Iomega to appoint 100 REV partners for corporate biz

Portable storage solutions major Iomega is betting big on its revo-lutionary

removable hard disk drive-REV. Positioned mainly for the corporate market, the

company is banking on chann-els to make it happen. Iomega is creating a new

channel struc-ture to exclusively deal with REV and is in the process of

appointing 100 REV partners across the country, before this year-end.

"We are embarking on a new program and the channel partners (REV

partners) for corporate market would bring in a significant revenue within the

next two years, increasing our corporate marketshare," elaborated DR

Bhaskaran, the newly-appointed Business Development Manager (India & Middle

East) of Iomega Pacific Pte Ltd. His appointment comes in the wake of Iomega's

expansion plan for India and it is a newly created post, as for the first time

Iomega is app-ointing a direct representative for Indian sub-continent.

REV is a revolutionary rem-ovable hard disk drive develop-ed and patented by

Iomega. It comes with a storage capacity of 35/90 GB and available at an

economical price, giving cost-advantage on total cost of ownership (TCO). It is

eight times faster when compared with the relative product available in the

industry, and it is mainly positioned against tape and DAT drives. REV media

comes with a five-year warranty and 30-year lifetime reliability, and the media

can be re-written up to one million times.

"We are doing lots of activities around REV and we are planning to

capture a significant marketshare in the corporate segment with this product, in

the next two years," added Bhaskaran.

As REV calls for better understanding of technology to position it well among

the customers, Iomega will invest on the partners to train their executives

(five executives of each partner). Meanwhile, the company is adopting a

three-pronged strategy to create more awareness about REV among the

distributors, channels and end-users.

"Channels are very impor-tant to us and they bring more than 80 percent

of revenue for the company. We are increasing our channel strength on an

on-going basis and currently, we have 175 Iomega Certified Partners (ICP) in the

country, who market our products to the entire reseller community. We are

constantly engaged with them by doing lots of promotional activities and

awareness programs, besides conducting schemes regularly. We are also providing

mark-eting and product support, by giving demo units to them," he detailed.

S Gopikrishna


Chennai