Sanjay Padode, CEO, Religare Technova Limited on current scenario of networking solution providers’

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Religare Technova offers traditional data networking services including routing and switching; security, unified communications and wireless. The company has strategic alliance partnership with major global players and offer networking solutions to our customers. Sanjay Padode, CEO, Religare Technova Limited, gives an insight into current scenario of networking solution providers business...

ITVARNEWS: How do you see the networking solution business in current scenario? What response CIOs and CFOs are giving these days?

Sanjay Padode: There is a tremendous amount of convergence that is taking place in the IT industry. Networking business in a standalone model may become redundant very fast. The end customers are now looking at business solutions which will help them run their business processes efficiently. An efficient business solution would be the perfect blend of business process mapping, rig

ht software application and the most optimal IT infrastructure. Networking would be just one component of the IT infrastructure. This trend is evident in the market as large networking manufacturers are slowly evolving their profiles to include tele-presence solutions and are willing to work with application providers to tune their technologies for making the application more business friendly.

In line with this trend, CIO and CFO are watching price performance ratios and total cost of ownership (TCO) very closely just like the other CXOs would watch when they would evaluate other infrastructure required for building and running their business.

ITVARNEWS:Gartner reported that CIOs and CFOs have shrunk their IT budgets. What impacts do you see in networking solution business?


Sanjay Padode: The recession looming across the world has rightly levelled spends across the industry. The CIOs

and CFOs have become more conscious about their spends and this applies to all spends of the organization. It is natural that IT spends would also have got impacted. Again if you look at the networking business on a standalone basis, this impact may be significant, however if you integrate the same within a solution that would help the C level officers to make their processes efficient, then the impact may not be that much significant. Also, as far as networking business is concerned, it has got two components:

1.Costs associated with the purchase of equipment
2.Costs associated with the bandwidth

Considering the fact that bandwidth costs have been going south all along the CXOs are fast evaluating alternative means of communication to reduce other expenditure from the P&L such as Travel cost, shipment of documents, etc. The growth of such applications is tending to help the networking business in a way as the number of applications that it is being curre

ntly being deployed for is only increasing.

ITVARNEWS: What are the CIOs and CFOs concern these days?

Sanjay Padode: Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is the major concern of the CXOs today. Obviously, quality of service is being assumed to be given.


ITVARNEWS: Kindly throw some light on networking solution offerings for SMBs and enterprise?

Sanjay Padode: SMBs are perpetually starved for capital and this is the biggest challenge when it comes to procurement of IT infrastructure. However with the emergence of newer delivery models such as SaaS and the rising affordability of access to the Internet is enabling the SMB sector to push forward their plans on IT. The number of service providers offering shared resources such as data centers, bandwidth and networking equipment is fast enhancing the ability of this sector to use

IT effectively in their operations.


 ITVARNEWS: As per you, what are the challenges networking solution providers are facing these days? How can they tackle the current scenario?


Sanjay Padode: The greatest challenge that is emerging for focused providers of networking solutions is to evolve themselves into business solution providers and grow beyond being just box pushers. The networking solution providers will need to fast align themselves with application providers and the equipment manufacturers to evolve solutions that would enable the organization to tackle the challenges in their processes efficiently.


ITVARNEWS: Are you getting proper service support from vendors?

Sanjay Padode: Vendors are as challenged as the solution providers themselves. They are responding to such challenges

by providing maximum support to the solution providers and this has improved their service levels to the solution providers.

ITVARNEWS: How do you choose vendors to work with?

Sanjay Padode: The decision of choice of vendor is purely based on the application and its specification that the customer builds. The only factor constraining the choice of the customer is the budget and hence many a times the customer does land up making compromises which does shift the choice of vendors from the initial recommendation. As a solution provider, we treat all our vendors equally and try to engineer the most cost effective and efficient solution for the customer.

ITVARNEWS: What are your strategies to ensure profitability?

Sanjay Padode: Our strategy to ensure profitability to make money out of what we save for our customer. Thus designing efficient sol

utions that deliver the maximum performance for our end customers in the best price is what we focus on. As long as we are able to help the customer to save his money and earn a share of his savings, we are confident of profitability.