SME Channels May issue

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Philips Commits to the Indian market /16 www.smechannels.com

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Global Infonet: “Within last 3 years, we have grown more than 100% year on year”

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SME CHAT /51 GoIP: The Idiosyncrasy

GUEST IN TOWN

lies in Creating Great Value Add

THE

PROMISE OF MANAGED PRINT SERVICES MARKET IN INDIA

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McAfee: McAfee to Focus More on Partner Enablemen

The managed print services market is still nascent in India but there is a huge potential as the market matures and more vendors begin to offer services. /28

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Tally Launches an Online Apps Store /10 www.smechannels.com

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Tally: “Tally.ERP 9 was simple to use and had advanced functionality”

GUEST TALK

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CANON: Strategy of Defence and Attack Help You in Bad Times

SME CHAT

/48

RSA: Access Control and Encryption are the Most Important Factors

MY EXPERIENCE EDITORIAL

IT’S TIME TO ACT WISE SANJAY MOHAPATRA editor@smechannels.com

IT IS BETTER to be careful now before things slip under your feet. Two things are happening at a time. One side: inflation is on rise and on the other side vendors are becoming aggressive in the market. Even the companies which hail their rout from Japan including NEC, Panasonic, Canon, Epson, etc. are launching huge product lines. They want to show as if they have not been affected by what happened in Japan. Even though these companies are facing challenges in their home turf, they find it is suitable time in India to invest. Is it a suitable time or business tactic? It is the recognition of true and professional company. They do not get ruffled by any adversity.

Apart from all Japanese companies, vendors from US including, Cisco, Juniper, CA, HP, IBM and

Silicon Power MicroCro SDHC SILICON POWER SDHC Class4 32GB card is one of the high-capacity and high-performing cards in the small form factor range.

SDHC is the new generation of SD cards that can reach up to an enormous 32GB capacity. Silicon Power’s SDHC Class4 32GB memory card provides mechanical write-protection switch; supports Content Protection for Recordable Media (CPRM) and it is lifetime warranty. In addition, Silicon Power’s SDHC Class4 32GB memory card can store your MP3 music file, high-resolution photos, and video clips as well.

Silicon Power’s SDHC Class4 32GB memory card will definitely upgrade your high-quality digital life.

We have recorded video and taken photographs for last many days but still there is space.

SAP have launched new solutions. The biggest news is IBM’s forayed into the virtual Desktop segment, which is good for the industry. It will stamp the much needed importance on VDI solutions, which people or market otherwise, was seeing it as poor alternative to the full-fledged PCs. Even though many companies have been propagating for VDI solutions but it was more restricted to the secondary priority of enterprises. With IBM at the forefront this industry will get much need fillip.

Coming to the moot question, whether apprehension of inflation and rising cost should impel the customers to buy faster or hold on their decision? Probably, it might go either way. We saw an example of long queues on the petrol filling stations on the eve of petrol hike by 5 rupees. But this may not be applicable to the technology buying. But it is one of the factors to the market swing.

Of course it is irrelevant to the MNCs as they have outlaid budget for the year but at least to the customers who are on the verge of taking their decision, they will surely be disturbed. People actually become panic thinking they will have to pay more for everything. They go with a particular budget.

Even the SMEs also behave in the same way.

Therefore this is the time to be very calculative and take steps prudently. Unlike previous months this is not very bad but you never know what will happen to the future for next couple of months. It might be worse.

SPECIFICATIONS It can reach up to an enormous 32GB capacity.

FINAL WORDING We found it gives a tremendous result. It is very smooth in recording, transforming video, photo and voice notes to and from the camera. Only thing we are concerned about is its support if it goes wrong while fully loaded.

OVERALL RATING

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www.smechannels.com

india’s first IT magazine for sme business

ACHIEVERS’

AWARDS GOLDEN SALUTE TO THE PERFORMERS OF INDIAN IT INDUSTRY

2ND SEPTEMBER 2011 I N T E R C O N T I N E N TA L E R O S , NEHRU PLACE, NEW DELHI

B E S T

SME IT ENTREPRENEURES SOLUTION VENDORS PRODUCT AWARDS SOLUTION PROVIDERS

BOOK YOUR DATE AND PARTICIPATE CONTACT: M Raj <raj@smechannels.com> 91-11-9313891660 6/101-102, Kaushlya Park, Hauz Khas, New Delhi-16; Phone: 91-11-46151993 / 91-11-41657670

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contents

MAY VOLUME 02 ISSUE 03

2011

ER COV RY STO

india’s first IT magazine for sme business

Publisher: Sanjib Mohapatra Editor: Sanjay Mohapatra Executive Editor: Smruti Chaudhury Copy Editor: Neil D’Souza Reporter: Neeta Israni Design & Development: Gagandeep Miglani Visualizer: Manas Ranjan Lead Visualizer: DPR Choudhary MARKETING Senior Manager: M Raj Executive- Marketing: Rajat Kumar Circulation and Printing: Panchanan Bhoi SALES CONTACTS Delhi 6/101, Kaushalya Park, Hauz Khas New Delhi-110016 Phone: 91-11-46151993 / 9313891660 E-mail: raj@smechannels.com Bangalore Subrat S NO.661, 10th Main, 5th cross, 4th Block, Koramangala, Behind Old Maharaja, Bangalore-560034 Phone: 9886107294 Mumbai Hemal Shah B/14, Neel Ashish 92, J.P.road, Andheri (West) Mumbai - 400058 info@smechannels.com Kolkata S Subhendu BC-286, Laxmi Apartment, Kestopur Kolkata-700101 Phone: 9674804389 EDITORIAL OFFICE Delhi: 6/102, Kaushalya Park, New Delhi-

The promise of managed Print services market in India

110016, Phone: 91-11-41055458

The managed print services market is still nascent in India but there is a huge potential as the market matures and more vendors begin to offer services.

Bengalore-560047

/28

SME CHAT Global Infonet /42

“Within last 3 years, we have grown more than 100% year on year”

SME BIZ

BenQ /44 DLP projectors moving ahead & BenQ shows the way

info@smechannels.com Bangalore 136/ 9, Ground Floor, Eden Crest Apartment, Grape Garden, Ejipura Vivek Nagar PS news@smechannels.com

Printed, Published and Owned by Sanjib Mohapatra Place of Publication: 6/101-102, Kaushalya Park, Hauz Khas New Delhi-110016

RSA /48

“Access Control and Encryption are the Most Important Factors of any Good Security Strategy”

GUEST TALK VP Sajeevan /24 Strategy of Defence and Attack Help You in Bad Times

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more inside Editorial~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 04 Snippets~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 08 Partner Programme~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 26 Case Study Tally~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 38 Trend Setter ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~40, 51 Partner Corner ~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 47 Guest In Town ~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 50 Products~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 52

Phone: 91-11-46151993 / 41055458 Printed at Karan Printers, F-29/2, 1st floor, Okhla Industrial Area, Phase-2, New Delhi 110020, India.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced without the prior written permission from the publisher.

Subscription: Rs.200 (12 issues) All payments favouring: Accent Info Media Pvt. Ltd.

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SNIPPETS PRODUCT | CHANNEL | CONSULTING | SERVICES

for more log on to smechannels.com

IBM Breaks Through in Virtual Desktop Solution Bringing cloud to the client level, IBM unveils Virtual Desktop, a workforce mobility offering that provides anytime, anywhere access to personal desktops from mobile

devices including tablets, net books, laptops and thin clients.

The IBM Virtual Desktop allows Windows or Linux desktops to be hosted and managed centrally, thus

lowering the cost and complexity of managing PC environments through rapid deployment of new applications, automatic software updates and reducing the need

for help desk requests. The Virtual Desktop for Smart Business, which includes VERDE software from Virtual Bridges, can be deployed on a customer’s own infrastructure or through a Business Partner “private cloud” hosted environment. Available in India through IBM Business Partners such as ZSL and Ingram Micro, IBM Virtual Desktop V2.2 now enables users to enjoy a real high-definition experience while accessing audio and video files.

“As IBM’s latest smarter work offering, the Virtual Desktop is a First in Series of Integrated Solutions for Midmarket Businesses.

VDI, expands the time and place where people can access information, contribute ideas and support customers,” said Anoop Nambiar, Country Manager – Business Partner Organization, IBM India/ SA, “Together with our partners, we’re bringing the power of virtual computing to mid-sized companies seeking greater agility while freeing up critical IT resources.”

“IBM Virtual Desktop Solution addresses the growing complexities and business risks that midsize client’s face today -- helping them to achieve a secured work environment at a lowered TCO,” said Mr. Bimal Das- Senior Director Ingram Micro India Limited.

Delta Expands foot Print in India Delta India Electronics has inaugurated its new green corporate office in Gurgaon. As part of Delta’s expansion plans in India, the new eco-friendly corporate office supports Delta’s commitment to the environment. This facility also doubles as a manufacturing unit for Delta display solutions.

Delta has invested in India since 2003. The company currently has three manufacturing units located in Rudrapur, Gurgaon, Pondicherry and two R&D centers in Gurgaon and Bangalore. Over the past few years, Delta has become a renowned name in telecom power solutions, uninterruptible power systems (UPSs), display solutions, industrial automation, and components, with many top-tier clients for its various product lines in Indian market.

Dalip Sharma, Managing Director, Delta India Electronics, said, “Delta India Electronics is aggressively moving forward, keeping pace with the growing Indian market. We strive to be a company focused on improving our processes, innovation, product quality, professional services and solutions.”

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Outstanding Performance For Less.

Discover excellent print quality, exceptional value, great ease-of-use and outstanding reliability with the Dell 1130n - itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s everything you need in an entry network printer at a price thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s as competitive as it can get!

High Performance: Up to 24 A4-sized pages per minute.

High Productivity: Monthly duty cycle of up to 12,000 pages Lasting Value: Low cost per page and 250-sheet covered paper tray

For enquiries, please contact Copyright 2011 Dell Inc. All rights reserved.

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Supertron Electronics Ltd., Mr. Bankim on 09891672350 or write to bankim.dlh@supertronindia.com

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SNIPPETS

Ricoh India Forays into IT Services Space Foraying into IT services market, Ricoh India has acquired Noidabased IT company, Momentum Infocare. With about 100 employees and revenue of Rs.311million, Momentum offers a comprehensive range of IT enabled Services.

Tetsuya Takano, MD & CEO, Ricoh India Ltd. Says, “With the changing business environment, customers are looking for products and services that offer quality, increase efficiencies, and have short turnaround time with prompt after-sales service. The fast-changing information technology has brought about drastic changes in the working of any organization. Ricoh has completely aligned itself with this transformation. As part of our global mandate and strategy, Ricoh has been making rapid strides in offering advanced solutions by acquiring the skill set and technological knowledge that help our clients to deliver better results. Ricoh envisages over 25% of our new businesses coming from such synergies. The markets for Ricoh US and Europe have also growing phenomenally primarily because of such initiatives.”

Gurpirt Singh, Director, Momentum Infocare remarked, “We think that now is the right time to join forces with Ricoh India Ltd., because there is a huge opportunity to leverage each other’s strengths and achieve our long term vision of becoming leading system integrators in the country, delivering happiness to customers, employees, and vendors. Ricoh’s presence across the country and strong leadership team would ensure that together we are able to achieve this much faster.

Takano added, “Ricoh India’s business acquisition with Momentum Infocare will be significant in nature. In Momentum Infocare we have found complete synergy which will help us cater to our clients better. Momentum Infocare has been registering a very healthy growth over the past years. With this alignment, Ricoh’s vision is to offer package of IT services to clients that would bring efficiencies in work, reduce cost and bring a complete turnaround in the working of the company.”

LG Monitors to be Available at a Higher Price LG Electronics India Private Limited (LGEIL) has announced price hike in its monitors owing to the constant escalation of input costs. Due to increase in price of LCD & LED panels in the international market, LG intends to hike its monitor prices in the India market.

Dr Y.V.Verma, COO, LGEIL said, “We’ve always believed in providing our customers with products at best prices. Now, due to continuous increase in panel prices internationally, it has become imperative for us to consider the price hike in India. Though we’ve been absorbing the panel cost which contributes approximately 70 per cent of a finish set cost for the past three months but it’ll become difficult to avoid this change in the market prices. We hope that our partners & patrons will cooperate with us in this situation.”

Considering the current scenario, the panel price increase trend will continue till September 2011 and would impact the overall set prices. The impact of the price hike would be seen in all LG monitors staring from 15.6” to 23”inches (LCD, LED, and Monitor TV) by at least Rs.3% to 5% depending upon models.

MY POINT

“The digital information explosion is not relevant to large enterprises alone.

Information technologies are becoming more inclusive in an SMB organisation’s core strategy for delivering value.”

MANOJ CHUGH

PRESIDENT, EMC INDIA AND SAARC

Tally Launches an Online Apps Store Tally Solutions has launched ‘TallyShop’ - an online application store. ‘TallyShop’ addresses the needs of customers who want to deploy ‘ready to use’ add-on applications that provide specific functions to their existing ERP at affordable prices. The effort and time taken to customize is reduced to zero as these application have been developed, tested and tried.

It is truly a unique initiative to reduce cycle time and lubricate the sales process. The add on applications are priced at INR 180, some even offered free of cost, and will be available to customers from over the world in about 100 countries where Tally.ERP 9 is increasingly being adopted. Customers will be able to choose from 18 categories under which these add on applications have been featured.

Digisol Unveils Wireless Green Broadband Router Digisol has introduced its new Wireless Green Broadband Router DG-BR4000NG. This new broadband router enables communication between wireless and wired notebooks/desktop computers in the network and it also allows Internet connectivity to the network. The DG-BR4000NG wireless broadband router can provide wireless data transmission rate up to 150Mbps which enhances the sharing of files, photo, audio, video and gaming experience over wireless network. DG-BR4000NG is truly a high performance and cost-effective solution for your home and small business environments.

DG-BR4000NG is an energy-efficient router which helps to save power by using advanced power saving technology.

Cisco Unveils Linksys E4200 in India Cisco has introduced ‘Linksys E4200’ in India, the latest and most advanced member of the Linksys E-series family offering network speeds of up to 450Mbps and a new innovative design.

It’s ideal for home entertainment – delivering the power you need for HD video streaming and connects all network devices in the home including laptops, smartphones, iPads, internet enabled TVs, Blu-ray players and game consoles. E4200 is available in over 2000 stores across India, including in large format retailers like Reliance Digital, Croma, Staples, and Hypercity. Thanks to the SpeedBoost technology this superior performance is made available throughout.

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For sales query please contact: North: Mayank Singh I Email: mayank.singh@mmd-p.com I Mobile +91-9654455821; East: Nil Bhowmik I Email: nil.bhowmik@ mmd-p.com I Mobile +91- 9831457341; West: Yogesh Mayekar I Email: Yogesh.mayekar@mmd-p.com I Mobile +91- 9820390999; South: Kuldeep Ramaiya I Email: Kuldeep.Ramaiya@mmd-p.com I Mobile +91-9310092727 Customer care Toll free no. : 18004256396 / SMS “PHILIPS” to 56677 / india.callcentre@mmd-p.com

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SNIPPETS

Acer Forays into Tablets Business Acer launches tablets under the ICONIA series.

Acer today launched its new range of five tablets under the brand ICONIA, a new concept device set to add a brand new tablet experience for highly intuitive all-point multi-touch functionality, which means user’s can navigate seamlessly using all their fingers.

Powered by Google Android Honeycomb 3.0 and Windows 7 platform, tthe end user price of Acer ICONIA Tab A500 the 10” Android is expected to be priced at Rs 27,990/- and the 10” Windows HP with the portable keyboard and Windows 7 Operating System is expected to be priced at MOP Rs 32,499/-

LENOVO FORTIFIES ITS ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE Lenovo India has announced new appointments to its management team in a move to strengthen the organization. “We’re focused on driving speed, performance and efficiency with a corporate structure that makes us even faster and even more customer focused. Going forward, we will continue to introduce game-changing products, quality service and support and enhance our go to market strategy through channel.

