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“We have developed capabilities to deliver managed services in heterogeneous computing environments”
In an exclusive video interview with Sandhya Michu, Senior Correspondent, CRN India, Vishal Bindra, CEO of ACPL Systems, shared ACPL’s success story over the past three decades in information security, growing in a pandemic and building a profitable business. Here are the main takeaways from the interview:
Building the trust of people and customers
Although it has been 32 years of ACPL, it feels like yesterday. One of the things I keep saying is that CPRA is the one place that keeps me excited on a daily basis and I can’t wait to come here. Today, ACPL is surrounded by committed people and customers who have become friends and now family. The whole ecosystem has become very user-friendly.
The customers we acquired in 1999 are still with us. We have seen generations of customers change but they have stayed with us. Today, we have about 60-70% of customers from IT/IT services, manufacturing and e-commerce. Additionally, the launch of its two cybersecurity and security product start-ups further strengthens the portfolio.
Growth of the pandemic
When the pandemic hit us, CPRA was quick to transition from full on-site work to full remote work while providing flexibility to our 200 employees. Even, it has helped many of our clients who wanted to quickly switch to working from home. This was when CPRA was delivering some of the big projects with complete work from home.
“We’ve implemented 200,000 to 300,000 endpoints with our customers and we’ve taken huge advantage of those early days. As a result, we saw healthy growth with no layoffs or pay cuts as the industry experienced the big resignation period and lack of skilled professionals,” Bindra explained.
The dominance of cloud and SaaS changes the role of the security provider
As cloud and SaaS-based models dominate the market, partners like ACPL need to transform. Customers may not really ask us to buy the solutions anymore. Customers want ACPL to integrate the existing infrastructure into a particular environment and be able to service heterogeneous environments with their existing professionals and tools available. We have helped several of our clients to minimize their investment and we have outsourced a large part of these operational services.
Need to integrate security at the product development stage
ACPL believes that cases of cybersecurity attacks and vulnerabilities continue to grow in the enterprise as well as in SMBs. “It will be many, many years before we can see security built into product development. Security should be seen as the frontline thought process of the developer’s mind. Otherwise, we will continue to see big data breaches and big ransomware attacks,” he said.
Run a profitable business
One of the most important things we need to understand is that we are entrepreneurs and our primary motivation for doing business is to ensure that we are doing a “profitable” business so that entrepreneurs make more investments and that customers feel happy and they also start paying more for services. Our OEMs have to pay more because they know customers are going to work with you.
He cautioned, “Don’t panic and take deals with lower margins and higher service value and spend too much time trying to manage that. We are not unlimited funded businesses that can keep spending money on customer acquisition and then expect you to know that we will one day become profitable like Amazon.
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