Close on the heels of changing its guard on its Go-To-Market strategy for India, global IT powerhouse, Dell is now going all out to drive growth for its products and solutions in India. With a renewed focus, the company is now looking up to channel community in terms of scaling greater heights. Ajay Kaul, Channel Head and Geo Head- North, Dell India, talks with ChannelDrive.in about the company’s current focus and future plans for India.
What are some of the big priorities for Dell India now? How does the company look towards the channel business?
Growing our business and growing our market share is one of the biggest priorities for us now. With our new go to market strategy in place, we are now looking forward to considerably improving our coverage and drive depth and give greater breadth to our growth in India.
We are looking forward to driving depth in business coming from large customers. At the same time we are improving our coverage in tier 1 and tier 2 cities of the country.
Earlier we had a network of about 2500 partners working with us but with this new GTM in place, we are surely set to expand this. However, there is not number that we are looking at. We are looking towards adding quality partners rather than going after numbers.
We have Ingram Micro as our national distributor for client products and Redington is our national distributor for enterprise products range.
How is Dell moving ahead to better engage the channel community today?
We are doing all we can, to change the perception of channel towards us. Channel partners believe that we are going after their customers. We have no intentions like that and we sincerely want to change this perception. We want to help channel partners grow with us.
How can channel gain by associating themselves with Dell?
We are an end to end IT solutions company. So whether it is a computing need or networking requirement or even a storage solution, we have all our products that can be configured as per the customer’s needs. This is becoming a big differentiator and a huge advantage for us.
Today, there is a huge opportunity in front of us. As you know, there are some Indian manufacturers who have exited the space and hence we are in an ideal position to fill the vacuum being created by this development. And by working with us, channel can benefit too.
How important is training for partners, especially when you expect them to sell IT solutions? How is Dell helping partners on this front?
We are taking care of the training needs of our partners as well. We have an initiative called, the Dell Enigineer’s Club which involves pre sales teams of our SI and solution partners. This is fast becoming a great platform for technology exchange. We already have more than 150 engineers enrolled in India.
Even though we keep coming across such opportunities, which at times, look to be lucrative but we have a deep process to vet these opportunities very closely and most of the times, we have found that it is better to focus on.
We have also introduced ‘Online Solution Configurator’ initiative, where we are giving all the capability to design specific solutions in the hands of our solutions partners. Additionally, we are also encouraging partners to engage in best practices and hence, we have this ‘Deal Registration’ application where a partner can register its deal and then no other partner can work on that particular deal. All this is enhancing our day to day business activities with the partners here.
