Cisco pushes further into SAN market
Firm introduces new specialisation for resellers
Cisco has introduced a new specialisation for resellers selling the vendor's MDS 9000 range of SAN storage products.
But Cisco-accredited partners could be left out in the cold as the specialisation is available only to storage resellers accredited to IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) or EMC.
"We're introducing this specialisation because we see huge potential in the SAN market," said Paul Salmon, technical operations director for EMEA channels at Cisco.
"When we first entered the SAN market we had no experience of selling in that market, whereas HP, IBM, HDS and EMC did. It was more elegant to get to market through these original storage manufacturers (OSMs)."
Cisco has worked with all four OSMs for two and a half years, and Salmon said he was not aware of any plans to add more vendors to the line-up.
The storage certification, which is one of 14 such specialisations launched by Cisco, will add 30 accreditation points to the Cisco scheme. To become a Cisco Gold Partner, resellers must earn 100 points from a variety of activities and accreditations.
Simon Gay, consultancy practice leader at Computacenter, said: "We are already looking at this specialisation. Something like this will help resellers get sales and differentiate themselves.
"We've been watching Cisco becoming more credible in the storage space as it moves from the pure networking market.
"It is working with key storage players, both manufacturers and integrators, and this makes sense because it is moving into an area it is not familiar with."
Gay added that as the SAN market matures, Cisco and other vendors, such as Brocade, are moving towards building their own channels instead of selling to other vendors on an OEM basis. Brocade has recently begun to create direct links with integrators, he said.