I’m confident the new team will help steer Lenovo towards its business goals,” said Amar Babu, Managing Director, Lenovo India.

Rajesh Thadani who has been leading the Consumer business unit reporting to Alex Li, will now independently handle the segment. Rajiv Rao joins Lenovo to lead the SMB business. Rajiv has over 18 years of experience and has worked with Pepsi, HP & Dell before starting his own venture from where he joins us. Rahul Agarwal will continue to lead the Relational business.

Similarly, Hunter Zhou joins Lenovo as Head, Services Support, Lenovo India.

Akamai & Riverbed Shake hands on Cloud Akamai Technologies and Riverbed Technology have worked on a joint offering designed to overcome the application performance bottlenecks facing enterprises that leverage public cloud services.

Akamai and Riverbed are announcing their intention to develop a joint application acceleration solution for hybrid cloud networks that leverages a combination of Internet optimization and wide area network (WAN) optimization. The planned solution would be designed to accelerate cloud-based applications. Akamai and Riverbed offerings are already used separately today by more than 13,000 organizations, including by Fortune 500 businesses worldwide. Akamai’s globally-distributed network of more than 90,000 servers deployed in the cloud provides route, protocol and application layer optimizations for the Internet, and serves roughly 30 per cent of all Web traffic. Riverbed has thousands of appliances deployed within enterprise networks providing network, application and storage optimizations for the WAN.

McAfee Forays into Cloud Security Platform McAfee has announced the McAfee Cloud Security Platform, an innovative new approach to helping organizations safely and efficiently take advantage of Cloud computing. The new platform achieves this by securing all content and data traffic–including email, web and identity traffic–moving between an organization and the Cloud.

“Once you move data or applications to the Cloud, you essentially lose most–if not all–of your security visibility, which most organizations find unacceptable. By securing the data and traffic before it travels to or through the Cloud, we help businesses extend their security practices and policies into the Cloud,” said Marc Olesen, Senior Vice President & General Manager, Content and Cloud Security at McAfee. Another key aspect of ensuring Cloud security is making sure organizations identify data that should or should not be moved to the Cloud. Using McAfee’s Data Loss Prevention solution, organizations can first understand where its data resides, classify that in terms of importance, build policies to protect that.

Om Nanotech Starts toll free Helpline Om Nanotech launches its all India toll free helpline number as part of its initiative for customer satisfaction. Customers across the country will be able to post queries, lodge complaints and get assistance by just dialling the number ‘18002661140’.

Atul Khosla, Director, Om Nanotech Pvt. Ltd., said, “The helpline is an information forum; the customers can call on the number and avail any required information. We at Om Nanotech assure that our customers get access to the best of services, they become a part of our family and we aim to treat them just like that by providing them a helping hand. Seated in any part of the country, the customers will find our team providing them assistance anytime they require.

Asus Unveils Mobos on Z68 Express chipset ASUS offers a range of new motherboards based on the Intel Z68 Express chipset. The ASUS P8Z68 Series and ROG Maximus IV GENE-Z motherboards exploits the performance benefits of Sandy Bridge technology without compromise, packing more features and new innovations onto the Z68 platform while maintaining unmitigated performance and reliability. These include the universal implementation of LucidLogix Virtu switchable graphics to harness the capabilities of Intel Quick Sync Video for faster video transcoding and the extreme performance of the latest NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards, along with Intel Smart Response Technology to accelerate hard drive performance.

Socomec Organizes Seminar In Metro Cities Socomec has recently organized series of ‘Critical Power Day’ seminar in Chennai, Mumbai and Delhi. The Chennai and Delhi seminar was attended by CIO’s, CTO’s, System Integrators and Business Partners. The session was primarily focused towards explaining the key trends and Challenges in Data centre development and the requirement of green and efficient datacenter to drive Virtualization. In continuation of these two seminars Socomec also organized ‘Critical Power Day’ seminar in Mumbai. The session with the aim to explain Socomec’s in depth study of Industrial applications, their requirements and the need of introducing Masterys IP+ product that having high reliability in harsh environments.

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Fortinet Ranked No.1 in UTM Market IDC names Fortinet as the No.1 in UTM in India for Q4 2010 and the full year of 2010. In order to maintain its market leadership, Fortinet pursues its expansion in India with the appointment of two new Sales Directors, Digvijaysinh Chudasama and Saurabh Chopra, both security market veterans, whose responsibility will be to accelerate market penetration in the following strategic verticals: Government, Defense and Telecommunications.

“The UTM market is recognized as the fastest growing segment of the network security market. In order to maintain market leadership in this rapidly growing and increasingly competitive landscape, it’s critical for us to continue to focus on our technology value proposition and innovation, but also to affirm our strong commitment in the Indian market by increasing our sales and support resources to guarantee customer satisfaction and sustain our growth,” said Vishak Raman, Regional Director for India and SAARC, Fortinet.

In order to deliver on its strategy of more high-end focused sales, Fortinet has added two senior industry specialists to its India team to support and grow business opportunities.

KASPERSKY TO PROTECT SMART PHONES Kaspersky Lab has launched mobile security solution for smartphones and communicators. It helps the users safeguard from malware, network attacks and SMS spam. Not only that it also safeguards the data not to be used by others if the smartphone or communicator fall on to some other’s hand or is lost. The privacy protection feature enabling users to hide (L-R) Jagannath Patnaik, Suk Ling Gun, Thomas Abrahim, and information about any contacts Altaf Halde they want to keep confidential.

The new version now supports the Android and blackberry platforms alongside Symbian and Windows mobile.

Smartphones like Blackberry and Android phones are gaining more and more popularity in the Indian Market. According to a research, Indian consumers are expected popularity to buy 12 million samrtphons in 2011. This growth definitely is a precursor to the number of Trojans and malware that may be aimed at the smartphones. The only way to be sure that the device is protected is to install proactive security software on the device.

Jagannath Patnaik, Director- Channel Sales, Kaspersky lab, South Asia said, “We always listen to our clients’ preference and desires, whether in connection with the capabilities of our solutions, or our distribution channels. ”

EXECUTIVE MOVEMENT

INDIA PC MARKET ACHIVES 6% GROWTH IN Q1 2011

HP has appointed Naresh Shah to serve as Vice President of Engineering, Enterprise Servers, Storage and

ACER, DELL, HP AND LENOVO, THE TOP 4 VENDORS, REPRESENTING 50.4% PC MARKET SHARE (PERCENTAGE OF SHIPMENT)

Networking.

16.7% Dell

12.1% HP

42.5 Others

11.9% Acer

9.7% Lenovo

7.1% HCL India PC Market Share Estimates for Q1 2011 Source: Gartner (May 2011)

The combined deskbased and mobile PC market in India totalled nearly 2.6 million units in the first quarter of 2011, a 6.2 per cent increase over the first quarter of 2010, according to Gartner, Inc.

ViewSonic Technologies has Appointed Ajay Sharma as Country Manager – India. He will be responsible for Driving the business growth and strategic transformation.

Adobe Systems Inc. has appointed Umang Bedi as Managing Director, Sales & Marketing for South Asia. He will lead Adobe’s sales & marketing operations for India and SAARC. Su-kam Power Systems has appointed Brijlal Chandiramani as its director.

Saviance Technologies appoints Kaushik Bellani as the CEO.

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Join Finch Club & get exciting reward. To join Finch Club please log into http://ap.viewsonic.com/in/reseller/

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SNIPPETS

HP UNVEILS Z210 CMT & SFF WORKSTATIONS HP has unveiled its new Z210 CMT and SFF Workstations, 8460w, 8560w and 8760w EliteBook Mobile Workstations.

The announcement demonstrated HP’s commitment to meet real time business demands and provide maximum reliability and performance for the most demanding professional tasks.

“Built for professionals, the HP (L-R) VinayAwasthi, Josh Peterson and Stephen Koo at Z210 workstations with the new Intel the Forefront Workstations Launch in Mumbai Xeon processor, E3 1200 family is changing the definition of the entry-level workstation. This processor’s greatest innovation is how it integrates the CPU and graphics engines on the same die. That means visual and 3-D graphics capabilities that were once only available to entry workstation users with discrete graphics cards will now be accessible to anyone with an entry workstation powered by the Intel Xeon E3 family with Intel HD Graphics P3000(1),” said Ravichandran R- Director, Sales & Marketing, Intel South Asia.

Philips Commits to the Indian market MMD reinforces its presence in the Indian market with the launch of a wide range of new Philips LCD, LED Monitors and Monitor TVs. All Philips monitors introduced in India are packed with Philips proprietary image technologies and features many smart display technologies. HDMI input lets consumers explore the multimedia world in Full HD. LED technology lights up to full, consistent brightness quickly. Intelligent SmartTouch key control responds to the lightest of user touches and coolly illuminates to acknowledge the user commands.

“With the India launch of these products, the next step in our endeavor is to position Philips as one of the leading brand in the PC display market. The Indian market is sophisticated and mature to appreciate high quality, good design and innovative technologies that Philips monitors deliver,” said Benjamin Wong, Managing Director, MMD Singapore.

Gautam Ghosh, Country Director, MMD India says, “These product offerings are carefully selected with the India consumers at heart. We want to give more choice. Our product innovation is driven by market response, and we shall be introducing with more products in the IT display space.”

QNAP Expands QPKG Application Offerings QNAP Systems launches 4 new QPKG add-on applications and 3 updates to the original QPKGs for its NAS customers. These QPKGs give users a versatile NAS covering their need from web applications such as Gallery, to media servers and download utilities consisting of PS3 Media Server, pyLoad, and Transmission. These applications improve a QNAP NAS by enabling it not only as a pure storage server, but also a powerful yet energy-efficient downloading machine, multimedia sharing center to game consoles with transcoding capability, IP TV streaming, online photo sharing server, and an all purposed web server with advanced manageability. QNAP’s QPKG applications are free to download and convenient for end users to install. “The QPKG platform is a great feature for users to explore unlimited possibilities of what a QNAP NAS is capable of,” said James Wu, Product Manager of QNAP.

DIGEST SEAGATE UNVEILS A NEW HDD Seagate has unveiled the world’s first 3.5-inch hard drive featuring 1TB of storage capacity per disk platter, breaking the 1TB areal density barrier to help meet explosive worldwide demand for digital content storage in both the home and the office. Seagate’s GoFlex Desk products are the first to feature the new hard drive, delivering storage capacities of up to 3TB and an areal density of 625 Gigabits per square inch, the industry highest. Seagate is on track to ship its flagship 3.5-inch Barracuda desktop hard drive with 3TBs of storage on 3 disk platters–enough capacity to store up to 120 high-definition movies, 1,500 video games, thousands of photos or virtually countless hours of digital music–to the distribution channel in mid-2011. The drive will also be available in capacities of 2TB, 1.5TB and 1TB.

TRANSCEND LAUNCHES 1TB USB 3.0 PORTABLE HARD DRIVE Transcend launches a powerful, high-capacity portable hard drive, the Super Speed USB 3.0 powered StoreJet 25H3P in India. Exhibiting a sleek ultra portable design, the feature packed StoreJet 25H3P Model boasts ITB of storage capacity, and comes bundled with Transcend Elite data management software, which allows modern users to keep their precious digital content organized, protected and up-to-date. Encompassed in a robust shockproof case, the newly released StoreJet 25H3P offers extra capacity for more downloads and files.

EMC FOCUSES SMES WITH NEW STORAGE SYSTEMS EMC has announced multiple new storage systems and software features– more than 40 new technologies and products in all – including a new family of unified storage systems–EMC VNX – for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), new unified systems for the midrange, new software for its high-end systems and new disk-based backup and recovery and archiving systems. The technologies are part of a multi-billion-dollar investment in storage that positions EMC at the intersection of all the major trends that are driving massive information growth, including cloud computing and Big Data applications.

EPSON TO TOUCH RS.1000 CRORE TURNOVER IN 2015 Epson has launched an exclusive Epson experience Zone first time in Delhi at Nehru Place. The store showcases all the Epson products available including those for home, Commercial and office application.

Samba Moorthy, Senior General Manager, Sales & Marketing, said “Epson achieved a turnover of Rs.506 Crore in the fiscal just completed (2010-11)–a growth of 25 per cent from last year’s turnover of RS 400 Crore”. With ambitious plans in place he said Epson would be confidently targeting the RS 1000 crore mark by 2015, if not earlier. He said retail presence would’ve a very key role to play to ensure the ambitious targets would be met.

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SNIPPETS

Belkin Takes ExeLAN as its RD for Structured Cabling Belkin India appoints ExeLAN Technologies as regional distributor for its structured cabling business. An established distributor and integrator of networking products and solutions, ExeLAN will drive Belkin growth plans for its structured cabling business across the region.

“ExeLAN is an established name in the industry and a perfect choice to drive our growing structured cabling business across all regions,” says Mohit Anand, Managing Director, Belkin India, “Having deployed networking solutions across a wide range of customer applications, ExeLAN understand our business and is ideally positioned to drive demand for our solutions, and scale with our growth,” he added.

“Belkin structured cabling offerings fit perfectly into our growing portfolio of offerings for the networking solutions market and we intend to leverage Belkin product quality to enhance our customer value proposition, across target geographies, “said Mr. Premdoss Samson MD, ExeLan Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

Datacraft changes its name to Dimension Data

WELCOME IOMEGA SCREENPLAY DX HD MEDIA PLAYER Neoteic makes available Iomega ScreenPlay DX HD Media Player line, a family of easy-to-use multimedia devices that changes the way you experience digital entertainment in your home.

With the Iomega ScreenPlay DX HD Media Player, you can access and enjoy videos, movies, photos and music on the Internet as well as content you own–all on your own TV in full 1080p high definition.

The new line-up of Media Players is compatible with the most popular formats, including H.264, WMV and RMVB, as well as being DLNA certified for easy streaming with compatible devices on your home network. Other notable features include DivX Plus HD certification for stunning playback of MKV movies, WiFi capability right out of the box thanks to the included 802.11n adaptor, and a user-friendly remote control featuring a full QWERTY keyboard for fast and easy text entry of online links, websites and more. The ScreenPlay DX product family includes 1TB and 2TB models for consolidating user’s digital entertainment collection in one place, and the Iomega Media Player, which has no onboard storage but the same large screen TV experience with Internet content as well as users own digital entertainment collection.

“With previous generations of our ScreenPlay products, Iomega has become a world leader in sales of high definition media players. The new DX products represent our best ScreenPlay line yet, making it even easier to enjoy your favorite web-based content as well as everything on your home network right from your HD TV. Forget about hunching over the laptop or desktop to enjoy the Web or your own videos, photos and music. The ScreenPlay DX HD Media Player allows you to effortlessly immerse yourself in the Web from the comfort of your couch and your TV. Once you try one of Iomega’s new ScreenPlay DX products, you’ll never go back to the computer for your digital entertainment,” said Praveen Sahai, Director Sales for Iomega in India & SAARC.

Datacraft changes its name to Dimension Data. The change in the brand demonstrates the improvements the company is making to ensure global consistency in its business operations. Dimension Data systems integration business now operates under one brand across 49 countries, simplifying support for its clients and accelerating its ability to serve businesses in a more consistent way.

“The rebranding exercise is an excellent opportunity to reinforce the message to the market that we’re a truly global company. We see more business opportunities as our clients can better leverage our global pool of resources, expertise and client references, in addition to consistent service delivery globally and regionally,” said Kiran Bhagwanani, CEO, Dimension Data India Limited.

neoteric Announces Quarterly Incentive Program

BenQ Chooses Global Infonet as its ND

neoteric offers “Trend Micro BEAT the HEAT” Quarterly incentive program for its Channel partners. It’s a Point based program wherein Trend Micro Products has been assigned points and the channel partners have to accumulate the points. The program is targeted towards to Tier 2 (Crusaders) set of partners and would be valid on purchases made from Authorised Sub-distributors (Titans) as well as neoteric. At the end of the Quarter basis the amount of points accumulated by the partner, the partner can redeem those points against cool gifts that are on offer for each slab. The program is an extension of “Be the Invincible” the loyalty program that was launched in January. As per the earlier program, this program will also be run thru be the invincible partner portal at www.neotericpartners.co.in.

