By Sonal Desai
Actis Technologies, a provider of audiovisual and videoconferencing solutions, is planning to pep up its channel. The company is in the process of appointing a national channel manager, and is expanding its branch network and support coverage.
“Partners contributed about 40 percent of our revenue before the slowdown,” said Abhimanyu Gupta, Director, Actis. “Today it is only 10 percent of our turnover. We want to strengthen our channel business and double it over the next 12 months. We will soon have a national channel head, and we have earmarked a separate channel development budget.”
Some of the products Actis distributes are projectors from Epson and Sanyo; displays from Samsung, Panasonic and NEC; projection screens and digital signage from 3M; videoconferencing from Polycom, Tandberg and Lifesize; and IP cameras from Sony.
While earlier the channel focus was on reselling projectors and other boardroom products, Actis now wants to promote solutions-selling among partners. “We will continue to push product sales, but the bigger thrust will be to drive solutions-centric business through partners. We have identified 50 partners and are helping them to train and certify,” informed Gupta.
The company is targeting the education, corporate, hospitality, retail, home and SMB segments, and on the back of the new channel push it aims to double its current topline of `50 crore in FY2011-12.
Actis is also focusing on build-and-design projects. “We are now working with designers and architects to blend in our solutions—such as boardroom presence, training-room presence and home theatre—at the project design stage itself, and some of these projects are being implemented by our partners,” said Gupta.
The focus in 2011 will be to increase revenue from underperforming regions. At present the west contributes 45 percent to revenues, the north brings in 25 percent, 25 percent comes from the south, and the east contributes 5 percent.
“We have traditionally been strong in the west, and the focus now is to increase the share of the other regions. In the east we plan to add new sub-distributors in Kolkata, Kharagpur and Orissa. In the north we plan to open one more branch in Delhi, which will focus on business outside Delhi. We will also open a support office in Jammu,” disclosed Gupta. In Chennai, Actis plans to open its second Experience Center for partners and their customers to get a feel of its products. It already has one such center in Mumbai.
In order to deepen its engagement with solutions-centric partners, Actis is strengthening its regional partner relationship teams. “In Mumbai and Delhi, we have two channel managers. We have added one channel manager each in Pune, Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Chennai. Their main job is to manage the sub-distributors and the set of 10-12 solutions partners,” explained Gupta. |