Cisco’s priority is its Partners !!!

Andrew Sage 
Vice President, Worldwide Partner Led,
Cisco Systems, Inc.

The Networking giant Cisco, has once again taken a step ahead in showing its commitment towards its Partners by making the Partners the centre of attraction in its second edition of Cisco Asia Pacific, Japan and Greater China (APJC) Partner Led Network 2012 event in Bangkok, Thailand. From all over the region around 300 Partners participated in the event.

Aiming to help its partners better serve customers who are looking to increase productivity by enabling mobile employees to work and collaborate with a high degree of security, Cisco has announced its new portfolio of small and midsize business solutions. Also included in this portfolio are Cisco Jabber(R) and Cisco WebEx(R) solutions, which can further boost Cisco's highly secure and flexible collaboration experience for small and midsize customers. Cisco's partner-led go-to-market model empowers its channel partners to lead customer engagement in the small business and midmarket segments with new offerings. 

Cisco believes that mobility and cloud will see the shift in the market to services and this will drive demand for services. Partners can derive even more revenue from services as the cloud and mobility demand new approaches. Partner should focus more on services and prepare for Cloud computing as it represents an $8 billion market opportunity. It involves a focus on cloud services including SaaS, TaaS and IaaS. 

The company predicts that the business models that worked today may not survive in the next three to five years. Taking on a services-led model is also "win-win" for both partners and Cisco as it offers higher margin. Upto 40 percent of the vendor's partner revenue came from services but contributed up to 60 percent of their overall profit.

Lately, the company has launched the new streamlined program, the Cisco Services Partner Program (CSPP). Around 7,100 partners have already enrolled in the new program.Rebates or discounts are typically given to channel partners and distributors to help them make margins on sales. The CSPP will also open up their access to Cisco's smart services. 

In order to reach the SMB market, Cisco has launched a new portfolio of products which includes an all-in-one network security product, the ISA500 Series Integrated Appliances, and a router--RV215W Wireless-N VPN Router--to enable affordable wireless connectivity through 3G and 4G networks.

Cisco's focus on building a network of partners and channels was very positive. 

Cisco has recently announced Partner Plus in India. A new global channel program targeting mid-sized customers, partners who are participants in the program receives increased preference, investment and support in the form of business accelerators. VARINDIA talked to Andrew Sage, to know the latest from Cisco. Excerpts from the interview.  

Trace the journey of Cisco’s Borderless Network architecture in India especially in the context of the small and medium sized customers. 

It’s the majority of what we do in India.  We have been focused on small and mid-sized companies in India and introduced products that meet their specific demands.  Adoption of technology among small and mid-sized companies is directly dependent on bringing down the total cost of ownership and increasing ease of use.  Our products are specifically designed to address these issues and offer attractive value proposition to small companies.  We recently strengthened our portfolio for small business, the ISA 500 (Integrated Security Appliance) is part of that broad borderless networks portfolio and we are already seeing a lot of traction for this in Indian market.  So, mainly the demand is from India and it’s pretty exciting. 

Can you brief us on the partner strategy for targeting the growth of small and mid- size customers?

We have increased the virtual engineer resources that support the pre-sale service that we offer to our partners in India. In addition to this, we have added virtual sales people growing our sales force pretty significantly. There is a real focus on Partner Plus which was launched just few months ago in India and we have roped in about 65 partners in this program. They all are reportedly targets to the mid-market.  We are also aggressively looking at non-metro markets.

What about you are targeting engaging partners through Digital Marketing?

There are two areas where we are getting our leads from our developing new partners. One is the pretty traditional marketing activity; calling on the phone and customer bends; those two things that have been around since the beginning of time and they still work. So we spend some of our time on that. With more and more we are getting better results at our digital strategies so prefer investment in cisco.com website. We are doing analytics on who is showing up at cisco.com; how many times have they come back; what have they looked at. We are using that to turn around and target messages to them. So it’s all happening in the background until a lead pops up and then we take the lead and share that with the partner. We are also investing in bordering homes. We find places where SMEs typically go for business buy or to do banking transactions or whatever. Usually they are non typical they are not technology sites technology publications or non typical sites like bank sites and things like that. There we put the offers and collect leads from that. So we have a ‘Bordering home’ strategy and then obviously the standard ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ work that we are doing. On top of that I think maybe we could share or find out little more about is how we are leveraging the facebook and typical social communities and very active business communities on facebook. We have a program called ‘Advantage Now’ which is like a very successful program. It’s a bi-annual program, conducted across cities in India. We have reached out to over 1500 p artners in the last two editions. So that’s kind of aiming and enabling them to target small and medium businesses.

