Manpower education is need of the hour for channels

Education on cutting edge technologies is a critical factor when it comes to
proper functioning of channels and appropriate measures should be taken to
ensure education of people involved with reselling.

While dwelling upon the issue of manpower education for channels, Anil Sethi,
Country Manager (PCD Channels), IBM India stated this. He was speaking at a
panel discu-ssion on business strategies for sol-ution providers, organized by
DQCI.

Speaking at the issue of nonavaila-bility of skilled Linux systems manpower–Alok
Gupta, Director, Samtech Infonet, said, "When it comes to manpower
education, you need to do the gap analysis and analyze the market. Because of
its community development approach, Linux is not that revenue-friendly. So it
becomes quite difficult to provide services around an open source
platform," he added.

On the other hand commenting on the software giant–Microsoft’s strategy,
he said that Microsoft invests heavily on training and certification programs
and the result is that we have a lot of people who are well-trained on Microsoft
environments.

At a time when it is becoming hard to fish out the best talent when it comes
to high end technologies like Wi-Fi, Sethi suggested that vendors should jointly
conduct interview with channel partners.

"This is a good idea and we are ready to implement it. We can mutually
conduct inter-views and select deserving candidates. This way we can have best
of both the worlds," he added.

Talking about the hot areas in the near future, Gupta said that Security
would continue to catch eye-balls of the industry.

The other panelists consisted of Sanjeev Wad, Country Ma-nager (Com-mercial
Cha-nnel), HP In-dia and Anil Gupta, Dire-ctor, Artek Enterprises. Prasanto K
Roy, Chief Editor, DQ Channels India, moderated the discussion.

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