Embarcadero Technologies is not very well known in India, nor are its local channel partners. But this does not bother Lohmann. He believes that the five partner organizations that his company has tied-up with are adept in the database-management business and can act as database consultants to emerging organizations

What resources will Embarcadero deploy for the Indian market?
Keeping in mind the growth potential in India, Nigel Brown was appointed as the Director for APAC. Worldwide, we follow a mix of direct and indirect business models.

For instance, in Australia, we go direct to the customers. But in India, we have decided to go for the indirect sales model, because of its geographical vastness. It also helps us get better penetration in the marketplace. We have five local partners right now, and our focus is to strengthen our existing partner­ships rather than building new ones.

What is your partner selection criterion?
Softcell Technologies was the latest partner we signed up late last year. Besides these, we are also working with Biztech Technologies, E-Quest Techno­logies, Infomatics Set Marketing and Systech Consultancy.

We seek companies that are heavily into database modeling so that they can understand our product lines and also know how to market them best.

Your partners are not very well known in the Indian market. Don't you think that will limit your potential of getting more business?
Softcell is known in the industry as a pure play software distributor. From a supplier's perspective, I think they can reach out to the entire country with their seven offices.

I agree that the others are not as well known. But they all have the specialized knowledge in database modeling and also have the manpower that understands this business well. They know how to manage better database architecture and can explain to the customers why they ought to opt for Embarcadero.

Michael Lohmann Director-APAC, Embarcadero Technologies

This will give them the confidence while dealing with database administrators of any genre of companies. Reason being the emerging customers might not have adequate knowledge about database management. We want our partners to act as their advisors in such a scenario and would rather work with people who are adept in this field than add on folks who have just a passing knowledge of our core business domain.

Also these companies worked with us when we were new to the country. What matters to us is to stand by those companies that have stood by us when we were not established.

Does this mean that you are content with your existing channel network?
No, we are on the lookout for new distributors and resellers who meet our basic criteria. We don't want to flood the marketplace and create unhealthy compet­ition between our partners. We know that if we sign on more partners, we will also water down our product offerings, which we want to avoid at all costs.

So we are looking at experienced players in the database-management business or similar fields so they can have a faster crossover to our domain area. They should have the technical capability to offer end-to-end service so that the end-users are confident to ask them any question about database and get the highest level of satisfaction. These incumbent partners should also have adequate manpower with the right technical aptitude.

We will also sign them up on different levels of our channel program, which is negotiable. We will look at our mutual profitability and they will get brownie points if they have managed to take another developer tool and made in successful in the market.

What kind of resources will be made available to them to replicate a similar success with Embarcadero?
We will make a good market development fund reserve available to them and will run online campaigns to carry out lead generation activities. We also participate in specific events where they can interface with the IT administrators of our target customers.

Are your products aimed entirely at the large enterprises? Or do you have any low-cost software for the SMBs as well?
We do have low-cost offerings. We believe India is a price-sensitive market and cost can be a key differentiator while trying to bag customers. This is why our pro­ducts are priced appropriately.

Our tools can work across multiple platforms, and customers can use the same product on an Oracle or SQL architecture. Besides this, we have products that work on open source as well. This translates into a big cost saving for our customers.

We also offer flexibility in our licensing policies. So customers can go for a single-user license or that for multiple users. Besides this, we are also looking at offering customized versions of our software where customers can decide which particular features they want and the pro­duct will be priced accordingly.

We come across as an enterprise company. But we would like to sit with customers, irrespective of the size of their organizations and see how we can construct our products for their individual needs. We think that any one who has a team of database administrator is our customer.

In short, we have different tools for different industries. All these measures have been taken so that we can reach to the smaller and medium-sized companies as well.

Do you propose to have an office in India sometime soon?
Yes, we would definitely want to have our local presence. Right now, we are working on opening an office in Singapore, which will handle India, Malaysia, Thailand and China. Once that is in place, we will set-up a similar base in India as well. All these decisions will depend on the profitability of the country and the amount of business that is generated there.

Brief us the backgrounder of Embarcadero.
The company was started 15 years ago in San Francisco with a single database-development tool. We develop professional-grade database tools from development of database archi­­tec­­ture to its application and security.

Over time, we have grown to a vendor catering to over 12,000 customers including 97 of the Fortune 100 companies. Gartner has stated that we are the fastest growing database designer vendor in the world.

Earlier, we were concen­trated on the US and European markets. We have identified China, India, France and Germany as our key growth markets.

VINITA BHATIA
vinitavs@cybermedia.co.in

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