We Want to Establish ourselves as best in class ‘Made in Indian brand'- DIGISOL

DIGISOL, an IT Developer is focusing on “Made in India” brand, giving importance to locally manufactured products. In a candid interaction with DQ Channels, Mandar Joshi Channel Head, DIGISOL talks about their Channel Stretegies and existing channel partner program.

What is your Go-To-Market strategy?                                                

Our main focus is positioning DIGISOL as a major brand in the midmarket. Once the partners are comfortable with our product range, quality, specs etc, we want to focus on brand awareness among the end customers. We want to position our brand as a value-for-money ‘Made in India brand.’ For consumer products, we can take advantage of economies of scale.

Providing best quality products is important, while imprinting the image of a brand on the minds of the customer is even more important, when viewed from the long term perspective. Though the channel has always been there and the company existed for over two decades, the brand DIGISOL is still young. To promote the brand we are putting a lot of efforts to educate the channel community—partners, distributors, SIs, etc—because it is the channel partners who interact with the end customers, so they play a big role in building the brand. In the coming year, our main objective is to get the brand established in the customers’ memory and increase the recall value, so that they are able to recognize as well as associate the DIGISOL brand with Networking and SCS products.”

This year we will undertake events across India for our channel community, where we will be having 1:1 interaction with our channel partners. We also actively participate in the trade shows, expos, etc. Apart from these, we will also aggressively promote in-shop branding. We will regularly connect ourselves with our partners who have been selling our products through regular marketing updates and marketing brochures. Apart from them we will also conduct lot of training sessions.

We have big focus and budget to promote DIGISOL brand on digital media and create customer pull in the market. While advertising in print media remains a part of our promotion, we will be very active on social media front on sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, etc.

How your solutions help IT organizations/people?

We at DIGISOL want to give our customers what they really want and therefore understanding their preferences is an important aspect to device product and solutions innovations. Not just our products are customer friendly but also our after-sales services like product replacement guarantee and customer service support function are in place so that our valued customers and partners aren’t left disappointed.

Given our 23-year history of pioneering technologies in the networking equipment segment, we have been actively shaping the networking markets locally as per the global standards. Since we are the first one to introduce networking products in the Indian market, so you can say we created the Networking market in the country. Similarly we are the first one to start manufacturing in country with setup of the SMT lines.

What are the recent developments at the company?

We took yet another important step in our corporate journey of 34 years with introduction of Passive range of Structured Cabling business in India. Now we offer an entire range of Copper, Fiber and FTTH Structured Cabling Solutions for customers in India along with our Active Products line.

DIGISOL’s cabling portfolio includes Copper cabling solutions (Cat5e, Cat 6 & Cat 6A), UTP/STP LAN Cables, Keystones , Patch Panels, Patch Cords, Face Plates etc. The Fiber range have Fiber cables, Fiber Patch Cords, Pigtails, LIU couplers and an entire FTTH Product line. DIGISOL cabling products adhere to EIA/TIA and ISO/IEC international standards. They are RoHS compliant and are backed by international 25 years product warranty performance. DIGISOL Structured Cabling Systems is here to fulfill the network connectivity needs of medium to small businesses and home networks, as well as SME & Enterprises requirements.

Majority of SCS products are made in India, We have introduced products which will be game changers for System Integrators like patented keystones, manufactured locally and for easy installation, our 90 degree patch panels ranging from Cat 5e to Cat 6A.

With our strong presence in SMB & Enterprise, we will work with regional and national SI’s for enhanced presence in large scale projects and select verticals.

What are your main focus so far?

One of our main focus this year was to position DIGISOL as a major “Made in India” brand, giving importance to locally manufactured products, Today we are happy to see DIGISOL emerging as a string 'Made In India' brand in the Indian Networking market which is today flooded with other foreign brands, especially Chinese that are slowly killing profitability in this space.

We are the only vendors who manufacture in India and we are very proud of it. We started manufacturing in India when government support was meager and local manufacturing was a difficult option, . Since we manufacture in India, we are able to customize our products as per the Indian conditions and customers’ requirements. We are trying to Indianize the product so that the product is by India, for India.

