Constantly Keeping Up with Change

In a constantly evolving industry scenario, SI galaxy automation has the task of reinventing themselves constantly, to be able to stay afloat and make money. Sanjay Patodia, CEO, Galaxy Automation, shares his views on industry trends and how their association with Lenovo has added to their market share.

Tell us something about Galaxy Automation?

Galaxy automation is a three decade old organisation that started as an office automation company. The first partnership that put them on the growth path was with Godrej, there was a division of Electronic office equipment like electronic typewriters and fax machines. Over the years the company has been rebranded and become Galaxy Business Solutions, Networking Services, Tech Services, BI Consulting.

But the focus of the company has always been enterprise customers. The legacy carried is a strong corporate customer base – with presence in the Indian govt PSU as well as the upper segment of mid market. Evolving with the product lines over the last thirty years, galaxy today caters to almost every part of IT infra service – data center, network, software and services around this as well.

Galaxy automation was also in the market for assembled computers till the association with IBM began. When Lenovo acquired the PC business of IBM in 94, Galaxy started their partnership with them as well.

Do you see any vertical specific advantages of Lenovo’s products?

Lenovo has been doing PC product range and now the new the server range, since 2014, which is a new market for them.

On the ThinkPad and other new products, new models are coming in and newer generations, even on their tablets. About a year and a half ago we started on the Tablet business, today that’s quite well established as well. Whatever we have, and point devices, desktops, laptops, and servers, they will anyways go to our well established customer space.

Now we are focusing on how to establish the server business. I think there are specific challenges- one is the overall business model that needs to be relooked at. Secondly there is a lack of team bench strength to actually go and address the opportunities- the existing team that used to sell PCs is still being trained to cater to server business.

The Channel is very important for solving this type of issues and we are doing our best.

How has Lenovo been a beneficial partner for galaxy?

For us the relationship has been very beneficial. There is no problem, and we are among the partners who have been associated loyally with Lenovo for so many years. As a result we have been able to adapt to the system. But not all partners are same so characteristics are different.

What are Galaxy’s focus areas for 2016, and is Lenovo a part of it?

We had a fantastic 2015-2016, and we will be investing heavily to build resources in various verticals, over the next 3-6 months. We have done very well, so we have enough time and funds available internally to do those investments and take bigger risks. The whole idea would be to build on new technologies till September and to focus on more coverage in the market space – expanding new customer space, or grow. We need to look for results of this in third quarter of 2016.

Our primary focus would be to strengthen our existing portfolio and this will be including end point, in which range we go exclusively with Lenovo.
Apart from that, mobility is one area where we already have presence. Storage is also a focus, and another area is hyper- convergerence. In this area we plan to build capability perspective and we need to grow. Two specific areas where we will do a lot of investment is security, and another area will be analytics. Dashboard reporting, predictive analytics is an area that is growing fast. We plan to enter that line, invest more in it and add more skilled resources in the field to build up our base in it.

From a coverage standpoint we have planned that more resources will be added to do better coverage in the marketplace. We also plan to build additional sales resources – to get additional customer space.

What are your observations of the trends technology market?

From a services standpoint, I really feel services that customers are today looking at need to be loaded with assets. Our industry is such that while enterprises keep on buy more and more hardware and software assets, the utilisation rate are very low. It is sometimes as low as 25% to 30%, unfortunately. We want to spread our skills in helping them utilise these assets. That is a focus area for us- optimisation of their assets, which will increase their RoI. It’s a very big space and we are already doing a lot of work there, but not in a formal manner. Unfortunately we don’t have enough resources, and that’s an area we want to work on. We have noticed that customers are also happy to pay well for these services and the benefit is actually for both of us.

Software licence management is another field that is coming up well. MS, Oracle, Adobe are the major players there. For every year end they put in compliances for the customers, and most of the customers are not every happy with these proprietary procedures. They need to have a service where they don’t get into the trap of compliance with software companies. That’s a big space. The orgs are growing, so obviously those issues are there. They need companies who can provide services; we are also in all those spaces so that is another growth opportunity trend we are seeing

What are Galaxy’s growth plans over the next 2-3 years?

The industry is rapidly changing if you talk of the SI community where we belong, we have been able to survive because we have been actively dynamic constantly, evolving with the technologies and the industry. We have tried to change ourselves every time, probably every two or three years. We have tried to adapt to it- and we also realise that it will become more competitive and challenging. People who adapt will survive, and those who will not will get washed away.

With a stable partner like Lenovo by our side, we hope to be able to do well in the face of these rapidly and constantly evolving trends as well.