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Westcon, a distribution arm of the $5
billion Datatech Group, has notched up global revenue of $3 billion
with the aim of doubling that in the next four years. Closer home,
the company registered $102 million growing at around 50 percent over
last year. “Our revenue from the Indian market grew from Rs 300
crore to around Rs 470 crore. For the coming year, we are aiming at
achieving 100 percent growth in this market,” said Rajiv
Unnikrishnan, Business Head, Westcon India.
Westcon has two other sister concerns
namely,
which primarily handles the Cisco business for the
company, and Inflow, which is another distributor in the Indian IT
supply chain landscape. Currently, the company has around nine
principal vendors on board, including names like Motorola, Zebra for
enterprise mobility; Blue Coat, Sonicwall, F5 and Bigfix for
security; and Extreme and Motorola Wireless for networking.
Unnikrishnan explained the value that Westcon brings as a value-added
distributor, “There is an expectation from the market for the
distributor to be more involved in the go-to-market strategy from a
technical, marketing, customer and channel perspective. Where Westcon
adds real value as a company, is the level of involvement we show
with all the partners we engage with. From a channels point of view,
we enable them with pre-sales and post-sales support and also help
them with implementation and deployment. Besides this, we also
conduct training for our resellers.”
Westcon presently has a reseller base
of around 180 partners of which more than 20 are national SIs; more
than 15 are regional SIs; around five sub-distributors and with the
rest making up local SIs. Westcon has more than 40 employees working
across eight office locations including the four metros, Bengaluru,
Hyderabad, Kochi and Pune.
Sharing briefly about some of the plans
the company has, Unnikrishnan commented, “We plan on increasing our
product portfolio along the existing lines we are already in. We wish
to add other brands, which do not compete with our current base of
principals. We already have products like UTMs and would like to
enhance our security offering with quality anti-virus, firewall and
IPS products. In networking, we would like to add a structured
cabling brand and are looking to sign on three more principals this
year.” Staying with the expansion theme, Unnikrishnan also revealed
the plans for the reseller base and company expansion, “Talking
about our reseller base, we plan to increase this by 20 percent over
the coming year. We also wish to expand our geographic presence to
Bangladesh and Sri Lanka and for the Indian market, set up an office
in Ahmedabad.”
Dwelling on other aspects like the
go-to-market strategy, Unnikrishnan ideated, “We would like to
execute our marketing to our channels and end-customers very well for
the coming year. Until now, we have been managing, but we want to do
better at the way we conduct our events, send out EDMs and also do
our lead generation activities.” The services space is also an area
that Westcon hopes to give its attention. “We recently tied up with
Blue Coat as its technical services partner and our employees were
being evaluated for training others on some high-end devices. After
getting trained, we wish to pass this on to our partners as well.”
Finally, Unnikrishan revealed some of
the challenges in the market, “There are still some issues with
aspects like credit given, working capital and cash flows from our
resellers end and often we have to deal with delayed payments. Also
there has been volatility in the foreign exchange market and being
importers of these IT products, we tend to get negatively affected by
the frequent fluctuations that occur. Although, the year was better
than last year, we are yet to see the 2008 levels return and there is
a lot of fear of another round of recession hitting the economy,”
signed off Unnikrishnan.