Cisco Systems is embarking on a new strategy to marshal its solution provider and service provider partners to deliver managed services to small and midsize businesses.
At the Cisco Partner Summit in Honolulu, Nigel Williams, vice president of Cisco's worldwide service provider channels, said the networking vendor aims to foster partnerships that would enable VARs and integrators to resell managed services built by service providers on Cisco technology, particularly in areas such as security, IP telephony and storage.
Through partnerships, service providers like ILECs (Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers) and IXCs (Interexchange Carriers) could tap solution providers' role as trusted advisers on the data side to sell services such as managed IP-VPN to customers with fewer than 1,000 employees, Williams said.
"From the security perspective, there is a constant threat, and constant changes are required to infrastructure to be secure," he said. "Trying to maintain that yourself is virtually impossible for the commercial [SMB] market."
At the same time, solution providers could benefit from the scalability of service providers' offerings, which would be difficult for VARs and integrators to match, Williams added.
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