The IT Panchayat organized in association with The DQ Week and DQ Channels
was once again instrumental in terms of bridging the gap between the channel and
the national distribution community. The event was well attended by over 60
people from the local Chandigarh IT channel community.
Panelists at the Chandigarh IT Panchayat which was moderated by Zia Askari,
Associate Editor, The DQ Week were Subroto Banerji of Redington, Vijay Kumar of
Ingram Micro, Ram Pansari of Rashi Peripherals, IP Singh of Beyond Computers, V
Phutela of Phutela Computers and Sanjeev Walia of Jetage.
IT Panchayat was held in association with Hitachi, Sify, Microworld, Amconics
and Geneva.
Amit Kohli of Sify, Anil Gupta of Microworld and Sanjeo Singh of Hitachi made
the presentation educating partners about their products.
Speaking at the event, Walia of Jetage raised the issue of price parity
between big cities and small locations.
"We still have a situation wherein some product are cheap in Ludhiana and
expensive in Chandigarh, even though we sell in big numbers here. And the same
goes for a place like Delhi and Chandigarh," he questioned.
 |
| (L-R) The panelists: IP Singh of
Beyond Computers, Sanjeev Walia of Jetage, V Phutela of Phutela Computers,
Subroto Banerji of Redington, Vijay Kumar of Ingram Micro and Ram Pansari of
Rashi Peripherals |
Responding to this, Banerji of Ingram Micro said that he was not aware of
such practice in the region.
Transparent policy
Singh of Beyond Computers said that today a distributor should move from
just being the logistics provider to actually being a friend of the channel. He
also mentioned that there is an urgent need to have transparency between a
vendor and a channel and a distributor should play a big role here.
"They do not share any policy details with us. If we are the one facing the
ire of the end-customer on DoA issues, we should at least have a fair amount of
idea on the vendor policies. We have raised this issue many times but nothing
happens either from the distributor side or the vendor side," he explained.
Reacting to this, the overall gathering strongly felt that distributors
should go back to vendors and ask for better transparency for the channel
policies when it comes to clearing off the DoA cases.
At this point, all the distributors also felt that the same should be
realized at the vendor level and they should be transparent in their dealing.
"This is something that comes from the vendor side and we cannot do much on
this. However, we will definitely take this feedback to the vendors and
something positive will come out of it," said Kumar of Ingram Micro.
Speaking on the issue of backend payments, Phutela of Phutela Computers
informed that in most of the cases, distributors do not help the channel in
terms of getting backend payments. "They just want to dump their products at our
doors and then forget about the schemes or any other issue. If there is a vendor
scheme, we should be informed about it and everybody should be treated alike.
All should benefit from the backend payments," he added.
Reacting to this Pansari of Rashi said, "We always try to be there when we
are required however, if this is a big issue then we will make sure that we are
in sync with the channel," he added.
Addressing the gathering on the issue of cartel formation, Singh said that
this is a menace for the channel and distributors should not engage themselves
in such activities at all.
"We are pretty much against the cartel formation and as in the past we will
continue to take stringent action against such distributors which engage
themselves into these activities that go against the channel," he added.
Reacting to this issue, Banerji of Redington said that there are some
decisions that are taken in concern with the vendor and this was one of those
decisions.
Distributors and association
In their bid to help themselves in terms of deciding the credit limit of the
channel players, distributors agreed unanimously to take active part in the IT
Forum activities and take this platform as a way to ensure that right credit
limit is given to right partners.
"We welcome distributors and we will surely increase our interactions on this
association platform," Walia added.