The loudest get the fastest service, complain Rajkot partners

There is a lot of simmering resentment against vendors with respect to the
protracted turnaround time for dead on arrival (DoA) issues amongst the channel
fraternity of Rajkot. This came pouring out during The DQ Week IT Panchayat held
in the city on March 21, 2009 at Hotel Imperial Palace.

The event was an open forum discussion between over 80 channel partners and
representatives from leading distribution companies -Alap Talati, Location Head,
Redington India; Mukesh Agarwal, Branch Manager, Rashi Peripherals; Deven
Kothari, Manager Channel Sales, Neoteric Infomatique and Rajesh Rawal, RSM-Upcountry,
Ingram Micro India. Samir Desai, Secretary, Rajkot Channel Traders Association
spoke for the channel at the forum, which was moderated by Vinita Bhatia,
Executive Editor, DQ Channels.

Flagging off the debate on DoA, Jatin Shah of DSK Infotek complained about
the lengthy turnaround time for the getting replacements. “It takes several days
and sometime months to get replacements for DoA cases. As a practise we have
started sending emails to everyone we know in the reseller, sub-disty,
distributor and vendor company about each such issue in the hope that it will
get resolved quicker,” he added.

(L-R) Samir Desai, Secretary, Rajkot Channel Traders Association; Alap Talati, Location Head, Redington India; Mukesh Agarwal, Branch Manager Rashi Peripherals; Deven Kothari, Manager Channel Sales, Neoteric Infomatique and Rajesh Rawal, RSM-Upcountry, Ingram Micro India

Channel partner attend the IT Panchayat event

To this Rawal pointed out that instead of doing this, partners needed to
understand who were the responsible people for getting the issue resolved. “In
most cases, partners are not even aware of the service policy for different
vendors,” he said. Mukesh Agarwal added that in some cases where the vendor had
empowered the distributor to handle the service, the partner can simply escalate
the case to the local distributor representative to get speedy resolution.

Vimal Patel of Keval Infotech quipped that in Rajkot most dealers managed to
resolve the service related issues on the basis of their relationship with their
immediate suppliers; be in the reseller, the sub-distys or distributor. “We have
learnt that the best way to resolve these issues is by banking on our long
standing relationship with our suppliers. If that does not help then we fight it
out by not paying them till our issues get resolved,” he added.

Most of the assembled partners also noted that they did not have any issues
with Rashi Peripherals and Neoteric Infomatique as much as they did have with
Ingram Micro and Redington India. Said Dharmesh Pattani of Nibble Infolink, “The
Rashi and Neoteric people are regularly in touch with us and that is why we do
not have too many issues with them. There have been times when they have
replaced DoA and defective products from their inventory on a case to case
basis.”

Other partners claimed that this was the level of support they expected from
other distributors as well. To a complaint about dealers finding it difficult to
become registered Ingram partners, Rakesh Rawal promised to share the details on
the registration process with the local association's executive council.

The underlined demand of the partners at the event made repetitively was that
they needed better and increased interaction from distributors as well as better
support from vendors when it came to resolving their DoA and post-sales support
issues.

The event also included presentations by the sponsors, namely-Emerson,
Gigabyte, GoIP.