When a vendor has niche or high-end technologies, which are not of the retail variety, his go-to-market strategy leaves out national distributors. This is because distributors want well known brands and products with high sales turnaround.

So these vendors prefer working with solution providers (SPs). However, SPs are hard to find because only the top players have personnel with sound technical knowledge. Smaller SPs in non-metro cities do not have a well qualified technical work force or the scope for up-skilling themselves.

While looking at non-metros for business, vendors need to deal with the dilemma of finding SPs with the right skill sets. Even if they sign on SPs, most of them are not convinced that the partner will be able to sustain the business of niche solutions given the attrition levels in manpower. Against that backdrop, how do these vendors view and tackle this problem?

Sharing his thoughts on the need to work with channels, Thomas Abraham, MD of Sage Software India said, “We believe in building a strong and loyal channel. These partnerships that we forge are focused on organiz-ations that have numerous capabilities, namely a team with strong CRM or ERP skills, focused sales and pre-sales teams, good project management and implementation skills.”

Speaking in the same vein, Michael Lohmann, Director-APAC, Embarcadero Technologies said, “The software tools we provide to the market are niche in nature. While, we do have relationships with a few distributors throughout the globe, we find our best market penetra-tion comes from partnering specialized resellers. However, this varies depending on the country.”

Don't discount distis
Surajit Sen, National Sales Manager, NetApp India however had a slightly different opinion. He maintained that NetApp products do not belong to the fast moving, retail variety, where a run-of-the-mill distributor can stock and sell. Its storage and data management solutions are focused on mid-to-large enterprises, whose sales cycle could be long in many cases.

He said that there are certain value-added distributors that do carry high value/solution-oriented products on their portfolio. They bring to the table their extensive knowledge in working with VARs and help select the right tier-2 partners for the principals. They also actively participate in the sales process by supporting the VARs with pre-sales resources and evaluation equipment.”

“To have a complete range of offerings for their VARs to sell, distributors need to include high value (thought not fast moving) products too on their portfolio. Currently, we have two distributors-Ingram Micro and Inflow Technologies-and our experience with them has been very good so far,” Sen indicated.

Commenting on the need to work with SPs, Chinmay Patra, GM-Sales and Marketing, Godrej Infotech said, “Our products are not of retail variety and hence we find it difficult to sell through distributors. If we have to grow substantially and reach out to prospective customers, then there is no other alternate but to have partners.”

Why are SPs preferred?
If partners' were a way to go, would SPs be the best bet to survive in the India market? According to Thomas, Sage only works with solution providers.

But the biggest challenge he faces is not about locating good solution providers, but more a question of how to work with them as a team and treat them as true partners. “We have several organizations that wish to work with us but our approach is to make sure that the right partners are chosen who have a long-term commitment to Sage. That helps Sage to focus on them as well and ensure they get a decent RoI on their investments,” he said.

But Lohmann finds it quite difficult to identify potential partners with both technical resources as well as existing customer relationships to work with and are not focused in a different field. Sen too shares this concern. This is why SAP invests heavily in the technical enablement of its partners so that they can architect a solution based on the 'best practices' and the deployments are planned and managed seamlessly.

Enabling partners
What is interesting to note is that since the solutions business is taking off in the smaller cities, big SPs from metros are setting up their operations here. This is because they already have the domain expertise and skilled teams and it is only a matter of deploying them in the right geographies within India.

Since signing up good SPs is a challenge for Embacardero, Lohmann indicated his com-pany has engaged professional service companies (like the US Commercial Service and their International Partner Search) to assist them. “They can provide local staff who are familiar with the markets to prepare reports and summaries of prospective companies, while also engaging on our behalf. In addition to this we invest heavily in global brand awareness strategies, which helps drive interest directly from our company website.”

Some vendors position smaller SPs with their existing channel partners who can provide direct support from a technical perspective. This also adds value to its main channel partners.

Controlling attrition
The reason SPs in smaller cities are strapped for quality manpower in the technical end of business is because of their high attrition rates. Taking note of this serious problem, vendors like SAP try to make their training programs simple to get people trained in a shorter time.

“If you really analyze attrition properly, I feel these days attrition is more if you do not improve skill sets of employees and make them a more motivated workforce. Improving skill sets and teaching them newer and niche technologies will actually help in retaining people” said Patra.

Subbalakshmi BM
subbalakshmibm@cybermedia.co.in

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