IT Panchayat goes to Raipur

Providing an ideal platform to the channel community of Raipur to interact
with the local distributors and discuss the real issues affecting the Raipur
market, the IT Panchayat was well-accepted among the dealer community.

The IT Panchayat panel included Devendra Marwah, President, Chhattisgarh
Compu­ter and Media Dealer Association; Vishnu Reddy from Redington; Kapil
Tiwari from Ingram Micro and Sunil Agarwal from Hitech Solutions. Zia Askari,
Content Editor, Voice&Data Connect moderated the panel discussion.

Participating in a lively panel discussion, Marwah said that the distributor
community should stand by their commitments and deliver value to the reseller
community.

The panel (L-R) Sunil Agarwal from Hitech Solutions; Devendra Marwah, President, Chhattisgarh Computer and Media Dealer Association; Vishnu Reddy from Redington; Kapil Tiwari from Ingram Micro listening to the grievances of channel community.

“Today most of the distributors are just acting as logistics providers for
vendors. It is time that they seriously start moving up the value chain.
Distributors should take responsibility for their actions and not try and put
everything on the vendors,” Marwah added. Reacting to this issue, Reddy

said that distributors are already doing whatever they could to make sure that
the reseller community gets proper credit and service when it comes to providing
products.

When asked about the formation of cartels by different distributors and its
overall affect on the market dynamics, Agarwal said that the national and
multinational vendors should come forward to check this practice and make sure
that the interest of channel community is taken care of.

Answering this issue from distributor's point of view, Reddy opted not to
comment and said that these decisions are taken at the corporate level.

Speaking about creating a better synergy within the channel and the
distributor community, Tiwari said that the local IT associations should
incorporate local distributors as well.

Welcoming this thought, Marwah said that of course distributors should
actively participate in the association's activities. On the growing number of
dead on arrival (DOA) cases, Raipur channel community expressed its anger and
decried distributors for not doing much about solving this issue.

“Many a times the products were found missing from the boxes, received from
the distributor side. Such issues should be taken very seriously and
distributors should take the responsibility for such negligence,” Marwah added.

However, on the other hand, Tiwari said that distributors have always helped
the channel community in terms of getting the best value from vendors. “We have
always tried our best to help channel get the best from vendors. If there are
certain issues, we will surely solve them collectively,” he added.

DQC News Bureau