NEC seeks upcountry partners for communication products

MUMBAI, INDIA: NEC Infortia Asia-Pacific, manufacturers of PABX systems, is looking at getting more feet on the ground to drive it revenues.

In India, NEC is represented by Enkay Technologies and the latter is driving its channel expansion plans.

NEC currently has 60 channel partners and is hoping to expand this to 150 by the end of this year. Around 70 per cent of the existing channel network comprise office automation partners (OA) while the rest are IT resellers.

Increasingly the company is witnessing a convergence between the profiles of these two distinct channel and expects more IT dealers to start selling PABC systems with the portfolio of products they offer to customers.

Talking about the nature of partners they would like to include, CK Tan, senior manager, regional sales, APAC and Middle East, NEC Infortia Asia-Pacific said, "We are looking at OA as well as IT partners. More than the industry that they are targeting we are interested in working with partners who have a good installed base, reliable customer accounts, a strong service network and technical base."

The latter is perhaps the most crucial when it comes to signing up partners to it networks, because Enkay depends on the partners to offer post-sales support to customers.

"If a PABX system comes down then organizations are unable to function at their optimal level. This is why we assure a service turnaround time of four hours and we train our partners to provide the first level of service," said Dayal Hemrajani, CMD, Enkay Technologies.

Ensuring this level of service has resulted in repeat business from 30 per cent of Enkay's customers.

This is precisely why the company is unwilling to appoint a third party service provider and would rather address the support issues directly or through its partner base.

"Besides our partners, we have around 200 service engineers on the field," informed Hemrajani.

In India, NEC is focused largely on the SOHO, SME, corporate as well as banking finance service and insurance verticals.

It has tied up with service providers like Tata Telecom, Reliance Infocomm and Airtel where the latter supply its handsets to customers.

This has helped it reach out to a wider end-user market.

Like Tan put it, "At any given point of time, around 8,000 sales people of these service providers are out in the street literally selling our EPABX terminals."

NEC has an installed base of 45000 PBX on key systems unit that is used at the backend. Each of these KSUs can have front-end extensions ranging from 308 to 60,000 nodes, depending on the client's needs.

Now NEC is focusing more on making a shift to IP for its communication products.

"All our products are geared for IP, but we are waiting for the infrastructure in India to be able to support them. So we have the appropriate products, now service providers need to rollout services for IP communication," said Tan.

NEC's alliance with Enkay will soon complete 25 years and the vendor has no plans for tying up with any other distributor for India.

According to a Gartner Group's 2006 report, titled, 'Enterprise Telephony Equipment, Worldwide', NEC emerged as the global leader in the enterprise telephony equipment market with 12.6 per cent share.

The other players who factored in the survey were Avaya, Nortel, Ericsson, Siemens, etc.