Westcon seeks partners for enterprise mobility solutions

MUMBAI, INDIA: A month after it officially started its business in the country, Westcon India has prepared a blueprint of the channel related activities that it will embark upon this year.

High on the agenda is to first have a set of solutions providers who have technically sound teams and are more interested in services-oriented business, rather than merely offering hardware and software components to their clients.

Westcon itself will be selecting disparate products from different vendors, integrating them into a solution and then offering them to their partners. It is right now working on offering enterprise mobility solutions, which will leverage on products of Motorola and Zebra Technologies, two of its five vendor alliances in India, revealed Rajiv Unnikirshnan, Business Head, Westcon India.

Giving an instance of the enterprise mobility solution, he spoke about targeting retail and manufacturing organizations who can use a handheld device to capture data, scanners to scan it and sync it with the central server for storage purposes, including information input as well as retrieval and archiving, and then printing the relevant information on the fly. "Another example are airports where customers can be issued boarding passes by attendants without them waiting in a queue for the same," Unnikrishnan explained.

Westcon will also shortly rollout its physical security solutions which include surveillance cameras, access control devices and a management suite which gather the data, record it for future archival and then disseminate it to the IT manager. For these initiatives the company will work with non-IT channel partners though its focus will be towards the traditional IT solution providers to adopt these technologies as an extension to the contemporary solution stack that they take to their customers.

"This is why we are currently engaged in a selective channel recruitment process, especially in smaller cities, where we expect better uptake for the solutions we can offer," Unnikrishnan further added. Currently the vendor is engaging 200 partners in the country in a bid to identify those that it can work with.

To update its enrolled partners about the new technological advances made by its vendors, Westcon will introduced its MailVision newsletter. Globally the company has targeted solutions for verticals under the ConvergencePoint program which caters to emerging business houses as well as Westcon Healthcare, which is aimed at meeting the needs of the healthcare industry.

Besides these, the company also has channel programs like ConvergencePoint and OneVoice which clubs all its solutions in the data and voice business for convergence-based solutions. There is also the SecurityPoint and OneDefense, which integrates its "multi-vendor-based reliable network security solutions."

Next is the MobilityPoint program where its next generation mobility solutions, wired and wireless, are clubbed besides the CollaborationPoint which comes with real-time video, voice, unified messaging and web-based communications technology.

"We will jointly decide with our partners which of these programs they can imbibe to grow their business and enjoy the benefits," Unnikrishnan said.

The company also offers its Rent-a-Lab rental services for networking equipment manufactured by its principals, from the single product all the way to pre-configured overall solutions. But as of now, it is not known whether the company will introduce this in India.

In 2008, Westcon's global revenues increased 26 percent to touch $2.9 billion while its gross margins increased from 9.5 percent to 10.4 percent with gross profit increasing 37 percent to $296.7 million. The EMEA and Americas contribute 46 and 45 percent to its business respectively, while the rest comes from comes its Asian sales.