Back on the channel track

Mumbai: Trying to gain lost ground in the security space, Computer Associates
(CA) India is banking on the channel, especially the volume sellers, to
help it do so.

There was a time when CA was one of the most well-known security vendors
in the country. Over time, people started associating it more with
enterprise security and the company did little to dissuade the channel
of this notion.

Now, it is trying to re-entrench itself with the software resellers and
solution providers as a holistic security player, with equal focus on
mid-level to enterprise-class solutions.

This is probably why India is the only country where the vendor has
appointed a chairman-Saurabh Shrivastava-at the helm of national
affairs, in addition to a country manager-Amit Chatterjee. One of the
reasons behind this is the strategic importance that the country has as
a high-growth region for CA's overall business plan.

Secondly, CA also has a R&D center in India, which carries out a lot of
development work, underlining the country's importance in CA's global
service delivery plans as well.

Broad channel lines

CA has two broad streams of products-one is the volume products business
headed by Vijayant Rai, Director Channels-India and SAARC and the other
is the value or the enterprise product line which is managed by Lata
Singh, Director, Partners and Alliances.

The enterprise section has products like Unicenter, which are typically
products used by larger enterprise customers and have longer lead time
in terms of selling and deployment. The enterprise products also need a
whole host of consultancy services, which is why CA works with tier-1
solution providers to deliver these solutions.

Volume products by definition are those sold by resellers to the
enterprise as well, but which does not take so long for selling or
implementation. Some examples of the volume products are arcServe, XO
Soft and anti-virus products where the period for implementation is no
longer than a few days.

Both streams work through partners, as CA's go to market process is 100
percent through partners. The value partners are tier-1 systems
integrators (SI) in the likes of HCL Infosystems, Wipro, Datamatics, etc.

The volume partner model has a national distributor which then caters to
the local partners. In India CA's national distributors are Ingram Micro
India and Redington India. This aside, it has a set of over 200 partners
nationally who sell a gamut of CA's products from recovery management to
anti-virus solutions.

Service business

The entire services in terms of consultation, pre-sales support,
implementation etc for volume products is also done entirely through the
channel partners. The dogma followed by CA is that services is where the
margins are better in the software business and therefore partners must
be afforded the opportunity to make money in services as well.

In the value business, the services amount is much higher, because the
customer engagement is very high as well.

CA's Hyderabad R&D center also doubles up as its global support center.
This center also offers the bulk of support for most products like
ArcServe. The global R&D work also comes from Hyderabad which has over
2,000 people.

Channel tree

In the volume business, Rai has a team of managers and pre-sales teams
in the four regions of the country. The pre-sales team is in charge of
ensuring that calendar training happen in every region and that partners
have the requisite sales kits to close any prospective deals. The
channel managers are responsible for their individual sales teams.
In the value business, there are certain major accounts where CA works
closely with partners like HCL or Wipro in closing the sales deal. For
big ticket projects it also has a large team of pre-sales people who are
there to construct the solution and work with the partner team to
handhold them into the implementation part.

As it stands, the ecosystem is pretty well-oiled since it has been in
place for a very long time. CA claims to provide the air cover to its
partners in terms of all the pre-sales support required, including the
budget planning. In recent times, there have been some changes in the
company's top senior manage­ment in India. Now it is looking at ways to
augment the structure in the volume business to get more business.
This does not necessarily mean that the company will add more
distributors. Instead it will probably increase its channel partner
network by 20 percent this year. The company is in talks with some of
the newly emerged value-added distributors, though there are no
immediate plans on the anvil to add them as national distributors.

(As told to Vinita Bhatia)