Manpower education need of the hour for solution provider

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DQC Bureau
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The DQCI Channel Champion Conference on "Business strategies for Solution Providers" saw both channel partners and vendors discussing the critical aspects of being in the solutions space. 

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Representing the solution provider community were Alok Gupta, Director, Samtech Infonet and Anil Gupta, Director, Artec Computers. The vendor’s side was represented by Anil Sethi, Country Manager - PCD, IBM India and Sanjeev Wad, Country Channel Manager, HP. Prasanto Kumar Roy, Group Editor, Cyber Media, moderated the discussion.

Beginning the discussion, Anil highlighted the fact that getting the right manpower with expertise on cutting edge technologies is a critical factor while in the business of providing solutions. "Equally important is retaining the good manpower after through incentives," he said.

Speaking at the issue of non-availability of skilled Linux systems manpower, Alok Gupta, Director at Samtech Infonet informed the gathering that Linux is not much revenue-friendly and providing services around Linux is a difficult proposition.

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"When it comes to manpower education, you need to do the gap analysis and analyze the market. Because of its community development approach, Linux is not that revenue-friendly. So it becomes quite difficult to provide services around an open source platform," he added.

On the other hand, he said that Microsoft invests heavily on training and certification programs and the result is that we have a lot of people who are well-trained on Microsoft environments.

At a time when it is becoming hard to fish out the best talent when it comes to high end technologies like WiFi, Anil Sethi from IBM suggested that Vendors should jointly conduct interview with channel partners. 

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"This is a good idea and we are ready to implement it. We can mutually conduct interviews and select deserving candidates. This way we can have best of both the worlds and it will be a win-win situation for all of us," he added.

Talking about the hot areas in the near future. Alok said that Security would continue to catch eyeballs of the industry. "This is a hot area specially for the BFSI segment as they cannot afford to loose the grip on this sector. Other areas like disaster recovery are also good when it comes to making profits. However, I am still skeptical about the WiFi movement as Wifi application are not that well accepted in the market at present," he explained.

Later in the evening DQCI presented awards to the champions of the IT industry wherein HP walked away with six of the coveted awards, including the Gold Channel Champion award, which was collected by the HP team. Samsung was given the Silver award for Channel Champion category.

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In all Samsung collected four awards.

Award for best hardware products Gold category went to HP and Sanjeev Wad from HP collected this award. Under the same category, the silver award went jointly to IBM & Samsung - Anil Sethi from IBM and Asim Kumar from Samsung received the award.

It was not a surprise when Ananth Lazrus from Microsoft received the gold award for best Software product category. Under the same category the silver award went to Symantec.

Gold award for Best brand image went to IBM and Mukul Mathur received this award for IBM. Under the same category, the silver award went to Intel and GB Kumar received this award.

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Gold Award for best after sales support went to HP and Sandeep Behl received this award. Silver award for the same category went to Intel and again GB Kumar received the award for Intel.
Gold Award for best market support went to HP and Rajiv Rao from HP received this award. Silver under the same category went to Samsung and Asim Kumar recieved award.

Intel won the gold award for Best Commercial terms category and GB Kumar went on the dais to receive this award. Silver for the same category went to Samsung and Asim Kumar received the award.

The gold award for best relationship management went to HP and V Krishnan from HP was more than delighted to receive that award. Silver for the same category went to IBM and Mukul Mathur received the award. 

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Last but not the least - the gold award for best support category went to IBM and Anil Sethi received the award. Silver for the same category went to HP and Vivek Dwivedi received that for HP.

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