Nortel boosts SMB focus in India

BANGALORE: After creating a strong foot hold in the Indian carrier and enterprise market, Nortel today reiterated its commitment to India by extending its product offering to the burgeoning SMB segment in India.

Nortel's new product range includes switches, routers and access points and will feature the SMB-specific Business Communications Manager (BCM50), and a digital hybrid PBX supplied by Nortel's Korean JV, LG-Nortel.  SMB customers will benefit from both voice and data enabled solutions backed by Nortel's carrier-grade industry standards. The specially designed offering will provide customers simple, scalable and easy to use products at a very affordable price.

Backed by the buoyant Indian economy and the large SMB market, Nortel has established a long-term strategy to cater to specific needs and challenges of SMB customers. India is the first country in Asia where the SMB initiative is being rolled out, and is backed up by dedicated marketing, support infrastructure and people. The SMB initiative will be one of Nortel's biggest product roll outs in India, with multi-city road shows taking the solutions out to customers across the country.

Announcing Nortel's SMB focus in India, Mr. Ravi Chauhan, Managing Director, Nortel India said, "The SMB segment is going through a process of evolution and businesses are looking at technology to enable them to grow bigger. Nortel is gearing up to become a dominant player in this segment. Nortel has streamlined its training processes and established a robust ecosystem for its SMB solutions that will help channel partners deliver the value of Nortel's voice and data solutions across India at a really affordable cost. Our solutions will cater to businesses even as small as three to five  staff."

Commenting on Nortel's Channel Strategy, ER Ashok Kumar, Director-SMB, Nortel India said, "We will follow the 'four E' approach: Engage, Enable, Excite and of course Execute. Emphasizing Nortel's long-term commitment to its partners, Ashok said, "As part of enabling our channel partners, Nortel will invest the manpower and resources to educate them, provide complete technical support and develop a unique rewards program. There is an increasing number of data networking dealers who aspire to get into voice networking, and vice-versa. We will work with them and train them to broaden their knowledge."

To provide an end-to-end value proposition to SMB customers Nortel will also set up a dedicated national customer support center. This support center will be accessible through a toll free number, which will provide customers a single interface for all post-deployment support and services.

The new solution will combine the traditionally distinct voice networking products and data networking products to provide a complete end-to-end solution. Nortel's SMB solutions will be distributed through Ingram Micro and its focused resellers covering the length and breadth of the SMB segment across the country.

© CIOL Bureau