Despite global headwinds and an evolving technology landscape, VS Hariharan, Managing Director and Group CEO, Redington Limited, shares in an interaction with CRN India that Redington still continues to defy gravity. He highlights the company’s reported 11% topline growth last fiscal year, with particularly strong performance in India and the UAE, complemented by steady gains in Saudi Arabia and Africa. In the first quarter of FY25, Redington’s growth momentum accelerated further with 22% topline and 12% bottom-line growth YoY across all operating markets, including India, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Africa, Turkey, and South Asia.
“We recorded broad-based growth,” says Hariharan. “India grew 24%, UAE 35%, and Saudi Arabia 32% last quarter. Across our portfolio, cloud, software, and mobility segments are all firing.”
The cloud business, primarily driven by hyperscaler partnerships, surged over 40%, while software solutions encompassing security, SaaS, and cloud grew nearly 25%. Even traditional on-premise infrastructure such as servers and data centres expanded at 21%, signalling sustained enterprise demand. Meanwhile, mobility, one of Redington’s core verticals, saw a stellar 44% growth, boosted by rising demand for premium smartphones in India.
Reimagining reach: The MSME and rural push
For Hariharan, India’s growth story lies not in the metros but in the heartlands. He reveals that Redington is now extending its footprint to 300–400 cities, supported by a hub-and-spoke logistics network that connects smaller cities with regional distribution hubs.
“Hardware remains strong, but the real story is in access and enablement,” he explains. “We’re not just moving boxes anymore, we’re building ecosystems.”
To that end, Hariharan shares that Redington has diversified its financial offerings. Channel financing now accounts for 20% of its business, with the company also experimenting with project financing models to help partners execute larger deals. Additionally, the company has innovated on its route-to-market approach, establishing state-level large-format retailers (LFRs) and a Direct-to-Retail (D2R) model that supports 5,000 premium mobility stores nationwide.
But he also mentions that the real frontier is rural India. Through partnerships with microfinance institutions (MFIs), Redington is piloting PC and smartphone financing programs aimed at enabling digital adoption for small businesses and first-time users in tier-3 and rural markets.
The digital trinity: Building the cloud ecosystem
As digital transformation moves deeper into the mid-market, Redington has evolved far beyond its legacy role as a hardware distributor. The company’s “Digital Trinity” strategy rests on three pillars, hyperscalers (AWS, Microsoft, GCP), security providers, and SaaS vendors, enabling a unified ecosystem that MSMEs can tap into seamlessly.
To operationalise this, Redington launched Cloud Quarks, a proprietary digital platform that automates sales orders, renewals, analytics, and marketplace transactions. “The shift from hardware to software requires a completely different approach,” says Hariharan. “We needed to digitise the reseller and customer experience end-to-end, that’s what Cloud Quarks enables.”
While hardware still accounts for 85% of Redington’s business, software and cloud services are scaling rapidly, with growth rates exceeding 25–40% quarter-on-quarter.
AI as a cross-cutting enabler
Few themes excite Hariharan as much as AI. He sees it not as a standalone vertical but a horizontal enabler across every product category. “Everything around us is becoming AI,” he notes. “There’s the AI PC, AI smartphone, AI server, and AI-enabled software, we’re preparing our entire partner ecosystem for this transformation.”
Redington’s AI Capability Centre is central to that vision. The centre has already developed over 75 use cases, with 25 pilots and three at full-scale production. These range from internal process automation to customer-focused deployments via Managed Service Providers (MSPs). “We call them AIMSPS, AI-enabled MSPs, and we aim to have hundreds of them replicating use cases across industries,” Hariharan adds.
To structure this journey, Redington follows the ‘5Cs Framework’, Capacity, Capability, Community, Catalogue, and Communication. The company is building an AI catalogue of vertical-specific agentic solutions, developing a community of ISVs and resellers, and showcasing innovations through Centres of Excellence (CoEs). Through its CSR initiatives, Redington is also advancing AI literacy, in collaboration with NSDL, Microsoft, and AWS, focusing particularly on smaller towns and less-privileged communities.
Mind the gap: Awareness vs adoption
While awareness around AI is rising, Hariharan cautions that the real gap lies in execution. “Customers are aware, but they need to see clear ROI before scaling,” he says. “Everyone’s doing pilots and proofs of concept, but commercial adoption takes time.”
He believes this challenge isn’t unique to India. “Globally, too, we’re seeing the same pattern. The UAE and Saudi Arabia are ahead, largely due to government-led AI strategies, but even there, scaling adoption is a work in progress,” he explains. “AI is not automation; it requires training models, human judgement, and continuous refinement.”
Looking forward, Hariharan identifies software, cloud, and AI as Redington’s next growth engines, even as hardware remains robust. The company is betting on emerging technologies such as IoT, drones, and 3D solutions, though he admits they’re still in the early stages of commercial maturity.
Regionally, Redington is expanding into ASEAN, with a focus on software and AI-led solutions, and Central Asia, given its adjacency to the Middle East and Turkey. The company also continues to grow selectively in Africa, particularly in Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, Egypt, Rwanda, and parts of North Africa, albeit cautiously, given macroeconomic volatility.
“Our goal,” Hariharan concludes, “is to evolve from a distributor into a true ecosystem orchestrator, enabling growth not just for our partners and customers, but for the digital economy as a whole.”
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