 "Harish Kohli")
Traditionally, Acer concentrated heavily on data creators bringing latest technology to them at affordable prices. This means we are ahead of the technology curve, Harish Kohli tells Sangeeta Tanwar
Mobility is a key concern for consumers today. How and where does mobility figure in Acer India's product strategy?
We have two categories of consumers - one, the data users and two, the data creators. Data creators may be users also. However, data users may not be data creators. Now the first category - that is the data users - has been taken over by the smartphones, courtesy a lot of technological changes witnessed by the industry. When one talks about the traditional part of information technology, the focus is on data users and data creators separately. But the gap between the two is wafer-thin. Then there is this big set of people who are data users but not creators. Traditionally, Acer concentrated heavily on data creators bringing latest technology to them at affordable prices.
What this means is that as a company we are ahead of the technology curve. Mobile has taught us that with changing data patterns, we want to carry our device at all the time and at all the places. Once you recognise this pattern, the focus shifts towards offering customers a product that meets their "mobility" requirements by being lightweight, thin and easy to use. All this in turn calls for product innovation - larger batteries that last longer and help in doing away with the need to carry a charger and an adapter. Acer has been designing products that are thin and light with an eye on meeting the user's mobility need. So we have also made products available in the two-in-one or convertible category. We have on offer the thinnest notebook ever.
In a world populated by multiple devices, a key consumer concern is data security. What are the points at which device users are prone to security breaches and what's your template for delivering a safe and secure user experience?
The issue of security needs to be looked at from the changing device usage pattern of the consumer. More and more people are using devices on the go and consuming more data. So there are two parts to security - first, from the perspective of device usage and the second is from the perspective of internet usage. To help avoid misuse of the device, Acer has been providing security features such as fingerprint lock, trusted platform module etc. for fairly long. Such features take care of product security. The next level of security comes in from the software perspective where data usage is involved. When we are selling products to a software services company, the product USP is locked at the buyer's level itself. All this helps in ensuring that data from a particular device is not compromised.
The more complex part is managing security concerns from the data usage perspective. While working with partners such as Google and Intel for product design etc. adequate security is provided at the time of launch which takes care of any hack at the consumer level.
As e-commerce takes root in India, how has Acer's go-to-market strategy evolved in the recent past?
We have segmented products for our e-commerce partners and for our brick and mortar stores. Different product portfolios for the two channels help in ensuring that there are no channel conflicts, keeping in mind the overhead structures and margin that each offers. Depending on the strength of each channel and the product on offer, we keep experimenting. For example, we brought in large chrome books and slide books and tried selling them through traditional channels but the sales never took off. We shifted the products to e-commerce and saw huge sales. Hence, there are specific product categories that do well online, and we make them available on e-commerce channel.
What's the next big disruption likely in the mobile devices industry?
We believe that different types of devices will co-exist - it is never going to be total replacement of one device by another. The real game changer for the industry is going to be artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR) on one side and internet of things (IoT) on the other. As regards to IoT, we already have five to six products in the market. Acer is working on technologies like AI and VR. Most of the work we are doing on VR is on devices available to developers so that as and when we launch we have enough software on offer for consumers. We are also big on gaming. For a country like ours it is just a question of pushing gaming to the forefront of devices.
