Importers provide better services

Support for service-related issues and providing complete information about
new products by the national distributors, were some of the concerns put forth
by channel partners in Kolhapur, during The DQ Week IT Panchayat. The event,
sponsored by Sify, Delta and Supertron, was attended by over 90 channel partners
and distributors, including Redington, SES Technologies, Rashi Peripherals and
Neoteric Informatique.

Another highlight of the event was the announcement of the formation of
Computer Association of Kolhapur (CAK). The event began with a speech from Arun
Mangave of CAK followed by a cake cutting ceremony. Mangave remarked, "We want
to collectively resolve several issues that are pinching us at the moment and
the formation of an association will give us the perfect platform to voice our
opinions. Currently around 40 members have already become a part of the
association."

This was followed by presentation from Sify and Delta. During his
presentation Nilesh M Mistry, Deputy GM-Enterprise Division (West), Sify gave an
insight into the existing opportunities for the partners in enterprise
connectivity, enterprise application service, data center hosting services,
messaging and collaboration and data center among others.

On the other hand, Jagdish S Gujari, Team Leader-UPS Sales, Western Region,
Delta Energy Systems shared the opportunities the partners could explore by
furthering UPS products to customers ranging from entry-level users to high-end
data centers and large enterprises that require 24x7 backup.

Mandar Chavan of Rashi Peripherals; Mandar Khare of Redington India; Vijayendra of SES Technologies; Amit R Patil of Neoteric Infomatique; Rahul Patil of Computer Association of Kolhapur and Arun Managave of Aditya Peripherals

During the panel discussion, Kolhapur partners got an opportunity to raise
some of the trade-related matters. Rajesh Shah, Proprietor, Mahalaxmi Computers
highlighted a service-related issue pertaining to Intel motherboards.

Responding to Shah's query, Mandar Chavan, Branch Manager, Rashi Peripherals
opined, "Rashi is willing to look into after sales service issues and will bring
the matter to the notice of the vendor."

Another point of discussion was around lack of product knowledge among the
channel community in view of the untrained staff at the distributors' office.
One of the partners stated, "Many a times when we call up the distributor's
office to enquire about some products the local staff, there either has no
information about the availability of product or the technical aspects related
to it."

Responding to the above question, Mandar Khare, Branch Sales Mangaer-Pune,
Redington stated, "In order to get rid of the above problem, we have resolved to
collate database of partners in Kolhapur from the newly formed association and
will make every information around product available to the partners."

During the discussion, partners clarified that several importers who are
doing direct business with them provide them better services when compared to
the national distributors.

Puja Sharma

poojas@cybermedia.co.in