The best is always yet to come, says Aaron Bhashkar

Soft Solutions’ brands manager talks about the growth in IT security and why he loves the IT industry

By Vera Alves, Auckland | Thursday, 27 October 2011
Aaron Bhashkar started working at Soft Solutions back in 1997, when the company’s headquarters and only office branch was Chris Fitzgerald’s living room.

Bhashkar was the company’s first full-time employee, having started as a sales and technical specialist. Over the years, he has risen within the company and is currently the distributors’ brands manager, working with a wide portfolio of vendors and solutions.

He says the past couple of years have been “up and down like a yo-yo”, much due to the global financial crisis. The company itself was not directly affected and did not lose any staff members but Bhashkar says there has definitely been a change in how people do business.

“It has been tough but everything is picking up,” he says.

Soft solutions works with over 900 active resellers in New Zealand. Bhashkar says the distributor deals “with pretty much anyone”.

“We are always getting new people on board,” he says. “Resellers see us as trusted advisors. We are finding more and more people interested in our products.”

In his position as brands manager, Bhashkar has a privileged view of the state of the industry. He says the IT security industry is still growing, as vendors “are always finding new ways to innovate”. Bhashkar also points out that hosted security “is probably the biggest game changer in the next few months. We are moving into that with some of our vendors.”

“The dynamics of the IT security industry are going to change... mainly because of the growth in hosted security,” he says. Managed service providers and IT helpdesks are two other areas of growth, at least for Soft Solutions’ vendors. “Through ManageEngine, IT helpdesks are seeing huge, huge growth. It is probably the biggest [area of] growth in our company.”

Bhashkar says Soft Solutions is also looking into consumerisation of IT and while “not all is set in stone yet”, the company should be making an announcement in the next few months.

For Bhashkar, his job is all about educating the resellers about the solutions on offer, so that they are better equipped to educate their customers in turn. “Not needing localised infrastructure, for example, is good for SMBs,” he says. However, he still sees some small businesses struggling with the idea of not having everything on their premises. “It’s an education process.”

Also as part of that education process, Bhashkar is involved in the organisation of a number of events. “I love face-to-face interaction with resellers. At the end of the day, you’re doing business with people,” he says. The people, along with the technology itself, are what has kept him in this business for so long. “The changes are amazing and the best is always yet to come,” he says.

Of all the people he has met in his career, which started in 1995 with a sales job at Total Peripherals Group, Bhashkar says he draws the most inspiration from Soft Solutions’ managing director Chris Fitzgerald. “Chris has the ability to see the strengths in the people that work for him, and the reason why three of us have been with the company for over 14 years,” he says.