BenQ India has appointed Global Infonet Distribution as National Distributor for Digital Camera business. With the appointment of Global, BenQ will expand its presence across India and also reach out to consumers in Metros, Tier II and Tier III towns with its latest range of Digital Cameras.

Global, with its focus on distribution of Consumer Electronics, PC systems, peripherals and IT Components and a nationwide network of 30+ branch locations has ensured that it encompasses all the requirements needed for providing quick response and efficient turnaround time which is required for a fast paced business like Digital Camera in India. BenQ aims to leverage the strengths of Global as it plans to introduce the entire line up of Digital Still Camera and Digital Camcorder in near future.

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SNIPPETS

Intex Organized Partners Meet at New Delhi

Enjoy Octopus’s Exclusive Scheme for SME’s

Intex Technologies has concluded its all India premium distributors meet for Computer Peripherals channel partners.

The annual meet was held in four stages covering key distributors from the North, South, East and West India.

“Looked upon as the major channelactivity for 2011, the meet stood apart from the regular meets as it focused only on the primary channel.

The participants were acquainted with the business plans, product road map, new entrants in the portfolio, growth trigger points, the opportunities and most importantly the learning from last year’s performance, so that we could jointly exploit more avenues and take Intex to the next level of growth” said Pawan Kumar, National Sales Manager-Computer Peripherals, Intex Technologies.

ABACUS CONCLUDED ANNUAL NATIONAL CONFERENCE 2011 Abacus Peripherals, the brand owners of ZION Memory Modules and Exclusive National Distributor of Biostar Motherboards, Sparkle Graphic Cards successfully concluded their Annual National Conference 2011 at Goa. The conference was attended by all regional heads and product heads from across India. It was also attended by dignitaries from INTEL, HYNIX, BIOSTAR, COOLER MASTER, NVIDIA and SPARKLE. The conference commenced from 7th April and ended on 10th April. The First day was dedicated to individual and group interaction.

The Second and third day were scheduled for business planning and input from vendors. Along with the fun and rejoicing company’s growth potential and marketing plan and strategy were also discussed during conference. Apart from this all the branch heads and representative from across India got an opportunity to have a face to face interaction with each other and top management.

D-Link Incentivizes Registered Partners D-Link has offered ‘Sizzling May’ an exclusive 15 day channel incentive program specially formulated for SI/ Registered Reseller Partners (RRPs).

Starting from 13th May to 27th May 2011, SI/ VAR partners doing business on D-Link range of product and solutions will get to earn amazing rewards like Samsung Galaxy Tab, Home Theatre system, Smart phone, Tanishq gift voucher, Exclusive trolleys bag, Cordless phone, Bluetooth headset, USB powered noiseless notebook cooling stand, wrist watches and many more.

Rajesh Sahore, Sales Head–India & SAARC,

D-Link India said, “Almost every quarter we come out with a unique scheme that aims to offer exciting business opportunity to our partners.

As it has always been our endeavour to enhance partners’ business experience with D-Link. We’ve ensured that the target set for the partners are more realistic, so that everyone can participate & go home with some exciting reward. Therefore with ‘Sizzling May’ scheme we’re confident that our SI/Registered Reseller Partners will be able to make most of it & value their association with D-Link further”

WD appoints Global Infonet as its Distributor WD has expanded its distribution agreement with Global Infonet in India to include WD’s range of external storage and home entertainment products. This is in addition to WD’s existing relationship with Global Infonet which has a network of over 5,800 channel partners in the country for WD’s internal drives. Global Infonet has focused on distribution of PC systems, peripherals, IT components and home entertainment products for consumers. With this expanded relationship, WD plans to tap Global Infonet’s network in a phased manner to enter new regions and provide access to its range of external storage and home entertainment devices to customers in smaller markets.

Octopus-e International has launched an exclusive scheme for SME’s, ERP at 150/day for the first time in India. The company is providing this solution on a cloud model. This solution now can help the SME’s who’ve need of Business management solution but it was beyond their budget. For many companies and small establishments moving to cloud computing is a financially sound strategy. The savings that can be made from having their services hosted in a web cloud are really noticeable.

Neeraj Kathuria, Director, Octopus, said, “The SME/MME can largely benefit with the unique solution provided by Octopus. Octopus Systems foresees a fairly large potential in this business model.”

Trend Micro Rewards to boost Small Business Trend Micro has launched ‘Trend Reward Program’ on its Small Business (SB) solution— Worry Free Business Security line. Trend Micro has rolled out this scheme particularly targeting the partners’ sales persons. The scheme, which is valid till 23rd June, 2011 is applicable on all products (paper licenses) sold from 10 to 100 user range. The company has introduced special pricing offer for Worry Free Business Security for 3 years at Rs. 999 / user for 3 years excluding taxes.

Under the Trend Reward Program, channel sales persons can earn incentives up to Rs.12000/- in a single deal of 100 users.

Xerox India Banks on Multi-City Roadshows Xerox India has started multi-city road show campaign to expand consumer outreach in the northern markets. Starting with the Chandigarh chapter on 27th April’2011, the road show showcased range of printers in the MFD category like Xerox Workcentre 5700 series, & Xerox Workcentre 7120 multifunction, Xerox wide format 7142, Xerox Wide format 6604 & 6605 solution & Xerox workcentre 5225/5230.

Arvind Chabra, Regional Head, North & East, Value Segment, Xerox India said, Presently North India contributes a considerable amount of value businesses. With the first of our consumer outreach program in Chandigarh and multiple other roadshows that are in the pipeline in May, we plan to increase our market share and brand equity by the end of 2011.”

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SNIPPETS

Get rebate of upto INR 20,000 on Old Printers HP offers ‘Buy Back Offer’ for its LaserJet customers in India. The program is specially designed for businesses that demand more and want to add on to their productivity, efficiency and cost-savings. The program allows customers to avail a cash rebate of up to INR 20,000* on return of their old printer after buying a new LaserJet printer or scanner. The offer is valid on a select range of LaserJet printers or scanners and the complete list is available at www.hp.com/in/ laserjetbuyback.

Varadarajan Krishnan, General Manager, Marketing, HP-IPG said “The HP LaserJet Buy Back Offer is intended to provide growing businesses a more effective printing environment and gain competitive edge. The steps involved to avail the cash rebate are very simple; customers have to just register with us once after purchasing an eligible HP LaserJet printer/ scanner.”

HP’s latest range of LaserJet printers offer enhanced energy & time saving features along with industryfirst innovations like HP Auto on/ auto off technology and HP Smart Install, that help the customer to manage cost and improve productivity.

Jabra Features in the Avaya’s DevConnect program

DELL ENHANCES STRUCTURE FOR CHANNEL PARTNERS Dell has enhanced its Partner Direct program for its certified partners globally.

Effective from May 9, it features a new structure which sets out increased rewards for certification and training, including new rebates for premier partners, expanded deal registration terms, financial incentives, and marketing and technical assistance.

“These improved benefits are based on inputs that we’ve received directly from our partner community. For those partners who’re investing in Dell, we’re enhancing incentives and benefits to better position them for success. It has been the success of our commercial partners and their response to the PartnerDirect program that has enabled us to do this. We firmly believe that by working together we can help our partners and customers to grow and thrive,” said Mahesh Bhalla, General Manager, Consumer & SMB Dell India.

PartnerDirect’s enhanced structure aligns rewards with education and training and helps position partners for long-term success with Dell solutions. It also underscores Dell’s commitment to a simple and streamlined channel program for partners, based on their feedback, to provide the right resources partners need to successfully grow their businesses and deliver value to their customers.

“This new structure helps strengthen the solutions we’re able to offer and also helps us deliver better value to our customers. Dell listened and responded to our feedback, and now we’ve a structure that enables partners and Dell to work together better than ever.

We look forward to the continued growth of the PartnerDirect program in India,” said Vineet Mittal, Executive Director, VSM Technologies.

Jabra has been elevated to Platinum Membership in the Avaya DevConnect program. As a global headset provider for Avaya Unified Communications solutions, Jabra has been recognized for a higher level of commitment in developing and integrating a wide range of wireless and corded headsets that offer superior audio quality, increased workplace productivity and enhanced ergonomic comfort. Businesses deploying Avaya telephony can now experience the full benefits of Unified Communications anytime, anywhere through Jabra’s unique, easy-to-install, simple-to-use headsets and speakerphones.

The Avaya DevConnect program promotes the development, compliance-testing and co-marketing of innovative third-party products that are compatible with standards-based Avaya solutions.

Vivitek To Expand Channel Base In Northern India

Tirupur Exporters shake hand with Microsoft and Wipro

In order to strengthen and expand its current partner eco-system in Punjab, Vivitek has organized two channel partner meets in Chandigarh and Ludhiana on 22nd and 23rd April, 2011. In this meets Vivitek outlined the business strategies for 2011. The events also highlighted update on product road map and sharing of ideas on how Vivitek can add value to its partners’ business. The channel partners got an opportunity to interact face-to-face with the leadership team of Vivitek. The meets were organized by Vivitek Corp. and Ceeco Technologies, national distributor for Vivitek Data projector range. The partner meets were attended by more than 100 partners and provided an excellent opportunity to communicate and discuss Vivitek’s vision, business strategy and business opportunities in northern India.

Tirupur Exporters’ Association (TEA) through G-Tech Info Solutions has adoption of a Wipro’s next generation enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution for all manufacturing units in the cluster. G-tech also has plans for future to roll-out this solution to other textile clusters across India. The cloud solution, based on Microsoft Dynamics ERP, is expected to enhance the productivity and efficiency of over 4000 SMEs in Tirupur by automating and simplifying processes across domains like manufacturing, logistic, financials, customer & vendor relationships, human resource and the supply chain.

The Wipro solution built on the Microsoft Dynamics ERP platform shall be rendered in a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model from Wipro’s state-ofthe-art Cloud infrastructure.

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GUEST TALK

STRATEGY OF DEFENCE AND ATTACK HELP YOU IN BAD TIMES This is the time for people, organizations and leaders to evaluate and formulate strategies to sustain their business and achieve goals. More than achieving the goals, which they might have set in the beginning of the year, sustaining the similar or better business would be important. The situation may be bad because there is no control of human.

VP SAJEEVAN Director-Consumer System Products (CSP) Division, Canon India

BRIEF PROFILE As Director- Consumer Systems Products, Sajeevan is responsible for building the Canon Brand and growing the company’s IT product group and channel infrastructure in India. He has been with Canon for the past ten years.

Sajeevan, has over 17 years of experience in Channel Management and Sales and Marketing. In his previous assignment at Modi Xerox he has set up robust channel networks for OSS products in Kerala & Tamilnadu. At Canon he has built an exclusive channel network for IT products across the country and has brought consistency in IT business. His focused initiatives in the emerging home photo printing have helped Canon gain a strong foothold in this segment.

Sajeevan holds a Masters degree in Economics and is a MBA. He has great team work skills. He is a voracious reader and has a very positive personality.

AFTER A LONG recession, it is Tsunami in Japan that has affected many countries in the world along with Japan itself. In earlier case, it was created and manipulated by man but this time it is nature made.

It may also impact the marketing, sales, stock, production, etc. extensively. But as far as India is concerned, the most important thing we are facing now is inflation. It is around 9% . That means effectively, it would be 11%. What you had spent last year, the same time this year you would have to spend 11% more therefore you would have to earn 11% more. Inflation is not under your control again.

What you can do as an organization in term of inflation or even with the situation like Tsunami in Japan, which is not under your control? People say: In order to overcome the inflation, you need to increase you production. The moment you increase your production, you can see your bottom-line go up. But, is it easy? No. It is not. Here, you need to have a clear strategy of defence and attack to keep yourself unruffled.

In defence, there are three factors you need to look at - Employees, Partners and Customers.

The first factor is ‘people’. This is a time to invest your time and energy to retain your people. You need to inspire them. There are many non-monitory parts to inspire them. You need to make them understand that they’re not the problem but they are part of the problem and solution too. So there are companies in such situation aggressively get into cost-cutting as an austerity measure. It creates a negative wave across the organization.

Instead of cost-cutting, why cannot you think of cost saving. Organizations can actually save cost in many ways. For example, in terms of power, communication and travel saving, etc, You need to involve your employees or people for cost-saving procedure.

The second thing is: they must feel that if they bring more productivity, they are going to earn more, so you should incentivise them for any other additional business they bring in. The third thing is inspire them to bring new ideas - be open to all crazy ideas, so that they will feel being part of the organization.

Second important thing is the partners. The first and most important thing is to make every thing transparent to them by communicating with what currently is happening. They should know about all your new initiatives well in advance. And also, give a clear indication that it is a partnering so all the initiatives are going to be benefited mutually, whether it is a marketing program, scheme, in shop merchandising, pricing, consumer promo, etc. Take the partners on board because you and they need a stronger relationship to really come-out of this.

The third and important factor is the customers.

The customers are everything for you. And it is a time to protect your customers and their interest. The question is how you can actually make them happy.

The first important thing is constant engagement with the customers. If you are not calling them up from last six months, it is a time to contact them now- be it through a phone call or e-mail. Even a personal contact will help you understand them very well. Be a consultant with them. A regular contact with the customers will help you to retain them.

So, these are three defending factors that will help you to bounce back from the current situation.

What is the attacking strategy then? For any defence there needs to be an attacking strategy. 3000 years back ‘Chanakya’ very clearly said that ‘attack the fear before the fear attacks you’. So, first attack your customers with good proposals, good programs and good relationship before they come to you with the complaints. Attack your fraternity of channel with mutually benefited programmes, good profitability and how you can increase their productivity. This is a time to attack the market with very good advertisements and promotions.

Finally…

This is the time you need to invest your time, wisdom and finance. Keeping these things in mind you will be able to make a turn around. So keep your people with you… ensure that partners are with you and give value for money to your customers.

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PARTNER PROGRAMME

RAMKUMAR PICHAI, GROUP DIRECTOR, CUSTOMER AND PARTNER EXPERIENCE, MICROSOFT INDIA

MICROSOFT STARTS RUPEE BILLING IN INDIA It will surely bring more consistency and predictability in the Indian market. We wish Microsoft starts billing in India instead of Singapore, which will make things even better.

F

rom May 1st 2011, Microsoft moves to INR regimen. It means all the distributors billing Microsoft products from Singapore will be buy it on INR. Of course the company is not moving all the products under this arrangement.

As per Ramkumar Pichai, Group Director, Customer and Partner Experience, Microsoft India, all volume licensing and full packaged product licensing products from Microsoft will be available in INR. The distributors will be given a list of pricing in INR. Owning to the economic boom in the country - especially the phenomenal growth in the SMEs in India, Microsoft wanted to do many things so that it can take active part in the growth path. One of the good things is that Microsoft has decided to transact with the partners from Singapore in the currency of the country. The company has published price list of the products which has Indian rupees instead of dollars. No matter what the price is in dollar, now the partners need not have to hedge the price for the customers in India and concentrate more on the business.

Ramkumar says, “We have the reinforced confidence that India as a market is growing very fast for us and we need to focus it more.”

He added, “Worldwide, Microsoft does 90+% of its business through partners. In India, it is 100%. Therefore, they are very critical. These partners were giving feedback that since our

price list is in US dollars, they were facing a lot of issues on the occasion of fluctuating dollar price.” It means between the times they quote a price to the customers and till the customers pay them, the price of the dollar fluctuates drastically, which impacts on the consistency of their business. Having given the opportunity to do transaction in INR, Microsoft has certainly brought consistency for the partners and predictability for the customers.

Earlier the partners also used to do a little bit of hedging against the Dollar fluctuation for customers against the dollar fluctuation but it was not same all across. Different partners were doing it differently but now there is no need of the partners to do so. They will now concentrate on their business. They will be worried about their margin and other things than what way dollar price is going up and down.

