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Cisco Gets Aggressive in SMBs With New Solutions
By
Yuga Chaudhari
Mumbai, Jun 9, 2007
Cisco, the networking giant and popular name among the channel community, has planned to expand its market into Small and Medium Business (SMB) for which it has recently launched a slew of products designed and engineered for the SMB market.
The SMB segment has become the IT industry's fastest-growing market since more SMB customers are embracing technology to gain a competitive advantage. Elaborating more on this while interacting with 360 Magazine Parag Arora, regional manager channels, Cisco India said, "The SMB customers rely heavily on their IT partners as trusted advisors and knowledgeable network professionals who can successfully design and deploy Cisco SMB solutions."
"Therefore to meet the needs of the SMB market, Cisco plans to help partners develop the necessary skills and capabilities to be successful with SMB customers and attract new partners whose primary focus is growing market," he added.
Cisco has launched global channel program called SMB Specialization. According to the company, this is the first Cisco partner specialization program that addresses high-level skills required to successfully design and deploy Cisco SMB solutions.
Arora further added that the SMB Specialization enhances partners skills to identify customers' routing, switching, security, and wireless network needs and recommend and implement proven solutions. It also reflects the partner s technology and business expertise specific to the SMB market and can help them build customer satisfaction and loyalty while increasing exposure to new customers.
Cisco is also providing regular training to their partners. The segment-focused partners require training and exams that are tailored for their business practices. Select Certification is an entry point into the Cisco channel partner program for partners with a primary focus on small and medium-sized business (SMB) customers that have fewer than 250 employees. This certification offers training, tools, and incentives and indicates a partner s competence in selling and deploying Cisco SMB solutions.
Reflecting the plans of the company to improve on providing support to the channel partners, Arora said, "We provide a variety of online tools to help partners evaluate their customers needs, identify solutions, and learn more about how networking technology can help their businesses. Some of the key tools include, smart business roadmap assessment tool, Cisco IP communications cost savings calculator, case study search tool, Cisco product advisor, solution designer, and small business network designer."
According to S. Karthikeyan, Bloomberg Computers, Coimbatore, though Cisco sells in India only through channel partners, still the company is not able to maintain contact with a large number of channel partners. On this Arora said that the channel is an extremely important part of business strategy and focus. We continue to invest and broad base our focus to more and more partners.
"As an example we just launched a new training initiative called Cisco Thrust . This is meant to provide detailed trainings to our new and other reseller partners to be enabled on our technologies. We intend to cover 8-10 cities in this initiative," he added.
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Please throw some light on CISCO THRUST ; Interested for the same. |
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- Col.R.K.Ojha,
AverNet India, Uttarakhand
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ofcourse yes,more channel partners leads to more business bt they have to be more careful while chosing partners |
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- pranay jaiswal,
Istrat solution, pune
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