Mumbai-based distributor for IT products SATCOM recently marked its 15 year anniversary in IT business. Started in 2003 with a few members, has established itself as a leading IT distributor and worked with several leading brands in the country. The company has been committed to helping its partners share knowledge and create innovation.
Over the past decade, the company had almost quadrupled its workforce and has embraced diversity and gender balance. According to the Vinod Kumar, CEO-Founder, SATCOM, “We had around six people completing 10 years of service with 4 of them still on board. More than 50% of the people in the team has a tenure of 5 years or more. In 2008, the company went down in a big way with a major dip in business and also almost losing distributorship of a major product line,” he added.
The company is the leading distribution unit for many of network securities products like Sophos, GFI, Cososys, SOTI, to name a few. It has expanded our presence across all the major regions and metro cities of India like Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Pune, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai.
“IT distribution has undergone a major shift in these past few years owing to the fact that the IT business itself has been evolving at such a fast pace with vendors growing every year, acquisitions and mergers happening every year, new products and technologies evolving every year. Coupled with these facts is all the vendors seeing India as a major market and having huge expectations from India. This has in turn also widened the scope for IT distribution in India with a space for all,” said Kumar.
Today there are regional distributors, national distributors, global distributors, value added distributors, distributors who partner with vendors for a fixed period of time to jointly create business in India.
Speaking about the role of a distributor beyond credit, he thinks, in IT distribution credit limit is the last role. There are many roles such as creating market awareness, product and technology demonstration, pre- sales support. A distributor also bridges the gap between the vendor and partner and has to act in a manner so that the interests of both are maintained. According to him, a good distributor acts as a representative of the vendor in the eco system in taking responsibility for delivery, product performance and quality, price and support the same way the vendor would.
Kumar believes that the next five years is going to be the most challenging period for Satcom as we are poised to grow to a different level. We are looking at a turnover of growth of not less than 25% YOY and are committed to bring lot of niche products and technologies to the Indian market,” he added.
“Going forward, we are focused on accelerating the execution of our growth strategy while continuing to build on the strength of our brand—in helping our Partner share knowledge and create innovation and in bringing positive change to the communities in which we work and live and also which will help us to grow our business rapidly across India,” said Kumar.