Cloud is the Buzzword and Thrust for WinMagic’s India Plan

In a rendezvous, Mark Hickman, COO, WinMagic, tells The DQ Channels that future depends on Cloud based solutions and how WinMagic aims to explore and expand its presence pan India. Right now, it stands tall as a small team of 30 people, WinMagic is running its business here, with teams in the landscapes of Delhi NCR, Mumbai and Bangalore and a tele-email support team based out of Chandigarh.

What is your channel structure? How many channel partners do you have globally and in India?

On a global basis, we have four big global partners. First it is Lenovo, followed by Hewlett-Packard (HP), LANDesk and we just recently signed IBM. So that one is very much in its infancy, the ink’s not even dry yet, so that’s out global strategy. In terms of the way we go to market, North America has direct band channel so much more of a direct model whereas in the rest of the world it is all channel centered. In Japan, we have a very mature channel market that we partner significantly with NEC. We have to go with the market strategy and play that surface play with them. They actually manage our product to the customers’ end. Talking about Europe, we have a channel throughout different regions, every country like UK, France. Pretty much all over we umbrella everything with those four global partners, then we have specific partners.

In India right now, we are concentrating on six markets. Delhi in north; Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Chennai in South. In west we have Mumbai and Pune. Here, we are looking to work with four to five focused partners. Some of these are national, some of these are local based centers and then there are multiple opportunistic partners. In India, 100% of our business is channel driven, channel executed. And we from our part focus on these partners to spend out times, of course we do education campaigns with partners across so that the awareness remains.

What is WinMagic’s market strategy in India?

We want to become the de-facto endpoint standard and we think that by driving that the cloud will come to same time. India is a place where a lot of other organizations have asked me like, why did you choose to go to India? You know India’s a very difficult market from a western perspective. I think people look at it as a very difficult market to crack into and be successful in. I look at it as it’s really no different than anywhere else. If you're doing the right thing, you have good marketing and you have good sales people and you build up a good channel ecosystem, you know India’s a very educated society. Everybody I meet is an engineer. I’m not. My dad is though. So I think our product really fits into the market place and the psyche of Indians very well. It’s a sophisticated product, and people also want to have the best solution. This market is one of the world’s fastest growing economies. Indian companies are becoming known more and more known globally. Lot of other organizations are obviously investing heavily in Indian Technical companies.

So far how it is going on in India?

We have a very innovative strategy for moving forward. We've invested a lot of money into the R&D space in India. We have invested in the market place; we have local channel support with our team in Chandigarh and our teams around the country. So we are proud on ourselves on being incredibly responsive from the sales and the support side, so what channel partners want is vendors that are going to support them and make them successful. And I think we are demonstrating out to channel partners what we are doing.

What are the verticals you are looking upon?

From a vertical stand point we are a horizontal company. Our product is a horizontal product. So, we cut across every vertical that exists. However, our preference to buy for customers is more in what we have seen is really be BFSI, people who have money and financial data, health care, Pharma. And third and most importantly, the IT/ITES companies which really work on somebody else’s data. In IT/ITES companies, I really put in a lot of emphasis on outsourcing piece, the knowledge process out sourcing, legal process outsourcing, IT/ITES companies where their bread and butter is data which is owned by somebody else, that is their customers. So these are the industries which are of huge amount of interest to us and we see a good amount of traction there. From an industry stand point.

What initiatives are being undertaken in government projects?

We are fairly new in India’s landscape and we are doing very well here. Another six months’ times we should be able to really put in a plan together to invest heavily in the government piece because that requires a lot of time, effort and investment. We are really sowing the seeds right now, So it will help us when we start getting really aggressively in to the government space.

However, we have significant, global government presence. In US federal government, we have like over a million seats, Canadian government, European government, Japanese government, Singaporean government. So government is something we defiantly have expertise in and we’re excited to go and do that. We have thirty people in India who are right now committed towards market. Once we get to that level, we plan on going after the government in our next fiscal which we start November first.

What are the latest trends in data support?

Definitely, the latest trend for us is Cloud. In every meeting, I go into no matter where I am in the world; and the minute we mentioned cloud, they’re like, we need to meet this person, questions come asking for help to secure their datas. Every one of our major customers, they're all lining up. I mean if you're not adopting a cloud you're not going to be successful. And it’s not about cost it’s about time to market. People don't have the time to set up new server infrastructures they need something that’s real time. So, we are definitely seeing Cloud as the fastest growing area.

What’s your plan for 2017?     

Cloud’s a major focus for us, as Cloud is a new emerging market. From a perspective of marketing, it is way more exciting to be marketing Cloud solutions than the net. So we feel that it’s much more relevant in the market place and growing. It does not mean that, we will tap off our end point business; it is still a significant growth area for us.

How are SMBs reacting towards encryption solutions?

In North America, I think we do probably as much business in that market place as we do on in the enterprise space. The enterprise deals are bigger, take longer, in India we play up and down the ladder. It’s very easy as, you know when you don't have a massive organization to focus more on the bigger deals. Because you get pulled into the 50,000 seat deals which are much more lucrative than 50 seat deals, as we mature our channel which is really the key to driving into that market place. Channel infrastructure is being built. With new channel ecosystem, we hope to get as many leads in India as we do in North America at the moment. So we will continue to invest in that area and we see it as obviously a significant business.

Do you think encryption is a tough security product for traditional channel partners? 

Yeah I think so, you know the channel partners we’re dealing with, you know numerous sponsors who we have recently signed with, and they're kind of blown away. Usually the reaction with our product is, wow I didn’t know about you at all. So especially in the Indian market, it’s getting that visibility through marketing, getting our name out into the market place. But also when they see the product they're like wow this is way better than mine. So the channel partners I think once they see the product and then they know that we have something behind it, we have a team behind it; we have local support in India. We’ve got an infrastructure of channel partners. They want to know when we get leads, which is what we’re doing; we’re driving leads and opportunities to them.