Recently, Microsoft India organizedaroundtable titled ‘Partners of Choice’. During the virtual round table Alok Lall, Director – Partner Development, Microsoft Indiaand Microsoft’s leading partners shared their valuable opinions regarding technologies that are trending in the market; customer behavior, attitude and needs; and opportunities in the future technology landscape for Microsoft products and solutions and their partners in India.
The participants were Alok Lall, Director – Partner Development, Microsoft India, Sibjyoti Basu, Client Service Partner Microsoft & EMEIA Microsoft Alliance Leader, EY; Sudhir Kothari, CEO & Managing Director at Embee Software Pvt. Ltd, Jesintha Louis, Director – Partner Success, G7CR Technologies, Shreeranganath Kulkarni, Chief Delivery Officer, Birlasoft, and Anirudh Kala, Co-founder, Director, Chief Data Scientist, Celebal Technologies.
Ideas, Opinions and Outlook of Partners ExpressedDuring Microsoft’s Round Table – Partners of Choice
Alok Lall, Director – Partner Development, Microsoft India
Microsoft’s mission and overall partner ecosystem: Microsoft is and continues to be a partner first company.Microsoft’s Mission is to empower every person and organization to achieve more and partners to gain the best possible benefit. Globally, we have over 400,000 partners and 95% of our commercial revenue comes through partners, and our focus will always be on expanding the power partner opportunity. If I look at India, we have a 14,000 plus partner-ecosystem that delivers value to businesses and to the country’s economy. Partners play different roles. As a services scale partner and advisory and a global system integrator, a managed service provider, etc. Into one of our six solution areas, hardware and devices, partners and ISVs lead with IP on top of our platform. Now with our partners, we share a common goal here to help customers drive business growth and digital acceleration.Business transformation hinges on 3 fundamental principles: Agility, differentiation, and economics, and I’m inspired by our partners innovation and the agility on top of our platform to unblock customer growth and build a competitive advantage for them. And with this widespread partner ecosystem, we are transforming together to capitalize on the vast opportunities associated with cloud and the services opportunity.We value how our partners amplify our reach and impact with customers across industries and verticals, from the largest of enterprises to the small customers. These offerings help our partners in the lifecycle of building the solutions, getting them to market, reaching new customers and are available and discoverable on the marketplace by millions of customers.Whether it’s our offerings, program support or how can we differentiate something that drives strong relevance for all of us. Our technology platform is just the beginning and we believe technology should be an inclusive force for global good and that’s why we work with partners in delivering meaningful, accessible, inclusive and sustainable solutions around the globe and in India.We are focused on ensuring partners have the right skills, tools, and resources they need to compete and win.We have moved further in our journey of being with the partners at the time of just not closing the opportunity, but in the entire lifecycle. In the cloud world, it is even more important that the client consumes the service that has been delivered.
Sibjyoti Basu, Client Service Partner Microsoft & EMEIA Microsoft Alliance Leader, EY
Digital Transformation trends across sectors: Our experience has been that digital transformation means different things for different clients. For some, it’s an enterprise-wide transformation and driving the tech acceleration or adding intensity. That’s where the more progressive ones are headed. But for some others, it’s more around driving growth or managing business model disruptions. While there could be some others who are looking at a more functional transformation of the front office or back office or reshaping the supply chain or workforce transformation and so on and so forth. It’s a very diverse pattern.Organizations within a particular industry vertical tend to huddle together in terms of the same directional deployment of digital and driving transformation within their organizations. But there are only two consistent themes that we are seeing across our clients. One is talking about impacting outcomes. I think our clients are talking more in terms of what these transformational initiatives do, and I can think nobody is talking about outputs or effort. Everyone is talking about saying how quickly can we impact the outcomes. The second being the need to be agile, nimble and accelerate the speed to market and value to market. I think these two are consistent themes.Our success in delivering some of these programs comes from being able to partner with Microsoft and embed the technology in sectoral fields of play.
