“Canada is the land of small business,” Wendy Bahr,
the new SVP of Cisco’s Americas Partner Organization, said in a recent interview with
The Standard.
Moving this past summer from her previous role as head of the company’s Global Partner Organization, Bahr has over six years of experience in the Cisco channel and sees a growing opportunity knocking at the door in the shape of Canada’s SMB space.
2013 will see a continued focus by Cisco on growing its partner-led go-to-market strategy in Canada. Bahr said they are aiming to improve and simplify partner enablement and education programs and to find ways to increase market share by partnering with both traditional and non-traditional VARs.
A renewed focus on SMBs will help increase revenues and reach new customers because of a “big opportunity in Canada,” Gary Isaacs, Cisco‘s VP of mid-market and small business in Canada, said in an interview.
Both Isaacs and Bahr forecast a continued demand for the hot technologies you would expect (UC and collaboration tools, cloud-enabled solutions, and enhanced security and monitoring), but as these smaller organizations increasingly demand the functionality of enterprise-class IT solutions, but at a scaled down size and cost.
Cisco’s ticket into these end user customers will be its network of Canadian channel partners.
“We've got a core set of technology that we invest in developing and patenting… but research shows that small and medium business customers want to buy off that “trusted advisor,” Issacs said. “What we want is to have that core technology integrated into [a partner’s] offering and then have them take it along with our support to their customers in the small and medium space. If we can do that properly we'll be successful together.”
