Shridhar Luthria – Director, Marketing & Business Development at ResellerClub
With a firm belief that mobile friendly web entities will be the order of the day, Shridhar Luthria – Director, Marketing & Business Development at ResellerClub feels that they way to differentiate oneself in the new world order is to offer customised solutions that deliver a personalized experience. The Indian growth story has just started, as far as web penetration is concerned, and we still have a long way to go, with opportunities every step of the way.
The Resellers Club is doing its bit by hosting regular events and creating a platform that will keep businesses connected to leverage the tremendous business opportunity that is the Indian enterprise.
1. The market for web services (right from web hosting, domains, website control panels, website builders, Internet security solutions, cloud solutions all the way to other allied businesses), is seeing unprecedented growth. What trends do you see over the next one year?
The past few years have been very encouraging for all of us in the Web Services business in India. The growth of e-commerce and mobile internet has helped increase awareness about security solutions, website development, reliable hosting, new gTLDs etc.
In the year 2015, I only expect the growing awareness to translate into more businesses going online and I see a clear trend emerging in favour of Mobile friendly websites and business emails, even for small businesses.
2. Do you see any challenges in the growth of this market in the near future?
I believe market consolidation is a big challenge here because we have these end-customer focused, big players in the market attracting customers with slashed prices and eye-catching promotions. Going by the market share projections, the percentage of end-customer focused registrars will increase by about 14%. Having said that, I strongly believe that a local player can still carve a niche for himself by offering something that the bigger players don’t – a total package backed by impeccable after-sales service and amazing support.
In addition, a personal connect with the end customer can take you a long way. To summarize my advice to all the local players out there would be, a) be a solution provider – concentrate on core services making the domain name cost immaterial, b) deliver a personalized experience – a simple phone call as opposed to an email can do the trick here, c) segregate efforts – based on individual requirements, industry verticals in order to provide a customized solution that caters to individual business requirements.
3. Despite tremendous growth for enterprises, web adoption in India is not quite as much in the consumer segment. To what do you attribute this shortfall?
I think we have come a very long way over the past few years and what you term as a shortfall, I would call it a unique opportunity!
With mobile phones and other portable devices now becoming indispensable and mobile internet omnipresent, more and more people now have access to technology. Businesses in the country are waking up to this reality and there has been considerable growth in the past year, but definitely, this is just the beginning so we foresee a major boom very soon.
4. The fact that “India will soon overtake the US as the second largest internet user base with more than 302 million subscribers by Dec 2014″ is merely due to the numbers of population involved. What about the absolute reality?
Well, it is true that the high user base is a function of the population – but that does not make the statistic any less relevant. In fact, it is a sign of the size of the market – for a fair comparison, we should look at China which passed this stage of growth relatively more recently and that gives us a clear picture of what is to come – tremendous growth and immense potential! The catalysts for China and even the US markets were the availability of Internet friendly devices and easy access to Internet – both of which are now happening in India too. So I am convinced that the growth story will follow and that is the reality we are working to enable.
5. Is ResellerClub doing anything to increase adoption?
Reseller Club has always taken pride in playing host to several knowledge-sharing initiatives such as ResellerClub Partner Meets held across India and of course our flagship event that was concluded in December 2014 in Mumbai, via: ResellerClub presents HostingCon – which witnessed over 2300 industry influencers across the world.
We also have taken the lead role in educating our reseller base/ partners on new gTLDs through our ResellerClub New gTLD Summit series, helping Indians tap this huge opportunity. We believe that these events serve as an opportunity to a large number of people within the industry, as well as people who are starting off, to interact with each other and do more with their business.
Apart from that, we regularly conduct webinars to keep our clients up-to-speed with the latest happenings in the industry. As a reseller focussed platform, our resellers are our best ambassadors to drive adoption rates and we constantly provide them with collateral and marketing assistance in this regard.
6. Despite such high technology standards, the retail online saw a tough situation this festive season in the country. Why do you think it happened? What are the vendors doing to remedy the situation?
The incidents witnessed during the festive season were unfortunate and can be attributed more to inaccurate demand forecasting and inadequate preparation rather than technology standards itself. In fact, even the issues that IRCTC used to face at Tatkal opening hours were along similar lines – a trade-off between the costs of maintaining a high load capacity against the frequency of such high loads. These issues can be tackled at hardware as well as at a load balancing network level and vendors are actively working to facilitate this.
The emergence of cloud based applications, DDOS protection and network rebalancing solutions will help prevent such incidents – but all these are contingent upon the businesses making a reasonably accurate estimation of their peak loads.
7. The same applies to Cloud, while it is absolutely imperative to use the cloud for its various advantages, what’s the reality and how is this group looking at promoting cloud usage?
Cloud computing is one of the most exciting spaces in the web infrastructure space now and in fact, most of us are using it even without realizing it: take a Google Drive or a Dropbox file share for instance. The reality is that cloud is already around us and to address small and medium businesses in particular, web applications and websites that can use the unique abilities of the cloud needs to improve. Currently this is being led by start-ups and new applications, but we see this expanding to include every online business that has a need. We at ResellerClub are gearing up to introduce our cloud offering in 2015 and we are focussed on making this a mass market offering rather than a fancy term. Our dedicated Cloud and Infrastructure block at the recently concluded ResellerClub presents HostingCon India in Mumbai is testimony to the faith we have in this segment and right now all I can say is stay tuned for updates very soon!
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