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Erik Tetzlaff

On Record: Parallels is targeting Optmized Computing

Interviewed by Yogesh Gupta Wed, Apr 01, 2009

image Virtualization is surely the best bet for technically sound solution providers. image

Erik Tetzlaff Territory Director, MEA & India, Parallels

How is Parallels placed in India?

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TETZLAFF: There is a colossal untouched market as Indian enterprises are seeking alternate solutions like virtualization. We cannot match the marketing funds that our competitors are pushing into the market, but we’re confident of bagging a decent marketshare and making ourselves a value-added vendor.
We’ve received good customer responses, which has propelled us to expand our operations. Opening an office in India is our top priority to make a stronger ‘closer to customer’ presence. We’ll soon have our first ‘on the ground’ sales person dedicated for the India market.
We acquired a third-party company in Bangalore as first-level frontline support, whose services we will extend to our channels. Traditionally a strong proposition for telcos, our offerings are mostly horizontal, mainly across IT/ITES, oil & gas, and manufacturing segments.
Indian enterprises, owing to their ‘save the dime’ mentality and experimentation tendency are more open to newer technologies. At the moment, we are focusing mainly on VDI.

What is your value proposition for the CIOs?

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TETZLAFF: We are more of an optimized computing vendor than a mere virtualization vendor offering end-to-end solutions. Our highly scalable offerings provide high ROI and low TCO, which is not comparable with any of our competitors. We are an open company, which can provide customized solutions due to our flexible architecture according to our customer’s needs. Virtualization to a certain extent is good, but you need to deploy automation tools across virtual environments to manage and derive maximum benefits. We’re fortifying our projection as a company that leverages all these benefits across our various product offerings.

What are your key offerings for enterprises?

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TETZLAFF: We provide virtualization and automation software for consumers, data center businesses, and service providers across all major hardware, OS, and virtualization platforms. The popular offerings include desktop virtualization, OS level virtualization, and service provider automation. Our product lines reduce IT costs, improve capacity utilization, and increase service levels providing enterprises with high density portioning, complete isolation, dynamic resource management, and live migration. We announced ‘Parallels’ offering, which will be a real competitor to ‘VMware ESX’. The ability to automate exchange and billing processes that can streamline enterprise operations will be a big push in 2009.

How are you aligning your channel strategy to gain a larger marketshare?

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TETZLAFF: We signed our second distributor — Sion Technologies. At present, we have a dozen plus partners including national/regional systems integrators. Our strategy is not to over-distribute the market, thus ensuring healthy environment for channels. If there are dozens of partners targeting the same customers in the same city, then why should a sales team of a solution provider put hard efforts? We will grow our channel base very selectively. We’re looking for dedicated companies that have complementary offerings for our products. We recently forged a strategic deal with AGS who are into physical thin clients.

Will you sign up channels who are already selling your competitor’s offerings?

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TETZLAFF: It makes no difference to us. Today’s multi-vendor partner should be a consultant who can cater to the customers’ needs. Although we are not keen on working with partners who are into selling competitors’ products, that definitely is not a criterion to not sign them up. We’re looking for channels with a potential and promising customer base.

How can your solution providers create more business opportunities?

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TETZLAFF: The constantly evolving IT market will certainly transform into a service-oriented industry. Solution providers need to have a proactive approach than wait for someone to knock at their doors. It’s a huge up-sell market as virtualization goes in steps from mid-size projects, starting from server virtualization to VDI to automation. The maintenance contract every year is an excellent recurrent business. Since virtualization is a strategic decision for mission-critical environment, IT managers usually take time to implement it. Thus, it is vital for partners to convince faster ROI to customers apart from benefits like migration and green IT. For technically sound solution providers with decent customer base and a zeal to make money during the downturn, virtualization is surely the best bet.



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