Exclusive Interview: Sudhindra Holla, Director, Axis Communications

In an exclusive interview with DQ Channels, Sudhindra Holla, Director, Axis Communications India & SAARC talks about the channel strategies, Partner Program and Axis's solutions cater to digital transformation in the new normal. 

What's happening at Axis communications from your point of view? How was the last financial year? How did you manage your business during lockdown, and pandemic crisis?

Sudhindra Holla: Despite the pandemic last year with people working from home, 2020 has been a good year for Axis Communications in India. We ran a series of webinars called Online Certification Academy Training to educate our channel partners and customers through our training initiatives.

We also maintained agility in our business continuity by being accessible to our distributors, partners, and customers. We witnessed segments such as city surveillance, smart city segments, traffic projects, data centre, commercial buildings, going ahead with surveillance expansion projects post the lockdown. We have fared well in these segments as we remained united as a team. We wish to continue this journey in 2021-22 also.

The employees at Axis Communications have slowly started coming back to the office with half the workforce at a particular time. Most of the events we conduct have moved online. Digital adoption has changed the way we communicate, and conduct events with our partners, to our partners, and through our partners, and end to end customers. We have also participated in some of the expos in the format of online forums. We utilized this time to educate ourselves on various things. We had invited our ecosystem partners to exhibit their solutions relevant to the pandemic to understand their requirement. We have also deep-dived into some particular segments like pharmaceuticals, data centers, critical infrastructure with focused solutions.

We all are talking about digital transformation. Where do you see the maximum traction going towards? Any particular vertical?

Sudhindra Holla: Even though no one had envisaged the pandemic coming in, the smart cities have used their command-and-control centers effectively to monitor the cities through installed cameras for surveillance and safety measures. We are witnessing traction coming from safe cities, smart cities, and traffic-related investments.

Secondly, content is king. People are consuming more content than ever before. With remote working, everyone requires to access to the company servers and resources. This led to a big boost in security investment for the backend infrastructure of these data centers, both private and public.

Thirdly, with everything being transformed to digital and employees operating remotely, we saw a boost from the global IT-ITES companies. Despite the pandemic, expansion transpired from our large IT-ITES customers due to digital acceleration.

Additionally, segments that gained traction are working lean and had to use the IT systems and the surveillance systems more effectively. Airports were also running lean. It was then the time for them to upgrade the systems because carrying installation in a busy airport is difficult. So, installations on critical infrastructure like airports went ahead with implementation.

You mentioned the shift towards the IT-ITES industries, and we are seeing that a lot of IT-ITES companies have moved to the work from home culture. They are adopting it slowly, but they will gradually adopt it overall. So, do you see the product and the solution Axis Communications gives, somewhere there will be some barrier will be in the future? Because then the company workforce will work from home. So, companies will not invest so much in the solution and this kind of transformation in the companies.

Sudhindra Holla: Even when people are not at the office, it is still important to secure the premises. In fact, we witnessed a boost in smart buildings and industries where they had to secure the systems and the infrastructure for the employees when they come back. Companies will not go entirely remote but will adopt a hybrid model and certain companies are already looking at bringing the workforce back. What misses out is the human and cultural elements of the organization while working remotely.

Whereas on one hand, data center organizations and IT-ITES companies went ahead with the investments, industries like banks, the education segment, tourism, brick and mortar retail and hospitality slowed down on investments as the business went down. The pandemic has created opportunities and reduced some. In certain ways, the business has balanced out for us in the last year.

What is your recent development in terms of your product and solution? Which particular solution or product did well in the last 12 - 18 months? And which particular solution or product, will be the game-changer in the new normal?

Sudhindra Holla:  Since the last year we have been consistently working at our end-to-end solutions. Axis has simplified installation solutions with one software, and one server storage hardware, which can be plugged easily. We are seeing good traction as customers and partners in this kind of sale are looking at simplicity, eliminating multiple devices, multiple companies dealing with their software and hardware. We saw manufacturing, retail, education segments, and the critical infrastructure goes end to end because of the complexity of talking to various vendors in the security system.

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Axis Communications has also moved beyond from being a reputed and leading IP network camera vendor to integrating other solutions along with a camera. For example, we integrate audio. when an intruder trespasses, a response can be automated in the system to alert the intruder. Our audio solutions are gaining a lot of traction.

The other trend, we see in indoor installations is the need for panoramic cameras. Every camera has a cable behind it, and every cable connects to a switchboard. A panoramic camera gives an overall 360-degree view of the location by just connecting to one cable. This helps in simplifying one cabling infrastructure, saving cost. There is only one switchboard that controls four cameras, and one license to give to the VMS vendor as well.

