicated resources to support them since it is a source of revenue for them too. The F5 team supports end-customers from level 1 to level 3.
F5 also offers certification programs which help partners provide effective pre-sales assistance, as well as installation and post-sales support services. These programs include coursework, examinations and performance objectives designed to give participants a solid technical understanding of the concepts required for design and implementation.
What is the investment you plan to make in India over the next 12-18 months? Also, what kind of office network do you have and plan to have? What about post-sales?
We are currently focused on strengthening our position and association with partners and customers by growing our market and network.
Today, we have a direct presence in Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi. We will look at adding more team members as we grow. Post-sales is driven by our partners because it is part of their revenue model.
Are you looking at joint marketing and alliances with other vendors?
F5 is part of an eco-system, and so we are always working with other vendors. Joint efforts are undertaken both at the corporate and regional level.
We build technology alliances with many leading companies. These alliance partners work closely with our engineers and take advantage of our iControl programming interface. Together, we create solutions that enable highly capable and easy-to-manage networks for our customers.
F5 has application-specific partnerships with vendors such as Microsoft, Oracle and SAP.
What initiatives can we expect to see over the next 3-6 months?
At F5, there is a constant endeavor to enhance channel capabilities through training and certification. From time to time, the company announces schemes for channels in recognition of their efforts to build our business.
We encourage partners to undertake joint marketing activities to generate business leads. For example, this month F5 is hosting an end-customer event with Datacraft for application delivery solutions for SAP; it’s going to be a two-city event. And our Advantage Partner Program offers one of the most compelling channel relationships in the industry. Our goal is simple: to help F5 Advantage Partners sell more and earn more on each sale. |