Making their role stronger among the channel fraternity, IT associations in India are coming up with new initiatives to fight diverse issues concerning the channel community.
It’s no more a conventional style of working. The associations are becoming more organized and structured that’s led to issues now being resolved more efficiently. They now aim at coming up with proper guidelines and plans that will help IT business grow in the given market situation.
Big names in the IT fraternity have formed committees and sub-committees to take care of issues. These committees oversee various matters, like channel verification, event management, cultural and social welfare, and so on.
Most of these bodies have a separate cell that deals with channel grievances. For example, Mumbai-based Traders Association of Information Technology (TAIT) is one of the early players that took the initiative of coming up with this idea. It has a separate committee to solve partners’ grievances. On similar lines, Trade Disciplinary Committee was formed under Surat-based South Gujarat Information Technologists Association (SITA).
SITA also established separate groups to resolve issues related to Microsoft and Octroi. Such groups were formed on a temporary basis and were successful in achieving their goals.
Owing to increasing fraud cases within the channel community, a few associations based in metros introduced channel verification cells. However, success of this initiative is still a matter of debate. As far as past records are concerned, the ingenious initiative taken by TAIT to establish the Channel Verification Committee received a lukewarm response from the local channel community. Despite the failure, this trend was appreciated and further adopted by Delhi-based Progressive Channels Association of Information Technology (PCAIT).
Generally, it’s taken care of that senior members of the association are part of these committees to avoid any scope for bias or prejudice. Elsewhere, election of members is always a matter of concern — leading to differences and factions within the trade bodies. Thus, learning from the past, associations now ought to try to maintain the sanctity of a committee by electing members that enjoy widespread respect in the channel community.