Sanjay Sehgal, AVP-Enterprise & Project Business, D-Link (India) Limited, talked to Harshal Kallyanpur about the company’s renewed focus on the enterprise segment
What’s the rationale behind D-Link realigning its business strategy to target the Indian enterprise segment?
The channel business has been the core bread and butter for us for a very long time and continues to fulfill that function. That’s about satisfying the demand for entry-level products through box movement. We wanted to go beyond that and target large enterprises with our solutions.
Though we had focused solutions for the enterprise earlier, the challenge was primarily with regard to the customer mindset of not perceiving D-Link as an enterprise solution vendor.
While organizations would readily deploy our equipment at the branch level or the edge of the network, they had apprehensions about adopting our solutions at the core of the network.
Despite this, there are customers who have been using our equipment at the core of their network. One of the biggest customers for our enterprise solutions is the Indian Government.
Then there’s the fact that about one in four educational institutes in India would have our solutions deployed on campus. We had a gap when it came to sectors such as BFSI or IT/ITES and we began looking to diminish this gap by taking our solutions to these market segments.
How are you going about targeting the enterprise segment?
Our enterprise solutions range from entry-level products to larger solutions, which also include the security pieces such as UTM and firewall. We are offering the entire gamut of solutions to this segment as we believe that we need to take an approach that’s solution focused rather than dividing products based on the value of the market segment that we cater to.
A customer could have branch offices, which could deploy the entry-level products; the central or head office could go in for a single aggregate solution that would integrate with the solutions deployed at the branch office.
With our solutions, we are providing the customer with an end-to-end infrastructure that starts at the physical layer and goes up to the application layer. They get a solution that includes passive components such as structured cabling, the switching and routing layers as well as the storage and application layer to manage the network components.
What kind of adoption are you currently seeing for your enterprise solutions?
Switching and routing continues to be in strong demand. IP surveillance, storage and the security solutions (primarily UTM and firewalls) are also in demand. Given the dated technologies that traditional CCTV solutions use, demand for IP surveillance is there in branch offices, jewelry outlets and food store chains—all of whom want access to video footage in real-time.
Our D-Link MyCloud IP surveillance solution helps address these requirements with the ability to access and control the IP surveillance infrastructure remotely. Users can even do so through a mobile device such as a tablet or a smartphone. While the idea initially was to offer MyCloud for the SOHO and SMB sector, we have now extended this solution to the enterprise as well.
One of the largest prisons in India has deployed our IP surveillance solution.
We are also seeing a good demand for our security solutions. A lot of educational institutes that are deploying Wi-Fi solutions from D-Link on campus also want to ensure that Internet security is in place. Here we have been able to sell our UTM and firewall solutions along with our Wi-Fi offerings and, in some cases, we have convinced customers to deploy IP surveillance for the campus.
Tell us about the response to this realignment in your strategy?
The last three years have more or less been the same and steady for us with the company seeing Rs 130 crores of business almost every year.
However, over the last one year, with our traditional markets still doing well for us, and with the renewed focus on the enterprise segment, we have seen our business grow from Rs 134 crores to Rs 224 crores.
Our business in the enterprise space grew by up to 80% percent from November 2011 onwards. The growth has largely come from the government and education segments. We expect to see demand coming from manufacturing, BFSI and defense over the course of the next few years.
Educational departments of India are working towards creating a National Knowledge Network connecting all the universities in the country. We are looking at participating in this project.
We are also looking at demands from the government sector for solutions to help them implement better network and Internet security.
We are also organizing multi-city road shows to showcase our end-to-end network solution offerings, with a special focus on the enterprise product portfolio and to educate our customers, partners and industry about our enterprise solution portfolio.
