Banking on the success of its first IT expo-Digital Expo 2008, held in Chennai in the month of May, distribution major Redington is all set to take this expo to other regions. The disti has announced plans to conduct similar expos in major cities in South India such as Coimbatore, Vijayawada and Trivandrum in the next three months. “Redington's initiative, to become a value-added distributor, was a major success and we drew huge crowds during the expo in Chennai. It enabled our channel partners to do very good business. We want to replicate the same across the country. Initially we will take the expo to Coimbatore, Vijayawada and Trivandrum to capitalize on the tremendous opportunities provided in terms of sales, branding and publicity,” informed Sridevi TP, Marketing Manager, Redington India. As per the plan, the event would be conducted in Coimbatore from October 10 to 12, Vijayawada from November 21 to 23 and Trivandrum from December 19 to 21.

On the selection of these three cities, Sridevi said, “After the success of the Chennai expo and based on the feedback we received, we plan to conduct this event in the major industrial cities in South. So we selected Coimbatore, which is the Manchester of South India; Vijayawada, the business capital of Andhra Pradesh and Trivandrum, the capital of Kerala.” She also said that Redington would undertake a comprehensive marketing effort to attract and ensure the footfall of the decision-making audience.

“A highly integrated and focused marketing campaign, consisting of a complete above the line and below the line marketing mix with special focus on Internet marketing, has been designed to promote the event in and around the event cities. The event is sure to attract 10,000 to 15,000 visitors over three days in all these places,” she shared. The IT exhibition is aimed at providing a cost effective platform for principals to promote their products and bolster their relationship with channel partners. The expo will showcase computers, components, peripherals, consumer electronics, software products, networking, computer education, multimedia, and telecom and mobile communication. As a part of its value addition exercise, Redington has planned to conduct a seminar for the first time for the educational institutions. The purpose of the seminar is to enable institutions to obtain complete knowledge on their IT implementations under the name 'IT for Educational Institutions: Solutions & Strategies.' For this reason it has joined hands with Cisco and HP. “Lots of educational institutions face challenges in knowing their IT implementations and as a value addition to our distribution, we will join hands with vendors and enable institutions to obtain more knowledge on their implementation necessities,” Sridevi averred. A daylong session is scheduled to take place on September 13 in Chennai for the IT expertise and decision makers of the educational institutions. “We wanted to do more such programs and are interested in joining hands with other vendors too. Since Cisco and HP opted for the sponsorship of the first event, we joined hands with them and in future too we look forward to conducting more such seminars in association with other vendors,” Sridevi informed.

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