IT Panchayat organized in association with The DQ Week and DQ Channels in
Ludhiana once again brought together the local channel community and the distis
working in this region.
Speaking on various schemes announced by the vendors and its related backend
payments at the event moderated by Zia Askari, Associate Editor, The DQ Week,
Paramjit Singh Juneja of Secant Technologies said that there is no transparency
as far as execution of such schemes is concerned and asked the vendors to
provide details of their policies to the channel.
Reacting to this point, Vikas Gupta of Ingram Micro said that as a company
Ingram always tries to help channel deliver better profitability. "Policy is
decided by the vendor and we do not have much say on this. However, we can take
this message to the vendor and ask for more details to be given to the channel,"
he added.
Talking about the burning issue of price difference between big cities and
smaller locations, Gurpreet Singh, President, Association of Computer
Entrepreneurs (ACE) informed the gathering that there is a huge price difference
being given by distributors in concert with vendors in bigger cities.
"If you buy something in Delhi, it is cheaper. In such a scenario, how will
the smaller markets become big and deliver more profitability, distributor
should make sure that price balance is there in the market, otherwise it creates
a difficult situation for everybody," he added.
Speaking on this issue, all the distributors expressed their opinion that
there is not much price difference in the products that they deal in however,
the gathering was of the opinion that distributors along with the vendors are
the root cause of this situation and vendors should come forward and do
something concrete on this front.
The gathering also felt that the local representatives of the distributors
need to do much more in terms of making sure that they are not merely providing
logistics and actually helping the channel gain on profitability. "If we take
DoA related issues, distis do not help us at all. They just push the ball on
vendor's court. This is not the way to help channel. When we need them, they are
not there," explained, Rishi Sudhakar of IDM Solutions.
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| (L-R) Rishi Sudhakar
of IDM Solutions, Paramjit Singh Juneja of Secant Technologies and Gurpreet
Singh of ACE, Rakesh Kumar of Redington, Vikas Gupta of Ingram Micro and
Ravi Kant of Rashi Peripherals |
The distributors present informed that they are always settling the DoA cases
as per the policies defined by the vendors. However, they also felt that lack of
manpower can sometime come in the way of helping the channel in such cases.
Channel cartel
Expressing their grave concern on the issue of cartel formation by the
distributors, the channel gathering strongly felt that cartel formation is a
menace for the industry and the distributors should not engage themselves into
such acts.
"If distributors can form a cartel, even we can do the same and make sure
that distributors pay for this kind of activity. Cartel spoils the market and
gives birth to a lot of other related issues. Distributors should not indulge in
such activities as they spoil the health of the market," explained Singh.
Reacting to this, the distributors felt that the vendors primarily drive
cartel formation and distributors do not have much of a say for this issue. They
also said that cartel formation at times helps the channel in terms of
controlling the price points. However, the gathering disagreed by this thought
and voiced their desire to give an answer to future cartel formation by distis
in the form of a cartel by channel community.
The evening bought together some of the best IT channel partners, and the
local representation of distributors in Ludhiana. In the end, the channel
partners thanked the local representation of distributors for supporting them in
their call for 'One day bandh'. This was done to express support and solidarity
for Big Byte, a company, which was robbed a day earlier. "I would like to thank
the distributor community - Ingram Micro, Redington and Rashi for supporting us
on this call for bandh today," Singh added.
Ludhiana IT Panchayat witnessed 90 channel partners. Amit Kohli of Sify, Anil
Gupta of Microworld, Sanjeo Singh of Hitachi made presentation educating
partners about their products and there was also a video presentation made by
Chirag at the event.
The panelists at the event were Vikas Gupta of Ingram Micro, Rakesh Kumar of
Redington, Ravi Kant of Rashi, Rishi Sudhakar of IDM Solutions, Paramjit Singh
Juneja of Secant Technologies and Gurpreet Singh, President, ACE. The IT
Panchayat was organized in association with Sify, Microworld, Hitachi, Amconics,
Geneva and Chirag.