After divesting its direct business (systems integration arm) in India to its partner Progility Plc., Unify India, the parent company is aiming to drive growth through channel partners. Since the burden of acquiring customers and retaining them is no more with the OEM, the company can bring a lot more value in developing channel business and empowering them to broad base its market space in India.
[quote font=”tahoma” font_size=”14″ font_style=”italic” color=”#262626″ bgcolor=”#f2f2f2″ arrow=”yes” align=”left”]“The recruitment of newer partners will be on the bases of current gap on the territory coverage and the market potential of the specific territory.”
Shrenik Bhayani
Country Channel & Sales Head
Unify India.[/quote]
Provider of integrated communications solutions Unify India recently announced the completion of its direct business to indirect business in India.
To make it straight the earlier entity Unify Enterprise Communications India has been assimilated with Progility PLC because of its acquisition of the earlier during the second quarter of 2014. Known as Unify India, the earlier used to be a systems integrator and independent solution provider specialising in communications infrastructure, applications and services for enterprise customers. But now Unify India is an OEM company whose objective is to do business through partners. Today the company has already taken on boarded 30 partners and plans to double this number to 60 in the next two quarters and Progility is one of its partners too.
“Plans are also afoot to recruit new solution focused partners in Class A cities & product focused partners in Class B cities. The recruitment of newer partners will be on the bases of current gap on the territory coverage and the market potential of the specific territory,” says Shrenik Bhayani, Country Channel & Sales Head, Unify India.
Unify has collaborated with Beetel Teletech Limited, a subsidiary of Brightstar Corp., to serve as the value-added distributor for India & SAARC countries.
Bhayani emphasises that Unify solution portfolio addresses all the segments of market: SMB, mid-market and enterprises. Recently it launched OpenScape Enterprise Express – a mid-market product servicing till 2000 users with all UC features and functionalities (scale down version in terms of user capacity of its flagship Enterprise product Openscape Voice).
In near future Unify will launch “Circuit” – a real time collaboration platform as a service in India through service providers/hosted plan. “We will not sell these services directly; these services will be sold through the channel network,” he adds.
To help drive Unify’s channel transformation the company has appointed an authorized training partner in India for partners to get trained across the portfolio. Its Partner portal provides extensive information to the partners on its products, solution portfolio, digital market place, competition, etc.
Soon Unify will be providing deal locking mechanism to the partner to secure the opportunity and avoid any channel conflict. This will allow partners to stay focused on opportunity without worrying much on competition from Unify partners.
Launched earlier this year Unify Partner program is a global program for partners across the globe. More than 2,000 partners are now part of the program globally, including 30 in India. The Partner Program rewards partners for expertise and specialization, helping to drive greater revenue streams and increase customer satisfaction. It offers a straightforward framework providing profit predictability; attractive incentives for increased profits and return on investment; specialization level discounts to reward partners’ investment in Unify; improved differentiation to highlight partners’ expertise; and leverage their competitive advantage.
In addition to having a strong presence in verticals such as manufacturing, engineering, retail, transportation, and European MNC’s based out of in India, Unify plans to tap hospitality and healthcare industry in a big way.
“Hospitality will be a big focus for us. As per our analysis 75000+ hotel rooms will be built in India in next two years. We have right solutions for the vertical and we will leverage on our existing install base. We also have healthcare specific vertical solution. We have success in India with large hospital chain and we want to replicate it across large hospitals.”
For its partners maintenance support services programs have been launched which will offer implementation services for complex implementations and support partners to win the business in the market.
Claiming to own 26% of the market share in voice business in India Unify intends to grow by 25% on y-o-y basis.
With this announcement Unify has set for itself three goals: making the market aware of Unify’s transformation from direct to indirect business; educating the partner on benefits of partner program – The Return on Investment; and selling vertical solutions for healthcare industry –aligning with partners who specialise in hospital management systems.
