Sify to leverage channel for managed services

By Dhaval Valia

Sify plans to aggressively tap channels for its connectivity solutions and managed services offerings. The company has set a target of doubling its partner base and market coverage over the next six months, and plans to offer a bouquet of managed services through its partners.
Said Anil Pant, VP, Channel Sales, Sify, “At present we have 140 partners in 40 cities, and our aim is to increase this to 300 to cover more than 80 cities. Apart from our vanilla connectivity solutions, our focus this year is to boost our MPLS VPN services through partners and also increase their share of managed services sales.”
Sify estimates the overall opportunity in the connectivity solutions market to be worth over $4 billion and the MPLS VPN opportunity is 25 percent of that. Sify has 37 percent share of the existing MPLS VPN market in India.
Apart from its core business of connectivity solutions, Sify is looking to tap channels for a range of managed services. “Over the past 12 months, we have launched many managed services through partners including messaging and collaboration, perimeter security, and shared storage services,” said Pant.
Pant expects managed services to find significant acceptance in India because “the current economic slowdown will compel customers to move toward an opex model from a capex model. That’s where utility computing will score.”
Apart from messaging and collaboration managed services based on Microsoft Exchange and UC platform, Sify has also designed its own Mail2Mobile services. “It delivers e-mail to any mobile device anywhere, addressing the needs of employees on the move. It synchronizes with all messaging products like Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, AOL, Gmail and any ISP mail service without any installation on the mobile device,” said Pant.
Another managed service that Pant believes will do well is the shared storage that provides customers with the archival of any digital content in any format. “This is a utility storage service on a pay-as-you-go model backed by a tiered range of backup and recovery services with raid-level storage protection,” Pant informed.
Sify’s perimeter security services include anti-virus and anti-spam which are presently sold through select partners. The plan is to expand the partner base because the exponential rise in spam and phishing attacks will force even small businesses to use such services. “The worldwide volume of spam has increased by over 100 percent from previous years to 120 billion spam messages daily. Even small businesses with basic Internet connectivity are affected, and are looking at using managed services to protect themselves,” stated Pant.