Taiwan-based Aten International, a manufacturer of KVM switches, will apply a six-point program in India to help it get a good foothold in the enterprise market, for which it has launched a range of high-end products. The company claims that it already has 55 percent marketshare in the entry and mid-level KVM business in India. Jerry Liu, Associate VP, Aten said, “India is a growing market and enterprises are increasingly demanding high-end KVM switches with additional and scalable features. Since we are already well established in the mid-level market, we have now decided to divert our focus on the enterprise segment with the six-point program.” To begin with, Aten will try to establish its brand name in the enterprise segment followed by offering a complete product line for all types of customers. The third point on the agenda is to offer cost-effective products since India is a price-sensitive market. “The fourth step in our plan is to beef up our existing service network. Currently, our partners offer level one and two support and Aten will get directly involved in case these cases are escalated,” added Liu. Logistics is the fifth item on the company's plans and it will soon launch a centralized support center, where products will be tested, repaired and even replaced if needed, especially for the higher end models,” said Nitin Naik of Cubix Microsystems, Aten's Indian national distributor. Currently Aten is leveraging on Cubix's direct presence in seven cities, which will soon be increased to nine locations in the country. These are likely to be Chandigarh, Coimbatore and a city in Gujarat.

The last aspect of the six-point program is offering better logistic support to the channel along with a good profit margin. “We will soon have a centralized logistics center to reduce the turnaround time of post-sales support. Currently the bandwidth of turnaround time is four to 24 hours and we hope to bring this down once the stocking center is established,” added Liu.

Aten currently has 600 partners in India through Cubix Microsystem, which is based in Pune. Of these, 20 comprise the Gold channel who stock and sell Aten products, 160 are part of the Silver who buy from the Gold partners regularly and the remainder are standard partners who place need-based orders. Over the past four month, Cubix has trained 200 engineers of this channel partners across five cities. In fact, Liu mentioned that India is the only geography where Aten does not have a direct presence and operates entirely through its distributor. The vendor is so happy with the success it has enjoyed through Cubix that it is now contemplating a replication of this model in other cities as well.

The KVM market globally has grown by 16 to 20 percent in the last three years and is expected to grow by 14 to 16 percent in the next three years, according to IDC. This slowdown is believed to be due to the saturation in European markets and a slowdown in the US economy, though the bullish growth in Asian and other markets has helped counter it and maintain the growth pace to an extent. According to Nitin Naik, the Indian KVM market is estimated to be around $10 million to $12 million, while the global KVM market is around $1 billion currently.

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