Exclusive Interview: Varad Gupta, CTO and Founder, Keen and Able

In a conversation with DQ Channels, Varad Gupta, CTO and Founder, Keen and Able shared his experience during COVID crises as a partner and How OEM's helped them to tackle the situation. 

From a partner standpoint, what are the different challenges faced by partners SIs, and customers regards to COVID-19?

We are largely an open-source services and solutions organization. We have 150 people and out of which 135 would be technical specialists. We do not have a sales team, and our business is largely on word of mouth. We meet the customer, understand his stake points and most of our solutions come out of understanding the customer and accordingly stitch a solution together from the open-source stack for the customer.

The challenges faced in the initial phase of customer engagement wherein you have the whole customer team in front of you and then you can sort of understand the main points, pick up a marker and draw on the whiteboard and draw a large view of the solution. That was initially a challenge, even now on remote to pick up a market and draw a coherent diagram is a challenge, though we use various things to open a drawing package, then the freehand nature of drawing, We have been trying to use a stylist, it’s a problem and therefore to get the idea across to a larger cross-section of the audience is a challenge to begin.

The second challenge is that time somehow has become very flexible. Working time of team has sort of stretched and the workday has increased.

What are the different steps taken by Red Hat for partners, during the COVID crises for business continuity?

We’ve been associated with Red Hat for a long. As Red Hat at one time was the only open-source OEM at one point and we only work in the open-source area. There are quite a few things that are very, very admirable about Red Hat. With organizations such as Red Hat, with such crisp and clear communication to customers across really helps partners like us. I believe that way the communication from Red Hat in terms of new technologies, new products, which way we are going, what we are launching,  how to go about speaking with customers and so on, Red Hat has been very crisp and has helped us in our communication in this journey.

Also Read: Exclusive Interview: Abhishek Datt, CTO, Taashee Linux Services

What are the different training programs from Red Hat to partner?

Red Hat has GPS services partners and a reseller who sells subscription and provides services. We have a sister organization called ‘Fostering Linux’, where foster is an acronym for free open source training education research. Fostering Linux is a partner with Red Hat Global Learning Services (GLS). With RHLS (Red Hat online learning), Red Hat has a fabulous platform that it has launched and they try to ensure that the content is up to date, there are videos, there is text content and more and more people are opting for an online learning model. There's a ‘Train the Trainer’ program. Red Hat keeps on organizing these remote ‘Train the Trainer’ programs where they train our trainers and they keep them up to speed with the latest coming in.

What are the different schemes and set of programmes for partners from Red Hat and is there any change since due to pandemic a lot of vendors, OEMs are changing the schemes and patterns? What is your view on it?

The HBR review during Red Hat APAC Meet had interestingly mentioned that empathy would be one of the defining characteristics for organizations going forward. We go to customers along with Red Hat and we understand that when we are positioning a solution to the customer, depending on the customers need and the impact that that particular vertical has had during COVID. Red Hat comes up along with us with interesting proposals which shows that there is a lot of empathy in such an organization and that is a mark for an organization or an individual and it has been a quote by great people across time that how you treat people in distress or societies in distress is a mark of how you are as an organization or as an entity. Because an entity could be an organization or an individual or family.

What are your future plans with Red Hat’s journey?

I believe there are a few segments which will be on a growth path. We are working very closely with Red Hat on a few large deals in those sectors. Then there are sectors which have lagged behind and unfortunately, these sectors have had those traditional huge proprietary IT budgets. Now, we are going to these sectors and telling them to convert to open source, move to the cloud, save costs and work in a new way. We are going to other segments to convince them to adopt open source, bring down costs, move to the cloud and further bring down costs, automate everything as much as possible, everything is code today to further bring down costs. A lot of customers are also looking at change and we are hopeful that in this period we will be able to tide successfully because of the maturity of the technology in certain established sectors such as telco, IT, ITES, Cloud, microservices, IT industry as well as the maturity and open-source nature and I believe are better ROI for organizations or sectors which have been heavily impacted by COVID.