Cisco ties up with Comstor

GURAGAON, INDIA: Networking vendor, 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."