DQ Week felicitates reseller community with Channel Awards

The DQ Week Delhi announced the coveted Annual Channel Partner Awards for the northern and the eastern region at the fifth annual awards function held at Delhi's Hotel Park Royal Inter-Continental. This event also marked the successful completion of six years by The DQ Week Delhi.

With the new avatar of the channel community in place, it is quintessential for every vendor to route its business through the channel partners. This community does approximately 80 percent of the IT hardware and software sales. In the eighties and for the major part of the nineties, they were known simply as dealers, but now they have become lifelines for every vendor.

The awards function was held to celebrate the success of various channel partners in partnership with Samsung India.

North India has approximately 8,000 channel partners operating either as resellers, dealers, systems integrators, Value Added Resellers (VARs) or retailers. In fact, Delhi has more than 3,000 channel partners, with close to one-third in just Nehru Place--unarguably Asia's largest IT market place.

Until a few years ago, there was little media attention to this critical, emerging community. The DQ Week Delhi, established in 1997 and focused to a large extent on the information needs of local channel partners, established the Annual Channel Awards in 1999. Adjudged by an eminent industry panel, these awards now recognize the contributions of channel partners across 27 cities of north and east India.

In his opening remarks while welcoming the gathering of more than 500 channel partners, Shyam Malhotra, Editor-in-Chief, Cyber Publications, elaborated on the positioning of channel partners in India. "Reseller community has grown from strength of being a mere box pusher to the market influencer. Channel partners now drive the marketing and sales initiatives. This graduation toward the channel partners marks the maturation of Indian IT market."

The awards function started with the best channel partners of cities other than Delhi. In the state of Uttar Pradesh six cities were covered. In Agra, MKG Infotech won the best reseller award, Stek Systems and Tritech Enterprises (third time in a row) won jointly for Allahabad. For Kanpur, Comexcell Technologies scored a hat trick. Lucknow also had joint winners in Nesco and Odyssey. In Meerut, Foretek Systems won for the second year in succession. Same was the case with Varanasi where Jwala Distributors bagged the award second year consecutively.

Rajasthan had two cities--Jaipur, where Kanchan Computech and Vishnu Computer Land (second year running) won the award jointly, and in Udaipur the award went to Ficusa Enterprises.

In Uttaranchal, it's state capital Dehradun was covered and the award went to NK Systems. Same was the case with Chhattisgarh where Merlin Multitech won the award for Raipur--its state capital.

Towards the east, Complete Solutions got the best reseller award for Guwahati--the sole representative of the North East. For Siliguri, the awards went to Digitech. Kolkata had three categories--the best retailer award went to The Web, Supertron and Trisita jointly won the best system integrator award, and the best reseller award was bagged by Supreme Technologies.

Patna's best channel partner award went to Byte Systems. Jharkhand's capital Ranchi had Sigma Computers as the award winner and in Jamshedpur the award went for the second year running to Galaxy Infosystem. Orissa's state

capital--Bhubaneswar--had Print Links as the award winner.

In the north, the award for Shimla went to Microbridge Computers for the second year in succession in Himachal Pradesh. Jammu & Kashmir had two cities covered--Prime Computers got the best channel partner award for Jammu and in Srinagar, Computer Embassy was the best channel partner.

Punjab's three major cities were covered. NV Computers was given the best channel partner award for Amritsar, SK Trading got the same honor for Ludhiana, and Superdot Computers bagged the award for the second consecutive year for Jalandhar. For the Union Territory of Chandigarh, Atlantic Technologies was the winner.

In Madhya Pradesh, two cities were covered--Bhopal and Indore. While Netlink Computers bagged the award for Bhopal, Abacus Combines made it a double by winning the award for second year in running for
Indore.

The DQ Week awards for Delhi had three categories--Retailer, Systems Integrator, and Reseller and each category had five nominations.

In the Retailer category, the nominees were Agrani Convergence, ComputerLand, Delphi, Graphline, and Landmark. While ComputerLand, which had won the Best Retailer award last year, had to remain content with the runner up position, Agrani Convergence won the top award in this category. Incidentally, Agrani had won the Most Promising Retailer Award at the last year's awards night.

For the Systems Integration category, the nominees were Computer Vision, Micro Clinic, PC Solutions, Targus Technologies and Team Computers. PC Solutions--last year's runner up in the same category--won the Best Systems Integrator award.

The runner up trophy went to Micro Clinic. The final category was of the traditional reseller that makes up the bulk of the revenues in the IT channel. The nominees in this category were Comnet Vision, Micromax Technologies, Park Electronik, RR System, and San Computech. While Comnet Vision was declared the Best Reseller for 2002-03, RR System got the consolation in the form of the runner up trophy.

The winners were chosen by a very eminent jury comprising of Aseem Kumar, Regional Manager, Samsung India; Sandeep Aurora, Channel Manager, Intel India; and Vidur Sehgal, GM, Redington India. They took into account a number of parameters including credibility, financial strength, sales, service attitude, long term commitment, etc.

The awards were given away by Pradeep Gupta, MD and Publisher, Cyber Media; Shyam Malhotra, Editor-in-Chief, Cyber Publications; Prasanto Roy, Chief Editor, The DQ Week; Aseem Kumar, Regional Manager; Farrukh Kazi, Product Manager; and Vineet Kanojia, Product Manager, Samsung India.

Despite an extremely bad weather due to incessant rains and the consequent traffic jams all across the capital, more than 500 top channel partners from Delhi as well as other major cities of the north gathered at the gala awards night. The awards function concluded with cocktails and dinner.

DQW News Bureau