Global success examples being replicated in India, or Indian success stories being replicated globally: I don’t think the relevance of this whole global to local and local to global has found any other better time to launch itself in. This whole assetize solutions is to solve problem – why do we need to reinvent the wheel? I think in our journey to assetize solutions, the industry that I talked about earlier and our partnership with Microsoft becomes extremely important. It allows us to drive this whole frugal innovation very quickly, create new IPs and deliver them as managed services. That’s essentially what our clients are looking for to impact their outcomes. Towards this whole transformation platform, I’ll give you some example everyone’s talking about a transformational platform that you can bring in, delivery-as-a-service which has been extremely successful across the globe. We are hoping to leverage that and are building IPs here and take that global and we’ve seen success. Similarly, what’s been built in the other geographies, we’re replicating that to great success here as well. This whole transformational platform continues to be a big thing for us and for our clients as well. Giving you a couple of examples – a few years back when GST came in, we didn’t have too much time. As we all know, our clients were preparing themselves to get ready. As advisories, we were trying to be aligned to the regulators on one side and our clients on the other. That’s essentially a great example of how we built our GST platform and now we drive a fair segment of large enterprises, mid-market, SMBs across sectors through our platform. I think that’s a phenomenal example that now we are replicating across the globe.In just less than 8 weeks of partnering with Microsoft, the point around co-innovate and co-build, we’ve been able to now build out a solution which is very nimble, very agile and can be deployed to look at all the regulatory reporting that organizations need to get themselves ready with. This whole assetize platform, co-build, co-innovate and co-deliver is something that we are seeing, and will continue for a long time.
Partner skilling initiative with Microsoft: We all realize the importance of skilling the larger ecosystem because you know what you’re trying to, or at least historically. If you’ve seen the attempts, what most of us have had been trying to do is basically skill at a particular organization or maybe that particular client level, right? Or even skilling at our own organization, or within our own organizations?But the current program that we’re driving is skilling at scale and basically bringing this whole education sector and then working back with top industry bodies as well as academic bodies like AICTE and many others. In terms of forming what we are calling as a virtual internship program and this is a program by Microsoft along with these various bodies, supported by EY.We are pretty much covering about 140,000-150,000 students who will now have digital skilling of part of their curriculum, and they would conclude with the submission of a live project. This would then get assessed and would then become part of their curriculum. It’s a great pilot that we are doing, but if it’s successful, this will become the law of the land for years to come.I think this is the best way of trying to get education and get digital skilling and at a very early level because these are our future project managers. These are future business leaders if we can get them ready for the market. We are seeing a lot of scarcity, a lot of that dearth of talent. We’re trying to address it at source itself so we’ll see how this program goes, but excited of what we can do together to drive the overall ecosystem outlook.
Sudhir Kothari, CEO & Managing Director at Embee Software Pvt Ltd
Transformation across SMBs: I think SMB opportunities in India are massive, and if you ask me the pandemic has forced a lot of SMBs to adopt technologies overnight to remain relevant in the business. We see all kinds of opportunities in SMBs right now if you ask me – like example ERP, CRM collaboration, security, hybrid cloud solutions. All opportunities are coming up and the decision making and inclination towards cloud innovation. We have never seen this; they are taking decisions very fast. This is something where Microsoft has a big role to play with their offerings. For example, we have Dynamics, CRM ERP, Teams, and SharePoint for collaboration and Azure for cloud, and all are backed by Microsoft Security platform which supports for both offline and online for any device, app level security, and threats. They have a control on the business, and we see huge opportunities coming from SMBs right now. A lot of enquiries coming in and they are looking at not from the product standpoint. Today, they are looking at how they can actually manage their business better which was not there earlier. I think lot is to do because of this technology being available in that form today. How do we actually reach out to our SMB client? I will divide SMBs into four parts -micro enterprises, startups, small businesses and mid-size corporate which are within our SMB segmentation. The mid-size corporate are usually handled like an enterprise account, which is a very oiled, refined machine but the other three segments where we are using digital channels to acquire clients we are pretty successful. Our digital journey started almost two years ago, and we feel we have now been able to get some kind of a foothold on the digital space right now and we have been acquiring a lot of customers, almost 30-40 a month. The customers are showing the interest which was not there earlier.60% of our business comes from enterprise and the idea of focusing a lot on SMBs right now is that the corporations will come out of these SMBs in future. We are looking at SMBs more from the future standpoint. We will continue to do our value addition business with the enterprises as well, andthat’s not going to go away either.We have also created a whole ecommerce technology platform to fulfill requirements that especially come from Micro Enterprises and startups. We are now evolving in our digital journey, creating infrastructure and looking at automation to achieve scale. And I must say that we have tremendous support coming from Microsoft which is constantly investing with us and guiding us in our digital journey.
