Cisco ties up with Comstor

Networking vendor, href="http://dqchannels.ciol.com/content/stateofmart/110051301.asp">Cisco
recently tied
up with Comstor as a value added distributor for its advanced
technology solutions portfolio. With this tie-up, the vendor now has
four national distributors on board-Ingram Micro, Redington,
Compuage and Comstor. While Ingram and Redington are decade old
relationships, Compuage was signed on around August-September last
year. The discussions with Comstor had begun around February this
year and finally in May the announcement was made official.

Why did Cisco feel the need for a
fourth ND? B Raghavendran, VP-Channels and Commercial Strategy,
Cisco India answered that, "Our global strategy from the
beginning of the current fiscal year was to increase our focus on
architectures and advanced technologies in the enterprise segment and
to address this market we felt that we needed a value added
distributor who could help take Cisco to a growing market where we
were late entrants." The obvious question next is to know why
Cisco froze on Comstor as its distributor partner. "Comstor is a
division of the Westcon group which distributes Cisco products
exclusively. We already had a relationship with Comstor at a global
level in markets like the US and other emerging markets and so this
was just a natural extension of that association. The most important
reason however is that Comstor has been successful across the world
because of their focus on driving forward advanced technology
solutions in the market and so their understanding and experience in
this field made it an obvious choice to partner with them,"
explained Raghavendran.

Comstor will be distributing Cisco's
solutions around three advanced technology offerings - Collaboration,
Virtualization in the datacenter space and the Borderless Networks
portfolio consisting of routers, switches and the entire networking
gamut from Cisco. Santosh Sankunny, Business Head, Comstor India
shared, "We are exclusive distributors of Cisco products both
globally as well as now here in India. The reason for this is because
at a global level, of the $3 billion business that Westcon does,
Cisco through Comstor contributes more than half at about $1.8
billion. Cisco is Westcon's biggest vendor so Comstor was spun off as
a separate division to be able to focus on this partnership
exclusively." Talking about Comstor's strengths, Sankunny
highlighted, "Our strength lies in our technical and marketing
expertise in the advanced technology space and so we can leverage on
our global resources some of which we will be bringing to the country
to take Cisco's business forward. We have a team size of around
twelve employees dedicated for Cisco besides other Westcon resources
to bank upon for aiding the Comstor team. We also have access to
Westcon's partner base of around 220 plus channel partners which
include SIs with regional and local reach besides another 39 large
SIs like TCS, Wipro who have a national presence. Some of these
partners are already Cisco partners through the other NDs and are
partners with Westcon for other vendors products. Our current
geographic spread is around 10 cities which include places like
Mumbai, New Delhi, Kokata, Chennai, Cochin, Pune, Ahmedabad,
Bengaluru, Hyderabad and we are also looking to shortlist Chandigarh
for an office presence."

Asked about some of the immediate plans
to take Cisco to the market, Sankunny detailed, "We plan to take
our training resources which stands at around three people through
training on Cisco which makes it more of a train the trainer program
before they themselves go to the market for bootcamp sessions we have
planned for our partners. We are also building awareness about our
tie-up to potential partners as well as existing partners there
through several introductory sessions. For instance we had a session
on the 13th of May at Hyderabad where around 30-40 partners - some
existing Cisco partners, some potential partners attended. Over the
next 35-40 days, we will take this across to the other locations
where we are setting up our offices." What sort of support will
Cisco offer to Comstor, Raghavendran said, "We will support them
with enablement as well as spend on joint marketing efforts to grow
the market. They will also have access to Cisco Capital as well.

Out of the 260 odd partners that Cisco
will have access to through Comstor, some of them already are Cisco
partners through other NDs. Raghavendran addressed this obvious clash
of interests, "There will be some cases of one trying to gain
the market over the other but this is a part of the dynamics of the
market and this was true with our other NDs as well. The partner can
decide which distributor to align with and it will depend on what is
the value offering for them." Sankunny added on a final note,
"Of course there is an overlap but there is enough space in the
market for all the players to grow so its not just a case of the
market being divided further but because the market is growing, there
is space for us to grow as well although there will be some part of
the pie which will be eaten into. We will be offering huge value to
our partners through Webex enablement, EDMs, our Discovery
Identification program which can help our partners to identify and
discover business opportunities internally besides offering pre and
post sales support and this should help us gain a foothold in the
market."

Cisco recently added href="http://dqchannels.ciol.com/content/reselleralert/110042204.asp">new
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