The bar has become higher for us

The way the
DQ Channels is going about its mission to address the Solution Provider (SP)
community; it becomes a little scary at times. It puts even more responsibility
on our shoulders and as a result the bar is becoming higher and higher for us.
Already, we have become the publication of choice for the SPs. In fact, no other
publication comes even remotely close to us in terms of addressing the concerns
of this community.

Our latest initiative-India's first ever SP
Summit-takes us on a different league altogether. The two-day summit organized
last week at the picturous Madh Island, off Mumbai, was attended by more than
100 solution providers who came from 14 different cities of India. And all these
were the very best-the crème-de-la-cream-of the community who set aside
their hectic schedules to be with us. In fact, there were some people who
canceled their US trip, organized by one of the leading hardware major, so that
they could come for our event.

The reason why we organized an event of this
magnitude was to provide a neutral and interactive platform on which SPs could
share their experiences and learn from each other. In addition, the idea was to
highlight the achievements of those SPs who have successfully used best
practices and processes in order to achieve the most important competitive edge.

Some of India's top solution providers shared their
secrets as to how they reached the summit. For instance, Sudhir Sarma of Netsol,
which was recently acquired by IBM, talked about acquisitions in an interactive
dialogue with RK Malhotra of OA Compserve, who recently merged his networking
division-Silicon Comnet-with Integrix India. Then Devendra Taneja of PC
Solutions and

N Jagannath of Fourth Dimension held forth on the best HR practices, which SPs
should adopt in order to hire and retain people.

Similarly, other experts talked on how to manage funds better and how to go in
for overseas business associations. In addition, there were a number of vendor
presentations including one by Reliance Infocomm, which talked about its
broadband and data center offerings.

The response we got from the participants at the end
of the program was way beyond our imagination. Responses varied from good to
great to fantabulous. Not one participant went away dissatisfied. Everybody
found something or the other of interest to him.

All this means that the SP community will expect even
more from us now.

As I said earlier, the bar has now gone even higher. But we are not fazed.
Rather, we are now going to do much better than what we have done till now. And
I am sure the SP community will give us its unstinted support as they have been
giving us all the while. Meanwhile, a big thank you to all the participants.

Asim Raina asimr@cybermedia.co.in