Sharing Profits, Spreading Happiness amongst Partners

Navinder Chauhan
GM – Marketing
Smartlink Network Systems Ltd

How has been the journey of Smartlink in the Indian market?

Smartlink has the distinction of being the first Indian company to manufacture Networking products in India. At the time when Goa was just considered a tourist destination, Smartlink laid its strong manufacturing foundation by setting up its first SMT line in Goa and in the subsequent years. It continued to strengthen the manufacturing base and added more SMT lines to become one of the largest IT manufacturing companies in India by the year. Based on the strong customer support, the company got listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) and National Stock Exchange (NSE) in the year 2001. With its manufacturing base in Goa and R&D in Bangalore, Smartlink developed and manufactured Gigabyte brand of motherboards and D-Link brand of active networking products over the last two decades. DIGILINK, its own brand of passive networking products, was also developed during the same period. 

In the last couple of years, significant changes have taken place, resulting in the introduction of its own DIGISOL brand active networking products and DIGILITE brand motherboards. Smartlink has its own indigenous service and support division under the brand name DIGICARE.   

In the year 2012-13, Smartlink is all set to take DIGISOL to new heights and become a leading networking player in India, by using its own two decades of experience in local R&D and manufacturing. We would be launching a series of initiatives and programmes to celebrate its "Two Decades of Smart Success", which will touch both partners and customers. We would also be strengthening our DIGILITE product offering and expanding our DIGICARE service support infrastructure across the country.

Tell us about the various business verticals and brands under Smartlink?

We offer Active/ Converged Communication Products under the brand name of DIGISOL and manufacture motherboards under the brand name “DIGILITE”. We are backed by strong post- sales service network under the brand name “DIGICARE”. It also provides service to other third- party brands.

Throw light on the recent de-mergers in the light of your channel presence?

Even after de-merger, our regional distribution network is intact. We are present in almost all the locations in India either directly or through our Distributors or Dealers. We have a strong distribution network of 22 exclusive territory distributors, 400+ dealers and 4,000+ resellers across the country.

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DIGISOL celebrated Christmas and New Year with its Retailers and Resellers community by giving them a surprise visit to their outlets and gifting them a box full of Christmas candies! The activity covered partners across cities like Chennai, Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi, Calcutta and Hyderabad. 

Jayesh Mehta from MaxCom, Lamington Road, Mumbai, says, “It was a real surprise! For us, it was like any other working day until a bunch of people wearing DIGISOL shirt and Santa-cap came to our shop and poured happiness all over. We truly cherished the surprise visit and the bag full of candies!” 

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How do you safeguard the partners’ interest? 

We have always been a channel-driven company and our endeavour is to always improvise on our channel policies and time and again we have been recognized by the Channel community as one of the most channel-friendly companies in India. We ensure healthy margins for the Channels and also introduce new products with newer applications to increase the scope of growth for the Channels. These new products and solutions enable the channel to value add and hence can generate better margins from their customers.

We are supporting our partners with strong advertisement campaigns, retail branding and publicity material. Apart from this, we are conducting Technical Trainings, Seminars, Road Shows and Trade Shows to keep them abreast with the latest technological trends and markets.

We have been coming out with regular channel incentive programmes wherein we handsomely reward the partner community. The objective is to ensure good margins we wish to grow these partners along with us. We have introduced different incentive schemes for our channel partners time and again such as "Omega Partner Programme" and DIGILITE Karo Dil se. In fact, in the last quarter of the calendar year 2011, we launched “Karo Dil Se” scheme with an objective to reach a whooping milestone of one lakh motherboards. The channel partners showed immense enthusiasm and DIGILITE crossed one lakh landmark. Seeing high demand amongst the channel community, we relaunched “DIGILITE Karo Dil Se – 2”. This is because, at DIGILITE, we recognize the need to reward our performing partners and is confident that schemes help a lot in motivating partners to perform even better. 

The uniqueness of the scheme is that it is designed entirely on the feedback taken from their channel partners. Under this scheme, we bring to our partners a unique offer to help them realize the tangible benefits on an immediate basis.

What are the opportunities for channel partner?

