Zebra presents PartnerFirst program, for the first time in India

Mumbai: Zebra Technologies Corporation is coming up with its PartnerFirst channel program for the first time in the country by next month. Now that the company's Indian operations have been moved under the aegis of the Singapore headquarter, there are several other initiatives that it will be announcing shortly.

Talking about the program, Andrew Tay, President, Zebra Technologies Asia Pacific said that its objective was to drive profitability through channel. “Often there is no discipline while executing channel plans unless there is a structured framework in place. With this program, we will drive discipline in terms of channel management, clearly outlining the roles of the various partner tiers, thereby satisfying our customers,” he said.

As Zebra prepares to ramp up its business from India, hoping the country will contribute at least 10 percent to the APAC revenues within two years, it wants to match the aspirations of its channel through the partner program and ensure that the more business generated by them, the better the support they will get from the vendor.

Traditionally, Zebra has barcode and card printers under its Specialty Printing Group (SPG) and a Zebra Enterprise Solutions, which like the name denotes sells high-end solutions for enterprises. Both the businesses are driven through the channel, and in the past, some thought was given to integrate these two channels, enabling them to sell both the products lines.

But Tay stated that Zebra has now decided to keep the enterprise business group independent for the next couple of years, as the latter have a lot of direct contact with customers given that its deployments are usually complex in nature.

Admitting that currently enterprise customers in India are not aware about the asset tracking and management technology which is why a good portion of the work is still done manually. To effectively showcase to customers the benefits this technology can bring to their business, Zebra will soon be launching Asia-specific products.

“We have moved our manufacturing from Chicago to China and our R&D teams will try to understand the needs of Asian customers and design products to address it,” Tay informed.

This aside, the company is also going to increase the headcount of its sales team and will be opening offices in Bengaluru and New Delhi too. “We want to increase our reach in India and will therefore also increase our existing channel network,” added Tay. However he stated that Zebra would not augment its existing distributors, which is Ingram Micro India and Westcon.

Zebra has been traditionally focused on electronic manufacturing vertical in India, but in recent times it has diversified into five other segments as well. These are transport logistics, healthcare, govt, retail and mobility. It has already launched a few products for these verticals and is now adding channel partners who are engaging with customers in these business domain areas.

The company will also initiate its supplies business-including ribbons, labels and spare parts-which it had not introduced in India earlier. Giving the reason for the same, Tay said, “Traditionally Zebra has been focused on hardware and not on supplies. But now our customers are demanding our supplies as well because of its high quality. This way they face less services and post procurement issues.”

Zebra provides solutions to identify, track, and manage the deployment of critical assets, which includes on-demand thermal barcode and card printers and its affiliated software.