He says, “We are working very hard so that the

INR TRANSITION APPLICABLE TO FPP, E&D Software, Open License, Open Value, Open Value Subscription, Campus Agreement, School Agreement, EES, Enterprise Agreement, Enterprise Subscription, GGA, SPLA, Select Agreement, Select Local, Select Plus.

INR transition not applicable to (Continue in USD): Hardware, PC Games, ISV, OEM and others

transition is smooth for both the partners and the customers.”

As per him, Microsoft wanted to bring it at a time when the partners would have finished their business and they chose the financial year beginning 2010. In order to make it smooth, Microsoft had two day training – one for the business heads of the partners and the other was for operation head as to how to set up the accounts, etc.

As per Ramkumar five distributors including Ingram Micro, Redington, Compuage, Neoteric, Rashi Peripherals, etc. will be get the benefits. In fact these distributors have already started sending mailers to the partners on this. Of course it is not applicable to OEMs and ISVs. The other thing that Microsoft is doing is to align with the customer requirements in terms of the markets. There is humongous opportunity in the small and medium space. The company has a very good programme for the Geo expansion.

As per Ramkumar, the company is working with distributors and partners to expand their SMB market base in terms of Geography.

Finally…

The company also is working on providing certifications on the partners’ capability. Microsoft has recently aligned its partner model to the worldwide model in terms of large account resellers, which again is a very good step in bringing consistency and transparency in the market.

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COVER STORY

PRINT SERVICES

THE

PROMISE OF MANAGED PRINT SERVICES MARKET IN INDIA The managed print services market is still nascent in India but there is a huge potential as the market matures and more vendors begin to offer services.

BY SANJAY MOHAPATRA sanjay@smechannels.com

T

here has been a lot of buzz surrounding the managed print services (MPS) market because of the compelling business propositions for the customer as well as a solid business case for service providers. This market has caught the attention of many categories of players namely, products vendors, IT service providers as well as BPO service providers. These categories of players have found a sustainable model for ongoing revenues in the MPS model. In addition, MPS provides an opportunity to increase customer engagement and thereby increase customer stickiness.

MPS is a new opportunity for product vendors to bundle services and move up the value chain by providing not only printing solutions but designing business-specific solutions, thus impacting the customer’s bottomline directly. Among other challenges, the printer market has started facing the heat arising out of environmental concerns, therefore combining services along with the traditional line of business is not only being business-savvy but is also an imperative for printer and copier vendors to continue to remain relevant to customers.

For the IT and BPO service providers, there is an increasing realization that by ignoring managed printing service solutions, they have left out a chunk of the customer’s requirements. By extending their service offerings to managed printing solutions, technology and BPO service providers can significantly enhance value to the customer. Traditionally printers, copiers, scanners are owned by different business units in an organization and there is no visibility in service quality, costs and usage levels. Therefore an IT or BPO service providers have immense potential to step in at the enterprise level and offer standardized printing solutions. Since a chunk of the IT service provider’s time is anyway devoted to solving customer complaints related to printer and scanners, offering MPS solutions will help the service provider in demonstrating solid gains to the customer.

Many BPO service providers are well positioned to target enterprises to offer MPS as they already handle a lot of customer interactions which also require an element of printing solution. Therefore for BPO service providers that handle customer queries for bills and payments, it makes ample sense to extend their offering to

offer invoicing, printing, and delivery services.

In addition they can also introduce streamlined processes which will create efficiency within the system and bring greater cost savings.

The Market Potential Market analysts are upbeat about the prospects of MPS in India and the Asia Pacific region. While the overall Asia Pacific market is estimated to grow at a steady rate, growth in Indian market is expected to outstrip the Asia Pacific market.

Australia, South Korea, and Singapore are more mature compared to India in the adoption of managed printing services. However the market potential in India is greater in the long run.

Ed Crowley, founder and president of Photizo Group, a boutique firm focused on research and consulting in the printing solutions market, writes in his blog, “Today there is an MPS market in India, although a relatively small one. But, there is a time in the very near future where India will be largest market in Asia.”

According to Springboard Research, India is the fastest growing market for MPS amongst the countries in the Asia-Pacific region. The market is expected to bloom from $31 million in 2007 to

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PRINT SERVICES

COVER STORY

THE MARKET IS EXPECTED TO BOOM FROM $31 MILLION IN 2007 TO $70 MILLION BY 2011 REPRESENTING A CAGR OF 22.6 %.

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PRINT SERVICES

“CORPORATIONS CAN SUBSTANTIALLY MITIGATE PRINTING COSTS

BY DELEGATING THEIR PRINTING NEEDS TO MPS PROVIDERS, WHO CAN PROVIDE A WHOLE HOST OF SERVICES.” VARADARAJAN KRISHNAN, GENERAL MANAGER, HP-IPG, MARKETING $70 million by 2011 representing a CAGR of 22.6 percent in the forecast period of 2007-2011. India presents the biggest market opportunity and in terms of maturity it is considered to be in the nascent stages of the adoption of this technology.

While India will continue to lag behind in market maturity compared to other countries such as Korea, Australia and China, the market size for MPS is expected to be double that of countries such as New Zealand, Hong Kong or Philippines. As of now, the Indian market is a significant one but certainly not the biggest of the lot.

Research conducted by Gartner highlighted the fact that MPS adoption is gaining momentum in India but there is lack of understanding among businesses about its benefits. One of the challenges faced by managed print service providers is that some organizations still see savings associated with hard costs and overlook the associated costs including the expenditure on supplies, services, maintenance and help desk, as well as the negative impact that an unmanaged printer/ copier fleet can have on employee productivity.

This is particularly true in price sensitive markets such as the Middle East and Africa, Latin America and the Asia-Pacific.

In its report, Asia Pacific Managed Print Services 2010--2014 Forecast and Analysis: New Challenges in a New Economy’, IDC predicts that the Asia Pacific (excluding Japan) or APEJ MPS market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 17 percent in the period 2010-2014.

The market will surpass US$990 million in 2014. Emphasis now is more on services and to this end, vendors have begun to expand services offerings either in-house or via partnerships to bring MPS to the boardroom. Enterprises in the APEJ region are inundated with new technology services such as cloud and the IDC study indicates that in the short term, these businesses will search for consolidation of services offerings.

IDC has noted the blending of multi-tower deals in the information technology outsourcing

(ITO) and business process outsourcing (BPO) services markets into single contracts. This blending has made IDC predict managed printing services will soon be integrated as part of such extensive contracts.

There has been a three-fold shift in how MPS is perceived by the market, says Suchitra Narayan, research manager for IDC’s Asia Pacific

IT Services Research, “Firstly, MPS is entering the boardroom via managed services and is gaining the CXO’s attention. Secondly, it is no longer about services that you buy bundled with hardware; it is hardware that comes bundled as a services offering. Thirdly, with the shift to a services economy, there will also be an increased focus on channel-based MPS delivery. Channels will have to undergo restructuring to ensure they build services capabilities and not just deliver and manage ‘boxes’.”

IDC too is upbeat about the market prospect in India and China. Narayan said enterprises in both the nations have begun to understand the need for implementing document-related solutions.

Businesses in India and China are especially interested in MPS because it makes significant impact on cost reduction via infrastructure optimization.

It also reduces energy and print-related costs. IDC also expects continued growth in Australia, South Korea and Singapore in the MPS market.

“The cloud creates a perfect platform for the OPEX [operating expenditure] delivery model.

MPS on the cloud will be a hassle-free solution for organizations, with a pay-per-use business model that delivers real-time analytics on print,” said Narayan. “It’s not just about fluff in the cloud. It’s about dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s. The keys to success for such a model lie in ensuring that clear service-level agreements are in place, there is a clear plan to reduce the business continuity risk, and there is commitment from the vendor on delivery capabilities.”

The Market Potential Among SMBs

“MPS GROWTH HAS BEEN PRIMARILY TRIGGERED BY THE INCREASING NEED FOR AUTOMATION IN THE ENTERPRISE AS A VAST AMOUNT OF INFORMATION STORED IN PHYSICAL FILES IS NOW DIGITIZED.” VIPIN TUTEJA, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, TECHNOLOGY, CHANNEL & INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS, XEROX INDIA

The small and medium sized business market is variously sized from 35 million units to 7 million units. Whatever the size of the market, this is the market segment in the country that holds the largest potential for the technology market. Although this segment contributes less than 10 percent to the country’s GDP, it accounts for more than 90 percent of the country’s industrial units contributing more than 40 percent to the country’s total industrial output and more than 35 percent to industrial exports. Technology adoption by this category of enterprises is therefore imperative in order to remain competitive and relevant.

Predictably technology penetration is very poor in this segment with scare resources and lack of knowledge and understanding about its benefits.

However things are changing fast as both the government and the industry have begun to see the significance of this market segment. The government has launched several initiatives targeted at making this segment competitive and become a more potent force as an engine of economic

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PRINT SERVICES

“AS INDIAN CUSTOMERS HAVE SPECIFIC REQUIREMENTS AND ARE LOOKING AT SOLUTIONS THAT GIVE RELIABILITY AND QUALITY AT COMPETITIVE PRICE POINTS, THE COMPANY HAS PLANNED TO EXPAND ITS PORTFOLIO, INCORPORATING MORE USER NEEDBASED PRODUCTS.” VP SAJEEVAN, DIRECTOR, CONSUMER SYSTEM PRODUCTS (CSP) DIVISION, CANON INDIA

growth. An overwhelming 85-90 percent of employment in the industrial sector is created by this market segment.

Among the various initiatives, the government is specifically focused on facilitating the adoption of technology by this segment. Hence there are several initiatives aimed at educating this segment about its benefits including road shows, partnerships with the private sector, information dissemination about best practices and access to technical experts. However the most significant initiative to date, the one that is likely to make the maximum impact, is the attempt by the government to make available access to easy credit facilities for technology adoption. Government banks and credit agencies have made concerted attempts to woo small-scale entrepreneurs with attractive loans and credit facilities that will help the members from this segment to invest in technology.

The technology vendors also understand the latent potential in this segment and have been targeting this segment with specific solutions and products. As a result, awareness and understanding about the benefits of investing in advanced technology in manufacturing and the impact of information technology in increasing efficiency and productivity is beginning to make an impact.

The SMB sector has begun to see the value in making the investments for higher returns.

Among other things, the market potential for MPS in this category of customers is very high as it will help in avoiding upfront investment as well as the challenges associated with the maintenance and upkeep of printing devices and copiers. While it is the cost factor that will be the most compelling reason for the SMB segment to adopt MPS, in the long run, the associated benefits such as increased efficiency

and productivity, and the need for confidentiality and compliance will become the more overriding reasons for continued growth of the market.

According to Photizo’s Group’s Senior Consultant Keng Keng Tang, one of the key MPS value propositions that resonant well in the SMB space is the advantage of transferring CAPEX to the OPEX model. “Though employee wage may not be as high compared to countries from matured economy, the value proposition of keeping employees focusing on driving the business versus providing IT support on printers and supplies logistics can still be attractive.”

Tang, who was leading the Lexmark laser business in Asia Pacific, points out to a very pertinent aspect that will likely impact the uptake of MPS amongst the SMB segment, “Finally, very recently, there is a mega advertisement campaign by Idea Cellular’s “Use Mobile Save Paper” featuring Bollywood hero Abhishek Bachchan has brought mass awareness about the need to reduce paperwaste, hence “Go Green” is beginning to be a visible value proposition too.”

In her blog, Tang also alludes to an interesting trend evident amongst SMBs in India. “It will be very interesting for OEM vendors to find ways breaking the MPS maze for India’s SMB space.

One of the answers may lie with the print jobbers.

Currently quite some of the print-jobs of these SMB actually go to what one calls in India as print jobbers within the vicinity where their business operates.” Print jobbers are neighborhood print shops that provide printing or copying services.

“By observing closely, one will notice daily incidences of frustrations and irritations faced by the SMB clients in terms of crowd at these jobbers, quality of print not up to expectation,

confidentially, poor turn-around times, etc. There is definitely a latent demand for “print-solutionin-a-box” concept, and observing closely the flow and demand at these print jobbers, one may see some spots of specialization opportunities where each jobber may address different customer segments. For example, architects, planners, educational institutions, students in addition to the generic run-of-the-mill jobs.”

She suggests that perhaps a study into these jobbers’ printing environment can help OEM vendors developing an out-of-the-box “horizontal” program for the SMB market in India.

Market Drivers of MPS The most compelling reason for adopting MPS is costs savings. Gartner estimates that enterprises that adopt MPS and select the right partners that can manage their printer, copier and fax fleets can save between 10 percent and 30 percent of their print costs.

In a highly competitive and growing market, customers are looking for solution help them solve complex issues and enable them to focus them to grow the business by creating differentiated services and products. MPS providers help customers by providing solutions that not only help them do away with the nitty-gritty of daily operations and maintenance but also create standards and policies at the enterprise level that impact business decision making and company bottomline.

An MPS provider conducts due diligence and helps an organization to assess its needs for document management, suggest changes that bring real benefits, bring in the required expertise in terms of manpower and device management skills to meet those changes, optimize the fleet, and track and monitor the changes that will help the enterprise to achieve its targeted savings. Sometimes the MPS provider is able to offer printing solutions that are aligned to the business units and suggest solutions that go beyond printer, copier and the MFP fleet and directly impact the business bottomlines.

Varadarajan Krishnan, General Manager, HP-IPG, Marketing, sums up the drivers for MPS adoption, “Corporations can substantially mitigate printing costs by delegating their printing needs to MPS providers, who can provide a whole host of services. A combination of printer and multi– function devices in the right architecture, along with suitable tracking and security solutions, and total outsourcing, can result in considerable cost savings for the organization, allowing them to focus more on their business goals. Over the last one year, managed enterprise printing has seen immense growth, as companies shifted from a

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capex to an opex model to save costs. Today, enterprises are embracing managed print services, as the advantages of outsourcing are manifold.”

While most enterprises have the ability to manage their printing requirements, in reality it is not a priority as they lack the time, adequate resources, focus and tools and systems to determine the requirements at the enterprise level, outline an actionable plan, track and monitor its usage, ensure consistent internal buy-in and thereby the sustainability of the initiative.

An experienced MPS provider comes loaded with industry-specific expertise which can significantly enhance a customer’s business processes.

By leveraging the provider’s expertise in vertical industries and applications, the customer not only maximizes on cost but is also able to enhance productivity and efficiency.

While the lower TCO continues to be the primary reason behind enterprise adoption of MPS, the other reason is that it streamlines the print environment. In addition to the need to focus on other key business activities, the fact that it does away with the need to pay for upfront purchases of printers and the coming of age of concepts like pay-per-page are driving adoption.

“The running cost generally ranges from 60-80 percent of the total TCO, depending upon the print volume and the print technology, it is imperative to understand the print requirement first.

Hence it is advisable to buy products which have a fixed cost per page (FSMA), when the volumes are higher and for lower volumes a consumable purchase plus AMC model works out to be better,” says Vipin Tuteja, Executive Director, Technology, Channel & International Business, Xerox India.

Tuteja says that there is a huge growth opportunity for Xerox Global Services in India as large businesses continue to use paper and traditional means of storage and there is an increased need for automation within enterprises.

Tuteja says MPS growth has been primarily triggered by the increasing need for automation in the enterprise as a vast amount of information stored in physical files is now digitized. “This has opened a floodgate of opportunities for document management solution providers. IDC predicts that enterprises spend 10 percent of their revenues on document products, management and distribution,” he adds.

In India, MPS is largely being adopted by the larger companies who have outsourced their IT services of which printing is the biggest part. Among other things, the maturity in the overall environment in outsourcing services, and the benefits that early adopters have reaped have lent credence to this set of business offerings, which in turn have contributed to its uptake among large enterprises.

However MPS vendors have also started tailoring specific offerings that will attract small and medium sized enterprises. Among other things, vendors have designed solutions that extend support to the customer’s existing printing devices.

