More than a trillion-dollar ICT market by 2020, India is certainly a hot bed of investments for the global investors and for the Chinese networking gear manufacturer, IP-Com, this is perhaps the right time to make an entry.
Networking is certainly backbone of any digital revolution and as India is going strongly for the digitization, it opens up scope for all vendors. And for IP -Com this is perhaps the right opportunity than ever before.
SME Channels had the opportunity to meet Bruce Shou, Global Sales Director, IP-Com and Pinaki Chatterjee, Director-Sales, India & SAARC, IP-Com at Convergence India 2016, where the company had demonstrated its entire commercial networking solutions including Wireless Controller, UTM Firewalls, Managed & Unmanaged POE Switches, Gateways, LSN Switches, Access Points – including indoor and outdoor solutions.
[quote font=”tahoma” font_size=”13″ font_style=”italic” color=”#333333″ bgcolor=”#f2f2f2″ arrow=”yes” align=”left”] 
Pinaki Chatterjee,
Director-Sales,
India & SAARC, IP-Com
We are keeping our positioning clear about just not to enter into a domain where we are not good at.
[/quote]
IP-COM products offers complete end to end cost effective WLAN Networking Solutions & Equipment for SMB’s and Commercial Establishments. IP-COM products are best suited to provide solutions to industries such as Hospitality, Real Estate, Hot Spot zones, Corporations, Educational Institutions, Hospitals and Airport. IP-COM is a market’s new hope in terms of networking solutions and products that offers better margins than the existing brands. IP-COM is a channel friendly brand and has full-fledged operations in India with local sales team and Radington as National distributor.
Bruce, said, “As a sales director, I travel many countries but I find India is very good for us. It is very big as a market. More and more people are using smartphones and smart devices. Therefore, there is a growing need of Wi-Fi for internet access. Actually, there is not many public Wi-Fi so the opportunity is really very big.”
“We are focusing on the SMB market right now but in future we will move to high-end enterprise market. IP-Com has good reputation in hospitality industry. Many hotels have installed IP-Com networking like Novotel, Sheraton, Hilton etc.,” he added.
[quote font=”tahoma” font_size=”13″ font_style=”italic” color=”#333333″ bgcolor=”#f2f2f2″ arrow=”yes” align=”left”] 
Bruce Shou,
Global Sales Director,
IP-Com
If you have any project in hand you only need IP-Com not any other brand.
[/quote]
As a new brand, under its national distributor – Redington, the company is developing partners in different regions of India. However, they have successfully tapped a good number of VADs, who are also sub-distributors for the company and these companies would provide end to end support to the system integrators (SIs), although the company is also looking at Internet service providers.
The biggest differentiator of IP-Com has been their strategy not to sell through online properties but to concentrate on the ISPs and SIs.
Bruce assures that the company is committed to support the partners with good margin and technical support. IP-Com is positioned only for the SMEs with the entire range or products – starting from Gateway, Access Points and controllers to turnkey Wi-Fi solutions. If you have any project in hand you only need IP-Com not any other brand.
Bruce maintained, “IP Com is the global leading manufacture of Wi-FI products. We are the technology partner of Broadcom. We control the entire supply chain because we develop and manufacture everything in house. Globally, we have a very big team and in India our strategy is to grow with our partners.”
By the month of August 2015, IP-Com closed the deal with Redington and the first shipment came by October but till that time the Think tanks were formalizing right strategy for the channel. They finally opted to follow a strict channel policy that they will have one distributor in place and under them sub-distributors across the country who will address the SIs.
Pinaki said, “As we understand the pain of the SIs, we decide not to go online in order to resell the products. At the same time, we are not going to sell the products through retail channel. Being an SME brand, our focus would 100 per cent be on SI market and we would like to be a preferred solution centric brand and make sure that they get a cost effective solution so that at the end of the day they can get some margin.”
In order to popularize the brand, IP-Com has started a demo drive. Under this the company will give demo to the system integrators to win their confidence. Pinaki added, “We are trying to keep it very simple and want to offer ease of working. They can directly interact with us and take our help in designing solutions and recommendation on right products and compliance so that the SIs does not feel complicated about our products.”
Challenges
Currently the challenge for the SI is that the end customers can come to know about the price of most of the brands available now; at least 70% of brands have their prices available openly online. And the SI finds a lot of undercutting of price and the orders going to someone else after him spending good time to promote brand. So basic challenge is the way they function.
Pinaki added, “As per my understanding, we do understand the pain of the SIs and this is the reason we decided to work with the SIs and help them secure their projects instead of opening the price for everyone and quote parallelly to spoil the market. We will provide ease of working and therefore appointed Redington to avoid any sort of challenges from distribution side.”
Plus, IP-Com products come with 3 years’ warranty and is leveraging Redington’s pan-india network for replacement. The regional sub-distributors are appointed on the basis of their domain knowledge so that the company could address all the points where SIs generally get concerned. The company expects that being a new brand they need SIs’ hard push to promote among the customers and the vendor ensures maximum margin for the whole chain.
IP-Com portfolio today has a wide range of product but is it going to open up all the products for the market? As per Pinki as a new brand they cannot create volume for all the products, so first they decide to address the lower segment of market. The lower segment here means most of the time the customer needs a good solution but due to budget constrains he ends up in buying the retail or SOHO products and uses in his SME environment. For example, the company has two products – one is called In-Wall Accent Point and another is Ceiling-Mount Accent Point, which are beautifully designed but low cost products. these are ideal for the SMEs having lower budget but aspiring to have good solution.
Pinaki maintained, “This is where the things start changing for IP-Com because in India 60-75 per cent of SMBs are still using very lower segment products in ADSL router or Wireless router in their SME environment. And the whole office is fully dependent on those small products. so we are trying to give them the value for money product where they can get SMB solution at a very good price.”
“We also have POE switches, which we are addressing the IP camera segments and distance deployment projects where the product is to be deployed beyond 100 metres cable connection. So there are 4-5 products which were becoming flagship for us now and we are getting good enquiry for those,” he added.
Everything is fine for IP-Com but what about the compatriot brand TP-Link or neighbouring country brand ZyXel? Are these not similarly priced and better positioned? As per Pinaki, these brands are very good brands as well but their while former’s focus is on retail business, the other’s focus is on enterprise and telecom business and IP-Com is neither interested now in retail nor interested in enterprise or telecom business. He maintained, “We are keeping our positioning clear about just not to enter into a domain where we are not good at.”
Finally…
The business of IP-Com out and out dependent on the partner/ SI network and till the end of 2015 IP-Com has around 18 sub-distributors in the country, who are in touch with approximately 450+ SIs for IP-Com business. The company has already won some prestigious projects and have been shortlisted for some government projects. Both the leaders think that this year would be a great year for IP-Com as they would embark on an expansive drive of roadshows to tap more SIs, which means more business.
