Netmagic treading the channel ‘path’ for business growth 

Shantaram Shinde, India Channel Head – Netmagic (An NTT Communications Company) shares with VARINDIA the company’s channel perspective and how Netmagic has been on a winning streak after aligning its business model with that of the channel-

 
Is Netmagic a channel centric company completely?
We are a channel friendly company; initially there have been a lot of challenges when we were slowly inducting channel partners in our business model, but in the last 8 years we have evolved a lot. Now we handle not only the partners, but also the distributors Ingram Micro, Inflow Technologies, Avnet, who are also our partners. At present, the channel business contributes to over 20 percent of Netmagic India’s overall revenues and we have a roadmap to increase that business to 30-35 percent by the end of this fiscal year. 

What is Netmagic's channel strategy?
The current structure of the channel ecosystem that has been there from the last 7 to 8 years still remains the same. But the maturity level in our partners is clearly visible now. We have a good number of partners, around 130+ partners. Almost 75 to 80% partners are contributing to our business, who happens to be our active partners. 

We have also categorized our partners as per their strength, which will help us in aligning our channel programs, marketing activities, events, EDMs and all the other activities. For example, we have created a few categories like cloud service analysis partners, security service partners, application integration partners and so on. So for instance if we see a good scope for SAP HANA implementation, that’s where our application integration partners will help us. 

We have signed up a lot of partners, but the 130+ are our actively engaging partners. Going forward we are thinking of 25-30% increase in active partners. We also have categories of partners like premium partner, elite partner and referral partner. Further, the active partners would be a part of these categories of partners. 

How would you define the role of your partner?
The role of our channel can be defined in two ways. Firstly, our partner identifies the opportunity and then brings to us. We jointly work and close the business. Another way is that a partner enters into an opportunity and takes it to a certain level by making the value additions to it. They involve Netmagic for any kind of documentation work or at any stage of the delivery process, where it feels that Netmagic should step in. 

From Netmagic to partners, there are opportunities in services delivery and services operation stage. There are times when we require the partner’s help to complete and fulfill delivery commitments. This is how we define the opportunities flowing from Netmagic to partners. 

Samrita Baruah
samrita@varindia.com