Back on the channel track

Computer Associates (CA) India is banking on the channel. There was a time
when CA was one of the most well-known security vendors in the country. Over
time, people started associating it more with enterprise security and the
company did little to dissuade the channel of this notion. Now, it is trying to
re-entrench itself with the software resellers

India is the only country where the vendor has appointed a Chairman-Saurabh
Shrivastava, in addition to a Country Manager-Amit Chatterjee.

Broad channel lines

CA has two broad streams of products-one is the volume products business
headed by Vijayant Rai, Director Channels-India and SAARC and the other is the
value or the enterprise product line which is managed by Lata Singh, Director,
Partners and Alliances.

Both streams work through partners. The value partners are tier-1 systems
integrators (SI) in the likes of HCL Infosystems, Wipro, Datamatics, etc. The
volume partner are Ingram Micro India and Redington India. This aside, it has a
set of over 200 partners nationally to sell CA's products.

Service business

The entire services in terms of consultation, pre-sales support,
implementation etc for volume products is also done entirely through the channel
partners.

In the value business, the services amount is much higher. CA's Hyderabad R&D
center also doubles up as its global support center.

Channel tree

In the volume business, Rai has a team of managers and pre-sales teams in
the four regions of the country. The channel managers are responsible for their
individual sales teams. In the value business, there are certain major accounts
where CA works closely with partners like HCL or Wipro in closing the sales
deal. For big ticket projects, it also has a large team of pre-sales people who
are there to construct the solution and work with the partner team to handhold
them into the implementation part.