Channel Events

"Our Partners are Strategic Collaborators in the Business" - Cisco Systems

What kind of trends do you see in the Indian market?

In the recent past, Cisco has seen a sustained growth and transformation taking place across all the key sectors of the Indian economy - manufacturing, infrastructure, banking, government and defence, IT & ITeS, telecom, outsourcing/ offshoring, retail, SMB, etc. Over the coming years, Cisco expects to see increased adoption of unified communications, datacenter and security solutions across all these segments in India.

The booming network and communications market is propelling the growth of the router and switching market in India. Indian banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) and telecom service providers will remain the key adopters in the market. Government is also emerging as a big spender due to various e-governance and SWAN initiatives. The SMB market having crossed the first wave of networking will witness considerable adoption of storage solutions. Security solutions are also likely to create a big buzz and offers a huge market opportunity in the market today. Additionally, spending from the SMB segment on integrated security appliances will also grow steadily.

What is the overall market size? How are you catering?

As per AMI Partners, SMBs in India are gradually recovering from the global economic slowdown and are progressing, hiring new employees, opening new sites and marginally increasing spending on IT. The overall spending on IT by India SMBs totalled US$9.9 billion and is expected to rise by over 8% in 2010. The Indian SMBs will gradually gear up for the upturn in the economy and utilize information technology to get an edge over competition.

Cisco's prime technology focus areas for the future continue to be Video, Collaboration, Data Center and Virtualization. Cisco will continue to extend its existing product leadership into systems, solutions, architectures and platforms.

In terms of product offerings, Cisco is present across different categories like Routers, Switches, Video & Conferencing, Wireless and Network Storage.

What is the Partners' role in the deployment of products and services?

Our partners are strategic collaborators in the business. They play an important role in helping us deliver solutions that are optimized for rapid implementation, superior performance and maximum RoI. We deliver almost 100% of our products through partners. In addition, certain services such as Cisco Smart Care Services is sold and delivered exclusively through partners. Partners will also play an increasingly central role in delivering Cisco consulting services, especially to smaller and mid-sized customers.

Specifically, partnerships help offer broader geographic coverage and a full suite of solutions that meet our customers' needs while allowing each partner to focus on driving our core business.

Partners are increasingly becoming a critical vehicle for helping to launch new products and services into broad new markets and for capturing customers with whom Cisco has little experience or direct relationships. Some highlights:

We are expanding our channel presence well beyond traditional networking partners to establish a presence in channels with deep experience and established customer bases in four particularly critical target markets (borderless networking, data center virtualization, collaboration and video)
Recruiting and developing new engagement models with services (such as systems integrators), technology partners (such as ISVs) and influence (such as management consulting) partners, in addition to reseller partners.

What kind of benefits do your Partners enjoy?

These vary depending on the product category, partner certification level and the nature of engagement with Cisco and the customer. The Cisco Channel Partner Incentive Program Suite provides partners a collection of flexible, easy-to-use programs that reward them with financial incentives for identifying and developing new opportunities, investing in technology or business solution practice development, and driving product migration. As partners increase their investment in Cisco by achieving certifications and specializations, Cisco rewards partners by providing enhanced financial incentives on a global basis.

Which are the most popular products which are selling more in the market?

Cisco's prime technology focus areas for the future are Video, Collaboration and Virtualization. We believe that there will be a “video” explosion in homes and businesses as it is increasingly becoming the most important means by which we communicate and share information.

In the future, we see collaboration moving from intra-company to inter-company, creating a safe and secure channel for companies that work together to communicate effectively with each other. Cisco's recently introduced Borderless Networks architecture which will help deliver services and applications to anyone, anywhere, on any device, at anytime - seamlessly, reliably, and securely - it is also our focus area.

Cisco’s virtualization vision is to aggregate pools of storage, compute, network, operating systems and applications, into unified, shared resource pools linked with an intelligent unified fabric. This is embodied by the Cisco Unified Computing System, a next-generation datacenter platform. We also see potential in solutions that use the IP network as a platform to manage physical security applications like video surveillance, physical access control, communications, etc.

What are the opportunities for channel partner?

As collaboration, virtualization, video and cloud-based services transform the information technology industry, Cisco is helping its channel partners accelerate their growth and evolve. During its Global Partners Conference, Cisco announced a series of initiatives designed to help the company's global community of channel partners evolve their business models. The initiatives include:

1) A Partner Incentive Program to encourage early engagement with Cisco

2) A collaborative partner-to-partner sales model to help partners respond to the globalization of business

3) Evolution of Cisco specializations from individual technologies to architectures. They involve driving early Engagement and promoting Investments in Professional Services

Customer satisfaction through Cisco Channel Partners is a quantitative measure of both pre-sales and post-sales support that an end-customer experiences while purchasing Cisco products or services from a partner. Cisco uses an independent company, Walker Information, to survey the end-customer and obtain an objective customer satisfaction score. Cisco management uses this score as an evaluation tool. Additionally, Cisco offers an extensive support system for customers with 17 logistics centers (premium depots). Besides that, Cisco is the only vendor to have a support program called ARNBD (advance replacement next business day) for its resellers.

