IT Panchayat becomes ''voice'' of Guwahati channel

Zia Askari

GUWAHATI: With resellers, distributors and sub-distributors coming together to attend the IT Panchayat at Guwahati, this DQ Week driven platform became a place where the regional IT channel community interacted with distributors and discussed a wide range of issues with them.

Some of the issues that were discussed during the event included – the advantages and disadvantages of local IT associations, price undercutting, addressing the issue of getting back-end payments among others.

Throwing light on the issue under-cutting of price points in the market, Hemant Jain from Guwahati based Jain Infosys said that vendors should work closely with distributors in order to make sure that no under cutting of price points is practiced. “This is a serious issue with the industry and vendors should spend some time with their set of distributors in order to address this issue in a better way,” he added.

On the other hand, Udit Sen from eSys, said that the issue of under cutting is driven by the channel community most of the times and this community to stand up in order to address this issue.

Speaking about the importance of local IT associations in places like Guwahati, Trideep Talukdar from Quadro Digital Systems said that it is very important for small regions to involve themselves at the association level.

“Associations play an important role in terms of helping the channel community. As far as Guwahati is concerned, we will be having more activity on the association front very soon. We have a lot of interest from local channel community, so the will is there. Now we just need to get our act together on this,” he added.

Emphasizing on the importance of IT associations, Ranjan Bardoloi from Redington said that associations should have more involvement from the distributor community as well.

“These associations give great opportunity to interact with the local channel community. But there should be a more focused approach towards making sure that local distributors are also involved in these associations,” he added.

Aimed at bridging the divide between the reseller community and distributors or sub-sub-distributors, the event was well attended by over 50 channel players from the Guwahati region.

As part of the IT Panchayat's panel discussion, Udit Sen from eSys, Ranjan Bardoloi from Redington came from the distributor side while Trideep Talukdar from Quadro Digital System and Hemant Jain from Jain Infosys came from the channel community to share their views on a wide range of issues concerning the local IT channel community. The discussion was moderated by Zia Askari, Assistant Editor, Channel Publications, Cyber Media.

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