Ilyas Mohamed, COO at AmiViz talks about how the company was the early to realize the need for market disruption in the IT distribution space and since the launch of the marketplace, the platform today offers channel partners and vendors ease of doing business apart from other benefits.
B2B marketplace has evolved over the years, how would you evaluate your journey so far and where do you stand currently in terms of your product portfolio, channel base and geographical spread?
It is true that B2B marketplace has evolved over the years and is still evolving to be more robust while the mass adoption is still a journey. We are experiencing different stages of adoption journey as we speak, we have the platform ready and loaded with many benefits to our channel partners, the usage and adoption by partners and vendors is a gradual ramp-up. We are introducing some more benefits to increase the adoption behaviour. In terms of our product portfolio, we believe we have a good array of Cybersecurity offerings and there is always going to be an opportunity for new technologies to join the bandwagon and we at AmiViz continue to bring them onboard.
With a dedicated channel team in every territory, our channel bases is growing in number and market reach and is getting fine-tuned with platform adoption and usual housekeeping and hygiene of a healthy partnership. The geographical spread is with expansion and focus on other North African countries and strengthening further with organic and inorganic growth of partner mindshare to either scale the revenue with existing vendor partnerships or add new partners to the ecosystem.
In your view, where is the regional distribution market heading for and how do you intend to grow AmiViz in the region?
In our experience we are seeing that the traditional distribution approach is losing momentum when there is nothing new to offer to its partners and vendors, however the ones that have either created that disruption or introduced a new approach of doing business are seeing better stickiness of partners and revenue growth.
Even at AmiViz we believe we were early to realize the need for market disruption and the model we have built is simply a hybrid approach, we have incorporated everything that was working well and fool proof in addition to adding new tools that can help us, our partners and vendors leverage to deliver better business response and engagement benefits to all parties involved to deliver the best customer experience.
What value does AmiVizbring to its channel partners and how can they gain partnering with AmiViz as compared to tradional distributors?
In our belief the traditional distribution model lacks few must-to-have business benefits like Demo environment, flexibility to process orders from anywhere and anytime, collaboration tools etc., At AmiViz we have been first to offer some of these benefits with our state-of-art Customer Experience Center for virtual demos of multiple technologies that AmiViz represents and also demonstrate an integration and co-working of multiple different solutions. We help partners transact on our portal or place orders to our order processing team anytime and from anywhere by simply using our AmiViz Mobile App or Portal.
We also facilitate our partners to pay online using credit card to complete their transactions, this is well utilized by partners to manage the high volume/low value transactions with less operational burden.
The collaboration piece helps partners retrieve current and historical information for reference and reuse purpose, saving them time to search and rebuild their proposals.
Why should any vendor partner with you and what edge do you provide them?
Vendors see a great amount of value with AmiViz, apart from the market reach we provide with our in-country presence in almost all countries across Middle East plus we work with 700+ Tier-1 Systems Integrators across. The major edge that we have today is about the business visibility and transparency in the way we engage with our vendors and conduct business for their products. The vendor App on AmiViz platform that is downloadable from Android or IOS, gives that power to the vendors to see the business updates timely and on demand. This degree of visibility of pipeline, forecasting accuracy, visibility of renewals, marketing and Customer Experience center usability are some benefits that stands out from others and makes our vendors experience with AmiViz unique and trustable.
Which new technologies that AmiVizis keen to bring to the region?
At AmiViz we constantly search for new technologies and vendor acquisition that can bring value to our partners and customers, we look at our solutioning segments regularly to determine the demand and accordingly will fill the gap with the needed partnerships from time to time. AmiViz has been at the forefront always to introduce promising and successful technologies in the region that not only puts us on early movers advantage but also helps us to respond to our customer’s need upon gathering regular inputs from them.
How effective is your channel program and what are its key features that attract your partners?
The channel program is now more robust and attractive to partners with local channel managers coming on board to take ownership and drive the channel behaviour that helps business growth and to maintain better channel hygiene.
AmiViz has rolled-out an Elite Channel Program that offers great benefits to its Tier-1 partners delivering QonQ and YonY revenues. The benefits include recognition and rewarding partners towards revenue achievement and new technology promotion.
Additionally there is a new points based incentive program for channel that helps them accrue points towards revenue generation and also towards platform usage, viz., if they log into our Amiviz partner portal via the Mobile App or a Portal and use one or many benefits, they accrue points that can be redeemed instantly.
Credit insurance, bank finance, project financing, delayed payments are some of challenges that the industry is groping, how do you tackle these issues and lend support to your partners?
We do understand that some of the above issues creates hindrance to businesses and are most common challenges for many businesses.
At AmiViz, we have our own strong financing pool, support of shareholders on top of it that provide us extra room to handle the above said challenges, as on date we are zero debt company which means we don’t have any bank finance facility however we are able to meet all our financing requirement internally.
Last but not least, what can partners expect from AmiViz going forward?
In simple words, we are demonstrating our value by been trusted partner that brings transparency of business data, offering investment in business tools like Customer Experience Center that is at disposal of our channel partners to use it as if it belongs to them with white-labelling opportunity and availability of competent technicians and subject matter experts that can deliver demos and answer all technical queries. Help achieve the golden triangle of vendor, partner and customer ecosystem for better customer experience, additionally helping our partners with the best credit support in the market and always giving that sense of ‘Ease of doing business’ with AmiViz.
