Challenges And Perspectives For The Distributors
Digital conferences are becoming very popular nowadays in enterprises. Rahul Sharma, MD, India & SAARC, LogMeIn discusses these solutions along with some other issues for the distributors in the IT sector in this interaction
ABOUT THE RECENT SOLUTIONS AND SERVICES OF THE COMPANY AN OVERVIEW
At LogMeIn, we primarily focus on three areas: communications and collaboration services, identity and access management services, and customer engagement and support services. For our Indian market, we have introduced four of our products - GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, Rescue and Bold360.
Bold360 is LogMeIn’s flagship digital engagement platform which is one of our key growth drivers and one of our fastest-growing product lines. We recently expanded Bold360 into a full AI-powered digital engagement suite in order to provide businesses with even better integration across their customer-facing lines, thus providing meaningful experiences whenever and wherever needed. With three core offerings—Service, Advise and Acquire—we extend the impact of AI across the end-to-end customer and employee experience, whether it is to help businesses enhance their operational efficiency and offer faster resolutions or to enable personalized engagements through self-service. It can also enable front-line employees with tools to manage and analyse customer information in real-time for an improved in-store experience and can also facilitate more seamless purchase process and outbound promotions through conversational chatbots. Essentially, Bold360 leverages AI to empower businesses to deliver seamless CX experience from the future, today. It is part of LogMein’s commitment to innovate in the AI space and create game-changing technologies that give the businesses, and their clients, an edge in the market.
GEOGRAPHICAL SPREAD OF THE DISTRIBUTORS AND CHANNEL PARTNERS IN INDIA DOES LOGMEIN HAVE PLANS TO EXPAND THE CHANNELS DISTRIBUTION NETWORK?
We work with two distributors in India - Ingram Micro, one of the largest technology distributors in the world with a very robust channel partner ecosystem, having been in the country for decades. LogMeIn is a preferred SaaS partner for them, and they give us a good amount of reach in India. Our second distributor-TechKnowLogic Consultants (Member of Netpoleon Group of Companies), a very niche distributor who have played inherently in the security domain but have recently expanded their portfolio to include remote support, identity etc. Like Ingram, they too have been around for over 2 decades and have a health ecosystem of channel partners across the country.We are always looking to expand our channels and partnerships network in India, since this is a key market for us.
WHAT ARE THE CHALLENGES DISTRIBUTORS ARE FACING AND WHAT IS THE COMPANY DOING TO RESOLVE THESE CHALLENGES? ANY EXAMPLES?
Traditionally, SaaS products have been direct to customers and with the increased penetration of these products in all types of big and small businesses there is an emerging need to have the channels partners & distributors to come in and play a part of the ecosystem. They bring in the expertise of reach, deployments, customer relationships at a very intimate level and our suite of products help them increase these relationships with their partners and customer. As we are getting started on the partnership ecosystem journey, we’ve made some significant investments in India to build on this motion and scale it along with them. Distributors are embracing the SaaS products at a fast clip and add our products to their portfolio and take it to market.
WITH EMERGING TECHNOLOGY, HOW SHOULD DISTRIBUTORS ADAPT TO THIS NEW TECH SCENARIO?
Emerging technologies like the ones we offer bring the power of Artificial Intelligence along with theease and speed of a SaaS product directly in the hands of the users. This is an asset for businesses, not just to save time and costs but also to improve productivity, simplify complexity, and drive better business efficiency and results.
Partners and distributors will benefit by taking these new-age solutions to their customers. Now is the time for channel partners to project and assert themselves as thought leaders, and become strategic advisors to their customers. Rather than only being called upon when a problem arises, the partner channel now has the chance to establish themselves as true partners to their customers’ success.It is still an unchartered territory and businesses will seek the channel’s help in guiding them towards success in the cloud. Partners that can create an identity as a capable cloud navigator with the ability to boost productivity, collaboration, and security will become market leaders. Since the economics of this business is different, it is also the greatest opportunity to build a healthy recurring revenue stream.