8th edition of ISODA TechSummit

An excellent opportunity for VARS to interact with industry leaders
 

With the perfect theme designed for this year, Infotech Software Dealers Association (ISODA) is in its 8th edition of TechSummit. Held in Hotel J W Marriot Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia from 1st to 4th of February, 2018, this year, TechSummit is sponsored by Cisco as the Platinum sponsor. Checkpoint and Kaspersky as the Gold sponsors, while other vendors which include Red Hat, Sophos, Radware, iPSwitch and Stratus are the Silver sponsors. LG has participated this year as the Associate sponsor. The event is attended by 100 key decision makers of the VAR community and the members of ISODA, who have been working tirelessly to onboard technology sponsors, create an interesting agenda, maximize participation and create the most interactive platform for discussion on Tipping Point: Breaching the finance barrier.

Atul Modi, Chairman of ISODA TechSummit 8 said, “This year’s TechSummit promises to be a mega networking opportunity for the partners and sponsors of the event. We have arrived at the theme after long deliberations amongst partners and vendors. Financial planning, execution and profitability are in the minds of all members and how to work towards minimizing losses and maximizing finance is a very interesting topic. We welcome the new ISODA members for joining us in Kuala Lumpur. This is the time of the year when friends across different regions get to meet and network among themselves. So the excitement has built up to a level of crescendo!”

For the first time ISODA has given the platform to the Sponsoring Companies and the VARS to come face to face over the round table to understand on how to enhance the business and learning from them if there is any scope of improvement. ISODA has opened the gates for newer opportunities for the participating VARS to come closer to the Corporates.

The event also witnessed the award ceremony in the categories of -
* ISODA Award for Business Excellence - Winner: one award, prize money Rs 21,001/-
* ISODA Award for Business Excellence - Upcountry Achiever, one award, prize money Rs 10,001/-
* ISODA Award for Business Excellence - Inspirational Achiever, three awards, prize money Rs 10,001/- each

“We have 12 sponsors this time with CISCO as a platinum sponsor and Kaspersky and Check Point as Gold sponsors. There were 5 silver sponsors – Red Hat, Stratus, LG, Radware and Sophos. There were close to 85 members participating this time. We have also changed some of the concepts this year. The vendor/sponsor went to  every table and interacted with the partners for 7-10 minutes. This idea was really liked by everyone as everyone get a chance to interact with the vendors,” says Atul Modi, Director, Modi Infosol & Chairperson - TechSummit 8

“It is an exciting time for all of us at ISODA because we get to meet our friends, meet new vendors and above all work as an association with a single motive – growth. I have really looked forward to it,” says Alok Gupta, Director - Softmart.

“I have been part of most of the TechSummits at ISODA. This is one association I will always cherish as I have come back every time with new knowledge of trends, new alliances and new friends,” says Amarnath Shetty, Director - LDS Infotech.
 

Shrenik Bhayani,     
GM - Kaspersky Lab (South Asia)
“I should appreciate ISODA as an organisation in terms of taking the efforts for organizing this TechSummit. For us, the vision for our channel in 2018 will be coverage, geographical expansion and effectively expansion of our enterprise business. We are building our teams at a territory level, which effectively will means that the teams would go and interact more with the channel community of that specific territory and then focus on the enterprise business for Kaspersky. The channel needs to be coached in terms of making them understand what more they can sell into an account. For instance, they have been selling endpoint for ages, but they can build up their capabilities in a way that they can sell security to a SME customer on a virtualised environment.”

Jaspal Sharma        
Technical Head - India & Middle East (Govt, PSU) - Radware
“If you go through the Radware history, primarily our business is provided and driven by the big system integrators. So here it’s a great platform to interact with the people, partners and the channel who are not competing with the big SIs but they are focusing on specific accounts and specific geographies. And this is where Radware is trying to work and emphasize more into the channel. This is a great opportunity for us to represent our solution. Of course everybody loves the business and we see a lot of potential and positive vibes from the channel partners. 

