Advertisment

'For better prospects, channel partners need to turn to services.'

author-image
DQC Bureau
New Update

After

starting his career  with Zenith Computers and working there for six years,

Rajesh Bakshi donned the garb of an entrepreneur by founding NetLink Business

Systems and Ranve Computers for dealing in hardware and software respectively.

Started with a modest investment of Rs 5,000, the company today boasts a

turnover of over Rs 42 crore. DQCI gets Rajesh's insights on the channel

business and its future. 

Advertisment

What made you graduate from hardware to software?

The transition was a challenging job, which appealed to

me. Besides, it was easier for us to capture the international market as India

is a prominent player in the global software space. This presented an

opportunity that we could easily exploit. We had been in software development

and training since 1992, though we increased our focus in the area only in 1998.

We started the development of what I call the “industry

engines”. We chose to get into customer relationship management (CRM), IT

asset management and help desk. IT asset management at that time was very

complementary to our very own business of services and integration.

Advertisment

What exactly do you mean by IT asset management?

IT asset management deals with the purchase of IT assets

within an organization to cover its entire life-cycle. This includes purchase,

installation, deployment of the asset, warranty, depreciation and then

recovering its scrap value or to redeploy it productively within the

organization. Because, as we understand the industry and the IT products, it

never becomes scrap and can be redeployed.

I may find my 1 GHz notebook of no use to me after one

year, because I may be using heavy applications, but it can be redeployed for

use by a person in the organization, who uses only spreadsheets, or by someone

in the marketing department as a productive tool in making better presentations

and capturing data. So we deal with redeployment of the asset so as to increase

its life cycle.

Advertisment

How does it help to enhance the value derived from the

asset? 

The life cycle of an IT asset stands increased, which

means that it contributes productively to the organization for a greater length

of time, thus, saving on the purchase of new assets. And under the IT asset

management service that we provide to our customer, we have many modules that

help enhance the productivity of the asset too.

One of them is Web auditing. The application lies on the

server and whenever a user logs on to the network, the web auditing component is

activated and an audit of his machine is performed without actually disturbing

the user. What we have found out is that most of the users use memory and

hard-disk heavily, while the processor doesn't get used to its maximum

potential.

Advertisment

This means that an average user never needs to migrate to

a higher processor. But most of the time a machine is replaced with the launch

of a new processor. So this kind of information will help the management take

informed decisions about IT asset purchase and upgradation.

How have you leveraged your learnings in the hardware

trade?

We were selling a lot many products from Cisco, Compaq,

Microsoft and other networking companies. Today what we do is more related to

services and software. So in a way it is a natural extension.

Advertisment

We have however productized the service by launching the

first service product in the industry, called the TIIMS or total IT

infrastructure management services. The product is driven by our proprietary

3DO--design, deploy, deliver and optimize--model.

Under 'design' we work on network planning and design,

fault tolerance planning for the network, data sizing and storage networks and

contingency planning. Under 'deploy' we deploy different types of processes

around asset management like standardization of IT practices, service level

agreement (SLA) negotiation and management and cover various other related

aspects.

Under 'deliver' we undertake network audits, storage

audits, facility management, fault tolerance management and so on. And finally

under 'optimize' we undertake OS optimization and migration, application

optimization and IT asset life-cycle optimization. So in a nutshell we are a

service company with a focus on IT assets.

Advertisment

All channel partners are selling IT assets, so how can

the channel benefit from your product offering?

The 3DO model is delivered through a powerful application

that we have developed, called the IntelliAsset. It is a complete IT asset

management application and comes with an IntelliDesk, which is a help desk. If

the partner has a system to deliver services to its customers, then this is a

powerful tool that will help them make their services quantifiable and

accountable. The services will therefore become much better.

For better prospects, channel partners have to turn to

services. You cannot think of selling a product and forget about it. You need to

be close to the customer for the life cycle of the product. And only then can

one expect a customer to look positively at the channel partner.

Advertisment

We shifted our entire focus to services one-and-a-half

year ago and today we have a good number of customers for our services. And they

are much more happy and delighted than they were when we were selling only

products to them. Services contribute half of our turnover today but by 2003 we

want this to be 80 percent.

Are you educating the channel partners about the

availability of such tools that can help them move up the value chain?

We are on the verge of tying up with a few distributors,

who in turn would go to channel partners and offer these tools. We will train

and help partners directly, while the logistics will be looked after by the

distributors. So we would retain our focus in the area of developing better and

more powerful tools.

We already have about 25 large corporate houses as our

clients for these tools. We will focus on them and keep increasing our

business-value for them. The results so far have been very good. And now

customers are getting educated about the concept and are asking for IT asset

management.

We put our own practice managers to work with a team of

clients’ engineers to manage the assets. Besides, the clients’ engineers are

trained to avoid dependence on us. We are planning a seminar in October this

year and hope to see about 70 channel partners attend it.

What are your future plans?

We are already present in Malaysia and planning an office

in Singapore by the end of this year. We will cater to the Middle East market

from India itself with resident engineers there. The next step would be the US

and the European markets, where we will open wholly owned subsidiaries.

Do you think there is a need for a national

association for channel partners?

Definitely, there is a need for such a forum. If nothing

else, the body can bring the partners together once or twice a year to share

different solutions and best practices. No company can be present in all cities.

But channel partners are there across the country and they can share

infrastructure and leverage each others strengths. This will help create a

win-win situation. And interaction always brings learning.

MOHIT CHABBRA in New Delhi

Advertisment