Cadensworth, the offshoot of Redington India intends to provide solution based distribution that goes beyond sales and post sales; whereas Redington services are restricted to distribution and VAD activities covering services up to pre-sales support
With the market requirement changing and a lot of brands requiring solution-based approach from the distributors, Cadensworth gets created by Redington in India in 2012 and has been working parallelly with the same intention but with solution selling approach, which is one notch up than what the normal VADs do in terms of functionality.
[quote font=”tahoma” font_size=”13″ font_style=”italic” color=”#333333″ bgcolor=”#f3f3f3″ arrow=”yes” align=”left”] 
Anand Chakravarthy
Director, Cadensworth
We would definitely not assume that we are the best in what we are doing and keep on innovating ourselves to see that we are adapting to the changing dynamics of the market
[/quote]Anand Chakravarthy, Director, Cadensworth, said, “At Cadensworth, we help partners to the extent of going to the customers’ space in designing, implementing and maintaining, if required. So it helps the partners to pitch the solutions across the board without having deep domain knowledge about each of the solutions that they are representing. Having said that we would never get into the space of end customers unless partners’ want us to do so. And we would never do billing with customers directly.”
“On the other hand Redington is a distribution and VAD company comprising four business groups. The first two groups are focussed on consumers and enterprises products. The third group is for security and software products. And the last group, which is upcoming, is focussed on addressing cloud and mobility market,” he added.
As per him there is no overlaps in terms of brands between Redington and Cadensworth. Redington has every other brand than the brands Cadensworth does have. As far as products’ placement in both the companies are concerned is the call of the vendors as some vendors require solution based approach to the market and some do not. So to make it clear Redington as a VAD does pre-sales consulting including designing and support for the vendors not beyond that; whereas Cadensworth’s mandate is to go beyond pre-sales and does post implementation activities for the partners.
The question comes since the market is adopting IoT, Virtualization and analytics aggressively and if the products are carried under Redington what will happen and who will address the partners, Anand maintains, “If some value business opportunity requires collaboration on various brands which Redington carries, we would decide to host it in Redington only as a practice. Similarly, if any of those brands are carried in Cadensworth, we would host the practice in Cadensworth. For example, IOT portfolio is sitting out of Redington portfolio; therefore, we are trying to evolve from there but we may imbibe some of the practices in Cadensworth if required. So, from the action perspective Cadensworth might be carrying a different mandate but the nature of business in both the companies are same and Cadensworth is an offshoot of Redington not a competing company.”
Today, Cadensworth represents ten vendors from the Voice, Video, Data and Storage perspective. As per Anand, the brands within Cadensworth are aligned around the Data Centre and there are no competing brands present in Cadensworth portfolio.
From Geo expansion perspective, Cadensworth would remain in India reason being there is enough to do in India although later stage they might look at other geographies. When it started in 2012, Cadensworth had only 12 head count but now it has grown to have 150 people. And, a large section of the people are into pre-sales consulting, which the company calls as ICTS team, which takes care of inside sales, sales, consulting and support. The company also hosts a POC for various solutions and Anand is of view that the company is not interested in setting up a NOC unless a large community of partners wish to have it hosted in Cadensworth’s premise, which will basically support the partners rather than support the customers directly.
Secondly, with complexity in technologies ever growing, where partners may not have enough expertise in addressing the market requirement, Cadensworth may come in by collaboration with other companies to imbibe the capability but that will certainly go from the portfolio of Cadensworth.
Anand added, “We are an agile company. Although we are old in terms of our experience, but our thinking has always been refreshing and we would definitely not assume that we are the best in what we are doing and keep on innovating ourselves to see that we are adapting to the changing dynamics of the market because the way the products and services would be consumed by the customers are going to change multiple times.
Finally…
Today, the market is moving from product based approach to customer based approach, so Cadensworth would go around this theme and help partners create satisfaction among the customers. Also, as a distribution house, the company would also look at the new brands but definitely rivet its eyes on the brands which could stand the test of time.
