Barco to strengthen and consolidate its channel business in 2019 

Ramya Chatterjee, Director – Sales (Visualization & Entertainment), Barco India, who works closely with the channel partner community plans to leverage their strength in bolstering the presence of Barco in the country. While the company was on an expansion mode in 2018, it will look to consolidating both its business and channel presence in 2019 -  

Barco as an organization has multiple Business Units (BU)as it caters to 3 different verticals – Entertainment, Enterprise and Healthcare. Different verticals have different product line catering to different needs of customers. Also, these different business verticals have got their distinctive go to market strategies. 

“We will look to further strengthening and consolidating our partner eco-system. 2018 was a year of expansion for most of our business line in the metros. By doing so we understood who our top performing partners are and so in 2019, we are going to expand our business beyond the metros to tier II and III cities. The major focus will be in the capital cities though. Education is also going to be a big focus area next year,” explains Ramya Chatterjee, Director – Sales (Visualization & Entertainment), Barco India.

Channel consolidation in 2019
In 2019, since consolidation and expansion will happen simultaneouslyfor Barco, it will run various partner loyalty & engagement programs. Barco has conceptualised an interesting channel program for tier II & III town partners and it will continue to do it next year too. 

Channel Connect Program is one such program that has been developed for the tier I & II partners globally. Here partners are provided back-end rebates, certification programs, preferential price support for large deals, joint customer calls, besides giving product demo assistance & POCs, time bound target driven incentive programs, customized EDM program, workshop, and also partner on-boarding programs sometimes. 

Barco has different nature of partners to cater to different verticals – Audio Visual partners, Office Automation partners, IT & Networking partners, Security partners, education driven partners and so on. All these partners are carrying a different kind of supplementary and complementary products in their portfolio and the programs will be designed in such a manner that they will help these partners to grow. 

Barco follows a two tier model of distribution. The national distributors export the products from Barco Belgium and then they give them to their next tier of partners who are called the VARs or stockist partners and they in turn sell it to the end customers. Sometimes big system integrators like Honeywell, Siemens, Larsen & Toubro also come into the picture when it involves products like control and command center solutions. Barco’s integration partner, Qube-UFO has got more than 400 resources across India who is working for Barco in the areas of sales, service & project deployment. The enterprise business (ClickShare) has 150+ partners and in the healthcare space Barco works with select 25-30 partners who with their expertise add value to its business. The company has at present 3 distributors for its enterprise line of products - Supertron, Online Instruments and Ceeco Technologies. 

“By 2020, we would like to double our active partners who associate with us for our ClickShare business,” says Ramya.

While selecting partners, Barco keeps in mind 3 parameters – 
•    The investment appetite the partner has
•    The partner’s capability to focus on technology-based products since Barco products need a different kind of engagement
•    The partner’s focus on those product lines which have got a long gestation period

“Since our products are niche and not mass products, our partners need to have a prolonged engagement with the end customer. Also, the RoI is also very high on these products,” he says. 

He further adds, “When we sign up with the partners, we try to build a win-win proposition. We invest in terms of both money and time with our partners and certify & train them so that they come to that level where they ooze confidence whenever they deal with our customers. In 2019, we would be investing heavily on partner training and enablement program.”

And so… 
Today more than 85% of Barco’s business comes through channel. “For instance, our cinema business is done through the channel, except for the PVR and Cinepolis which are done direct. Our ClickShare business is again through channel. In the control room business where we deal with Video Walls, control & command centre solutions, 90% business is done through SI partners. In the Healthcare and also in the virtual & Augmented reality space, 100% business is done through the channel.