Channel Stars And Success Stories

Come to think of it, who- ever had thought of stars among channel partners and their success stories! At CI we had an eventful year tracking down achievers among the channel community and doing much more.

We enjoyed gathering news relevant to the channel community. We were the first to break some of the key stories like Powertel being bought over by Citrix, IBM getting the skumars.com project, Tech Pacific diversifying into electronics components distribution and so on. The list is long to enumerate in full.

From breaking news to conducting interviews with industry leaders and opinion-makers to highlighting market trends in technology and products to producing a comprehensive guide on street prices of a whole range of IT products, we have done it all.

Gathering market intelligence, on the other hand, was an arduous affair. While many market players came out readily with information, others did not. With a little extra effort and persuasion the facts and figures did emerge, making our stories relevant and helpful in decision-making.

Our focus during the year was to provide new business opportunities to channel partners. CMDs, MDs and CEOs of IT companies used our columns to communicate emerging business ideas to channel partners opening up new vistas.

Channel and marketing managers in their interviews spoke about their company policies, initiatives and schemes for channel partners helping the latter to take maximum advantage of this information and enhance their businesses.

We put together IT tenders on an all-India basis giving channel partners an opportunity to explore this avenue for business. The ‘Dealer Meeting Ground’ has been successful in generating an intense interaction among vendors and channel partners providing a chance to expand their businesses.We are flooded with mail for this particular section.

On the occasion of our first anniversary, we are adding one more feature to ‘Business Opportunities’ section where we will publicize promotions. The page, which will be called ‘Value For Money’ will provide advance information to channel partners on various promotions, schemes and drives carried out by vendors, OEMs and distributors.Channel partners had no dedicated publication to voice their grievances till CI came on the scene. We gave top priority to highlight problems faced by channel partners, be they related to sales tax, octroi or warranty.

The associations run by channel partners are very dear to them and so they are to us. We have been running a regular feature called ‘Limelight’ wherein we have given wide publicity to the good work done by these associations.During our interaction with association as well as channel leaders, many of them have come out emphatically for a National Association of Channels of Information Technology (NACIT). We too see a strong need for NACIT and hopefully, by our second anniversary NACIT would be in place.

CI came on the scene a year ago as a bridge between vendors and channel partners, to provide up-to-date information on tomorrow’s technology today. We will continue to provide this with greater gusto not only to keep channel partners well informed but also make their businesses profitable.