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Internet? No Thanks

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DQW Bureau
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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 style="text-decoration: none;"> size="3"> style="font-weight: normal;">2B

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.

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style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none;"> color="#000000">However,

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.
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