Redefining Power

Power: Merriam Webster defines it as 'influence over others'. The Oxford
dictionary thinks it is 'the ability to influence the course of actions or
events'. But what does power really stand for?

You could do well to ask the 10 Most Powerful Partners this question. Some
feel that it is the power to do business on their terms. Others think it is the
ability to take their people along with them on the success route. Yet others
feel it is doing business ethically, yet successfully. But whatever their own
personal definition of success is; these people have carved a niche for
themselves in the channel community.

The idea to compile the list of the 10 Most Powerful Partners in the channel
came to us over a few months. We had noticed that there were some people in the
channel who could change the course of events in the business. They were the
people whom even the vendors averred while taking business decisions.

Highlighting these people would serve as an inspiration for the current and
the next generation of partners.

The methodology

While coming up with the list, we had to keep in mind that some parameters had
to be considered. The thumb rule was that we had to focus on the people and not
just the company.

So we spoke to represen­tatives from over 25 vendor companies as well as
national distribution houses, asking them to give the names of five channel
partners who are a crucial cog in their wheel. Revenues were not the sole
criteria for selection. Instead, they were asked to focus on how well the person
has grown his company, the innovation he brings to his business, his negotiation
skills, his charisma, his ability to deal with difficult situation and his
progress over the years.

After culling the top 10 names, we traced the order in which they featured on
the nominations tendered by the vendors and ranked them accordingly.

There were some partners who were highly spoken of, but could not make it to
the Top 10 list. These are definitely people to look out for this year. Will
they be able to dethrone their peers who made it to the Top 10 list? Your guess
is as good as ours.

Super Power

Super Power

Nobody comes anywhere close to VK Bhandari in the power hierarchy of the
channel community. He probably occupies the top five positions and the next
powerful partner would rank somewhere down at number six only

Power: The ability to choose your path on your own terms

Today it is a given fact that the American President is the most powerful man
on earth, though the Russians as well as the Chinese may not necessarily agree.
However, in the Indian IT channel there is no such dispute. Vishnu Bhandari of
Kolkata's Supertron Electronics is the most powerful channel partner in India.

Interestingly, this powerful personality does not know driving. As a young
man in his twenties, Bhandari who is now 46 years old, tried to learn driving
twice. But both the times he banged his car. So, he gave up and since then has
employed a driver who remains with him 24 hours a day. He may have given up on
trying to learn driving, but when it comes to business, Bhandari is an extremely
efficient driver. As Rajesh Khurana, Country Manager of Seagate puts it, “Bhandari's
understanding of a brand, his goodwill in the market, availability of cash and
his business relationships are second to none.” Virtually every vendor seconds
these words.

Branching into his own

Bhandari's association with the IT industry is now 22 years old, having
started in 1984 with PD Gupta of Sujata Computers. Subsequently when Gupta's
younger brother RK Gupta started Vintron, Bhandari started consulting for both
of them simultaneously. Finally in 1993 he branched out on his own with
Supertron. Initially, Supertron started as an importer for several products
including monitors, keyboards, motherboards, add-on cards etc, which were
supplied to Neoteric, Rashi, Compuage, Zenith etc. At the same time, the company
became a C&F agent of Vintron.

It was only in 1995 that the real growth started when Bhandari started adding
other brands starting with TVSE in 1995 and later on with Kobian and Seagate.
Today, the Rs 165 crore Supertron is the national distributor of Acer, Biostar,
Seagate and Transcend, and regional distributor of APC and LG.

Distribution is just one line of activity for Supertron. There are two more
lines: the Vintron PC business, which was acquired sometime back, and the
Supercomp branded products including casings, keyboards, speakers, mouse, USB,
MP3 players etc. Bhandari notes that the distribution will give Supertron the
topline while the Supercomp range will bring in the bottomline. To strengthen
the Supercomp product portfolio, a sourcing office has just been opened in China's
Shenzen region with four people.

