“Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise is working towards expanding reach in India”

In exclusive interaction with DQ Channels, Prasath Rao, Head of Channels and Operations Enterprise , South Asia, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise (ALE) talks about company’s strategy to increase footprints across the regions in India.

What are the challenges Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise (ALE) faces while operating in emerging geographies like India?

While working in emerging geographies like India, reach is the biggest challenge we face today. We have excellent product portfolio, we offer best services to our clients and technologically we are advance. However, the irony is that we are lacking behind in terms of the reach.

How ALE- Neoteric partnership address the challenge to tap potential market space for ALE?

We and our value added distributor Neoteric have jointly chalked out a plan to reach to the prospective segments in the industry. Neoteric has channel connect and reach and we help them complementing the solutions. That is how we are incubated in relationship with Neoteric. More importantly it is not just the distribution of solutions but the engagement is much bigger in terms of support services and also in terms of market engagement. Neoteric is fully aligned with our vision and we are working towards increasing our partner base.

What are your key offerings and what are the verticals you focus on?

One of our key offerings includes ip communications. On the data side or on the infrastructure side, we have network portfolio of LAN switches and routers. We are also into collaborative application space. We are into data centers and we give solutions to data centers. This is our entire gamut of portfolio. And from a verticals perspective we concentrate on SMBs, Medium and Large Enterprises (MLEs). Our enterprise business is 100 per cent indirect and it is only through our partners. As mentioned earlier, our core focus is on Enterprise segment, especially SMBs.

How the Indian SMB space is critical for ALE?

SMBs are very important not only from business perspective but also from the perspective of reach across the region. We cover hospitality, education and we are clearly successful. But we also want to reach the untapped SMB space as we have excellent portfolio. We see that the SMB growth will complement the other solutions as well because today the partner who is in SMB also connect us to other geographies and other portfolios.

ALE has tropicalized its portfolio. What is the reason behind adopting tropical business strategy?

We are going to fine tune the product and optimize the product based on Indian scenario. We will deliver what is required in India keeping in mind the pricing factor. Since we face competition from home grown companies , we are going to bring tropicalized portfolio of offerings that suit the Indian market in order to compete with our competitors efficiently.

What is the Channel strategy of ALE for Indian Enterprise segment?

Today most of our partners address large user base. But when it comes to below 50 users, partners’ ask is competitive price. So the best way to be competitive is to have a version that suits the needs of this segment. Today we have one common system across the 50 users 150 users and 200 users. We are now trying to adapt something to 50 user space and this will be available to all the partners. It is more of R & D play and later we will optimize it and then bring down to our partners.

What are the crucial steps ALE has taken to increase partner base?

From direct reseller perspective and indirect resellers perspective we have close to 45 to 50 partners in India. And we strongly feel that this is very less. We have a strategy to increase partner base especially in the SMB space. Neoteric is aligned with us and they have their own channel team which will do the partners recruiting along with us. We are doing multi city road show with the aim to reach and convey to the partners that we are there to help them and support them. We will be recruiting Partner Account Managers (PAM). The main KRA of PAM is to educate the partners with our solutions give them valid propositions and demonstrations. This PAM is very critical for us. Apart from that we are increasing our resources especially to support the SMB space.

Apart from Enterprise Partnership Program which governs our relationship with partners is key for us. It’s a very flexible program and kind of incentives and benefits partners get by the virtue of the program itself, I think nobody else can match it in the industry. We invest in partners training and have dedicated kits only in SMB space. We also give backend rebate on the business they achieve. Apart from that there are lots of things we do locally. We aim to be number one partner to our partners.

What are your marketing strategies for brand awareness?

 We are trying to have a group of team members who will directly work with IRs, especially in SMB segment.  Till now our moral was that we will work directly with partner but now we are also adding few people who will work closely with IRs so that we can help them in lead generation and grow their presence in the market and it will be a direct touch point to them to work with ALE. For next year our core focus will be on advertisement, promotions and demand generation. We will also launch special schemes and incentives for IRs.  We are trying to create a top partner IR club where the IRs who reached at the particular level will get rewards and incentives based on the parameters set. The whole idea is to drive a growth in tier 2 tier 3 cities also bring about awareness of the brand.

Considering your Channel initiatives and corporate strategies, how will you forecast growth of ALE in next 3-5 years? 

Presence is important and we are working towards it. We have portfolio which is best in class and we have promotions in place also we are taking care of price. Therefore, I do not see that why we cannot grow beyond.  At the same time we want to be organic in terms of growth and do not want to saturate the market . Therefore, we select appropriate number depending upon the geographies and then it makes more easy for us to enable the partners. Because of our initiatives in 2013-14 we have doubled our numbers in SMB space. Taking this forward, we are expecting good growth in India.