Cisco poised to invest in channel to fuel growth

Vendor sets its sights on SME and vertical sectors in plans to expand business to $50bn

Networking giant Cisco will double the amount of investment it puts into its channel training and marketing to grow into a $50bn (£25bn) firm.

The vendor intends to take aim at the SME market and vertical sectors, where it does not have enough partner capacity, according to Keith Goodwin, senior vice president of worldwide channels at Cisco.

“At our partner summit earlier this year we introduced the Select level to our partner programme for those partners who target SMEs,” he said. “We want another 5,000 partners in this level by the end of our fiscal year. We will double our investment in this including partner enablement and our partner talent initiative, as well as bringing new partners on board."

Cisco intends for the first time to allow resellers of its SME-focused arm, Linksys, to be automatically registered to sell Cisco products and vice versa. “We want a more integrated approach to Linksys and having joint partners will do this,” Goodwin added.

“Our challenge is to build enough channel capacity across all of our
sectors and we need to identify the opportunities associated with regions, markets and verticals."

Cisco intends to target various vertical sectors through its Industry Solutions Partner Network (ISPN) Goodwin said. “We want to get to the next-generation route to market and have the internal process to do this supported by Web 2.0 technology.”

Peter Titmus, managing director of Cisco services firm Networks First, welcomed the investment.

“We are seeing a growing demand for professional services and often these are skills that are not in the channel or are too expensive for a lot of partners to invest in,” he said.

“However, Cisco needs to police its channel more and make sure that partners who do make the investment have adequate protection against those firms that d on’t invest.”