“We have 300 strong registered channel partners across the nation”

With over 17 years of experience in the industry and by working with diverse customers across various verticals and geographies, Venkatesh Swaminathan, country head, The Attachmate Group (TAG), India has accomplished a strong level of expertise in sales management. He is credited for his achievements in building and heading high performing sales and presales teams; He has not only built business operations from scratch in new geographies but has also strategized unique sales and marketing models which helped the organizations to establish a robust brand identity among target groups. In an interaction with DQchannels. Swaminathan highlights the role of cloud technology and virtualization in the scalability of business enterprise.

Can you give a brief about TAG or The Attachmate Group?

TAG was established in 1981. It delivers advanced software for terminal emulation, legacy modernization, managed file transfer and enterprise fraud management. In 2005 , we acquired a company called NetIQ  which deals with solutions that ensure security of an organization along with providing a whole of gamut of reporting and management tools. In 2011, it acquired Novelle data management, collaboration, mobile device management and endpoint management markets. The fourth business unit is SUSE which offers a family of products centered around SUSE Linux Enterprise, the most interoperable platform for mission-critical computing.

Which business unit, according do you has the highest demand in India?

Novelle and SUSE have been in existence in India for quite sometime. The NetIQ was introduced in India in 2011. If you look at out business growth, there has been a consistent growth on all the four business units. So it is difficult to pinpoint on one which is doing better than the others. But NetIQ and Novelle’s  solutions in cloud, big data, data centre optimization, data centre management, data centre recovery, virtualization, enterprise management solutions, security and compliance, these two business units has been growing at the maximum rate. However, all four have been unique properties for enterprises to improve efficiency and save cost.

Can you elaborate on two products of Novelle- file sharing solution and iPrint. What does each of these do?

The amount of files or data we upload is the existing need of enterprises today. The amount of storage required is growing in terabytes today. So we have come up with mechanism of sharing this data with the enterprise in mind. Like we have come up with the mechanism of dropbox along with the security of postbox. The data stays on the existing enterprise’ server and does not require any duplication. Users can access the data through their mobile devices with security measures that control the access rights.

iPrint is a technology that helps you print a document from your hand held device or any other device within your enterprise circuit. That is how flexible that entire printing concept has come out to be.

Do you think the adoption of cloud technology, on which majority of your product lie, has come up a little late in India?

Although cloud technology has entered late in India but the adoption rate or the learning curve in the government sector, the BFSI and the enterprise segment is steep as they have seen the potential behind cloud technology and the role it plays in scaling business.

What is your distribution strategy?

We have two national distributors in the country. The partners can buy from any of these national distributors and can sell them to the end customers. We have 300 strong registered channel partners across the nation, out of which 80 are very active. We are undergoing into stronger channel engagement programs this year to better market our products.

Interview done by  Anushri Mondal, correspondent, DQ Channels.