Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Cisco's Linksys subsidiary, a company traditionally addressing the home and SOHO markets, is collaborating with its parent on a co-ordinated channel strategy that will enable resellers to offer products from both companies.
Central to the company's initiative is its Linksys One small business communications architecture and product range. This was launched in late 2005 with voice as the first application but, with release 2.0 of the software just released, is being made generally available along with a range of new product components.
The collaboration with Cisco is a component of Linksys' new channel strategy, the Linksys Partner Connection programme (LPC) announced globally on 7 June, which represents a more concerted push into the SME space by Linksys, driven my market research showing that, globally SME spending on IT will increase at 35 percent CAGR over the next three years.
According to Graeme Reardon, general manager of Linksys Australia, another attractive feature of the market is that there is no dominant supplier. "The SMB market is very fragmented. None of our competitors as more than 10 percent market share. Even Cisco has less than 20 percent, and that is very very rare for Cisco."
Reardon said that Linksys would launch a "brand new unified channel programme in conjunction with Cisco, adding that "today there is no linkage between the two programmes." Globally Cisco has around 35,000 VARs and Linksys about 13,000, with around 5-7 percent of the total selling both companies' products.
In Australia, he said Linksys was ahead of the rest of the world in that its three chosen distributors - Lan Systems, Express Data and Ingram Micro are also Cisco distributors.
Globally the Linksys Partner Connection programme will have three tiers: Registered Partner and Business Elite Partner, entry to which requires partners to undergo technical and sales training, and which offers additional product discounts.
Business Elite partners can also achieve product specialisation in Network Attached Storage and the Linksys One small business telephone system.
David Bass
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