Partner Leadership Summit 2020 Asserts Collaboration, Up Skilling as Crucial Elements for Channel Growth in the Post-Pandemic Era

The 11th Edition Saw Record Participation with over 800 Members of Channel Fraternity

In its online avatar, the most comprehensive and trusted channel event has raised the bar even higher with a mix of IT industry’s leading players, domain experts, pan-India audience, an innovative showcase zone, one-on-one meetings, power discussions and customized marketing initiatives

New Delhi, November 23, 2020:Collaboration and new skills acquisition have emerged as the most promising elements for sustained business resilience in any future crisis situation. The recently concluded Partner Leadership Summit & Awards 2020 bolstered the fact that peer-to-peer collaboration among the channel community as well as up skilling on cloud and new-age solutions will be crucial for sustained business growth and resilience in the post-pandemic era. The industry experts and the channel community opined that long-term resilience strategy will result in businesses that are able to anticipate and prepare for future scenarios, minimize the impact of the shocks that do hit and recover more quickly from them.

In a thought-provoking opening keynote, Tushar Parekh, Chairman, ASIRT, underlined that despite Covid-19 impacting businesses like never before, on the positive note, the disruption has resulted in renewed focus on sustainability practices. He added that companies with focus on digital businesses, such as automation software and cloud-based service delivery, would fare better than those with a focus on business process management and legacy application and infrastructure services. However, the main essence of growth going forward rests in collaboration. “With our essence of collaboration and cooperation, we intend to leverage on the synergy between the members as ‘ONE ASIRT! Partners need to collaborate and leverage on each other’s expertise. To enable this, we have formed Chairman’s Club for mentoring and partner growth. In addition, we have started an initiative to enable businesses within the consortiums to enhance collaboration and trust among the partners for mutual growth,” he disclosed.

Rajeev Mamidanna, Chairman, ISODA, supported the narrative with his views that the Covid crisis has raised the importance of collaboration among the peers. During his keynote, he mentioned that the pandemic has given us the opportunity to introspect on the failures, areas where we need to be flexible and the domains which are relevant from the business point of view. “We must take a three-pronged approach to inculcate resilience in the business. Relook at services that we offer and realign them as per the relevance and demand from the customers. In addition, determine whether the customers we are addressing today are relevant for the next couple of years. And most importantly, ensure that we work with our peers by leveraging on each other’s skills and expertise.” In fact, collaboration is the biggest impetus for ISODA as an association, he concluded.

While elaborating on the Oracle’s cloud strategy and the modernized Oracle Partner Network (OPN 2020) designed to accelerate partners’ transition to cloud as well as drive superior customer experience, Sanjoy Mukherjee, Senior Director& Head of Alliances &Channels,Technology and Cloud Platform, Oracle India, highlighted the growing importance of cloud for business resilience during his channel connect session. He stated that more Indian organizations are now looking to improve their business resilience with cloud-led innovation owing to the current pandemic situation. “Industry experts anticipate an increased demand for secure cloud services. We see partners playing a big role in fulfilling this demand as they seek more collaboration opportunity with us to help their end-customer realize extreme performance, greater security, and increased cost savings via Oracle cloud,” he added.

In a similar brand connect session, Lata Singh, Executive Director, IBM Partner Ecosystem & CSI, elucidated on the partner ecosystem dynamics and how IBM helped them during the pandemic. She stressed that SMBs as well as the large enterprises have been driving energies on cloud solutions more than ever. She added that IBM was quick to launch new initiatives for the SMBs. “We offered many of our cloud solutions on 90 days free trial that encouraged a lot of SMB customers, as well as our partners to download and experience our applications. In addition, we encouraged partners to develop cloud offerings around the IBM portfolio for the SMB segment. That was the critical piece as the CapEx buying was converting into OpEx buying and that was a big shift for smaller businesses.”

