India Market holds immense importance for SUSE    

Open source started picking up in India after the government’s announcement of its adoption. It gave a big boost to the open source companies. Prior to that India was lagging behind when compared to other countries in terms of its adoption but the government’s move helped to boost the open source market.       

“In recent future, the government in India announced that they are adopting open source which helped a lot. Before that, India was little behind in adoption of open source compared to other countries. But since the government declared and has also taken a leadership role in conducting pilots helped a lot in boosting the adoption,” views Ronald De Jong, President - Sales, SUSE.  

Reacting on the same, Rajarshi Bhattacharya, Country Head, SUSE elaborates, “If you look at Government of India’s initiative like Digital India, it has got two pillars - one is establishing the infrastructure and that pillar is totally developed around open source. So right from deploying Smart City to Access Control Systems and UIDAI, everything is developed on open source.

The second pillar is Service Delivery to Citizens; in the last seven years all the mission mode projects have been developed on open source. So the prioritization of open source is there and the government today is also fairly matured enough to understand that they require enterprise grade open source in order to maintain stability, sustainability, and security. So these pillars which revolve around open source is actually nibbling us to grow very fast.” 

India as a market

India as a market holds high importance for SUSE for various factors. The market is flooded with opportunities as the country has a huge young population which further indicates rapid adoption of new technologies. Moreover, India is a big opportunity for SAP and SUSE has good products around it which will help the latter to grow in the market.         

“India is a very important country for SUSE because it has a huge young population. Its IT educational system is one of the best in the world. So there are a lot of IT experts available in India which also means that the adoption of new technologies is much faster here. We create new offerings with the System Integrators (SI) in the market, while also making sure that we are in that stack, which will help us to be important and gain market share in the rest of the world. So that is why it is important to be in India. We want to grow fast in Asia as this is one of the fast growing areas. We have very good products around SAP and India is a very big country for SAP,” explains Ronald.    

Go to Market Strategy

From SUSE’s go to market perspective India is very important. To better focus on the market, the company has two teams, one which works with the SIs and the other that concentrates on the local market.    

“India is a very important market from SUSE’s go to market strategy perspective. Since I am responsible for Sales worldwide, I was required to look at all the go to market models we have and when we did an exercise, we found out that India is actually very important. In India we have two teams - one is the team of Partner Executives (PE) that looks after the big System Integrators (SI). In some countries we have dedicated PEs for the SIs and in some countries we have one PE managing two or three SIs. But around the world we have a big ecosystem of Partner Executives. They are rolling out the solutions that are created in India. 

The other team looks after the local market because it’s little different. Both the teams are working together but they have their own leadership strategies and go to market people,” elaborates Ronald.  

 
Channel Strategy

The company is focusing on few aspects, which include empowerment of SIs so that while implementing any solution the SI can easily bundle SUSE technology along with it.  

“We were focusing on a couple of key areas. SAP is very important for our business when we look at how customers are consuming SAP solutions in the market. As its solution implementation gets more complex, customers want to leverage SIs to implement these solutions. So from a strategy perspective we want to make it easy for our SIs to be able to include our technology in those offerings that they give to customers,” mentions Rajarshi.   

Further adding to it he says, “The other areas that we are focusing with our SI Partners are Software Defined Infrastructure and also Application Delivery. 

In India, there are actually three levels in the channel market. There are large SIs whom we call the Global System Integrators (GSIs), they work on two sectors - Banking Financial Services Industry and Government. So that is where we partner with our GSI team members and we work very closely to address those customers.

Then we have the second type of partners like L&T, Inspira Enterprise etc which is handled by a named partner team. We also have Global Partners like HPE, IBM etc. who work across industry verticals like Manufacturing, BFSI, Government etc. So we work very closely with them.

Lastly, comes the Tier two or three city partners who are very state or city specific. They are more like opportunity specific, target alignment partners that we have. Our partner strategy revolves around the technical skill set. So it’s not primarily based on revenue but based on the skills set in terms of SUSE products. We are getting in more partners who are reaching higher levels of certification and we are hopeful to add few more to that.”