The channel strategy is to stay ahead of the business landscape evolutionary curve: Micro Focus

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Software firm, Micro Focus, focuses on helping customers adapt and succeed in the accelerated digital transformation journey. With its portfolio, backed by robust analytics intellectual property, the company delivers the insights, efficiencies, and automation necessary to succeed in today’s rapidly evolving marketplace. Micro Focus helps customers attain the four critical outcomes of digital transformation- simplify IT transformation, accelerate application delivery, strengthen cyber resilience, and analyse in time to act. Saurabh Saxena, Country Director, Micro Focus, India, talks about the charted growth of the company, future vision and more. Excerpts.

Which are the 2021 technology trends that will redefine the channel strategy for Micro Focus?

The pandemic has accelerated digital transformation within the global business landscape. Enterprises are moving onto cloud and hybrid environments at an unprecedented rate to counter the challenges posed by social distancing and lockdown restrictions. The channel ecosystem has no option but to evolve faster than the pace of this change to ensure business continuity and operational stability for enterprise customers.

This focus on staying ahead of the evolutionary curve of the business landscape reflects in the channel strategy. Instead of starting from scratch, we are working closely with our system integrators and channel partners to identify how we can build on and modernise existing solutions and digital infrastructures to fulfil customer-specific requirements. We are also promoting DevSecOps deployments to counter the security challenges that have arisen in the wake of the large-scale digital migration. The goal is to assist our enterprise customers to transition, seamlessly and securely, to more future-proof, digital-first business operations and deliver competitive advantages in terms of pricing, deployment, flexibility, agility, and scale.

What are Micro Focus’ plans for partners and how is the company playing a significant role as the enterprise company?

In 2021, we aim to prioritise the strengthening of its channel ecosystem in India and become an increasingly channel-first organisation. The country’s enterprise landscape is large and diverse, and we see our channel partners as an extension of our sales and customer support operations that can ensure the maximum market coverage.

To this end, we will be focusing on expanding the current digital capabilities of our channel partners to ensure greater business resilience. We will also make investments to augment the talent pipeline and technical skillsets across our channel ecosystem. We aim to provide an additional layer of support and enablement with an emphasis on portfolio enhancement, training, and certifications by launching newer initiatives, such as our integrated global partner program. These measures will ensure that our partners are equipped with the right tools and capabilities needed to drive growth and improve profitability while delivering a more enhanced level of customer satisfaction to our enterprise clients.

What is the importance of digital transformation for channel partners?

As IT infrastructures and solutions continue to evolve in 2021 and beyond, the Indian enterprise ecosystem will move onto an increasingly cloud-first model of doing business. The channel ecosystem will have to adapt to the changes that this digital migration will bring about. To remain competitive, players in this space will need to sustain their existing revenue streams while exploring newer upselling and cross-selling opportunities.

This will not be possible without initiating a substantial transformation of channel operations to handle business demands across multiple environments – whether on-premises, cloud, and hybrid. Doing so will empower channel stakeholders to accelerate growth and improve profitability, thus enabling them to not only survive but also thrive in an increasingly competitive business landscape.

How the relationship between vendor, partner and channel has been redefined in the new era?

The pandemic has made it necessary to improvise and experiment how to engage among customers, markets, and organisations. Because of this, companies can learn and progress more quickly than ever before. The ways they learn from the pandemic will deeply influence their performance in tomorrow’s changed world, providing the opportunity to retain greater agility as well as closer ties with customers, employees, and suppliers.

Now is the time to examine your organisation’s digital initiatives. Those that provide near-term help to employees, customers, and the broad set of stakeholders to which businesses are increasingly responsible and those that position you for a post crisis world.

What are your GTM strategies and roadmap for 2021?

In 2021, we aim to become more channel-driven and focus on expanding our ecosystem. The focus on building partners’ digital capabilities and resilience underscores key Micro Focus initiatives to introduce flexibility and process adjustments to the channel program, specifically in India and APJ. With a need to safeguard the existing revenue model (run) and expose new business opportunities (transform) at the same time, customers will have a unique set of core needs in 2021. The objective is to address each of these core needs to reduce the drama for our customers, delivering a highly differentiated value proposition.

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