SINGAPORE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--From January 20 - 21, Cisco held its annual 2011 Singapore Summit. Under the motto, “Capturing the Next Wave: Empowered for Business Success,” Cisco and their partners showcased their latest innovations in unified information and communications technology and Cloud computing with the clear objective in mind to enable their customers to seamlessly integrate the latest Borderless Network, Collaboration and Data Center technologies in a vertical business environment.
In his keynote, the President of Asia Pacific and Japan, Edzard Overbeek emphasized how Cisco’s Quad will take social networking to the enterprise. Such integration of social networking with business applications can enable enterprises not only to provide value-added services in marketing and customer services, but to unlock new growth opportunities through a whole new customer experience and customer insights.
The market opportunity of this strategic focus is strongly supported by AMI’s recent findings on the adoption of social media technologies among SMBs. With increasing customer demand shaping the market, SMBs are beginning to see the greater benefits and advantages of their social media efforts and, in turn, are embracing it as an integral part in the business strategies.
Longer term, AMI is seeing a confluence of factors giving cloud adoption stronger momentum not only among enterprises but also with SMBs. Key among these is the growing ubiquity of broadband, mobility and smart devices which have collectively raised the level of data & application access, collaboration and interest in Cloud services. “As many channel partners make the transition to the Cloud services model,” says Gina Luk, Manager of Research and Consulting at AMI-Partners, “telecommunication service providers (telecoms) are making a strong bid for the SMB Cloud share, beyond their traditional voice and data service offerings due to declining average revenue per user (ARPU) and increasing churn.”
Sheila Jordan, Vice President, Cisco Communication and Collaboration IT, stated in her keynote that, “Modern organizations are all about improving employee productivity and efficiency through effective collaboration and communication.”
AMI’s recently published SMB study underlines a strong market opportunity for UC solutions in particular for companies with 20 employees and more. “As companies in the mid-market segment are increasingly driven by competitive and profitability pressures,” says Venu Reddy, VP of Asia Pacific, AMI-Partners, “they are keen to invest in technology that will drive a higher quality (richer) relationship between themselves and their customers. Due to this, companies are increasingly adopting solutions that will not only integrate the various communications into a single platform, but also do so in a form that will be secure and enable employees to provide better service to customers.” With industry-class solutions and innovative technology, Cisco, along with its partners, is well positioned to provide the best-of-breed solutions by integrating all the important elements that connect people and enrich their experience, including social networking paradigms, video, discussion forums, and customized business applications.
The thought leadership provided during the summit has also demonstrated that Cisco is certainly one of the well positioned Cloud enablers in this emerging market. Cisco’s key differentiation comes from its innovative and cloud-optimized infrastructure, its professional services, and its capital strength. Cisco’s inclination toward becoming an IT services company in the near term must therefore continue to develop its own professional services offers for the long term and provide companies advice and support in understanding how to take advantage of the cloud, in migration of workloads and integration of cloud applications with legacy, on-premise systems.
According to Steven Weeks, Vice President of Cisco Services in Asia-Pacific, Cisco is working with various service providers and enterprises to help them plan, design, and deploy data centers, cloud-based services, as well as offering managed services for their network infrastructure. At the same time, businesses can also take advantage of Cisco Capital’s financing offerings to optimize their cash flow, by taking advantage of Cisco flexible leasing deals. “As global economic conditions are still uncertain with subdued growth in the US and Europe as well as inflation and bubble risks in China and India,” says Dr. Vu-Thanh Nguyen from AMI-Partners, “many businesses will likely adopt a conservative approach in their ICT investment. Most are aware that preparing and optimizing their ICT systems now will enable them to compete better in the future. But not many are willing to spend a big sum at once. And that’s why Cisco Capital solutions could be useful for many businesses, especially SMBs.”
About Access Markets International (AMI) Partners, Inc.
AMI-Partners specializes in IT, Internet, telecommunications and business services strategy, venture capital, and actionable market intelligence — focusing on global small and medium business (SMB) enterprises. The AMI-Partners mission is to empower clients for success with the highest-quality data, business planning and go-to-market solutions. AMI was founded in 1996. Since its inception, the firm has built a world-class management team, each with ten to fifteen years’ experience in IT, telecom, online communications or multimedia.
AMI-Partners has helped shape the go-to-market SMB strategies of more than 150 leading IT, Internet, telecommunications and business services companies. The firm is well known for its IT and Internet adoption-based segmentation of the SMB markets; its annual retainership services based on global SMB tracking surveys in more than 30 countries; and its proprietary database of SMBs and SMB channel partners in the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific. The firm invests significantly in collecting survey-based information from several thousand SMBs annually, and is considered the premier source for global SMB trends and analysis.