Tracker Solutions not upbeat about the festive season

New Delhi: Come Diwali and most channel partners are usually upbeat about the prospective sales. However, this year quite a few partners are expressing otherwise. New Delhi-based Tracker Solutions, a sub distributor of Kaspersky in North region, is not expecting increase in sales. On the contrary, the company feels sales dip during this time. “During Diwali IT sales go down as people have other priorities such as shopping for clothes and such. IT products are not very high on their list of things to buy. It is due to the schemes that are launched at this time that there is a hype around IT sales, but the actual buying does not really happen now,” commented Piyush Mittal, Manager-Sales, Tracker Solutions.

The distributor decided to sell Kaspersky about two and a half years back. Before that the company was into providing solutions in the networking space and annual monthly contracts. “The networking space is very competitive. The margins and operating price are low and there are many issues with warranty,” said Ramesh Kotni, Director, Tracker Solutions, explaining the reason for their transition to distribution.

Kotni added that the margins and back-ends on Kaspersky's products were pretty good so it was an attractive product to be distributing.

Recently, Kaspersky had hiked the price of its three-user packs, but Mittal pointed out that the price was still low as compared to their competitors. “The increase in price was due to the launch of single user. The world over, the price of Kaspersky software is the cheapest in India,” stated Mittal.

Three user is available at an MRP of Rs 1,795 with a street price of Rs 550-600 and single user is available at an MRP of Rs 990 with street price of Rs 300-350.

Giving a boost to its dealers Tracker Solutions has also announced a scheme for its dealers in which the latter can get 20 single users free with the purchase of 100 single users.

About 70 percent of Tracker Solutions' sales comes from the corporate segment, which they cater to directly. In this segment they can take up business from anywhere in India, while their channel sales is limited to North India.

Kaspersky is the only product the distributor is dealing with, and though this seems be a case of putting all the eggs in one basket, Mittal had a different view. “We do not anticipate any change in Kaspersky's distribution model. They have invested a lot of time and effort into building the channel structure that they currently have. In terms of targets we have been overachieving them, and have been doing pretty well,” elaborated Mittal.

Sharing plans about their future, Kotni shared that they would be looking at adding more products to their portfolio. “We will add more products, in the software space, and are currently in talks to finalize the deals.” Mittal added that the future was in network security and this was where they would be focusing their energies. “Data is very important for all organizations and hence securing that data is becoming vital,” said Mittal.