Channel Partners: Foundational component of CA Technologies’ go-to-market strategy 

Ashok Vasan, Vice-President, Partners, Asia Pacific & Japan, CA Technologies

CA Technologies considers it’s Partners as core to its business and a foundation of its go to market strategy. The company is very much focused about its plans regarding channel community. In a chat with VARINDIA, Ashok Vasan, Vice-President, Partners, Asia Pacific & Japan, CA Technologies reveals the importance of channel for the company, its channel plans for 2018-19 and how it is empowering the partners   

Where does channel stand in CA Technologies' scheme of things? 

Partners represent a foundational component of CA’s go-to-market strategy. It is their expertise combined with our technology, which positions us to meet customer needs as the application economy shifts the way businesses manage and consume information technology. 

Organizations are still unable to achieve business agility due to factors such as siloed organization culture, archaic processes, and legacy technologies. Partners play a strategic role to successfully traverse the digital transformation journey for them, which necessitates a holistic approach from organizations and CIOs alike.

Our Modern Software Factory blueprint resonates at all levels, and the traction we have received across segments has been tremendous. We are in a great space and partners are strategic and core to our business. Moreover, the focus will be towards profitable and sustainable growth for both, our partners as well as for us. Along with our partners, it is our focus to deliver higher business value and exceptional customer experience.

What strategic plans do you have in 2018-19 to build on your Channel eco-system?

Our relationships with our partners have grown and matured over last few years. The focus lies towards working with our partners to ensure that customers consider us, prefer us and select us. 

Our strategy is quite simple
Fewer partners, Greater Focus – we believe that partnerships are about relationships and value proposition.  We seek partnerships with organizations that share our technology vision and understand our strategic intent; and are therefore willing to commit to our partnership.  Mutual strategic value is our utmost priority and it is bearing good results

Align with customers’ buying behaviour and consumption patterns – Today, customers buy and consume technology in many ways. Broadly speaking these map to our ‘Routes to Market’; i.e. Managed Service Providers (MSP), System Integrators, Resellers/VADs. Our strategy is to ensure that each of our ‘Routes to Market’ have strong partners who excel in that mode so that the customers’ journey is smooth

Where to Play; How to Win – The core element of our strategy which we jointly establish with our partners based on their strengths and our solution offerings to jointly take to market an offering that is compelling and differentiated.  This ensures that there is clarity in the market as well as with the various partners across the region.

How CA is empowering its Partners to better serve customers? 

Business agility has become crucial and is multi-faceted. It is important that CA’s partners understand the concept of Modern Software Factories and the skills that are required to successfully traverse through the journey of digital transformation.   

Our Partners are trained and equipped to help rewire organization’s DNA to achieve greater success. These specialists offer solutions, skills and capabilities to accelerate application delivery, improve quality and deliver better customer experience, while also managing security risks and integrating an organization’s diverse technologies and processes to attain better results. Additionally, our partners gain access to support services including sales, marketing and technical training to help build revenue and customer loyalty.  These include:

i.    CA has invested in its own enablement series known as CA Partner Momentum, which is a capstone enablement event. However, CA further provides enablement content to our partners in multiple media and formats ranging from online, YouTube, e-books and of course classroom training

ii.    Opportunity for our partners to leverage our marketing capabilities to get additional demand generation  

iii.    Presales support to assist the partners with proofs of concepts 

iv.    Architecture support on services engagements

CA along with its partners make this transformation journey shorter, smoother and more impactful. Our alliances leverage Partner’s thought leadership, strategy development and industry expertise to optimize our market-leading enterprise solutions; further assuring and emphasizing an organisation’s future readiness.

How competitive is the IT landscape today? How are companies like you trying to innovate and differentiate yourself in terms of offerings and market strategies?  

There is a clear and urgent need for organizations to create an agile business to take advantage of the rapidly evolving and increasingly digitalized business landscape. It’s been a decade since the onset of the application economy, yet organizations face the basic issues: the need to quickly roll out new apps, integration, and business models, especially when an organization’s enterprise architecture is based on legacy applications.

Along with our partners and experts, CA brings cross-functional teams and disciplines together into a cohesive, higher-performing whole. CA's DevOps puts agile methodologies to work in the digital transformation journey, and existing practitioners are realizing a long list of benefits. Together, we manage integration, automation, and orchestration of the entire DevOps toolchain. CA plays a crucial role to help navigate the complexity of today’s problem, which include multi-cloud/hybrid environments and the software complexity arising from architectural shifts, i.e. monolithic to n-tier, SOA and now microservices.

CA offers solutions, skills and capabilities to accelerate application delivery, improve quality and deliver better customer experience, while also managing security risks and integrating an organization’s diverse technologies and processes to attain better results. CA has the legacy that native cloud players don’t possess to provide the speed and agility, its customers require while managing multiple complexities and delivering results.

How do you see the growth of small, mid-level businesses and start-ups in India today? What is CA's focus in each of these segments?   

There is a healthy new breed of start-ups in India today, particularly in media, retail, logistics.

These are technology based start-ups that are scaling quite rapidly. It is imperative that they embrace cloud and cloud-based technologies to keep pace with business growth. They need also be open to work with managed service providers who can provide the right services, technology platform and consumption based pricing models. The idea is for these start-ups to focus on their core product and/or service and leverage infrastructure, tools etc. to MSPs, Cloud Service Providers and other partners.

CA Technologies is investing in this area and have partnered with MSPs who are looking to expand in India and across APJ.