CMDA conducts vendor meet 2012

CMDA recently organised the annual vendor meet at the Central Park Hotel, Pune. The primary objective of the event was to highlight the current key concerns of the CMDA members to the vendors, increase their interaction with vendors as well as national distributors and create a forum to build ethical and healthy business practices amongst all stakeholders.

Jayant Shete, president of CMDA expressed his happiness at the overwhelming response to the event, and stressed on the importance of such meets for the benefit of the members, vendors, NDs and RDs alike. "Vendors and NDs should control the MOP in the Pune market and set targets proportionate to market trends." He further highlighted the necessity of safeguarding decent margins for the partners, in view of substantial increase in costs and overheads in last year.

The president also appealed to vendors to consider setting up separate service centres in PCMC area, in order to facilitate quick service and octroi-free movement of spares for the benefit of PCMC partners and customers. Although, he appreciated the vendors, like iBall, TVSE, Acer, LG etc, who have already taken such measures.

The event was special due to the two new initiatives introduced by the CMDA, the panel discussion of representatives from vendor, ND, RD and SI communities, and the CMDA Member Choice Awards for vendors.
This year's event witnessed the presence of all major brands including HP, IBM, Lenovo, Canon, Fujitsu, Acer, Digisol, D-Link, EMC, VMware, Cisco, Microsoft, Quickheal, iBall, Logitech, TVSE, Emerson and LG. The forum was expanded to include the NDs, and well responded by the likes of Ingram Micro, Redington, Neoteric, Savex, Avnet & Rashi.

The panel discussion was conducted Hemant Naik, former CMDA VP, wherein he navigated the entire course of serious discussion on sensitive topics such as DOA replacement, onsite warranty support, partner profitability and MOP.

The vendor panelist Nitin Kharde of IBM, while acknowledging the need for honouring set timelines for DOA replacements, also explained that this may vary from product-to-product and vendor-to-vendor. He also explained the challenges in controlling the MOP, and in turn expected the partners to maintain the same.

Bharat Gopujkar, representing the SI community, elaborated the problems faced by small partners in DOA cases, costs incurred in supporting the customer when the vendor warranties are carry-in support, and the necessity of neutral service providers to safeguard the customer base of the selling partner. While, Ajay Sehgal, Country Manager, HP India Sales informed the attendees that most vendors have separate support packs available to upgrade the SLAs or support coverage, which partners can sell to the customer.

Brijen Shah, participating for the RD community, said that vendors can control the MOP if desired, and some vendors are already following this practice very strictly. He expressed that vendors must ensure the healthy survival of all links in the value chain - from ND, RD, T1 to smallest partner. He also raised the concern over material flooding the markets from unauthorised channels and hoped that vendors would take proper measures to stop such sources.

The panelist from NDs, Mandar Khare of Redington India said that this would certainly help resolve major concerns of the members. He expressed that the vendors and NDs would expect similar reciprocation from CMDA and its members.

Furthermore for the first time, CMDA managing committee decided to recognise the vendors and introduced the concept of CMDA Member Choice Awards 2012. The idea was to gauge the members' opinion and feedback about all the IT vendors on different parameters and decided to weigh the vendors on three generalised criteria of Sales & Marketing policies, Service Support performance, and Overall Business Experience of the partners in dealing with the brand.

An online survey was conducted, where members were to rank top three brands in each category, amongst some 50+ choices. The results of the survey were announced during the meet and few award winners are as follows :

Category:
Sales Policies: Rank 1: Quick Heal, Rank 2: Digisol and Rank 3: Intel
Service Support: Rank 1: Dell, Rank 2: HP and Rank 3: iBall
Overall Experience: Rank 1: HP, Rank 2: Canon and Rank 3: Lenovo
A special award for the most consistently associated CMDA vendor in all its activities and events, was conferred to Intex India.