Imation to upgrade partners from mere box movers

To launch its first USB flash drive in India

Imation Singapore has taken a new initiative in moving up
atleast 30 channel partners across the country, which included both wholesalers
and dealers. Imation has gone to the extent of changing the organizational
restructure of the bigger and smaller partners and this also includes going
through their balance sheets. Now these partners are catering to the needs of
atleast 400 data users, which include LIC, Coke, Pepsi, Maruti, Mckinsey and
Infosys.

"Wholesalers are the part-ners looking after an entire
region and the dealers work under them. We wanted to help the partners to shift
from trading and move up the value chain and tap vertical markets, which is huge
in India. In India itself, storage growth is expected to grow by 47 percent and
the size is approximately 3,700 terrabytes. Therefore, it was essential that
partners tap this growing market," said Ajit Karunakaran, Manager, Data
Storage (India) and Product Manager (Tape), India, SAARC and Indo-China
countries.

The storage vendor also plans to refocus on the perso-nal
storage segment, as it will be launching its first flash memory device called
Swivel USB 2.0, which will be available in 128MB, 256MB and 512MB. The pricing
is also going to be competitive as the 512 MB will be approximately upto Rs
3,500.

"Imation has a slew of perso-nal storage products, but the
Indian market was never ready. Now is the time to launch a pro-duct, which is
mobile and also is price competitive. A year back, there were products like
RipGo, FlashGo, which Imation had planned to launch but it didn’t take off, as
the market was not ready," added Karunakaran.

These personal storage products will be available through
Imation’s 250 partners from the earlier 100-190. The vendor has also channel
partners in every state and has increased its network across 53 towns and
cities.

"This expansion was due in India as even internationally
Imation has been investing (around 100 million dollars) heavily in other
companies. Last year, in India, huge amount of investment was put in channel
programs, promot-ions, training, roadshows, exhi-bitions, CIO enclave thereby,
increasing the size of the chan-nels," claimed Karunakaran.

He added, "We have been pushing channel partners to push
entry-level storage like the SLR and DDS (VXA-8mm) where the margins are
increas-ing. In DLT the margins are coming down gradually, there-fore partners
are moving away from it." Imation is also expanding its base in India and
will be opening another office in Chennai in April.

Nancy Sudheer

Mumbai