With 19 offices all over the country-two more will open by March in Cochin
and Raipur-Supertron has been divided into four regions with a service center
at each region. The employee strength of the company is close to 200 currently.
And for the year 2006-07, Supertron is expected to clock revenues amounting to
Rs 240 crore.

Having built the company into a powerhouse, Bhandari has started getting the
second generation in. While his own kids are still studying in school, he has
inducted his nephew Deepak into the company who now oversees the Supercomp brand
on his own with Uncle Bhandari happy to do backseat driving. Something that he
does even when he is in his Toyota Corolla.

Team Power

Team Power

Ranjan Chopra has spent over two decades in the IT industry. And for a better
part of this stint, he has been winning awards from virtually every vendor right
since Team Computers' inception

Power: The ability to work hard while thinking smart

His close friends call him Ranjha after the popular pair of Heer-Ranjha. And
his count of friends is innumerable. Not surprising at all considering the fact
that Ranjan Chopra has been a part of this industry for almost two decades now.
This year, he will celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the formation of Team
Computers. Although he recently celebrated his 46th birthday, Chopra doesn't
look a day older than 35. The Ranjha nickname could also be due to his striking
good looks.

However, it is not just good looks but it is hard work coupled with smart
thinking, which has made Team the favorite of industry captains. The company's
activities cover a wide area including system integration, infrastructure
support/management, business intelli­gence, and enterprise solutions with focus
on executive information systems.

Over the last couple of years, Team has been growing consistently above the
industry average. Though Chopra wanted to reach the Rs 200 crore mark in
2005-06, he had to rest content with just Rs 135 crore as compared to Rs 111
crore in the previous year. However, the growth in number of employees and
office locations has been quite spectacular. Its current employee strength
stands close to 1,400 working out of 40 offices and service locations serving
more than 600 customers.

Achievements galore

An IIT Kanpur alumnus, Chopra after graduating in electronics stream in 1983
worked for two years in Philips. However, his tryst with IT started with Raba
Coutel where he worked as a Service Manager. Within two years he quit and
established Team with an investment of just Rs 18,000.

In terms of awards and accolades, Team is right on top. It has been winning
awards from virtually every vendor right since its inception. The company is a
three-time DQ Channels Excellence award and four times The DQ Week Best SI
award. So, is Chopra content with his achievements? Not at all. He thinks he has
not achieved even half of what he wants to achieve. He is a man in a hurry who
is aiming to reach the Rs 500 crore mark by 2010 with a net of Rs 50 crore.
This, he believes, cannot happen just by organic growth. So, Team is on the
prowl for acquisitions-funding being no issue.

On the personal front, Chopra is very keen to open a jazz bar where he hopes
to himself entertain customers with some nice music-just like the Ranjha of
the yore.

Unperturbed By Failure Or Success

Unperturbed By Failure Or Success

Ups and downs, success and failure these are part and parcel of life and
Murali Mohan accepts them with an equanimity that comes from weathering many a
storm

Power: The ability to think big and achieve it, while creating value to every stakeholder in the business

Life is full of challenges—face it. This is Murali Mohan's mantra. He has
never been deterred by challenges in life and accepts it with a smile. After
all, be it business or personal life, one is always exposed to threats and
challenges. A right approach towards it is all it takes to keep one going. It is
perhaps this very approach that has helped him to almost double his company's
turnover, even when the going was rough. The company regis-tered a constant and
significant growth even despite an economic downslide, financial crunches and
high competition. The result is that today the Precision Group is one of the
fastest growing system integration companies in the country.

Precision became a topic of conversations with all vendors and suppliers,
soon after the company registered a 100 percent growth in 2002 and continued it
for a couple of years. Though, the company has not been able to maintain this
growth every year since, it registers a decent growth even now. And this is
impressive, because it has also worked on creating a bigger base for itself, in
terms of other business lines.

Murali and the other directors of Precision took a conscious decision of
moving into solution providing from plain reselling in 2001. Their decision
turned out to be a right bet and today, every solution provider is talking about
value-addition and end-to-end services to sustain him or herself in business.

