Arcserve’s Recognition in Cyber Security Comes from UDP and Appliances

Nikhil Korgaonkar, Regional Director India & SAARC, Arcserve talks about his solutions, channel structure and benefits from Sophos partnership

What is the structure of Arcserve’s channel ecosystem in India?

Arcserve is a completely channel driven company. Whatever business that we do in India or across the globe is through the channel. The channel is the lifeblood for Arcserve from a go-to-market perspective. We have been working in India for the last 20 years. There are a number of channel partners that we work with as our resellers, SIs, Global system integrators, GSPs. There are some partners who are now specifically working on government projects. The government is really increasing their overall spending in IT today. There are some specific channel partners who are completely government oriented.

How do you address this channel ecosystem?

From a go to market perspective, we have strong vertical focus on government and public sector at this point of time. We have been predominantly doing well with SMBs but from the enterprise standpoint too we have got large customers in India. Today we have got close to 2000 + customers that we manage through this entire channel ecosystem. What is important for the channel is the ease of doing business and profitability. When you look at the ease of doing business, we make sure that every channel partner is given a deal registration. We have one of the most lucrative channel programs that not just focus on profitability from front end perspective, but also look at certain strong rebates and some individual schemes that are coming up. Just to add, we make sure that we educate are partners the same way we educate our employees. We use the same platform for training all our partners that we normally train our employees. It is not just training online, but through webinars, hands on training and road shows with the partners that we update them about the latest technology solutions that we are introducing to the market.

What is the traction of Unified Data Protection (UDP) in India?

UDP is a very unique solution. Most of the people think of data protection as backup and DC/DR policies. Most of the people confuse UDP only with pure play backup, but there is much more to it than only backup. A backup is just one good copy of data that you are managing across in your data centre but then when you start looking at business critical and mission critical applications, you cannot take down time of hours. This is precisely where an UDP solution fits in. The solution has got a huge traction in India. In fact it is our flagship product at this point of time. Most of the growth that is happening in the last four years has come from this software solution. UDP is a snapshot based technology which is extremely fast and is the core for our entire solutions portfolio.

What is the business model of Appliance Series and its traction in India?

Appliances have been lapped up pretty well in India primary because it is a single solution that can take care of backup and multiple other functions. This is the only solution in the market which ensures that customers can design their DC/DR policies around that. This appliance can be hooked up with SSDs. It can be added with dedup. If you have to look for solution around cloud from a hybrid perspective, the same appliance can be used as a media server and that can connect to the cloud. We work with both Azure and AWS today and so any cloud solution the customer is looking for, it is easy for us to make sure that we can connect through to the cloud because we support the hypervisors. From an appliance standpoint we are platform agnostic and it does not matter about the underlying hardware Most of the enterprises are looking at the appliances and at the same time we have got good success from the government. So public and enterprises are where most of these large appliances are going across.

What are the benefits of collaboration with Sophos?

We tied up with Sophos last year and within three to four months of working with them we have won the Excellence award in cyber security in 2020. We have beaten some of the best security vendors in the market who have got really futuristic solutions, but then the entire approach towards this was a backup solution, a business continuity solution coming along with Sophos. It worked pretty well because when you look at a ransomware attack or when there is a lock down of your work that is happening in your organization, what is important is not just how do you prevent this attack but to make sure how fast can you come back and start your business. This was something which was not possible earlier. because now the security layer that is added across to the appliance today. The appliance is a one fit all solution, and adding a different layer of security on this comes the Intercept X solutions from the Sophos stable. This is one of the futuristic solutions that can prevent the whole malware from getting in. Therefore, this collaboration solution ensure a very strong resilient infrastructure today for IT companies.