Building a Competent Marketplace

As a VAD, how do you satiate the never-ending quest for Value in the term Value Added Distribution?

Value is dynamic. In IT, value is about two things – Be ready to adopt the change and adopt faster; Make sure that you have the required level of competency and expertise to derive the right value. As a value- added distributor, we have strived our best to ensure that our customers get maximum value from our vendors and we give maximum value to our vendors whilst providing them the ability to grow bigger and better in the larger vertical, have bigger channel, domains and exponential market reach. We have actually gone one step ahead in terms of working in conjunction with goals and objectives. From a pure channel perspective, we bifurcate value by identifying the right kind of channel and recruiting them and make sure that they are certified in all our products and services.

How have you been filling the vendor-channel gap as FVC?

As we spoke before, we are trying to fill this gap by recruiting the right kind of channel partners and ensuring that they are certified and have the same competency level. FVC has been a true enabler here. We help the partners till they get a perfect hold on the solutions. From being a solutions architect to pre-sales person who helps with PoCs, there are various areas where we have been the extended arms for the vendor. We have also been strong in providing support services. Our services are completely aligned with the partner.

How have you seen the customer or end-user demand changing over the past two to three years?

Priority, from a customer perspective, has always been on the cyber security side. Middle East has been prone to various attacks; hence security of the network has been pivotal.

Second is cloud migration. Companies have started looking at cloud as a part of their business. The adoption is still slacking but if we look outside MEA, the adoption of cloud in US or Europe is much higher in terms of companies who have moved to the cloud versus the companies who have moved to the cloud here.

The third part is the way customers are looking at skill sets and competency level with the partner or integrator.

A big challenge that the region faces today is that, the customer has been shouting out loud about their pain areas and no one is there to resolve the problem. We, as a company, started as a unified collaboration and unified communication solution provider. Steadily, we pushed more into the infrastructure space and bandwidth optimisation space.

Listening to the customer is the first step. The channel plays a key role here in coming back and telling the solution provider what the customer wants. From a vendor perspective, it has been more of a drill down and go to market strategy. It is more about sitting down with the vendor and understanding what he wants to do in this region how the company can align.

A few years back, there existed an evident gap in the private and public sector in technology adoption. How do you see that area now?

Earlier the cloud adoption and digital transformation were only undertaken by the private sectors. Cloud adoption was much bigger and evident in the private sectors with various use cases. Skill gap was the biggest challenge. But over the past two years, governments and semi-governments have been understanding and realizing the value of the cloud. Emphasis towards security is much bigger in government and semi government sectors.

Tell us about your recent and major partnerships.

FVC recently onboarded SMART Technologies. FVC can utilize the growing opportunity in the education and enterprise market across the region by offering a complete classroom technology solution and SMART’s award-winning meeting room technologies.

We also signed up with Prysm, SonicWall, Zebra etc.

As Parag, what are your top 3 priorities for FVC in 2018 and 2019?

1. To build a world class team working strongly with the channel community and addressing the customer pain areas in the area of collaboration and cyber security.
2. To build a strong service team to back this up.
3. Build a company which becomes a consultant to both the partner community and the customer community for bringing world class IT products.