Try everything once

Murali has always tried to experiment with new things ever since his first job,
which has given him an early-mover advantage in some cases. Fresh from college,
he first joined in a share broking firm taking care of accounts and
administration activities. He quickly realized that this was not his cup of
coffee and decided to opt for a job, which could give him more interface with
public and people.

He took up sales job in a pharmaceutical company and since then has remained
a front-end sales person throughout his career.

Murali and Precision by that extension is better known as a HP partner today,
though the company can trace its roots to HCL Infosystems. He met his business
partners-TG Ramesh who now handles finance and Mathew Chacko who look after
services at HCL. Murali's first brush with IT was in 1991, when his employer
HCL offered him a transfer to its computer division. He worked at various levels
and regions in HCL before starting Precision in 1996, along with Ramesh and
Chacko.

Though, Precision had a humble beginning in 1996 with just one division,
today it boasts of four divisions-Infomatic for system integration, Techserve
for services, Galaxy for retail and Techonet for software and specialized
solutions development. Last year, the group registered a turnover of Rs 155
crore. After having consolidated Precision's standing in the IT industry,
Murali now wants it to be the numero uno system integration company in the
tier-two level, within the next five years.

Silent Achiever

Silent Achiever

Power: The ability to influence others with your strong characteristics and achievements

Jayamuni Rao is a no-nonsense man. He never boasts his achievements nor does
hype carry him away. Using limited words, he comes across as a serious person.
But that does not mean that he is out of sync with the market realities. Nor is
he slow in thinking on his feet.

Instead, Rao can be termed as an out-of-the-box thinker and he always looks
at what others miss out. Initially, when all resellers focused on metro markets,
he decided to target smaller towns. Sogo opened branches in the smallest of
towns in Karnataka, which gave it good leverage in the sub-distribution
business. Rao purely goes by his intuition and it has worked out for him so far.

School dropout to entrepreneur

Rao, who was a school dropout, initially joined his cousin to work in a bank and
quit immediately as it did not interest him. He wanted the freedom to take his
own decisions. And being the only son, his parents pampered him a lot and
supported his every decision, including his plans for starting his own business.
This despite the fact that his father was working with Indian Railways while
mother managed the home.

While mulling over which business to enter, Rao came across a friend who
offered him a lucrative opportunity in travel. As that industry was booming
then, Rao snatched this chance and established a travel agency. The business
went well and he dedicates its success to his wife, Mary.

Entrance by accident

Rao entered into the IT business by accident. While he was running the travel
agency, he bought some computers and peripherals for his office. When it fell
into disrepair, Rao could not bring any service engineer or a reseller
immediately to attend it. So, he opened an IT service company of his own as he
felt that there were not enough companies offering quality post-sales support.
That's how Sogo Computers was conceived in 1991.

Rao recalls that Sogo was the first company in Bangalore to offer IT products on
lease. The concept of rental flashed to him when one of his customers approached
him for a big IT purchase. But, the client did not have enough money to buy it
and Rao suggested he take the equipment on rent. He also agreed and this
signaled the start of a viable business stream.

Talking about his succession plan, Rao said he wishes his daughter, Mythili
Shelkey, would take over the business, as his son Manmat Shelkey is too young.

Doing Business The Fun Way

Doing Business The Fun Way

Power: The ability to face challenges that make one resilient

The best way to do business is to enjoy it. That way you will always look
forward to coming back to it, day after day. This unique concept has helped
Verdes build a very successful organization with a strong team, who enjoy both
work and fun. According to him, responsi­bilities are not given but asked for.
So, he believes in bringing commitment to work from every individual in his
organization. He makes sure that his employees feel their quality of life is
getting upgraded when they are with Frontier. The rest of the effort
automatically comes from them.

It is not surprising that Verdes talks so much about fun - he comes from a
tourist's paradise called Goa. But though he hails from Goa, he prefers to
call himself a Bangalorean since he has spent most of his life here.

