By Claus Hetting, WiFi NOW CEO & Chairman
How do you grow your business faster on the highly competitive market for enterprise networking and Wi-Fi? NETGEAR’s new President and GM for Business Products Pramod Badjate says his first job is to make NETGEAR Business products and services ‘irresistibly lucrative’ for channel partners. We sat down with him and dug into the details of the challenges and opportunities ahead for NETGEAR Business.
The enterprise networking business unit of iconic Wi-Fi brand NETGEAR appointed a new President and GM last week and now NETGEAR Business is revamping its strategy to create B2B growth faster. New President and GM Pramod Badjate says one critical means to that end is helping channel partners to become more profitable. It’s all about simplicity and reliability, he says.
“Our VARS and resellers are really our primary customers, and when they know that NETGEAR Business products deliver the best quality at the lowest operational costs for them, it is natural for them to select our products for their clients. This is our key to growth. On our end our job is to make our products simple to install and continue to make sure that they are the most reliable,” Pramod Badjate says.
He says that enterprise networking is highly sensitive to operational costs that are simply too high and hence erode VAR profits. “If VARs have to perform multiple site visits to support their Wi-Fi installations or even get them to work, this erodes confidence in a vendor and drives down VAR margins. We want to make sure we deliver market-leading, easy-to-install, quality solutions from the get go,” he says.
Another important aspect of servicing channel partners is ease of onboarding as well as easy access to quality training and marketing materials. NETGEAR Business already offers free site survey services (read more here) that help deliver a quality connectivity result for the end client. All of this adds up to excellent channel partner service leading to increased VAR sales and efficient operations, Pramod Badjate says.
“Our brand is a household name and our products are well known for being excellent. Now our job is to focus on our channel partner customers in order to make them more successful. While we have a feature-rich product, I realise that the key to simplicity is to focus on the 10% of the features that 90% of the customers care most about and make them simpler and not let the rest of the 90% get in their way,” he says. NETGEAR Business also wants to transport the expertise and experiences gathered from its successful NETGEAR AV business into its Wi-Fi and enterprise IT offering, he says.
Pramod Badjate has an engineering and business background that harks back to the early days of enterprise Wi-Fi. Starting in 2003 he worked for Cisco (and Airespace) for more than ten years before moving on an 8-year stint at CommScope RUCKUS. More recently he has headed up Arista Network’s campus networking business.
NETGEAR Business launched itself into the Wi-Fi 7 era in March of this year with an award-winning, top-of-the-line AP and followed up just a few weeks ago with an affordable Wi-Fi 7 solution. NETGEAR Business is a long time official WiFi NOW partner. For more NETGEAR Business coverage also read here.
/Claus.
