2003 And Beyond

08 Jan 2003 00:00 IST

New Update

In this New Year Special Feature, we
present leaders among vendors and partners with their insights on business
strategies for 2003 and beyond.Â

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These leaders have also stuck their necks out to
forecast the products and technologies that will take center-stage during 2003
and beyond. These predictions should help partners to plan their business better
for the coming year.

	Ram Aggarwal CEO, WeP India
	“We are reinventing the business by providing higher focus on Business Printing Outsourcing (BPO) opportunities. I also believe the market will offer us opportunity in technology confluence areas like networking and storage, storage and convenience and networking and convenience.”

	KR Naik MD, D-Link (India) Ltd
	“My personal resolution for 2003 is to remain alert because in IT industry, one cannot sit quiet or sleep in peace. New things keep happening every moment in IT!”

	Avtar Saini Director-South Asia, Intel
	“Communications will become an integral part of computing. All computers will communicate and all communicating devices will compute. Intel is developing ‘silicon radios’ which would be integrated into future Intel chips and will have wireless radio communication capabilities."

	Joy Ghosh Country Manager, Symantec
	“The most important happening in the coming year or two in the security space will be the ability for companies to deliver a management solution for the various technologies that customers have already deployed.”

	Alok Ohrie VP, Personal Computing Division, IBM India
	“We would focus on using technology and innovation to help customers address business issues such as managing the cost of deploying and migrating systems, improving up-time and ensuring secure wireless computing.”

	Rajesh Bakshi MD and CEO, NetLink Business Systems
	“I see a lot of products addressing the needs of network security gaining importance in 2003. Also, I foresee a number of applications for broadband coming in because most enterprises today have access to broadband.”

	Suresh Pansari Director, Rashi Peripherals
	“A solid interface with end-users through our retail counters will be our focus, apart from the continuance of consolidation exercise started last year. We will also promote volume partners to ramp up marketshare of the products distributed by us.”

	Nitin Shah Managing Director, Allied Digital Services
	“Allied Digital will develop technical depth in related business areas, reinforce and further extend its service delivery mechanism’s spread within India and overseas, and ensure that the best management practices are followed.”

2003 And Beyond

	UM Taranath MD, GT Enterprises
	“In 2003, we are expecting to see rapid development in the open source software arena. Higher pricing strategies of companies like Microsoft will act as a deterrent for legal software and end-users will opt for ‘free’ products promoting Linux OS among others.”

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	Arif Allana MD, Fiona Infosystems
	“Our primary business strategy for the year 2003 is to evolve as a turn-key solution provider instead of being just a fulfillment company. We will also increase our focus on procuringÂ e-governance project.”

2003 And Beyond

	M Lakshmi Narayan Rao Asst Director Â Value Marketing, Canon India
	“Multifunctional devices are expected to do well this year. Imaging as a technology will play a key role in 2003. The focus will be on products that can help users manage different imaging-related functions.”

	K Jaishankar CEO, Tech Pacific (India) Ltd
	“I do not see regional distributors coming across as a threat to national distributors. Regional distribution is not a scalable model. It can only be a intermediate step. From a long-term business perspective, only national distribution model would succeed.”

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2003 And Beyond

	Anand Iyer Country GM, APC
	“Loyalty programs are the key. We want to increase our reach into 300 cities and towns. We also want to educate channel on ways to increase their profitability with APC.”

	Vivek Prakash GM, Samsung India
	“The strategy for 2003 is to grow the market, to upsell to the customer and to create channel policies that promote stable and even business. The products that I think will grow will be the CD-RW, which should ideally replace the CD ROM. Similarly on the display side, our efforts will be to have the 17" monitor replace the 15" and have the 5400 rpm hard drive get replaced by the 7200 one.”

2003 And Beyond

	GS Paul CEO, eSys Distribution
	“The herd mentality that is racing users towards a high performance PC is actually hurting the growth of PCs in India. In homes and offices there are very few applications that demand so much processing power. And it is our objective to educate users on this front.”

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	NY Prasad CEO, Ingram Micro
	“Channel is expected to play a more participative role than mere fulfillment and one would eventually see an evolution of service channel. We are also looking at newer geographies and would like our channel base to leverage on a comprehensive product portfolio from Ingram.”Â

2003 And Beyond

	Sanjeev Keskar Country Manager, AMD
	“Our roadmap, our product strengths coupled with our ongoing channel programs, corporate and government initiatives with OEMs and stepped-up brand building will take AMD forward.”

	Harish Shetty Chairman, Binary Systems
	“More than products, it will be technology that will grow rapidly in 2003. Mobile computing and wireless LAN will take the center-stage and record an exponential growth.”

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