From the security point of view, there are lot of illegal activities selling in terms of denial of service (DoS) as a service, hacking as a service which people are availing. As far as our channel vision for 2018 is concerned, we will try to spread user awareness as much as possible among our customers and partners and the pros and cons of using these services.”

Srinivas Sitaram        
Country Manager – SMB, Check Point Software Technologies
“We have been a 100% channel company always selling to channel partners only. But given the fact that ISODA as an organisation community is growing, we also thought that this is the right time we should also participate in it. Also given the fact that we are now foraying into SMB, we had to come at this time as a sponsor. Check Point is currently focussed on 3 areas- Print, Mobile and the cloud. Earlier our focus was primarily on the enterprise space but now we are slowly starting to cater to small and medium enterprises too. Our focus areas are also on the emerging technologies primarily cyber threat, mobile and cloud. We see a lot of value for partners who sell directly to customers, build services around it and make more margins. We want to make sure that it is profitable for them.”

 
Rajeev Gupta        
Director - Sales (India & SAARC), Sophos
“This is a 5th consecutive year that we are participating, and I feel that this platform has come a long way in delivering result-oriented initiatives. For us the main priority is to enable all our partners for the entire Sophos portfolio, because we have a lot of Cyberoam partners who have now started selling Sophos products. Many of the partners are very good on selling UTM and network offerings, but since the focus at Sophos is primarily to sell endpoint products, we need to enable our existing partners in selling these products. But the good thing is that this will eventually help them to build their competency in offering an end to end product portfolio to their customers. Today there are solutions which are working in silos, so manageability of different solutions from different OEMs has become a great concern. So at Sophos we are focusing on managing the entire portfolio of solutions with a single console and with machine learning.”

Vikramjeet Bhatti        
Managing Director - India & SAARC, Stratus Technologies
“We pick and choose partners. And if we choose to work with any partners, it means that they should have some amount of control on their businesses. Selling strategies require a certain skillset and not every partner would be able to do that. We enable our partners to regain control of the account they are doing business with. We are talking to CIOs and Managing Director of a customer account and for that there is a certain class of partners who can do that. Once we get the partner on board the primary objective is to help them gain significant trust in their set accounts with our solutions and secondly improve their profitability not just in terms of margins but in terms of improving and reducing the service cost. We depend on our partners for services and then come the reach. We also depend on the partners for educating customers about options which are available.”

Sanjay Joshi        
Country Manager (India & the Sub-Continent) - Edimax Technology
“It is our 2nd participation at ISODA and the experience has been tremendous. Particularly the round table session with the partners has been very fruitful. Competition has gone up to a level that today it become necessary for a partner to not just stick to security or networking alone. But they should be focusing on end to end. As a provider of networking solutions, Channel hygiene is also something which we at Edimax are very particular of and I think every vendor should think of it. On the partner perspective, especially the SMBs, the pain areas are their expertise and how easily can they make a deployment. So for us the need is to provide education and training to our enterprise channel and partners who in return would be able to help their SMB customers.”

Lyn Kwek        
Marketing Director – Ipswitch
“ISODA Tech Summit 2018 is a great platform for us to engage and work with the top partners and resellers in the India Market. It’s a very fantastic environment where everybody has time away from work to restrategize and gain knowledge about the latest trends in the market. 

We tried our best to talk with every partner and there were a lot of engagement opportunities.  So the event actually gave us ample opportunity to get to know each and every one of them on a more in-depth level. My only suggestion for improvement is that there should not be just business talks but there should be interactions happening at a personal level too, like organizing some games and sports. But otherwise I think this event has really been a good endeavour on the part of every ISODA member.”

Awards-
Best Managed Services  -   Futurenet Technologies India Pvt Ltd
Best Security Software Solution Provider  -  Macaws Infotech 
Best Cloud & Software Services Provider  -  LDS Infotech Pvt Ltd
Innovative Strategy Achiever   -  Dev Information Technology Ltd
                                                            Business Excellence  -  Umbrella Infocare Pvt Ltd