The economic slowdown generated a great of interest in MPS as enterprises were hard pressed to look for savings in their operational expenditure. The pay-per-use model greatly appealed to enterprises as it helped them to defer capital expenditure, control inventory and operational cost and make the printing environment economical, environment friendly and thus impact the company’s bottomline in a positive manner.

Another reason that has contributed to the popularity of MPS within enterprises is that printers and copiers are owned by different business

“THE MAIN VALUE PROPOSITION FOR MPS IS LOWER COST AND CONVENIENCE. WE HAVE FULFILLED BOTH THE CRITERION WITH OUR NEW PRODUCT OFFERINGS BY WHICH ENTERPRISES CAN HAVE PRINT OUTS AT VERY LOW PRICES—10 PAISE PER MONO PRINTING AND 30 PAISE PER COLOR PRINTING.” SM RAM PRASAD, BUSINESS MANAGER, CONSUMER PRODUCT GROUP, EPSON INDIA

COVER STORY

units and the enterprise rarely has visibility about the utilization, wastage, savings, and efficiency in the systems. An MPS provider helps bring transparency and visibility into the company’s systems.

Finally, the increasing awareness and significance of promoting a green environment is a very significant reason for the uptake of MPS. Environmentally conscious enterprises have started exploring benefits of MPS seriously as that will help them to streamline printing processes, initiate a formalized system of document management, reduce wastage and help achieve a clean and green environment.

Recognizing this market opportunity HP has started offering printing solutions that are environment friendly. “With green initiative becoming a key driver, HP’s Eco Solutions can empower customers to reduce their environmental impact and save money through an extensive portfolio of tools, software, hardware, services and expertise,” says HP’s Krishnan. In fact as a key finding in the HP Eco Solutions Printing Award, HP noted that 46 percent respondents highlighted cost rather than environmental sustainability as the main driver for adoption of Green IT products and services. “They have realized that there is a cost advantage too associated with the green adoption.

Through our Eco Solutions program which spans product design, reuse and recycling, as well as energy and resource efficiency, we set high environmental standards in the operations and supply chain, while providing practical solutions to make it easier for customers to reduce their environmental impact,” adds Krishnan.

Another significant contributor in triggering interest in MPS is the increased mobile and web connectivity across all major cities in India and the fast growing internet population in India, which has paved the way for more digital explosion, and hence the opportunity for more and more printing. “With the advent of ePrint—an HP technology—we have fostered the very idea of anytime, anywhere printing. Now it is just a click away to print documents from remote parts of the world. Also, with the invention of “Cloud-Print” technology, enterprise customers can print from a Blackberry remotely by using any printer. It is a cloud and web-services-based technology that provides mobile users the ability to easily print documents, presentations, reports and photos at the nearest network printer, in the office, at home or on the road,” adds Krishnan.

Market Dynamics The dynamics in the MPS services market has undergone drastic changes in the last couple of years with different categories of players entering the fray. Earlier it was the printer and copier

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“MULTI FUNCTION DEVICES ARE INCREASINGLY HELPING ORGANIZATIONS TO CONSOLIDATE INVESTMENT, MAXIMIZE SPACE AND SIMPLIFY WORKFLOW PROCESSES, SUPPLY ORDERING AND MINIMIZE MAINTENANCE CALLS, SAVING TIME, MONEY FOR SMBS.” AJAY MADAN, ASST. GENERAL MANAGER, DOCUMENT PRODUCTS, PANASONIC INDIA product vendors who would traditionally pitch MPS but now it is an area that even IT and BPO service providers are eyeing as it is the last frontier in technology managed services.

In line with this thinking there has been a spate of mergers and acquisitions and partnerships between product vendors and IT and BPO service providers. HP’s acquisition of EDS (Electronic Data Systems) in May 2008, Xerox’s strategic alliance with HCL and its acquisition of ACS, Canon’s 2010 collaboration with Accenture—all these clearly mark the growing convergence of the hitherto completely distinct MPS and IT/ BPO markets.

A significant trigger for this development is the overall maturity in the outsourcing market where the IT department has started realizing the benefits of managed services and is now looking to streamline other activities related to IT within the organization. While document management companies come with specific expertise, it is rather limited to make a significant impact in the customer’s business. Therefore combing this expertise with more expansive delivery capabilities makes the service provider’s offerings more comprehensive. For example, Xerox’s acquisition of ACS tripled Xerox’s services business to more than $10B and gave Xerox the scale to attack the $150B BPO market through a combination of services, technology and innovation.

Initially technology service providers had ignored the print and document management services market as it was considered to be messy both from an operations point of view as well as from the financing and administration point of view. But as things evolved and outsourcing best practices matured, this has become an attractive market for technology service providers. HP’s acquisition of EDS was the first to herald this

trend wherein HP sought to synergize its expertise in imaging and printing solutions with EDS’ IT services delivery management capabilities in order to bag more from the same client. HP sought to differentiate its imaging solutions by providing expert management capabilities across the enterprise.

However the ground reality in India is very different as the appeal and awareness about MPS is largely restricted to large enterprises and to some extent medium sized enterprises. This is because this category of market has extensively leveraged technology and have benefited from outsourcing services. This category has traditionally invested in printers and copiers across different locations and has document management requirements. This market segment is therefore ready to embrace the next wave in outsourcing.

However there are compelling business benefits for the small and medium enterprises to benefit from MPS. Says HP’s Krishnan, “The SME segment is growing at a rapid pace fuelling demand for all-in-one and MFD devices, networked and wireless printers. Print consolidation and green initiatives are driving enterprises to take a relook at their printer deployment and explore opportunities for savings. This is an area where HP is working with such organizations in providing solutions for balanced deployment and print fleet management, manage their work flow, and help adopt eco friendly methods to save printing costs.”

Similar sentiments are echoed by Xerox’s Tuteja, “The MPS market has evolved over the years, and today it has become a core business process in every enterprise. The trend is now moving towards SME’s; while majority of SME’s look at stand alone printing solutions however as they are moving up the next level they are looking at managed print solution and one single vendor

that undertakes their printing and document management requirements”.

While most vendors have differentiated offerings for all market segments in mature markets, only a handful of vendors, namely HP and Xerox, have seriously started addressing the MPS market in India. Most vendors in India still think it is a premature concept and require more maturity before it can become mainstream.

For example, Epson is very clear that business models such as MPS and cloud printing is still hype and does not have a market in reality. The company is therefore focused on providing value for money solutions in the market. It has launched L 100 and L300 inkjet printers targeted at the SMB segment that provides extremely low cost value printing. Says SM Ram Prasad, Business Manager, Consumer Product Group, Epson India, “The main value proposition for MPS is lower cost and convenience. We have fulfilled both the criterion with our new product offerings by which enterprises can have print outs at very low prices—10 paise per mono printing and 30 paise per color printing. This is rock bottom prices and printing prices cannot go cheaper than this. In addition, enterprises will own the devices, therefore MPS currently does not hold much value.”

Marketing strategy and product lines seem to echo similar sentiments for other vendors as well.

Most vendors we interviewed spoke about their product line, expansion into secondary markets, channel engagement strategy and penetrating the market further with traditional printing solutions.

Although many were aware of emerging technologies like cloud printing, web printing, mobile printing, the concept of managed printing was inadvertently dismissed “as not yet arrived”. This is a reflection of the market maturity wherein product vendors still do not feel the market is ready for a services-based business model.

MPS Ground Reality in India The MPS market has already gained a certain level of momentum with a clear cut go to market strategy and solutions portfolio by a few leading vendors.

“We call our portfolio of MPS solutions as Xerox Office Services (XOS). XOS is a suite of services for managing document output and infrastructure assets to help organizations deliver measurable efficiencies, reduce costs and improve productivity,” says Tuteja.

Xerox Office Services offerings in India include Office Document Assessment, Device Management, Asset Management, Asset Optimization, Supply Management, Break-Fix Management, Help Desk. Xerox Office Services can enable organizations to save costs up to 20-25% as well as help

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them go green. In addition, our portfolio of solutions is customized to meet specific client needs as well as provide secure access to confidential information within an organization.

The Document Management Services business from Xerox offers a broad portfolio of services including outsourcing, consulting, systems integration, imaging and content management. Xerox looks at document management beyond the realms of traditional printing to how documents can be produced and managed. The objective is to be an influencing service that supports an enterprise’s document strategy and consult and advise on the best method of production. The company wants to engage at the creation phase to ensure that the final output is taken through the most effective and efficient route to the market. Xerox has built its offerings in document management to optimize storage, bandwidth, and enterprise-

“WHAT HAS ALWAYS RESONATED WITH OUR CUSTOMERS SO FAR IS WHEN WE SAY THAT WE CAN SAVE YOU 20-30 PERCENT ON A PRODUCT LINE THAT MAY NOT BE A PRIORITY, AND WILL GIVE YOU YOUR IT BUDGET BACK SO YOU CAN SPEND THAT MONEY ON WHAT IS MISSION-CRITICAL.” SATYEN VYAS, DIRECTOR, MEDIUM BUSINESS, CSMB AT DELL INDIA

readiness. It has targeted services offerings for BFSI, telecom and retail verticals which offer great scope for augmenting, managing and sustaining the growth.

Speaking about HP’s offerings in the MPS space, Krishnan says, “Managed Print Services is and will continue to gain more visibility among organizations as enterprises are getting more and more matured they have long ceased to look at printing as a discretionary expense. They now know that treating printing just like another IT asset pays in the long run. With various enhancements in our MFDs, we help organizations reduce their printer overhead. HP is well equipped to help companies analyze, implement and maintain a suitable printing environment. We perform a detailed assessment of our customer’s current imaging and printing infrastructure and collate all relevant information about usage patterns in the organization and a current estimate of the costs incurred. We have been able to prove anywhere between 15-30 percent savings in printing and imaging costs with our managed print services offerings. 67 percent of respondents in the HP Eco Solutions Printing Award indicate that they will undertake printer fleet assessment and print infrastructure optimization within the next 12 months, which is a clear indication of better visibility among our potential customers.”

Canon India is also betting big on MPS and has witnessed a lot of traction in the opex model with approximately 45 percent of its business moving towards the opex model. An estimated 40-50 percent of this base is likely to get converted to its Managed Document Services.

Canon offers MPS to enterprises whose print volumes are at and above 5, 00,000. Canon India is said to be looking at 40 percent growth in its MPS business by the end of 2011, by targeting the top 50 customers. Canon is very clear about its growth in MPS in the next five years during which it will seek to expand its base of customers and also look at working growing its relationship with its existing customer base.

Back to basics Despite the growing popularity of the MPS market, most vendors are still focused on the traditional printing market which continues to grow at a healthy pace. Business priorities of companies are accordingly skewed towards selling printer and copier units and expand its geographic presence.

CRAIG LE CLAIR PRINCIPAL ANALYST, FOR-

RESTER RESEARCH ON TOP 10 TIPS FOR IMPLEMENTING MANAGED PRINT SERVICES

1.

Know That Implementing Managed Print Services (MPS) Is a Work in Progress:

Managed print services are not something you buy and install, but rather a life cycle that you engage in to gradually optimize a diverse and fragmented environment.

2.

Assemble the Right Team: Focus on change management and governance

by engaging IT, facilities and line-of-business owners early.

3.

Balance RFP Criteria Among Device, Process and Management Criteria:Vendor

selection should highlight key business drivers beyond cost and standard service-level agreement (SLA) goals.

4.

Emphasize Print Policy Software: While policies for color printing get all the

attention, the most dramatic savings can occur with global settings for duplex printing.

5.

Avoid Billing Surprises: It's bad enough getting the bill, but it's even worse if you

can't understand it. Firms should question providers about how billing works — particularly for global initiatives.

6.

Don't Fall for Fluffy Treatment of Environmental Requirements: Make suppli-

ers provide specific data on their environmental approach and focus on reducing pages printed, as this has by far the highest environmental impact.

7.

Carefully Weigh Your Pricing Options: While all managed print services have

some price per image (PPI) component, there's no "one size fits all."

8.

Beware of Color: Users can get hooked on color printing, which will have higher

PPI rates and can erode projected savings.

9.

Resist the Tendency to Rush the Assessment Phase: Assessment sets critical

goals such as realistic user-to-device ratios, as well as key metrics to monitor and improve service.

10.

Get Ahead of Compliance and Security: It's only a matter of time before audi-

tors focus on security and compliance holes in the office environment.

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Canon seeks to become the number one player in the laser printer category and achieve 42 percent market share. To achieve this, the company has signed new distributors. Canon has also introduced a new partner program called Channel Relationship Enhancement and Activation Management (CREAM). The program has been devised for its secondary and tertiary partners.

Says VP Sajeevan, Director, Consumer System Products (CSP) Division, Canon India, “Canon’s growth is now reaching an inflection point. While last year, we acquired one million customers, we are aiming to acquire two million customers in 2011 to reach a customer base of five million. As Indian customers have specific requirements and are looking at solutions that give reliability and quality at competitive price points, the company has planned to expand its portfolio, incorporating more user need-based products. Canon’s strategy is to address all customers to ensure that they have easy access to genuine products at affordable price points.”

Canon also plans to open 100 retail stores across India in 2011 and increase the number of stores to 300 by 2013. This will help Canon India to strengthen its foothold in 150 cities in the coming three years. The company plans to conduct 52 activation programs this year. Through CREAM it intends to meet partners and discuss healthy business practices that will guarantee their growth and profitability.

Panasonic is busy expanding its presence in tier two and three cities as business is improving in smaller cities. This has led to an increase in demand for printing and imaging in these cities, and they are emerging as potentially strong markets for MFDs. The company also believes that in the near future, companies will become more cost conscious with regards to their printing and imaging environment. IT, manufacturing, BFSI,

healthcare and retail are some of the sectors where Panasonic sees huge demand.

According to Ajay Madan, Asst. General Manager, Document products, Panasonic India, “Multi function devices are increasingly helping organizations to consolidate investment, maximize space and simplify workflow processes, supply ordering and minimize maintenance calls, saving time, money for SMBs. In 2007-08, Panasonic has entered the imaging and printing market with the launch of most advanced solutions of MFPs which are being specially designed to fulfill growing needs of SMBs and enterprises to fast track their growth in the current Indian economy by providing them with increased productivity and efficiency. Being a new entrant in market the company has achieved 7 percent market share in MFPs. The total market size of multifunction printers for the year 2010 was over 300,000 units and we project that the market for MFPs will grow at 30 percent going forward.”

Dell has recently launched its printer business in India and is focused on the low and medium end customer segment. The printers currently available in India are designed to meet the needs of all low to mid-sized user groups that require individual as well as shared printing requirements. SOHOs, small and medium organizations, and small workgroups of large corporations worldwide will all benefit from this range of single function and multi-function devices.

Dell’s India positioning is well articulated by Satyen Vyas, Director, Medium Business, CSMB at Dell India, who says, “When we talk to IT managers about what is on their top ten priority list, printers rarely make that list. What has always resonated with our customers so far is when we say that we can save you 20-30 percent on a product line that may not be a priority, and will give you your IT budget back so you can spend that money

“WE HAVE ENSURED THAT THE CORE FUNDAMENTALS OF ACCURACY AND PRINT QUALITY ARE NEVER COMPROMISED. ENVIRONMENT FRIENDLINESS IS ONE OF OUR KEY CONCERNS AND WE FOLLOW STRICT POWER SAVE POLICIES WITH ENERGY STAR RATINGS.” RANJIT YADAV, COUNTRY HEAD, MOBILES AND IT, SAMSUNG INDIA ELECTRONICS

on what is mission-critical.”

Dell’s channel focus is based on the premise of making technology more accessible to customers.

The company has established a robust channel strategy to be the vendor of choice for channel partners and is investing in tools to make it easy for partners to register deals, make purchases and obtain certifications, thereby facilitating easy transactions and allowing partners to focus on growing their business. Apart from making the products and the toners available through the channel Dell also seeks to conduct joint activities with partners to build awareness and undertake other market-building exercises.