What is the competitive edge that you have? 

Two flag points –the Business Edition 3000 and 6000 (BE 3000 and BE 6000). The BE 3000 is a very specifically developed platform. It has got good basic functionality, voice mail, basic telephony features but it’s designed to be very easy to install and very inexpensive for a customer to operate. We have built it specifically for the emerging countries. So we are selling that in India first and it’s beginning to take off. And it is developed in India. BE 3000 is the value priced member of the family. The BE 6000 is actually a very exciting product. BE 6000 is more targeted to the midsized customers and the power of BE 6000 is that it’s in a one server with multiple virtual machines running almost every communications application you could think of. So it’s got telephony, video, time and presence with included Jabber, basic call centre functionality. So if you have a business with few hundred people this is very powerful and uniquely featured solution and it runs on Cisco UCS server and with multiple VMs.

What is the growth opportunity in the emerging sectors like the managed video conferencing solutions?

Overall I think that growth opportunities are in collaboration video based, so managed video solutions. We have a service in the market – WebEx which has an HD video offering and its one of the fastest growing reasons why people are using WebEx, so it has gone from just web conferencing to web and video because that’s how people want to communicate and I think the growth opportunities are in all the architectures what’s driving growth in the borderless networks is this unified access idea, what’s driving growth in data centre centralisation is data centre simplification and driving cost out of it. The business is growing 100% a year for us. So, there is a lot of good opportunities for us.

What opportunity do you have in your data centre?

The nice thing about data centre is that there is a big portion of the compute market, very cost sensitive and likely not a place where our partners or Cisco is going to be very successful but in the plate server market where the idea of unified fabric, bringing together the computer, the network and the storage into one sort of system is really taking us forward right now. And that’s not just a large enterprise opportunity, we are doing fairly well in the large enterprise and it’s a great opportunity to partner to work as we work with EMC. We work with Microsoft high profile side even Citrix and so that’s what driving the market is cloud so building clouds for cloud providers; its private clouds or it’s a enterprise that’s trying to simplify the number of data centres it has and make them easier to manage and less expensive to manage. So private cloud or public cloud are driving the data centre business. It’s very exciting.

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K. Subrahmanya
Director, Central Data Systems Pvt. Ltd.

It’s been 10 years we have been associated with Cisco. Right from the beginning of 2003 we have been with Cisco. We moved from Premier Partner to a Silver Partner last year and are tier-I partner now. Cisco is a true channel driven company in true means. So, whatever they do whether its products or services, it is through partners and care about partner profitability. That’s something excites us. If you know the trick of the trade of doing business with Cisco certainly we end up doing profitability as compared to any other vendor compared to in the industry. There is a lot of road map which is given from Cisco to partners. So from the partners prospective, if we have to exist in the market we have to really be with the right vendor. From my perspective, Cisco is the right vendor to partner. Because there are lot of engagement from management to the partner, giving the road map and if you look at their investment in India, I think they are here to stay in India. So, I think that make us more compelling to partner with Cisco. I think, all in all, if you really drive the business as per plan, then vendors can make good money with Cisco. Cisco has lot of good technology and solutions to offer to customers. Looking at the partner’s future, I think Cisco is a good company to work with. Our strength in Cisco is basically getting more and more customer on board and Cisco has done a great job in enterprise. 

Rajiv Kumar
Managing Director & CEO, Proactive Data Systems Pvt. Ltd.

We have been associated with Cisco since 12-13 years. We are a Silver partner for the last 3-4 years. There are some benefits which are programmatic according to the program, which means that if you are a silver partner you are eligible for CS, CSS, CSPP etc. The other thing is that the brand image that you carry, that means you are amongst the top if you are certified. Above the silver and gold certification there is an audit process. We have to undergo an audit process which is very good, stringent and tough. The audit makes you review a lot of your systems at least once a year may be at your delivery system for services, for projects, your HR system etc. If you take the audit seriously and implement those then there is a huge shift in your organisation.  The other programs have also been very good like the VIP which is a value incentive program. VIP is a very cash oriented program so which means that if you meet certain target or certain milestones, you actually get cash in your bank, so that’s how they work. These are very good programs to invest into people, trainings, your own growth, so I would say a lot of growth has been fuelled which we have done in the last few years, it has happened from some of the rebate programs.