Meet the Chiefs: Lalit Shinde, Seceon
![Meet the Chiefs: Lalit Shinde, Seceon Meet the Chiefs: Lalit Shinde, Seceon](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt10e444bce2d36aa8/blt7b54e532ee1f103b/652464e72014a21de807df49/Handshake_Abstract_Thinkstock_6_1.jpg?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
Lalit currently leads strategic sales partnerships and business development for Seceon. He is an industry leader with over 24 years of expertise in Strategy, PLM and Business Development.
Before joining Seceon, Lalit was in leadership position with Juniper Networks in Strategy Planning, Product Management and Partner Development roles. His technology expertise includes Network Security, Network Automation, Control and Data plane APIs, Network Orchestration and Controllers, SDN/NFV, Broadband and Business Edge Services, Routing, Switching and Security Products and Technologies. At Juniper, Lalit drove BNG router security solutions working partnerships major worldwide service providers winning several multi-million dollar deals.
Roughly how many channel partners do you currently have?
At the moment, we have just under 15 partners. As a startup, our ability to host a large number of partners is limited by both time and resources. Therefore, we are very selective in our partner selection and focus our efforts on developing relationships with partners who have a true understanding and commitment to Seceon’s value proposition and want to work with us to reach both key vertical, regional, national and international market segments. We maintain partners in the U.S. and globally, including EMEA and APAC.
How old is your channel partner program?
Our Seceon OTM Platform became commercially available in early 2016 and our formal partner program launched in the same time frame. It is approximately six months old.
What percentage of your revenue is driven through the channel?
We expect to generate 75 percent of our revenue from the channel in 2016. As a startup, the relationships we develop with our channel partners are critical to our overall success. We highly value the relationships and support we retain with our partners.
Whether you are a company with a channel strategy that addresses hundreds of channel partners or a startup like us, every channel chief is challenged to better predict and lock down revenue.
As Seceon’s channel chief I see it as my role to keep our startup team focused on revenue creation. The very future of our company is all the motivation we need, but requires singular focus on execution in the short term. My role is to assess the ongoing opportunities and prioritize them against our limited time and resources. With regular assessment we can keep lock-step with our partners, engaged in a dialogue that is clear, concise and factual, enabling us to provide them with the tools they need to be successful and the solutions necessary to protect our mutual customers from threats to their data. Longer term, the channel will fuel revenue creation by contributing to the product development cycle. By directing feedback from our partners and customers into our product development cycle, we ensure a solution that continually evolves to address customer requirements for threat detection, elimination, mitigation and prevention.
Being a startup we are very nimble, despite limited resources. However, we have to budget our time most carefully in order to yield optimal results. In this vein, we are most challenged by partners whose processes and approvals require longer cycles to reach customer engagement. Over time I have learned that appropriate expectation setting at the onset of any relationship by both partner and solution provider helps to avoid any miscommunication and gets the relationship off to a great start, ensuring that both parties are equally vested in the goals we are trying to accomplish.
We are constantly taking feedback from our partners and using it to improve our processes, sharpen our communications, simplify onboarding and generally better the entire partner experience from introduction to demo, trial, training and implementation. We are always working against the clock, but, if we continue to invest our energy wisely, we can significantly speed up the entire cycle so we can more quickly address the real issues at hand—protecting customer data.
As a startup, anytime a new partner approaches us and opens our eyes to a new vertical market, country or region with their specific expertise, is cause for inspiration. By illuminating customer pain points, concerns and requirements beyond just security for their clients in financial and pharmaceutical to healthcare and hospitality industries, our partners reveal to us the full extent of the challenges these companies face. We are always inspired to present our partners with solutions for addressing their clients’ security and operations concerns and are recognized for our responsiveness. Our partners, in turn are inspired by our rapid onboarding, training and installation, our commitment to customer satisfaction and want to invest in our success, quite literally, sometimes!
Stay focused on the target customer. The best opportunity for our mutual success is to remain intent on helping the target customer to see threats clearly and quickly, including obstacles to network performance, and to stop threats from inflicting extensive damage through surgical containment and elimination, securing critical assets. Because our solution works well in any size enterprise we can cast the net broadly, yet the goal must be not to lose sight of improving the speed of threat detection, simplifying the process of threat elimination and increasing efficiency of security operations for our clients.
Our training program is what has enabled our partners to quickly convert qualified leads, nearly 100 percent of the time, into proof of concept, trial and even deployment installations without missing a beat. Our team at Seceon has worked tirelessly to develop a partner training program that makes it easy to learn how to install, integrate, deploy and troubleshoot the OTM Platform. The product’s intuitive interface and step by step installation process allows our partners to get up to speed quickly and ensure rapid customer implementation, sometimes in less than an hour. Our OTM Platform starts generating prioritized alerts, often within the first few hours of deployment. The combination of great training, documentation and ease of use, enable our partners to deliver the OTM Platform to customers quickly, efficiently and effectively.
Communication is critical. Both partner and solution provider must be committed to communicating the realities of the relationship—good news, bad news or otherwise. By establishing expectations for the relationship with a clear understanding of each party’s mission and product, customer and revenue goals and a willingness to share insights, both sides significantly increase their opportunities for success.
Communication is critical. Both partner and solution provider must be committed to communicating the realities of the relationship—good news, bad news or otherwise. By establishing expectations for the relationship with a clear understanding of each party’s mission and product, customer and revenue goals and a willingness to share insights, both sides significantly increase their opportunities for success.
What is Meet the Chiefs?
Meet the Chiefs shines the spotlight on the channel’s head honchos and offers an opportunity to learn a little bit about the person's real thoughts on the state of the channel. Click on each photo to learn more about the channel chief you’re viewing.
Want to be included in an upcoming Meet the Chiefs? Send an email to The VAR Guy Editor-in-Chief Kris Blackmon at [email protected] for more information.
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