For Cisco, its success is rooted in partnerships, and believes that together, it will emerge stronger from this crisis
The networking major Cisco has been at the forefront of supporting healthcare, education, government with its suites of networking, communication and collaboration and security product and solution in preventing, detecting, and managing the spread of Covid-19. In India, Cisco has provided Webex to over 200 government entities and healthcare organisations. In addition, they have donated a large number of video devices.
Today, Cisco Webex Meetings delivers over 15 billion meetings a month, offering industry-leading video and audio conferencing with sharing, chat, and more. The company has enabled thousands of organisations in India for remote working.
On the partners front too, the company has helped its partners to ease their financial burden by providing a broad range of flexible payment solutions.
Speaking to CRN India, B Raghavendran, Managing Director, Partner Organisation, Cisco India & SAARC says, “Partners have always been central to our business strategy and core to who we are. During this pandemic, helping our partners keep their workforces and customers safe and productive has been a top priority for Cisco. To make the transition to remote working easy and seamless, we have enabled free access to cloud-based offerings across our security and collaboration portfolios. Since many of their customers are experiencing working from home for the first time, our partners are also scaling their efforts to support them in ensuring continuity of their businesses.”
However, some of Cisco partners are currently facing a slowdown in their cashflows and business. But through Cisco Capital, the company has put in efforts to ease their financial burden by providing a broad range of flexible payment solutions to customers, allowing partners to receive payments on time.
Raghavendran adds, “We are creating pre-designed BCP solutions to enable our partners to continue serving their customers. In this endeavour, we have engaged with more than 400 partners over 150+ Cisco-led enablement collaboration sessions across India and the SAARC nations during the pandemic. We have also held several joint customer webinars across architectures with partners, reaching over 7000 customers from various verticals. Additionally, we have reassured our partners that their Cisco certifications, specialisations and authorisations will not be impacted during this time even if they are unable to complete their trainings or take exams.”
Along with partners, Cisco is focused on jointly supporting communities, customers and the industry at this time. Cisco believes, the new normal post Covid-19 will create a world of opportunities, and Cisco, through its partners, is well-positioned to serve the emerging needs of tomorrow. “Our success is rooted in our partnerships, and we believe that together, we will emerge stronger from this crisis,” he informs.
CRN India speaks to Narasimha Murthy, CEO & Founder, Connectivity IT Solutions, one the leading IT service provider of Cisco in Mumbai says, “The industry has seen several peaks and troughs during this pandemic. We acted swiftly in ensuring the safety of our employees, and business continuity for our customers while managing financial commitments seamlessly by deploying an adaptive and border-less execution model for the new norm of working from home. Cisco’s continuous support helped us in building broad expertise across enterprise networks, collaboration, data centre, cybersecurity, and next-generation intent-based networks.”
For Connectivity IT Solutions, with more and more customers considering remote working even post Covid-19, the need for collaboration tools that help merge virtual and physical workplaces while allowing secure exchange of information, will increase exponentially. This presents tremendous opportunity for the partner for taking all of these technologies to customers as they navigate through this crisis and chart their path to recovery.
Atul Bansal, Managing Director, Velocis Systems, another Noida based large turnkey project solution provider feels that Covid-19 is already accelerating digital transformation – what would have happened in the next five years, is expected to kickstart in the next one year. In this evolving ecosystem, a few trends are clearly visible. The new normal will see the growth of everything connected to the home worker, such as security, collaboration, network, etc. Customers are actively trying to build a more resilient business, which is resulting in discussions around hybrid cloud and moving more workloads to the public cloud. Cloud security is also gaining traction during this time. And finally, SaaS will become much more prominent in the post-Covid era.
“Our primary focus at this time has been on helping our customers keep their workforces safe and productive as they work from home. In these efforts, Cisco’s support has helped us in building comprehensive BCP solutions around DNA spaces, Meraki, collaboration and security for our customers. This may be a challenging time in the short term, but IT products and services will see accelerated growth in the near future, and we at Velocis are dedicated to leveraging technology to help our customers traverse the new world,” Bansal highlights.
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