While Prasanna Kumar is keen on expanding the existing channel base, he has a very clear idea about the kind of partners he wants on board for Commscope's structured cabling solutions. He revealed that the company is currently focusing on educating partners about their sales strategies

Like other vendors, are you planning to expand the number of distributors in your kitty this year?
We believe that currently we have enough distributors in the country to do justice to our products. But it all depends on the demand for our solutions and the strategy that we need to adopt in the future to reach a wider market. For that, if we need to increase the number of distributors, we will do so.

In India we have three national distributors-Ingram Micro, Redington and Annexter and we recently added a fourth distributor-SES Technologies. We have aligned ourselves with SES because of the strength of their distribution network across India, especially in smaller cities.

What kind of partners are you looking to add to your network?
We have 48 channel partners in the country. Each of them have to go through our qualification process in terms of their credentials, staff, training, investment in certification, fiscal strength and above all, their passion for the structured cabling business.

Are you making any changes to your existing accreditation programs for the channel?
We have three levels of accreditation for our channel partners-Elite, Prestige and Business Partners. Currently, we are creating specialists for our various solutions to differentiate our partners from other network integrators in the countries. From the solutions perspective, we are creating specialists on data center solutions, intelligent solutions, high-end fibre solutions and 10G support. In order to help them we have also trained people in our team who can educate the partners and accompany them to the customer site to make joint pre-sales calls as well.

What is the post sales support you extend to your customers?
We test the applications that will be loaded on the cabling solutions and then give a 20-year warranty on our cabling solutions. This is why we need knowledgeable and dependable partners who will be able to educate and highlight the uniqueness of our solutions to the customers against our competitors. Because we give such a warranty, we need to ensure that all projects are handled only by our team of authorized, trained and qualified channel partners. Only those projects which are implemented by our certified solution providers can avail of this 20-year warranty.

Vinita Bhatia
vinitavs@cybermedia.co.in

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