IT Panchayat becomes 'voice' of Guwahati channel

GUWAHATI

NOVEMBER 9, 2006

With resellers, distributors and sub-distributors coming together to attend
the IT Panchayat at Guwahati, this DQ Week driven platform became a place where
the regional IT channel community interacted with distributors and discussed a
wide range of issues with them.

Some of the issues that were discussed during the event included — the
advantages and disadvantages of local IT associations, price undercutting,
addressing the issue of getting back-end payments among others.

Throwing light on the issue under-cutting of price points in the market,
Hemant Jain from Guwahati based Jain Infosys said that vendors should work
closely with distributors in order to make sure that no under cutting of price
points is practiced. “This is a serious issue with the industry and vendors
should spend some time with their set of distributors in order to address this
issue in a better way,” he added.

On the other hand, Udit Sen from eSys, said that the issue of under cutting
is driven by the channel community most of the times and this community to stand
up in order to address this issue.

Speaking about the importance of local IT associations in places like
Guwahati, Trideep Talukdar from Quadro Digital Systems said that it is very
important for small regions to involve themselves at the association level.
“Associations play an important role in terms of helping the channel community.
As far as Guwahati is concerned, we will be having more activity on the
association front very soon. We have a lot of interest from local channel
community, so the will is there. Now we just need to get our act together on
this,” he added.

Emphasizing on the importance of IT associations, Ranjan Bardoloi from
Redington said that associations should have more involvement from the
distributor community as well. “These associations give great opportunity to
interact with the local channel community. But there should be a more focused
approach towards making sure that local distributors are also involved in these
associations,” he added.

Aimed at bridging the divide between the reseller community and distributors
or sub-sub-distributors, the event was well attended by over 50 channel players
from the Guwahati region.

As part of the IT Panchayat's panel discussion, Udit Sen from eSys, Ranjan
Bardoloi from Redington came from the distributor side while Trideep Talukdar
from Quadro Digital System and Hemant Jain from Jain Infosys came from the
channel community to share their views on a wide range of issues concerning the
local IT channel community. The discussion was moderated by Zia Askari,
Assistant Editor, Channel Publications, Cyber Media.