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Exclusive Interview: Anupam Nagar, Senior Director, Hitachi Vantara

In an exclusive interview with DQ Channels, Anupam Nagar, Senior Director, Channels and Alliance, Hitachi Vantara, shared deep insights on their offerings.

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Ankit Parashar
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Hitachi Vantara

Today it is more customer data than ever to store, manage and analyze; enterprises are missing out on insights hidden deep within their datasets. This can result in innovations, customer experiences and new revenue opportunities continuously going untapped. In today’s challenging times, enterprises need to push the boundaries of IT and deliver better customer insights and open up new revenue streams.

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In an exclusive interview with DQ Channels, Anupam Nagar, Senior Director, Channels and Alliance, Hitachi Vantara, shared deep insights on their offerings, Go to market and Channel strategies in India.

Hitachi Vantara's GTM strategy in India?

Hitachi Vantara has a diverse portfolio of products and solutions that help customer Store, Enrich, Activate and Monetize their data. In India and Saarc market we go to our customers only via our Partners who help co-create solutions and complementary value in order to provide a complete solution to our customers.

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Via our partner network, we believe in adding value to our clients and recognise that without a powerful partner community, a complete digital transition is not feasible. We have transformed our partner landscape to meet the demands for diversified solutions from the customers. Our approach includes all channel facets through which Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), Master System Integrators, Large System Integrators, Value Added Resellers and Distributors have established programmes and policies. This has also enabled us to bring about more clarity on mapping the right solution, catering to the right segment via the right channel.

What are the Hitachi product offerings? What are the recent developments have been done?

Hitachi Vantara is constantly evolving and enhancing our product portfolio and we have Industry Leading Products and Solutions for Modern Datacenters across Physical Infrastructure, Software Defines Infrastructure, Datacenter management, Applications and solutions on Analytics and Outcomes. Our solutions help customer deploy their application, resources and infrastructure on-premise, on cloud and Hybrid.

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We have recently launched a whole range of Midrange/Midmarket All-Flash Storage Arrays and solutions addressing Hybrid Converged and SAP HANA Infrastructure. All our solutions are available for customer consumption as Capex, Opex or As-a-Service via our Everflex program.

How Disaster Recovery(DR) is a strategy taking center stage amid large storage requirements?

As a result of the complexity, organisations are suffering from frequent outages and system breakdown, coupled with cyber-attacks, lack of skills, and supplier failure. Delivery of continuity in a hybrid multi-cloud involves a disaster response plan that incorporates specialist expertise, an adaptive approach and emerging technology, including data security and recovery orchestration. Comprehensive business resilience with orchestrated technology needs to be available to organisations to mitigate business continuity risks in Multicloud hybrids that allow companies to achieve their digital transformation objectives.

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Many companies are unable to build a disaster recovery strategy fast enough to overcome today's dynamic market and hybrid IT ecosystems. In a 24-7-world environment, an organisation can gain –or lose market share – a competitive advantage depending on how quickly it is able to recover from a disaster and recover key business services. Some companies employ external disaster recovery and advisory resources to fulfil the evaluation, design and delivery needs of a corporation, testing and full resiliency program management.

Hitachi Vantara provides a full range of products, solutions and services to help customer design and implement a robust disaster recovery solution for their data. Hitachi Vantara is the only company in the industry that provides a 100% Data Availability Guarantee on solutions designed, approved and verified by us.

 What are the different training programs for Hitachi Vantara channel partners?

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Our Partners co-create several solutions that we take to our customers. For this, we provide a diverse range of trainings to our partners – both Remote Class-Based and Hands-on Lab-based trainings from our experts as well as Hitachi University. These trainings range from Sales, Pre-Sales, Support and Services trainings to training on various tools and technologies.

We encourage all our trained partners to appear for Industry Certification tests and qualify. We include certifications as an integral measure to classify our Channel Partners as part of the Hitachi Vantara Partner Program.

 How much do you think about the profitability of partners? What are the different schemes and incentive programs for partners?

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Our vision is to create a self-sustaining, value selling and profitable ecosystem of partners which forms the crux of our channel strategy in India. One of our key objectives is to bring about more clarity on partner roles by outlining clear expectations. This helps our partners focus on specific growth areas and solution segments.

Our Channel Incentive Back-end Rebate Program is designed to benefit our Partners in the role they perform, in the segment they operate and in the product portfolio they utilize to provide solutions to our customers. Our Partner Incentive program especially benefits our partners who balance revenue performance with segment/solution play. We provide the extra benefits for Partner Sourced opportunities and protect their interest via our Global Deal Registration and Incentive program. Benefits also increase as the Partners go to a higher level of partnership in their chosen area and segment.

We have recently launched a Referral Program for our partners who do not wish to transact but only assist in finding opportunities and providing complementary solutions and services.

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The Hitachi Vantara Services programme focuses on building partners' resources and capacity through our offerings, allowing them to improve their clients' relevance, while becoming more successful in augmenting their own offerings and leading to better profitability.

 What is the criterion for selecting partners?

 Our commitment to driving mutual success is to build on delivering a Predictable, Profitable and Pioneering Partner Program experience. The Hitachi Vantara Partner Program offers our partners valuable benefits that increase based on the level of commitment exhibited. Partners must meet baseline requirements to remain compliant within the program. We have four Business models within which there are Primary Partner types:

  1. Resell- Value Added Resellers, Distributors
  2. Deliver- Global System Integrators (GSI), System Integrators (SI), Regional Service Providers (RSI), Service Providers (SP)
  3. Manage- Cloud Service Providers (CSP), GSI, RSI, SP
  4. Create- Alliances, Independent Software Vendors

There is a clearly defined criteria for each type of partnership and basic minimum skills and certifications required to level-up in that partnership. Our dedicated Channels and Alliances team provides the necessary guidance, investments and training help that is required by our partners to be successful in their chosen partnership and to progress to the next level of partnership.

What are the future plans for 2021?

With emerging technology such as IoT, Analysis of Stuff (AoT), AI, Cloud, Big Data and Predictive Analytics, many companies are rethinking their strategies. The journey for Hitachi has been widely exciting with successful. Hitachi is number one worldwide for patent applications in foundational technologies for Big Data analysis. These patents are in the main areas of Big Data technologies (e.g. distributed file system/DB, parallel distributed networks, and security against data falsification).

In the coming months, Hitachi Vantara will continue to have superior technology and computational capabilities that companies rely on for their mission-critical data in their data centres, clouds and on the forefront of emerging developments. With no clear winner in the emerging IoT market, we aim to fill this market gap and create an opportunity that will harness businesses and machine data across OT and IT environments to build comprehensive, data-driven solutions.

Besides, we will also be driving the development of strategic software and services solutions, including Hitachi Smart Data Center software and services, Lumada and Hitachi co-creation services.

Our task is to help companies transform into an agile information centre that uses our robust infrastructure at low risk, speed, non-disruption, and accuracy. Using emerging technology, such as Big Data and IoT, we allow businesses to identify new revenue sources, work more effectively, provide excellent services, and minimise risk.

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