Cisco plans centers of excellence for educating partners

Bangalore, Oct 19

While continuing to increase focus on the advanced technologies
arena, Cisco India plans to unveil new products and solutions in the areas of
unified communications, security, wireless and datacenter space. Parag Arora,
Regional Manager-Channels, Cisco India believe that globally as well as in
India, advanced technologies like unified communications and wireless are the
way forward and we are working to create effective solutions for our customers
in this space. He said, "Opportunities for growth are huge across the India
market, but we believe that BFSI, government and defense promise rapid growth.
Additionally, IT and ITeS and telecom would give us a lot of traction. We also
see a high momentum in the retail, healthcare and education verticals."

Sharing his thoughts on the choice of partners for selling
advanced technology solutions, Arora said, "We have divided our partners
according to different market segments like enterprise, corporate and mid-market
so that they can effectively tap them. We provide our partners with training pre
as well as post sales and demo equipments. We also plan to set-up four to five
centers of excellence (CoE) across the country in order to educate customers and
channel partners about various technologies in and around unified communication
and security. As of now, one such center is up and running while the others are
in the development stage."

The company also sees opportunity in the many micro verticals
and would look at tapping them about 12 to18 months later. According to Arora,
the company would continue to focus on the enterprise segment but he believed
that the SMB sector holds a lot of promise. "We need to create solutions
that are customized for the SMBs. Towards that end we would rollout solutions in
the Wi-Fi and wireless space for this market in the next few months," he
said.

In order to equip partners to sell these solutions, Cisco has
launched the 'Select certification' program across six cities in India,
targeted particularly at partners dealing with SMB customers. "We hope to
cover about 100 partners under this program at national level over the next six
months," Arora indicated.