10 March 2008
by Simon Quicke
The future for the networking world looks brighter than it has done for years but some resellers will not enjoy the benefits.
That assessment came from John Donovan, managing director of Cisco’s UK channel, who said some resellers had not made the move away from selling more than just boxes.
Cisco’s senior management have talked of the next phase of networking being the "age of collaboration" but getting customers beyond VoIP and convergence has a crucial role for resellers.
Donovan said he was concerned that some resellers are still focused on box-shifting and have not yet accepted complex selling over traditional approaches.
"Those that have got to grips with those skills have seen the opportunity and that has helped them emerge from being a reseller selling a product into someone creating demand," he said.
He said the firm would continue to place great emphasis on profitabiliy: "Everything we do is around driving that market and there is support and education to help more resellers."
He said the networking market was being buoyed by several developments including greater awareness of the importance of the network and customers adding capability to their infrastructure.
As a result the network had become more complex and with the growth in flexible working the limits of business were changing.
He said the majority of partners had started solution selling and Cisco had worked hard as a vendor in recent years to migrate all resellers to its revised partner programme, a process that ends at the end of this month.
"Every single partner has been through the programme, it has been pretty pain-free and the partners have got higher skills," he said.
He also said there were yet further plans for more highly skilled partners.
