“We are focusing on training our partners to sell our solutions”

Sanjay Motwani, regional director, India, SEA, Taiwan & Hong Kong, Raritan International shares Raritan’s plans for the year 2015 with DQ Channels

What is your key focus for business in 2015?

Raritan is an established name in the Indian market and in the IT Infrastructure Management Solutions space. Providing solutions and tools for optimising efficiencies in data centres is at the centre of our services. Our award winning power distribution solutions and KVM power will continue to revolutionise the Indian market to generate the ongoing business for us. Our key focus this year, however, will be on our innovative DCIM solutions where we foresee huge traction to meet the increasing demand of data storage across sectors.

Raritan’s DCIM software provides the utilitarian ability to better manage assets, change and capacity enabling power monitoring, environmental monitoring and energy management.

What are the hurdles and obstacles that you have faced in 2014 and what are you doing to overcome it in 2015?

In 2014, the industry itself did not grow as much as we all expected it to grow.  There was basically a wait and watch scenario by the industry with respect to the government policies and how the industry will spend its money in the sector.

With the introduction of new solutions like DCIM and it being a new category the definition varies across vendors and customers. Hence the expectation of what DCIM can and cannot do is quite blurred. So our focus is on training the channel and to educate the market on the definition and the kind of expectation from DCIM.

As told that data centres have become the heart of IT so this year how much growth we can see in those terms?

A steady growth rate is evident from the investments being made for facilities as well as IT infrastructure in the data centre industry. This is likely to grow at 5-7% this year which translates into us looking at a $ 2 bn data centre market in 2015.

How do you channelize your business?

We channelize our business through distributors and resellers. Resellers sell to end customers and buy the solution from our distributors.

Our go-to-market strategy is that we engage directly with our clients in terms of building relationships with the customers to understand their area of requirement and designing solutions while we leverage the channels for the deployment and support.

How you are planning to popularize yourself in the Indian market?

Raritan with a 25 year old legacy in data centre monitoring and management space is a known, reputed and established brand, adopted by large enterprises across industry verticals and global markets, including in India. With the launch of enterprise class solutions for the SMB market, our current marketing focus is to educate the SMB market on the advantages of deploying our solutions to improve operational efficiencies, plan future capacities, reduce environmental impact and provide a better ROI on data centre spending. This is being done through a targeted marketing program with a strong content focus and one-on-one interactions through our channel partners.

Have you made any channel strategy that is going to help in promoting?

As part of our channel strategy, we are training our channel partners to sell our solutions better.  We make it a point to skill our channel partners so that they can accurately identify the need gaps in a data centre, design solutions and successfully install and support the same.

Secondly, we do not entertain any channel conflict in our business which has resulted in increase in the customer loyalty and better relationship in the long run.

Who will be your target audiences?

With the increasing role of the Data Centre in most industry sectors today, our target audience is fairly broad. Raritan solutions have shown significant benefits in data centres with 25+ racks or 500 + servers capacity. While the key decision makers are the CIO’s, CTO’s and data centre managers, we also address key influencers and integrators.

What is the reaction of channel partners to your data centre managers?

Our channel partners are trained to understand customers’ needs and recommend the best DCIM solution. They train the customers on how to deploy the solution and provide post installation support as well. While we meet the client to build on customer relationship and design the solutions, our channel partners act as our extended arm and provide demo, installation and support to our customers.

How important is DCIM for 2015 budget planning?

DCIM will play a significant role in CIO’s budget planning for their respective businesses in 2015. Several new initiatives are being discussed by the new government which will have a direct impact on structuring India as a world class data centre market. This has a direct call for data centre demand increase in 2015.

As data centres become more complex with big data, complex applications and evolving data centre models, it becomes increasingly important for CIOs and DCOs to have a complete visibility of all elements of the data centre in real time.

DCIM is the answer to this need for large data centres as well SMB centres whether they are captive or co-located.

Minimizing risk to downtime, controlling energy usage/cost, maximizing utilisation of current resources, living with tighter budgets and financing major investments are some of the key challenges in both data centre operations managements and organisation’s executive management.

The organizations that can maintain maximum data centre availability and improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the basic data centre infrastructure will definitely have a competitive advantage. CIOs are always looking for new ways to enhance daily operational efficiencies, and Data Centre Infrastructure Management (DCIM) is the newest tool in the market.