After this graduation, Verdes started his career at HCL Infosystems. HCL was
a great place to work with and Verdes attributes his own success to what he had
learned at HCL. He recalls how the work pressure was palpable there, but
employees were also given the freedom to do what they wanted. And he has tried
to emulate a similar working environment in Frontier.

Going with the flow

After a five-year stint at HCL, which included one-year abroad, Verdes floated
Frontier Business Systems in 1994 to provide IT services. He was one of the
first movers into the solutions space and faced many highs and lows in business.
He believes that to truly judge the ability of an individual or organization one
should see how they handle and manage the 'lows'.

The secret behind Verdes success is his ability to treat success and failure
at the same level knowing that nothing is permanent in this world. This calm and
patient approach helps him to handle stressful situations better. Verdes has now
set a clear mission to achieve the top slot in solution providing and provide a
comprehensive IT infrastructure solutions and services. Over time he has
realized that it is better to draw a three-year plan and works towards it rather
than plan for every year.

And, Verdes has been quite successful in this adopting this approach. He
wanted Frontier to be a Rs 200 crore company by 2007, which he discussed with
his management team while achieving Rs 100 crore in 2003. Now, he is well on his
way to achieve this target. For the next three years, the company has set a
milestone of increasing its service revenue to 25 percent by 2010.

Quite a family man, Verdes makes it a point to spend quality time with his
wife Sarah and son Andrew. Though he is unable to take a lot of time off work
during the routine course of business, he makes full use of every holiday to
unwind with his family and have fun.

The Weary Traveler

The Weary Traveler

Power: The ability to decide the right time for the right action

Last year, Anil Mhaske paid Rs 68 lakh in income tax. And this year too, he
will pay what he legitimately owes the government rather than duck under some
tax saving schemes. He says that for someone who plunged into business with
absolutely nothing in his pocket, he is more than grateful for what he has
earned over the years and wants to repay society its due. And why not? Datacare
Corporation, a sub-distribution house, concentrating solely in Maharashtra,
raked in Rs 125 crore in revenues in 2005-06. This is a long way from the Rs 4
crore revenue it garnered in 1994-95, the year it started its operations.

Mhaske still lives a frugal life and claims that his monthly expenses can be
managed under Rs 40,000. His only luxury has been a Chevrolet Optra, which he
had to buy to keep up appearances.

Humble beginnings

After graduating and completing his MBA in business manage­ment in 1992, Mhaske
worked as a computer programmer for Grameen Junta Co-Op Bank for a year. Around
this time, he got an order worth Rs 1 lakh from the Kirloskar Company for
supplying peripherals. Mhaske's father, a bank official, was unable to invest
in his son's business plans and that is when an army man volunteered to do so.
Thus, Datacare Computers was born and Mhaske got another order from the Army
Training Battalion Group for training their personnel in FoxPro and other
software applications. Slowly, Mhaske kept adding educational institutions to
his kitty and today he operates out of an 11,000 sq ft office and has 200
employees on his payroll.

Over the past decade, Mhaske suffered several losses. But the most
significant one was when a dealer who owed him over Rs 35 lakh committed
suicide. This incident made his realize the importance of having a strict credit
control policy. And that is precisely what Mhaske does in Datacare today. He
manages the credit offered to customers and other financial issues, having
delegated other assignments to his team of trusted employees.

Standing apart

Mhaske believes that his success can be attributed to his unstinting support to
his vendors. He never takes on targets that he might not be able to fulfill and
neither does he pressurize his dealers to achieve sales beyond their capacity.
Often he gives over the counter replacement rather than wait for the vendor to
send in the replacement. This is the reason he has a network of over 3,000
dealers in Maharashtra alone.

Currently, Mhaske has deployed SAP in Datacare so that he can monitor which
are the brisk business areas that he needs to focus on strongly. His eyes are
set on a revenue target of Rs 1,000 crore in the next five years and he wants to
go national as well.

Self-made Guru

Self-made Guru

Picture a Bollywood story of a college dropout making a big fortune for
himself on his own. And you have the synopsis of Rakesh Jain's life

Power: An ability that comes with time through consistent performance in business

For Rakesh Jain, business knowledge and manage­ment skills came easily and
naturally, rather than any from confined classroom programs. In fact, this
intuition made him quit college even before completing his first year in
commerce, to start his own venture.

