Brief

Iomega increasing channel partners

Tom Lok

Iomega’s Director, Sales & Marketing, Tom Lok, is optimistic about the Indian market and is looking to expand his company’s presence here by increasing its local channel partners.

Talking about his visit to the country Lok said, “I have plans to focus on our channel network expansion and business development. The Indian market is very important to us, and is one of the biggest markets that we are pitching to worldwide.”

Explaining the strategy behind Iomega’s channel expansion plans in India Lok said, “We are primarily looking for value-added resellers (VARs) to get associated. In the first phase of our expansion strategy, we are looking at all the major metro cities of India. VARs are basically the interface of our business, and we expect good growth in our business through them.” He informed that Iomega sees itself getting associated with 80 to 90 channel partners shortly.

Discussing the product line of the company, as well as the business segments being targeted by them Lok said, “We are aiming at both the consumer market as well as the business-to-business market. In India we are pretty much focussed on the B2B market. We have some flagship products which are well-accepted by the industry. To give an example, for the B2B market we have NAS (Network Attached Storage) that has storage of 160 GB; it is very flexible to install and can run on both Windows and Linux OS. However, NAS has a wide range of products by itself. Then we have the REV family of Removable Hard Drives. With this product line we target the B2C segment. We also have a range of offerings related to these products.”

About the company’s global sales Lok informed, “In terms of volumes we sell around 5,000 units of NAS every quarter worldwide. The global sales figure of REV drives is 4,000 every week.” When queried about Iomega’s performance in the Indian market he revealed, “The market is showing good interest in our range of products. In volumes terms we sell around 500 REV drives every quarter, and in terms of value our quarterly sales figure in the local market is $1 million.”

Looking ahead Lok said, “We are aiming to grow these figures by 50 percent, so in the next quarter we look forward to achieving 1.5 million dollars as our quarterly sales figure in India.”

The verticals Iomega is targeting in India are government, banking & finance, PSUs and large enterprises.

Iomega Corporation, headquartered in San Diego, USA, provides personal storage solutions. The company is a leading manufacturer of smart, portable storage solutions including drives and discs.

Iomega entered the Asia Pacific in 1995 and made its headquarters in Singapore. Iomega Asia Pacific has distribution channels in Australia, New Zealand, ASEAN, Japan, Korea, India, UAE and China.

— Faiz Askari