Identity Management Gets Huge Interest from Channel Partners

Ranjit Nambiar, Director – Sales, South Asia, HID Global, on physical security and identity management market in India, and HID’s channel strategy. He shares his views on converged security and also on how the channel partners have increased in number.

What is the biggest change that you are seeing in the physical security and identity management market in India?

One of the key changes I see is the awareness and involvement of the end-users. Earlier, the involvement of end-users was limited and they were dependent on the system integrators and consultants to provide the right roadmap for the technology within their organization. Now, the end-users are coming to the forefront of the decision making. I think this is a good sign and this is going to be the trend moving forward.

What trends are you seeing in converged security?

By the very definition of convergence and security, I would say this is a convergence of logical and physical security. For example, take the case of an employee who comes into an office facility using a card for physical access. Using the same card for IT security – domain login or VPN when working outside office – is converged security.

Convergence is still at a conceptual level. There is a latent demand, but not a current obvious demand. The latent demand is driven largely by regulation and policy, and those organizations driven by regulations are the ones going for converged security. While convergence is happening, it is not at the rate at which it was predicted.

How does the adoption of converged security differ amongst Indian enterprises and SMBs?

I would say convergence is closer to the enterprise segment, because there is an inherent requirement for scale (for convergence to be adopted). Cost effectiveness would come in when there is economies of scale, which is difficult to achieve in a mid-sized organization. This is the reason we are seeing convergence happening more in the larger enterprises than in the mid-segment.

Having said that, mid-segment organizations, specifically with respect to verticals such as pharma and healthcare use converged security irrespective of their size. There are a lot of government led compliances to follow, especially in the US and European markets. Convergence becomes key when looking at physical security alongside logical security.

Channel partner ecosystem in the physical security and identity management space

I think the channel ecosystem is the most changing environment of the security industry. Five years ago,  there were 3000-4000 partners who were doing security solutions to the end customers. That number has gone up exponentially – today there would be 15,000 to 20,000 such partners. Not all of them are homegrown – they are not coming from the conventional security space. They are coming from adjacent channels. These adjacent channels consist of electrical contractors, IT resellers, networking partners, IT security solution providers, and others.

When you have more and more partners coming in, a problem anyone (vendor) would face is in aligning the partners to one’s organization. The other challenge is in developing their skill sets around the new technology and innovations. This is not yet a mature industry and new technological innovations are happening.

The combination of new channel partners coming in and new technology coming in is a complicated scenario for any OEM or any organization to manage. A large portion of our partners – about 20-30% of them – have come in the last two-three years.

How do you address channel partner training?

Building technical competence is a joint effort. On the partner side it depends on the involvement of the partner with the OEM. From an OEM perspective, it depends on the value add we are trying to bring to the partner ecosystem. It is a very complex, dynamic, and challenging environment for anybody, and specifically to an organization like HID which is very focused on the channel ecosystem. All segments of our business is partner dependent.

In terms of prepping our partners and building their competence, we have a very structured methodology in introducing new products to our partners. We go through an internal process of deciding the best way to take a new product to our partners, how they can be trained, the certifications they may require, etc. We go through the whole process to make sure that the partners are going through the journey of getting better in terms of their competence. There is a classification of partners under Platinum, Gold and Silver.

We are doing a lot of training programmes. In 2015, we are doing about 12 channel sales programmes thatare focused on the sales organization of our partners. This is an annual programme which we have been doing for the last seven years. We have certification programmes on different product categories. We do about 40 different training programmes in a year, ranging from sales training to certification training.

Which industries present the best opportunities for identity management solutions?

The technology appetite and hence the adoption varies across industries. If we look at Indian industries from a security perspective, the early adopters of access management and identity management were the IT and BFSI sectors. The driving force for these two industries to adopt large scale security in their organizations was that they were driven more by global policies because their clients were global multinational companies. Thus the uptake of security by this sector was driven by their end-customers.

Over the last 10-15 years, these industries have matured and are going higher in terms of innovation; their acceptance of new technology is higher than in the emerging verticals. Having said this, over the last five-seven years, across different domains, the adoption of security has been high. The question only is of what level of innovation is being currently deployed.

If we compare a traditional manufacturing industry to IT industry, though both are labour intensive, technology adoption is far greater in IT than in manufacturing. Manufacturing would still look at security for labour management, time and attendance or payroll management; but not really looking at large scale security management per se. Ecommerce may be similar to IT from a space requirement perspective, but this space is largely used in warehouses. Warehouse security management is different from managing an office space. The technology adoption would differ because of the nature of the threats.