His keen interest in business was approved and acknow-ledged by his father
who agreed to provide Rs 10 lakh loan. Initially, his father wanted him to be in
the family-run textile business. But, when Jain took a clear stand of getting
into an IT venture, his father supported this initiative. Supreme Com-puters is
today a leading sub-distribution company in the southern market, a position it
has held on to for sometime now. And Jain attributes this success to his father's
guidance and support. Before starting Supreme in 1994, Jain spent several days
just walking the length of Ritchie Street to understand the nuances of IT
trading. And after three months of interacting with dealers there and
understanding what they needed from their supplier, he started Supreme and there
was no stopping him after that.

The year 2000 was momentous for the company, as it shifted its focus from
reselling to sub-distribution. Jain felt that if he had to grow his business he
would have to take more responsibilities. As the business grew, Jain took his
family's support to run the show more efficiently and effectively. His elder
brother Jitendra who currently manages the counter sales and his father who
oversees the company's daily operations joined him.

Managing a vast portfolio

As a chief architect, he first developed his channel network and different
products portfolios to build his business and take it to the next level. Now, he
is trying to put systems and processes in place, and constantly expanding his
team's strength creating various new departments within the organization. He
has made his business more robust by diversifying into the direct model,
targeting the corporate and SMB segments. Retail is another area where Jain has
set his sights.

Loyalty Pays

Loyalty Pays

Hemant Kenia believes in being loyal, whether it is to his employees,
customers or his principals. He feels that loyalty is appreciated at all levels,
even if one has to let go of some business in the bargain

Power: The ability to do business on your own terms

Hemant Kenia shies from the limelight. And very few people outside his
immediate business know him. Which suits him just fine. His reasoning is that
the more noise he makes about his company and its achievements, the more
competition he attracts. He would much rather do his own thing quietly and let
his work be a testimony to his success.

And he has a clear idea of what he wants to do with SK International. Though
his family business was in plastics, he decided to enter the then unexplored
area of IT solution providing and services. And even now, he would rather not
indulge in IT trading, even if this line of business will boost this topline.

That is because he believes that business is not about the quantum of
transactions, but about the profit you make in it. And one way of remaining
profitable is by always working with niche and complex technologies, which other
people can't replicate easily. This is why he now wants to get into biotech
and bio-informatics, though he has not yet made any concrete plans.

Committed to principals

Kenia also believes in remaining loyal to his principals always. His first
vendor association was with HP since 1984 and till date he works with HP. In
fact his partner, Vasudev Rao says that this loyalty has cost SK International
at times. “We could have partnered with IBM and this would have gotten us
several crore of business but Hemant felt it would be unethical to defocus from
HP. And I respect him for this decision,” Rao stated.

Rao also recalled several setbacks that Kenia faced since the inception of SK
International. Once, he set-up a manufacturing facility in Bangalore that did
not do well and had to be shut down. Sometime ago, the company had also dabbled
in software development, but this did not pan out due to manpower issues. This
affected the bottomline of the company, but Kenia recovered from it quickly,
though it did slow the growth of the company.

Additionally, for the past two years, a lot of solution provider's core
customers have started outsourcing part of their business, rather than the
entire IT integration contract to SK International. But Kenia managed to arrest
this decline and has now reduced his dependence on a few strategic accounts.

SK International today has its presence in 11 offices in India with two
offices in US, with over 190 people on its payroll. Manpower management is the
biggest problem for Kenia especially in software and application development,
which is the domain of the youth who equate higher pay packages with success.
But he believes in taking his people with him and creating a working environment
that is conducive to growth as he feels that a good paying job is not
necessarily a good job. But a job with growth opportunities definitely spurs a
person on.

