Anand Choudha, CEO at Spectrami, speaks to Channel Post MEA about the impact of COVID-19 on Spectrami and how the company has emerged strongly from it.
Most of the businesses have been negatively impacted by COVID-19 this year, how would you evaluate your business these trying times?
I would say that our business has performed satisfactorily despite the impact of COVID-19. There was an initial impact as we were unable to reach out to our customers and it did take some time to arrive upon some solution to address this gap. With budgets being cut down by 30% – 40%, customers are more interested in technology that will enable them to work remotely as well as secure them.
As we focus primarily on cybersecurity, we are the least impacted and we are still on the growth path.
What kind of growth did you experience in the first half of the 2020 financial year?
We certainly did better than the last financial year and managed to register positive growth during the last 6 months, given the scenario where most of the businesses had experienced a negative growth.
What are the major factors behind your growth during this period?
As our financial year is from April to March, we had just closed the previous financial year when the crisis struck. We knew from the beginning that the current financial year is going to be very different. It resulted in better planning and execution compared to others whose financial year ends in December and hence did not anticipate the pandemic.
With our focus on cybersecurity and the strong demand for cybersecurity solutions in the market during this period helped us do better.
What is the reason behind adding several new vendors to your portfolio in the past few months?
We closely scrutinized our customers’ budgets and also understood their need for new technology that would enable them to adapt to the newly emerging work culture. We then corrected our portfolio offerings accordingly and made it more relevant to the current changing scenario. This is the reason we have inducted new vendors.
What are the major initiatives you launched for channel and how was the response from the partners?
One of the important things we did during the crisis is that we maintained management level contacts with the partners. We understood their challenges and reassured them that we were in it together. The Elite Channel Program helped us stay connected with our channel partners during the crisis. The response has been tremendous. We received a lot of appreciation from our partners and they helped us plan better for every approaching quarter.
What are your plans for the rest of the year and where do you see Spectrami in 2021?
Q3 and Q4 seem to be on target and we have a good opportunity pipeline and if this quarter closes as per our expectations, we should see double-digit growth this year. Having said so, in this current scenario there is absolutely no place for any predictions and only time can reveal what’s in store.
