Mandeep Gupta Country Manager – Channel–Business, Emerson Network Power (India) Pvt. Ltd.

What are your plans for Emerson? 
How do you plan to maintain your position in the market? We will maintain our growth rate of more than 30 per cent and focus on further increasing our market share in all the key segments. Our key focus will be solutions for SME and banking industry. We will continue to promote online UPS with Long Backup Option and Data Centre in Rack business for 2008.

Kindly elaborate on your Channel plans? 
Emerson has long enjoyed the leadership position in the enterprise and SMB segments. At Emerson, we constantly endeavour to introduce innovative strategies to enhance our channel network and leverage on our existing relationships with Business Partners, Distributor team and Sales Team that collectively form our Channel Workforce. In keeping with this ethos, Emerson is very aggressively targeting the 1–3 KVA segment and is advertising and hosting promotional schemes for channel partners to boost sales in the category.

Emerson is well attuned to the growing concerns about business critical continuity and network uptime being felt by IT managers. In order to channelize our efforts to “Meet IT” better, Emerson has announced a special focus on IT System Integrators to address the growing uptime needs of large enterprises, especially the CIOs/CTOs. For this purpose, a team of select IT System Integrators has been constituted who can complement their active network solutions with Emerson Network Power’s high availability solutions. Emerson’s plan is to tap into the base of the 35–40 identified large System Integrators in the country and empower them to communicate easily about the Uptime Solutions with the CIOs and CTOs. Emerson has also created a special profile for these partners referring to them as “Network Solution Partners”.

Further, we have introduced a system of certification which, in turn, gives Emerson’s partners more resources and more recognition to tap new markets and create new business opportunities. Within Emerson’s long-standing pool of exclusive Enterprise Business Partners, the company is creating three partner certification levels – Platinum, Gold and Silver indicative of the level of engagement with customers.

At Emerson, we not only motivate the business partners but also the sales team of our partners. Recently, we rolled out a programme called Liebert Warrior to motivate and reward the sales force of all our business partners. This new programme will create and motivate the sales force of 50-plus business partners that is exclusively dedicated to selling Emerson’s solutions in the market. Apart from this, we also invest heavily in training our partners. The guiding principle of our training is “Empowerment”. These training programmes that focus on skills and knowledge upgradations for air and Power solutions are of various levels, primarily to address the following objectives:

Build awareness about Power Electronics basics and understanding the basics of the UPS industry. 
* Update on new technologies, customer applications and new solutions for Uptime. 
*Focussed Sales Training Programmes on Products – FAB–(Features, Advantages, Benefit) analysis. 
* Training programmes focussed on “Value” creation and communication on Uptime Solutions. 
* Service training programmes on all the products and applications.

Do you have any new service support plans? 
An effective service model is the backbone of any business or enterprise. At Emerson, in the last 20-plus years we have been consistent in customer retention and have witnessed increase in business due to customer reference. This is because we treat SERVICE as one of the most important components of our business. We have a very large service infrastructure and more than 60 authorized service providers to provide multi-location support network catering to SOHO network.

Customer service is the most important component of our business model. We keep on innovating ways and techniques to improve our service quality to ensure CUSTOMER DELIGHT.

What are the challenges before you? 
The UPS industry is highly fragmented with many unorganized players at the lower end catering to the SOHO segment. Conversely, the higher end of the market is typically dominated by organized players who cater to enterprise segments such as IT and ITeS, Datacentres, Telecom Shelters, BFSI segment where one cannot afford any downtime. These segments prefer the branded players whom they can depend upon for complete tech solutions and after-sales service.

Thus, the challenge is more evident in the SME and SOHO segments where there are innumerable players to compete with. The challenges that the branded UPS players face in this space today are: 
* Low level of tech awareness amongst customers 
* High focus on price 
* Highly distributed segment and hence reach is a challenge

Do you have any other future plans? 
Our economy is booming and industries are growing at an exponential rate. It is an ideal time to be in the Indian market. Channel partners are an integral part of a business set-up and are in a good position to leverage the surge in the Indian economy. Our plans are to further strengthen our reach by going to new geographies, alliances and are going to focus more and more on large deals and continue to enrich our partners. However, along with opportunities lies stiff competition and threats.

At Emerson, we believe that the only way to minimize the threats is to equip the partners for upselling. If they are into Box Selling, they need to shift their focus to become Value Added Resellers and if they already are in the VAR space they need to hone their skill sets to become Network Solution Partners, thereby creating value for themselves and for their customers. This way, they would be shielded against the possible onslaught of becoming obsolete technologically and can create a definite entry barrier into their domain for new entrants. The key is to upsell and acquire newer and latest skill sets. Emerson provides round the year calendar for such aspiring partners to ensure they keep honing their skill sets and migrate and graduate to newer pedestal of learning.