Cruising in pace with some of the major Tier 1 cities in India, the IT industry in Pune has been booming rapidly, thereby providing a plethora of opportunities for ICT solution providers and the regional channel ecosystem. While the city is largely known for the presence of numerous IT parks, Pune has been generating significant demand for trending enterprise technologies.
In terms of the nature of IT channel partners, Pune is home to the entire spectrum – inlcuding resellers, retailers, system integrators, solution providers, apart from key national, regional and sub-distributors such as Redington, Ingram Micro, Savex, Iris and Compuage.
Providing an overview of the city’s market and business for his company, Rahul Meher, CEO, Leon Computers, says, “Pune is dominated by manufacturing industry, automobiles, OEMs, ITeS, telecom, and insurance sectors. As data is one of the most important assets for everyone, we are coming across a number of Big Data projects, Data Lakes, etc. Every company wants to use Big Data to predict and prevent risks.”
Being one of the oldest players in the Pune market, Leon Computers has witnessed shifts in IT consumption in the region and the evolution of Pune’s IT channel ecosystem. The surge of new opportunities and growth areas could be reiterated by the fact that Leon Computers has now withdrawn itself from reselling of hardware and software. The company is focused on building its own IP in business intelligence and advance intelligence with modern data platforms.
According to another city-based partner, Sarang Satarkar, Director, Ace Brain Systems & Software, the Top 3 IT segments in Pune include cloud, mobile and printing solutions. Whereas, the key months of purchase are January, February and March.
It must be noted that Pune, being one of the Smart Cities, acts as a catalyst in growing demands for ICT solutions in the government sector. Alongside, the Metro project also acts as an opportunity for channel partners, according to Satarkar. All major IT products in hardware are easily sold in the market. However, solutions of cloud migration are in greater demand.
Explaining some of the unique challenges, Satarkar says, “Service support provided by MNCs and Indian customer expectations are never complementing each other. Customer actually wants personal touch while providing after sales service, and MNC call centre are having an approach of ensuring that there is no or little cost involved to resolve the call. Call centre numbers are always on hold or in queue and call centres representatives always provide monotonous information to the customer. National distributors or vendors don’t consider delays in payment happening because of holidays and other natural issues, I feel henceforth the credit offered should always be basis working days rather than number of days. I don’t see the national distributors or vendors trying to understand taxation concerns of channels.”
On the potential present in the city, Meher highlights Big Data / Data Lakes in the ITeS, telecom and insurance sectors; data migration and advance analytics across verticals.
Speaking on the role of channel associations, Satarkar informs, “Associations have a big role to play in keeping healthy relationships between vendors, distributors and the channel. CMDA Pune works very actively in all regards about the concerns of the members.”
