Cisco offers training and incentive tempters to fuel VAR sales

Rebates for switches, deployment funds for UC and training for VXI in final set of channel-pleasers at partner summit

Cisco is looking to boost sales of its most bleeding-edge technologies with a swathe of incentives and training benefits for partners.

At the close of the vendor's Partner Summit event in San Diego last week executive vice president of worldwide operations Rob Lloyd told the assembled VARs that "a fraction" of people in the room – including Cisco employees – could adequately articulate the intricacies and benefits of VXI, Cisco's virtual desktop offering.

"We need to focus on enablement; we need to put those playbooks and tools in front of you," said Lloyd. "The feeling I'm getting is we need to amp our focus on enablement and simplification. We need to equip our sales teams to have conversations in a much simpler way."

But Lloyd also told resellers that maintaining dominance in Cisco's networking strongholds is of the utmost importance. To that end, the networking giant is offering additional rebates of five per cent on its Catalyst 6500 family of switches and four per cent on the 4500 line. A five per cent rebate is also to be extended to Nexus 7000 switching wares, with three per cent offered on the 5000 and 2000 series.

Lloyd also explained that Cisco is stumping up $1m (£620,000) to fuel rollouts of Cisco Jabber, the unified communications (UC) platform unveiled last week that carries no licence cost for existing Cisco UC customers. On a first-come, first-served basis, partners can avail themselves of a cash pot of up to $20,000 to cover deployment and services costs.

"We are trying to get Jabber pervasively deployed," explained Lloyd.