Exclusive Interview: Manoj Dhingra, Co-Founder and Director, Domestic Business, Stellar

In this exclusive interaction, Manoj Dhingra, Co-Founder & Director, Domestic Business, Stellar tells is about their new data erasure solution, about their partnership programmes and also about other aspects of data management.

Describe in detail your Green Partner Programme

Stellar Green Partner Programme is designed to foster business growth and profitability, strengthening and recognising the partners’ ability to sell, deliver and support the company’s world-class data recovery, data erasure services and solutions in tier 2, tier 3 and tier 4 cities in India. After implementing the successful partner programs in Europe and USA, the company has now forayed into India by launching its lucrative, pan-India partner programme.

This robust programme was launched in India in 2018,envisioned to provide unique benefits tailored around the capabilities of each partner, reinforcing the delivery of real and measurable benefits such as reward value exchange between Stellar and its partners, offering flexible ways of earning revenue margin. With its direct presence through 15 offices in India, Stellar is strengthening its presence in more than 100 cities (across North, East, West and South) such as Bhopal, Dehradun, Guwahati, Indore, Jaipur, Kollam, Lucknow, Madurai, Mysore, Patna, Salem, Shimla, Siliguri, Surat, Tiruchirappalli, Thiruvananthapuram, Visakhapatnam along with several other tier 3 and tier 4 cities.

Stellar’s channel and sales teams work closely with the partner community to support their diverse needs. All the partners receive range of enhanced benefits such as product and service discount structures, product demonstrations, sales strategy support, joint marketing activities, training, and access to the Stellar Partner Portal. This unique initiative, entirely focused on “partner experience” is introduced at two partner levels -

*Stellar “Value Partner” Programme – Specifically designed for regional partners to grow their business and enhance profitability with company’s award-winning data recovery solutions. This program is solely made with an aim to deliver value for both customers and partners. Customers in any tier 2, tier 3, tier 4 cities can access‘best in class’ data recovery services at their doorstep with Stellar’s value partners present in those cities. At the same time this program ensures the long-term success and profitability for partners.

*Stellar “Green Partner” Programme – Specifically designed for regional partners to follow a simplified and streamlined program that will focus on easy deployment of Stellar’s eco-friendly, safe, secure and certified data erasure service& solutions.Stellar Green Partner Program offers several benefits including sales and technical training, certification, regular software updates, preferential pricing and marketing support for the partners. Stellar performs over 100,000 Data Erasures every year which builds more trust and credibility for the partners and customers.

The company’s Partner Program portfolio also includes Affiliate, Referral and Resellers partnerships which are process driven online partnerships. This new addition is designed to ensure partners achieve long-term success by leveraging Stellar’s highly scalable   network partner model and also highlights the company’s commitment to growing its relationship with the partner community at grass root level.

With an aim to offer a great customer experience, we will continue to support our channel partners by strengthening their abilities to enter and to operate successfully in markets, by providing them with key elements of the platform that they require to ensure long-term success. We will continue to work closely with our partners to provide them with the cost savings, enhanced productivity, visibility and compliances that they desire.

What is your strategy for expanding channel partnerships in India and abroad?

We have a large partner network of more than 8000 partners right from the mid-market, low-end right up to the big enterprises; company has close to 8000 partners abroad and more than 177 partners in India, as of now. Our go-to-market strategy is to work through partners primarily since we strongly believe channel partners had always played a critical role in the success story of our company. They are one of a core pillars when it comes to the go to market strategy.  Stellar is enthusiastically working expanding in tier 2, tier 3 and tier 4 markets with primary focus in understanding the segment-specific nuances in those areas. We accordingly prioritize our channel partnership strategy to strengthen the capabilities and reliability needed to reach customers in the last mile; for instance an earlier announced outreach plan to touch 19,100 pin codes with our channel partners. We will continue to dialogue with different partners and see prudent expansion in the coming years.

With more and more organisations migrating to cloud platforms, how are your Green Partners ensuring Data Security?

When organisations are migrating to cloud platforms; utilising these cloud platform as a service (PaaS) model. Their existing hardware becomes redundant. BitRaser helps to sanitize data from the existing hardware comprising storage media like HDDs, SSDs, SAN/NAS storage etc. BitRaser utilises over 24 International erasure standards to ensure compliance by providing a tamper proof certificate of data erasure. This helps to safeguard Data Privacy of the organisations and prevent data leakages which usually take place otherwise due to unsafe disposition of these IT assets at the end of their lifecycle.

How is your data erasure solution different from the previous versions?

Stellar has been a catalyst for some of the most significant technology transformations in the last 26 years; from being a pioneer in data recovery services to launching the data erasure software. Stellar is at the forefront of providing end-to-end data recovery, data migration and data erasure solutions that are safe and secure. Managing up-to-date tech advancements is always a key priority for us.

The new BitRaser version 3.0 is more intuitive and powerful compared to the last version. Previous version had manual control relying on application functionality; for instance manageability of license count is easier since the new version is completely automated allowing license management & distribution on a secured cloud while the previous version had erasure reports gathered and saved on the BitRaser USB dongle or any other USB drive.

Tested by STQC Lab, Government of India, Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology, this software empowers organizations and individuals to wipe off sensitive data permanently from hard drives, SSDs, desktops, laptops, servers and mobile devices.

BitRaser version 3.0 has been certified by ADISA (globally recognized certification) to bring assurance to the process of data sanitization of IT storage media. BitRaser is a made in India software that generates tamper-proof erasure reports to help organizations meet compliance with legal auditing requirements. Bitraser software is compliance with data security & privacy regulations viz. GDPR, GLB, SOX, HIPAA, ISO27001, and PCI DSS etc.