Beetel gets enterprise, Huawei gets bigger network

Beetel India recently became one of Huawei’s more significant channel partners.  While the advantage for Beetel is in terms of an entry into Huawei’s enterprise products sales, the parent company also benefits in terms of a healthy brand partnership with Beetel.  Huawei focuses on quality more than quantity, which is reflected in the 100% growth that their Indian sales saw between 2013 and 2014.  The focus is on partner endorsements and training for a healthy growth, and it seems to be a win – win situation for both Beetel and Huawei.

Suresh Gupta, Director, Beetel   India sees a huge opportunity for both brands in the partnership. According to Suresh, the impact of this partnership is extremely positive, both on Huawei and on Beetel.  For us, we get to associate with the brand Huawei.  We already were associated with them but it was in the consumer products side.  Now we have inroads into the B2B, enterprise space.

Secondly, in our entire enterprise portfolio, we were missing this line.  We did not have IP category like routers and switches. Third, it gives us an opportunity to play in a very big market.  From our perspective, joining Huawei is all win win for Beetel. We are already in the enterprise market, we market Avaya and Polycom products, and this was the only product line we were missing.  The opportunity that existed in the IP market, router and switches we were not able to leverage, since we did not have this opportunity earlier.

The association signoff with Huawei now is the IP, which primarily covers router and switches.  This is a big part of the market.  Today Juniper and Cisco are dominating the market.  Huawei is, of course a new entrant.

It is a joint effort, a larger effort has to come from Huawei to   increase awareness of the product, there is no doubt about the amount of effort involved.  Both the brands need to bring about greater awareness, bringing the high quality product to the market, and of course, high price differential.

In India, people know  Huawei by name, recognised as more than 40 million dollar company worldwide, it’s also known in the market as  a consumer products company selling phones and data cards,  and is closely associate with telecom companies in India.  One of them is Airtel, whose 4G network Huawei manages.  The only way they can make it an even better known name is by bringing in many communications in the market.  Since Huawei has these kinds of products and great service, Beetel need to create some kind of differentiators as well.

Huawei offers great training to the partner, and of course, after-sale service.  These could be the biggest differentiators.  “Giving out a clear communication to the market that we have huge service support gives the confidence to partners and customers.  These products go into the core enterprise of any company; we all survive on these products.  So the best way for this is to give a good quality product and back it up further,   communicating about Huawei‘s huge service background,” shares Suresh.

“What we will need is a much higher awareness, which we can drive using roadshows and    events for enterprise recognition, where people can come and have a look at the products.  We need to remember that Cisco and Juniper have been in the market for much longer, so we need to now take the right steps to be in the limelight.  It will take some time, but steps have already been taken, progress needs to be made.  The market and the channel partners are now aware, so it is a matter of time before we can compete on the same level,” he added further.

Commenting on the expansion plans Beetel see under this collaboration Suresh shares, Beetel works in two categories, consumer and enterprise.  Since this an enterprise product, we see expansion happening in that category.  In this category, it’s a billion dollar market, mostly dominated by Cisco and Juniper and some amount of HP products.  This collaboration gives us an opportunity to grow our business enterprise, in fact, it may take more time, but at the end of the day, it gives us an opportunity to become a significant player in enterprise space.  Of course, we market Polycom and Avaya; they are not in the same range of products.  Polycom is known for its video, and Avaya is known for its audio.  So no, there is no common ground there.

Now with this new product category available to us, we can offer a complete basket.  We already have video and audio products, now we can offer the enterprise products as well.  Most of our customers are SIs, now they can have a one-stop shop in us, all the products they need will be available under our brand.

Advantage that  Beetel bring to Huawei with this partnership

The advantage Beetel bring to the table is the Beetel brand, which is also established in Indian market.  Its relationship with Bharti Airtel which is the anchor customer for Huawei as well. Now with Beetel a part of the partnership network, their products will sell to other telecom companies as well.

“Our distribution network will offer a much greater network to Huawei, 500 distributers and channel partners in India, about 10,000 retail outlets currently, with 26 warehouses across the country.  In addition, we have bonded warehouses in Goa where we can also pass the benefit of excise duty to our partners.  We also have a warehouse in Singapore.  In addition, we have well trained sales teams, with extremely skilled pre-sales resources and sales service teams,” asserts Suresh.

The package that Beetel brings to this partnership is a huge set of value added benefits.

 Sharing growth and expansion plans in the next twelve months Suresh informs, “Year 1 has been a time of big investments form both Huawei and Beetel, in resources. Now we are starting to see the traction in the market.  We see it growing at about 10-15%, and am sure we will not be long to reach the number 3 position, just behind Cisco and Juniper. In any case, I see us in the top three brands in this space in India very soon.”

“Our long-standing relationship with Huawei will be the basis of this growth representing Airtel 3G and 4G, which is supplied by Huawei.  Therefore, I can say we are already selling their consumer products in the Indian market. It is now time to front end and sell their enterprise products as well,” he sums up.