SAN FRANCISCO – Cisco Canada channel chief Mark Collins revealed three new profitability offerings for the Canadian channel.
Those three incentives are called:
- The Whitespace Incentive Program targeting dormant accounts;
- Zero per cent financing; and
- UCS Stampede Incentive.
The Whitespace Incentive Program is intended to increase profits in a deal registration format for dormant accounts. Collins explains that customers typically buy products in a three to seven year sales cycle. Some products such as servers have a shorter time frame, but generally that’s the rule Cisco Canada operates under.
“If we don’t see a customer actively buying in a three-year period they have either paused for some reason or are working with our competitors. So we have some work to do. Secondly, it’s a competitive market and customers have choice; if they are working with other companies we need to help the partners get a seat at the table,” he said.
The second incentive of zero per cent financing will be in territory business.
The UCS Stampede incentive was put in place to encourage partners to rapidly expand their UCS and HyperFlex business with customers. This program offers an incentive on these two products with a rewards program for identifying new opportunities and closing deals.
Collins did not divulge the margin incentive percentages to CDN.
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At the Cisco Partner Summit, the networking giant introduced the UCS S-Series storage optimized server that addresses the data intensive workloads for big data, streaming media and collaboration applications. It can also deploy software-defined storage and data protection solutions. Key to the release of UCS S-Series is the products ability to handle unstructured data created by the Internet of Things along with video, mobility, collaboration and data analytics.
Also the UCS S-Series works to cut CapEx expenditures by 34 per cent, while lowering ongoing management costs by around 80 per cent. It also reduces cabling by 70 per cent and consumes up to 59 per cent less power.
Cisco launched HyperFlex Systems in February of this year as part of broad offering called Cisco Multi-Cloud Architecture. HyperFlex are built on Cisco’s UCS platform to deliver network, compute and storage.
“We are intently listening more than ever. Partners have raised the profitability topic and when you stand in front of a Canadian partner and you show them these three new profitability offerings it shows them that we are listening and taking action,” Collins said.