The DQ Week Tech Caravan : Enterprise Ludhiana

The DQWeek has successfully completed its last leg of Tech Caravan on March 28 in the city of Ludhiana. The first phase of Tech Caravan started in the month of January covering 10 cities of India. The last edition saw the attendance of more than 65 key partners of Ludhiana.

The event was held at the Le Baron hotel, located at the heart of the city, which is precisely close to the IT market of Ludhiana. Despite of having a Punjab bandh on the 'D' day, Ludhiana partners participated with full zeal.

Talking about the Ludhiana market. It has more than 600 organized and unorganized partners, largely distributors and retailers. The channel partners are driven by sectors like corporate, home users and education institutes. According to distributors like Ingram Micro, Supertron and Redington, Ludhiana is considered to be the largest and strongest IT market across Punjab after Delhi.

This market is feeding or supplying material to smaller cities like Bhatinda, Amritsar, Sangrur and Jalandhar. On the flip side Ludhiana regional distributors, retailers and resellers are facing several local issues like margin operating price, price undercutting and many more. Therefore to discuss on these talk of the town issues, The DQWeek conducted a healthy panel discussion, which comprised of various vendors, distributors, retailers and distributors.

The event was sponsored by ERP company Ramco, security provider ESET, Uniline and Boxlight projectors in association with ACE Ludhiana.

Addressing the partners Ashish Dave of Ramco India introduced ERP based cloud model and talked about how partners can associate with the company and generate more margins by offering to verticals like discrete manufacturing, retail and health sectors.

During the presentation of Boxlight by Sukhwinder Singh Sran, partners were bowled over by the interactive and multimedia projector range. The company is also scouting for more partners locally.

Apart from informative presentation by sponsors. ACE Ludhiana joint secretary Gurpreet Singh Jagdev also addressed the gathering and counted the key achievements of the new team. He also hinted that the association is likely to bring its first of kind of directory, and blood donation camps are in offing. Above all, the initiative taken by ACE to form a Punjab based state association-Punjab Computer Traders of Association was also discussed at the event.

Lastly, the key attraction of the event was its panel discussion, which was moderated by Jagdev. The MOP issue was the most debated topic of the night. All partners highlighted their concerns and how their business are getting affected due to this. Rajan Vohra of August Marketing demanded for HP, Intel and Acer's local representative to form a transparent guidelines and hire an agency to keep a check on the MOP disturbance caused by vendors and small partners. Saurabh Puri, regional sales manager, HP India assured partners to take strict action against such culprits through its new payout scheme.

The other topic which is plaguing the IT system is confusion over consumer and commercial products of vendors. Again partners spoke about how vendors are selling consumers products to the commercial customers vis-a-vis consumer. They intended solution of demarcation of the products as both products have no price gap and configuration are also the same.

The last topic of discussion was degrowth of components, pushing notebook business. As a result assembled market has gone down by 30% in Ludhiana and forcing assembled players to shift their focus to branded notebook business. The growing imbalance is further spoiling the market of established players and increasing the defaulters cases.

While raising a very pertinent question to Ashutosh Mehrotra of Intel, Sunny, the past president of ACE Ludhiana suggested a CPU from Intel's side which will allow components partners to remain in the business. Rather giving any end to this problem, Mehrotra called it more of a macroeconomic issue. Nevertheless, he said Intel is coming up with all-in-one solution for assembled players.

The association also decided to continue these topics to be discussed at various forums. "The association is also planning to form a separate committee to work on these issues," concluded Jagdev.