Subhasish Gupta, country manager – India & SAARC at Allied Telesis, discusses major trends in networking infrastructure market in 2014 and shares the company’s strategies for 2015 in India.
Major trends in 2014
In 2014, we have seen customers who were more interested in outcomes than in technology for the sake of technology. Issues such as network management and the resources required to manage a network became quite topical, were particularly given the increasing hype around SDN. While SDN may be relevant in the carrier and service provider space, it remains to be seen how most enterprise organizations will benefit from the deployment of SDN. We have seen customers having considerable interest in our management framework – AMF – which assists organizations to reduce the cost and complexity of deploying and managing a network.
Throughout 2014, performance has continued to be topical with most deployments now requiring Gigabit at the edge and multiples of 10G or even 40G at the core. As we move into 2015 and beyond, we expect to have a number of important product and technology announcements relating to this.
Allied’s achievements – client wins, sales, volume, revenue growth, people, reach, geographies
Allied Telesis had a number of significant wins this year in specific vertical markets. They are: NIT-Raipur, Kolaghat Engineering College, BNMPL(currency printing setup, subsidiary of RBI), Mandoli Jail, Wokswen Business School, Jindal Group, Bhushan Power and Steel, Tata Power, BPCL, IOCL to name a few.
Apart from the above, we achieved the following:
# We have consolidated our position in specific vertical markets of focus during the year.
# We are seeing a close to 40 percent growth in our revenue year on year.
# One of the most interesting factors is the acceptance of our AMF solution as a part of our switching solution in most of the above customer premises.
#Allied Telesis also won the prestigious iCMG award for “Allied Management Framework (AMF)”.
Allied Telesis’ strategy to win customers in 2014
With markets maturing, customer knowledge in India has also increased many folds over the years. It’s beyond brands that they look at! Based on their requirements, they look at available technologies and solutions and then design their networks. Allied Telesis has taken a strong consultative approach in specific markets and have seen high success.
Also, our positioning and investments in the IP based surveillance market along with multiple wins in comprehensive surveillance projects have helped us to build a good eco-system of vendors as well as partners, who realize the value that Allied Telesis brings in this segment of critical infrastructure.
Good and bad moments in your market in 2014
Couple of good moments: Allied Telesis won first comprehensive deal with AMF early this year. After going through very rigorous and long processes from many months, Allied Telesis’s “AMF” offering was adjudged as the best innovation of the year in the networking industry by iCMG. The respect that we get from customers and the partner fraternity for taking a holistic approach while working on simple to complex requirements are moments that we treasure.
Your focus areas and strategies in 2014
The Indian market is large and growing. There are multiple vertical segments that we believe will see huge amount of investments in the coming years and decades. Some of them include power, infrastructure, surveillance, smart cities and education. We have and will continue to focus on these growing vertical markets. Healthcare is another market vertical wherein selectively we have focused and shall continue to do so.
Trends to watch in 2015
We expect management and security to be trends of particular interest in 2015. The interest in SDN in 2015 will only increase as people find interesting and unique applications for this technology that to date has really been a solution looking for a problem. At the same time, the challenges of management and complexity will continue to plague enterprise technology managers and many of them will be looking for alternatives to their current network management technologies. And as our level of connectivity increases, the Internet connected devices (think Internet of Things – IoT) security will once again return to the spotlight.
Allied’s expansion and investment plans in 2015
We have a very knowledgeable team in place and we are constantly trying to ensure that they are exposed to the various aspects of technology and not only to networking as a subject matter. We, in FY2014 have done 6 rounds of certified training programs for the partner/end customer community and there would be high thrust on the same in the subsequent year too. We believe that knowledge transferred in a systematic way would only help us to build more partnerships in the market, and that would percolate into more business.
With respect to investments, we have been doing substantial investments in some of the above vertical markets. This includes building solid knowledge base before even entering into a focused market vertical.
In FY2015, we shall be primarily investing into some of the above vertical markets to create the visibility of Allied Telesis and the expertise that we can bring to table for the SI partner, the end customer as well as our eco-system vendor partners.
New strategies for 2015
As we move into 2015, we will have three key areas of focus. These are management, mobility and security. We have already seen many organizations deploy Allied Telesis Management Framework (AMF) and from day one have been reaping the benefits and we expect this interest to increase throughout 2015 as the capabilities of this platform are extended. Mobility continues to be an area of interest throughout education, enterprise and other verticals and we expect 2015 to be no different. Allied Telesis has a number of announcements we expect to be made shortly relating to mobility which will definitely be of interest to our customers. And while Allied Telesis have products that feature security functionality in the past, we have recently announced our new Next Generation Firewall platform which will begin shipping in 2015 that will definitely change the security landscape and our presence within it.
Rajani Baburajan