Channel Partners are Essential for NetApp says Kaushal Veluri

Kaushal Veluri, Director, Channels & Alliances, NetApp India, talks about the importance of the channel partners ecosystem for the IT industry in this exclusive interaction. 

How do you make your organisation channel-focused?

We work with the entire ecosystem including resellers, distributors, retailers, system integrators etc. We work to develop robust programs around the benefits we can give them and the synergy we can establish with them to take the NetApp message out to the marketplace. That becomes the core of my engagement with them.

NetApp is a 100% Channel-focused organisation, everything that we do is completely driven by Channels. This makes it even more important to see that the Channel ecosystem is aligned with our vision in the world. NetApp India has evolved quite a bit over the last 4 years, from a storage company to the data authority in hybrid cloud. Today NetApp is the data authority in the hybrid cloud. We no longer talk about storage. We talk about data and how it is important to the customer. If you look at the infrastructure that the customer has, any customer today with footprints across co-locations may be in some public cloud.

So, how do you make sure that the customer is able to manage, move and analyze data across this infrastructure? Here, NetApp talks about storing, moving, analyzing, encrypting data across the enterprise infrastructure. That’s the story that we want our partners to be able to take to the marketplace. To spread this message to the larger Indian diaspora and the larger Indian marketplace, we need strong and effective partnership programs. Our objective is building an ecosystem and enabling customers to manage data. We are leveraging the skillsets of our partners and working towards creating a balance of customer requirements along with NetApp focus areas to enable best solutions for our customers.

What is the geographical spread of your partner ecosystem?

We’ve been in India for about 12-15 years. Primarily our work is in the metropolises viz., Bangalore, Calcutta, Chennai, Delhi, Bombay and Hyderabad. But there is a large scope of our expansion into the smaller cities across India. This makes the channel system very important for us right now. We’ve established ourselves in these metropolises, but the marketplace that is beyond these cities is also very large. We are looking at other cities and finding the relevant partners there who can build the story for us. Even in the tier II cities, customers are very sophisticated and knowledgeable. Their expectations are at the same level as the other customers. This means that the channel partners there must match up to that expectation and business requirement. Therefore, we must find the right partner who can take the vision and the story forward. It’s very important to sell the vision to the customer. The customers are looking for the solutions for their business needs and challenges. The customer is also looking at the next wave of technology. It is important to tell them that we are in the space of emerging technology now, so that even if they want to engage with it in future, they can come to us.

Can you tell us more about your strategies to make your eco system more inclusive of the channel partners?

From a NetApp perspective, we always look at it along 3 pillars – revenue, skilling and tracking the next wave of technology. In terms of revenue, the most accessible source is to build solutions according to the client’s needs. The inclusiveness comes in helping partners find new customers, when they are able to do this, we give them a rebate as a reward over and above the regular privileges. The other aspect is that NetApp India itself today has evolved into multiple product offerings. We’re not just a storage box, NetApp has offerings in the storage space, in the cloud space and in data management. We have this menu of product lines as well. This enables the partner to go back to the same customer and sell something new from our product line as well. The third is competition. If our partners are able to replace competition and bring the customer on board that’s well appreciated.

We have also simplified and streamlined the reward system for sales made in the past, so that the partner doesn’t lose out on his benefits. The onus of helping the partner getting rewarded for monetary benefits that they have brought in; is on us, not on the partner. They get their rewards automatically. We do a lot of skilling and enablement for the partners. For example, we go to 9 cities in India and we do what we call a partner academy. We reach out to our partners, we talk to them about the new technologies, new strategies for finding and retaining customers and so on and so forth. Solutions have to be built around the entire space of the customers. We tie up with other organizations in the new technologies to build a holistic solution for the customers.

The partner is always under pressure. We at NetApp India suggest the routes to build solutions and simplify it for them. We help them take the solutions to more cities and help them identify partners in those cities as well. Training is a regular feature which is usually done through webinars and other modes. I am most excited about finding ways to get partners inculcated into the next wave of technology. Partners who have survived for 25-30 years in the industry have constantly innovated and have tried to catch the next wave. AI/ML, IoT, DevOps, Cloud etc., become very critical today. We train them in the emerging technology, so they can talk to the customers with the knowledge. We have set up an AI/ML lab in our Bangalore office of NetApp India, so that the partners can come and experiment there. We are very strong in the cloud so the partner should know about it to be able to retain the customers moving to the cloud. We also have an annual flagship event Xcelerate for our channel ecosystem. We’ve consciously taken a decision not to go outside India and always choose the next rung of cities. Our intention is also to expose our products to all the partners.

A lot of the partners’ work is becoming service oriented. As clients are moving to the cloud, partners can earn by offering support services around cloud. If we can help our partners along the 3 pillars, then it becomes easier to form a synergy with the partner.

With the digitisation of most IT products, now the partners are finding difficult to carry on. How do you think they can work their way out of this situation?

In my mind the importance of partners will never go away. With clients moving to the cloud, partners must evolve services around cloud as well. The clients don’t know everything about the kinds of services that are needed. The partners must decide what services work best with the cloud and what services work with on-premise data. They have to offer consultative services to the customer. The enterprise customer has a large amount of data from where cloud-relevant data must be shifted from the on-premise data. A mid-level customer who wants to move entirely to the cloud, needs the partner to do the entire analysis for them. It requires taking the understanding of technology from the infrastructure bucket and placing it in the services bucket. The journey of the data from the edge to the core to the cloud can be facilitated by the partner. He can talk about services, infrastructure, servers, networking.

The important point is to help the partners understand the 3 pillars of business and help them in running, growing and transforming the business. Simultaneously, we also must run, grow and transform our businesses.