“You can't paint the same brush across all industries”: Kirat Khara at Lenovo on opportunities for partners
Khara discusses how partners need to have strengths in specific verticals.
Looking at the current Australian market, there are several opportunities within specific industries and government. However, to take advantage of them partners shouldn’t try to be a jack of all trades and a master of none, according to the channel director at Lenovo.
Speaking to CRN Australia, Kirat Khara, director distributor and commercial channel at Lenovo said, “There are a lot of opportunities, but you can't paint the same brush across all industries.
“So as a partner, you need to figure out, where is the opportunity? Am I equipped to service that opportunity? If I'm not, who do I need to partner with?”
For example, Khara said a fairly large scale IT transformation project will need on average five to six partners.
“One partner can't do it. If you're looking at that opportunity, we need the right vendors in place, the right product,” he explained.
“You need to have the right potential partners, you can't do it all in place and go after and build a unique solution, which you can pilot with one industry and then scale it across other customers.”
Edge compute offering
Khara noted that there is a lot of value partners can bring to end customers, specifically around automation and using technology to deliver better and faster outcomes for the business.
‘What I mean by that, there's a lot of talk about edge compute, there always will be data sovereignty issues, data privacy issues,” he said.
“How do we structure a solution where using edge and keeping or have a hybrid strategy on cloud and cloud versus on prem to maintain the data integrity issue? I think that's something that there is a massive opportunity.”
Khara identified agriculture, healthcare and retail as industries with massive opportunities for partners using edge compute.
“There is some smart AI technology with Edge compute on the checkout, which can figure out it's beef or chicken,” he said.
“Agriculture in Australia, where there is a vast amount of land, less amount of people. So how do we have technology in place to support water utilisation, support your stock utilisation, where you're stocking.”
Khara also highlighted the opportunity for partners in government, calling it “massive’.
"Yes, there's a lot of IT investment going in there as well. So that's, again, a proposition that the partners can explore,” he added.
“The opportunities are massive, but I think the partners need to find their unique value proposition. Otherwise, you'd have the top 20 partners who are good across everything.
“But then how do, how the partners beyond those top 20 go and address those opportunities? I think that's where as a company, we're happy to support wherever we can.”
Message to Lenovo’s partners
When asked what message he wants to send to Lenovo’s partners, Khara said the most important thing for them as a company is feedback from partners.
“We do a lot of things from an inside out view thinking that we're doing the right thing for our customers. So for me my customers channel partners, but I think the feedback is really, really important so that we can improve.”
He also asked partners to look at Lenovo to solve customer problems, rather than just providing hardware.
"You are looking at an opportunity, and you've got that opportunity requires 10 things for you to do, and you can do seven, speak to us, we might be able to help you with the other three.”
Khara ended noting he wants to work with channel partners to achieve long term objectives.
“We are in there to work with the channel partners to achieve long term objectives. We're all sales,” he said.
“We've got a weekly number to hit, a monthly number to hit, a quarterly number, which is part of the business.
“But my view is that we need to build a collective go to market strategy, which is potentially 12 to 24 months with the channel partners, yeah, and then break it down into checkpoints every three months or so.”