Let’s Leverage the Power of Digital

PRESIDENT’S NOTE

Dear members,

A big high-five on the successful third edition of ISODA InterConnect.

In today’s digital age, it’s all about making the right noise and being heard by the relevant audience. And that’s precisely what we are aiming. By expanding our media initiatives we hope to create a larger impact for every new step we take. The very fact that we are communicating through a digital forum is proof of it blossoming by the day.

The buzz around digitization is all pervasive. Consumer adoption of digital technologies is growing exponentially with digital banking, online shopping, e-governance, etc. The government’s flagship initiatives like Digital India, Skill India and Smart City are finally rolling out, which promise to provide a further impetus to digital G2G, G2B and G2C engagements.

Also as partners we have realized how our customers are increasingly relying on digital and social media to make their IT purchase decisions. Hence there is a need for all of us to focus on ramping up our digital marketing.

In the current edition, we are discussing both—how partners can leverage digital marketing to develop new business and also how digitization can offer new solutions and services opportunities to partners.

I am happy to inform that ISODA portal itself is gearing up to go mobile. Taking a step further, I welcome members to actively use WhatsApp and Google groups to share experiences, best practices, roadblocks and solutions.

Last but not the least; join me in congratulating our partners who have stepped into new ventures and those who have won prestigious awards. Details are provided in the news section.

Keep the energy up!

Let’s partner to progress.

 L Ashok, President, ISODA

Best practices to leverage digital marketing

K Ashok Prabhu, Founder, Director and CEO, Valuepoint Techsol, speaks about the best practices to leverage digital marketing for businesses

We embarked on our digital marketing journey 15 months ago by creating a responsive website, devising a SEO and social media strategy, and planning structured EDM campaigns. We also launched www.softkartindia.com for selling Adobe software.

“Patience is the key to achieve ROI
from digital marketing. SEO and
social media take time to deliver but
they certainly do if executed well
and consistently”

To drive our branding and marketing initiatives, we identified the best candidate internally and hired a well-known agency to drive digital marketing.

For SEO, we finalized 40 keywords relevant to our products and services. In just 12 months, we are at no. 1 position for 17 of the 40 keywords on google.co.in and google.com. Visits to our website have grown significantly with several online enquiries of which 2 percent are genuine. This has helped us close several small-value orders.

A vertical-centric EDM campaign has helped us generate leads that have contributed nearly `50 lakh of business in the past 12 months.

Patience is the key to achieve ROI from digital marketing. SEO and social media takes time to deliver and but they certainly do if executed well and consistently.

From being a pessimist, I have become a believer of digital marketing. In past 15 months, we have spent around Rs 5 lakhs in digital marketing, but this year we are planning to double the budget.

This year, we plan to focus on webinars and video marketing. The second agenda is to drive SMB and retail traffic and boost sales from e-commerce portal.

We will introduce niche products, which aren’t available on any other online platform.

Opportunities in Smart City, Digital India and Skill India programs

Dhirendra Khandelwal, MD, E-Square System and Technologies, shares how his company is preparing itself for opportunities arising from flagship government programs

We see big opportunities from programs like Digital India, Smart Cities and Skill India.

Our strategy is to build skill-sets, create a relevant solutions portfolio and to get into these opportunities at an early stage.

We have already been deploying e-Governance projects in many states in eastern region. In the past 12 months, we have executed projects worth Rs 18 crore. We deployed a solution for modernization of government records across 130 Taluka offices in Odisha. Another project involved deploying a large data warehouse for running the HRMS of the Odisha government.

Since Bhubaneshwar has been selected to be developed as a smart city, we are gearing up to participate in a big way. The first phase of the Bhubaneshwar smart city will see allocation of `4,400 crore over the period of 5 years. Currently the detailed project report (DPR) is being prepared and actual work on the project will start in next 12 months.

We have allocated major resources for developing best practices by studying the development and workings of smart cities in major countries. We are building a team of 15-20 engineers skilled on IoT and analytics. We are also working with companies like IBM, Cisco, and TCS to offer IoT solutions.

