The Channel Leadership Summit 2021: Day 1

With the largest vaccination drive in the world, India regains momentum across industries. Remote and hybrid work models have taken the pace of IT to the path of normalcy. In an effort to highlight the new beginnings for Channel partners and vendors, CRN India (part of Indian Express Group) organised the flagship virtual conference called Channel Leadership Summit 2021 from November 23, 2021 till November 24, 2021.

The first day of the conference (November 23, 2021) began with a keynote address by Rajesh Marar, VP and CTO, Cloud Channel Platform, Ingram Micro Cloud. He emphasised on industry’s compliance to fulfil the requirements of the customers. 

Marar commented, “Due to the Pandemic and social distancing, a vast majority of companies had to move to remote workplaces. Remote working is not a temporary situation as predicted in Mckinsey’s latest report. Cybersecurity has become a top priority for any company. The ability to simplify complexity and give customer satisfaction will be the prime focus of the organisations.”

The conference moved ahead with a session titled ‘Break Free with Boundless Cybersecurity’ by Debasish Mukherjee, Vice President, Regional Sales (APJ), SonicWall on cybersecurity. Mukherjee said, “We have 17000 partners globally and out of which 60 per cent are completely loyal partners. What is needed more than ever, is a rapid shift to the cybersecurity model to help regain the power of choice. There is a need to reduce human intervention with real-time automation. We have noticed four billion cyber attacks in the last financial quarter of 2021, out of which 99 per cent are known threats and one per cent unknown threats (around 40 million attacks). Three pillars of Boundless Cybersecurity are: Disruptive economics, knowing the unknown, unifying visibility and control.”

Next, Sharath Srinivasamurthy, Research Director, Enterprise Solutions and ICT Practices, IDC IndiaSpecial addressed a session titled ‘Managed Power Practice – An opportunity too difficult to ignore’. He explained, “Digital transformation is accelerating at a fast pace. Iot, blockchain and AI are the new technologies dominating the world. AI based automation is beginning to emerge at a fast rate. In 2020, 64ZB of data was created or replicated and is expected to grow by manifold level by 2025. There is rising pressure on network capacity. Most of the organisations are opting for a hybrid approach. The importance of green or sustainable initiatives is going to be the priority in the coming years.”

Vijay Muthu, Public Cloud Security Sales, Fortinet took the conference ahead with his session titled, ’Accelerate Your Customer Cloud Journey with Fortinet Cloud Security Solutions’. He stated that most companies are adopting digital transformation, increased cloud adoption and updating their security analytics. According to Muthu, “AI and ML knowledge base is required to handle the latest security challenges. Fortinet security fabric is built on: Broad coverage and visibility, integrated solution and automated self-healing network. One cannot build for the cloud without having cloud-native integrations. Fortinet technical support is offered extensively for our customers.”

The next session was titled ‘Western Digital Backup and Archival Solutions for Data Centre Market’ by Naresh Rana, Sr Sales Manager, Western Digital and Limton Xavier, Principal Technologist, Sales, WesternDigital. Rana mentioned, “Digital backup and archival solutions need to be very cost effective. The data storage functions should be fast and backup and archival solutions should be simple and easy to manage.”

Xavier stated, “Our target applications are Public/Private and Cloud SDS, Backup/Archive and Composable Architecture. In the current digital era, we are looking for huge back up demand solutions.”

The conference moved ahead with a fireside chat titled ‘Channeling Data Economics’ with Uttam Majumdar. He mentioned that most customers are in the process of their digital transformation journey. According to Majumdar, “Quick decision making process has helped in making businesses more efficient and robust. Data platform today decides how well your businesses can survive in the coming future. We run our own garage to develop data related facilities. Channel community is very strong globally, and even in India it is remarkable. It brings in a confluence of the best minds and innovations in the market.”

Next, there was another power packed fireside chat titled ‘AI/ML in Software Testing: The need of the hour’ with Ram Shanmugam, Co-Founder and CEO, AutonomIQ (A Sauce Labs Company) and Aseem Tamboli, Head, Cloud Practice, Tableau Practice and ISV Alliance, Savex Technologies Pvt. Ltd. 

According to Shanmugam, Covid-19 created an opportunity to try out newer technologies. Due to Covid-19, from a customer point of view, everything has become contactless. Newer technologies are giving greater efficiencies,  and most companies are reaping maximum benefits out of it. More and more software are being created due to the massive push in digital transformation on a global level due to the pandemic.” 

Aseem commented that we are trying to address all the queries of the customers related to cloud adoption, testing itself has become a huge segment in itself and one of the unique features of Artificial Intelligence is that it can do risk predictions.

The CRN India felicitated the winners who won an award for their contribution in the field of technology in the categories like AI, data centre, blockchain, enterprise security, enterprise applications and many more. The list of the winners is as following:

The conference moved ahead with the session titled ‘Fast Forwarding your IT Innovation with Everything-as-a-Service’ by Anirudh Shrotriya, Managing Director, Shro Systems. He expressed, “The forces behind digital transformation are data (creating outcomes), cloud (unlocking agility) and AI (driving insights). Business workload needs agility of the cloud experience to beat competition. Organisations need to cut costs, conserve capital and align costs to their business. Networking is very critical to most customers and digital businesses must scale quickly, before demand arises.”

Next, Shantaram Shinde, National Head, Channel Business, NTT Global Data Centers and Cloud Infrastructure, India took the conference ahead with his session titled ‘Netmagic to NTT – The New Avatar’. According to Shinde, “There is a need for leveraging AI/ML to deliver services that are robust, optimised and secure by design. In a constantly evolving world, technology does not stand still. We should drive agility, competitiveness and customer experience through valuable insights and automation. NTT is using IoT to deliver an unbeatable fan experience for the ‘Tour de France’. We help our people, clients and communities to move confidently into the digital future.”

Following this was a panel discussion titled ‘How the cloud can be used as a springboard for growth’. Prasenjit Mukherjee, Chief Information Officer, Team Computers commented, “Business and IT leaders have started reimagining and re-strategizing on a war footing.”

Mouzzam Ansari, COE-IAAS, Savic said, “Availability of the systems has increased, as far as the cloud models are involved.”

Gurpreet Singh, Managing Director, Arrow PC Networks pointed out that initially IT was invented to manage cost and provide technical support for organisations.

Shantaram Shinde, National Head, Channel Business, NTT Global Data Centers and Cloud Infrastructure, India said that for India’s partner ecosystem to do well, they have to adopt a hybrid cloud approach.

The conference ended with another awards ceremony where the winners were felicitated for their contribution in the field of technology in the categories like AI, data centre, blockchain, enterprise security, enterprise applications and many more. The list of the winners is as following: