cisco
ously for the reason that the market for the SMBs was not so high, there was too much competition from the Chinese and Taiwanese brands and the market slowdown was imminent. But with the passing out of the weak market condition, Cisco has again emerged invigorated. Of course there is a rise in he market sentiment for the quality products. The company has fine-tuned its strategy to address the entire breadth of market and Linksys as a brand has been positioned as the home networking market or the consumer market and for the small and SMB market the parent brand – Cisco has come forward. Patrick Mathias, Vice President Sales, Cisco, says, “An important effort by us to expand and capture growth opportunities in the Small Business space has been the integration of Linksys Connected Office Business Organization (COBO) into Cisco. This move has brought the Cisco and Linksys small business solutions together under a single distribution and channel partner strategy and given us greater market share.” Today when the industry pundits led by AMI Partners, says that Indian SMBs are on track as they had spent around US$ 1.04 billion on networking products and services in 2009, which is a rise of 11% over that of last year, Cisco is quite gung ho with its SMB dreams. It is a fact that SMBs use technology to model
themselves on larger enterprises. This is driven by the need for them to communicate and collaborate on a regular basis with an ever-growing ecosystem, including suppliers, partners, customers, and mobile employees. Since IT can enhance a company’s effectiveness – and therefore revenues – and also reduce expenses, SMBs find that the current environment is ideal to make internal adjustments that would enable the SMBs to be more competitive and efficient going forward. Cisco’s SMB market strategy involves helping customers create a sustainable competitive advantage, improve their operational efficiencies, increase their employees’ productivity, and ultimately boost their returns and profitability. Of course the first and foremost of the company is to convince the customers that Cisco solution for SMBs are competitive in nature – be it pricing or performance. Patrick maintains, “Cost is a motivating factor for most of the consumers, but we feel consumers have evolved from cost to performance. CIOs look at operating costs as well as the acquisition costs. We work with all these companies and give them customized solutions. A CIO is bound to measure on the availability and reliability of the network. He is more likely to look out for performance since he wouldn’t want to end up choosing something that defeats the performance objective just because
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it costs less. What Cisco is bringing is quality performance at the optimal total cost of ownership.” In its strategy of reaching out to the customers and explaining them about the new avatar of Cisco, the channel partners have played a major role. Cisco has a comprehensive strategy to engage these partners. Patrick adds, “We follow a multi-pronged strategic roadmap to tap the rapidly growing market for IT and networking of Small and Medium Businesses in India. The strategy includes focusing on new customised SMB products/solutions and financing schemes like the Easy Lease program, and the 0% finance offering for SMBs.” He adds, “To increase awareness of its products and programs among these businesses, Cisco will continue to invest heavily in partner enablement and innovative marketing initiatives such as the Network on Wheels and the Sales and Marketing Services Organisation.” Cisco’s unique channel programs help its partners define skill sets required to successfully deploy and operate Cisco solutions, optimize the technology performance and to reduce deployment risk. The company is committed to focusing on its long-term vision to build a collaborative channel. Over the past, they have adopted an approach where the company is prioritizing resources around the needs of partners to help
sme channels 33 may 2010