Samsung focused on consolidating its printer business with a distinct product strategy, strengthening its distribution channel and putting a sharper focus on its B2B business during 2010. During the last year Samsung strengthened its distributor infrastructure in tier one markets, established relationship with about 100-125 channel partners in tier two cities and is working towards engaging retailers, resellers and system integrators in tier three cities.

Samsung has a lineup of 33 models across the mono and colour single function laser printers and multi function printers and is priced in the range between Rs 5499- to Rs 230,000. Samsung’s laser printers offer a ‘green’ printing experience with ‘printelligence’ features such as toner save, smart panel, one-touch print screen and web printing.

Says Ranjit Yadav, Country Head, Mobiles and IT, Samsung India Electronics, “Innovation has been a key driver for all Samsung products. In the printer business too, our initiatives have been geared towards using technologies to make printers more compact while adding end-to-end functionalities. As Samsung printers become more feature loaded, we have ensured that the core fundamentals of accuracy and print quality are never compromised. Environment friendliness is one of our key concerns and we follow strict power save policies with energy star ratings.”

MPS road ahead There is increasing awareness about the MPS market in India as outsourcing as a service model matures and early adopters demonstrate benefits.

The momentum is currently evident in the large enterprises but the vibrancy in the market with the entry of more players offering MPS is slowly but surely permeating to other segments including the medium and small enterprises. MPS is bound to witness impressive growth in the next 18 months as its compelling business benefits along with enhanced service standards attract enterprises of all sizes.

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CASE STUDY

TALLY

“TALLY.ERP 9 WAS SIMPLE TO USE AND HAD ADVANCED FUNCTIONALITY AT AN ATTRACTIVE PRICE POINT Working in Tally.ERP 9 is really satisfying

BENEFITS l Better visibility of orders and operations at HO due to sync facility implemented

MRS. MANISHA MEHTA MANAGING DIRECTOR PERFECT INFRAENGINEERS

“Since the users were already familiar with the basic features of Tally, it was not a big challenge to get them to use the advanced features of Tally.ERP 9.”

S

tarted in the year 1996, in Mumbai, Perfect Infraengineers Ltd. provides complete MEP and Air-conditioning system (High side and low side) centralized air-conditioning plant and VRV (VRF) system etc. May it be household requirement or corporate requirement, Perfect is sure to provide the customers with the best solution in the area of

air-conditioning as well as Civil, structural, interior and MEP (Electrical, Plumbing & Sanitary, Firefighting, CCTV, BMS and fire alarm system, FM – 200 works, etc.,) The company also undertakes DG sets and complete Mechanical works as well as AMC for MEP works etc. contracts. The company services various vertical markets including Pharmaceuticals, Hospitality, Malls, Multiplex and Offices, Educational Institutes, Residential

l Improvement in process due to implementation of the sales order functionality of Tally.ERP 9 l Better controls due to setup of security options in Tally to allow specific areas for each user l Easier tracking of inventory, receivables and projects at HO

CONTACT Tally Solutions Pvt. Ltd. AMR Tech Park II, No. 23 & 24, Hongasandra, Hosur Main Road, Bangalore – 560 068.

India.Tel +91 80 66282559; Fax +91 80 30228775; www.tallysolutions.com

Complex, Government, Industrial Complex, etc.

Not only does the company service Indian customers but also services overseas customers for their air-conditioning needs.

Business Challenge Perfect Infraengineers Ltd. has 212 employees with 4 branches in Mumbai and 5 branches in other states including Delhi, Bangalore, Hyder-

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abad, Gurgaon and Raipur. The company’s head office at Mumbai and some branches use software for basic accounting functionality. But as far as synching of documents back and forth HO and branch office is concerned, it used to be done manually. They send people to carry documents or send through courier from HO to branch offices and vice versa. It was time taking and human intensive. At times, due to manual errors or even system error, documents get delayed or lost in the transit. This tells upon severely on the productivity of the company.

The Solution The company wanted some solution to get rid of the problem. They contacted Mr. CA Vikram Seth of Software @ Work India Pvt. Ltd., Mumbai - the Master Tally Partner through the latter’s website for upgrading their systems to Tally.ERP 9.

Vikram recounts, “They were looking for making optimal use of Tally for accounting, MIS and Statutory compliance, getting daily updates of Tally data from branches, customizations of Tally in the areas of order processing, security and invoicing, etc. for better business management.”

Mrs. Manisha Mehta, Managing Director, Perfect Infraengineers, says, “Good service normally helps relations last longer. We understand this fact. And that’s the reason our customer base is more than 5000 elite and satisfied customers who are with us for past one and half decade. It is achieved by collective efforts of our team, technology and processes. We had a pursuit of right solution for order processing, security and invoicing and Tally.ERP 9 was the perfect one.”

She added, “Tally.ERP 9 was simple to use and had advanced functionality at an attractive price point. Secondly, accountants knowing Tally are easily available - especially in branch locations.

We wanted an easy to use system and also knew that Tally.ERP 9 could be further customized to adapt to their business processes.”

She added, “We therefore decided that we should upgrade to Tally.ERP 9. It gives accuracy, faster speed, helps avoid duplication of work and offers data storage also. Today, our accounts staffs in HO and branch offices are really happy and worry free.”

Vikram added, “It was easy for us to implement the solution as the Chart of Accounts (Masters)

CASE STUDY

were standardised across all branches as the first step. Secondly, training was given on Order Processing, VAT and TDS. Synchronization between HO and branches was done using the functionality available in Tally.ERP 9 whereby all Masters were replicated uniformly across branches and transactions were consolidated at HO.” Mrs. Manisha maintains, “Since the users were already familiar with the basic features of Tally, it was not a big challenge to get them to use the advanced features of Tally.ERP 9. The setup was done in phases i.e. Training and Implementation, Sync Setup and customization. In the first phase, training was done in two weeks. But the biggest thing was the users could continue to use the system as the phases progressed and did not need to wait for all modules to be customized or implemented.”

Today, all Perfect Infraengineers’ offices use Tally.ERP 9 and weekly the branch offices are synchronized with accounts server of the HO. Initially while migrating data and synchronizing data, there was some problems but later on it was rectified. Mrs. Manisha says, “As a qualified CA, Tally did not need any introduction but working in Tally.ERP 9 is really satisfying.

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TREND SETTER

LENOVO

IT’S ABOUT

UNDERSTANDING MANY FACTS

OF SMEs

Given that SMEs are the growth engines behind the emerging market economies and an essential employment generating sector in any country, India is no exception and Lenovo is very much there.

BY NEIL D’SOUZA info@smechannels.com

S ADITI GANGULY, GENERAL MANAGER, SMB BU - HSB, LENOVO INDIA

“WE HAVE INTRODUCED MOBILE PRICE TRACKER, THE FIRST OF ITS KIND IN THE INDUSTRY FOR OUR PARTNERS.”

ME is certainly a high growth segment for most of the vendors operating in India. It is no exception to Lenovo as well. Similar to others, they also think that the organizations with 500 employees or less are the SMEs. These SMEs are cost sensitive, expects quality and reliability. They value the product features and cares about PC aesthetics. They want PCs with sleek and professional designs, to offer reliability yet affordability and with reasonably good backup.

Lenovo as a PC platform vendor thinks that the company is ideal for them, Ms. Aditi Ganguly, General Manager, SMB BU - HSB, Lenovo India, says, “Our products for the SMB segment include the classic ThinkPad Edge – the ultimate business machine for an SME, designed for entrepreneurs with great ideas. Our product portfolio also includes the Lenovo ThinkPad X100e business ultra portable machines; the Lenovo IdeaPad B460 a splendid business series laptop; the Lenovo IdeaPad V460, a highfeature, high-design super-slim machine and the Lenovo ThinkCentre A70z All-in-one PCs, which offer excellent features in a super cool design, ideal for the SMBs.” Lenovo has undertaken significant research to understand the many facets of SMEs - their requirements/buying behavior and key param-

eters that help SMEs opt for IT solutions.

Backed by this insight, Lenovo has introduced innovative products tailor made to suit the IT requirements of SMEs. Aggressive about tapping this market with its innovative business strategy, Lenovo India has created dedicated SMB go-to-market groups that bring together products, solutions, services and channels to better address market dynamics quickly and effectively. Lenovo today has become synonymous with product innovation. She adds, “We have consistently launched innovative and award-winning products for consumers – our primary aim is to deliver affordable innovation across a wide range of products to address the needs of the SME segment.”

Lenovo values and respects the critical role of its channel partners in the ecosystem. The company is very keen to nourish and enhance the channel relationships to propagate increased productivity for its channel partners, thereby increasing mutual profitability. One route Lenovo will continue to take in 2011 to achieve this is to empower partners with even more training and product knowledge to increase mutual profitability.

In line with our ‘Getting closer to customers’ strategy, the company has recently started ‘Think-in-Retail’, a novel initiative to connect

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LENOVO

Unistal’s

PROTEGENT

Co mplete La ptop Se curity

are fundamental to its business. Lenovo is greatly focused on building a mutually beneficial and encouraging platform for the channel partners, enabling them to perform optimally and grow as valuable partners to Lenovo. The company offers attractive rebate programmes and innovative initiatives to its partners. She adds, “We have restructured our entire channel operations and realigned our partners on the basis of specific product lines to leverage partners’ strengths. This has helped us ensure a deeper level of engagement with our partners.”

Especially for the SMB segment, the company has introduced Mobile price tracker, the first of its kind in the industry for our partners.

It is a mobile version of the price list that can be accessed from any mobile phone – anywhere, any time. It is the quickest way to revert to a client with a price quote, especially during meetings, doing away with the need to open a laptop or a catalog and browse through pages and tables.

Aditi maintains, “Our continued strengthening of the channel network will enable us to drive market expansion into key tier 3-5 markets. In parallel, we will expand our product

portfolio - especially in the lower end of the price band.”

Besides products and channel engagement, Lenovo’s quality service has been an area of focus to ensure better TAT (turn around time) and customer delight score. Currently their coverage is complete for Tier-1, 2 and 3 cities and rapidly expanding for T 4 and 5 cities. The service engineers are trained and certified by Lenovo. Its CDS (customer delight score) is growing quarter after quarter for Think products. Lenovo has started taking its service delivery to the next level by providing more “remote take over support” for all its customers. Lencare (Lenovo care) team, a dedicated support team to manage non-technical escalations, has been deployed to address customer queries.

Finally…

The vision of the company is to be the most preferred brand to do business with, among channel partners and consumers. Therefore, the company is aggressively pushing for hyper growth in the SOHO segment, which is resulting in its market share in the SMB segment growing steadily quarter-on-quarter.

360

deeper with its customers. This is now even more relevant as PC penetration spreads to tier 3-5 cities/towns.

Another key aspect they are focusing on is retail expansion for deeper penetration.

Powered by their robust partner engagement, Lenovo will provide increased opportunities to its existing channel base to increase their business benefits and grow more with brand Lenovo.

Now on the retail space, across India, Lenovo currently has over 120 Lenovo Exclusive Stores (LES), more than 225 Lenovo Multi-Brand Outlets (MBOs) and 17 Large Format Retail stores (LFR).

Recognizing the immense retail potential in tier 3-5 cities, the company has instituted a robust retail strategy to achieve deeper penetration and strengthen consumer connect. Aditi adds, “We have launched close to 200 LES Lites, a smaller version of Lenovo Exclusive Stores (LES) across the country. We plan to increase it to a total of 400 LES Lites in the next few months and reach out to 150 untapped towns and cities by FY 10-11.”

Besides, Lenovo believes channel partners

TREND SETTER

ANTIVIRUS PRO / INTERNET SECURITY

2011

2011

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SME CHAT

VISHAL SOPORY EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, GLOBAL INFONET DISTRIBUTION PVT. LTD.

“WITHIN LAST 3 YEARS, WE HAVE GROWN MORE THAN 100% YEAR ON YEAR” Global Infonet Distribution Pvt. Ltd. is one of the fastest growing IT distributors in the country.

From the day one of its inception, the company had set a target of becoming one of the national Tier 1 Distributors. SME Channels spoke to Vishal Sopory, Executive Director, Global Infonet Distribution Pvt. Ltd., to know more about the strategy in detail.

Brief us about Global Infonet?

Established in Jan 2008 with HQ in New Delhi, Global Infonet started its commercial operations the same year in the month of May. From day one, the company positioned itself as one of the National Tier 1 IT distributon companies focusing on finished IT Hardware and PC Components. Today, Global has Nationwide coverage with 30+ branches with IT infrastructure in terms of real time ERP and communications backbone in place and operational.

VENDOR RELATIONSHIPS (INDIA)

What is the turnover of the company?

Within last 3 years, we have grown more than 100% year on year with last year revenue of Rs.750 Cr. How many brands are associated with Global at present?

We have been working with Dell, Lenovo, Xerox, Western Digital, Xerox, Microsoft, Delta, PC tools and Strontium for quite some time now. In last 2 months we have added Philips (MMD), SAP B1,

Hipstreet, Su-kam and BenQ businesses to our portfolio.

What is the strength of Global Infonet?

Our strength revolves around our 4 pillars: Team, Credit Management, Sales Capability and Logistics.

Team – We have a team of professionals across departments with years of experience in respective fields be it business management, Finance, Collections, operations or HR. All professionals are fully empowered to take responsibility and accountability for their respective roles.

Credit Management – We use credit insurance very effectively, our internal processes have been validated for substantial amounts of discretional credit limits from leading credit insurers. Our partner information flow is best in industry, partners get mails/SMS from start to the end of the transaction cycle ie. order booking to cheque banking. We have set up credit Card Processing facility for all customers through terminals and IVR set up.

Sales Capability - Global has complete capability to assume sales responsibility for vendor sales plan. Our philosophy is of “Go and Fetch” and not

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SME CHAT

“OUR STRENGTH REVOLVES AROUND OUR 4 PILLARS: TEAM, CREDIT MANAGEMENT, SALES CAPABILITY AND LOGISTICS.” “wait and catch”. We have a dynamic compensation structure aligned to deliver specific sales objectives, top 30% Global Sales Persons earn 3X the industry average.

Logistics: Countrywide delivery capabilities, 90% orders delivered within 24 hours at customer door. Global still delivers freight free in most of its locations to partners. We have International logistics linkages to pick Ex Works/FOB shipments from all international manufacturing locations of our vendors.

Why do you think Global Infonet is best gateway to the market for the vendors?

With the efficiency and effectiveness that we have built around our strengths we truly offer value to vendors. A testimony of the same is our awards from brands like Microsoft and Western Digital, where we not only got awarded amongst the Indian industry but also among distributors across Europe and Middle East. Based on our success in existing brands, we are able to show value to our new additions like Philips (MMD), SAP, SuKam, Hipstreet and BenQ and enter into a winwin relationship with them.

What is your manpower strength?

We have close to 180 people on board. We also have additional 250 off rolls. (Sales promotersprimarily for telecom business)

street may not interact on a daily basis. Similarly our recently started tele-sales engine is also able to make us reach out to more partners and drive specific objectives. Our business/ product management team is also goaled on the number of partner trainings that get conducted for products across branches. These training sessions are of smaller gatherings and primarily happen at global offices across country. The number coverage per session is less but the frequency of sessions is high. Out sales person compensation structure has also been designed to incorporate these specific objectives and not just overall revenues.

What kind of value addition do you offer to the products?

In addition to the fundamental value adds of inventory management, logistics management and Credit to channel, we do value add to business in various other ways. We have been able to remain swift and responsive to market needs in the current times. We have a marketing team that drives and pushes Global and vendors’ initiatives across smaller (by value and not numbers) part of channels where our feet on

What kind of growth are you expecting this year?

Current year, our plan is to continue a drive for 100% plus growth. Market is growing and opportunities are immense. All our existing businesses are expected to grow more than 30-40%. Balance of the growth is expected from product additions within the same brands that we carry and addition of new brands as well, though there is a pressure on revenues from drop in ASPs of most of the products. SME

How many partners do you have?

