Mandar Joshi, VP – Sales, Digisol Systems, shares the company’s channel strategies for 2019
Key highlights 2018 and opportunities for 2019
2018 has been an eventful year as we completed 25 years of success in the IT networking industry. 2019 is a crucial year for our business as we also focused on enterprise product range along with our SOHO range of products. Our focus for the year will revolve around empowering our channel community. Like every year, 2019 will undertake various initiatives to engage with our partners. We plan to introduce new offers and schemes every quarter, along with loyalty and incentive schemes to motivate the channel partners.
Top tech trends for channel community
2019 will bring a host of technological upgrades that are aimed at simplifying various networking problems on both the fronts – enterprises and consumer. On the enterprise front, SD-WANs are now moving out from the early-adopter phase to mainstream adoption. As SD-WANs are agile, efficient, secure and offer better application performance compared to legacy WAN, thus enterprises are looking forward to this upgrade.
While on the consumer front, Wi-Fi 6 or 802.11ax is expected to make its way into new installations in 2019. This Wi-Fi standard will offer faster data transfer speeds i.e. up to up to 40 per cent higher compared to Wi-Fi 5. Besides this, 5G is another trend that will rule in 2019. Yes, we have been talking about 5G for a while, however, telecom operators and other industry players are making big bets on next-generation services for 2019 with a renewed focus on making it accessible for the masses. Apart from enhancing end users experience, 5G will also play a key role on the business front. 5G will allow faster download and data transfer and will empower business applications through which we can experience better services than ever before. 5G is foreseen to bring numerous advantages to the large and small businesses, however it will take few more years for large scale expansion.
Channel directions for partners
We have always been a channel-driven company and our endeavour is to always improvise on our channel policies. This year our top direction is towards building a strong presence in passive networking market and also to 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 feel that the profitability of the partners plays an important role in motivating them. Our solutions have the width; we have a wide range of products such as routers, switches, in addition to accessories like LAN extenders, media converters, SFP modules, etc, to meet the varying needs of the market segment we focus, whereas others are focusing on niche segments with limited products. Since our range is wide, our partners do not have to approach different vendors for different products and assemble them later.
