Cisco targets 25 SMBs a day in India to go digital

New Delhi: With India being home to over 63 million small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), networking giant Cisco has set the target of having conversations with 25 SMBs everyday in a bid to help them go digital, a top company executive has said.

While some SMBs are born with technology, a lot of the existing ones have not yet started looking at technology adoption.

"To address their needs, we have announced SMB as a separate vertical globally, so that there is a set of people who are looking at what are their needs, what are the requirements, what are the products that they need and what is the technology innovation that we need to do," Sudhir Nayar, Managing Director, Commercial Sales, Cisco India and Saarc told IANS.

Cisco, which is increasingly focusing on software and services for growth, has found that the SMBs want simple solutions and therefore the Cloud-based offering from the company have become a hit with them. With these solutions, the SMBs can have the luxury of not setting up the whole digital infrastructure within their premises.

"They can tap into a Cloud-based security system or a Cloud-based collaboration system. They can use it, pay on a fixed time basis, and can increase the consumption if they like. So these are the flexibilities they are looking at," Nayar said.

Cisco Meraki, for example, offers Cloud networking services and offers customers complete visibility and control over the entire network over the web.

"You can actually monitor everything using the Meraki dashboard, and you can exactly see where the performance is right, where the performance is not right, and you can fine tune deployment. All this can be done sitting in a central console," Nayar said.

About 30 per cent of Cisco's business in India comes from SMBs, which has seen over 20 per cent growth in the country, he said.

To drive its business in India, Cisco said it collaborates with thousands of its partners in India, while also focusing on different routes to market or building go-to-market strategies.

"We work with them (partners) so that they can take the best of the technologies across 100 plus towns and cities in which we are present," Nayar said.

"We have more than 11,000 engineers in our Bengaluru facility, which is the largest engineering facility outside United States. A lot of technology innovation happens there. They take a lot of feedback from our customers in India and globally," he said.

In terms of making their products secure in an age when cybersecurity incidents have become more common than ever, Cisco said it believes in "integrated security" in its offerings.