We have a registered customer base of around 5800 partners (5400 resellers, 15 Large Format retailers, 300 System Integrators/VARs and 70 large sub distributors). This partner bases is growing almost daily. End of this year, we are expecting the registered base be to touch 7500 numbers.

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SME BIZ

BENQ

DLP PROJECTORS

MOVING AHEAD

& BENQ SHOWS THE WAY

Global projector market is clearly driven by majorly two technologies including DLP and LCD though LCoS is another technology with a small foot print of vendors. So the competition is between DLP and LCD and the former is leading the way with BenQ as the flag bearer.

BY SMRUTI CHOUDHURY info@smechannels.com

FACTS ABOUT Year of Operation

:

2001

India Headquarters

:

Gurgaon

Key People

:

Rajeev Singh, Country Head

Direct presence

:

17 locations

Key products

:

Projectors, Monitors and Digital Camera and LED & LCD TV’s

Website

:

http://www.benq.co.in/

A

ccording to Futurescope, the leading independent market research agency tracking the projector market globally, the worldwide front projector market will grow by 20% in 2011 from its level in 2010. The Indian projector market size in 2010 was around 180K units which is likely to cross 300K units in 2011. With IT infrastructure spending becoming an essential part of every business budget, projectors are on their way to becoming integral to any organization. Education has clearly emerged as the major buyer for projectors contributing to more than 50% of the total projector market in India.

In this backdrop Benq is positioned as the World’s No. 1 DLP projector player. With a market share of about 12.63%, BenQ is currently No.2 projector brand in overall sale in the entire Asia Pacific region. As per Q1, 2011 Future Scope Report, Benq is the most preferred Education Projector brand in world.

BenQ India’s business which was earlier mainly

driven by the LCD monitor segment now generates almost equal revenue from the projector segment. In the first quarter of 2011, BenQ is among the top 2 Projector brand in India with a market share of 16% in overall projector market of India.

Rajeev Singh, Country Head, BenQ India, says, “BenQ’s target is to reach market leadership position in Indian market with over 20% market share by end of 2011.”

With an almost entire range of Projectors which are 3D Ready and short-throw models, BenQ is living to nature of leader in the Projector market. BenQ is a pioneer in launching industry firsts like 3D feature, Interactive Solution, Short Throw products consistently raising the bar for projector industry.

Projector as a technology unlike the old days is being used by many applications and led by education segment, which is responsible for 50% of consumption. BenQ provides more than twenty education projectors in its extensive portfolio of durable and user-friendly projectors designed to meet today’s demanding classrooms. Rajeev adds,

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BENQ

SME BIZ

ratio giving 81” diagonal projection at 1 meter.”

Similarly 3D, as an application, is evolving in projection technologies. As per Rajeev, unlike the traditional 3D projector system, BenQ require only one projector to take you through the exciting 3D demonstrations. Models MS612ST & MX613 ST with 3D Ready, short - throw technology making them the best choice for schools.”

Interactive education in modern schools is also driving the projector business. BenQ MP780ST‘s PointDrawTM projection System offers interactive capabilities promoting student participation, higher information retention and outright learning fun.

RAJEEV SINGH, COUNTRY HEAD, BENQ INDIA

Advantage BenQ

“We have seen multifold increase in our projector business in Indian market which is not restricted to bigger cities or few partners but it is witnessed at every level and partner focused on different industry verticals. With its transparent policies and fair practices BenQ has not only given a high profitability but also earned all weather business partner tag for itself. BenQ’s strong sales and marketing team across India ensures that we are very well connected with both end consumers and channel partners. This team is not only instrumental in enhancing the skill set of partners through trainings and technology sharing programs but is effectively supportive to the business of partners and demand generation.”

“Our interactive projector model MP780 ST with the PointDraw Interactive technology, WXGA resolution, USB reader, LAN & wireless display and 20W speakers gives the learning experience a whole new dimension.”

Similarly, corporate segment is also next major market for the projectors. In today’s time, projectors form essential boardroom equipment with 24X7 business operations and seamless business boundaries. BenQ is providing complete bouquet of projectors for boardroom requirement whether it is Extra Long lamp life, Short throw or connectivity options the solution is there. BenQ’s best seller is MX660 at 3200 ANSI Lumens, 6000 lamp hours and optional WiFi connectivity options it is the choice of modern boardroom. An entire array of Short Throw models is ideal for today’s cramped space in meeting rooms, some of the best sellers are MS612ST & MX613ST. For the training room requirement MP780ST becomes the most preferred choice.

Similarly, Government segment is also a major buyer of projectors because they are slowly but steadily moving towards modernization of their

operations and business approach. Today, BenQ is also present in this segment. Registered with the DGS&D for procurement of Government of India for last many years, the company offers multiple models for this segment. Last but not the least, the concept of projector–based home theatre system is also becoming popular. BenQ Video Projector product line provides options for home cinema, theatre and entertainment functions.

Model W6000 come with futuristic features like ultra-high contrast ratio, VIDI and HQV (Hollywood Quality Video). With Full HD gaining more popularity and its wide availability and multiple channel are fuelling big screen experience weather it is cricket or movies at home.

Besides the mainstream applications, technologies are evolving for various applications including. For example, Ultra-short throw technology where BenQ is the market leader. This technology only needs half of the projection distance of the traditional projectors to project a full sized image.

Rajeev adds, “Our projector model MX880UST come with XGA resolution and ultra short throw

BenQ business operations drive on a twopronged strategy: services to the customers and profitability to its channel partner. BenQ has the most extensive product range which is unrivalled in industry, with more than 25+different models available for channel stock and sell business.

BenQ is drawing on its extensive R&D resources to continually push the limits of what projectors can do, introducing models incorporating the newest technologies like interactive capabilities, 3-D ready, ultra short throw technologies etc. Also, BenQ provides an extensive product line across categories like short-throw series, mobile & lifestyle series, education series, and public display which help us serve to every segment of the projector market. BenQ’s efficient supply chain network with two national distributors and more than thirty regional locations helps the delivery on time anywhere in India.

For its partners, BenQ offer unique incentive programs and price advantages to its channel partners encouraging rewarding partnerships.

Channel strategy As far as its channel strategy is concerned, BenQ has two National distributors for projector business. These are Redington and Neoteric. Each of these National Distributors has their strong focus area - be it large accounts or servicing the IT Channel partners who are new in projector business. Between them they have more than 80+ branches which make the availability of BenQ products across the India with minimum lag.

BenQ Channel strategy focuses on identifying and training the right channel partners across geographies for its business encouraging technology selling approach than just product selling. The certified channel partners are categorized according to their performance into Diamond, Sapphire, Gold and Silver.

BenQ provides an encouraging reward and recognition system for the channel partners

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SME BIZ

BENQ

MX880UST – Ultra Short Throw 78” screen size @ 48 cms. With 3D Ready

MX660 – Extra Long lamp life of 5000 hrs. With 3D Ready and Optional WiFi features.

MP780ST – Interactive Projetor with short throw & 3D ready feature.

DLP V/S LCD

International Dealer trip for all our certified partners qualifying the target sales in our headquarters at Taiwan.

DLP

LCD

Compact & Light Weight with single-chip design

Bigger size & heavier with three-chip design

Technical advantage in preventing color decay resulting long term picture readability

Yellow & green tint color decay manifested in as little as 300 hours

Excellent readability that comes with higher native contrast ratio

“Screen-door” effect caused by large, easily visible pixels projected

Immune to dust with sealed optics

Reduced contrast by 50% due to dust accumulation

Lowered maintenance & operating cost with filterfree design

Huge overhead cost due to filter cleaning & replacement

“DLP’s unmatched image quality, portability and reduced cost of ownership makes it a preferred technology in office conference rooms, classrooms, cinema and other large display applications. BenQ, being the World’s No. 1 DLP brand is constantly pioneering innovations like 3D ready, Interactive projectors, making DLP unique in the market place”.

S Ganesh, Business Development Manager, DLP Products, Texas Instruments

have resulted in satisfied and motivated channel partnerships.

The certified partners have a unique advantage on pricing & Schemes over the non-certified partners.

BenQ has an aggressive channel expansion plan to penetrate and service the Tier II & III towns where the demand for the business has started to emerge. The focus is on finding the right channel partner who can effectively sell technology as this is where the future and margins are.

Also the focus is on to bring related industry channel partners like AV Integrators, Office Automation, Corporate IT & Networking partners and others to see the business potential and generate their interest in the business.

In order to incentivize and keep the partners in good humour BenQ never hesitates. One of the successful channel programmes that the company runs where they organize meeting and training for their SI’s and VAR’s in different cities in India included ‘BenQ Connect’. In the present quarter, the company is conducting this channel partner event in eight tier 1 and tier 2 city locations.

Rajeev maintains, “We encourage pertinent incentive programs like Gold Schemes, Sell More Earn More etc along with right margin structure that drives profitability for the channel partners and their interest in the brand.”

BenQ also organizes International dealer meets forming a platform for the global and the regional distributors. This quarter, we are organizing an

Corporate philosophy BenQ – Bringing Enjoyment and Quality to Life, believes in the fusion of user friendly technologies and the art to create innovation products designed to allow customers to see, hear, feel and experience a network and digital lifestyle with the brand promise of “Enjoyment Matters”.

With over twenty years in the industry, our strengths are in mobile communications, visual display and network convergence technology.

BenQ Group, composed of eighteen independent companies maintains key competitive advantages in many fields. From components to finished products, the BenQ Group’s integrated value chain, achieved through its impressive “Vertical Specialization and Horizontal Integration”, delivers the brand immense respect and success.

BenQ follows a much focused approach in its marketing strategy for the brand and the products. For the projectors, BenQ does many direct marketing campaigns focusing on different target segments like education, corporate, government etc at regular intervals focusing on brand activation and product promotion.

Finally…

BenQ’s constant focus on exclusive technology and innovations in the quality has got them favorable media response worldwide, further strengthening the brand equity and credibility in the market.

In 2010, Benq projector model W1000 received the Best Projector award in India under one lakh

by AV Max magazine. Also, we have been given five star rating for our projector model W1000 plus by WHAT Hi-Fi. Recently, in 2011 model W6000 and W1100 won the most recommended product award by AV Max.

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PARTNER CORNER

BHAVIN BHATT, COUNTRY HEAD, M. TECH INDIA

AS A VAD THE PRIORITY IS TO TAKE CARE OF ENDTO-END SOLUTIONS M.Tech is a VAD in real sense. It wants to create its own space away from the rase of other players. SME Channels spoke to Bhavin Bhatt to know more about it. Excerpts.

Brief us about M.Tech inception and growth?

The M.Tech Group of companies is part of the Singapore Exchange-Listed Multi-Chem Group.

Established in May 2002, M.Tech is leading regional distributor of IT security, application delivery network and video communication solutions, with operations in 23 cities in 10 countries in APAC. M.Tech is also authorized training centre for security and network certified courses.

M.Tech has started its India operations since December 2007 and has become a most preferred value added distributor for India resellers. M.Tech is value added distributor for Allot, Imperva, Citrix, HP Tipping Point, Armorize, Isilon, Proofpoint, Riverbed, RSA, Solarwins, Tuffin and in process to add few more solutions to provide end to end solutions to Indian market.

M.Tech is having national presence (Ahmadabad / Bangalore / Chennai / Delhi / Mumbai) to provide onsite support as per market need. (www. mtechpro.com) M.Tech selectively partners with marketleading vendors who are established in their respective domains, covering a broad spectrum of today’s security requirements, from firewall and intrusion prevention to anti-spam and web security.

Apart from security solutions, which other areas M.Tech strength lies in?

M.Tech is a leading regional IT security, application delivery network and video communications solutions distributor.

As Value Added Distributor M.Tech is taking care of end to end solutions – M.Tech is VAD for Imperva for application, database & file security, Armorize for code secure (white box testing), HP Tipping Point for IPS, RSA for SIEM and multifactor authentication, DLP and Governance regularity compliance, Tufin for firewall analysis, Proofpoint for email DLP, AV / AS requirements.

But at the same time, M.Tech do carry non security products like Riverbed for WAN Optimization, Citrix for server load balance, Allot for pecker shaping (QoS) and application visibility, Solarwinds for network monitoring and Isilon for high end storage requirements.

You have similar products from various vendors how do you justify the same?

M.Tech do not believe in taking competitive products for country but as global market is going through consolidation few big giants will continue to acquire small / mid size company hence few set of products by default comes to product portfolio. However we don’t have any competitive

product in M.Tech India product portfolio.

What is the core strength of M.Tech?

M.Tech is well known for its technical competencies for pre-sales / post sells and technical trainings and consulting. M.Tech is having 24/7 technical assistance centre (TAC) to provide support to the customers.

What kind of value added services do you provide to the brands?

As a VAD M.Tech always act as extended arms.

We do stock good amount of demo appliance to showcase product into Indian market. Addition to that, we organize road shows, channel and end customer events to promote M.Tech / Vendors’ brands.

How many resellers do you have?

As per last year we have 190 resellers in India to whom we invoiced.

Do you also deal with customers directly?

M.Tech is purely channel driven company and refuse to do any direct business with end customer but we do interact with end user to provide technical support and consulting.

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SME CHAT

RSA

AMITABH JACOB CHANNEL MANAGER, RSA – INDIA & SAARC

“ACCESS CONTROL AND ENCRYPTION ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT FACTORS OF ANY GOOD SECURITY STRATEGY” RSA, an EMC Company is one of the leading content security solution provider. The company vouches for its innovative solutions that enable enterprise to meet all secure challenges.

SME Channels spokes to Amitabh Jacob. to know about its strategy in market. Excerpts

Provide us a brief background of RSA RSA, The Security Division of EMC, is the premier provider of security, risk and compliance solutions, helping the world’s leading organizations succeed by solving their most complex and sensitive security challenges. These challenges include managing organizational risk, safeguarding mobile access and collaboration, proving compliance, and securing virtual and cloud environments.

What is your go to market strategy?

RSA has always championed the cause of taking a holistic approach towards security rather than a point solution approach. And we will continue to work towards this strategy of Information Risk Management in the coming year. Having a complete security framework in place is not an easy job and most companies are reluctant to invest in building the expertise to achieve this. Managed Security Services is the key driving force for the Security service providers.

Access control and encryption are the most important factors of any good security strategy.

A strategy which is information centric and focuses on the risks involved would be very effective in addressing the various threats that any organization faces today. For an effective

implementation of this strategy it also needs to be repeatable.

RSA’s Information Risk Management is one such strategy.

The Information Risk Management Strategy is l Information centric - Focusing on information first and foremost clarifies business context, and following its path across our IT infrastructure reveals where it’s potentially vulnerable. l Risk-based - Using risk as a lens for security investment decisions ensures that the most significant challenges are addressed first. This helps the organization in focusing on addressing most relevant threats. l Repeatable - Our approach emphasizes the implementation of processes and solutions based on standards and best practices that can be leveraged across multiple security and compliance initiatives, saving time, money, and effort.

RSA has the ability to provide the customer a complete, integrated and feasible solution to execute the Information Risk Management strategy.

IRM is a four step process – 1. Discover and Classify – Discover all source of sensitive information across the organization 2. Define Policy – Define how the sensitive information will be protected 3. Enforce Controls – Establish controls based on policies defined. The controls are applied to the data and access.

4. Report and Audit – Ensure the compliance with the defined policies What is your channel strategy?

As a part of RSA’s Securworld program launched last year to grow RSA’s channel focus and community in India, RSA currently has about 15 specialised partner organizations who address the growing needs of the commercial segment.

This is the first phase of RSA India’s channel growth strategy and the company has three to five partners across each region of North, South and West. The partners are primarily VARs and System Integrators and address the three product lines of RSA viz. SecurID (2 factor authentication suite), enVision and DLP. RSA believes that 2 factor identification will be the cash cow in the commercial segment, followed by enVision (SIEM) and DLP. Almost 90% of our partners addressing the commercial segment fall under the ‘Affiliate Elite Partner’ category. The entry level or opportunity driven channels will be Affiliate Partners. This set of partners will be largely driven by distributors Wep solution, M Tech and Redington.

