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Ramesh Natarajan, CEO, Redington India speaks to us about the channel strategies of Redington India.
How do you help the channel partners to go from offline to online and grow in business?
Ramesh Natarajan - There is a need for holistic digital platform that cater the needs of our partners while empowering them to manage their businesses more efficiently. RedingtonOnline is a recently launched offering that will help our partners take that step towards being self-sufficient with this fully automated portal, providing them with a digital pathway for doing business with the company.
Through this digital platform partners will have access to complete set of product offerings that Redington caters to through its robust inventory management, digital payment options to choose apart from Redington’s credit limit, channel financing option that will be available for the partners to manage pending invoice payments and working capital.
Benefits that the digital platform offers are, “One Redington” platform offering a wide range of technologies and brands, clear and simple documentation, greater predictability of business and a host of relevant programs for partners.
Does Redington have any plan to help the channel partners to compete against large E-commerce sites by providing them with similar facilities?
Ramesh Natarajan - We seek to enable our partners with world-class technologies, to equip them in solving their customers’ problems. We also offer a host of training programs as well as GTM options to help partners address their customers most effectively. For instance, our Cloud management platform CloudQuarks helps partners provision a host of cloud services and manage subscriptions, renewals and annuities. These initiatives help improve our partners’ competitive advantage and unique positioning in their respective markets.
What advantages do Redington channel partners have by associating with Redington in terms of capturing more customers and achieving business growth?
Ramesh Natarajan - Redington has always focused to be a partner-centric organisation and all of its programmes and initiatives are routed through its partner network. The strategic initiative of the company is to handhold and provide its partners with the tools and skillsets that are required to address their challenges and provide necessary closures.
To initiate the same, Redington’s marketing efforts are revolved around its partners and they provide the necessary training and certification too to equip them with technological know how to conduct business and have direct conversations with their customers.
Below are some necessary elements and steps that are taken into consideration while designing a partner program that ensures a robust relationship:
To be in sync with brands and seek to drive emerging technologies/business models such as subscription models, annuities, hardware-as-service etc., apart from on-prem offerings, incremental resources and benefits are geared towards new technologies as well as promoting Partners' digital maturity, enhancing their revenues, promote affordability and commercial viability. This will help partners gain from the shift in consumer spending behaviours and add value, designed to build a strong customer engagement, a robust skillset, solutions to customers' problems, enhance customer retention, lengthen the customers' journey with partners and help build demand generation through referrals. We seek to offer partners' technologies and skill sets that we invest in, and build lifetime customer value. The progress should be trackable for all the stakeholders where necessary interventions are done when required.
The key principle is to ensure partnerships are clearly a win-win proposition for all stakeholders (including partners, customers, brands and distributors). Therefore, Redington ensures the objectives are a mix of aspirations and achievability. The program is to be simple, clearly understood and drive some “quick wins”, as far as possible, to build momentum.
What is Redington's new channel strategy for 2022-2023?
Ramesh Natarajan - Redington works closely with vendors, hyperscalers, and channel partners to ensure seamless availability of cutting-edge technological solutions and services. These technologies are in the domain of Artificial Intelligence, Augmented and Virtual Reality, 5G based devices & applications, Software Defined Borderless Networks, Smart Analytics, Blockchain and Sustainability.
In a recent development, Redington has entered into a multi-year Strategic Collaboration Agreement (SCA) with Amazon Internet Services Private Limited (AISPL), which undertakes the resale and marketing of Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud in India. The deeper engagement with AWS will help Redington India enhance its Cloud capabilities to drive growth in existing markets, and expand into Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities through its partners. It will help fuel the adoption of AWS Cloud by small-and-medium businesses (SMBs), scale growth with independent software vendors (ISVs), build unique value propositions in the enterprise segment and strengthen the focus on public sector covering education, EdTech and central and state governments.