We are trying to find our place in India: Netgear

Netgear

provides wired and wireless networking solutions for the home, business, and

SOHO networks. Yogesh Sharma, country manager, Netgear, spoke to Pragati

Simlote of CyberMedia News about the company's journey so far and its

growth plans.






It's been approximately six months since you took charge at Netgear. How has
the journey been for you and the company?






It has definitely been a good change for me — from D-Link to Netgear. From
handling one region there, I am handling a very big territory in Netgear —

India and SAARC. I am managing the entire business, sales, support, policy,

operations, etc. for Netgear.






I believe everyone has their place in the industry and we are trying to find
place for ourselves. Everything takes little time but then the good thing about

Netgear is that the products are good, pricing is good and visibility is good.

Infact, we are now a major player in wireless products in India and are now

trying to push other Netgear products. These include business products like

switching products, broadband products — both wired and wireless, etc. We have

storage product also which are mainly meant for small and medium businesses (SMBs).

We also have lot of firewall products again to cater to the need of SMEs.






These products are already available in India. The movement so far has not been
the way it has been for wireless products. So we are now trying to position

those products also and we have been very successful so far.









What kind of product portfolio does Netgear have? What are your target
segments?








Our entire product range can take care of almost all product LAN requirements of
any company. Almost 90 per cent -95 per cent of the LANs can be networked by

using our product. Requirement of up to 1,500-2,000 nodes can be fulfilled using

Netgear products.






We have a lot of corporate customers. ICICI is one of the major accounts that we
have in India. In addition to this, there are a few banks that have recently

deployed our wireless products. We are now trying to position our business

products also to these customers.






Most of our business is coming from BFSI. Government is also a growing segment.
Apart from this we are also looking at the health sector in a big way. In

banking, apart from the nationalized banks we are also focusing on the

cooperative banks.









What kind of setup do you have in India? Please throw some light on your
partner training program?








We have a team six people in sales and support and approximately 200 people
working in the India call center. We have three national distributors — Rashi

Peripherals, Cyberstar Infocom and Advent Technologies. The good thing about

these three is that they all try to operate in different segments.






SI training is one thing that we want to carry on. From my own experience this
helps a company from a lot of perspectives. Front-end people who go to the

market share the customer feedback with us, they tell company how they

themselves feel about Netgear, etc. and this helps in planning for the future.






We are undertaking a partner training program where we are planning to roll out
our SI training centers all over the country. To begin with we would touch upon

all the big cities — like Lucknow, Jaipur, Delhi, Dehradun and are trying to

cover all the A and B class cities in the first phase. Based on the success of

the first phase we would decide on future course of action for the next phase.









How is Netgear different from your competitors?







We differ from our competitors on the basis of ease of installation, usability
and post sales support. We have been giving swap warranties so instead of

repairing any product; we swap it with a new one. Most of the products barring a

few carry three-year warranty, while two of them even carry five year warranty.

This is quite unique and no other networking company offers this as a part of

the product. Few companies do offer but they charge separately. Price wise also

we are quite competitive.






We collect lot of feedback from our partners and distributors and depending on
the feedback or suggestion, we also do our own assessment of the products after

launching it in the country. Based on this we customize our products depending

on the local needs. The customization is done in our warehouses and

manufacturing facilities. We don't have our own manufacturing facilities. We

outsource it to many places in China, Taiwan, etc.






We outsource only manufacturing. But to ensure quality to match our expectation
and our customers' expectation, we have deputed our own team there. We have

our own quality and R&D team at the location and Netgear people are

monitoring even the manufacturing processing.









What would be your India strategy going forward?







Our India operations are growing at a tremendous pace. Broadband would be one of
our major driving factors for our growth. We want to position the company as one

of the reputed networking organization in the country, be profitable, make our

partners profitable and go for a long lasting association.






Our last two quarters have been tremendous for us. We are definitely looking at
somewhere between 150 per cent -200 per cent growth this year.






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