Cisco Expands Technology Portfolio for Small Businesses

SMBs as well as large enterprises are seeing more and more of their employees working from home or on the road. This demand for consistent connectivity is driving the workspace towards a software-based mobile unified communications and collaboration (UCC) platform that runs on any device, any place, and on any network. Cloud adoption among SMBs in 2011 was at 72 percent, and is forecast to grow to 98 percent in 2015, according to Cisco. And over the next two years, SMBs are expected to spend about $50 billion on cloud services. However, with only a third of SMBs having a communication strategy plus less than a quarter with a deployed UC solution, the SMB market is huge and wide open to competition. Competition comes is two flavors, hosted and premises-based solutions. Cisco is clearly making the right move by plugging holes in its SMB offerings, particularly at the low end. This energizes the partner community and allows them to cultivate young businesses that can be weaned on Cisco products. Establishing a relationship early in life is far easier than trying to break seasoned relationships down the road.  

Against this backdrop, Cisco recently reported on the expansion its small business product portfolio with new wireless access points, routers, switches, UC and partner-managed service offerings with a focus of enabling its partners to bring cloud-based UC to their SMB customers.

What This Means to You

We focus on the two anchor products having cross-sell and up-sell opportunities for partners – the UC320 unified communications system and OnPlus Service.

Cisco’s UC320 Unified Communications System

For Customers: Cisco’s UC320 is a competitively priced UC solution targeted at small businesses (SBs) with up to 24 users (all 24 phone licenses are included in the base price) that are cost-conscious and for whom reliability and service/support are important. MSRP is $995 (phones not included). UC320 provides a voice/data network, wireless voice/data network and a WAN connection and routes between them. If these networks are sufficient, there would be no need for additional routers. The base platform includes a complete set of business communications capabilities – including call processing, integrated automated attendant, 12 hours of voicemail storage, voicemail to email notification (.wav files) and support the entire portfolio of SPA series IP Phones. These Phones were developed specifically for SBs. Moreover, they afford investment protection in that they can be used with UC500 and many 3^rd-party call control systems (in hosted environments) and support both SPCP and SIP. The UC300 has 1 year of hardware support and 90 days of software support though the Small Business Support Center. It can be expanded with 3-year Small Business Support Service at $149.

As it stands, the UC320 is really IP Telephony platform with unified messaging. The system will also support SIP trunking if the customer desires to add that functionality. SIP trunking can also serve as the starting point for the entire breadth of realtime communications possible with the protocol, including Instant Messaging, presence applications, white boarding and application sharing. Again these are add-ons.

For Partners: The UC320 offers a pathway for moving customers to a converged (voice/data) network by offering a full-featured IP voice system with built-in SIP trunking support, integrated with the data features that SBs need: routing, switching, and WLAN streamlining administration. Partners should view the UC300 Series as the heart of a UC solution for which various options or components are available that make up that solution – dependent on customer requirements.

The UC300 is a relatively easy sale supported by availability of Cisco Capital. Installation and postsales support are simplified through use of the embedded Cisco Configuration Utility. This reduces partner deployment costs, training requirements, and post-deployment support leading to reduced sales cycles and higher margins.

Cisco Small Business Support Service has been extended to all small business products giving Cisco Partners an expanded opportunity to increase their services practice profitability, and increase customer loyalty.

Cisco OnPlus Service

For Customers: Cisco OnPlus is a cloud management and service platform. Cisco hosts the OnPlus service and partners subscribe to the service for each customer site they wish to manage. A small, dedicated network agent appliance is included in the subscription and it sits at each customer site. The appliance discovers and connects to the devices on its network, including non-Cisco products (laptops and PCs, other networking devices, servers, storage etc.) and securely reports its findings back to the OnPlus portal. Partners log in to this portal and gain on-premise access to their installed base of customer networks.

The bottom line for customers is that they experience a more reliable IT environment as the partner proactively monitors, maintains and optimizes the network as part of a managed service practice.

For Partners: OnPlus Service is cloud-based platform enabling IT solution providers serving SBs to deliver managed network services with assessment, management and advising capabilities. It will also help position the support of specialty managed services practices such as security, voice, and wireless, as well as the sale, deployment, and management of Cisco cloud services (e.g., WebEx and ScanSafe). OnPlus discovers Cisco and third-party devices with an IP address on the network and displays them in topology and inventory views. Partners can access a view of customer networks from anywhere, at any time, through a highly secure portal using a PC, tablet, or mobile device.

Customizable alert thresholds and notification rules can be enabled for proactive support and device management. The service also supports configuration backup and restore, application of firmware updates, warranty and support contract status, and reporting. OnPlus reports can be submitted to the customer on a periodic basis creating face time opportunities to deepen the customer relationship. In addition, OnPlus will alert partners about revenue generating opportunities that are specific to Cisco, such as warranty and service contracts renewal, or end-of-sale of Cisco products.