Partners want enhanced vendor interaction

Varanasi

November 7th, 2007

The DQ Week IT Panchayat recently held in Varanasi saw participation of 60
partners from the channel community. The evening started off with presentation
from Realtime and Amconics. Post the presentation, which also saw a lucky draw
by Realtime it was time for some serious discussion.

Ankit Johri represented distributors on the panel from Ingram Micro. Joining
him were Vishal Varshney from Redington and Updesh Singh from SES Technologies.
Udit Kumar of Life Computers, Praful Somani of Jwala Distributors, Shashank Dora
of Infotrend Systems and Ramesh Singh of RK Computer Services, who is also the
President of the channel association represented the partner community. Shivangi
Yadav, Executive Editor, The DQ Week moderated the discussion.

Discussing the problem that the partners face while dealing with DoA, Kumar
said, "While the distributors are willing to sell us the material according
to our requirements and even dump some stuff in our shops when they have targets
to achieve, they are not willing to help us with when we have a DoA issue."

Another partner from the gathering remarked that he has a case in which his
DoA claim has been pending with a vendor for more than six months now and there
was no way for him to resolve it. Reacting to the same Somani added, "In
such instances the distributors are not willing to help us at all. Neither is
our claim processed nor are we given a replacement piece, so we have to shell
money from our pocket and give the consumer what he wants. We are incurring
losses both ways. If we do not change the piece for the consumer we lose our
credibility and if we do replace the piece, our money gets stuck. It's a
Catch-22 situation for us."

Replying to the partner's salvo Johri said that they were helpless, as the
rules on DoA are laid by the vendor and apart from educating partners about what
are the processes and paper work that needs to be followed, there was little a
distributor could do. "This is the first time that we have got this kind of
platform where we can discuss these issues and problems. Our interactions with
the partners are mostly limited to business and orders, but now that we have
realized that there are certain issues bothering the partners, from our end we
will ensure that we educate the partners about the processes that are involved
and the paper work that needs to be done, so that the hassles for them are
reduced."

Dora then raised the issue about the lack in clarity about incentives and
schemes. He said, "The vendor after announcing the scheme or incentive
never makes any efforts to get in touch with partners when their schemes have
ended and incentives and payouts have been waiting for a while." Adding to
the same Kumar said, "Most vendors have people sitting in Delhi who are
processing your claim on most issues. These people sit and decide about all
claims from all over India but they never make any effort to know the kind of
problems that the partner is encountering in getting what is his due."

When asked whether there were any specific companies or was the problem
omnipresent across vendors, most of the present partners pointed out that these
problems were mostly with HP and Samsung. Demanding enhanced interaction with
the vendor community Kumar said, "With the distributors, vendors should
also be present at such events so that they know what the partners feedback
about their policies is. They need not answer the questions but at least they
need to realize that we are facing so many issues."

Reacting to the fact that partners faced a slew of issues with vendor
Varshney opined, "That if there are consistent problems with a vendor the
channel partner community should stop selling products of that particular
vendor."

In response Singh said, "That the policy of not picking up stuff of a
big vendor would hurt the channel partner only since the consumer demands a
product these days. Also the vendor needs to listen to its partner community
with being forced." Agreeing with Singh, Somani said, "Boycott's, bans
are a way of forcing a vendor. We would avoid doing that but if our problems are
not resolved then we shall have to reconsider."