With a fresh focus on multiple business areas, Digisol Systems will be looking into channel expansion and new partner initiatives along with an increased focus on solutions business. In an exclusive interaction, K R Naik, Chairman, Digisol Systems, reveals more details

How has been the company’s growth in the past one year, especially after the addition of passive networking products?
As we are celebrating second successful year of our Structured Cabling business, and we are excited to see that over such a short period of time we have made tremendous in-roads in this highly competitive market. We are thankful to all our channel partners and SI customers who have believed in us and shown confidence in Digisol Structured Cabling solutions, and are committed to work closely with them to provide best product and performance along with a good post-sales infrastructure.

How are you aligning with the government’s digitisation drive, being the country’s first few ‘Make in India’ companies?
It is an ambitious campaign that the Government of India has embarked upon. We foresee that boost in manufacturing through Make in India is going to provide impetus to the complete economic chain of activities in the country. The IT hardware manufacturing industry will have a major role to play here. The nine pillars under the Digital India initiative are going to be huge demand generators. Demand arising out of Digital India initiative, coupled with the existing demand in the domestic market, is a huge opportunity for the domestic manufacturing industry.

For example, Digisol’s many fast moving products are made in the two fellow manufacturing subsidiaries of our parent company, Smartlink, viz Synegra and Telesmart. Because Digisol has not only made in India, but also quality products which are at par with other imported products. Digisol has got preference in many project orders in government and private sectors.

Digisol wants to be one of the key drivers of Digital India, with the range of products like routers, enterprise wireless solutions, switches, IP surveillance solutions and structured cabling solutions. The core strength of Digisol is ‘networking’ which is an integral part of making digitally connected India a reality. We have technology and infrastructure to do that – this makes Digisol different from other brands. We, as Smartlink, have been in the manufacturing sector for the last 25 years and have always contributed positively to the Indian economy by locally manufacturing networking products. If need arise, both subsidiary companies, Synegra and Telesmart, are open to further investments and scaling up of their respective manufacturing setup at Goa to cater to larger manufacturing volume.

How are you looking to tap the underlying opportunities in the enterprise and government sectors?
We have a full-fledged enterprise sales team which is mapping the enterprise businesses and projects, and aligning with major SIs and consultants. Besides, we are reaching out to our SI partners with various activities such as our own events and third party events. This year we are engaging with SIs and VARs in a stronger way, with having done a large number of events with the primary focus being on training SIs and VARs.

In the first phase, we have been largely working on visibility among the SI community, coupled with SI engagement programs. Going forward, we would continue to closely work with SI partners with a host of activities such as road shows, events and training programs.

Looking at the changes in the market dynamics,, are you also re-visiting your go-to-market strategy? How significant will be the role of channel partners?
We have always been a channel driven company and our endeavour is to always improvise on our channel policies. We have been continously recognised by the channel community as one of the most channel-friendly companies in India. We ensure healthy margins for the channels and also introduce new products with newer applications to increase the scope of growth for the channels. These new products and solutions enable the channel to value add and hence generate better margins from their customers.

We feel that profitability of partners plays an important role in motivating them to sell more. Our solutions have the width to meet the varying needs of the market segment we focus on. Whereas others are focusing on niche segments with limited products. For instance, if someone needs surveillance solution, there is a high probability that he needs POE switches – we have both to offer.

As a regular activity, this year also we will undertake events for our channel community, wherein we will be having one-on-one interaction with our channel partners. We will also aggressively promote in-shop branding. We regularly connect ourselves with our partners who have been selling our products through regular marketing updates and marketing brochures. We are already investing considerably in training and empowering of our channel partners.

What’s the technological innovation being brought in your line of products?
We have introduced a game-changing product which can prove to be highly efficient for SIs, like our patented tool-less keystones which are manufactured locally and focus on easy installation, as well as our 90-degree patch panels ranging from Cat 5e to Cat 6A for easy termination. We have launched new patented solder-free UTP keystones and patch panels. These products have high resilient rectangular cross section gold plated contacts for excellent repeatability and consistent performance. They also have specially designed IDC contacts which accept wider conductor diameters. These new keystones jacks and patch panels modules have patented PCBs to accommodate solder-free pin and IDC mountings, which make them practically immune to wide environmental variations such as temperatures and humidity.

Our main aim is to provide products which save time and efforts and thus make the cabling procedures simpler, with the best user experience.

The biggest competitive advantage of local manufacturing is that we can customise our products as per local requirements and conditions. We have the capability of not only manufacturing, but conducting R&D in-house as well.

What’s the roadmap set for the organisation?
We want to establish ourselves as the best in class ‘Made in India’ brand. We have all that is needed to do that, making Digisol different from other brands. We want to make sure that our partners know Digisol very well and they are confident to sell the products. Besides some of our key initiatives will include: expansion of channel partners, channel initiatives, products expansion, geographical expansion, and focus on solutions business.