“We aim to build a partner network of 240 VARs”

Tell us about Albion InfoTel's background and its current structure?
Albion's InfoTel was incorporated in the year 1995. Previously, we were acting as a proprietary company by the name of Creative PC Solutions, and then in the year 2001, we became a Private Limited company, with the name changed to Albion Informatics. We started our operation as an IT hardware infrastructure company, where we used to create and deliver projects to the government departments, public sector and large enterprises.

Till 2005, we continued in the same line of business. But in 2006, we decided to increase our profitability, and so expanded our current business by introducing three new line of businesses mainly managed services, cloud services and consultancy services. In 2007, we effectively started developing platforms for our managed and cloud services.

Presently, we are offering live products based on our platforms, which we are selling not only in the Indian market but in the international markets as well. Albion group has three companies including USA based Albion Global, Albion InfoTel, and Albion Research and Labs for product development and innovations. All the products and solution development happen locally and sold by Albion Infotel in India and Albion Global in the US.

What products are you offering under different platforms?
All Albion services and products come under consulting, infrastructure built services (IBS), managed services and cloud services. All products are sold in pay-as-you-go model. Under the cloud services, we have products available for consumers, SME and enterprise segments like Albion CRM, email, disaster recovery, data safe and remote view.

In the managed services, we have product offerings like Albion helpdesk, procare, server management, secure and kids guard 4U.

The entire product delivery happens on the paper used model. Moreover, we do offer all these products as on-premise as well. However, we do not encourage our customers to go for on-premise solutions.

How do you see cloud computing adoption in consumer and SME in India?
We are very fascinating for the consumer side. More than 150-250 customers come to our cloud portal every day. Presently, we have 20,000 customers on our cloud platform. Back home, the trend of buying services through cloud is still lagging, but slowly catching up. In India, people are not sure while doing online transaction. Overall, we have about 80-85% customers from the US, Canada, Australia and UK, and about 10% customers from India.

Having said that, we are developing our indirect channel and trying to set up a wide channel network. We are appointing 240 resellers for our delivery fulfillment. As SME and customers are not tech savvy and they are slow on shifting to cloud computing, they may not come to the portal directly to buy the services, wherein in other countries, direct traffic comes to our portal. We have about 2,000 customers visiting our portal daily. Out of that, 10% sign up on our services on a daily basis.

Can you through some light on your partner network building?
To build our partner network, we have a robust 15-people channel development team, which is divided into five zones. The role of this team is to set partner network all over India. The major role of our partner network team would be towards customer engagement, signing of contract, etc. But all the deliveries and access of application will be driven online from our Hyderabad based data center. We have a broader plan of doing 100% channel business in India and globally.

Currently, in USA, we are doing 60% of business directly and the rest from the partner network. Moving forward, we want to route our entire business from direct to indirect. In the consumer business, we will be managing the back-end like getting traffic to our site and contract sign up. But, we want our partners to assist us in the collection of payment in the local geography.

For the SME and large enterprise class of customers, the partner will do the enablement and customer relationship management, signing up the contract delivery of application to customer, and managing the contract and delivery of SLA.

The partner network will have one national distributor and five zone-wise regional distributors. Our channel development team has already appointed 25 VARs in the north and north east region. Nevertheless, we have targeted to complete our partner network by 2013 March. Typically, we are looking for such resellers, who are into the business of hardware and packaged software for the last 5 years. We are also investing our energies on partner training and certification.

Can you tell us about your major business plan for the next year?
The company targets to get a revenue of `110 crore in FY13 and `140 crore in FY14. In FY13, approximately 67% of revenue is projected to come from system integration business and 28% from managed service and cloud service businesses. Besides growing the Indian pie, we would also want to enter into new markets through our channel partners like Latin and South America. Moreover, we will be adding 200 more people to expand our international business.

Lastly, customers that have been served recently in India are National Thermal Power Corporation, Hindustan Petroleum, BSES, Steel Authority of India, etc.