SGI signs Allied, Cerebra and CMS as partners

SGI India has signed Allied Digital Services, Cerebra Integrated Technologies and CMS Computers as its new partners. While Allied has a strong customer base in the pharmaceutical sector, Cerebra and CMS have large clients amongst corporates and government departments.

Addressing resellers at the second India partner meet, Prasad V Medury, MD, SGI India, urged participants to "sell differentiation" of SGI products. He called upon partners to stress on features and desist from selling on prices.

SGI wants its new partners to provide the reach for its expertise in high-performance technical computing and visualization in market segments where the latter have a stronghold.

"We want to achieve a growth of 30 percent during this fiscal," said Prasad. This, if achieved, would be six percent more than what was achieved in 2000-01. He expects SGI's 20 partners to contribute to this growth by solutions selling.

SGI admitted that manufacturing segment, where it had a marketshare of 30.5 percent, was facing a slowdown. But it is confident that other segments including government, telcos, media and sciences would make up for the slower demand in manufacturing. Currently, SGI has 25.5 percent marketshare in the telecom sector, 16.5 percent in sciences--including education and research, 16 percent in media and 11.5 percent in the government sector.

Due to the US sanctions, SGI could not sell to the government departments during the last fiscal in a big way. Now with the news that the US government has lifted the sanctions, it expects big growth in this segment. Said Avinash Fotedar, Director (Marketing & Channels), SGI India, "We expect the growth to come from government spending on weather forecasting and energy exploration where we offer high-end solutions."

Growth is also expected to come from services business which contributes 35 percent of the revenue, while the rest comes from products.

(CNS)