Workplace of the future: I would like to speak about modern workspace. Business leaders are reimagining today to workplace for future.They are reimagining the operating model for people, workplace and processes. For more flexible world of work, through Microsoft Teams we are empowering people for a hybrid workplace. This has provided us with opportunities to all size of partners to develop powerful tools around teams.For example, our company has co-developed, co-built with the Microsoft Engineering team. Microsoft helped us building a lot of IPs – I think we have built almost 10 to 15 IPs on Microsoft Teams so far. This is giving us competitive advantage in the market. We have almost 600 organizations on Microsoft Teams currently. These are the kind of opportunities Microsoft allows us to delve in. Secondly, coming to how the partnership is impacting the modern workspace for corporate. This is not only in SMBs but across enterprises and corporate as well. We have seen the adoption of modern workspace massively and it has a great impact also at the same time. In a nutshell, it has increased employee productivity, and customer satisfaction. Customers can work in a hybrid way so they can spend more time with their families. It can also cut travel costs to more than half, for a lot of corporate. For example, a lot of corporate are conducting board meetings and using Microsoft Teams, the organization are increasing the employee engagement especially with the frontline workers, which was not there earlier. Microsoft has also brought in the future culture of working from anywhere and made it an acceptable norm for businesses, which is a boom for GenZ and gig workers. Overall, I think it’s a great opportunity both for businesses as well as partners like us who can build lots of technologies, solutions, services, and managed services around technology like teams and Microsoft Azure amongst others.
Jesintha Louis, Director – Partner Success, G7CR Technologies
Innovation across Startups: There’s a culture that is very different from what you see traditionally with any other business. If I have to break down and say, what do startups expect from GRC7, and Microsoft is driving that tech intensity because speed is very, very important for these guys. Like you rightly said, Azure is about creating the differentiator for partners. And that is the differentiator for startups.
How quickly can I kind of go on board? For instance, this is the first time it ever happened in India. One of the largest assembly elections was organized, and there’s a partner of ours who provided surveillance services. That was the first election where the entire election was under camera surveillance. There were about 50,000 devices that were installed that had live streaming. How much time did this partner have to set all of that up? Just seven days. They set up 100 plus servers, 1500 TB of data for them, storage on Azure, andwe were able to do all this in three days. Get the performance testing done, ensure security was in place. They went live and that was the first large event, especially on that level that went live on Azure. I think this speed is the biggest differentiator for startups. In fact, India has world’s third largest startup ecosystem. So, there is a lot to do. We are on boarding 25 startups on an average every single month.It’s not just about that I can only do this but changing things to suit partners to ensure their growth happens and Microsoft has given us a lot of confidence in this. Anytime we’ve reached out to our partner leadership and said, hey, this is what startup wants. It may be a small startup, large startup, but it doesn’t matter. Only comes down to – how can I solve that problem? And we’ve seen the leadership team go back, work it out and then come back and say hey this is done. If you ask me today, the Microsoft Partnership team is an enterprise, but the culture is still startup because they can move fast, get things done. I think that’s what the key differentiator is.
Talent and Skilling: I think it’s also the culture because our founder has been very specific about this that, people who work for GRC7 are not employees, but part of a family. We work together to make this organization successful. And as we scale, there are challenges because people are not able to see the same vision and things. I think at the end of the day it’s about the intent of how you want to treat your people and where they are, when they become a part of the family, they just take more ownership. And yes, they help you succeed. However, we’ve seen a lot of other customers that we work where there is a dearth of talent. I think all of us can agree with that. We have been constantly hiring and a lot of the institutional trainings are not helpful when we get people on board, especially cloud because it’s new. Even your engineers who worked on technology earlier will still need that time to kind of get deeper into cloud because it needs specific skills, and you have to be to the point. Specifically, you know the program and the challenges that will come through.We have also seen a lot of other areas where what to do in terms of the employee engagement that we have internally, and we’ve invested a lot in doing that. And our founder always said if you make X amount of money, you’re supposed to give it back to the employees.We spend a lot because we make it for all of us to share, andthat’s in the culture that we continue. In addition to that, we want to expand in areas where we can support other partners and our customers.A lots of businesses are looking to modernize their existing applications and the need for scale is there because it’s easier to build something new but modernizing something that’s already there takes a lot of effort and needs specialized skill sets. What we’re doing is soon we’re launching an institute called Drona. We will hire freshers from colleges and train them. We will put them in six months training program with live projects with R&D and then place them in different projects and into GRC7. We aim to recruit and train at least 2000 people by the end of 2023.Hopefully we will be solving a lot of problems for a lot of startups that you work with.
Shreeranganath Kulkarni, Chief Delivery Officer, Birlasoft
Driving digital transformation across customers, both local and global: I think the whole world is coming closer, what you see happening in North America happens at the same time in Asia too nowadays. People have started looking at the adversity of COVID as an opportunity. It is very evident that COVID has accelerated the digital journey for all of us. And that is working out for players like us as technology is no longer just an enabler now and is a differentiator for businesses. At this point of time, we should look at the advantage of partnering together. One, as a service provider, we understand the domain. We have the industry knowledge and know where our clients are present across industry verticals. Every client has a specific challenge that they are going through and we are using technology as a medium to provide specific solutions to help our customers differentiate themselves in the marketplace as well as to move ahead. While doing so the scalability is an important aspect to look at. While I work with Microsoft team here, it is not just to go-to-market, writing proposals or go to the customer and trying to win businesses but to figure out a way to create a whole supply chain. For example, it starts with somebody who is a tech strategist, who helps us to build this capability. I know what I need to build but with the help of Microsoft as a partner, we can build that capability and get our customers to scale their operations quickly. Coming to the second part, how do we bring technology and business together and innovative solutions at the same time? Building innovative solutions cannot be done in isolation and should be done addressing a client specific problem which I call as a co-innovation. We try addressing this co-innovation challenge with the help of technology which we get through Microsoft. This is what is binding us with Microsoft, helping us drive growth and scalability for our customers.
