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Giving Due Credit to ISVs
By Dhaval Valia
Back in 2004, I remember meeting many vendors to understand their strategies to tap the ‘vast potential’ of the SMB segment.
Leave aside a rational SMB strategy; vendors didn’t even have a proper classification of SMBs. Most were using the US classifications of small and medium businesses. Very unusual, considering that the SMB sector in every country is unique.
But to the vendors’ credit, over the last couple of years, they have done thorough homework to understand the nuances of the Indian SMB sector and have worked diligently to form a cohesive strategy to tap its potential.
Core to a successful SMB strategy are ISV alliances. India has innumerable small and local ISVs, who, over years of fine-tuning, have developed versatile and customized applications to suit niche micro-verticals in their respective cities.
I can cite an example of a friend from my hometown Bhavnagar where two major micro-verticals are shipping and diamond-cutting. A batch-mate from my engineering college, this friend has made a good fortune developing a highly customized accounting and inventory tracking application for ship-breaking companies in the city.
His customer base consists of 25 ship-breakers with an average annual turnover of Rs 7-10 crore and an IT set-up of an average 5-7 PC nodes. He is not just an IT supplier but also a consultant, and at times even helps his customers with tax consultancy.
Every city in India has several such inventive entrepreneurs who have been instrumental in growing the IT industry by creating and selling customized applications to customers who otherwise have meager IT sensibility.
I believe that ISVs understand customer pain-points better than the IT infrastructure integrators because the genesis of their business lies in understanding customers’ business issues and then developing customized automated software to address those.
There is no doubt that the strategy to bring ISVs and hardware integrators together will help IT to penetrate in a major way. However, this initiative from vendors will require a lot of legwork in going to small cities, identifying the right ISV partners, and then working toward creating a framework where they feel comfortable and confident working with their local hardware partners.
While such ISVs are already working with the local hardware channel and vice versa, it’s the recognition and acceptance as an alliance partner which I feel will further boost their engagement and bring them into the mainstream channel. |