The channel has an increasingly important part to play in helping businesses flourish as enterprises continue to adopt transformative technologies. Avinash Advani, CEO of Spire Solutions discusses the relationship Spire has with its channel partners, outlines the responsibilities he has in his role as CEO and talks about his management philosophy.
What does your position as CEO at Spire Solutions entail?
As the CEO at Spire Solutions, I work closely with the company’s Founder and President to make major corporate decisions, manage the overall operations and resources of the company, while acting as the main point of communication between the board of directors and corporate operations. I was brought on board to revamp the corporate strategy and accelerate the company’s growth through optimisation, portfolio evolution and geographical expansion.
What was your previous role and what did it involve?
Prior to coming on board at Spire, I was at StarLink for seven years. I started there as the Director of Business Strategy in Dubai. Over the course of my tenure I was promoted to VP of Business Strategy, then to SVP of Business Development and Alliances, and eventually to CEO of North America, Europe and Emerging Markets, based outside of London. At StarLink I developed and executed the channel, customer and portfolio strategies, as well as spearheaded the geographical expansion initiatives.
Can you explain how Spire Solutions works with channel partners?
Spire Solutions is a security-centric value-added distributor that focuses on providing real tangible value to channel partners. Spire aligns with key partners across the region and works closely with them across the sales lifecycle, providing end-to-end value-added services including marketing, business development, pre-sales, professional services, support, training, renewals etc. All of these services are optional and are provided based on the channel partners’ requirements and on their individual go-to-market strategies and capabilities. Channel partners are managed both by Product Managers as well as in-country teams. The Product Managers ensure that for each vendor the channel partners select, they get the support they need, meet programme requirements and have a channel plan in place to enable them to achieve a focused, differentiated, profitable and growing business. The in-country teams align with the channel partners on their business development activities to ensure that the customers get the best possible support across the sales lifecycle in each opportunity.
What is your management philosophy?
To lead by example and provide guidance, direction and leadership through effective listening and giving feedback. I also strive to maintain productive employees by avoiding office politics and bureaucracy, keeping the morale high by encouraging low performers and rewarding the strong performers. I firmly believe in planning and I formulate each decision by looking at the impact on people, product and process. The environment I thrive in personally and therefore endeavour to preserve is a dynamic, flexible and agile culture, founded on the key values of integrity, loyalty and trust.
Do you work differently with channel partners in the Middle East compared to Africa?
Spire doesn’t actively work on the Africa region currently, albeit we do have some remote engagements and operate reactively to opportunities that we may receive. So, at this juncture, yes, the approach is different whereby there is no on-the-ground coverage, nor a proactive market development strategy. This will absolutely change over the next couple of years once we initiate our investments into Africa as a part of our expansion plans.
How do your partners deliver Spire Solutions services to end-users?
The majority of Spire’s technologies are delivered today by partners to end-users via the traditional channel resale methodology. The partners that choose to invest in services capabilities then also provide professional services and support, although many do count on Spire to provide these services on their behalf. A few partners provide managed services to end-users using Spire’s products.
How do you ensure channel partners flourish in a highly competitive market?
Spire Solutions is reputed for bringing best-of-breed and bleeding-edge cybersecurity technologies to the market that address customers’ business challenges today. These next-generation products enable channel partners to differentiate themselves and achieve higher levels of profitability. Spire also invests in business development to evangelise the technology, educate the market and create awareness, all of which lead to the creation of new pipeline opportunities that are passed to channel partners. Essentially, Spire enables channel partners to immediately have the capability to sell its products and services with minimal upfront investment by providing the full array of value-add services that can be leveraged until the channel partners develop the skills themselves. Training is also a focus area for Spire to ensure that channel partners have the skills they need to develop strong services practices.
How does Spire Solutions prepare partners to take their solutions out into the market?
We follow the ‘teach them to fish’ approach. In the early days of engaging with a partner on a new solution and once a business plan has been put into place, Spire supports the partner end-to-end with pipeline generation including joint-marketing and opportunity creation activities, while initiating sales and pre-sales training for its team. After the training is complete, we then ensure that the partner’s reps shadow Spire’s sales and technical resources respectively during the sales lifecycle. After a sale, Spire provides certified professional services, training and support to the partner for resale, until the partner has developed the required expertise itself.
What are the latest trends you see emerging across the channel?
As the journey to the cloud accelerates and matures, cloud is becoming more pervasive and prolific. Simultaneously, security vendors are evolving their offerings and licensing models accordingly to be subscription-based. These dynamics are causing a paradigm shift in the channel as many make the transition to MSPs, while other more traditional partners start offering forms of managed services such as MDR (Managed Detection and Response). Then there are newer partners that are ‘born in the cloud’ and provide security offerings that are designed for cloud delivery. Breach response is also an area that is moving away from the channel and residing with vendors that are leaders in the incident response space who are investing heavily in their services offerings and attaching them to their products. End-users seem to prefer engaging directly with a vendor after an incident anyway. Other trends that are being observed in the security channel are: the emergence of interest in IoT security (which includes ICS/SCADA security) and Machine Learning/AI, which every vendor seems to now be incorporating into their technology roadmap and messaging.
Which regions do you see offering the most opportunities for Spire Solutions?
In 2019, primarily the Middle East. As our expansion plans unravel over the next 12-36 months, newer regions will begin to offer more opportunities.
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