Western Welcome

In September 1996, the DQ Week was born in Chennai when the first edition was launched from this southern city. Within a year in August 1997, the Delhi edition also became a reality. The two editions currently reach out to nearly 14,000 channel partners in the entire north, east and the southern parts of India.

But all these years, we were missing out the western region comprising of highly industrialized states like Maharashtra, Gujarat and Goa. We are now plugging this gap by bringing out the Mumbai edition from this week.

This third edition of The DQ Week comes from the over 20 year old Cyber Media (India) Ltd which pioneered the publication of IT magazines in the country. Amongst its stable are magazines like Dataquest, PC Quest, Voice & Data, Computers@Home, DQ Channels India, and BioSpectrum, all of which are leaders in their respective fields and are well respected by the entire IT community.

The Mumbai edition of The DQ Week will bring you news every Monday morning. Although their will be a strong focus on news from Mumbai--India's commercial capital--the other places in the region will certainly not be neglected. Rather, there will be a heavy dose of news from the other parts of Maharashtra as well as Gujarat.

Special emphasis will be made to ensure that we carry a lot of stuff which will be of direct or indirect benefit to the vast
channel community which is doing business in the western region. In fact, one whole page has been devoted to them which carries street prices of a number of IT products, upcoming tender details, etc. Then there is one more page which gives details about new products introduced by different vendors. This will come in very handy for all the dealers who are always on the look out to add to their portfolio of IT products which they can offer to their customers.

More than three-fourths of the PCs sold in the country pass through the hands of the dealers; in fact, a number of PC vendors as a policy do not sell directly to the end user at all, rather preferring to work through the dealers. And a city like Delhi has almost 500 dealers in just the Nehru Place market, ditto for Lamington Road in Mumbai. PCs are not the end all. Rather, all these dealers sell almost anything under the sun which is connected to PCs, like printers, scanners, modems, monitors, hard drives, UPS, all kinds of software packages etc.

But unfortunately, till date there hasn't been much media focus on the dealers in the western region, something they certainly deserve. The DQ Week, we hope, should be of immense benefit to this vibrant community.

All in all, the whole Indian IT industry leans on the shoulders of these channel partners who will have an even more important role to play in the years to come. And recognizing the importance of this segment, we dedicate the latest edition of The DQ Week to the entire dealer community. Welcome aboard.