CA bets big on SMBs

CA Technologies, a Nasdaq-listed, IT management software and solutions company, is looking at further expanding its VAD (value-added distributors) programme to take its service assurance (SA) solutions much closer to the small and medium businesses (SMBs) in India.

“Last quarter, we had launched our SA channel business by recruiting two VADs to take our solutions to SMBs through their 50 resellers. We are planning to add 20 more resellers by the end if this fiscal,” said Abhilash Purushottaman, solution strategist (India and Saarc – service assurance business unit) for CA.

SA is a procedure or set of procedures intended to optimise performance and provide management guidance in communications networks, media services and end-user applications. SA can involve quality assurance, quality control and service level management.

Speaking to Business Standard on the sidelines of CA’s ‘only-for-the-industry’ seminar on application performance management (APM) held here on Friday, Abhilash said a lot of SMBs would be going to public clouds from next year. “SMBs have to take that decision (moving to the cloud) at some point. We want to ensure that we are part of that decision,” he said.

SA solutions, including NetQoS and Torokina (now known as CA Mediation Manager), currently contribute close to 50 per cent to the $4.4-billion company's India revenues. While the government vertical accounts for 60 per cent of these revenues, 25 per cent flows in from the banking, financial services and insurance, 10 per cent from IT/ITeS and the remaining from SMBs.

CA thinks that this (break-up) is going to change, basically because of the cloud. The industry has to adopt cloud to progress. And, they will lag behind if they don’t, Purushottaman said, adding the company was currently testing the waters and may improve its SA strategies for the Indian SMB market next year, depending on the performance this year.