Channel Partners are the building blocks for *astTECS

Levis Wilson
Chief Operating Officer
*astTECS

Please elaborate on *astTECS journey in India and its achievements?

*astTECS  is continuously working towards innovations in technology and progressing to move to the next architecture of communications with Asterisk based telephony solutions that can support the growing demands of technology environment. *astTECS focuses on the philosophy of Quality, Reliability, Affordable pricing, Environment friendly and seamlessly integrating with the legacy infrastructure. We have been successful in offering Asterisk based Communication products & solutions, across enterprise levels that are feature rich, extremely versatile, flexible, customizable & scalable.

*astTECS solutions are tailored for enterprises across all categories and these can be easily scaled up. The verticals we address includes, IT & ITES, Large enterprises, BFSI, Hospitality, Railways, Airlines, Logistics, Retail and Manufacturing apart from small and mid size companies.

Our product range caters to the small and medium Call Centre Operations to Enterprise wide applications. The *astTECS PBX today is a step ahead than the traditional PBXs, since it offers a wireless infrastructure, it has GSM integration capabilities and offers features like: IVR, Call Centre Dialer, Predictive Dialer / ACD, Voice Logger, Multiparty conference and voice mail. Apart from the above, our solution comes at a very competitive pricing in comparison to traditional IP PBX vendors.

*astTECS is not only present in all major cities in India, but also has a massive reach with local representations & customers in 27 countries globally.

In today's market where service is a key driver to market adoption, what edge does astTECS service support has?

*astTECS' strengths lies in its ability to understand the market requirement, have a vision for the future technology and work towards bringing it to the customer at the right time and offer a broader value proposition.

Our technical support team consists of trained professionals on all types of Asterisk applications, with troubleshooting experience ranging from basic dial-plan construction to real-time configuration management. 

We believe in a quality and efficiency driven services and have put in place a 24/7 customer care support, striving to make the customers experience fruitful with us. We have different types of SLA's, in order to serve our clients with customized solution and better quality. Almost 15% of *astTECS yearly business is generated by Repeat/ Loyal customers, which talks about our service & support.

How do you see the competition in the market?

*astTECS products provide an impressive feature list at very competitive pricing, thereby promising the consumer more value for money.

*astTECS approach focuses on new ways of business combining IT Innovation and adoption and works with enterprises and new generation technology companies to build new Products or services and to implement prudent business and technology strategies in today's dynamic digital environment.

 With quick turnaround time and customer centric approach combined with aggressive pricing and excellent support, we are ready to take on the large players.  We strive to bring together technology and engineering to create solutions for the benefit of our customers and place a high degree of trust in partnership with the clients.

How do you plan to promote your products in the India Market?

We constantly work towards empowering our channels and see what can be done more to add value to their portfolio and also ensure customized and specific solutions made to suit the customer's infrastructure needs.

Our go-to market strategy includes a series of road shows and seminars in key cities and Tier II towns, Education and Training to Partners, Resellers and Systems Integrators ensuring visibility of path breaking Asterisk based solution.

What is your channel strategy in India?

*astTECS is focused on expanding its current business only with the support of channels. We do not follow the policy of opening offices in every city. We also depend on our channels to provide local support to our customers. We encourage our partners to earn via sales as well as providing support.

We would establish 3-5 partners in each city and focus on growing them.We are living in a world of convergence. We have a set of channels coming from the Voice world and trying to enter the IP World. Similarly, we have another set of partners, who were in the Networking domain so far, and they recognize the potential of Voice Solutions. A very few come from the mobile world. We would prefer partners, who have some basic background of communications and they could be from any of the above backgrounds.

We have specific training programs for sales as well as technical manpower, regularly conducted in our head quarter in Bangalore. These programs educate our partners to sell as well as support our products.

Have you signed-up any distributor for the enterprise market segment?

Each of our resellers located in various cities and towns has key competencies in certain product lines. We believe that resellers are the face of the product-line we offer, therefore our go-to-market strategy ensures that our partners earn more through higher sales and better incentive programmes.

We understand and respect our relationship with channel partners and offer necessary supportive measures. We feel a distributor is an extended marketing arm of a dealer and we try and ensure that more confidence is created within the channel community so that it brings credibility for us.