Maximum Power

Maximum Power

His company is the first pit stop for any vendor who wants to make
inroads in the northern market, however success was not always a smooth sailing
for Rajesh Agarwal. But it has made him a stronger person

Power: The ability to drive a hard bargain and get things done on one's terms

Way back in 1990 when Rajesh Agarwal got married to Anju, the future looked
uncertain to him as he had just quit his job with Ocean Computers to start his
own venture. Fortunately for him, Anju gave him complete support and in 1991
Micromax Technologies was born with less than Rs 1 lakh in terms of funding. The
name Micromax came from 'micro to maximum products', something that Agarwal
wanted to achieve.

However, the start for Micromax was far from smooth. In the initial years,
Agarwal lost lot of money when he was doing system integration and assembling of
IT products. The biggest loss came from supplying to a customer in Dharamshala
who never paid up. But the signing up with TVS-E in 1994 was the turning point
for him. This was followed with an alliance with HP a year later.

A spike after a flat

Sometime back, Agarwal took a conscious decision to exit from brands where
margins where negligible. In addition, he decided that henceforth Micromax would
not play second fiddle to other distis. As a result, in the last two years,
Micromax showed flat growth. However, having done the hard work, March 2007
should see the company close the financial year with Rs 100 crore revenue as
com-pared to Rs 75 crore in 2005-06.

Apart from the IT distribution business, Agarwal also runs another company
Micromax Informatics, which supplies fixed wireless terminals as well as fixed
wireless phones to the three leading GSM service providers in Delhi-Airtel,
Hutch and Idea. Started in the year 2000, this company clocked Rs 34 crore in
revenue during 2005-06.

Overall, the 42-year old Agarwal today runs an Rs 200 crore powerhouse, which
he hopes to grow consistently for the next couple of years. In this endeavor
Anju, who is also a director in the company and spends time in office everyday,
assists him.

Destiny's Child

Destiny's Child

Nitin Shah is a strong believer in fate. And he should be. Because it was
this very fate that intervened his life when he was an engineer with CMS and
handed him a business on a platter, literally.

Power: The ability to acquire big customers and better talent to improve your business

He still recalls the phone call he got from an acquaintance from Mafatal
Consultancy Services (MCS), asking him to repair a tape drive, that other
engineers were unable to rectify after 60 days. And Shah managed to iron out the
problem within two days. Impressed by this, he was offered a contract for
servicing the entire IT infrastructure for MCS for Rs 3.5 lakh, and was promised
references to other corporates like Pfizer and Bombay Dyeing. For Shah, whose
annual salary package came to Rs 1 lakh, this was a dream come true. Especially,
since he had just gotten married and his wife encouraged him to dream big.

Shah started Allied Digital Services (ADS) in 1984 with his brother, Prakash
and another employee, Vivek Gokhale. Gokhale used to accompany Shah for customer
calls and worked with him for over eight years before moving onto Intel India.

Today, ADS has over 1,200 people with a business turnover worth Rs 159 crore
in 2005-06. Shah is no longer in the thick of things now and prefers to
concentrate solely on strategic issues and which new paths the company should
chart. He is always striving to stay ahead of the growth curve. It is this
determination that influenced him to get into the security and surveillance
business a year ago. He has now taken this business further by setting up a
security operational center in Mumbai.

What makes a winner?

According to Shah, to be successful one has to learn to delegate
responsibilities. He recalls a few years ago, how every delivery challan,
requisition order, pay slip and bank document had his signature. Over time, he
realized that he was getting bogged by the operational duties.

He therefore set up a team of managerial people who would supervise various
business activities while he would focus on unearthing emerging technologies,
which could be developed into successful business models. This is probably why,
despite Allied having its presence in 72 locations, his cell phone rings very
rarely.

The other aspect that Shah focuses on most times is the branding of ADS as a
technology provider. He believes that in this line of business, the customers
are much aware of the vendor. To sell well therefore, it is pertinent that the
solution provider also makes his brand a well-known entity.

Living to the fullest

Recently, Shah suffered a huge personal loss after his wife passed away. He is
now making efforts to spend more time with his daughter and son, who are in an
engineering college.