–By Anil Sethi
Dell has always been a game changer. Being customer-inspired, our strength is in our ability to listen and act upon client feedback by creating solutions that address efficiency, cost and scale. Despite difficult market conditions where major Indian IT companies have stopped manufacturing IT products and few MNCs are grappling with keeping their market share and margins, Dell stands apart as one of the few credible OEMs with end-to-end solutions capabilities, enabling channel partners to not only fill the vacuum, but grow their market share.
When it came to our Channel Strategy in India, we recognised the need for greater availability of our products across India. Hence early in 2014 we strengthened our focus on distribution to ensure maximum coverage of our products across the country. Several years into our transformation as an end-to-end solutions provider, we were in a position to focus our efforts on distribution. While we were always in the distribution space, for the first time we were able to cater to the end-to-end range of our products including desktops, notebooks, servers and a few storage products. This new model led to the formation of a new route-to-market viz. a viz. the Distribution led route.
Over the course of the year we partnered with several national distributors such as Ingram Micro, Redington and Iris. In October last year, we expanded our presence to 117 tier 2 and tier 3 cities across India through our Dell STORM approach, an initiative aimed at penetrating cities across India. We interacted with over 300 partners in these locations in conjunction with our distribution partner Ingram Micro.
Our partners have been very receptive to this change as it has enabled them to do business more easily with Dell. Channel partners today have greater access to Dell’s end-to-end range of products. Our partners have also realised our commitment towards them and are more confident in doing business with us. Today we have 800 distribution partners across India. This has translated to greater success in our commercial segments and we have been leading in the sale of Servers, Storage, Commercial Desktops and Workstations.
(The author is the channel head of Dell India. The views expressed here are that of the author and not that of Channel Times)