Thou Shall Not Pirate

Living up to its name of being a proactive associa-tion, Trade Association of
Information Technology (TAIT) in association with Microsoft, Symantec, IT Focus
and DQ Channels, conducted a seminar aimed at educating channel partners on
piracy and counterfeit issues. This seminar comes as a follow-up to the
channel-cleansing initiative it launched recently. According to TAIT officials,
in just two weeks, they have received an overwhelming response to the TAIT
verification program. The anti-piracy seminar is just another initiative from
the series of activities that TAIT has planned for the year.

The anti-piracy seminar, which was held in Mumbai, threw light on various
piracy issues faced by both vendors and channel partners in their business. The
seminar began with presentations by Symantec followed by Microsoft. Symantec, a
leader in the anti-virus space, claimed it was the worst hit by piracy.
Officials from Symantec elaborated on the legal aspects of piracy. Microsoft
presented its stand on promoting Genuine Windows software.

The presentations were followed by a heated question and answer session on
who is to be blamed for the growing piracy menace.

Moderated by Asim Raina, Group Editor - Channel Publications Group,
CyberMedia, the session went on to address various concerns of channel partners
due to piracy. Giving a neutral view on the topic, Raina initiated the session
with the remarks that channel partners are not willing selling pirated software,
but present circumstance force them to do so. In such a situation, the onus
rests on the vendor to educate not just the channel partners, but also the
customers about the advantages of using genuine software.

Asim Raina, Group Editor, Channel Publications Group, CyberMedia presented the trophy for Best IT Association in India to TAIT members. In a recently concluded survey done by IDC and DQ Channels TAIT came on top among the 28 associations that were surveyed across India.	Panelists of the session (L-R): Chetan Shah, President, TAIT, Dinesh Jotwani, Legal Counsel IP, Symantec APAC, Asim Raina, Group Editor, Channel Publications Group, CyberMedia and Pradipto Dey, Partner - Account Manager, Microsoft
Channel partners listening to the one of the speakers at TAIT seminar	A delegate expresses his views at TAIT seminar

Channel partners urged both Microsoft and Symantec to focus on lowering the
high price of its products in order to make customers buy original software.
Partners gave few examples of few companies that have managed to bring down
piracy levels of their products by reducing prices. While both the vendors
accepted the fact, they informed partners that pricing decisions are taken
globally and there was little they could do about it. However, they assured
partners that all the feedback will be taken forward to the decision makers in
the company.

Coming to the discussion on margins on Microsoft products, Microsoft official
pointed out that it is the channel partners who discount margins to survive
fierce competition, and hence asked channel partners to come forward with a
solution to solve the margin problem.

The discussion ended with the channel community urging all the vendors to
educate the customer more than the channel partner to buy genuine software,
especially the SOHO segment where the fear of judicial action is minimal.

DQC NEWS BUREAU