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| We have rightly priced technology for KVM market in India |
IWQ: What about growing your market share in India? Is KVM still a good business story for solution providers?
Karthik: After China, India is the largest revenue for us from APAC region. With a dominant market share of 60 percent in the Indian KVM market, we work closely through our sole distributor Cubix Microsystems.They have a 500 plus partner base of system integrators and resellers across India. With a majority of over 60 percent revenues from Altusan, we are empowering partners to focus on enterprise/SMB products from this brand. The KVM industry is growing multifold and is expected to touch 1 billion dollars by 2012 according to the industry reports. Apart from KVM opportunity, our foray into video is another marketplace for partners to make margins.
IWQ: Your main competitors like Raritan and others are introducing innovations like IP based KVM switches. What makes Aten a market leader?
Karthik: We have rightly priced technology for KVM market. Vendors like Raritan and Avocent operate across certain set of KVM solutions. With a comprehensive portfolio, we are a one stop solution for KVM needs of enterprises of all sizes. In KVM over IP solution, if a customer needs accessories related to entry level product, they would not be able to provide it. We recently bagged number of Government tenders against competitors in India on price factor without compromising on quality.
IWQ: Will the same set of partners who sell KVM be selected for other technology offerings?
Karthik: Cubix has been engaged with a dozen odd partners who will specialize in video space. Partners who have expertise in A/V integration and good customer base in medical, education, hospitality.Digital signage is huge business in India across ATMs, check in kiosks. Video is an important vertical for us as our products are technology compliant with latest technology needed by users like HDMI, Compatibility, HD A/V and so on.
IWQ: Do you think virtualization would reduce the demand for KVM switches with decline in physical servers? What is your roadmap to leverage such emerging technologies?
Karthik: Virtualization is relatively nascent in India due to high cost of setting virtual infrastructure. As data and related business applications record exponential growth, the demand for physical servers will continue to grow. Servers cannot exist without KVMs and vice versa. Be it storage or server virtualization, there would be need for KVM switches in a different format. Infact, we are looking at virtualization in our technology roadmap to incorporate co-existence of virtualization and KVM in a typical enterprise architecture.
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| Simmtronics On a Strong Wicket |
Leading component vendor Simmtronics has a growing clout in the in memory module, motherboards and VGA cards business and is all set to grow its India business with its simple channel expansion strategy for pushing its products. Mr.Vinit Shangle, National Sales Manager, Simmtronics Semiconductors Limited, speaks with IT-Webquest on the details of Simmtronics’ go to market strategy.
Q.1 How is Simmtronics along with its partners responding to the slowdown?
We at Simmtronics decided to fight the slowdown by building up our infrastructure taking advantage of the lower cost compartive to before the meltdown. We setup our manufacturing plant at Roorkee for Motherboards & Graphics Cards. We increased our branches from 10 to 16. We kept launching new variety of Motherboards & Graphics Cards to keep the Channel interest high
Q. 2 Please elaborate your partner strategy in the region.
We at Simmtronics have a very simple Partner Startegy. We work with what we call them as "DIRECT BILLING PARTNER (DBP)". The DBP's are registered with repspected 16 branches with a approved credit line. We work with depth & width Partner so as to ensure maximun reach. We as a policy don't have a National Distributor or a Regional Distributor concept as we decided to be closer to the Partner fraternity and also cutting down the margins of one tier.
Q. 3 How many channel partners do you have? Is there any plan to increase the existing number?
Well we already have about 1800 DBP's registered with us. Adding & increasing these numbers is an ongoing process as we keep targeting new cities & areas. Since there is a fallout also of the registered Partner's we need to keep adding the numbers to ensure a stable increasing business month over month.
Q. 4 Do you have any promotional activities for channel partners in this quarter or in near future?
Promotion activities / Scheme / Programs are done through out the year. That is an ongoing process to keep the DBP's interest high & keep them linked with the brand. It also helps us to get them to commit volumes with us & thus effectievly block the sales for competitive brands. We will definately have new Programs for future which will be revealed at appropiate time
Q. 5 Which are the likely segments that you would be targeting?
Currently we are working with Reseller' / SI's / Traders & we will continue to work with them for some more time. In future we may target SME / SMB as we are planning to launch new product range for that segment
Q. 6 How are you formulating your go to market strategy for the retail market in India?
Currently we are not working in this space & have no immediate plans also to venture into retail space.
Q. 7 What has been done on the support side?
We have 16 support centres in India wherein we give support all other products. Apart from this we have online support also through our website www.simmtronics.com . All product drivers, warranty policy, RMA forms are also available onsite. We offer a table replacement warranty for our Memory Module across all the Support Centres. On the Motherboards & Graphics Cards, we strive to maintain a TAT of 7 days.
Q. 8 Which are the flagship brands that you sell and how do you look at their strengths in the market?
We only sell our brand SIMMTRONICS. We have never sold any other brand nor we will ever do it. What ever we will sell will be under our own SIMMTRONICS brand name
Q. 9 What is the next phase of growth for the company?
Our manufacturing unit at Roorkee is plank for us to grow many fold in near future. We would soon be manufacturing new & exciting range of products in Roorkee. These new products will be launched around Deepawali time. We also working on to increase the sales of current range of products ie Motherboards, Memory Module & Graphics Cards. We are very excited about the future as future for is all GROWTH for us |
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