Rajesh Gupta has been associated with the IT industry
for 18 years and has been working with Intel for the past 10 years. He was part
of Intel when it began operations in India and his first role was establishing
the Genuine Intel Dealer (GID) program besides managing OEM sales. After
dabbling with business development, technical sales and support roles, he is now
involved in propelling channel sales at Intel India.
As Director Sales-Channels, what is your immediate
agenda?
My top priority is to familiarize the channel community with the changing
business environment and help them adopt a usage model-based solutions selling
approach. I intend to increase our channel's reach across the country and get
partners to become successful in the mobile business.
What strategy would you adopt to enhance the channel
reach nationally? How do you plan to push sales through partners?
We will extend our activities to more partners across more cities in the
country. In cities that we have not ventured in, we will conduct a host of
activities. This would involve training, providing sales collaterals,
merchandising and demand generation to ensure that partners are successful in
providing the right solutions for their customers.
Elaborate on the usage model and solutions selling approach
that you want partners to adopt.
We want the channel to understand the needs of their
customers better and accordingly provide them with relevant solutions. One such
example could be a digital home solution for a household, with a variety of
computing and entertainment needs.
Similarly on the server front, we need partners to adopt
specific solutions for select segments and offer the relevant solutions. We need
to get more applications that have been tested and tuned with Intel platforms to
our partners, along with its complete documentation and support model.
You are also aiming at making the channel successful in
the mobile business. How do you endeavor to achieve this?
Currently, consistent availability of mobile building blocks from OEMs is
one of the key challenges for most partners. We will identify some options in
this respect. Next, they need to recognize that price is not the key
consideration for customers, especially when it comes to mobile computers.
We need to identify select segments for our partners and
think about solutions, support and overall value. They need to invest in
creating service and support capability that can be multiplied. One of the
options is that the partners could work collectively as a unit to deliver
support.
An Intel Premier Partner provides technical support to the
customer on the channel dealer's behalf in a particular location, and they
have a money exchange agreement between them. Intel can help facilitate the
same.
What are your expectations from partners?
Our partners are our extensions to reach end users. We therefore expect them
to be ready to provide the required, relevant solutions to the users. We would
also expect them to offer value over price, solutions over the products and back
it up with good support to the customers.
Can you give a brief on the new programs and initiatives
that Intel would want to initiate for its partners in the future?
We would like channels to be able to offer solutions to the huge SME segment
in the country. In order to help them do that, we have a new initiative called
'SMB In A Box'. This provides our dealers with a 'Do it yourself kit' to
offer the solution for a select SMB segment. This program is tied with SIDBI
finance options.
What are the biggest challenges in 2006 that you foresee
as far as channels are oncerned? How do you plan to tackle them?
Our biggest learnings in 2005 have been that customers today demand
solutions rather than mere boxes. So the channel will have to gear up to provide
customers with complete solutions rather than merely selling boxes. Another
challenge that we see is the need for the channel to pep customers about
mobility devices, especially laptops. This is because there has been and will
continue to be a growing demand for laptops.
To counter both these challenges, Intel meets partners and
devises programs to train them. We intend to develop selling strategies so that
our channel can meet the growing challenges in the changing market.
Among other things that we need to work on in 2006 is
increase our reach geographically into many smaller cities where Intel is not
directly present. By doing that, we would not only increase our visibility in
smaller towns, but also give our distributors present there an opportunity to do
better business.
What is your take on your competitor AMD stealing a
march and increasing its market share in the country?
We are aware that AMD has increased its market share in the market,
especially since its launch of new consumer products for the enterprise segment.
We believe that AMD is in a stage of growth and as we see it, the market is big
enough for both of us to survive. We still believe we have a greater share in
the market and we would ensure that we contribute substantially to ensure that
the Indian market continues to grow by 30% like it has been so far.
BM Subbalakshmi