Deterred by Autodesk India's approach to monopolize the software reselling market in the region, the channel community has engaged itself in a coordinated campaign to encourage usage of other competent products like Cadian or Smartdraw in the Indian region.

Keeping in mind the interest of end-customers, the resentment of software channel community is fanned by Autodesk's desire to move towards selling its products at a premium. The company achieves this with the help of its national distributor Ingram Micro by selling its products only to 'certain software resellers' in the region.

“Autodesk products like Autocad are well accepted in the market and there is no doubt that the customers want it. But there are certain areas where the company needs to have more clarity. We are quite big in software when it comes to the South Indian market, we used to sell Autocad but one day the company asked me to sign an agreement for selling its product at a certain price point. I don't think that this is good for a company of Autodesk's stature to do such things. We don't have any options but to resell other competitive products now,” informed a software reseller from South India on condition of anonymity.

When contacted, an Autodesk official spokesperson responded by saying, “We do not want to comment on how resellers who are not in our partner network carry on their business. Autodesk adopts a consistent approach to its business. We sell through our channel and support them to develop the market. It's a win-win situation. Autodesk does not get involved in end-user pricing matters,” he concluded.

At a time when this win-win situation seem to be working only for the company and its distributor, the software reseller community is going all out to support products like Smartdraw or Cadian in the Indian market. Interes-tingly, the cost of these products is 80 - 90 percent lower than that of Autocad.

“These products are not that popular but we can make them popular, the same way as we have done with Autodesk. After all it's the channel that goes all the way to sell to the end-customer. We just want to safeguard the interest of the end-customer,” informed a big software reseller from Delhi.

With an aim to safeguard interests of its 'closed and small reseller community' at any cost, Ingram Micro has gone to the extent of sidelining big regional software companies involved in reselling. The nat-ional distributor has asked its 'select' reseller community not to sell to New Delhi-based Softmart Solutions. Interestingly, the same company was an authorized Autodesk reseller sometime back.

“This has created a very bad situation for the end-customer. Even if I have orders for Autodesk products, today I cannot get it from Ingram. They do not want to have competition in the market that is why they have such policies. The company as well as the channel grows multi-fold only when an end-customer is benefited and not by putting controls in the market,” informed Alok Gupta, CEO, Softmart Solutions.

According to Ingram Micro, distributor for Autodesk in India, the company has done this in order to stop under-cutting of price points by various resellers in the Indian region. “We have sent this e-mail to our resellers in order to stop companies like Softmart to undercut on price points,” informed a source close to Ingram. Disagreeing with this argument, the resellers feels that this approach does not encourage a healthy atmosphere when it comes to safe-guarding the end customer's interest.

Zia Askari

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