Quest scouts for partners in India

Quest Software, a Nasdaq-listed over $650-million enterprise systems management company, plans to sign up 20 value-added resellers (VARs) and ‘managed services’ agreements with large outsourcers from India in the next six months, to embed its technologies into the latter’s global offerings.

“Channel is a very critical part of our growth strategy for India. In fact, India is one of the few markets for Quest where 100 per cent of the deals are done through partners. In addition to these traditional distributors, we are working to build a whole new VAR channel who would use our products as a part of their overall solutions stack,” Krishnan Thyagarajan, managing director of Quest Software India, told Business Standard.

Quest Software, which started operations in India about a year ago, already has alliances with Alltech, Vision Technologies and Nippon Data to distribute its products in the country. It has also added bigger partners like Sonata and Softcell Technologies.

“This has fuelled interest among some of the large systems integrators. We are in the process of signing up Wipro while discussions with Sun Microsystems are in an advanced stage,” Krishnan said.

To penetrate opportunities in the Indian market, the company will expand its own presence through new offices and build reach through a well trained partner network.

“We currently have an office each in Bangalore and Mumbai. We will expand into five more metros including Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Pune in the next 12 to 15 months, before spreading our horizons to other parts of the country in the second phase of expansion,” he added.

Globally, identity and access management is an emerging area and is currently pegged at $10 billion. In India, it is in a nascent stage.

Large companies are beginning to understand the risks but large scale implementations are a few quarters away. In the next 12 months, many globally-focused Indian companies are expected to have a clear strategy in this area, Krishnan said.

“Quest India is a very recent entrant and hence constitutes a very small portion of our overall revenues. However, it is a very strategic and promising market where we hope to see our revenues from India doubling in the next two years,” he added.