Cisilion diversifies from roots with innovation centre launch

Cisco Gold partner opens satellite office in the City's tallest skyscraper

Cisco Gold partner Cisilion has ploughed £250,000 into an innovation centre designed to spearhead its transformation into a wider datacentre provider.

The VAR grew sales 50 per cent to £23.7m last year and is aiming to hit £50m turnover by 2014 as it diversifies from its roots as a Cisco unified comms specialist.

The facility, which is based in Cisilion's new satellite office in Heron Tower in the City, enables it to showcase VDI, branch-office-in-a-box and bring-your-own-device solutions based on Cisco, VMware and NetApp's Flexpod infrastructure.

The centre draws on £250,000 of equipment and took two man years to design and build.

Rob Quickenden, pre-sales manager at Cisilion, said: "Many companies have demonstration suites where you do a demo and run a script. What we have created is an immersive environment that allows us to recreate a customer environment so they can see those challenges and how we would address them."

The Heron Tower office runs off Cisco, NetApp, VMware and Riverbed equipment based at Cisilion's head office in Leatherhead and can be used to simulate a remote working environment for clients.

"It is about using what we sell," said Quickenden.

Since it was unveiled on 26 January, 150 customers have visited the centre, which Cisilion is also encouraging its vendors to use.

Setting up a City pad also enables Cisilion to get closer to its banking and finance clients.

To support its diversification, the VAR is working towards gaining Enterprise partner status with VMware, Gold status with NetApp and Gold UC status with Microsoft.

"This is about being a solution provider rather than a product provider, which is perhaps how we may have been seen in the past," said Quickenden.

Jason Clark, chief executive of NetApp Star partner Proact UK, said: "If you look at the vendors in the Flexpod road map they are obviously moving together quite quickly so I am not surprised to see a Cisco Gold partner moving into the datacentre piece. It is the right thing to do, but unfortunately lots are doing pure infrastructure, and no-one is dominating it from a services perspective."