Complementing and coworking is the new normal. They wish to live to compete another day.
If Covid 19 has taken many things away from us and made people separated from each other, it has also brought many people together. In the Indian IT channel ecosystem, it has impacted positively by bringing the partners together and pushed them to work in tandem with each other, which was rarely seen in the past. Although the associations were created to sermonized togetherness and propagated theory of complementing each other but it was limited to not under cutting margin by quoting too aggressive pricing and passing the lead if there was no absolute competition or the solution was beyond one’s limitation.
Ever since the nationwide lockdown, no one was able to step out of his houses and purchase technology to support him in work from home. He placed the order with his partner; but the Partner was also unable to deliver as he was under lockdown. After some days of impasse, partners could realize that by not supporting the customers means losing business. Therefore, not caring about what would happen to their own business, they exposed their customers to other partners who were located near the lead, thereby ran a risk of losing the customer to the competition.
This turned out to be a miraculous step for the partner ecosystem. When they started trusting each other, the business whatsoever started coming on their own way and this became a new normal.
Today most of the partners are talking to each other and sharing their lead on national basis. A partner in Mumbai is passing leads of Delhi to Delhi partners and asking him to fulfill the order, who used to be a competitor in the past. Even intracity cooperation is on the growth trajectory now. A Delhi partner based out of Nehru Place is asking a North Delhi partner to fulfill the order of a North Delhi based customer. A partner of Juhu, Mumbai is passing the lead of Navi Mumbai to a Navi Mumbai partner and asking him to fulfill the order, which he would never do in normal days.
By doing this the partners are able to manage flow of business at the same time address customers with a limited workforce.
Mumbai Vimesh Avlani, Managing Director of Graftronics says, “I am able to manage my business swiftly by executing order anywhere in India not even stepping out of the locality a single day. His peers in ISODA and ASIRT are doing this for him.”
Avlani is also reciprocating to others by executing order and giving services on others’ behalf wherever he can in his personal capacity within the city or outside the city. This way he is not finding any challenge to his business while others are gasping with anxiety of loss of business.
It is not Vimesh only but there are many partners who are coming forward and reporting this camaraderie during this time of difficulty.
