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Chanelling change

MUKESH Gupta runs a fairly successful law firm in Mumbai. He employs around 12 people. Around a year ago, he bought PCs for his staff, networked the machines and attempted to quicken the pace of work and increase efficiency. The objectives were largely m et, but not without hassles.

In the first week, a couple of PCs just refused to boot. The problem was solved by the hardware vendor. Then the software in the accountant's PC wouldn't talk to that in the new recruit's PC. When an SOS was sent out, the hardware chap refused help since it was a software problem. Which meant, that the systems integrator was solely responsible for the networking, and so on...

In effect, for every hiccup, a different person's help had to be sought. Gupta and his team could not cope with the running around. Add to it the permanent worry that the machines, assembled by the neighbourhood ``computer ustad'', might not last long en ough.

Bharat Kumar

Raja Simhan T.E.

Would you cite a business opportunity here?

TEN small law firms buying 15 PCs each is clearly a better bet than one manufacturing firm placing a 50-PC order. Revenues, revenues and more revenues. That's what the small and medium enterprise segment offers to vendors of hardware, software and soluti ons. And what better option than to combine all three, add the lure of post-sales services and dangle the plump carrot for customers?

Hewlett-Packard India, considered one among the top MNC brands for high-end business vendors of computer hardware, is undergoing a change, from being a vendor of mere hardware to a single-point of contact vendor of an IT package.

It's not uncommon to hear every vendor say, ``we offer complete solutions.'' In that sense, HPI is another in the pack. But what's different here is that HPI is going through labour pangs of internal restructuring in order to be able to present a pleasan t face to the customer. And here's why: When the overall desktop market is growing at about 35 per cent annually, the desktop market for small businesses is growing at 58 per cent. Surely, there is an incentive to train your guns here.

Says Rajkumar Rishi, Country Sales Manager for Small and Medium Businesses in HPI, ``The whole business model has changed. HPI's enterprise sales division and the business retail sales divisions are now merged. We have taken on the onus of servicing ever y component of the package that the customer buys from us.''

Labour pangs

Making a decision to switch to hands-on channel partnering was easy for HPI. As early as last year, 65 per cent of its Rs 1,200-crore revenues came from the SMB segment. So, it made sense to address more of that market this year through its e-Smart initi ative. But, in implementing the change lies the challenge.

HPI's channel partners will have to change more than a shade from being mere box vendors to service vendors. For this, HPI is undertaking initiatives to help them make the change. Meanwhile, it is looking out for new resellers who will add value to the s ervice offering. According to Rishi, ``We will continue adding new partners to the fold while helping our old ones shift to the new paradigm.'' HPI aims to increase its channel partner strength to 700 from the current 500 before October this year.

Roping in unbranded assemblers

Part of that expansion will come from enticing local assemblers -- with no affiliations except inexpensive box offerings to customers -- to become partners. Rishi concedes that a major portion of the SME segment is serviced by the neighbourhood crony who the user can depend on for immediate service. According to him, ``If we can rope in such assemblers, we can take advantage of their reach while giving them our infrastructure.'' Infrastructure here means, says Rishi, ``escalation management, training on specific software and other such value addition. Through our channel network and seven warehouses across the country, we are able to offer spare parts replacement in 24 hours time, except in some places in the North-East.''

Packaging

e-Smart is an HP initiative across the Asia-Pacific region. As part of the package, a couple of Indian software products have been bundled. One is a Practice Management solution (PMS) targeted at self-employed professionals such as doctors and lawyers. T he PMS automates and streamlines processes to enable professionals to work efficiently.

Challenge before the manager

Rishi says the challenge here is to change the mindset of people involved -- particularly those within the organisation and channel partners. ``We have to deal with different organisations within HP itself. So, the outlook for all of us should be service -oriented. Further, resellers who have sold boxes earlier but want to make the change will find it difficult. We need to hand-hold them through the process. Finally, we want the customer to consider us a service organisation and not a product organisatio n.''

All this sure requires a whole lot of change. But what's change for Hewlett-Packard whose area of expertise -- when it started early last century -- was the business of measurements. In other words, the predecessors to your calculator came from HP.

Pic.: Rajkumar Rishi