In an exclusive interview with the SME Times, Vijayanth Rai, Director, Channel Sales, CA Technologies, India said that Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in the past were more focused on investing on applications and servers, but today this has changed. These days, they are seeking out for more advanced technologies as well.
Excerpts of the interview...
Could you highlight on the services CA technologies provide to the consumers?
Vijayanth Rai: CA Technologies is committed to providing quality to its consumers. Services here are not restricted to just strategizing and consulting but also implementing and managing them. CA Services enables organizations of any size to effectively advance through the physical-to-virtual-to-cloud journey by employing a pragmatic and proven approach that incorporates people, process, technology and architecture. CA Technologies provides its customers with a varied range of products and services to choose from. Some of our services include Cloud Computing services, Project and Portfolio Management Services, Security and Compliance Services, Service Management Services, Service Assurance Services, Mainframe Services, Virtualization and Service Automation Services besides many others. Some of our Additional Services include: Associate Services Consultant Program, Global Delivery, Managed and Hosting Services.
Here at CA Technologies we have world-class services to offer. For example, CA Arcserve r16 has been recommended for data protection and business continuity by Earns Network Testing Labs. CA Technologies service does not restrict itself to contractual time periods but rather services consumers throughout its solution life cycle.
In addition, CA’s ARCserve D2D On Demand provides individuals and small & medium businesses-- a solution which offers robust onsite data protection and includes bundled and integrated public cloud storage, powered by Microsoft Windows® Azure™, for offsite file protection. Companies use local storage for faster backup and recovery and copy critical information to the cloud for disaster recovery—all performed automatically on your schedule. Individual & SME Companies can also recover files directly from the cloud, wherever and whenever it makes sense.
How much popular is your services among the Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs)?
Vijayanth Rai: Amongst BRIC countries and the US, India has the second largest population of small and medium businesses. Until recent past IT companies were of the opinion that SMBs were not going to invest in IT. Budgets from SMBs were focused mostly on applications and servers. However this has changed. SMBs today are seen as growth drivers for a number of IT firms. The newer SMBs are seeking for more advanced technologies. CA Technologies recognizing the potential in this rapidly growing market has rendered it services to SMBs by providing its solutions.
CA Technologies is strongly focused on SME marketplace specially with it’s Arcserve suite of Data Management solutions. Many small businesses barely have the time, money and resources to run all IT operations and at the same time, adequately protect the systems, applications and data that their business depends on every day. And most don’t have a disaster recovery plan and solution. Cloud disaster recovery (DR) is making its way into IT environments, especially for small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) who may struggle to keep up with all of their disaster recovery requirements. We are seeing a lot of interest especially in the SMB towards various services like ‘Backup as a Service /to the Cloud’ & ‘DR (Disaster Recovery) as a Service / to the cloud’.
What kind of solutions and software CA technologies has designed to accelerate, transform and secure small businesses?
Vijayanth Rai: CA Technologies has a number of solutions and software products to offer to SMBs. However, we will break this question down in three parts.
a) Accelerating Small Business
CA Technologies aims at delivering new services faster with better quality. Our business management software solutions help optimize portfolio for the greatest return, and they respond quickly to dynamically shifting organizational needs. From CA LISA to CA Automation Suite for Cloud to CA Applogic all help accelerate the enterprises with mid-size functionality.
b) Transforming Small Business
CA Technologies help automate small business end-to-end IT environment, resulting in reduction in IT delivery costs. With products like CA Application Performance Management, CA NetQoS Performance Center, Nimsoft Unified Monitoring and CA ecoDesktop offered to SMBs, they can improve service quality, and lessen risk.
c) Securing Small Business
Being able to provide maximum security is a key aspect especially when dealing with customers. CA Technologies offers its customers which include SMBs to choose the service that best suit their enterprise be it CA SiteMinder or CA CloudMinder Advanced Authentication. They are also given the liberty to customize the service that leverage secure virtualization and cloud services as it can reduce security costs, increase customer loyalty, and improve competitive position.
How much benefit SMEs get from the products and services you offer?
Vijayanth Rai: Business today is putting more pressure on IT than ever before. It is very important for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) to maintain their current level of service, while answering demands for mobile, social, cloud, analytics, and other solutions — all with stretched resources. Clearly, the old model for IT isn’t built to keep pace with today’s business environment. With the changing time and increased demand, organizations need to develop their IT infrastructure. CA Technologies have wide portfolio of products/ services for small and medium enterprises. Products like CA IT Asset Manager, CA SiteMinder, CA AuthMinder, CA ARCserve and CA Erwin helps in collaboratively visualizing and managing data across the enterprise. It gives a better view of your IT asset costs, contracts and licenses and reins in spiralling IT costs and boosts ROI, mitigate risks, support compliance efforts and improve decision-making processes. CA ERwin is a powerful visualization tool that helps users to represent data that is managed in multiple systems, applications, platforms and locations. Users can more effectively manage the migration of data to the cloud and other new forms of IT infrastructure. These products also provide improved Web application and information security.
Could you highlight on the business growth you have been witnessing lately?
Vijayanth Rai: Business growth has been robust with customers looking to use CA Technologies solutions & products to help improve IT efficiencies as well as for competitive advantage. We are also experiencing strong traction with the partner community as well as Managed Service Providers (MSPs) & Service Providers.
What kind of IT infrastructure development do you feel is required among SMEs?
Vijayanth Rai: Small and medium enterprises are an integral part of Indian economy and play an important role in developing the nation. This segment is more concerned with the issue of inefficient technology. IT infrastructure development starts with a strong technology foundation which provides a roadmap for future. For a Small and Medium enterprise (SME), it is very important to have a robust infrastructure which can support their day-to-day transactions. It should have a set of efficient and cost effective components which can hold up the IT infrastructure and reduce downtime. An ideal IT infrastructure enables enterprise in reducing cost of production, maintain consistency in quality, improve productivity and finally develop the competitiveness of the enterprise. SME’s today face challenges in terms of managing IT complexity which is ever changing & the availability / cost of skilled IT manpower. All this, as they try to use IT as a competitive advantage & growth driver. In this scenario we see our resellers, MSP & Cloud Partners play a vital role as they help handle the customers ‘IT Chores’ & let the customer focus on his 'Core' business.
(Namrata Kath Hazarika can be contacted at namratakh@tradeindia.com)
