Channel Chief
“We Want Partners To Talk The Language Of Architecture”
By Dhaval Valia
 B Raghavendran, VP, Channel Operations and Commercial Strategy, Cisco India, spoke about the company’s channel plans in an interview with Dhaval Valia
The worldwide Cisco Partner Summit recently concluded in San Francisco. What were the key take-aways for Indian partners?
This year Cisco’s message to its partners is ‘write your rules, own the game.’ We will work closely with our partners to write the rules around the transitions happening in the market today, mainly collaboration, video, virtualized data center and cloud services.
Already, over the past 12 months, we have boosted our collaboration portfolio by adding 61 new products. Cisco believes that video is the next wave in collaboration, and we have further enhanced our video portfolio with the acquisition of Tandberg. The virtualized data center with Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS), along with our Vblock alliance partners EMC and VMware, is another focus area for us. The other important agenda is around the cloud computing transition. Apart from preparing the ground for our partners to provide private cloud services on our virtualized DC platform, we are also looking to work with partners to build their own set of services and take them to customers.
At the core of these transitions is the network platform. Cisco’s borderless network architecture will drive the products, solutions and services that we bring to customers through partners.
How is Cisco ensuring the purveyance of its architectural play among partners?
Our focus is to get our partners to talk the language of architecture with our customers. To enable the partners to do so we have launched a new program called Teaming Incentive Program (TIP). This is in addition to our other existing programs—Value Incentive Program (VIP), Opportunity Incentive Program (OIP) and Solution Incentive Program (SIP).
TIP will be for partners who team up with the Cisco sales organization early in the sales process of a deal. The objective of TIP is to ensure that partners and Cisco engage with the customers from the start in order to encourage them to take an architecture-led approach rather than a product-based approach.
To incentivize partners to become business and technology consultants, we have launched the specialization training program where Cisco will bear 75 percent of the training fees. The first round of this training initiative is underway, and we have received nominations of senior technical and sales staff from our Silver and Gold partners. This is a 3-phase rigorous training program and will happen over the year through Web and onsite training.
Another major initiative is the new Global Partner Network which lays out the framework for partners to collaborate for sales, both with Cisco and each other, across borders.
UCS was a big bang for Cisco, but we haven’t heard much about it over the past six months.
UCS is a new technology and a new concept; hence our strategy so far has been to work with select partners in creating referral deployments. Presently we have six partners who have the capability to provide UCS solutions. By the end of the year we plan to add another 4-5 partners. We have done 3-4 significant UCS deals in India. Customers who have deployed UCS have vouched for its value proposition, so overall we are happy with the market response.
Cisco had announced the launch of servers through distributors. What’s the progress on that front?
We have a dual product strategy in the compute infrastructure space. We have the B series blade servers which are part of our UCS portfolio, while our C series rack servers will be sold as stand-alones through our distributors. Stocks of C series have been available with our distributors since April 2010.
We have asked our distributors to suggest the best go-to-market for the C series. We are also gathering feedback from our partners regarding the best strategy for the products. Using this feedback we plan to devise a comprehensive go-to-market for the C series. You will see us launching specific partner programs and additional SKUs for the C series product line.
When will Tandberg be integrated with Cisco?
We have all the necessary statutory approvals for the Tandberg acquisition, so technically Tandberg is already part of Cisco. However, for the company to be completely integrated with Cisco, we are looking at January 2011. Till that time both companies will have their different distribution and partner programs though we will continue to leverage Tandberg’s portfolio. We will be creating opportunities for our partners to fit Tandberg into their solutions kitty and vice versa.
Cisco recently added Comstor as its value-added distributor. Does this mean that Comstor will focus only on advanced technologies which require value addition?
Comstor will carry the entire portfolio, but yes, their focus will be on driving our advanced technology portfolio.
We have a global contract with Comstor; they bring immense value in solutions-selling through partners. We see them playing a key role in promoting our architecture-based approach.
One of the biggest issues over the past year has been the shortage of Cisco products. There has also been a large influx of grey Cisco products into India due to this.
We believe we have tided over the shortage problem for most of the SKUs. However, there are certain SKUs which still have a supply issue. We hope that by August the shortage problem will be largely addressed.
As you know, supply shortage was an industry-wide issue globally. Not just Cisco but other vendors too faced shortages which were primarily caused by demand forecasts. Most companies expected the economic recession to be deeper and hence resized their manufacturing downward.
The influx of grey Cisco products has been a nagging issue and we have taken all the steps possible to curb it. However, we are aware that it continues to happen in some pockets of the market and are doing all we can to overcome it.
There was also some confusion regarding Cisco’s limited warranty which had partners aggrieved. Is the matter resolved?
CRN had brought this matter to our notice in the early part of this year. After taking partner feedback we figured that it was not so much to do with the process but about the communication of the warranty process. Since then we have created a document which clearly lists out the process of warranty; this document has been circulated among the entire reseller network to give them clarity. The limited lifetime warranty is a distributor-led program, and hence the products under this particular warranty scheme have to be sent to distributors for RMA.
What has been the response to the FIFA World Cup scheme?
Our objective was to get everyone—even the smallest of small resellers in small cities—to sell Cisco products. We have succeeded in this. Also our goal was to do the same business in the AMJ quarter that we had done in the previous six months, and we exceeded this goal by a good margin.
Apart from the numbers, what’s satisfying is that we were able to reach out to resellers in small cities. This was a distributor-led scheme, and it helped us in activating new partners in new locations. Out of the 23 partners who won and will be flying to South Africa for the World Cup finals, many are from upcountry locations. |