‘We at Cisco make our Services completely Pro-active in nature’
Amitabh Patney
Manager, Partner-led & Distribution
Cisco Services India & SAARC
Cisco has been offering its Services since January 2007 and they focus on enabling seamless working of the network, its applications and their users to enable the organization, stakeholders and customers to achieve their business objectives and goals. Cisco being a partner-driven company, the Services offering is made available to customers through 1200 active resellers, 9 Gold & Silver partners, and 25 premium partners.
Cisco Services offers Advisory, Advanced and Technical services to cover the business and technology needs of customers.
Cisco Smart Services
The Cisco Smart Services is a family of service offerings designed to support network technologies, from secure data connectivity to more advanced applications. This portfolio of services includes a range of delivery options that take into consideration customer preferences and needs.
“Cisco has been a name known to providestate-of-the–art and the best possible offerings. It was recognized by the industry from time to time and was rewarded several honors,” says Amitabh Patney – Manager, Partner-led & Distribution, Cisco Services India & SAARC.“We at Cisco realized that our services are reactive in nature and a reactive service from a future standpoint is not good enough. Customers are moving to platforms in which they want services that are more & more pro-active and predictive. We wanted to shift the whole dimension because we always want to stay ahead of our competition. We needed to change the ball game.”
And that is when the whole genesis of Smart Services came in. Cisco Smart Services offer a choice of responsive and proactive services to complement the internal IT support capabilities and meet the network needs. With the world moving from a reactive to a predictive to a proactive kind of an environment, customers expect that even before a problem occurs, companies should know about it and have the right solution to rectify the problem.“Our partners should take up this responsibility of actually informing the customers about it. And that what was emerging clearly from our partners and customers,” Patney assures.
The basic underlying principle for these Smart Services is building in automation and Cisco finally took this bold step. “We are building a lot of automation so that our customers and partners are benefitted. For instance there is a partner who is monitoring the network for an end customer where firewalls are running at a capacity of 90%. But it is a matter of time when there are chances of the network breaking down. Moreover, the network is not constantly monitored on a dashboard. Rather he gets an alert from Cisco saying that this particular firewall is running at 90%. He immediately calls up the end customer and tells them that it is either time to upgrade the network or do a bit of load-balancing because there are chances of a crisis to take place. So this is what we call Smart that changes the whole dimension of the industry. They are more of Technical services that we are offering to the end customer and are more at a Network level or device level,” he says.
Smart Services for SMBs…
SMBs do not have a full-fledged IT staff and their dependent on the market is very high. With Cisco Smart Services for Small and Medium Business, customers can increase the network’s business value and return on investment by -
• Lowering the total cost of network ownership
• Increasing network availability
• Improving business agility
• Speeding access to applications and services
• Choosing the right service for your business
Cisco Smart Services include Cisco Smart Care Service, Cisco SMARTnet Service and Cisco Smart Foundation Service. These services are being offered based on their relevancy to the business requirements of an organization of any size.
“While Cisco SMARTnet is targeted at high-end of the segment of enterprise and service provider, Smart Care Services are totally focused on the SMB vertical. The partners will play a role here in customizing these services before offering them to the end customer. How he plays around with it is dependent on how a customer wants these end product to look like. The partner improvises on it, builds on it, makes his offering around it and then offers it to the end customer,” explains Patney.
Smart Services via Partners…
The Smart Care Services are primarily sold to partners and the partner in turn gives them to the end customer as a Value-add service. “Cisco’s is a 100 % Partner-led model and we want our partners to be more cost-effective and profitable,” Patney opines. “For instance, there is this dashboard that is made available to a partner and he in turn would have a contract with an end customer. He will be in a better position now to be able to rush his engineers and build a body around it and this would also ensure offering better services to customers.”
To make its partners and customers aware about these services there are workshops conducted by Cisco that aim to educate them about the benefits these services offer and how they can avail them. A set of Business Development Managers (BDM) have also been appointed who meet up with the end customers and partners to aware them about the offering.
samrita@varindia.com
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