iValue Ready with the Digitization Journey

Krishna Raj Sharma | Director & CEO | iValue InfoSolutions informs how they assessed the current situation and accordingly tweaked the digitization plans.

What is your assessment of the current scenario and the lessons learned?

We see most of the customers are currently prioritizing business continuity. They also have increasing digitization need to meet as the physical world is very restricted currently. We are seeing a great improvement in engagement and traction every month from April. We are happy to say that we had a good April and May. Even in the current scenario we have almost grown around 3% over the previous year. The focus is actually going to be around protection and optimization transformation of the data. This is how the scenario is going to be currently.

How well are you prepared to handle such unprecedented situations? What are some of the best practices followed?

Being a solution provider for 100+ brands across BFSI, ITES and manufacturing verticals, our internal processes were already in line with remote working. We did get impacted when the physical movement of goods got restricted as 40% of our business still remains hardware. We are actually training our sales team largely to address remote selling. We have actually reimagined iValue in our process, our space in the market and our customers including partners and OEMs. We have taken very different initiatives to address and meet all the needs of the stakeholders.

During this period of uncertainty, how are you ensuring 24×7 support and service to your customers and in the process, helping them in maintain continuity of their business operations?

The time is very uncertain. Our service is to the stakeholders or the partners, largely customers. We are on with remote working, so the restriction comes only when we try moving goods especially in some zones which are not accessible to us. Otherwise we were completely ready and none of the services were blocked to the stakeholders. We do support and deliver services to the customers and partners. In today’s world, remote delivery of services has been enabled and accepted across the ecosystem. In delivering the remote services and support to the customers or to the partners, we had any challenges.

What kind of support have you received from OEMs / vendors that is not only helping in smooth functioning of your business, but also living up to the changing customer expectations?

The challenges we had are especially with the partners and customers who are not used to working in such scenarios. Partners from tier 1 and tier 2 cities were not digitally ready to work from home or remotely, especially their back-end processes and supporting staff. The challenges were around the receivables because certain functions of the partners were restricted to physical work. There were delays and and it would continue to be especially on the receivable side. They actually joined hands with us for a number of enablement sessions which we have done for our internal staff and also for lot of our partners. We have conducted a lot of enablement session focusing on certain technologies, certain solutions, up-skilling especially on the new solutions which may have been launched. OEMs have really helped us in such activities.

How the IT channel industry will evolve post COVID-19 crisis?

Some permanent disruption has happened during Covid. The post COVID effect would continue largely on industries on the IT side that have already announced certain sector of people or department working from home. I think that is going to be the norm of the post COVID era. Large investment is going to come around business continuity, how to keep the business running in spite of having scenarios like what we are going through or maybe something which is uncertain. A lot of investment would continue on connectivity, secured working from home and things like that.

How would you outline your growth roadmap and GTM strategy post COVID-19?

We have been growing at 3x of the market from the past 11 years. We did close P funding last financial year and this is what would help us to be very strong financially. The plan was to grow 4x times and beat the market growth. Hopefully we should be able to achieve that even in the current scenario. After the investment the balance sheet is pretty strong financially. We have been upgrading our credit creating continuously to have a better status with respect to credit. We did put some blueprint for our growth for the next five years and that would have helped us in the right time correctly. Certain actions which we have initiated last year would have surely resulted us being in a better position to face the current scenario. One of the adoptions we have done is largely improving service capability to offer services to partners on the solutions which we sell. We did decent investment in this area and that is really going to help us stabilize our position in the current scenario.

Could you share details on the new WFH solutions for your customers?

Work from home is a new norm in the industry and IT industry have adopted it pretty fast and quick. Few of the industries which are related to IT are also adopting following this kind of work from home. Work from home has become a critical need in this hour for the current scenario. The most critical requirement in the work-from-home situation is connectivity, availability and security. Cyber attacks have drastically increased in all the sectors and cyber risk also need to take care of as a new norm. Thinking of all this we have divided into three segments to look at the protection of network and also keeping security in the mind.
When you work for an independent network which is at home you need to protect the device irrespective of whatever it is. So we have divided into network protection, defense-in-depth and endpoint protection. We have chosen certain solutions and bundled them together under these three segments. So a customer or a partner looking out for a network protection and a partner who is looking out for an endpoint protection, it is very modular and he can pick and choose the product he needs. The solution bundle will start as low as $20. So that is the walkaround which we have done with the mix and match of brands and solutions to offer the right bundle. With respect to the requirement, customers and partners can choose between any one of them and commercially also it has been worked out very efficiently.

What is ivalue’s digital strategy for 2020 and beyond?

Our focus is on data network and application protection, and optimization management and this has been the right strategy. We are able to be part of the digital journey of most of the customers with whom we participate. This strategy actually has enabled us to be ahead of customers’ life cycle of adoption of technology. This actually has given us a growth of 30-35 % year on year. Search areas where you are participating recently is very relevant even in the current scenario like COVID.
Every customer is currently looking at digitization, automation of every process which he is adopting. He is looking at how do I automate certain processes in the organization so that the physical need of person is not required at any given time. We have adopted uncertain initiatives which have actually put us ahead of the current requirement. Certain initiatives that we have taken internally to onboard certain OEMs have actually helped us a lot. Between the earlier digitization story and the current digitization story there is a shift which is coming out from the customers. We were ready to take the digitization journey ahead.