TeamViewer scans for partners to grow its business in the India market    

TeamViewer has announced the opening of its first India office in Mumbai as a key driver for its long-term growth initiative in the South Asia region. TeamViewer’s Mumbai office will act as a sales, marketing, and support centre to provide best-in-class remote connectivity solutions for a dynamically growing local user base on the subcontinent with more than 100 million installations to date. Konstantin Ebert, Vice President Sales EMEA, APAC and Global Channels – TeamViewer speaks to VARINDIA, talking about the kind of growth he is looking from the Indian market -

Can you provide an overview of TeamViewer’s business module, key focus area, expansion and your channel strategies?

This year 2018, we started to build a strategy to go much more detailed into Asia. We have identified few core markets in Asia - China, Japan and India, where we want to become physically present and much more serious in the market. We have always done business in India and have a very big brand reputation in India. Our software is very broad spread, we have more than 100 million download and installation of our software. We have made our software for private user free and that is what is helping the software to spread.

But to grow more with the enterprise customers in India, we started to establish a legal entity in India and decided that we would open our first office in Mumbai. We started building a team here and hired Kunal Patel as our head of the country here locally. Kunal started to build a full team around sales, presales, post sales, support for our customers and enterprise sales. We were initially between 7 and 10 people, now 7 more are already onboard. Our focus is to cover the market much more as an Indian company then just remotely from Germany or Adelaide in Australia, where we have been so far.

How hasthe perception of remote access and collaboration platform space changed the market in the last few years?

Earlier the focus was mostly on remote support but today we see more focus in connecting any kind of devices. It has a lot to do with remote support still but also at the same time remote access, remote control as well as collaboration. We see the market as very fragmented. Then you have lot of small fragmented players; very often when they come to larger installations, they have limitations and functionality and bandwidth. 

The market has grown a lot for us because we have many devices and our number of devices has grown tremendously. Today globally, we have 1.8 billion devices online, devices that have downloaded TeamViewer. That growth has been phenomenal for us. Now with everything coming up around IoT used cases, we see further a big growth and potential of connecting massive numbers of devices. 

How is the remote access and collaboration platform growing globally versus India? 

We see India as one of the most exciting market because first it is very big;second, it’s a fast growing large economy. It has a highly skilled population, who have lot of knowledge around IT, lot of creativity, software development and so on. That's why we took the decision to come here and invest in the market because we see all these trends and eco system developing and we believe that we could add a lot of value to those.

If you look at the government and public sector, keeping the factor of developed and developing markets in mind, what would you like to share with your partners?

For us, channel has become a very important pillar of our business and if you look at how we operate, we do not provide any professional services, we do not provide installation or complex project management but this is an element where we fully rely on partners. Looking at the government, there are a lots of initiatives happening in the government, from remote work to digitalisation, to smart cities and so on. We can add a lot of value, but at the end we only provide a great software and technology to make successful projects, we need implementation partners and we need partners who are reselling the software.But more importantly,we are working in the customer projects, bringing projects to life.

India is a market for business sales expansions.How do you see financial year 2019 and what will be your top priorities for the Indian market?

Our first priority was to establish a legal entity - we have done that; starting to build a team - we have done that too. We already have a partner network but we would like to grow our partner network, especially around the enterprise business.We are looking for more partners, who can really generate together with us in enterprise projects. We see a minimum of 100 % growth in next year in India. We have put the team together and now we are in the mode of acquiring channel partners who help us developing the projects together with our enterprise customers.

Presently how many channel partners you are working with?
We are today working with one distributer - Ingram Micro. We have 2 platinum partners - Softline and Software One. We have 150 registered partners - some work on case by case, while some work more seriously together with us. We started to engage well with some of the largest integrators as well. We are really looking forward to further growing that ecosystem, especially also to make sure we are covering all the key regions in India; we have several regions with white spots and we of course want to have partners in those markets.