"We are the Cloud Ready Partner", says Atul Ahuja, MD, Softline

In a candid interaction with DQ Channels, Atul Ahuja, Managing Director, Softline India talks about Russian IT MNC’s aggressive business expansion plans into Indian enterprise and SMB segment.   

Can you give overview of Softline Group?

Softline is a leading global IT service and solution provider operating in different markets all around the world including Russia and CIS, Latin America, India and Asia. Our services include end-to-end technology solutions, software licensing, hardware products and services. Softline offers corporate licensing for a full range of software products, such as operating systems, virtualization, security, business productivity, creativity, education, CAD and others. We are the 8th most competent partner for Microsoft globally. We offer our customers comprehensive IT solutions ranging from consultation, hardware and software delivery, project planning and implementation, system integration, maintenance, training and even the complete onsite operation of our customers' IT. We offer a diverse portfolio of cloud computing services, including public cloud, dedicated, private cloud, and hybrid cloud based on our own cloud platform. We are the customer centric company suggesting brand independent solutions which best serve customer’s needs.

How do you analyze the business potentials in emerging economies like India?

As part of Softline’s business strategy, we have identified the growth engines that are from certain segments and regions. We have identified not only what areas to be gone after for business but also the geographies we would focus on. We are excited to be in India. India is maturing much faster from a market perspective. There are lots of disruptions happening on the technology site. For instance, we never thought that mobility would get adopted in corporate so quickly. Lot of such kinds of technology disruptions have been witnessed in last 18 months. Indian entrepreneur are opening up towards emerging technologies and that gives us abundant scaling opportunities.

How Softline’s solutions will address criticality and complexities faced by Enterprise segment?

When we see broad spectrum of market, enterprise needs are completely different from what they need from a particular solutions that they deploy. Whereas SMB does not really have a time to do a lot trial and error as they are serve their customers in faster turn-around time. We understand such requirements of enterprises. We have skilled ourselves to understand the enterprise need and we have quick service offerings. We have clearly enabled our organization to get the SMB part whereas for enterprise part little larger road map of IT architecture designing and service solution have been kept in mind. We are bringing the special expertise on those areas of mobility, cloud, BI and we will plug it into the existing ecosystem of the customer. We will bring special expertise on the data center side, on the cloud side and collaboration side to help customers and we will partner with the existing setup there. We are working with Microsoft on CRM online and dynamic ranges of applications which are very good for SMB.

What are the verticals Softline will focus on?

We have identified verticals such as banking and BSF where largest treads in technology happens. We are focusing very heavily on the government run businesses as they are in the transition phase. Healthcare is another area where lot of automation on technology is due but at the same time they really don’t know how to get it done. Therefore, there is need for lot of vendor collaboration in healthcare sector. On SMB site, it is really offering and not really vertical approach because SMBs across behaves similar. They want agility and infrastructure available at the lowest cost. So we are focusing on enabling their business by providing the technology at an affordable cost. This is our clear differentiation form our SMB perspective as well.

Will you avail channel platform to tap potential clients?

No. We will be an end customer organization in India. We will not have multiple partners from driven perspective.

What is a future of Cloud Technology in enterprise and SMB segment?

We definitely see the cloud is moving from a peripheral and a non core infrastructure to a core infrastructure. The readyness of the data centers has moved into India and the capabilities of lot of service providers are coming which will bring lot more confident to customers. We see the shift form peripherals to a non critical applications even critical application being done on cloud. In fact large enterprises are adopting cloud in a very heavy manner. We recently signed new customer for Office 365 and it’s a service provider. We definitely see across the enterprises, SMBs and users, behaviors are changing and I would say it is really making the CIOs adopting cloud. The best approach to increase business productivity is to move to cloud. Surely there is a growth in the all areas from the cloud perspective.

What is Softline’s go to market strategy from business expansion perspective?

We will work with our priority partners Microsoft, Citrix, VMware and Symantic.  Although our expertise with Microsoft is very deep, customers look at us as a vendor neutral strategy perspective. We will use some of our partnership with Microsoft, Citrix, VMware to make sure that customers expectations fulfills. Some of the solutions from Microsoft are very SMB ready so we are really banking on it to help us organic growth in the Indian market. We have divided our strategy on two modes. One is verticals and second is workloads. When it comes to across the technologies and across businesses, we will lead with the cloud for SMB and we will lead with the solutions in the enterprise segment. In fact our clear message is that we are the cloud ready partner and we have got our own data centers. Our key differentiator in the Indian market is that we are not here just to sale licenses but we are here to deploy these licenses. We are here to make value out of every rupee that customer spends on the existing infrastructure. That is how we are positioning or structuring ourselves. As we are a company with specialization, we want to walk on the path where there is clear road to success.