‘‘We leverage on our partners to distribute our technology integration skills’’

KN Prasad Head-Marketing and Alliances,Apara Enterprise Solutions

Bangalore-based Apara Enterprises has created a niche for itself by offering
complex solutions in the enterprise space across major domains of networking,
storage and security. As the person, responsible for taking these solutions to
the market, KN Prasad is now looking at selling solutions developed by Apara
through partners. Excerpts from the interview:

n What are the key
activities that Apara, as a solution provider, is currently engaged in?

Apara began its operations in 1992 and is more than 11 years old today.
Initially we started by offering services and over time, we have evolved to
providing core IT infrastructure solutions as well as services in the enterprise
space.

KN Prasad Head-Marketing and Alliances,Apara Enterprise Solutions

We have internally aligned our organization in terms of business lines. We
address enterprise storage as a focused business. Then we have intelligent
networking as a separate business activity, we have enterprise security as our
third group. And to complement these three distinct activities, we have the
professional service business.

So if you look at the way our business is structured, we are addressing
almost 80% of the core IT infrastructure requirements in the enterprise space.

n Do you
also engage with other channel partners?

Yes, we do have a ‘leverage’ model wherein we work through partners.
This is a very unique model where we are looking at offering real high-end
solutions to the next level of customers with the help of our partners. Aligning
with partners means we will distribute our technology and systems integration
skills.

We are not going to our partners with a product but we are
going as a solution distributor. The pitch that we have taken is that we will
distribute our solution integration skill by packaging our solutions as well as
productizing our services. We address a set of focused 25-30 people across the
country who work with us on identified opportunities.

n Would
Apara also be looking at new partners, probably those who are not so well-known
or well-established but still having that solution focus in their business?

Absolutely. There are two kind of the partners in this industry. The first
are those who don’t go beyond topline growth and are distribution oriented.
Then there are value-added resellers who work according to customer needs. Their
focus

is on how to meet that need and develop the customer. They are not much
topline-focussed and they will have a fixed set of customers they want to work
with.

It is the second kind of partners that interest us and we are
obviously open to engage with them in further delivering our solutions to the
customers.

n Who are
your key vendors?

The way Apara is positioned, its a vendor-neutral company. But at the same
time, we work with the best-of-breed vendors. For example, in storage, we work
with Hitachi Data Systems, Network Appliance, Veritas, Brocade, Quantum,
Tandberg, Backbone etc. On the networking front, we work with Juniper, Avaya and
Peribit. In the security domain, we have partnered with vendors like Netscreen,
RSA, ISS and Trend Micro.

n What sort
of solutions do you offer in the domains that you talked about?

In networking, we offer solutions like bandwidth management/optimization,
content delivery, load-balancing and SSL (secure socket layer) authentication,
to name a few. We also do VoIP and solutions for contact centers.

Technology Partners

In security, we do infrastructure security, including
firewalls, intrusion detection, anti-virus. At the same time we do content
security as well. We have also recently entered into offering solutions for
storage security. Storage security is a very new and upcoming technology trend
across the world and we would be one of the first players in India to address
this segment.

At Apara our vision is also to take storage networking to the
masses instead of it being restricted to top 200-300 companies. And to achieve
the same we have also taken an active part in an international forum of storage
companies called SAN ecosystem. From a technology integrator perspective, Apara
is the only company to be a part of this forum.

n What kind
of training do you impart to your partners?

For the kind of solution space that we operate in, which is quite complex in
nature, mere training sessions don’t help our partners. We do conduct some
pre-sales training, product introduction sessions but to really understand the
customer requirements, we engage with our partners in a real-time scenario.

First, we identify a business and then we ask our partners to
go to these customers and understand their requirement. It’s basically a joint
exercise for us and we go to the customer as a winning combination. So, we
stress more on ‘on-the-job’ training, which is more project-based.

Our experience has been that our partners have not yet
reached that level to drive the projects independently. They take stand
depending on which vendor’s product are demanded by customer. So until this
approach changes, a lot of hand-holding would be required on a regular basis and
at Apara we are committed to provide that.

GOLDIE