Small-medium business was the main focus of this year’s Cisco Partner Summit, but that does not mean the company is ignoring its other channel tiers.
Rebecca Leach, manager of partner programs for Cisco Canada, confirmed the subsidiary is also looking to increase the number of Premier partners across the country.
“We are looking at the gaps in our channel coverage, and it is not about adding more partners,” Leach said.
The plan is to reach into the more than 1,500 registered Cisco resellers and recruit them to cover the gaps in the market.
The coverage gaps are in rural areas and in provinces such as Saskatchewan and Manitoba, Leach said.
Cisco Canada wants to increase the Premier base by 50 per cent in the next couple of years.
“It is not a numbers game for us. It is really about increasing competencies across the partner base and make sure the partners who are selling Cisco are comfortable across all of the technologies,” she said.
Cisco Systems Canada’s current partner landscape is made up of 1,622 partners, the vast majority of which are registered and buy from distribution.
Of that base, 15 are Gold partners, eight are Silver partners and 45 are Premier partners.
In the new SMB Select tier there are 54 Canadian partners inside the 5,000 network. These 54 partners come from a mixture of Gold, Silver and registered, according to Rick Graham, area vice-president, distribution and channel operations at Cisco Canada.
Graham added that Cisco Canada is doubling the resources for the SMB Select initiative, while also funding more resources at distribution.
“We have hired two more to join the team next fiscal year and we have seven ICAMs out of Raleigh, N.C. to look at the partners for SMB Select. Some programs, such as TechSelect, run through Tech Data Canada, who will help us identify those partners we are going after and nurture them and bring them to the next level,” he said.
Graham believes the channel team, led by Ross Pellizzari, will be able to more than double the number of current SMB Select partners by 2010, saying about 200 partners is reachable.
“It is such a big market that there is room for everyone to play and have customers to put in this (Smart Business Communications Systems) solutions. It does give Insight and CDW a role to play, and they understand the market in the five to 99 space and they are aggressive,” Pellizzari said about the direct market resellers (DMR) in Canada.
Greg Myers, vice president of marketing for Tech Data Canada, agreed with Pellizzari, saying that the large market opportunity would include any resellers. “Direct market resellers’ business is not solely made up of small business. They have significant large accounts in their scope. We are even surprised that some DMRs are not interested in playing in that small deal,” Myers said.
Cisco also formed partnerships with application developers Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics Group as well as hardware developers such as Intermec, Rockwell and IPCelerate.
Comment: [email protected]
