‘IT Distributors Need To Build And Focus On New Enablement Capabilities’

For Mumbai based national distributor neoteric infomatique last fiscal year was an exciting one, as the distributor redefined the distribution capabilities. It consolidated existing businesses, improved hygiene parameters, channel expansion and marketing activities and grew its product portfolio in the AV, Enterprise and converged-solutions vertical.

Anup Nair, Head- Corporate & NTS, neoteric infomatique during an interview shed more light on how neoteric is transforming with cloud computing and shrinking hardware industry.
Excerpts from the interview:

CT: Can you tell us about neoteric Group as a distributor and service provider?

Nair: Established by Paras Shah in 1997, neoteric infomatique is a Value-added National Distributors in the IT space. Today, neoteric has around 400 employees generating business opportunities for 10,000 channel partners across 500 cities in India. It caters to AV, components, consumer and memory, creative, enterprise, PC group of products and solutions. Over the years, neoteric expanded its company operations to countries like Singapore, Dubai, China, Hong Kong, Australia and UK. Apart from value-added IT distribution, neoteric offers a host of other services through its associate companies – F1 and One Leap. Some of neoteric’s current top vendors are Acer, ACTi, AJA, Alcatel-Lucent, AMX, Belkin, BenQ, Bosch, Bowers & Wilkins( B & W), Corsair, Cybernetyx, Canon, Dell, Emerson, Gigabyte, Giesecke & Devrient ( G&D ), G-Tech, Hitachi, Incase, Kramer, LaCie, Lenovo, Leviton, LG, Lite-On, Logitech, Matrox, NEC, Numeric, Panasonic, Promise, UMAX, Wacom, Western Digital and Xerox.

CT: Being a national distributor, how have you expanded your distribution strengths in last one year?

Nair: Last year, we consolidated existing businesses, improved hygiene parameters, channel expansion and marketing activities and grew our product portfolio in the AV, Enterprise and converged-solutions vertical. We made headway in building a strong Security surveillance vertical, Data Centre solution vertical and developed a strong consumer accessories portfolio with deeper retail penetration and creation of consumer vertical. We succeeded in strongly implementing GTM, operational efficiency, IT investments, strong biz hygiene focus and reviews all across at every level of every dept.

Also, we strengthened our focus on the corporate, SMB and the SME segments. We built our competencies in the services business to enable the partner to pitch in the focus segments and support them on the complete gamut of activities right from consultation to after- sales services. Now, we have two larger BUs in neoteric- Consumer and Commercial. This overall consolidation will bring increased focus and synergies into our execution plans. The new Commercial BU team will be able to cross sell and upsell products to the same partners who possibly were just buying one or two categories from us. This will also help in improving our gross margins.

In the last fiscal year, we laid the foundation for channelizing and fortifying our existing channels of growth and made a foray into new, flourishing services, products and verticals. Also, we got our strategy in place and continued developing our focused verticals. We struck major deals through new vendor sign-ups and customer acquisitions, and expanded our overseas-reach by penetrating into Australia and Dubai.

On the commercial side, we signed up Xerox for both stock-and-sell and B2B. We associated with Emerson for both online and line-interactive range of products, thus further enhancing our power portfolio on the commercial side.

On the consumer side, we kicked off Bowers & Wilkins (B & W) mainly targeted at the Apple stores, further building our accessories portfolio. We also grew our LG mobility-relationship and started scaling up in the territories we manage.

On the components side, we further developed our approach and portfolio. We added LG monitors and the Corsair line of memory products to our portfolio.

Last year also witnessed our foray into the Software & App. Development space alongside we made headway with our software trainings under ‘Evolve’.

CT: What were the new vendors alliance neoteric made?

Nair: As yet another significant move, we made a recent foray into mainstream Acer business. We geared up on our accessories / Apple Resellers’ connect. Also, we firmed up our revenue and margins thus enhancing our distribution strength. We beefed up our retail-connect business during the last year and saw our active participation on the retail front.

CT: Hardware distribution is bound to shrink as the industry consolidates and customers move to a services-led opex model. What is neoteric doing to remodel its business?

Nair: neoteric has launched its cloud computing services initiative with an objective to provide its channel partner community Software-as-a-service, Infrastructure-as-a-Service, business continuity and data migration solutions. neoteric has a comprehensive suite of offerings under its partner enablement program to help solution providers better understand and market cloud-based solutions. The services include cloud foundation webinars, sales and marketing support, and technical services. As part of the technical services, support services viz. knowledge base, virtual classroom trainings, and technical support will be provided through the cloud partner portal.

CT: What are the major paradigm shift do you see in distribution in next 2-3 years, and how is neoteric gearing up for these transformation?

Nair: As the vendors’ downstream alliance partners, distributors reach out to VARs that vendors cannot reach directly because they can’t afford to. IT distribution strategy is to strengthen the channel partners’ role as an influencer with their customers by strengthening the partner’s expertise around cloud and business solutions, targeted at business verticals of their influence. In their efforts to provide more core value to their partners, IT distributors are adding new enablement capabilities like digital marketing, setting up practices around a particular vendor’s technology, and positioning and upselling technical knowledge and expertise.

CT: What was your revenue performance for this year and what are you gunning at for next year?

Nair: We are looking at profitable and solutions-oriented growth.

CT: neoteric has been exploring options of on-boarding a strategic investor for Neoteric IT distribution, has there been any success?

Nair: This has been more of an on-going quest and we have not zeroed in on anything concrete yet.