What are your focus areas for 2009?
There are four areas that Intel will focus on this year in order to ignite the market. We already have nettops and netbooks, which we want to take into the market through our channel.

Kamil Hassan Director-Reseller Channel Operations, Asia Pacific, Intel

Managing the supply chain is crucial for any organization. Hassan has been working on ways to ensure that the entire chain remains stable and if this calls for giving them support for their working capital, then so be it

Our second step for this year is to lead technology. We have great products coming up and we want to sell them rightly. We are pushing the channel to help us in this endeavor because we have seen that they can make product-sales transition faster than direct customers.

Our third focus area is the supply chain. If the supply chain falls down, than products will not reach the right market. This is why we have put in a lot of work with our distributors to ensure that they remain healthy.

The fourth opportunity for us this year is servers. Desktop sales in the channel are growing but the money and margins come from the server business. That's why we invested a lot in the channel, whether it was infrastructure, building their credibility or the go-to-market strategies. We've got great results with this attempt.

How have you invested in the channel?
In December, we paid our partners bonuses in advance. Instead of giving them bonuses at the end of the quarter, we started paying them in the first month of the quarter, before they had even performed. This was another way of supporting their working capital.

What is important for us is that our distributors continue to give credit in the market because if they do not then channel partners will stop buying which can bring down the entire supply chain.

But how will you gear up the channel partners, who are predominantly desktop integrators, to sell servers?
We can do this by several means. We have created a website for our partners where they can lock in any opportunity that they have for servers. We check the same and then see what support they require in terms of technical hand holding, funds, etc so we can figure out where we need to invest with them accordingly.

We have a marketing program where rather than asking partners to spend their own money on marketing activities we give them funds to do that based on the business they generate for us. This aside we have another reward program called Flex Plus, where partners can redeem the points they get by selling our products on various things. The biggest benefit of this program is that it helps the smallest partner, because usually the top partners get all the benefit.

What operations precisely fall under the banner of the Reseller Channel Operation which you head?
Intel has two types of customers-the direct customers who are the MNC OEMs and the channel partners. Previously, my group used to handle only the large accounts. Now we handle every customer who is not directly buying from Intel.

Vinita Bhatia
(vinitavs@cybermedia.co.in)

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