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ChannelWorld.in, 25 May, 2008
Tickets to Success
Service delivery is seen as the answer to brand creation. It is the bulwark of the new-generation SIs. Many channel partners are also now keen to venture into the international market, mainly owing to increased competition in the Indian market. As things stand now, most IT vendors are looking to expand their addressable market and target SMBs. However, SMBs are widely spread in terms of geographical coverage. Concurring with this is Partha Sarathi Sengupta, Manager - Strategic Market Analysis at research firm AMI Partners, who says, "Hardware reselling has become a commodity business with heavy discounting. This is curbing reseller margins. To stay profitable, channel partners have ventured into services and solutions as a business model."
Neeraj Mediratta, Gurgaon-based storage SI, agreed adding, "Vendor branding is not so important." Ace Data, which has been in storage since the year 2001, was mostly working with HP and was known as an HP partner in the market. The company is now firmly entrenched in the domain and is servicing a plethora of storage solutions to its customers through a tight multi-brand portfolio. This was due to the fact that Ace opened its doors to many storage vendors around 2004. Mediratta says, "We decided not to restrict ourselves and depend on a couple of vendor names to take us through."
The company, in a move to give the best-of-breed technologies and services, is looking at being vendor neutral. Mediratta and his brother Anuj Mediratta are in the process of aligning with the global vendor-neutral industry body SNIA as franchisees for their training programs. This, Mediratta strongly believes, will bring in much needed storage professional expertise into the industry and standardize platforms. "The Indian market does not yet pay big for consultancy services, but it will surely happen in the near future." states the optimist entrepreneur.
Anand Rao, CEO of Par Data Systems, suggests that there are quite a few ways in which an SI can evolve his identity independent of the vendor’s identity. He says, "Any project has a stage of conceptualization. Typically, this is a consultancy area and the partners do involve in visualizing the end solution through designs, documentation of various BOQs & BOMs of products that go in to it, independent of the brands." He further stated that there were system integrators and solution providers who were into consultancy business too for IT Infrastructure solutions and services. So, the onus was on the partner to be proactive in looking at verticals not on a stand-alone basis such as BFSI, but more from a datacenter or ITES perspective and developing the value proposition.
Jotshi of Juniper networks says, "Partners have to recognize their strengths. Like in the case of the Tier I players, TCS is strong in government accounts while Datacraft is strong in the financial services; these SIs know the value proposition that they have to take to the customers."
Suryanarayanan B, Director-Sales and Marketing, Intel, South Asia, further said that the channel partners have to be abreast of the key developments in the industry to know how best they can utilize the latest technology to the best extent possible. He said, "Partners also need to understand the importance of collaboration among them in order to make a difference."
Annadurai Elango, Director-Global Alliances, TCS, however gave a slightly differing view, "Solution providers confuse services with solutions." In his opinion, the better long-term strategy is based on the vision or the roadmap that a partner would have; This means the SIs should develop their own customized solution model, retain its Intellectual Property (IP) and go to customers with the proposition. This would save cost to the customer and create more value than packaging services. He said, "There are ways and means to manage the initial upfront cost of evolving the solution, which can be absorbed by the regular service business of the partner organization." This is typically the model that large SIs such as Accenture, IBM and TCS successfully adopt.
Jaishankar of Ingram also sums it up as the solution deployment capability of the SI that will ultimately make the difference between the also-rans and the winners. A statement corroborated by L Madhu, Apsis Technologies: Apsis is the classic case of the rise of a reseller to the position of a brand owner after having dabbled with 35 brands in duration spanning over a decade. The company's flagship networking brand, Ambernet, launched last year is now being promoted extensively and according to Madhu, a year-on-year growth of about 40-50 percent does not seem unachievable. Apsis is also expanding operations and has put a channel structure in place through the appointment of regional and national distributors. What really perhaps stands Madhu in good stead in steering his fledgling brand is his own experience in distribution of multi-fold brands.
Chennai-based BI firm, Sinmax Global, is case in point of a partner company, which has its own IPR BI solutions in retail and banking domains, which, it claims, enables the company to do a POC and 'promise a delivery', which is much faster than the traditional approach. Sinmax is in fact an authorized IBM partner and has got the right to deliver the conglomerate's secondary industry BI models such as banking, data warehousing, insurance data warehousing etc to customers. Sinmax also implements tools of other BI vendors such as Cognos, Business Objects, Informatica and Hyperion. But, the company is reluctant to go to market with this positioning and prefers to market its own name. The company has also gone a step ahead to devise its own Sinmax Resource Program and Certifications, which will help aspirants develop the technical expertise in the BI domain.
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