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Today’s fast changing technology environment comes with its own set of vulnerabilities and complex security challenges. With constant technology upgradation and increasing data touchpoints both within and outside the firewall, inadequate IT security poses far greater risks to business than previously imagined, says Prasenjit Roy, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, NTT Communications. In conversation with Poulami Chakraborty of Elets News Network (ENN).

Can you throw some light on the genetics of Netmagic as to which enterprise verticals it is serving? Are you counting to include or introduce to serve any other verticals to enhance the brand bandwidth of Netmagic?

Our business is a combination of multiple Line Of Business’s LOB’s)—cloud services, end-to-end managed hosting services and co-location services to all our clients including medium, large, very large and global enterprises. We were the first in India to launch services such as cloud computing, managed security, disaster recovery-as-a-service and software-defined storage. Netmagic also delivers remote infrastructure management (RIM) services through NTT Com’s Global Management One service to global customers across Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific region. From our nine carrier-neutral, state-of-the-art data centers, we serve over 2,000 enterprises globally. Our focus has always been to differentiate, and we do this by continuously investing in a 70-seater R&D set-up for developing unique offerings that are customised to enable our customers to scale up and bring in more new features before our competition could bring in.

Our customers are from multiple verticals – e-commerce followed by IT/ITeS, BFSI, and Media among others – they not only buy quality services from us, but they also buy quality customer experience.

Being a global ICT giant, providing datacenter and cloud solutions to top brands, how do you strategise and differentiate your marketing initiatives to compete the highly competitive and growing market in India?

Our entrepreneurial passion and start-up element remains in our DNA which has been the driving force to keep ourselves updated and relevant to the evolving market. Netmagic’s marketing strategy is undergoing constant evolution. Today’s marketing approach is weaving the key element of content into a business story with compelling differentiated proposition and disseminating the same through content syndication in different channels.The critical thing is to be at the right place at the right time with the right piece of message that will do the trick.

Online transaction or usage of information technology rose significantly in recent times, giving birth to online security issues in almost all enterprise sector. Are you bringing in any new product to counter this? What marketing strategies would you adopt to boost any such genre specific product or services?

With increasing online transactions, several enterprises may end up being used as channels for delivery of malware and conducting attacks, leading to regulatory, compliance and legal challenges. To avoid this, enterprises need to foster a security aware environment. They need to prioritise risks and deploy resources towards mitigating the highest ones.

Today’s fast changing technology environment comes with its own set of vulnerabilities and complex security challenges. With constant technology upgradation and increasing data touchpoints both within and outside the firewall, inadequate IT security poses far greater risks to business than previously imagined.

Our Managed Security Services (MSS) give the customer’s IT the ability to simplify security management, thereby minimising risks, protecting critical information and effectively reducing the cost and complexity of your security infrastructure. With an endto- end suite of fully managed services, MSS gives you a consolidated view of your security environment. Our VAPT service provides world-class network and Web Application audit services using solution combination of automated and manual testing. Audits help uncover technical and business logic flaws in the application workflows.

Also recent studies have found that nearly three-fourths of major organisations worldwide would have experienced Distributed Denial of service (DDoS) attacks. DDoS attacks are normally initiated through mechanisms such as UDP flood, DNS amplification, etc. This makes prevention quite difficult. However, if your systems face a volumetric DDoS attack, one can use our managed DDoS Attack Mitigation Service to keep your business available, and also ensure that DDoS attack traffic is filtered before it congests your network. Deployed through a SaaS-based delivery model, the MSS is a cost-effective and scalable offering that accelerates customer’s readiness to handle evolving security threat scenarios.

As a Chief Marketing Officer, what major initiatives are you taking to boost the face value of the Netmagic in comparison to its competitors?

Marketing function has to broadly cater to two corporate objectives besides discharging other corporate functions. One is the business enablement which has been elaborately covered in the previous question. The other is building the corporate brand through a slew of sustained initiatives that is not expensive but very effective and encompassing. The key thing is you have to constantly innovate in your marketing strategy, try our new approaches, new channels / medium and always be one up on your counter parts and other companies.

“Major thrust will be on enriching the overall Customer Experience – vide B2B Loyalty Programs, Customer Advisory Board, Customer Satisfaction Survey and Brand Advocacy.”

As a brand marketing expert, what key qualities do you consider essential in a good marketer?

There is no single quality, but a combination of multiple traits that combines in different proportions to make a successful marketer. The most successful marketers have a vision and plan with built-in flexibility to make necessary course corrections along the way.

While so much of marketing today is all about the specialist, it’s still important to be able to think like a generalist. It helps you to see the big picture. Also marketers need to be able to think about everything they do through the lens of the consumer. So designing the user-experience with keen insight into consumer motivation and behavioural dynamics is critical to success.

It’s extremely important to realise the importance of measuring each portion of the campaign to understand the true value of each tactic. The best marketers are committed to measurement. Even if a marketer is leading in their category, they are not satisfied with where they are, and encourage those around them to stay restless, curious, and healthily paranoid. Similar to having a commitment to continuous improvement, strong marketers are also lifetime students. The best marketers I’ve been around have had the unique ability to understand marketing at a tactical level, but could also understand how to leverage business data, consumer data, and marketing data to build strategy.

What made you switch to marketing stream from a glorious engineering background?

Let me share the trigger point that happened many years back. The setting was – I was in the second year of Engineering. The US MNC Caterpillar came to the Engineering campus and picked up only ten students to do a marketing survey cum research assignment pan India basis. I was fortunate to be among the top 10 for this plum assignment. That was my first brush with a marketing related activity. The experience was very rich, fascinating and may have etched a mark in my mind thereby helping me to choose my carrier path later. The interesting thing was my first job was with Tata’s in software division and I knew then that was not my cup of tea for sure. After a brief stint there, I enrolled into a MBA programme and formally moved into marketing stream.

What spends have you stored for the brands marketing purpose for the next fiscal year? Would you share with us your strategies in pipeline for the next fiscal year?

Major thrust will be on enriching the overall Customer Experience – vide B2B Loyalty Programs, Customer Advisory Board, Customer Satisfaction Survey and Brand Advocacy.

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