Like most other distribution majors, Iris Computers' year-on-year growth too slumped, from 65 percent in 2000-01 to nine percent in 2001-02. The company closed its books with at Rs 190 crore in 2001-02 as against Rs 175 crore in the fiscal before. However, ranking-wise, it improved its position by climbing to the #8 slot from #10 last year in the DQCI Silver Club.
Following the industry trend, Iris too expanded to smaller towns to buffer its
bottomline. This foray was however not at the cost of their focus on branded PCs.
Iris partnered with IBM in their Very Focussed Business (VFB) initiative to go upcountry. Under the VFB initiative, IBM launched a low-priced product to cater to the unexplored markets.
Explaining the concept, Sanjiv Krishen, Chairman, Iris Computers says, "The introduction if these low-priced machines was to
reach out to smaller cities and cut down the time wasted on negotiating on pricing." He adds that this initiative helped the company gain nearly Rs 5 crore of business.
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To face the rough weather, Iris ensured that value add delivered to the customer was maximized and for this Iris worked like a gymnast-with speed and flexibility. The company went to the extent of even renting out servers to one of its customers. "The
delighted customer came back to us with a repeat order," explains
Sanjiv.
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The company also maintained its focus by distributing only desktops, notebooks and servers offered by MNCs in the country. Year 2001-02 also saw Iris make substantial progress with
IrisCare, its service wing and Iris Unified Learning, it training and education arm.
Iris is quite upbeat about taking its training and education venture forward. Last year saw Iris Unified Learning become profitable. With over 15 Microsoft certified trainers on its payroll today, the company has trained many corporate personnel and officials from government departments.
Laying down a roadmap to take the initiative forward, Iris is setting up a state-of-the-art training-center in Delhi. While this will bulwark their training efforts, it will also act as a lab to demonstrate firewalls and security systems, a domain that Iris plans to enter soon.
Talking of the future, Krishen says the company is looking at getting into the business of high-end servers. "We will be looking at servers from Sun and high-end servers from HP and IBM too," adds he.