Associations are becoming more important

There was a time when the JFM quarter was the most important one for the

Indian IT industry. This was because more than 40% of annual sales used to

happen in this period. But over the last couple of years, the scenario has

changed with JAS becoming more important.

However, the JFM quarter is now turning out to be quite eventful for the

channel community. Close to 15 expos are held at various places-Pune, Surat,

Nagpur, Baroda, Pondicherry, Indore, Bhubaneswar, Kolkata etc-all organized by

local channel associations. Apart from these expos, most of them tend to have

their annual elections also in this period. Additionally, this year, a new

association-PCAIT-made its presence felt with its formal announcement

happening in the middle of March.

With so much happening on the channel association front, we thought it would

be a good idea to take stock of their working. Basically, the idea meant having

a look at their working and what their members have to say about the same.

Accordingly, we roped in India's premier technology market researcher IDC to

conduct a nationwide survey.

The next step was to compile a list of channel associations and it turned out

to be quite an eye-opener. To our surprise, we were able to gather names of 55

channel associations spread across close to 50 cities. Although we had a good

idea that there are lots of associations, but we had never imagined that there

would be so many of them. As it turned out, even small-small places had local

associations of the channel partners. However, as we did a close scrutiny of all

these associations, we found out that not all of them were really active. So, we

short-listed 26 associations, who we found are pretty active on the ground.

Once we were ready with the final list, IDC took over and formulated a

qualitative model. Based on this model, first office-bearers of the associations

were interviewed and then a random sample of their common members were quizzed.

Although the satisfaction level amongst the members was quite okay, still a lot

remains to be done. Most of the smaller associations got high marks, whereas the

associations in metros saw lower satisfaction levels.

At the end of it, we are quite certain that this first-ever ranking of

channel associations will generate a lot of heat and controversy, especially

from the metros. However, as the heat and dust settles down, channel partners as

well as associations will realize on their own that this is a very valuable

exercise we have undertaken, which will be an annual feature, and will help them

in pulling up their socks.

Asim Raina