Attractive Incentives Power Sales

Bangalore's UPS market has seen products flooding the shelves of channel partners. Advancement in the enterprise computing infrastructure and power protection technology has given way to new players who have entered the market with products that carry promising features and high performance levels. Thus, both, vendors and channels, are looking at UPSs to bring in greater revenues. 

Channels in the UPS market are more driven by schemes offered by vendors rather than products and their features. "Features of different brands vary marginally, but it's the scheme that vendors come out with that attracts us to push products," says A R Santhosh, Marketing Executive, Millennium Systems Pvt Ltd. 

No wonder then that schemes like, 'win a car'; high incentives for top resellers; and gifts in gold are becoming common in the UPS market. Yet another hot favorite scheme is to bundle the UPS with other products. The most recent promotion in this direction has been the APC - Dell offer. According to this scheme a Dell customer is eligible for special discounts on certain

APC UPSs. The fulfillment of this scheme is again routed through APC's channel network, helping it to its sales targets.

TVS Electronics has decided to use its newsletter 'The Channel Partner's Communique' to spread the word about its products. This release informs its resellers about end-customers' expectations from a product and the company. This in turn helps partners fine-tune their knowledge about the product details and provide solutions based on specific customer needs.

The company also runs special periodic schemes for their UPS range. 

An extension of the PC

Power cuts, spikes and surges have become a common affair in most cities, including Bangalore. The effects of power problems include keyboard lockup, complete data loss, hardware degradation, damaged motherboards and more. This is one of the reasons why the demand for power protection has gone up. "Flickering lights might not affect a home user much, but in a business-place, power failure and variations in power can pose high risk to mission-critical data," explains R S Shanbhag, MD, Value Point Systems. 

Shanbhag has made the UPS an integral part of his business along with other products. Says he, "Though our main stream products are PCs and servers, we sometimes bundle UPS to add value to our sales." Most resellers stock UPS as a logical extension of their PC business. They often package UPS with PCs. 

These days purchase of an UPS has become almost mandatory with a PC. One can talk about several factors, which have driven the UPS market to great heights. One of them is the advent of the Internet, which has influenced some vendors to build UPSs to protect modems. 

Wipro's eMerge UPS 525 claims to protect modems along with the computer from sudden surges on the telephone line. With this facility users can stay connected to the Internet and also protect their modems from current fluctuations. 

Newborns in the UPS market

With the entrance of brands like Wipro, Cerebra, TVS Electronics, Bangalore's UPS market has undergone a sea change, leading to stiff competition. Each company is motivating its channel to push their respective products in the market. "Wipro ePeripherals has a wide reach across the country and also has a support network spanning over 90 locations and 3,500 trained engineers," says S Raghavendra Prakash, Group Product Manager, Wipro ePeripherals. "Our sales channel is 225 strong across the country and addresses around 5,000 resellers. We are planning to aggressively push Wipro's UPS through this network." 

The latest brand to enter the UPS market is Olympus, which will soon be launched by Pune-based Sky Business Solutions. Wellwin Industries, a Chennai-based company is making a back-door entry into Bangalore's market. The company is planning to launch 'Non-drip UPS Batteries'. "We have tied up with couple of UPS vendors who would be deploying our batteries in their UPS," says S Sudhir, GM, Wellwin Industries. 

Vendors on the popularity ladder

APC still seems to be holding an edge in the UPS market and it also appears to be the most preferred brand in the Bangalore's SOHO segment. Other vendors like Microtek, Wipro, TVSE and others are battling hard to grab the market share from APC by offering new features in their products.

Newcomer Olympus has introduced a few unique features in its products. "Our latest range carries more features than that of APC and Wipro products. These features include additional software, modem and telephone interface," says Mahesh Borole, MD, Sky Business Solutions.

All these developments are good news for channel partners. They are in a position today to reach a monthly turnover of Rs 1 lakh by selling around 4,000 to 5,000 units. 

Bottom line

In the e-world where businesses can't stop for a nano-second and downtime is unacceptable, UPS products have made themselves absolutely vital for every business house. And with new products and brands being launched at regular intervals, it is obvious that partners have enough products to sell. 

Sunila Paul  in Bangalore