Pawan Awasthi, Marketing Manager, Nvidia India, in an interview with Kapil Mudholkar, talks about the company's India plans, and channel perspective. Excerpts

Brief on Nvidia's India plans.

Our 'Optimized PC', and 'Graphics Plus' initiatives are designed to help channel partners drive their businesses. It's no longer just games that require advanced graphics capabilities; the performance of applications from Google Earth to Windows Vista to HD-DVD players is heavily dependent on the GPU.

Optimized PCs allow users to enjoy an exceptional visual computing experience at a very competitive price by focusing their investment on the GPU. The channel should focus on working with Nvidia to educate consumers about how Optimized PC can ensure the best PC for their money.

Our Graphics Plus campaign continues to be successful in educating end-users about the additional benefits from Nvidia. As well as PhysX, which brings games to life with incredible realism, more and more applications are emerging that use the GPU to accelerate everyday tasks. With our ION and Tegra brands, we're now bringing that power to very low-cost PCs and mobile Internet devices.

Will Nvidia be scouting for new partners for its products?

We appoint partners where there is an opportunity to develop the ecosystem for our technology and products. Our most recent announcements have focused on relationships which complement our Tesla and CUDA technology. Based on the feedback from our distributors, we found that channels in non-metros - especially smaller towns - did not have a platform to upgrade their technical knowledge about our products.

What is PartnerForce Programme? And how does it help Nvidia's channel community?

Partners have been eagerly signing up for the programme. We have more than 3,500 resellers registered with PartnerForce Programme. It is a platform for them to access all Nvidia information in one place, including training and marketing material as well as special schemes and offers available 'only' to PartnerForce members. We are striving to make this programme even more beneficial and relevant to the members.

Nvidia recently partnered with Adobe for GPU acceleration on flash player. How does Nvidia see this development helping partners in getting business?

Our partnership with Adobe is one more example of how the benefits of the GPU are coming to our most important applications. Adobe Flash Player will be accelerated across the range of Nvidia processors, including Nvidia Tegra, enabling users to enjoy uncompromised web browsing, full H.264 video playback, and rich, consistent Flash technology based content any time, any place, and on any platform. This will be great news for partners as new small form factor, low power and low cost devices with outstanding multimedia performance and GPU acceleration based on Nvidia technology come to the market. 

What advice would Nvidia like to give your partners in this slowdown period?

Economic conditions are tough and everyone is being more cautious about how they spend their money. However, India remains an emerging country with massive potential and great visual computing for entertainment and productivity is in demand. Difficult conditions inspire us to create innovative products which help our customers and drive sales.
 
For consumers, the Optimized PC concept guides them to invest in a PC equipped for the best visual computing experience at the best price. At the same time, ION and Tegra are bringing the excellent graphics performance end users expect from Nvidia to new levels of affordability and mobility. For professionals, CUDA and Tesla are bringing increased computing performance while enabling cost savings in hardware, energy and real estate over conventional server solutions.

Such savings are crucial for companies and institutions in these tough times. By focusing on these benefits in their communication with customers, we believe our channel partners can continue strengthening their business despite difficult times and be perfectly positioned when the market recovers.