Further, a remarkable panel discussion moderated by Rajneesh De, Consulting Editor, Techplus Media,deliberated on the strategies and best practices for partners to face cash flow challenges, offer remote customer support and forging a balance between retention of existing customers and acquisition of new ones. Speaking on the trends in favour of work-from-home (WFH), Suresh Ramani,CEO & Cloud Evangelist, Tech Gyan,highlighted that businesses, specifically mid-tier, will adopt a mix of WFH and onsite approach. “People are quite happy with the productivity of the employees working from home. However, the need is to inculcate the right mix of culture and process to make WFH a success as well as to ensure employee motivation. In this process, over-communication through various mediums of communication is highly important.” Jiten Mehta, Managing Director, Magnamious Systems, elaborated on the strategy for customer retention vs new customer acquisition. He maintained that retaining the existing customers and the manpower is quite important to have a sustained cash flow. “Working on this strategy, we have garnered impressive revenue growth in the AMJ quarter by supporting our customers with WFH solutions. We proactively approached customers with our strong domain expertise and solutions for segments like BFSI, Pharma and manufacturing.” Adding to the strategy, Amarnath Shetty, Managing Director, LDS Infotech, shared that cloud computing has been the biggest winner amid the entire crisis. “WFH culture has forced businesses to adopt cloud in a big way. As per market estimates, cloud computing market is expected to grow by over 80 percent over the next 1 year. In fact, most of the enquiries are on cloud solutions, cloud migration and WFH solutions.”

Highlighting the cash flow challenges and the best practices, SaketKapur, Managing Director, Green Vision, said that while the partner’s financial liability towards the vendors is secured and fixed; for the customers, whether corporate or government, the financial liability is not secured at all. He emphasized that due to Covid restrictions three scenarios have emerged: Scenario #1 where contractual obligations were performed successfully prior to the lockdown and customer is delaying payments using lockdown as an excuse. Scenario #2 where contractual obligations have been partially executed and the partner is stuck with payments but has to fulfil commitment towards the vendor and the manpower. In the third scenario, contract has been made but the work has not yet started off. “In the first scenario, litigation is not advisable. The feasible solution is to approach the channel association and let the association compel the customer to pay or face boycott with no future support from any channel partner. The second scenario entails reviewing your contract and leverage on the provision for partial payment. Joint call can be taken on the remaining obligation to be completed. In the third scenario, partner must sit again to realign the terms and conditions of the contract before starting the project,” he explained. Further, L Ashok, Managing Director, Futurenet Technologies, recounted channel expectations from the government to ease the challenges due to Covid crisis. He informed that ISODA has communicated the expectations of the channel community to the government. “Cash flow is the main pain point of the channels. Government must ensure that all the IT payments must be expedited. In addition, RBI should play a role in ensuring credit facility to MSMEs by setting up a grievance redressal cell. Further, GST payments must be deferred and could be paid in a staggered manner. These measures will go a long way in helping channel community keep their businesses running.”

Moreover, in an interesting channel talk session, Joybrata Mukherjee, Director – Channels, SMB, Services, HPE India, listed the financial initiatives and partner support in the pandemic times, while explaining HPE’s strategic direction in the post-pandemic era. He informed that as part of the worldwide initiative, the company came out with a deferred payment solution for Tier-1 partners, which they passed on to the Tier-2 partners. “In addition, HPE Financial Services rolled out $2 billion package, which enabled us to help our partners as well as our end customers with deferred payments. Secondly, we offered consumption based payment models to help SMBs. In addition, we helped customers ininfusing cash by buying back assets for infrastructure refresh. These initiatives helped a lot in terms of ensuring that cash flow was maintained,” he concluded.

The summit coincided with the much coveted Partner Leadership Awards that celebrated the success of the Top-150 premier partners and top-performing Technology Implementers & Providers with the best application of technologies across sectors. The award recognized the top system integrators, SaaS Providers, MSPs and VARs across various categories.

The Partner Leadership Summit and Awards 2020 was supported by IBM, Oracle, Nutanix, HPE, Suse and F5 as sponsors as well as ISODA, ASIRT and Gesia as association partners.