“Education and healthcare remain our priorities” –KP Unnikrishnan

How important is the Indian market for Brocade?
The Indian market for us is growing at a very fast pace and DQ Top 20 has put Brocade in the slot of one of the top 5 fastest growing companies in India. While the entire APAC region is one of the key areas for us, India continues to grow financially at a healthy rate. So far, we have concentrated over some key locales in the country, but with the renewed vigor, we are now focusing on a holistic geographic expansion including class-B cities.

Which are the key verticals for Brocade in India?
Education and healthcare remains our priorities and the growth in India so far has accounted primarily from these verticals. Also, the government and defense sector comprises one of our key areas where we have deployed significant projects. This financial year, besides retaining our focus on these sectors, we want to concentrate on the BFSI segment in particular, as it is one of the key growing segments, and animation and media industry and high-end computing projects in IT and ITeS sectors. The decision is based on the analysis of key market trends of this and the last financial year and the product offering compatibility that we have in place.

What is your channel structure in India?
We operate our Indian business through 2 national distributors with absolute rights over the entire geography. They are Redington and G7. Unlike the regional exclusive distribution model, we do not limit our distributors to local billing or limit them to any particular geography. In terms of channel partners, we have 25 partners across the country under several overheads like elite, premier and other categories.

One of the key focus areas for Brocade is concentration on virtualization tools and products. Which are the latest offerings from you?
Brocade is known for building efficient data center networks that just work. Ethernet fabrics based on Brocade VCS technology are highly differentiated, pro­viding unmatched automation and simplicity compared to traditional, outdated network architectures. Our differentiation is based on 15 years of expertise in building high-performance fabrics for world's most demanding data centers. With this second major wave of Ethernet fabric capabilities, we are extending our lead in this important new technology category and delivering greater agility to our customers through superior simplicity, automation and reliability.

We are now in a position to deliver more choice, flexibility and automation to customers deploying virtualization and cloud IT infrastructure. Specifically, the company announced enhancements to the Brocade Ethernet fabric portfolio that utilizes Brocade VCS technology. These enhancements are designed to increase scalability, improve virtual machine awareness, further simplifying management and significantly reducing operational overhead.

Brocade has recently launched the subscription-based network infrastructure pricing. Could you throw some light on the key facts of this?
The challenge facing IT organizations today is that new technologies such as cloud computing are coming to the fore and are making it much more difficult to project and predict workloads. A flexible acquisition option like Brocade Network Subscription enable organizations to add and reconfigure resources in a much more compacted time frame. Brocade Network Subscription is optimized to address the unique requirements of cloud-based IT environments and represents a viable new procurement alternative that offers customers the most flexible, open-ended network acquisition option available today.

Brocade Network Subscription revolutionizes net­work acqui­sition by giving customers the flexibility to scale up and down according to actual network utili­zation with minimal risk and no capital outlay. With Bro­cade Net­­work Sub­s­cription, custo­mers pay for their network infras­tructure on a monthly basis, allowing them to align network capacity with actual usage and thereby reducing cost and mitigating capital risk.

How have you implemented the Brocade Network Subscri­ption model in cloud?
The pay-as-you-grow aspect of Brocade Network Subscription is particularly well-suited for migration to cloud IT architectures, as it is the most agile option among acquisition models, such as capital purchases and leasing. While organizations of all sizes look to the cloud for different reasons-from improving busi­­ness processes and application availability to intro­d­ucing new, value-added services-they all view the abi­lity to quickly address changing internal and exter­nal custo­mer needs as a fundamental business requirement.

Do you foresee any major changes in the channel structure or in your strategy this financial year on account of cloud?
As stated truly, cloud is one of our key players in business and we have developed a holistic range of services and products in the space of cloud. However, on account of this emerging trend, channels need to be addressed considerably.
Cloud computing has indeed smoothened up the IT processes for its adopters but at the same time, our distributors and partners are complaining about the loss of scope with the rapid adoption of cloud and the shrinking space that cloud now provides. To address these complaints, we must ask our distributors and channel partners to realign themselves with the trends in place and the obvious future that cloud is about to bring. For this we have come up with extensive training and certification program and have invested over $ 50,000 for free partner training needs.

What is your channel strategy and plans for this financial year and the next calendar year for India?
When it comes to selecting channel partners, we are very choosy. We tend to avoid partnerships where partners are not well suited technically or financially to handle the accounts. As is normal for any vendors, we too want to expand in India in channels, but we are maintaining a constrained approach in the appointments. We will be supporting our channel partners through lead generation and handling as well as during the implementation stage, but will appoint only those partners who can meet our quality standards. Training and certification is one of the key considerations for us this financial year and partner promotions and account determinations will be streamlined accordingly through certifications. In India, we are looking for education partnership with leading institutions for partner certifications and training.