Emerson Network Power focusing on Channel Strength to lead in the market

Emerson Network Power provides deployable hardware and software solutions for power, thermal and infrastructure management. One of the strategy, its focusing on is maintaining the channel network in India, Sanjay Zadoo - Country Manager Channel at Emerson Network Power (India) Private Ltd, talks about channel strength and various channel program and upcoming projects.

How many channel partners do you have in India and what are the schemes you are offering them

Channel plays a vital role for Emerson Network Power’s business here in India. We believe in collaborating with our partners consistently and reaching out to our customers. Emerson Network Power is working with a variety of business partners, solution providers and Value Added Resellers many of whom; we have been working with for a very long time. In India, we work with two national distributors: Ingram Micro and Neoteric Informatique Ltd, who have helped to reach out to various partners across the length and breadth of the larger market. Our partners have contributed immensely to our growth as a brand and we hope to continue working with them with them in the future as well.

We believe in maintaining a healthy, steady and long term relationship with all our channel partners and therefore are adopting channel practices that are mutually beneficial to both. We intend to continue investing in training and incentivizing our partners for their work. This is why we have tied up with PAYBACK so that our channel partners can earn and redeem their reward points from over more than 50 leading PAYBACK partner brands. This also allows them to club their points with other payback cards and choose rewards of their choice on sales of Emerson Network Power’s product portfolio. Our most recent New Year New Gear incentive program in association with PAYBACK has seen good response. This scheme incentivised our partners for sales of uninterruptible power supply upto 20Kva.

What are the key technology areas for the channels to look over next few years?

The DCIM market is expected to reach $2 billion in 2016, an increase of 5.2 % from 2015 according to Gartner. With data center modernization continuing to be a key driver for infrastructure spend in India, we foresee the DCIM space as a key technology area that will drive our channel growth next year. One of our key offerings in the DCIM space is our range of smart solutions.

With SMEs and SMBs generating large amounts of data, the need will also arise for them to expand their IT infrastructure. As many of the SMBs and SMEs make do with limited IT infrastructure they are always on the lookout for Smart Solutions that can help them save and manage data without having to build new data center space. This approach, helps them increase their data center capacity, improve IT control and business efficiency without having to build a new data center, which would involve the company incurring huge costs. Additionally we also provide UPS systems to ensure clean and uninterrupted power supply which facilitates the functioning of the manufacturing units without any interruptions in production processes. From a company standpoint, Emerson Network Power is geared up to adapt to the changing scenarios of the industry and our focus will be to work with the channel fraternity to target SMEs and SMBs considering the growing demand for cost efficient IT Solutions.

What are the trends you expect to tap in 2016?

These are some of the trends that will come to play in the coming year.

Cloud gets complicated: Most organizations are now using cloud computing to some degree and we will likely see an evolution from SAAS to true hybrid environments, in which cloud services could be used to bring greater agility to legacy facilities. Due to this cloud will get more complex and the push for adoption of right sized datacenters will become an essential step in managing energy consumption. That said, the potential for unused data center capacity to become part of a shared-service, distributed cloud computing model will also be explored, enabling enterprise data centers to sell their excess capacity in the open market.

Data Centers Will Communicate in a Common Language: The Internet of Things (IoT) will not only impact future data center architectures by increasing the volume of data that must be processed, it will also change data center management—and the latter sooner than the former. Today’s data centers include thousands of devices that speak a host of languages, including IPMI, SNMP, and Mod Bus. This creates gaps between systems that limit efforts to manage holistically. That limit will cease to exist as Redfish, an open systems specification for data center and systems management developed by Emerson Network Power, Intel, Dell and HP, gains traction.

We are also keen on working with the channel fraternity to ensure that we can tap in to growing market for renewable energy sources from both Datacenters as well as power backup systems.

What are the areas in which partners still need to work on for their better growth?

With time our partners have to evolve and learn to market our products better and acquire new skills. These new skills can mean acquiring feedback from CIOs on products, understanding the industry and the customers’ requirements, considering business criticality, low total cost of ownership, flexibility of adoption and reliability etc.

To help foster our partner growth further, we are now extending channel programs to our partners to develop and enhance the skills to allow them to explore opportunities based on their strengths.

What are the channel practices you follow?

Channel is an extremely important part of Emerson Network Power’s go-to-market strategy in India. Hence we are adopting channel practices that are mutually beneficial to both.

