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'We plan to structure our price-package to better suit the demand in India'

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DQC Bureau
New Update

Abhay Dubey has over fifteen years of experience in staff and executive positions in sales, marketing, engineering and research. Before joining Speedera, he was VP at Verecomm, a communications software company, and senior director at Frequency Technology. An electrical engineering alumni from the University of Roorkee, India and Colorado State University, Abhay handles Speedera's sales operations from his office in California. 

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What are the various services that Speedera provides?

Speedera has a content delivery network. Essentially it entails 100 point of presence with servers, switches and routers already in place worldwide. Based on that infrastructure, we provide speed, performance and availability of online service.

This means that our customers do not have to scale up their hardware when their sites start attracting more visitors. 

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Speedera handles this additional load in a very efficient manner. It protects against denial of service attacks and intrusion attacks because we are serving content from different points of Speedera network. On the performance front, we are providing our customers content from a location closer to the user, so the download speed of the content is much faster. 

Along with web content delivery, we also provide delivery of secure content, which is useful for transaction business. So our customers are saving on their overall hardware investment, while at the same time their customers are getting much more enhanced data at a faster pace. On the streaming segment, we provide live and on-demand streaming, which includes audio and video files. 

Why have you followed the reseller model for your services?

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Outside North America, the Speedera strategy is to go indirect. In North America we have a dual strategy, wherein we have a direct sales force as well as our resellers. 

Typically in each and every region there are entities who have prominent market share or the mind share of potential customers. They can provide a one-stop solution to customers in their local region. 

Now there are different types of partners we can have in each region. There might be partners who are concentrating more at the infrastructure level like HCL Comnet, or there might be others who are more prominent in the data center segment. This provides us an immediate presence in the regional market.

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What are the benefits that your resellers pass onto your customers?

Because our services increase the performance, availability and reliability of our client's online content, there is a lot, our resellers can offer. They can advise customers on how to build their infrastructure and how to make it perform at an optimum level. 

What is the nature of your recent tie-up with HCL Comnet?

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We recently signed up HCL Comnet as a reseller. The company has a worldwide presence, which will help them to resell our services and get new customers. And this tie-up suits them to facilitate the services that they provide as an infrastructure provider. Speedera complements their entire menu of services they provide. 

One of the initiatives they announced was their monitoring service - the India Internet Index - where they monitor the performance of web sites. And a logical follow-up to this would be to offer solutions on how to fix the problems. And with the Speedera suite of services, they can provide a better solution to their customers.

Can you elucidate about your channel network in India?

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As there is no product associated with Speedera, we look for a service-oriented organization when we sign on a reseller. Besides HCL Comnet, we have NextBrick in Delhi and Wipro Net as our resellers in India. 

How many resellers are you planning to have in India?

We do not want to draw a hard limit to the number of resellers we have. There might be strategic tie-ups soon. At this point of time we are trying to have some more resellers and we will make sure that we support them very well. If we sign up too many resellers, there will be a lot of contention between them for the end-customers. We do not want that to happen. 

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How are you equipping your resellers?

Giving an example of HCL, as soon as we signed an agreement with them, we brought a two-man team with them to train them about our solutions. Then we worked very closely with them to deliver the solution to the customer. We will go with them to different cities to engage in customer meetings. After the first round of training and getting some customers, we will provide them with another round of training. In addition to this we are establishing a joint partner site, where HCL has access to all of Speedera's information and we can make this available to their customer when required.

What is India's contribution to your worldwide revenue?

We started our Indian operations in July 1999 and since then India has contributed almost 15 percent to our worldwide revenue. 

How did the dot.com bust affect your company?

It has not affected us badly. Early last year, there was some indication that there would be a downslide in the economy and we were quite prepared for that. And as earlier mid-last year we changed our profile from the dotcoms to enterprise customer. As a result we have the Fortune 50 enterprise customers today. 

We slowed down our expansion plans to beat the downslide. As a result of these measures we today have many blue-chip customers, and have a healthy bottom line. We also received a $ 20 million funding recently, which in the current scenario, speaks volumes for our company. 

What new plans do you have for the Indian subcontinent?

We plan to support our partners to the best of your abilities. We plan to structure our price-package to suit the demand in India. We understand that the need of the community over here are different form those of the other regions. We are also trying to tie up more resellers to focus on a wider region. In April this year, we signed up with Hitachi in Tokyo. Hitachi's new division will provide our services to their customers.

Vinita Suvarna-Bhatia in Mumbai

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