Complete Customer Focus drives 22by7

Setting up the System integrator business in 2007, the growth path has been anything but straight for Venkat, the Prime Mover of the team Alpha, at 22by7. Over the last 7 years the company has constantly changed offerings and services, in an endeavour to ensure that clients have uninterrupted support with changing technology landscapes. The growth pattern has been just that – growing with clients.

What is the focus of 22by7?

Basically 22by7 is focused on providing business continuity solutions, we give customers solutions on information security, infrastructure lifecycle management, virtualisation, data canter and cloud and also networking. That’s been the main area where we provide business continuity solutions to customers.

What are the trends you are seeing in the industry??

We have seen a lot consolidation happening in the IT end, while you know there is a lot of convergence happening in the technology as well. IT as a solution is becoming a profit centre, moving on from the cost centre it was. In order to ensure companies gets the competitive edge, even the technology is adopting itself to give a business advantage to customers. I see a lot of changes happening, and as a system integrator we have seen the growth of me- too companies selling just a product to becoming solution providers.

I think that’s been the constant change we have been seeing. It has been driving us to be ahead of competition always, new technologies, new business IT solutions.

What are the solutions being provided by 22by7?

As a part of our business continuity strategy to our customers, we are also providing information security. When I am saying info security, we talk about protecting information, starting from desktop to the cloud. Today a lot of our customers are moving towards the cloud, so we have been guiding them as a part of our solutions. We sell a lot of encryption solutions, firewalling solutions, DLP (data leakage prevention) solutions and of rights management. Many of our customers are talking about integrating their DLP with IRM (Information Rights Management) in order to secure their data. Moreover, compliance is taking a play in terms of deciding the IT strategy.

When it comes to ILM (Information Lifecycle Management), we do a lot of data solution, as well as BCP DR. People are talking about consolidating their IT in order to prepare themselves to move to the cloud. So these are the solution we provide to ILM. Virtualization is straight forward, in order to get onto the cloud, it is important to virtualize their platforms. So we provide a lot of solutions to help this transition. And also a data centre today OPDC (On Premise Data Center) is rapidly taking shape, and it is crucial in order to be agile in terms of IT. When a new project comes we have to be extremely agile to assign resources, that’s where OPDC plays a major role.

Networking is the backbone of any company, so we provide holistic networking solutions to ensure our client companies should be future ready.

What is differentiator in the market?

22by7 always believes in providing best of the bid solutions. In fact ever since we set up the company, we have been focused in providing high quality services. We have personally felt that selling the product is not the only job. We have to understand the customer requirement, customise the hardware software so that it matches their expectations and gives them the best service. These are the three main things at 22by7 we particularly focus on. We have been putting a lot of efforts in terms of training our man power, getting our people certified on products we sell. We are sure that we do not sell any products unless we are sure our people are certified we place a lot of importance on training an individual. So we always make sure that at the end of the day whoever delivers should be aware of what exactly he is delivering to the customer. We have more solutions architectures even before we offer a solution to the customer. So these are a few things we always make sure before we offer him anything.

Do you see any particular vertical contributing maximum to your growth?

We are a small south based SI. We are seeing a lot of growth in pockets. When I say pockets I mean, some sectors and some solutions are seeing more growth over the last few quarters. We are seeing a lot of growth in IT ITES over the last one year. In the last one year there is a lot of interaction happening in hospitality areas, also with semi- govt, and pharma sectors. We have been successful in penetrating a lot of those areas.

In your industry, what role do governmental and quasi government organisations play, and how much of success are you seeing in it?

We have not made huge inroads in it but we know they are going to be the biggest IT spender in India. Especially with the new government, am expecting a lot of scope. We are actually planning to have a different strategy next year in order to make sure that in our next GTM we have a separate division to offer these solutions. We are not going to change the solutions because we believe that whatever we are offering now is the key and all we need to do is to take it to a different level. I think next year we are seriously looking at acquiring some defence as well as state government organisations on our client list. This also includes quasi government sectors.

What is your Go to Market strategy and your expansion plans?

Next one or two years we want to be spread across south. We already have offices in Bangalore and Hyderabad; we plan to open up a few other places. We will shortly be able to take a decision on where all we can start the offices. So next year is going to be another year of expansion for us.

GTM remains very simple …. extremely customer centric. Even our learning curve is very customer driven. When we started in 2007, it was just with information security and storage solutions. Then it became data lifecycle management, and then again it became information lifecycle purely based on the customers and what exactly they want out of system integrators like us. Because at the end of the day customers needed somebody who can really meet their need, create a solution and present it to them so that their infrastructure is very agile and they can just give their resources to the project. They need support to be able to take care of their future projects in case something needs to be done abruptly. This sudden expansion requirement may be in terms of resources, to increase my compute power, or to have 100 people in 2 months. There we are going along with the customer to define our GTM, and this is going to become our GTM. So we are extremely customer focused…we have our brand of services of brand name Assist…we have about 70 people who avail our Assist.

What technologies do you think the market should focus on?

As a part of our growth strategy we feel there are new technologies in the buzzword, Big Data, analytics, IRM…these are the areas where we still feel we need to catch up. In the next two years we need to be really there to be competitive. This will be the opportunity for us to take things forward

Which of your principals would you like to talk about?

We have been very vendor agnostic when we give the proposals. In fact when we give our first cut proposal we never even talk about the vendors. But vendors have been a very integral part of our offerings to our customers. In Info security we deal with large brands like Fortinet, Websense, and firewall solutions like checkpoint

In ILM space we talk about EMC, NetApps, we also offer a lot of Symantec storage offerings. In virtualization we have VMware. Networking we talk about CISCO, Aruba …these are the typical vendors we are going to be associated while giving solutions.