Tandberg enhances India focus

Tandberg Data is gearing up to strengthen its position in the India.
Realizing the potential that lay within the Indian market, the company is
planning to enhance its existing channel structure and looking forward to expand
its channel base.

Bharat Kumar, VP-Sales and Marketing, Asia Pacific, Japan and Middle East,
Tandberg Data mentioned, “While various markets across the world are feeling the
effects of recession, India has weathered the storm very well. The market here
is showing positive signs. There is a strong demand for technology and buyers
are confident of their purchases. Therefore, we are planning to increase our
focus on the Indian market by investing in our channel.”

Talking about the lack of visibility of Tandberg in the Indian market till
now, Kumar said, “It is true that Tandberg has not been prominent in India for
the last few years. We are not a household company. HP and IBM have huge brand
positioning and commercial exposure but they have huge marketing budgets and we
cannot compete with them.”

He further mentioned that in the current scenario, Tandberg simply wants to
support its channel so that the company can position itself strongly in the
market. On a global level, Tandberg has 20,000 channel partners. In India, it
has three national distributors that include Ingram, Inflow and Store IT.
Tandberg is planning to increase the number of channel partners and the company
is planning to recruit another 20 channel partners across the country.

Elaborating on company's challenges, he said, “Educating and training channel
partners is one of the issues of concern. Selling the product is not the right
way to promote a brand. We have to educate our partners to help them in
positioning our brand. There are multiple new products in the storage space and
in the near future, Tandberg would come out with combinations of software and
hardware appliances that would be a complete disk solution.”