How many of us have had to compete with other providers quoting with Cisco products in the SMB space?
Probably not a lot.
That will change as Cisco had their engineers team up with Linksys engineers to collaborate on an entirely new GUI driving line of products priced to sell into the SMB market.
In a conversation with a prospective client where we were talking about a Small Business Server 2008 solution, they had some information on a few different firewall products.
When we mentioned that Cisco had some new SMB focused and priced products they really perked up.
Now, what business owner or manager has not heard of Cisco and their products?
Once through the initial Cisco Partner registration process, click into the Profile Manager then the Addition Access link:
Click on the Cisco Channel Partner or Authorized Reseller link to begin the process of registering the company in the Cisco Partner program itself.
- Note that it will helpful to have the company DUNS number ahead of time:
The process itself is a bit cumbersome, but once through it, we will have our Cisco Partner ID that will unlock access to Cisco products at the distribution level (Canadian Distribution Shown):
The Distributor Locator will give results for specific geographic locations.
Our interest in Cisco started when a Cisco representative at the SMB Nation Fall Conference sat at our table to lunch with us. Kim M. Dunlay did an awesome job of talking to us about Cisco’s new SMB line of products.
Every one of us at that table, and there were 8-10, pretty much bypassed the Cisco booth because of our assumptions about Cisco’s products and price points being out of reach for the typical SMB.
After our discussions, and Kim referring one of the Cisco engineers to chat with me about some specifics for the new SMB product lines, it became pretty clear that we needed to examine their new SMB products very closely.
The principle reason why?
The Cisco name sells itself. It will take very little convincing on our part to provide a Cisco SMB focused firewall appliance that has the necessary features our clients need at a competitive cost.
Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book
*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.
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