From aiding both Central and State Governments by providing IT solutions, to providing a gamut of its products that offer complete banking solutions, Array Networks is surging ahead full steam. Shibu Paul, regional sales director, India in conversation with Priya Yadav
How is Array Networks different from other companies offering web-based solutions?
Array Networks is providing complete solutions to all the banks where multiple applications are required. If there is a Finacle deployment, all our products are relevant – Application Load Balancing, SLL Offloader, Link Load Balancing, etc. We are one among the few companies offering solutions in all segments. Earlier, most of the banking applications were client based. Each local branch would keep its data. Today, what is happening is that the applications are centralised. Data has increased almost four to five times. So, we offer the required solutions.
What are the future ventures of Array Networks that excite you most?
We have very recently partnered with Juniper to provide solutions to banks and cater to their demands. Banking sector is one that needs our entire range of solutions for their smooth functioning. Our SSL Offloader is especially designed to cater to the huge traffic and is an essential strategy for assuring the performance of servers and business-critical applications.
Who are you catering to the most currently?
We are not state focused, we are vertical focused. Government definitely is our largest contributor; from business perspective, government holds a large chunk of our business. We are spread everywhere. Starting from UID, where we have been for four years, we are involved with all the treasuries – Punjab treasury, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala and Karnataka treasury. If you look at Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems (CCTNS) projects, we are almost involved in 80 per cent of the projects in the country. In the finance industry, we have CBDT, ITBA, efiling and almost 100 per cent of the Inspector General of Revenue Services. We are one of the companies that have presence in the East. There is a huge potential in that region.
What business opportunities are you looking at in the 100 Smart Cities project?
A Smart City offers a lot of services online – through applications, network, content. You need a data centre and all the services. But without Internet services, no services can be availed. The Government is of the opinion that most of the documents should be made available in digital format for which DigiLocker has been created. We see immense opportunities for offering web solutions in this sector.
What are the security concerns in this digital age?
Nothing is safe. All the security arrangements we see are more for psychological reasons. Recently, there was an incident in the US where a car was hacked into and the engine started. It’s all about access. Now we are doing business over phone, or access information on any device, anywhere, anytime, and that makes it more critical. Array Networks is offering applications which will only allow you to access a particular application from a particular machine.
What are your focused projects as of now?
There are a lot of banks that are migrating from traditional banking to core banking applications. These applications could be Finacle or something else. They are upgrading – Corporation Bank was the first one to do so. Lot of cooperative banks are also implementing core banking. The Government is very close to our projects. We will see the impact of a digital India happening over a couple of years from now.