''Our job is to find customers, products and even human resources for channel partners''- - Pavan Sood, MD, ITNation.com Ltd

A man of in-depth understanding of both direct and indirect

marketing channels of the IT industry, Pavan Sood joined ITNation.com from AIMS

International Ltd. A graduate from HR College in Mumbai, Pavan has to his

credit, a degree in business administration from Sydenham College. Early in his

career, Pavan headed and successfully led a shipping company to international

success. With his marketing competencies, Pawan wants to expand and shift a

substantial percentage of the IT B2B online trade to ITNation.com. He speaks to

CI on his strategies to make his portal the No 1 IT portal of the country.

Excerpts from an exclusive interview:

What is ITNation.com? Are you an e-tailer or an infomediary?

ITNation.com is a marketplace for India’s IT industry. We

are an infomediary. As an IT exchange, ITNation.com serves as a neutral online

marketplace where buyers and sellers can buy, sell, trade, auction and advertise

their products and services. We offer the IT community a seamless platform for

information exchange. We offer the IT seller several trading and marketing

opportunities, enabling him to expand his business to the net. The buyer will

find a comprehensive store of product information, comparative rates, news,

trends and events in IT industry. In addition, at ITNation.com, he will find all

the buying options he wants. Our job is to find customers, products and even

human resources for channel partners. In other words, we are the channel’s

partner and we would like to empower them. We are a trading exchange as well as

a service platform, and our focus is the seller.

What is unique about ITNation.com?

While most Internet-based market places focus on buyers,

ITNation.com has approached the IT B2B proposition from the seller’s side.

This has been done keeping in mind that a large share of the IT industry today

consists of small and medium traders. The site aims to eliminate the

disadvantages of size, distances and spending power, giving every IT seller an

opportunity to compete in today’s market. For the buyer, this automatically

translates into huge benefits in terms of range, accessibility and the power to

compare as well as leverage this information into better buying decisions.

How will your site help channels?

There are 6,000 channel partners from six cities. These

include SIs, retailers and distributors. In these days of shrinking margins,

channels would like to cut costs as much as possible. On ITNation.com, users are

separated into one of the four member categories -- trade, institutional,

corporate and individual. As of July, our site has over 6,500 registered trade

members and the top 1000 of India’s large corporates like Cadbury, Reliance,

Siemens, Ranbaxy and Thermax. We would like to involve the channels as much as

possible.

ITNation.com targets its products and services towards

helping the B2B Indian IT market shift part of its business online. Our vast

seller base also provides channels with extremely viable additions to their

long-standing supplier relationships, allowing them to acquire the best

price-service deals. Similar advantages are also available to individual and

smaller corporate members of the site, making ITNation.com the one-stop online

IT exchange — providing products, information, services and online business

consultancy, besides support facilities.

Does your site have any innovative features?

We know exactly what people in the IT industry want. So we

have classifieds, besides 50 listings, auctions and an interactive catalogue. It

is possible to request for a system of any configuration or send a quote

directly to the customer. We function like a commodity exchange or a stock

market. We have already run auctions successfully three times. Our site has a

feature called ‘Just-In-Time-Buying where the customer can actually cancel his

order electronically, even at the last stage.

Shortly, we also hope to introduce order tracking. Soon there’ll

be trade auctions and end-users auctions. We also intend to have 19 different

kinds of auctions, including reverse auctions. One of the main differences

between ITNation.com and e-tailers is that in our case, invoicing is carried out

by resellers themselves. In the case of e-tailers, they are the ones who take

the payments. As far as we are concerned, resellers are not our channel

partners; they are our members.

How does a typical transaction take place?

Sellers are looking for a price at which they wish to sell.

Buyers bid for a price at which they want to buy. When there is a match, a

transaction happens and that brings quick liquidity to the market place.

What is your revenue model?

Revenues will accrue from transactions and services. Our

charges will be negligible. Whatever we charge, we will more than compensate by

increasing volumes of sales and procurement. Channels will save in terms of cost

and time. They will also be able to manage their inventory far more effectively.

What infrastructure have you put in place to facilitate

transactions?

ITNation.com believes that it is ‘functional marketplace

technology’ that will make serious business happen on the Internet.

ITNation.com tied up with the leading global e-commerce platform provider, Ariba.

With this technology ITNation.com members can look forward to more advanced

market place activities such as dynamic trade and revenue auctions. When

ITNation.com chose to partner with Ariba, it was not merely from the technology

perspective. The exchange will gain enormous value, insight and benefits from

this partner’s global experience in building and executing B2B marketplaces

for a wide range of clientele.

For payment gateways, we are talking to HDFC, ICICI and

Citibank. Funds transfer over the Net is possible with a facility from Hong Kong

Bank, called ‘Hexagon’. We already have settlement days for commodity

exchange transactions. The payment systems will also have credit and escrow

accounts.

Are you confident of generating revenues in a market where PC

penetration is not very high?

ITNation.com evolved from its concept stage in August 1998 to

a business model in January 1999 and it is now already in the revenue generation

stage. According to Gartner, by 2004, the annual sales of PCs will increase from

1 million to 7 million. B2C might take time to take off in India, but in the B2B

segment, it is already action time. IT is the one industry that sells on the net

and channels are already web-savvy. What we are creating is a win-win situation

for everybody involved, which only the net allows us to do. When margins come

down, you need more products to sell, besides increasing volumes. To do that, a

reseller has to be exposed to all the products in the market and that is what IT

Nation offers. We hope to have a black balance sheet in one year.

Bobby Anthony in Mumbai