Cisco to roll out Security Challenge contest for Indian channel

Cisco India will soon
be rolling out a contest for its security channel called the 'Security
Challenge'. This will be open to all of the 30 Cisco Gold, Silver, Premier and
Premier Select partners. Each team will have a pre-sales and a sales
representative from the company who will have to make a presentation about
self-defending networks (SDN).

Cisco is trying to
generate a lot more awareness about SDN, which is how the company's calls its
vision for integrated security. The objective behind this contest is to help
partners make the correct pitch to corporates and SMB customers about SDN.

The company will have
qualifying rounds in the regional areas and then the finalists will be asked to
construct a complete SDN setup for a fictitious customer. The qualifying
parameters will constitute understanding the client's requirements and
devising a solution based on his requirement, legacy system and cost
considerations.

Said Parag Arora,
Business Development Manager-Security, Cisco Systems India, “We had a similar
contest for our internal sales staff and we decided to emulate it for our
partners as well. Making presentations of this nature builds their confidence
and knowledge and they can sell our products well to the customers.”

This is the first time
Cisco is organizing such a contest for its partners, apart from the Cisco
Mastermind. And it will be unveiled in India initially. It hopes this will help
it further inroads into the burgeoning SMB

segment.

It is setting up proof
of concept centers with three of its partners — HCL Comnet, Wipro and
Datacraft — to showcase its point-to-point offerings for building enterprise
security.

For the past year,
Cisco had charted out an incentive scheme to enthuse partners to sell its
security products. There were two categories within it. The first was a
high-incentive reward for solution providers who were offering comprehensive
security solutions while the second was a lower-incentive scheme for partners
merely pushing the boxes.

Shortly, Cisco will also work out its Small Network
Foundations program, where partners will be taught how to position its
entry-level security products for the SMB segment. Parag recalls how in the past
in a bid to cater to this market, Cisco would lower the prices of its enterprise
products to make it more feasible for the SMB clients. “But we realized this
is a wrong strategy and in the past six months, we have been introducing
products exclusively for SMB. We expect this segment to grow rapidly and want to
make sure our partners are geared to sell to them.”

VINITA BHATIA