“In an exclusive interview with ITVoice Mr. Sunil Raj Malik, Country Manager, India EnGenius Networks, reveals his strategies for business in India…„
“Sunil Raj Malik, Country Manager, India EnGenius Networks, has been instrumental in the strong growth and the fresh build-up of the business. EnGenius is a Taiwan based conglomerate and pioneer of Long Range high power wireless solution provider in the telecommunication industry. The company markets and manufactures wide range of indoor and outdoor “Smart Wi-Fi” products for mobile operators, broadband service providers and corporate enterprises.
Mr Malik has a robust experience of over 21 years in the industry and he has been associated with various top notch and multinational organisations before he stepped in to this challenging role at EnGenius. In a candid interview, he appears to be more than revealing:”
ITVoice Media :- It’s been quite a considerable time for EnGenius in India. How do you go about it? Tell us more about EnGenius.
Mr.Sunil Raj Malik – EnGenius is an industry expert in wireless communications and radio frequency (RF) technology. The unmatched affordability literally differentiates EnGenius from all others. Most of the competing solutions require costly hardware, per AP licensing, cloud management subscriptions and technical support fees, thereby substantially hiking the cost. There is no such requirement with the Neutron Series of EnGenius. Since it’s also easy to deploy, manage and operate, one will save valuable time and resources all translating to manageable, predictable costs – and a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) per deployment. Simplified Deployment & Provisioning our automated AP provisioning and intuitive configuration tools help streamline mass AP deployments. And since the Neutron Series is easy to deploy, manage and operate, without an extensive learning curve, one will spend less on network management travel costs and system training.
ITVoice Media :- You came from one of the industry’s leader in Wi-Fi. How do you go about your role at EnGenius when you joined the board recently?
Mr.Malik – My role was equally interesting and challenging, we deployed a three- pronged deliverable agenda. Increasing the EnGenius footprint in India was ‘the’ goal for me. And what is helping us towards the object is the strong product line. We have aimed to increases revenue by more than 100 per cent year-on-year basis. We added a good number of channel partners, including the top players like Wipro, M2M, Accel Frontline and a huge fleet of tier-2 partners. Our last 12 months have actually been about partner education and customer touch points.
ITVoice Media :- If you look at the wireless LAN market, though you are very old player but on the fifth placed, you are far behind the top player like Cisco, Ruckus & Aruba in terms of market share. Why such a huge gap?
Mr.Malik :- There are companies who merely buy a couple of access points (APs) and are not really bothered about the management part. Our competitors play in that segment, but EnGenius does not. Then, there is SMB and mid-market that typically buys 30 to 50 APS contingent to requirement. This market is very much price/performance metrics driven. Chief criterion is pricing. That’s not our sweet spot, but competition again has an offering for this segment. The enterprise-class customers, on the other hand, are looking at exhaustive and feature-rich wireless solutions. These customers are very demanding on performance and application awareness. This is the market segment where EnGenius emerges as a champion; most relevant. And in that segment, if you make a technology versus technology comparison, we are best placed. Our focus is to move away from the centralized hardware-centric access controllers and APs to a Distributed Network Management Solution architecture.
ITVoice Media :- Last year we have seen announcement of intelligent WLAN support tools some of which kind of self-heal the minor network issues. Does EnGenius has similar products already in the line-up or any future plans about the same?
Mr.Malik – Yes in our SME offerings, we do offer such solutions through our distribution network technology architecture controllers and we have a plethora of new products in our road map.
ITVoice Media :- How exactly do you differentiate yourself from your competition in term of channel?
Mr.Malik – We are carefully building our network. We are continuously investing in training programs every quarter for all our channel partners develop the required skills. We help our channel community to be successful, as our success is completely built on the success of our partners. Channel partners constitute our strong family.
Wireless LAN took a big fillip when 802.11ac was introduced. Now BYOD makes wireless more relevant for organizations. This is the time when customers are looking at more experienced and reynold vendors. Our focus in India is strictly on building partner community. Wireless requires more handholding and therefore you need knowledgeable and committed business partners. And that is the reason why we spent a lot of time enabling partners. If you go out in the market and compare the customer experience on both the channels (our competition and EnGenius), you will get a far better satisfaction rating on the EnGenius channel.
ITVoice Media :- What is your Vision 2017 in India?
Mr.Malik: – We will continue to focus on the same areas and work with our partners to enhance their solution skills. Our volume business will be driven mainly through our VADs, while our solutions partners will work directly with the EnGenius team to drive our high-touch business. Education sector still happens to be the largest market for us, besides enterprise, healthcare and government are other dominant markets.
“EnGenius recently announced the availability of four new enterprise-class 11ac Wave 2 Access Points. It’s ideal for deployment in high-density environments such as campuses, sports arenas, shopping malls, and resorts. Neutron 11ac Wave 2 APs combine MU-MIMO technology provides high user capacities and ultra-fast speeds reaching 2.5 Gbps for reliable and fast connection to wireless client devices.”
