In light of your recent tie-up with Secude India for SAP applications, how do you plan to tap the enterprise security segment?
We have the corporate sponsorship coming from our internal channel group which is going to be of immense value in our go-to-market initiative for security on SAP applications. The combined reach of EMC in India, of which RSA is the security arm, is immense.

Amuleek Birjal Country Manager, RSA India

RSA India has recently tied-up with Secude India to offer security on SAP applications to the large enterprises. Birjal talks about RSA's plans to focus on the bigger companies in this vertical by working with partners who implement ERP for the customers

Given our partnership with Secude, we feel that our ability to reach out to the large enterprises segment is an easily accomplishable task. More importantly, even if we look at the individual resources that RSA itself has in India, when it comes to addressing the go-to-market opportunity, it is not a challenging task

We will complement this initiative with several aggressive marketing activities as well to ensure that our channel and customers get to know about the solution area from Secude and RSA, and how this can autonomously help the users save time and improve efficiency.

In recent times smaller enterprises are also opting for ERP as well as large enterprises. Therefore, don't you think you should be targeting SMBs as well?
Based on our experience in the traditional information security business, we have learnt that the thrust for such solutions will come first from the large enterprises. Understanding that security is a key business area, these larger enterprises are the first to adopt any new technology and over time the idea percolates down to the commercial segment.

In the security domain in India, RSA India is one of the only few player to have dedicated sales force focused at the commercial and mid- market SMB segment. But yes, looking at the availability of our resources, the size of opportunities and the strength of our existing relationships, we will focus on the large enterprises initially. However, this does not mean that we will not look at the mid-market segment at all for SAP security applications.

Because of our direct sales presence and the focus of our partners in that segment, the importance of implementing security at the ERP level is a message that is going to be carried out through our marketing efforts, equally to the SMB segment.

How will you involve the channel in this gameplan since you already have a direct sales force?
When you talk about ERP installations, the large manufacturer customers have well-identified solution providers who manage their infrastructure. When we go ahead and target that segment it is very important for us to use that set of partners foremost.

Did you know? Amuleek Birjal is an MBA from Harvard Business School He participates in the annual Bangalore Marathon and will be running with the EMC team this year in the city as well He has worked with EMC on key emerging market initiatives with focus on India, Russia and China. He also has worked with Microsoft and Tata Consultancy Services During his growing years in Jammu & Kashmir, he would often go on long mountain treks He believes that his biggest achievement as a professional is the learning he has acquired in diverse roles-developer, marketing, consulting, sales and strategy-within the tech sector His suggestion for dealing with tough times is to have a better depth of customer engagements and be relevant from an RoI perspective

What we are going to do is come up with a list of the major SAP partners and then zero down to those partners who do a lot of SAP business and are associated with us as well. We will use them as our priority partners to reach out to our target of the top 900 manufacturers in the country.

Over time we will have a programmatic approach to bring in other partners as well, which would include tier-2 solution providers, especially as we start working with the entire universe of the remainder 3,000 manufacturing enterprises in the country. It will take us at least six months to set the full engine up.

Vinita Bhatia
(vinitavs@cybermedia.co.in)

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