To this effect, all our channel practices aim to foster and develop or that allow us to develop our channel fraternity and keep them motivated. Below are some of our channel plans for FY’16:

• Collaborate and strengthen relationship with all our partners
• Encourage our partners to sell solutions, integrating various products from the portfolio of Emerson Network Power as part of a complete solution
• Develop and expand our partner network for having good customer reach across the country
• Motivate our partners from time to time by way of rewards
• Extend our post sales service as well as our technical support to our channel partners throughout the product cycle, thereby promoting a solutions approach among partners so they can up-sell and create value for their business.

Any tips that Emerson Network Power would wish to offer to the channel partners?

Below are a few tips that we would like to offer our Channels partners:

• Stay close to customer – Channel Partners must consistently engage with the customer and try to understand their requirements from time to time. My suggestion to channel partners is to continuously update themselves with the products and solutions and make the transition to becoming a solution provider rather than being just an IT vendor

• Maintain Long Term Working Relationships with customers– They also need to ensure that they maintain and enjoy a healthy rapport with customers as this will go a long way in building trust and getting feedback.

• Be Solution Focused - At Emerson Network Power we want our channel partners to be solution focused rather than product centric. We encourage our channel partners to offer a full-fledged product portfolio complete with all solutions and products rather than just one product, so customers can get a complete solution which is cost effective and beneficial.

 How was your business in terms of sales in India in last 5 years?

Emerson Network Power is and has been growing consistently in the last five years. This is due to an innovative portfolio of state of the art solutions we have been offering our clients. We believe that this will help us in growing at an even faster rate in the coming years.

Over the last five years there are many sectors that have contributed to our growth. In the coming years, E Governance projects will come to be a key focus area for & will become the next biggest demand driver, as it showcases enormous potential considering that DCIM is a key area of specialization for our business. Other focus will be sectors such as BFSI, ITeS, manufacturing, education, hospitality banking, healthcare & other small and medium business critical applications.

What’s your plan for FY 2017?

As every business is slowly gravitating towards becoming a digital business, decision-makers are looking to improve both the efficiency and effectiveness of their overall IT environment as well as network infrastructure. To this effect, India and China are today seeing a huge surge in demand from enterprises for state of art network infrastructure. The ongoing initiatives like the Digital India and Make in India campaigns, has opened up new market opportunities for us, especially for our datacenter infrastructure management solutions (DCIM) and UPS products portfolio. Moreover, post spin off and inception of Brand Vertiv we will have strategic marketing plans to reposition ourselves and retain the customer loyalty.

We will continue to offer a wide range of products in both power and thermal management embedded with lifecycle management services and solutions for maintaining, deploying and optimizing these products.

What about cloud adoption? Is it not affecting Emerson Network Power's business?

Increased cloud computing adoption is being driven by a variety of factors. Many of these drivers are directly correlated with the need to balance IT budgets with the increasing demand for business-critical IT services. From a business perspective, the ability to scale infrastructure resources to support rapid growth without compromising business efficiency is critical. Converting long-term OPEX and CAPEX investments into a scalable OPEX that reflects actual needs makes cloud computing an attractive option for many C-level executives interested in “getting more with less” from their existing infrastructures.

Emerson Network Power is geared up to take on this challenge and offer its customers the best in class solutions for the deployment of cloud architectures in in existing facilities as well as an integrated approach to data center infrastructure management (DCIM). We do not see this affecting our business in the long run as most of our solutions are such that they can be assembled on site and therefore are categorized under on-premise physical infrastructure.

Latest trends report that SME's are reaching out for DCIM solutions? How do you look at the situation and how are you reaching them?

As businesses need access to data 24x7 quite a few SMBs have started thinking about datacentres, but they haven’t been able to invest in them considering resource and space limitations. SMEs are constantly on the lookout for solutions that are cost effective that have an easy user interface. They generate large amounts of data, and more often than not make do with a limited IT infrastructure and with perhaps just two to three servers and therefore usually don’t have the capacity to invest in data centers on account of space constraints.

Emerson Network Power’s industry leading solutions has enabled quite a few of these companies with solutions such as smart rows, smart aisles and smart mods which are mini data canter’s with racks and various facilities all enclosed in one. A smart solution is a mini data center which comes equipped with all solutions like precision cooling, UPSs, power management, monitoring, control technologies, and fire suppression in one encased system. All of this, as well as the need for modular solutions which are less complex where the IT infrastructure is viewed as one rather than piecemeal are major reasons that have today spearheaded the demand for smart solutions.

With a view, to reaching out to as many companies as possible we are running various on ground programs for them, wherein we display our solutions so these companies can have a first-hand view of how these solutions work and benefit their businesses. In addition, we also have a large network of channel partners who reach out to them regularly. Primarily we believe that there lies a significant untapped market opportunity for partners to grow their business laterally by helping customers explore the repertoire of smart solutions from Emerson Network Power for datacentres.