What is the evolution path in the future in terms of market segmentation of various product ranges?

At Cisco, we believe that organizations will move from a technology-centric approach to a more holistic architecture-based approach. Cisco will evolve its channel partner specializations from technologies to architectures to help channel partners develop integrated practices around borderless networks, collaboration, and data center virtualization. Cisco is also helping to train its partners to develop architectural sales capabilities in partnership with its global community of Cisco Learning Partners. These partners are helping to create new individual curricula for "Business Architect" and "Technical Architect" designations. This new training will help partners sell their consultative services and architectural solutions.

Cisco has also begun to accelerate the partner evolution towards architectures a year ago, when it announced its flagship profitability program, Value Incentive Program would shift from rewarding partners' investments in technologies to selling architectural solutions.

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We have been Cisco Partners for over 12 years. We are Premier Certified Partner for them.

Frontier and Cisco

We deal with the Foundation Technology Solutions (Switching & Routing), Advanced Technology Solutions (Security, Unified Communications, Wireless, Application Networking Services and Data Center) and Network Management Solutions.

We get good margins for all our deals from Cisco. The percentage varies from deal to deal. We enjoy healthy margins on Cisco OIP deals and on SMARTnet and SMART Foundation services for multiple year contracts. We also make excellent margins on Cisco Advance Technology Solutions. We get PDF rebates every quarter for SMB Products and Solutions. We have Avant-garde promotion programme. This year, we qualified for the FIFA Kick-Off Incentive programme. From this quarter onwards FY2011 we are eligible for VIP rebates also.

To sum it up, Cisco is the best Partner Oriented Principal. They ensure Partner Profitability. They give very good Partner Incentive Programmes like PDF rebates, OIP, VIP, Avant-garde and they invite partners for Cisco India Partner Summit every year. The Post Sales Support Services offered by Cisco are unmatchable and outsmart their competitors. Cisco is the best in terms of RMA, 24x7 hours Support and 4 Hours Replacement in the metro cities.

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Some Cisco Initiatives for Their Partners:

Cisco's Teaming Incentive Program (TIP) encourages early sales engagement and rewards them for their investment in consulting and professional services capabilities.
Historically, Cisco has rewarded partners who uncovered new opportunities through its Opportunity Incentive Program (OIP).
Cisco will determine which partner is entitled to benefit under the TIP for each customer deal based on a set of objective criteria that includes customer relationship, pre-sales investments, joint account planning, certifications, specializations, and investments in professional and technical services capabilities.
Once the most qualified partner is identified, and agrees to team up with Cisco, that partner will have the opportunity to benefit from differential discounts in recognition of their investment in the deal.
The TIP will form the fourth pillar in the Cisco's Channel Partner Incentive Program, joining the Value Incentive Program (VIP), OIP, and Solutions Incentive Program (SIP).

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Operating as a CISCO Select Partner for the past four years, Kalyx Networks deals in Routers, Switches, Security and Unified Communications product line for the principal.

Kalyx and Cisco

We engage with customers to understand their business requirements before working on defining the networking and communication requirements of the customer. Our customer support engineers always ensure the products are implemented and maintained, as per customer's requirements.

Cisco rewards us with financial incentives through various programmes like OIP where we get rewarded for identifying new opportunities, Partner Development Fund – for selling Cisco Small Business and fast-moving products. Reward points are offered for every CISCO sale made that can be redeemed for some exclusive gifts. In the interest of those having long-term association, we see our margins well protected along with various incentive programmes and a lot of other benefits to partner with the market leader. As a focussed CISCO partner, we engage in several sales programmes offered by CISCO to enhance our sales. We are also trained often on various technologies to increase our expertise and address the market demands. Technology innovations from CISCO as well as updates on the market forecast enable us to position ourselves well to address the market. Our Sales Team gets recognized by Cisco during regular programme reviews for various activities or efforts they put in, which motivates them to perform better and better.

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Nortech started as a Cisco reseller over a decade ago. Within a year, we graduated to the level of a Premier Partner. Thereafter, Nortech actively participated in the Premier Select Programme and secured certifications in Express Foundation, SMB, SmartCare Services Partner, WebEx Partner and Advance Unified Communication Solutions. At present, Nortech is a Tier-II channel partner.

Nortech and Cisco

Trends indicate that the market is moving towards managed services, smart + connected community, collaborated business, cloud computing and green technologies. We are really satisfied with our decade-long partnership with Cisco. Cisco has always been the first in identifying market requirements and has encouraged Nortech to offer new technologies and solutions. Not only this, access to Cisco Global Briefing Centre has enabled us to showcase all Cisco solutions on a single platform, thereby shortening sales cycle and helping customers make informed buying decisions. The Nortech team is entirely aligned with the Cisco Channel team, employing its best practices and keeping ourselves reenergized to offer the best-in-class solutions and services and achieve greater heights in customer satisfaction.