For Skill India, we are developing training programs for engineers on networking, storage and software development. We expect to garner `150 crore from Digital India, Smart City and Skill India opportunities in the next 2-3 years.

DigitalTrack Provides Total Storage Solution

The solution provider designed and implemented a cost-effective unified storage solution for a real estate development company which has provided several tangible and intangible benefits.

Total Environment is an architect-led real estate design, development and construction firm. The company has developed several prestigious projects—that range from residential apartments to educational campuses—across Bengaluru, Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai, Ooty and Mysore. The company had a huge storage requirement—real-time storage for operational and project management data, and archival for 2D and 3D designs of its real estate projects.

CHALLENGES

The company’s existing primary storage was old, non-scalable and well-past support period. The company’s data backup on tapes was not reliable and lacked DR.Human intervention was required in managing data backup and recovery. In a nutshell, the company required a scalable, flexible and futuristic storage solution.

THE SOLUTION

Chennai-based DigitalTrack was selected as a partner for providing the storage solution due to the partner’s unique consultative approach. DigitalTrack analyzed the customer’s current challenges and future needs to suggest a solution which included Dell Storage NX3230, a capacity-dense, dedicated network-attached storage (NAS) solution integrated with advanced file-sharing software designed especially for small- to medium-sized organizations.

“We recommended a flexible and cost-effective storage solution that offers scalability of up to 96TB, and has all the features that the customer required including online replication, de-duplication, DR and thin-provisioning. We also provided data migration services to the customer to port data from old storage systems to the new solution,” said R Madhusudhanan, Director, Sales, DigitalTrack.

The storage system boasts of several unique tools like DFS Namespace—a virtual view of shared folders across the organizations. Using this feature, an administrator can easily select which shared folders to present in the Namespace, can design the hierarchy in which those folders appear, and can determine the names that the shared folders show in the Namespace.

The other unique tool, DFS Replication, allows replication of data between servers across a room or on the other side of the world. DFS Replication uses remote differential compression (RDC) to replicate only the changes in a file on a block-by-block basis instead of replicating the entire file.

BENEFITS

The solution has automated the backup thus reducing the effort in backup procedure. It also provided significant savings on backup software and hardware.

Overall access to large size files (>200MB) has decreased significantly. Reliability of the backup has increased as recovery is almost guaranteed and time to recover

lost files has reduced drastically. Efficiency of the storage system has increased due to thin provisioning. Overall time to recover files has reduced drastically.

The out-of-the-box de-duplication feature has improved storage utilization and performance. “DigitalTrack has provided a cost-effective solution that meets all our objectives.

It is the right solution that takes care of our organization’s current needs and future expansion using the generic technology with a brand guarantee on the product and service,” stated Anil Baradia, CIO, Total Environment Building Systems.

Enjay becomes preferred partner of SugarCRM

 Enjay IT Solutions has officially become the preferred India partner for open source CRM vendor, SugarCRM. Enjay has been providing customized CRM solutions using SugarCRM platform since 2009 and has more than 350 customers not just in India but also globally.

“We have been a prolific ISV and solutions provider for SugarCRM and have developed several unique plugins. Our contribution to SugarCRM has been recognized with this formal partnership,” said Limesh Parekh, CEO, Enjay IT Solutions.

The partnership will enable Enjay to pitch SugarCRM to large enterprises. “So far we had been catering to SMEs but a strong partnership with SugarCRM will allow us to provide solutions to large companies. We are already working on some prestigious projects,” informed Parekh.

Enjay’s CRM customers span the healthcare, IT & ITeS, manufacturing, telecom, real estate, and professional services segments. Some of them include Wysetek, Insight Business Machines, Mahima Group, Jariwala Labs, Global Hospitals, Phoenix Medical, Omnex International and Navaida Solutions. Many customers chose CRM solution from Enjay over platforms like MS Dynamics owing to superior price-performance and features. “We evaluated many CRM solutions including MS Dynamics before we chose Enjay, as it’s flexible, cost-effective and has great CTI plug-in,” stated Gunjan Shah, Director, Insight Business Machines.

