Cisco shifts focus to SME zone

Trade

Excited: Cisco’s Tom O’Reilly

Cisco is turning its sights on the small business market in Ireland and plans to recruit as many as 60 resellers to market and sell its products into the SME space by its July 2011 year-end.

The move, which has also led to a doubling of its small business team to six staff, is part of a Europe-wide effort to expand Cisco’s presence in the SME market.

Tom O’Reilly, sales manager, Cisco Business Partners & Commercial Partners in Ireland, conceded that the vendor had not traditionally played a big role in the SME market, but it had developed “a pretty compelling product portfolio” over the past three or four years.

“We see it as a significant growth engine over the next 12 to 18 months,” he said, adding that, although Ireland had “probably been under-served in recent years”, the vendor was “excited about the opportunity”.

Cisco presently deals regularly with 30 partners, but O’Reilly expects to double that number by the vendor’s year end next July.

It has introduced two reseller programmes, Avantgarde Start and Avantgarde Plus, designed to provide training and marketing to resellers selling Cisco products to SMEs. The Plus scheme is aimed at partners prepared to commit to selling gear worth $500,000 or more to SMEs.

O’Reilly said the schemes provide partners with additional rebates over and above Cisco’s normal rebates. Avantgarde Start partners could add up to 5.5% extra while Avantgarde Plus resellers could make as much as 15 to 20% extra.

He claimed channel partners were reacting positively to Cisco’s strategy, with numbers up 30-35% on the previous three months and a 32% growth in business for the first fiscal quarter.

“The more partners we meet and speak to, the more energised they are,” he said. “They’ve never had that touch before.”

Sharptext and Ingram Micro are the two distributors chosen to deliver Cisco’s SME channel strategy. O’Reilly said its distribution partners were “critical to our success”, adding that Sharptext had “made a significant investment this year focused around small business”.

Cisco’s product range covers networking, telephony, security, servers and data storage. O’Reilly suggested that with the diversity of its product range, it could be entirely possible for two or three resellers to be selling to the same customer.

It also presented customers with the ability to add technology as they saw fit in an incremental way rather than having to make a step change. Cisco’s “joined up approach” would allow customers to be more flexible and agile and to drive efficiencies and cost-savings, he claimed.

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