CommScope Launches Dual-Brand Strategy for Enterprise Industry

CommScope, pioneers in providing wired and wireless infrastructure and technology for communications network has launched a dual-brand strategy for the enterprise market in India and believes that it’s a one stop solution for the Indian customers who are looking for quality along with value for money. In an exclusive chat with Bhawna Satsangi, Alamuri Sitaramaiah, Director for Channel Sales in India and SAARC talks about the highly advanced solutions that will help the customers tackle mission critical, high bandwidth and emerging applications.

Please throw light on the company’s dual-brand strategy for the enterprise market globally and in India?

CommScope’s dual-brand strategy goes against the theory of ‘one-size fits all’. We, at CommScope, believe in listening to our customers and understanding their requirements. While our flagship SYSTIMAX solution was developed for customers who require more than the expected standards of performance, we realized that a large bulk of them expect only mandatory compliance in their network infrastructure. These are generally customers who work from leased office spaces or who do not rely on IT infrastructure for their daily business needs. In line with CommScope’s strategy to deliver the best suited solution for our customers’ needs, we have introduced our Uniprise solution in the Indian market.

The dual-brand strategy allows CommScope to not only continue serving niche customers who rely on excellent IT infrastructure but also enables us to penetrate into the bulk of the Indian market that is looking for good quality along with value for money.

What are the solutions that you will be providing to the end customers?

CommScope has established its leadership in the Indian market with the SYSTIMAX brand that we acquired 11 years ago. SYSTIMAX is our high-performance premium brand which assures the customers headroom over the expected standards in cabling systems. The adopters of SYSTIMAX are generally niche customers who have a vision of migrating to 40G or 100G speed over the next five years, thus future proofing their networks. These customers usually rely heavily on efficient IT infrastructure for their business and are willing to pay a premium price for it. In this scenario performance matters more while price can be negotiated.

As mentioned above, the other solution that we will now offer to our customers in the Indian market is Uniprise. The Uniprise brand has been under the CommScope umbrella since past 30 years and is popular in the US market. After identifying the needs of price conscious customers, we decided to bring Uniprise outside the US market for the first time and launched it in Bangalore on May 3^rd, 2013. We are now working on a new channel partner strategy to help maximize its reach to our end customers.

Both the Uniprise and SYSTIMAX solutions are supported by CommScope’s 20-year warranty plan and are effective for both large and small enterprises depending on their requirements.

You talk about the cost effectiveness of Uniprise Solution. Kindly elaborate on it?

When it comes to Uniprise Solutions, our focus is on design simplicity, application flexibility and uncompromising quality. Our customers expect these values and qualities from CommScope.

Designed to cover every connection and every component, our Uniprise portfolio of solutions offers superior performance at sensible price points putting the power of cutting-edge network technology into the hands of businesses all over the world. Uniprise Solution strategy recognizes the need for solutions that address a number of key areas, including performance, quality, reliability, robustness, lower costs and ease of use.

Uniprise Solutions come with cabling and apparatus in all kinds, namely Category 6A, Category 6 and Category 5e. It also supports OS2 single mode and OM3 and OM4 multimode fibre networking applications. Overall, CommScope’s Uniprise Solutions provides an added value to the customers within effective costs.

Backed by CommScope’s industry-leading innovation and manufacturing quality, Uniprise Solutions is committed to providing faster, better ways to help business networks connect proven by our 20-year warranty on all products.

Uniprise Solution’s strength through integration focuses on delivering industry standards-based architectures that support the transition to higher-bandwidth networking and reduces the cost of ownership.

What are the benefits that the customer will get through the solution?

Uniprise Solutions are ideal for enterprise customers that need superior value over world-class performance.

High-quality, easy-to-use Uniprise Solutions are built to support the customer’s structured cabling needs and with a 20-year warranty, to protect their IT investment well into the future. The right quality, the right level of technology, the right support and the right price these are the cornerstones of Uniprise solutions.

CommScope Enterprise Solutions develops network infrastructure solutions for any and every need.

What is CommScope’s strategy to promote the solution in India and globally?

To promote this solution, we have set up a parallel channel network for Uniprise which is based on the Regional Distributor concept. When I joined CommScope eight months ago, I realized that we were missing the depth and breadth of partner coverage to enable us to reach out to the top and mid-market effectively. Given that SYSTIMAX is performance driven solution, we require CommScope authorized and certified partners to effectively reach our addressable market and is positioned accordingly with the customers in Tier 1 market. However, now with the launch of our Uniprise Solution we are looking at increasing our geographic reach by recruiting partners in Tier II markets as well.

With the launch of Uniprise, we are engaging Regional Distributors or RDs to efficiently deliver and promote the solution to our customers in smaller cities and towns across India.

We are very pleased with the performance of our national distributors but we believe that Regional Distributors will help us further expand our reach and increase our depth in the Indian market.

We have already received a great response from our customers and partners in Bangalore, Mumbai, Pune and New Delhi during the launch of Uniprise. We have completed the launch in Chennai, Hyderabad, Ahmadabad, Baroda, Surat, Kolkata and the North-East market as well. Our plan is to launch the Uniprise solution across India’s Tier II cities and towns over the next few months.

What is the number of channel partners that you are working with for Uniprise?

We aim to cover 14 regions all over India in the current financial year. We have 13 regional distributors who have come on board and expecting more additions over the span of 2013. We are going aggressively to acquire more number of partners. We are conducting ongoing trainings and workshops for all the partners with the help regional distributors. We have a Partner PRO network for all the Business partners across the globe and have mandatory certifications which the partners need to undergo in order to be the part of Partner PRO network.

What are some of the major challenges that you foresee in the structured cabling market in India?

One of the key trends we see is the explosion of data that is going to take place in India. Indian enterprises need to realize that any compromise on quality will severely affect bandwidth availability. CommScope believes that the Indian customers are not building infrastructure for the future, barring a few. Most of them are only looking to fulfill their needs of the near future. In our opinion, this will severely restrict usage of the latest technologies and will restrict their competitiveness in the global market.

In China for example, customers ask us to build infrastructure that can support a 10G network today, 40G in 2-3 years and 100G in 5-10 years. However, in India, most of the customers we talk to are essentially building infrastructure which will suffice for now and really thinking from long term perfective. We would like to work as trusted advisors with our customers, understand their requirements and position our solutions accordingly.

Secondly, last two years have witnessed a lower two digit growth in the structured cabling market. However, the year 2013 looks promising for the industry and slowly picking up the momentum. Structured cabling solutions are commoditized and not really looked in the way it needs to be.