Vodafone contest to focus on medium enterprises this season

Vodafone Business Services (VBS), the enterprise arm of Vodafone India, is targeting medium-sized enterprises - those with a turnover of between Rs 100 crore and Rs 500 crore - for Vodafone Drive into the Big League (DiTBL) Season 3.

DiTBL Season 3 will provide the winner of the competition with an opportunity to place its logo on the Vodafone McLaren Mercedes race cars that will race at the Indian Grand Prix 2013, to be held in Delhi from October 25-27. The company this time is focused on only medium-sized enterprises.

Talking to Business Standard about the initiative, Asit Shekhar, Business Head - Punjab, Himachal Pradesh and J&K, Vodafone India Ltd, said that in the first two seasons small-scale companies remained in the forefront.

"The nature of small enterprises' business is such that due to a very small base they achieve a very high growth rate year-on-year, so 90 per cent of the qualifiers were from this segment. In order to give equal opportunity to medium enterprises, the competition is open only to medium-scale businesses this year."

He added that unlike previous years, where the selection was done in eight to 10 towns across India for short-listing SMEs, the first round of screening will be done online this year.

Ten shortlisted participants will be able to present their case to a panel of experts and will compete for the top spot. This will be telecast as a six-part television reality series on a business channel during September-October 2013. Three finalists will be selected to be the part of grand finale that will be held in Delhi closer to the Indian Grand Prix 2013.

The final winner will be selected by a jury who will evaluate the shortlisted participants, providing them with real situations that each of their businesses could face and assessing how they work around those situations.

Medium-sized enterprises, according to Shekhar, take advantages of wire and data solutions, machine-to-machine solutions, conference facilities and enterprise mobile business solutions to make the optimum use of technology. This helps them to achieve scale and cut costs, he added.