Manage services and build trust: Co-innovation is when you sit with the client to understand their challenges and address those challenges with technology that becomes more effective. Return on investment is extremely high compared to generic innovation. Today in a digital world, while everybody is adopting, IoT, AI, blockchain have become common buzzwords across organizations. There’s lot of worry about how partner gets in. How do I do that? Yes, all this is good and other companies have done it. I also want to do it, but how do you do that? The trust that clients have in that combined solution which is vetted by both the persons who understands my challenges. My vertical understands my domain plus Microsoft coming together with trust that they have is much easier. When the initial trust is established, they change. Management is much easier when you start implementing that, rolling it out and provide this scale that is one part of it.
Anirudh Kala, Co-founder, Director, Chief Data Scientist, Celebal Technologies
Customers implementing solutions leveraging emerging technologies and increasing innovation: What we are seeing is that organizations are not just looking for a point solution. They are looking for a pervasive transformation. First thing that brings into the ecosystem is the cloud. Of course, moving to cloud becomes the first step but we need to understand what on the cloud. Do they want to build new gen applications on top of it, or your security ecosystem should be driven through cloud, or your new low code-no code innovations should come from the cloud?And then finally it goes to what we are seeing as the biggest trend today, in innovation. It is the low code-no code ecosystem.If I look at my own journey in the last 15 years, when BI used to be a norm in the US, it was a luxury in India. About 8 years back it became a norm in India, no longer a luxury, and now the adoption of a low code-no code concept. It’s now a concept which is needed to be adapted to because it will lead to the new set of innovations that we are all looking into the next few years.BI analytics continues to be the state which needs modernization and upgradation. So that’s part of it. AI of course is at the heart of everything.My view on the overall pervasive digital transformation is that it can hit the dots chronologically and you’ll see that there is a need, which has now been converted from a luxury to a necessity and now finally to a norm. That is how I’m seeing these innovations. Of course, all powered, and I would say generated through AI. AI is at the heart of all. But then come these applications and these ecosystems, which are empowering the transformation.Azure is by far the choice for the enterprises specifically, where they’re looking at the security, the compliance as well as the end-to-end ecosystem. If I talk about the enterprises only, the applications were the source, and the data was in the cloud. Now what we’re seeing is a new paradigm. Data of course continues to stay in the cloud, but it is, generating the need to move the applications to the cloud. So, it’s a reverse movement that we are witnessing.
Talent and Skilling: The first thing that we realized while working in the cloud economy is that there is a massive need for training. I mean, you cannot just go and hire.What we did a couple of years back was start our own institution within the colleges in the ecosystem nearby, whether it’s in Pilani or in Jaipur.Early we would have our own course. It’s called Azure 101. In each of these colleges it’s a mandate for our every employee to teach one subject at least once in the entire year; whether physically or online, it’s a mandate. It’s part of their appraisal process. What we do is we give them this internship program and then they are part of the company. These guys are only trained on Azure for about a year, right? With employee skill initiatives and other programs that Microsoft also helps us with. We ensure that certifications are a mandate for every individual technology wise.Hiring has been the biggest challenge. I’m not shying away from saying that it’s not just with us. We’ve been discussing with our partners and, they had mentioned that hiring is a challenge. But what we are offering is the ability to become an entrepreneur in the 24 to 36 months journey of showcasing a potential candidate. It’s the ability to show technology as the area to grow with. But what do you get along with that technology? Become a business leader in the next 24 to 36 months. That’s what we offer to all our employees.
In a Nutshell
Covid has advanced the process of digitization and hybrid working by several notches. In today’s digital world, IoT, AI, hybrid working, etc have become common buzzwords across organizations. Microsoft is a highly partner-friendly organization with a mission to empower individuals and organizations to achieve more and partners to gain the best possible benefit. Microsoft ensures that their partners have the right skills, tools, and resources they need to compete, win, and move forward, in the cloud world. Partner skilling, managing services, building trust in the customers, digital transformation across SMBs & startups and how to enable clients to leverage emerging technologies and innovations are some of the hot topics discuss.
