No words of praise would be enough to
laud the resilience of the Indian IT channel community. The general
market slowdown, negative cash flows, credit crunches, stifling tax
and duty regimes, vendors changing distribution policies
overnight-nothing seem to faze them for long. One or more of these
would put them at discomfiture for some time, but be rest assured
they will find some way or mechanism to not just wriggle out of the
situation but even carry on their businesses normally. However, the
same cannot be said about the channel community's receptiveness to
new things, either technology or strategy-wise. In fact, there is a
definite aversion towards adoption of any new form of technology,
especially if it has to do with how they conduct their business.
Quite an irony, considering that they being in the business of
technology are not keen to use it. Nothing illustrates this better
than the channel community's general antipathy till now towards using
the online medium actively to conduct their businesses.
Not too many partners have till now
conducted any serious amount of business online, neither have they
used their websites to undertake any concerted marketing exercise
till date. In fact, many of them have perfunctory websites, which
forget being equipped to handle online transactions (e-commerce), do
not even have basic information uploaded regularly. They have been
quite brazen about it till now-and the pretext is simple, there is
not enough business generated online, so it does not make business
sense for them to focus energies on online as a medium. Even the
various channel associations do not fare much better on the online
stakes. Considering that the primary role of these associations is to
take up the cases of their member partners and often negotiate on
their grievances against the vendors, it's quite surprising that even
they have resisted using the Internet optimally till now.
Things though have started changing,
albeit not at the rate expected, but some partners are starting to
look at online with a more serious eye. The first push, expectedly
came from the vendors themselves, most of whom started conducting a
significant portion of their distribution transactions online. The
national distributors followed suit and as a natural corollary many
of the channel partners were compelled to go partly on the online
route. In fact, Ingram Micro's B
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website for resellers had been a resounding success in FY10 in
improving transparency and reducing costs of doing both stock sales
and run-rate business. Ingram took a lead on this in the Indian
market and in FY10, 30 percent of its business happened through this
website. That should be a major learning for the partners that going
online improves transparency and by reducing costs helps them post a
healthier bottomline. For some partners at least, this has acted as a
catalyst in moving their businesses partially online.
there
are definitely some genuine reasons preventing this movement
from becoming a wave. For one, right now the transactions are
primarily between vendors, NDs and RDs but not becoming popular with
sub-distis or the smaller resellers under them. In many cases, these
small players do not even have manpower with the requisite skillsets
to handle or manage websites or conduct transactions through them. In
many cases, particularly in the upcountry markets, there are often
severe connectivity and bandwidth pressure; last but not the least,
it's the non-availability of local language interface online that
acts as a hindrance. You would expect a partner from Mehsana or
Tirunelveli to be comfortable dealing only in Gujarati or Tamil
respectively. Till that happens, the widespread usage of online by
the entire channel community will remain a chimera only.