Cisco pays for VARs to install collaboration kit

Vendor offers massive discounts to encourage partners to practise what they preach

Cisco is offering to foot almost the entire bill for some partners to deploy high-end collaboration tools.

At the vendor's worldwide partner summit, taking place in New Orleans this week, senior vice president of worldwide channels Edison Peres urged attendees to deploy video tools in their own organisations. He then revealed that, for a limited time, Cisco will give partners a 90 per cent discount on its EX60 and EX90 TelePresence systems for their own use.

"We want to collaboration-enable your business," he explained.

Today the networking vendor also told conference attendees that accredited unified communications, datacentre or datacentre networking partners can also save money on in-house deployments of Cisco Quad. VARs can install the enterprise collaboration software for up to 1,000 employees at a discount of 95 per cent.