VARIndia has reached the ninth year of its operation. On this happy occasion, I would like to offer my sincere thanks to all our readers, friends and well-wishers for their unstinted support and good wishes. Over the period of time, VARIndia has grown from strength to strength, and the Indian IT market has become more exciting to work with.
The PC market has touched 6.3 million units this year and there has been manifold growth in networking, broadband and security market as well. For the enterprise security vendors, the Indian market has been really interesting. After China, India has attracted a lot of investment in security. Almost all the major players are present in this space. In the broadband space, next-generation applications like IPTV have been rolled out in India by MTNL, with Reliance to follow soon. From the connectivity perspective, careers have focussed more on metro Ethernet than fibre networks.
On the other hand, the channel market has been more attractive and refined. People in the channel have started adapting themselves to the dynamics of the changing market. They have started picking up value addition in the right spirit.
In the box-moving peripheral space also, a paradigm shift is taking place. People are giving preference to innovative and quality products over cheap and run-of-the-mill ones. Quality has been given more importance over pricing by the customers.
Despite all these exciting things, the worrying thing is that the basic infrastructure of the marketplaces is not being given due importance. These places still continue to be in awfully poor conditions and also vulnerable to fire and burglary. The market is maturing very fast keeping pace with those of the advanced countries, but we have not been able to create infrastructure to cope with the market growth. The second major concern which has remained unsolved so far is the shortage of technically educated salespersons who can offer right advice to the customers about the right solutions.
However, keeping the upswing in mind, this issue of VARIndia magazine (anniversary issue) has tried to provide a comprehensive idea of the Indian IT industry growth, highlighting the role of channel partners. In this issue, we have tried to bring out the channel policies of individual companies and published all top channel partners, including distributors, sub-distributors, dealers and SIs. I expect you will enjoy reading this issue.
Sanjay Mohapatra
Editor
