While Indian IT resellers have started facing the hit of the global economic slowdown, Synergies 2008, the brainstorming session, a part of COM-IT 2008, has emerged as an excellent and effective guiding sub-event for them. Thanks to Trade Association of IT (TAIT), the symposium has successfully focused on the trend of the Indian IT business, some major vendors’ business plans, expectations in the coming days, resellers’ growth potential and how to move ahead in this challenging economic situation.
From vendors’ end, most of the presentations made in the conference have focused on the contemporary issues, their solutions and the ensuing products release to address the present shortcomings.
Intel’s Channel Platform Manager, Devendran Pandian explained, at present, for every 72 client desktops only one server is sold. Also, the demand for entry-level servers is growing. Thus, in order to address the space and budget constraints, the vendor is releasing Modular Servers. From a threshold of 4 servers, blade solution is the cheaper option.
Intel’s new architecture (DDR3) is expected in March 2009. Another interesting development – that the company is working on – is Solid State Drive (SSD). Existing FSBs will change in next year. Quick Path Interconnect is coming up. In the multicore processors, based on less workload requirement, some of the cores will automatically get off, and the running core will undergo overclocking.
Vipul Sant, Director – Genuine Software Initiative, Microsoft, declared, “We will remain a partner-centric company.” According to Sant, Microsoft will invest on four pillars – Desktop, Enterprise, Entertainment & Devices and Software services. The company is stressing on use of Unified Communication to reduce travel and telephone cost, Virtualization – which will lead to cost saving through server consolidation and reduction in power consumption, Share Point to improve productivity with collaboration and knowledge managed tools.
Sant also pointed out that the software piracy rate in India in 2007 was as high as 69%. As per him, the situation can be changed through firming up the value of genuine software, through bringing momentum around corporate governance and creating strong baseline of law of the land.
He drew attention on the implementation of Software Asset Management (SAM, ISO 19770 -1). Microsoft will get in touch with 25,000 small and medium size businesses in India to explain the importance of SAM. The company is also looking at channel associations to help in promoting original software.
Vijayan Vargeese from CA talked about the company’s vision on Enterprise IT Management (EITM). CA’s recovery suite is coming up soon. According to him, the company will provide high quality software to partners, and remain 100% channel focused.
Through his presentation titled ‘Surviving the Slowdown’, Vimal Raj of Allied Digital invited partners to be customer-centric. He advised to make the debtor circle shorter, to do better cost management by focusing on Cost of Finance and Manpower Retention.
Paras Shah, CEO, Neoteric, said 80-90% of the IT business comes from top cities. Naturally, there are wide unexploited scopes in the smaller cities. Also, household needs of IT products are growing. He explained that there are some prominent emerging trends – like buyers are preferring laptops to desktops, MP3 players are being pushed behind by the PDAs and converged devices.
According to Shah, entry of global players in the IT products selling business is the latest trend. Under this extremely competitive situation, need for value-added reseller with strong vertical focus is quite prominent, and that is the mantra for survival in the coming days. Online sales will be yet another strategy that will be more common.
Samir Tapde, Director, Techlink Infoware, stressed on the importance of customer acquisition and retention, implementation of automation and investment in a system that takes care of itself.