At Smartlink, our emphasis is to offer quality products adhering to highest standards and back them with one of the best post-sales services. With this, the channel partner doesn’t have to worry about the quality aspect and he is rest assured. Today, in India, there is a huge opportunity in almost all of the verticals for the networking products. We have also seen tremendous implementation of IP Surveillance right across verticals and markets.

To enable our partners tap the potential in the best possible manner, DIGISOL rolled out its extensive seminar series “nextech 2011” for its dealer and reseller community. It covered more than 120 cities across the venue city.“nexTech 2011” successfully promoted DIGISOL range of products from Switching, Broadband routing, Wireless LAN Converged Communication, IP Surveillance, LAN Communication and VoIP in the class A, B, C & D markets.

How does DIGICARE strengthen your market positioning?

We are amongst very few IT companies which have its own Service Support division which gives us an edge over our competitor. Our high-quality and reputable after-sales services are strategically built to deliver customer satisfaction. Currently, we have 64 centres all across India.

We offer first-rate integrated service and support through our special service division, DIGICARE, which consists of RMA centres, DIGICARE Technical Assistance Centre (DTAC) and Direct Service Department (DSD).

DIGICARE has evolved most efficient, skilled and professional state of service infrastructure. It has 18 Direct RMA/Service centres and 46 Service Partners across the country, making it to total 64.

What is the evolution path in the future?

Active Products have been very much part of the company’s core competency right from the beginning. With in-depth knowledge of networking industry and well balanced resources, we have drawn up ambitious plans for the future. We have sophisticated manufacturing plants in Goa which are well equipped to manufacture IT products in large scale with best experience of more than two decades, an all-India distribution network and a dedicated team of professionals, all in place.

We have drawn up a road map that will focus on high potential verticals and the company will deploy significant resources to capture opportunities and make strategic investments to improve its competitiveness in the marketplace. Indeed, Smartlink is poised for growth with three distinct businesses: DIGISOL, DIGILITE and DIGICARE.

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Rakesh Mishra
CEO
Data Systems (Hyderabad)

The company is known for providing networking solutions, not only to optimize business processes but also enhance scalability, reliability and availability. Data Systems is an organization for providing Networking and Security solutions since 1984. And since 1995, we are part of their loyal distributor family and work as a Regional Distributor. We deal in both Digilite and Digisol brands, including all networking products like switching, wireless, broadband, IP Surveillance, Unified Communications and Motherboards.

Whatever may be the phase, our relationship has always been healthy and stable. We have always got 100% support as per the assurance from K. R. Naik. We see obvious boom in the SOHO and SMB markets which are fuelled by growth in broadband penetration.

We believe in good margins for our partners and hence their interest to sell our brands. We offer free consultation to our partner enabling him to give a proper solution to his end-customer. We believe in giving our partner technically and commercially correct solutions which many people in the industry do not give. We are thankful to our principals like Smartlink, who supports our mission of promoting solution selling and not just box-selling.

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Suresh Joshi
Chairman & Managing Director
Cache Technologies (Pune)

We, at Cache Technologies, have been closely associated with Smartlink for more than 14 years, which is not only professional but personally too. This relationship is time tested and now matured as a strong bond after going through lots of thick and thin. Currently, we are distributing Digisol active range of networking products and Digilite’s motherboards. We are also Digicare partner for services.

When the company was going through many transitions (de-merger, acquisitions), it was actually a real testing time due to the prevailing uncertainty in the market. Giving up the brand which you nurtured for more than 12–13 years was a tough decision. But we, at Cache Technologies, had very high level of confidence in Smartlink and also equally strong “Trust” in the brand and vision of Naik. There was an assurance from both the sides to remain connected and grow together.

In the current distribution model, we are very happy with the kind of margins we get while selling Digisol’s products. We are not much into deployment and pre-sales is part of our FREE offering. We call ourselves as “Value Added Distributor”. So, there is no question of making money in pre-sales. India is an ever-growing market which itself means big potential. Plus changing technology trends, higher bandwidth, speed, ever-increasing data, security needs, increased requirements in C and D towns so on and so forth. Whosoever maintains quality, product availability, faster service support and the most important “Channel Engagement” will be a successful brand.