Mitul Shah, Director, Rajesh Paper Mills also vouched for Enjay. “They understood the CRM process required for a growing organization like us and provided us a customized solution which has grown our revenues by 30 percent,” he said.

Veeras wins big at Intel Security APAC Partner Summit

Chennai-based Veeras Infotek has won the Intel Security Partner of the Year award at the recently concluded Intel Security APAC Partner Summit in Bangkok.

Veeras won the award based on parameters like revenue growth of the Intel Security business, nature of projects deployed and overall competency.

“It is a timely recognition. Although our security practice is very significant, we are mainly recognized for our virtualization and storage solutions competencies. This award firmly reestablishes us as a strong security player and validates our deep competencies in this space,” said Sudarsan Ranganathan, CEO, Veeras Infotek.

According to Ranganathan, Veeras witnessed a revenue growth of 35 percent in FY2015-16 partly due to execution of many large security projects in India and globally.

The company deployed a large IPS solution project for an MNC across 8 countries. It also won a prestigious multi-year services contract to manage the security operations centre (SOC) of a large customer in Saudi Arabia. Veeras executed a significant project involving migration of the entire security infrastructure of a large MNC from a competing platform to Intel Security solutions. On the back of its increasing global business and fast-growing security practice, Veeras is expecting to clock 50 percent growth in the current fiscal.

Rachaita and Amity bag NCN Valued Partner Awards

JSI to distribute Longmai’s e-security products Rachaita Infosoft and Amity Infosoft have received the most Valued Partner Award for their performance in selling ESET security solutions at the recently held NCN Awards in New Delhi.

The NCN Awards were presented to companies that demonstrated strong growth and sales performance in the last fiscal.

Accepting the award, Raju Warriar, CEO, Rachaita Infosoft, said, “We bagged some major deals for ESET during the year—deployed 2,700 endpoints for Parul University, Baroda and 3,500 nodes for CVM, Anand. In both cases the customer shifted from Quick Heal to ESET because of the product’s superior features and our trusted local support. Our performance and the award have given us immense confidence and motivation to deliver faster growth for ESET antivirus solutions.”

Manoj Patel, CEO, Amity Infosoft said, “Amity has been distributing antivirus products for the past 12 years and has a strong sales and support presence throughout Gujarat. Last year, we sold more than 25,000 AV licenses of ESET products. The award has motivated our team and also our partners.”

“Strong partner relations, wide geographical
coverage, smart channel and customer marketing,
and localized tech support contributed to our strong growth of ESET business”
RAJU WARRIAR, CEO, Rachaita Infosoft

“With strong sales and support throughout Gujarat, last year we sold more than 25,000 AV licenses of ESET products. The award has motivated our team and also our partners”

MANOJ PATEL, CEO, Amity Infosoft

Congratulating the two winners, Zakir Hussain Rangwala, Country Head, ESS Distribution, said, “It’s great to see two of our leading partners win the NCN award. All the awardees were chosen based on independent research done by NCN and both Rachaita and Amity came out trumps.”

JSI to distribute Longmai’s e-security products

JS Infotech (JSI), a provider of e-security and PKI solutions, has partnered with Century Longmai Technology, China to distribute their range of PKI-based multi-factor authentication security solutions.

The distribution portfolio will initially include the Chinese vendor’s mToken range of smart cards-based tokens and FIDO (Fast Identity Online) Authentication.

Allen Liang, CEO, Century Longmai signs partnership contract with Narayanan Murthy, CEO, JS Infotech

Commenting on the partnership, Allen Liang, CEO, Century Longmai, said, “JS Infotech is the natural choice for distributing our products in the Indian market as our products complement their existing portfolio and expertise. We are confident that JS Infotech will effectively represent and market our products across the country with their strong partner network.”

Echoing similar thoughts, Narayanan Murthy, CEO, JS Infotech, added, “The partnership with Century Longmai has strengthened our portfolio and will help us and our partners to significantly expand business. The company has a wide range of products that are industry certified and have unrivalled performance.”

With a pan-India presence and a 250-plus partner network, JS Infotech specializes in distributing e-security products including digital signature certificates and PKI-based security products while also offering easy-to-access services such as cyber law consultancy for e-governance.