We will be shortlisting partners who are serious about networking

How does F5 look at India as a market? Which are the key verticals that
you are targeting?

India is an important focus market for us where business is customer driven.
We are seeing an increase in webification or use of the Internet. This
automatically boosts the demand for networking. Subsequently to support
expansion of networking capabilities, one requires datacenters and that is where
we see scope for our products and solutions in Application Delivery Networking.
Some of the key verticals we are present in include telecom, BFSI and IT. There
is no single major telecom provider who does not use our solutions. Telecom
infrastructure providers like Verizon and AT&T have helped us to establish our
presence within this vertical by offering solution packages which come bundled
with our solutions. Within BFSI, the largest banks including MNCs as well as
insurance majors are our customers. Likewise we have IT giants like TCS, Infosys,
IBM, Wipro who are again on our client list. One emerging vertical is
government, where we recently won some major deals one of which was with SAIL.

Could you elaborate on how you are tapping the government vertical?

We constantly keep in touch with government consultants like IDRBT, NIC and
IISc whose inputs help us sell to PSUs. Besides these consultants, we also work
closely with companies like TCS, Infosys and Wipro who are already well
established technology suppliers to the government sector.

What are your channel plans for this year?

We have around a dozen or so partners in India including big names like HP,
Datacraft and even smaller regional players like Cubix Micro Systems. We plan to
increase this number by looking at some players with a strong regional presence
so that we can cater to a wider customer base. Having said that, we will be very
selective in choosing the right partner because we believe not anybody can sell
an ADN solution to the kind of customers we deal with. We will be shortlisting
those partners who are serious about networking and those who have had prior
experience with systems from Dell, Cisco, IBM, HP and these would include tier-2
partners of these vendors.

JOhn Jacob

johnj@cybermedia.co.in