Our products are environmentally tested. We do 100% testing, which very few brands are doing today and therefore, our return rate is lowest among the networking vendors.  We are also developing regional language Web GUI to focus on tier 3 and tier 4 cities where local language plays a vital role. All these efforts set us apart from the competition.

What is your channel strategy?

We have always been a channel driven company and our endeavor is to always improvise on our channel policies and time and again we have been recognized by Channel community as one of the most channel friendly companies in India. We ensure healthy margins for the Channels and also introduce new products with newer applications to increase the scope of growth for the Channels. These new products and solutions enable the channel to value add and hence can generate better margins from their customers.

We feel that profitability of the partners plays an important role in motivating them to sell more. Our solutions have the width; we have a wide range of products such as routers, switches, in addition to accessories like LAN extenders, media converters, SPF modules, etc, to meet the varying needs of the market segment we focus, whereas others are focusing on niche segments with limited products. For instance, if someone needs Surveillance Solution, there is a high probability that he needs POE switches: we have have both to offer in our kitty. Most providers have limited range of products in their portfolios. Since our range is wide, our partners do not have to approach different vendors for different products and assemble them later.

1. We offer the best Marketing & Branding Support to the Channel
2. Partners who enroll with us are there for long years.
3. We set targets which are achievable by all.
4. Stocks are easily available as we follow RD concepts rather than ND concepts.

What is your existing channel partner program?

We have partner programe named “DIGISOL Alliance Partner Program”. The DAPP program revolves around exclusive benefits to DIGISOL partners such as Post sales technical support, Prioritized partner support, Advance product replacement, Technical & Sales training, Go to Market tool kits, Sharing product Road maps, access to Marketing collateral's and Co-marketing opportunities etc.

Under the DIGISOL Alliance Partner Program, DIGISOL will be appointing DIGISOL Authorized Regional Distributor, DIGISOL Connect Partner, DIGISOL Select Partner and DIGISOL Valued Partner

Some benefits that DIGISOL’s Alliance Partners are:

• Authorized DIGISOL Partner Status
• Regular Training's & Workshops with Certifications
• Product Launch Kits
• Rebate Programs & Incentive Schemes
• Joint Promotion opportunities with DIGISOL
• Staff Incentive programs
• Lead Referrals from DIGISOL
• Joint Marketing Funds

What edge do your services offer to customers?

DIGISOL provides service and support under a special division known as DIGICARE. DIGICARE’s RMA has an all India network of 64 DIGISOL service and support centres and has a Technical Call centre as well, called DTAC (DIGISOL Technical Assistance Centre). DIGICARE supports all India customers on voice, email and chat. It offers high quality after sales service and support designed to deliver total customer satisfaction. DIGICARE has built one of the most efficient, skilled and highly professional service infrastructures in the country and provides end-to-end product life cycle support.

Through its easy-to-access DTAC contact center and a wide network of Partners across the country, DIGICARE has implemented a lean and yet efficient service model where the defective products are swapped with good units at the customer touch points instead of repairing them. This network is supported in the back-end by the state of the art Repair Hubs at Goa which ensures the repair quality standards are maintained. With this new service management model, DIGICARE is all set to provide the best possible after sales support to DIGISOL and help making DIGISOL the most preferred product.

DIGICARE offers significant advantages:

• State-of-the-art infrastructure, well equipped, with the latest equipment's
• High skill sets to repair networking products, motherboards, notebooks and LCD monitors
• Supports level 1, 2 and 3 troubleshooting in all networking products range consisting of switches, routers and wireless LAN products
• Unique web based CRM system with web access to the Customers to monitor service

activity

Any tie-ups to be announced in near future?

Since we are a public listed company, we will not be able to give any forward looking statement.

What are the company's future plans?

DIGISOL wants to be one of the key drivers of the digital India with the range of our products like Routers, Switches, IP Surveillance solutions and Structured Cabling Solutions. The core strength of DIGISOL is ‘Networking’ and networking is an integral part of making digitally connected India a reality.

We want to establish ourselves as best in class ‘Made in Indian brand’. We have technology and infrastructure to do that and that makes DIGISOL different from other brands. We wanted to make sure that our channel knows DIGISOL very well and they are confident to sell the products.

Below are the few key initiatives We will be looking into:

1. a) Expansion of channel partners
2. b) Initiatives towards channel
3. c) Product expansion
4. d) Geographic expansion