We are also seeing is the need for thermal cameras, especially for the perimeter of airports, power plants and critical infrastructure installation. For securing perimeters that don't have lights, thermal cameras along with radar solution are deployed. When any movement right in the dark is spotted, an optical BDC camera can track whether it's a human or an animal or a vehicle and accordingly take the act of turning on a light or announcing something on audio.

People now want higher resolution cameras. They have simply moved from two-megapixel to Ultra HD and 4k cameras. They want more resolution details for evidence grade video covering large areas, but with lesser storage. They want high-performance cameras taking very little bandwidth to reduce cost in storage. These are different kinds of emerging trends that we see have picked up.

What are your channel strategies and go to market strategy? What is your channel structure for the Indian market?

Sudhindra Holla: We believe in going wide and deep. We go wide by looking at channel partners where we don't have enough geographic coverage. We saw success in reaching out to a lot of remote channel partners in tier two and tier three cities where we don't have our own salesforce, and we represent through the distribution. People are coming to our CRM and requesting our solutions, and so we want to activate more partners.

We are looking at going deep with our solution partners, because we are seeing the segments such as commercial, critical infrastructure, pharmaceutical or manufacturing, demanding a deeply integrated solution, with not just the cameras but with a lot of other things. These are complex installations where we expect our solution partners to have very deep knowledge. We are looking at providing training to our solution partners with deep knowledge, on Axis cameras, audio systems, and our ecosystem offering which would be our video management software, analytics in software, and solution-specific software for some segments. We are also trying to be very consistent in our education and marketing efforts in terms of educating our channel partners, and running demand creation, lead generation events to empower them in their sales pitches.

The third element we are trying to do is on the channel, we are looking at a very specialized program called the ACS specialist, which is our end-to-end specialist program. We have identified a list of partners, whom we feel can be audio specialists, and end to end specialists among our channel bases. We work closely with our distribution to reach out to our channel partners for disseminating knowledge on the entire Axis gamut.

Where is your manufacturing happening?

Sudhindra Holla: We outsource our manufacturing from seven reputed contract manufacturers worldwide. There are three in Europe, two in Asia, one in North America and one in South America. But unlike other vendors, we bring the product back to our Configuration and Logistics Centre (CLCs), where we integrate the firmware as cybersecurity is very critical to us. To prevent the firmware from being in third party hands and cameras being vulnerable to cyber-attacks, we do the firmware ourselves. We load the firmware, test it, and then pack it into the carton box for installation. Our latest-generation cameras will not boot if somebody tampers with the firmware. This helps the customer not to have to run pillar to post. The order on our distributor or a channel partner becomes the onus of the channel partners or the distributor to bring it into the country where the customer wants to purchase it.

Who is your national distributor?

Sudhindra Holla: We have four of them: Anixter, Inflow, Ingram, and ADI, which is now called Resideo. All our channel partners are free to buy from any of the distributors depending on the comfort they have on who's carrying the inventory and providing better terms. We leave the entire choice of purchasing to the partner. We also ensure the channel partners are not locked with one distributor to prevent monopoly, and there is fairness amongst the distributors on the terms they're offering. We want it to be competitive.

What are your incentive programs for channel partners? I have seen the pattern of incentive programs during the pandemic, it has been changed for most of the vendors. Have you changed your incentive programs for partners, or planning to add some more incentive programs?

Sudhindra Holla:  We run very differentiated incentive programs and don't believe in a turnover based incentive at the end of the year. We have a scheme running for partners who do well in our end-to-end specialist program, where we pick the top three partners every year. We also provide seed units for our top-performing partners so that the partners can use them to demonstrate to their customers. This gives us knowledge on end customer opportunities which can turn into closeable sales. For our distributors, we bring in more active partners. We run a scheme with the distributor, where they give us a list of the top channel partners across the country, and we activate them by giving a target.

Our incentives are focused on the strategic things that we want to do. For example, when we want to have more active partners in a geographic footprint where we are not building through our distributors, we incentivize the distributors and the partners for more strategic sales. Our team goes through structured calls with the partners and explains the incentive program. There is also a scorecard which they run with each of the channel partner every month, which promotes transparency in the program on how the scheme is running.

We also augment this with our training initiatives. Our presales team is involved in training partners on our solutions and their opportunities. We present use cases on a very regular basis in a rhythmic pattern on the calendar we run. The team works hard to run these focused incentive schemes for our channel partners and the distributors.