Cisco Canada is implementing a “Made in Canada” configuration plan for its Business Edition 6000 collaboration system that will leverage distribution facilities for increased speed to market for the channel.
David De Abreu
According to David De Abreu, the channel chief of Cisco Canada, this plan is being called “Made in Canada” because it was developed internally at the subsidiary by Rod Scotland, the national architecture strategy lead, Canadian mid-market solutions for Cisco Canada.
The Made in Canada plan has three key distribution partners Tech Data Canada, Ingram Micro and Comstor providing a base-level configuration for the Cisco Business Edition 6000.
The BE 6000 is suited for customers with 1000 employees and offerings voice, video, mobility, messaging, conferencing and instant messaging on a single server platform. The product is built on Cisco’s Unified Computing Systems running Intel Xeon processors in a one rack unit.
“The focus for Cisco Canada in FY14 was to intensify the mid-market space through distribution as much as possible. We want to leverage their skills sets the idea is to remove the day-to-day common base configuration challenge,” De Abreu said.
The BE 6000 is highly customizable, he added, but what the Made in Canada plan does is remove the bottom 30 per cent of customization. “This provides the baseline that is still strong, but removes some of that front end work and helps channel partners get to market quicker,” De Abreu said.
Rod Scotland
Scotland told CDN that the Made in Canada plan was based on a three stage installation process. “Cisco coined the stages as day zero, day one and day two. Day zero is addressed at the configure-to-order facilities at distribution. It’s the out of the box experience. After you take it out of the box you go to day one where the channel partner provides for more customization. Zero two is when it’s turned over to the customer,” Scotland said.
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Cisco has also created a CTO portal for its Made in Canada plan where channel partners can fill in an online form with information about the customer installation. The portal then populates the rest based on a baseline configuration.
“A pizza analogy is a better way to describe this as you get the basic dough and sauce and then it’s up to you to decide what you want to put on it for the customer,” De Abreu said.
The Made in Canada plan has been well received by other regions at Cisco and Scotland has been asked to present this plan for other geographies.
“If we are able to decrease the time a partner needs to be on the customer site it will lead to a better profit share because they will be saving on sending a technical resource, which can be used for another competitive situation,” Scotland added.
Greg Myers, senior vice president of sales and marketing for Tech Data Canada, said the company’s value-add integration services result in substantial cost and time savings for resellers.
“Our goal is to provide an out-of-box consolidated single platform that works in the end user network environment and is accessible through a Web interface for end users to complete the configuration. Reseller partners across Canada can focus their efforts on the strategic growth elements of their own business and we’ll support them with leading-edge integration capabilities including speed, accuracy and customer service. We guarantee the best quality integration for all CTO Cisco Business Edition 6000 configurations,” Myers said.