Channel Chief
“Our RDs don’t need to be concerned”
 Gary Yang, MD, D-Link India, clears the air about several issues concerning the company including the role of its national distributors and product shortage
There’s a perception among your regional distributors (RDs) that you are moving away from the RD model and are instead focusing on Ingram and Redington. Please comment.
Post de-merger, D-Link has realigned its strategies and has introduced an enhanced distribution structure by appointing Ingram and Redington as our national distributors (NDs). At the same time, we continue to work closely with all our 25 RDs. For the last 15 years, both D-Link and the RDs have grown together. We attribute our success to their support.
However, over the years, we have added several new products and technologies. As a company we intend to create and expand the market for these new products, and the role of the ND is to help us reach out to newer geographies and to partners not accessed before. For instance, partners managing large projects need multi-locational billing and support. NDs can provide such support with their widespread regional presence, and strong pre and post-sales support.
RDs shall continue to play a major role in our organizational structure and they have nothing to be concerned about. In fact, the appointment of NDs has benefited the RDs because they can now get immediate stock replacement from them at the same price structure as earlier.
D-Link has also created a new set of distributors called Business Distributors.
This is not a new set of distributors; they have been with D-Link for many years. They were earlier called Empowered Resellers; we have just renamed them. Any partner who stocks and addresses the resellers is a distributor, and the scope of their operations is the pre-fix we have.
At present we have two NDs, 25 RDs and 82 BDs. While NDs provide end-to-end support and widespread reach, RDs ensure continuous business support and BDs enable us to reach out to more resellers and partners in smaller cities. There will be some overlap in the markets they address, but there’s no conflict in their role.
There’s also a complaint that over the past few months there have been ex-stock availability challenges even for your fast-moving products.
With the global slowdown, 2009 turned out be a challenging year for industries across verticals. While India managed to maintain a steady growth rate, the slowdown did have its impact on global manufacturing supplies. As a result, all global brands in India were affected. Since then we have increased the stock level at our centralized warehouse in Goa, thus ensuring uninterrupted supply of D-Link products. Our NDs have played an important role in ensuring stock supplies.
What is D-Link doing to improve its post-sales support and ensure faster turnaround for in-warranty repairs?
Our sales operations are divided into four regions with 17 offices. Every region has a dedicated pre-sales and post-sales team. All our branch offices are well-equipped with technical manpower and proof-of-concept labs for all kinds of pre-sales and post-sales support under the supervision of the Regional Technical Manager. All customer queries from smaller towns are served by the nearest D-Link service center. We also have 25 RMA centers in major cities. Almost 95 percent of the products are repaired or replaced on the same day across the desk.
In addition, we have designed a service support system to match customer requirements. We have also set up technical support through a toll-free number, and Web-based support through an e-mail service. We replace a product, if established as dead-on-arrival by the partner’s inspection team, within 10 days from the shipment.
D-Link is making a bid in the enterprise solutions space. What’s your strategy for that market?
D-Link has a large portfolio of enterprise products. Enterprise solutions is one of the key agendas for us; we are working closely with systems integrators and shall continue to do so. We have plans to launch new enterprise solutions from time-to-time. We are in the process of creating industry vertical specialist partners for infrastructure products, as well as technology-focused partners for newer and emerging technologies like IP surveillance, storage and UTM. Right now we are mapping partners.
Please provide details of the recently launched Global Partner Program (GPP)?
GPP is divided into four levels of partners: registered, elite, silver and gold. Under this program we have introduced certifications like DCS (D-Link Certified Specialist) and DCP (D-Link Certified Professional). Partners can apply for and achieve different levels of partnerships by achieving revenue targets, geographic reach and certificated resources. Our aim is to create partners who are technically qualified to sell our products.
We have also created a strong D-partner portal for channel partners. It contains a data repository, tools, case studies and project details. It also enables partners to participate in D-Link education programs to achieve partnership upgradation as well as more discounts. D-Link also offers partner certification programs through the portal. |