Simultaneously, RSA continues its focus of deploying information-centric security solutions across the enterprise segment. The key verticals of BFSI, Telecom, high-end tech and Government are currently addressed by six to

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RSA

SME CHAT

Recently you have launched a solution called RSA’s Authentication Manager Express, tell about that product?

Last quarter, we announced the launch of RSA’s Authentication Manager Express, which is designed to meet the cost and convenience requirements of SMBs. The same risk-based RSA technology used to protect millions of online transactions every day and more than 250 million identities worldwide is being made available in a package that businesses of any size can use.

Today’s organizations are faced with the challenges of an increasingly mobile workforce, stricter regulations, and advanced threats that target sensitive information and intellectual property. Both industry researchers and realworld security breach events have demonstrated for years that weak, password-only protection is no match for savvy cybercriminals and cannot be considered an effective method of preventing unauthorized users from accessing company resources.

RSA Authentication Manager Express is a risk-based and on-demand authentication system designed for organizations to provide up to 2,500 end users with secure access to data and business applications through SSL Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) and online portals.

“IN THE FIRST PHASE, WE HAVE BEEN CREATING AWARENESS AROUND THE PRODUCT THROUGH INITIAL ‘KICK OFF’ CALLS FOLLOWED BY SALES TRAINING FOR OUR DISTRIBUTORS.” seven national System Integrators. RSA is working on further fine tuning this set of partners known as ‘Premier Partners’ and is aligning more closely with them. The Premier Partners are attuned with a specific vertical/ product focus to help entrench RSA’s market leading offerings further.

How are RSA’s solutions complementing EMC’s storage portfolio?

EMC is the leading provider of information management solutions while RSA is the leader in protecting and managing identities and digital assets.

Bringing RSA into the fold provides EMC with industry-leading identity and access management

technologies and best-in-class encryption and key management software to help EMC deliver information lifecycle management securely.

Pls. give us some market performance report especially Gartner report if you are featured somewhere?

RSA has been positioned in the Leaders quadrant within Gartner’s 2010 Magic Quadrant for Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and Web Fraud Detection - http://www.rsa.com/ press_release.aspx?id=10798 RSA has also been positioned in the Leaders quadrant within Gartner’s 2010 Magic Quadrant for Content-Aware Data Loss Prevention (DLP) http://www.rsa.com/press_release.aspx?id=10963

How different is it from the competition solutions?

Building on more than 25 years of innovation and leadership, we’ve engineered the RSA Authentication Manager Express solution to provide enterprise-class identity protection and security while also meeting vital ease of deployment, cost and end-user convenience requirements of SMBs. The solution also demonstrates a compelling model and vision for securing access to web-based applications and resources using smart phones and mobile devices that have become a mainstay for business end-users How are you seeing this product being marketed?

In the first phase, we have been creating awareness around the product through initial ‘Kick Off ’ calls followed by Sales training for our Distributors.

We also announced this to the Key Partner Executives, in the recently concluded Partner Summit at Phuket.

In phase two, we will go through a detailed training & enablement program for all partners.

This will be held in 3 Cities later this quarter.

We are also planning promotion campaigns around AMX and will announce them as they are released. SME

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GUEST IN TOWN

GAVIN STRUTHERS, DIRECTOR- CHANNEL & ALLIANCES, ASIA PACIFIC, MCAFEE

MCAFEE TO FOCUS MORE ON PARTNER ENABLEMENT Gavin had visited India during McAfee’s Partner Advisory Council Meet during the first half of April 2011. It was a congregation of McAfee Channel Partners to understand the McAfee Initiatives for the year 2011.

M

cAfee’s Partner Advisory Council Meet is one of its kind meets in the Information security industry where select partners are apprised with the company’s future strategy. This time, held at Mumbai, this meet had seen people like Gavin Struthers, Director- Channel & Alliances, Asia Pacific, visiting India and giving discourse on various topics.

As per him the channel partners’ organizations certainly are growing. They more and more are becoming serious about information security.

Even there are a number of partners whose revenue comes around 35-40% from the security solutions and there is a lot better response from the partners in last three years for security solutions.

He added, “As far as McAfee is concerned, we are doing a lot of hands-on training on enabling them to do deployments. We have even created a new certification programme for McAfee Accredited Channel Engineers (ACE). That is after a hands-on training, we certify them for deployment in the customers’ sites.”

“The other aspect is the managed security service: Where partners are offering managed security services in terms of Managed IPS, Managed Firewall, etc. We are seeing a lot more of growth in this space for the partners,” He maintains.

“Thirdly we are seeing security as a service – cloud based service. Probably, these are the three things we are seeing the last 18-24 months.”

As per Gavin, as security as a service is concerned, a lot of adoption is happening at the SMB level as starting points. Even within enterprises, more and more large enterprises are taking much interest. A lot of Telcos are taking much interest in this market.

During the two days of McAfee’s Partner Advisory Council Meet he had talked length and breadth of partner programme enhancements in terms of profitability. The company has got an enhanced rebate programme for the partners. They also had talked about ACE training programme and got feedback from the partners about this. The other area that he talked about was how the company could help partners in lead generation – creating new prospects, etc. One of the areas was to creating demand generation programme by making material and resources available to them. He added, “We have created a demand generation portal where in we provide tools to the partners to give it to the customers.

For example there is a campaign running on next generation firewalls. So, the partners can download all the materials including emails, reports, white papers related to the campaign to send to the customers.”

Of course McAfee Partner Advisory Council is a global programme but India is one of the countries which lead in adopting these initiatives. Gavin adds, “We have experienced a great response and uptake in the Indian market. We are very pleased with the way the response we have received in the country.”

The company has invested massively on the channel technical engineers in terms of their training. Besides, the company also has invested millions of dollars on its strategy to grow its SME business in India. The company is highly committed to the Indian market.

McAfee is not at all ready to expand the channel base under its advisory channel partner programme rather they want to consolidate and focus on the quality partners. Today, the programme has nearly 28 channel partners and they come on board or any of the events on invitation.

Secondly focus area of McAfee is to expand its base geographically.

Finally…

McAfee has grown above the market share of 40% in India last year. That is one of the reasons why the company is investing in India and the company expects to grow the similar way this year as well.

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GOIP

TREND SETTER

THE IDIOSYNCRASY LIES IN CREATING GREAT VALUE ADD Today’s IT distribution market has undergone a transition. Most of the traditional distributors which were banking upon their logistics strength have moved to being value added distributors. GoIP is no exception to this.

BY NEIL D’SOUZA info@smechannels.com

S

tarted in the year 1994 as a product distribution company, GoIP has emerged one of the large integrated services, solutions and a product companies in India. The many faceted GoIP has three principal businesses i.e. Value Added Distribution, Providing solutions to large corporate and Telcos and managed services.

Under value added distributions, GoIP engages a large pool of channel partners who are spread across the country. Rahul Swarup, CEO &MD GoIP, says, “Today we have more than 500+ channel partners to sell our OEM products to their clients. Many of them are in the SME sector. Our model is that we work with channel partners, give them the solutions, give them design tips to service their end customers.”

The second part of the product distribution of GoIP is where they work with large customers including Telcos. Here they take products from RAD, Radwin, DiaLogic, Techrouters like companies and design solutions for the second last mile or last mile, also design access solutions - wire and wireless solutions. The company even provides POC to the customers. And post POC, once a customer is convinced that the solution will work in his network, they go back and implement the solutions and provide post sales support.”

Rahul adds, “We are working with large Telcos to be able to do crossover technology. Telcos in the Metros are rolling out more and more Ethernet and they still have a lot of legacy SDH, PDH, TDM network in the edge. So they need to take Ethernet solutions to the Edge. We give them the technology which allows them to provide Ethernet over PDH.”

RAHUL SWARUP, CEO &MD GOIP

“WE WANT TO GET MORE AND MORE SERVICES TO MORE CUSTOMERS AND PARTNERS.”

large projects, we provide one year post sales support but our effort now has been to get into areas which include long term services which includes both remote and onsite services.”

The third stream of revenue as mentioned is called managed services. The company is in this space for last four years. Earlier, GoIP was working with a lot of international clients. The company’s focus was totally on international clients.

Over the period of time, the company found that it is equally important to focus on the Indian clients. Rahul adds, “We are now transitioning and also looking at Indian customers for managed services including infrastructure management, desktop management, server management and database management, mid-tier application management and customised application monitoring.

We have a very strong practice of dealing with infrastructure management support. Our focus is that we want to get more and more services to more customers and partners. Therefore we are building our own managed service centre in Noida, which is catering to around 200 seats for managed services. This will help us create stickiness and want to drive growth for us.”

Finally…

He maintained: “We work very closely with the Telcos where our value proposition is not only designing solutions that we do for the SME market but also we go ahead and do systems integration.”

GoIP works with large customers and their idea is to give them end to end support and comprehensive services. Rahul says, “Typically, for

Apart from these three major areas, GoIP wants to offer managed services to the SME sector. Their effort is to create a basket of services for its channel partners to be offered to the end customers.

Even the same, they want to offer to the Telcos. So the idea of GoIP is to remain as an exclusive distributor to the customers creating value addition which is clearly unique.

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PRODUCT

REVIEW

GLOBUS ULTRA SERIES PROJECTORS

BU

BUY l

2011

l B EST

ST

ST B U

Y

BE

Y l BE

GLOBUS ULTRA SERIES is an environment friendly, ultra bright, portable and highly efficient projector. It is technologically

LINKSYS E1000 ROUTER

superior and come in varied brightness

BY MANAS RANJAN

projectors deliver true to life colors with crisp

info@smechannels.com

categories from 2000 ANSI lumens â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 4000 ANSI Lumens. With a high contrast ratio, the and bright picture quality. Globus being the leader in the field of Audio and Video is known for its continuous path breaking and reliable

LINKSYS E1000 is a great choice for people who plan to buy a Wireless Router For Home Use and do not need advanced features like NAS server or Dual Band .

The router is easy to setup and configure ,offering solid performance for 59 bucks , it could be a great deal. E1000 Router is a draft 802.11n compliant device that delivers up to 14x faster speeds and 6x farther range than 802.11g. No knowledge needed to install the router, all you have to do is following the Manual and itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s done in few clicks. With Linksys E1000, you can Limit access time and websites with Parental Controls ,Easily access advanced network settings, Create a separate, secure, password protected network for guests. It is affordable and comes with a nice design. With a super-quick transfer speed of 300Mbps, Wireless-N technology is fast enough to allow rapid data retrieval and backup, the streaming of high-definition content from your PC through to your games console and impressively smooth, uninterrupted online gaming. But the flipside is that it does not support Gigabit Standard (wired connection). It does not come with USB port used to connect a printer or an USB storage device, such as a hard drive.

Although throughput speed is acceptable in a short range , but it drops drastically at long distances.

The best thing is that it weighs only 1.7 pounds and comes with 1 year limited warranty.

FEATURES n

offerings.

Easy to set-up

The Ultra Series projectors are Eco- friendly

n N technology Advanced Control

filtering n Throughput Tests Short range :

30-40 Mbps / Long range : 15-25 Mbps n Number Of Antenna : 2 n Antenna Type : Internal n Directivity :

Fixed

as the power consumption is quite low. All these Ultra Series range of projectors are registered with DGS&D. The cost of procurement of these projectors is less but the cost of maintenance is lesser as they come with 6000 Hours lamp life. Also it has other technically

n Wi-Fi Radio Frequencies: 2.4 Ghz

superior features like: Auto Digital Keystone

n Encryption: WEP 256 bit

correction, Auto source selection, Auto ceiling image reverse, Digital virtual lens shift, Auto shut down, 10 watt speakers, 6000 hr. lamp

PRICE (MOP) Rs 3250/-

WARRANTY 1 Years

CONTACT

life, etc.

Globus has the complete and attractive package for its channel partners be it: Innovative and extensive product line by the pioneer name in the field of Audio and Video in India (Globus), handsome earning potential, strong

CISCO Consumer Products, E-mail Address: consumersales-india@cisco.com, Phone: +1 800-419-5797, Website: http:// www.linksysbycisco.com/APAC/en/home

support and attractive quarterly schemes for

OVERALL RATING

n Price: (Range from Rs. 25,000- 95,000/), Contact Person: Manish Jain (Vice President- Sales), Mobile No. 9711210614

the channel partners.

52 SME CHANNELS MAY 2011

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PRODUCT

NEW ARRIVALS

LOGINWORKS

LOGINWORKS TASKTREK

HCL

HCL ME LAPTOP M54 DEVELOPED BY LOGINWORKS SOFTWARES, TaskTrek is an affordable collaboration tool for the SMB organization in India. It is a hosted service and can also be purchased as a product for on premise installation. In the hosted model, all data will be secure with Loginworks server. The price is quite affordable. It starts from 10 users with 5gb space and price is only 1000 rupees per month and can go up to 100 users with 100gb and pricing is Rs.10000. And, additional space requirement is calculated in multiples of 5gb and for every additional 5gb the cost is Rs.200.

Of course the product is available in various packaging in terms of number of users including 15 users, 30 users, 50, 100 users, etc, which almost fits into any organizational size across businesses.

For a nominal amount of Rs. 3000 per month, a 30 user team (internal + clients) can avail the benefits of TaskTrek, demo, set up & training, IT maintenance and backup, support online, email & phone, storage space and data security.

Although the company is promoting TaskTrek as standard packages but any number of users or storage space required is possible. Packages can be customized keeping in mind the clients’ needs. The product version of TaskTrek is also available with one time fixed cost and / plus annual subscription cost (for 1 year). n Contact: Preeti Juneja, Senior Manager, Brand and Sales, Loginworks Softwares. Phone: +91.120.4133564, email: preeti.juneja@loginworks.com, Website: http://www.loginworks.com/tasktrek

HCL ME LAPTOP M54, India’s first, Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE) star compliant notebook, is power-packed with unique features embedded with latest technologies. HCL ME Laptop M54 meets REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals) standards, laid down by the European environmental-safety standards, and is future-ready for the environmentally-conscious global consumer. The laptop has been designed and manufactured with materials completely free from harmful chemicals and hazardous toxins like Polyvinyl Chloride(PVC), BFR, Antimony, Beryllium resulting in environment-friendly recycling of electronic products thereby reducing risks to health and environment. HCL ME Series M54 is ISO 14001 certified and also included in the HCL GREEN BAG CAMPAIGN which caters to the e-waste collection for corporate as well as individual customers. n Price: Rs 29,999, Warranty: 1 Years, Contact: HCL Infosystems, Phone: 1860-1800-425 or 0120-2406105, SMS: ME to 56161, Website: http://www.hclstore.in

GIGABYTE

GIGABYTE Z68 SERIES MOTHERBOARDS GIGABYTE Z68 SERIES Gigabyte Z68 series motherboards are based on the Intel Z68 Express Chipset and support the new 2nd generation Intel Core processors. Delivering the very best that Intel 6 series chipsets have to offer, including a significant performance boost with Intel Smart Response Technology, the first ever mSATA drive connectors on a standard desktop PC motherboard, and Gigabyte’s proprietary Touch BIOS technology, Gigabyte Z68 series motherboards put users in the driver seat, allowing them to take total control over how their system operates and performs to best match their individual computing needs. 11 models are available now, with more than 9 additional models, including at least 4 mSATA versions, to be introduced in June, 2011. n Price: On request, Warranty: 3 Years, Contact: Anilkumar Ramakrishnan, GIGABYTE Technology India Private Limited Phone: 91-2240633218, Email: anilkumarr@gigabyte.in

54 SME CHANNELS MAY 2011

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3/24/2011 11:14:52 AM

RNI No.: DEL ENG / 2010 / 3192

Data of Posting: 22 & 23 of Every Month

Postal Reg. No.: DL-SW-1/4145/10-12

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5/22/2011 8:41:00 PM