Zebra Technologies expands India partner strategy to target MSMEs in manufacturing and retail

The expanded strategy allows India's partners to leverage Zebra’s Mid-Market program within the PartnerConnect program.

Zebra Technologies is scaling its India partner ecosystem to target micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs), with a specific focus on manufacturing and retail sectors.

The move, announced at the India Partner Summit in Goa, marks a strategic expansion towards India’s MSME segment, where digital adoption remains uneven, but opportunity is expanding.

The company is aligning this expansion with its global PartnerConnect programme, which completes 10 years this year and spans over 10,000 partners worldwide.

India is emerging as a key market within that structure. The focus appears to be on enabling partners to engage earlier in the digital journey of MSMEs and build long-term growth pipelines.

India has over 70 million MSMEs, contributing around 31 percent to GDP and nearly half of exports. However, the market remains fragmented. Most of these businesses operate at a micro scale and are still in the early stages of digital adoption.

This creates a distinct opportunity for partners. Instead of incremental upgrades, many MSMEs are in a position to move directly from manual operations to connected and automated workflows.

Zebra is extending its mid-market play within PartnerConnect to India, allowing partners to access tools, resources and engagement models tailored for manufacturing and retail customers.

This includes solutions for improving frontline visibility, asset tracking and workflow automation. The emphasis is on plug-and-play deployments that reduce complexity for smaller businesses while allowing scalability as they grow.

For partners, this changes the engagement model. Rather than large, one-time deployments, the MSME segment requires repeatable solutions, faster rollout cycles and deeper involvement in customer operations.

“India’s MSME sector is a powerful growth engine, yet many enterprises remain fragmented and lack access to scalable technology,” said Zebra Technologies’ country lead, India and subcontinent, Subramaniam Thiruppathi.

“To remain competitive and expand their footprint, businesses must adopt purpose-built, future-proof tech solutions that can grow alongside them. As we celebrate 10 years of our PartnerConnect program, we are doubling down on our partner-led approach in India.”

“By providing plug-and-play solutions that build a connected frontline, deliver real-time visibility, and drive intelligent automation, we are helping MSMEs evolve into truly connected, intelligent enterprises capable of scaling upwards efficiently whenever the need arises,” Thiruppathi added.

According to Zebra, together with its partners, the company is building a future-ready ecosystem in India, one that enables Zebra and its partners to better serve shared customers with solutions that digitise, automate and embed intelligence into frontline operations everywhere.

Why MSME digitisation is becoming a partner-led opportunity

The shift towards MSME-focused engagement reflects a broader change in India’s technology market. Large enterprises have already moved through the early phases of digitisation. Growth is now coming from smaller businesses that are beginning to invest in technology to improve efficiency and competitiveness.

For partners, this expands the addressable market but also changes how deals are built and delivered.

MSMEs operate with tighter budgets and shorter decision cycles. They require faster deployments and solutions that can scale as the business grows.

This is pushing the ecosystem towards standardised and repeatable offerings instead of highly customised implementations.

At the same time, the opportunity is moving beyond basic digitisation. As MSMEs adopt connected systems, the demand is shifting towards real-time visibility, workflow automation and data-driven operations.

This creates space for partners to move beyond product sales into solution integration and ongoing lifecycle management.

By extending its PartnerConnect model with mid-market programmes, Zebra is helping partners to engage deeper within customer operations rather than at the infrastructure layer.

The focus moves from devices to outcomes. In manufacturing and retail, that means digitising frontline workflows where inefficiencies are most visible. For partners, this opens recurring engagement models but also raises expectations around execution.

Serving MSMEs at scale requires balancing cost sensitivity with delivery speed and consistency. India’s MSME segment is accelerating its digital adoption, and the partner ecosystem is expected to play a central role in translating technology investments into operational outcomes.