Gen-Next Array of Solutions
Please share with us about the solutions that Array Technologies roll out for Digital Transformation and Smart Cities in India?
Technology is the foundation of Smart Cities and Array Networks is committed towards Smart Cities transformation in India. Supporting the ‘100 Smart Cities Mission’ initiative by the Union Government of India, Array Networks is currently involved in various stages of Smart City implementation for multiple cities.
Today’s modern world runs on applications and the users demand secure, uninterrupted and immediate access to applications they need. In order to succeed in today’s hyper-connected digital world, applications need to support a robust set of application services.
Array has assisted in devising futuristic data centers for smart cities by introducing unique concepts such as Hyper-Convergence in networking into the Data Centers. Array’s hyper-converged solution stack include Application Delivery Controllers (ADC), Web application firewalls (WAF), DDoS, Web vulnerability scanners, SSLi & MARS Visibility & analytics tool. The solutions rolled out by Array for Digital Transformation and Smart Cities Mission include:
Application performance & acceleration solutions (ADC): Whether interconnecting application delivery functions to ensure availability, security, and performance for mission-critical applications, or consolidating load balancing gear to reduce space, power and cooling costs, Array’s Network Functions Platform delivers an ideal combination of performance, agility, and best-of-breed technology
High availability solutions (GSLB): GSLB infrastructure provides automatic fault detection and transparent failover of each component, and contains no single points of failure. Also uses application-level health checks to monitor the end-to-end availability of each Service IP in the system
Security solutions (SSLi, WAF, DDoS ): Our ADC+WAF solutions protects web applications from cyber-attacks at the application level while enhancing high performance, fault tolerance, and scalability in application delivery. Array’s DDoS protection feature prevents attacks at the application, session, and network layers, and uses machine learning for anomaly detection and automatic configuration of threshold values. Array’s SSL intercept (SSLi) provides 3rd-party security devices visibility into encrypted traffic for improved security and performance
Array Networks AVX solves the challenges of high availability, scalability, and performance for enterprises, cloud service providers, telecommunications and government entities, thus assuring excellent user experience.
What are the other solutions that Array Technologies roll out for various sectors of operations?
The key contributors for Array’s growth apart from the Government and Enterprise sector have been BFSI, Education, Media and Transportation verticals. The solutions offered by Array in these verticals include:
Advanced remote access solutions for the manufacturing & BFSI industry: In today’s business environment, different business units, project groups, partners, contractors and guests all require different levels of remote access and often require a user experience tailored to their unique requirements and devices. Array secure remote access solutions provide greater levels of security, a greater range of access methods, a broader range of device support and the ability to provide differentiated, identity-based access tailored to the needs of multiple communities of interest
WAN Optimization: Array’s WAN optimization controllers improve application response times by up to 50x and reduce bandwidth utilization by up to 95%. It helps to prevent performance degradation and offers traffic shaping to assign guaranteed bandwidth for specific hosts, networks, ports or applications
What strategies of operations have been adopted to cater to the highly competitive market in India?
Last year Array had invested over USD 2 million in setting up Array Center for Technology and Innovation (ACTI) located in Bangalore. ACTI is equipped to support requirements coming in from across the globe. Our team strives to provide cooperation and support needed to create more focused products for our customers. Our focus is to invest in people and create a maximum localized support system, including RMA & TAC, based out of India.
ACTI has aided in providing timely feedback and first-hand insights needed for our engineering team to maintain high standards and drive profitable growth momentum. The lab features state-of-the-art technology and has a fully equipped customer training center capable of providing enhanced support to local and global customers. Channel partners have been major beneficiaries of ACTI as it allows them to test networking & security solutions on Array’s HCI platform AVX.
What Challenges do you face while operating in the Indian market? How are you mitigating these challenges?
We find it difficult to cope with extending timelines and lack of visibility even after project wins. In enabling project visibility by tracking progress in real-time, we can ensure that potential fires are addressed in real-time as well.
Another problem is the frequent changes in customer budgets. Projects at times have budgets which are moving targets mostly going downwards. Hence costing goes haywire. One way to address this is to opt for fixed-bid projects, which allows much less room for error when it comes to project cost and timeline estimates.
What plans of expansion of business solutions are you having in the Indian market and abroad?
We will be launching a few new products for the Indian market in 2020 along with the enhancement of our engineering and R&D to support field teams. Currently, we are working on expanding our business in Africa & South East Asia.
Please apprise us of your plans in the pipeline for business solutions in Smart Cities and Digital Transformation domains.
Array technologies are in a unique position in terms of data delivery and management of customer’s infrastructures and hold the ability to provide insights into application data that can be used to boost security as well as improve efficiency.
We intend to unveil our new flagship product, Zero Trust, which will equip enterprises with advanced security to facilitate every employee to work from anywhere and any network without the use of a VPN. Our aim is to work closely with IoT application vendors and integrate our solutions to suit their requirement and also to enhance our SSL Intercept solution to take care of the newer challenges and requirements.
