D-Link eyes the retail market

D-Link India is now training its eyes on the retail market for reaching out
to its customers. It has tied up with several malls and retail chains to display
and sell its products. These include Tata's Croma, Hypercity in Mumbai,
Spencers in Chennai etc and with the retail segment poised to take off in a big
way, D-Link will also increase its branding through this conduit.

“Selling through the retail chains and malls make sense to us, because the
clientele who frequent it are technologically aware and can afford to buy our
laptops or other lifestyle products,” said Tushar Sighat, VP-Channel
Business (India and SAARC), D-Link India. This is underlined by the fact that a
single Croma outlet in Mumbai sells around 50 units of D-Link's Skype phone.

The retail boom in India has made almost all IT vendors sit up and take
notice. According to Retail Biz, an Economic Times publication, the total
quantum of private spending in India is over Rs 15 lakh crore and the
discretionary spending after taking out expenditure on healthcare, education,
transportation and housing is almost Rs 10 lakh crore giving an idea about the
size of the retail market in India. D-Link too has sniffed blood in this means
to the market and is trying to capture as much shelf space in as many retail
outlets as is possible.

Now, it is considering using the retail channel for selling its IP PBX
systems. The company believes that this technology is ideal for the Indian
environment, especially in the price sensitive SMB segment. It has already
introduced an IP PBX for offices with 25 users. And since most of the decision
makers of SMB companies visit malls, this will be a good place for the
networking vendor to grab their attention.

Though D-Link had introduced IP PBX systems six months ago, it had not
actively pushed the product in the market. It was trying to get some
installations underway before getting the channel enthused about selling the
product.

The company is training its mid-size system and network integrators partners
to sell it to their existing clients. While admitting that IP PBX machines are
20 to 25 percent more expensive than the traditional EPBX products, Sighat
claimed that the former is more scalable. “Also with the increasing
penetration of the Internet, it is natural that companies would like to leverage
on IP for their voice and data transmissions,” he noted.

Rather than deploying the product at corporate houses, D-Link is taking the
bottoms up approach. It will try and get the SMB customers to adopt this
technology, because this segment is straddled with several issues related to
investment, RoI and upgradation.

Conventional voice networks within any organization do not support mobility.
So a user is chained to the analog handset, which could hamper productivity. An
IP PBX allows software phones to be installed on any IP-supporting mobile
computing device, which the user can carry all the time, thereby allowing
connectivity to the enterprise's voice network continuously. Also, IP phones
are priced around Rs 1,500, which is not an expensive buy for an enterprise.

This is why D-Link has even introduced a station gateway, which can take
voice packets from one EPBX and then route it out through several IP phones by a
simple connection. “This is for those companies which do not want to throw
away their legacy EPBX systems, but want to graduate to IP telephony at the same
time,” noted Sighat.

Also, according to some market reports, when the IP telephony has been
implemen­ted, users have reported a 37 percent reduction in move/add/change
costs associated with the physical hardware of EPBX, a 23 percent reduction in
toll, a 10 percent reduction in maintenance costs, and the ease of
administration has enabled a 30 percent reduction in staff.

VINITA BHATIA