Cisco India will soon be rolling out a contest for its security channel called the 'Security Challenge'. This will be open to all of the 30 Cisco Gold, Silver, Premier and Premier Select partners. Each team will have a pre-sales and a sales representative from the company who will have to make a presentation about self-defending networks (SDN).

Cisco is trying to generate a lot more awareness about SDN, which is how the company's calls its vision for integrated security. The objective behind this contest is to help partners make the correct pitch to corporates and SMB customers about SDN.

The company will have qualifying rounds in the regional areas and then the finalists will be asked to construct a complete SDN setup for a fictitious customer. The qualifying parameters will constitute understanding the client's requirements and devising a solution based on his requirement, legacy system and cost considerations.

Said Parag Arora, Business Development Manager-Security, Cisco Systems India, “We had a similar contest for our internal sales staff and we decided to emulate it for our partners as well. Making presentations of this nature builds their confidence and knowledge and they can sell our products well to the customers.”

This is the first time Cisco is organizing such a contest for its partners, apart from the Cisco Mastermind. And it will be unveiled in India initially. It hopes this will help it further inroads into the burgeoning SMB segment.

It is setting up proof of concept centers with three of its partners – HCL Comnet, Wipro and Datacraft – to showcase its point-to-point offerings for building enterprise security. 

For the past year, Cisco had charted out an incentive scheme to enthuse partners to sell its security products. There were two categories within it. The first was a high-incentive reward for solution providers who were offering comprehensive security solutions while the second was a lower-incentive scheme for partners merely pushing the boxes. 

Shortly, Cisco will also work out its Small Network Foundations program, where partners will be taught how to position its entry-level security products for the SMB segment. Parag recalls how in the past in a bid to cater to this market, Cisco would lower the prices of its enterprise products to make it more feasible for the SMB clients. “But we realized this is a wrong strategy and in the past six months, we have been introducing products exclusively for SMB. We expect this segment to grow rapidly and want to make sure our partners are geared to sell to them.”

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