Rai has the unenviable job of getting CA at the top of the mind recall. But presence of mature brands is making it a daunting task. Excerpts from the interview

There is wide gap between Computer Associates (CA) and your biggest competition currently as opposed to some years ago. So is CA trying to gain lost ground?
Yes, there are vendors who are bigger than us and have a well oiled mecha­nism. But we are acquiring partners from them and trying to make sure that we are the first choice with these partners.

To continue doing this, we will have a lot of training and sales engagement. We will work with the key resellers and show them that they can make money with CA.

In recent times a lot of home-grown companies are playing aggressively on the pricing front which has gone down well with the Indian customers. How will you compete with these vendors?
This is true in the retail and consumer market, which is a big business chunk. It's the channel's forte to address this market.

Vijayant Rai Director-Channels India & SAARC, Computer Associates

CA has not been very focused on retail and consumer market as we had our sights trained on the enterprise and SMB segment. We have now come out with some plans to tap this market, because it is still a recession-proof area. And we do believe that if we get the right channel to work with, we should be able to dominate that market as well. Towards this end, we are planning some re-launches around the Internet security space.

What steps are you taking from a localized perspective because the retail customers are not highly technology conscious when they buy a product?
We are looking at some local vendors who will offer the first level support only for our anti-virus retail products. We want a national player who will be working with the CA support team.

He will provide an interface for the home user and will act as the pipeline between CA support team and the customer. This is because if the home user calls up CA support, it might be tough for the support team to ask technical questions which the customer might not be able to answer.

What other propositions do you have for the channel?
CA worldwide is looking at offering managed services for instant recovery on demand (IROD) through partners where we will offer disaster recovery from a data center. This service will be a part of the SKU in the distributor's price list.

Here the customer would'nt be investing on two servers as he just needs to have a primary server. We believe this service makes sense because data is growing and its needs to be managed, which might not be something that SMB customers can do.

SMBs are beginning to face the issue of compliance. We believe that managed services around disaster recovery will make a lot of sense for the customers to invest in and partners to sell.

We are already talking to a couple of partners about this. We will work with a data center that would have a virtualized bank of servers. It will be segmented virtually and customers would have areas where they could back up data. In case of downtime of their servers, the users could get connected to these servers.

Partners could offer it to their end users as a service on a monthly basis, since it is a subscription-based model. For the partner the services revenues get augmented as he still has to set-up the server on the customer site. He will also get a commission as long as the customer subscribes to the service.

Are you planning to rattle your channel ecosystem a bit?
Our channel ecosystem comprising our national distributors and resellers is pretty well oiled and has been there for a very long time. CA provides the air cover to its partners in terms of all the pre-sales support and budget allocation needed.

We have had some changes in the top senior management but the basic structure will remain the same. We might augment the structure in the volume business to do a lot more and will probably add more headcount in the number of resellers by 20 percent this year.

Vinita Bhatia
(vinitavs@cybermedia.co.in)

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