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Marthesh Nagendra, Country Manager - India, ME & SAARC, NETGEAR speaks to us about the channel strategies of NETGEAR, which will benefit the channel partners.
How expanded is your channel community across India? Do you want to further expand it?
Marthesh Nagendra - We have channel partners across all major cities – including most of the Tier2 and Tier3 cities where there is growth. We enable our partners with the right pitch to position our products accurately with our customers and hence always end up being the right fit for the SMB customer. Our business in India is purely driven by the channel partners and therefore it is critical that we educate our partners about our offerings. We provide them our full support in terms of working together for any of the projects. For most of the known brands, the wider the network, the lesser the opportunity cost. We are constantly looking to expand our network and any growth hungry firm will tell you, it's never enough.
What are the new channel strategies that you have introduced in 2021-22?
Marthesh Nagendra - NETGEAR being a channel oriented company implements various channel Partner programmes from time to time. The various channel partner programmes are announced to make it easier and more profitable for VARS to grow their businesses. We run various partner programmes on a quarterly basis. We customise our programmes for our partners to make it mutually beneficial.
Do you have a strategy in place to help your offline partners to go online and reach a wider net of clients?
Marthesh Nagendra - We help and support our offline partners to go online in all possible ways. For a partner to go online it's just not about building an E-commerce page, it's more than that. Getting the product to the customer in 24 hrs, last minute deliveries etc. and other challenges have to be taken care of.
What are the new technologies in Internet connectivity that should reach the clients?
Marthesh Nagendra - Today’s households are dealing with an increasing number of connected devices and an increasing demand for greater bandwidth from streaming video, audio and online gaming. Add to this the plethora of smart home devices from IP cameras, voice assistants, smart thermostats and appliances, all of which are dependent on a constant connection to the cloud. These devices just increase the complexity of a network as they compete for bandwidth, pushing wireless home networks beyond the technical threshold for the current generation of Wi-Fi.
The newest tech in India is still Wifi 6 — the latest generation of Wi-Fi – delivers up to four times better performance than Wi-Fi 5. It operates in the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands and features improvements in throughput, multiple-device support, and WiFi spectrum efficiency. However we are also working to enable WiFi 6E clean 6Ghz band in India. Like 5GHz before it, it may take WiFi 6 on 6GHz years before we start to see it everywhere, but that’s not to say that you won’t see much benefit if you’re an early adopter. Wi-Fi generation updates need new devices. Several manufacturers have started rolling out Wi-Fi 6E compatible electronic products.