"MP3 players and Fotoshow are becoming the focus areas of Iomega"- - Sanjiv Gupta, Business Manager, Iomega Pacific

As business manager, distribution sales at Iomega Pacific, Sanjiv Gupta is responsible for the channels in the Indian sub-continent, Middle East and Philippines. Channels are his specialty as throughout this career, he has made it a point to make their lives easier. At Tech Pacific where he worked as a marketing manager, he shouldered the responsibility for identifying new products, markets and avenues for e-commerce. Now as Iomega gears up to launch a slew of new products in the country, Sanjiv tells

CI that he wants to project the company as a data management company as well as a software solutions company and not merely a data storage company.

Iomega has offices in over nine countries in the Asia-Pacific region but none in India. What is stopping Iomega from opening an office in India?

It is like a phase in life. Our business is doing extremely well, we have grown by over 100 percent in India. So partly the question is why do we need to be in India? We have good marketing support, we have good distributors and we have a lot of third party relationships going on with companies like Channel Strategies. They give us almost six people regularly for the streets full-time. We work with the local PR and advertising agencies. And I too am in India for 15 days every month. So there is no reason for us to have an office in India this very instant. But things are changing and the business is growing really fast and at the right time we will think about opening an office in India.

What we are looking is to provide the right marketing, right distribution and the right after-sales support. I emphasize a lot on the latter. Firstly our distributors play a very important role in making sure that resellers and end-users get the warranty in exchange programs very well. For instance, if a customer exchanges his Zip drive for a Clik, he should get the warranty for the latter as well.

We also have a third-party partner managing our call center. What it means is that any reseller or end-user who really needs to know any technical details of our products or has any pre- or post-sales issue, can call our call centers in any of the six cities. So except the fact that we do not have an office over here, we have everything available at this point of time.

We do not want to have a call center only in Mumbai or in Delhi. We want to optimize the resources of our third-party partners to ensure results. Today the number of calls we typically get from Mumbai or Delhi alone do not justify the need for us to have a call center in each of these locations. So what these call centers do is that they actually transfer calls centrally and the customer does not have to pay for that.

And then again these guys have a very transparent access to us, so we monitor each call they get and the response given. Each and every call in which they answer a customer or the channel is actually recorded in a specified format decided by Iomega. And then there is an escalation process by which these calls are transferred to our Singapore office as and when we require them.

Yes, we definitely have plans to increase our distributors. We are looking at how much business we can expect next year. We are in the midst of a planning for next year. We will talk to our existing distributors and find out how much business they can give us and we will then see how much business we had planned. And then based on that information, we will see whether we need to appoint another distributor.

I personally do not favor regional distributors. So if we look at it, we will look at national level players. Consumer lifestyle products like MP3 players and Fotoshow are becoming the focus areas of Iomega. Once we feel that the market is ready for these products, we have to evaluate whether the current channel partners are able to handle this new dimension of our business. This is a continuous phenomena, you can never really say as to when is the right time to add a new distributor.

There is a lot of merging happening between consumer durable channel and the IT channel. Our channel loves us.

We have synergized programs for all our products for the benefit of the channel. Suppose the channel is going to get certain rebates, they can build the rebates very quickly from all the building blocks of Iomega, rather than looking at one source for set-top box and one source for zip drives and yet another source for CD-Writers. So our message to our channel partners is that you can buy the whole assortment of storage products from us and build up your mileage. So we really want to build up our relationship with our channel partners.

That was part of our global 20^th anniversary celebrations. It was a kind of thank-you note to our customers. There were a lot of rebates for media. We wanted to tell our customers that you use our products and maybe find it a bit expensive. So we would like to offer it a little cheaper for a month. And we were also trying to find out whether with the right price, we can get more people to use more media. It was very successful as it was given up-front to the customers. It was also a mind-share exercise for our channel and our customers as we plan to launch many new products.

Today most resellers have a lot products on their hands. They are registered as channel partners for ten different vendors, and they have very complicated procedures for filing claims, rebates. I would like to make the life of my channel partners easier. Our channel partners do not have to file claims. We get data from our distributors and we automatically offer them rebates. We want to really and strengthen our back-end processes too.