The pillar of success

This transformation is likely to leave a crowded vendor marketplace, but resellers will need to ensure they have the skills in place, regardless of the vendor set they carry.

“We continue to offer such training and when we do this we go into a lot of detail and are finding that resellers are keen to learn more and find out about these new technologies,” said Reardon. “Resellers are always looking for new revenue opportunities and they need to be able to add value and more margin. There are some resellers out there who are happy with their lot, but 90 to 95 percent of our reseller base is looking to get skilled up on these
new technologies.”

Reardon said talk is still around everyone still wanting to go wireless, but on the LAN side Linksys is also seeing strong growth with
end-users wanting more offerings which they can integrate with other solutions.

“Resellers have to get skilled up outside of the base infrastructure network and should also add services to their portfolio, and the amount of sub-100 resellers doing this is increasing. It enables resellers to add revenue streams that they have not been able to access before,”
he said.

Reardon claimed Linksys has a good channel business and with Cisco as its sister brand it ensures that the firm has full coverage across the SMB space.
“Linksys plays in the sub-100 space and if Cisco comes down there will be some overlap. However in that one to 99 users space we are fairly good and we make sure we get the right offering for our customers.”

Reardon also pointed to Linksys’ and Cisco’s investment on its consumer business which is growing in strong proportions, with marketshare growth.

“Our resellers have the customer base, they are the trusted advisor and they need to take advantage of this and get them locked in,” added Reardon. “The networking landscape is getting stronger and stronger and is the platform for everything which is getting
rolled out.”

Kevin Bloch, director of business and technology solutions for Cisco in A/NZ said: “As resources virtualise, the importance of the data centre will grow, enabling new opportunities for service provision such as Software-as-a-Service. Organisations will need to consider deployment of wide area network (WAN) technologies such as WAAS (Wide Area Application Services) to provide effective remote access to applications and service residents in the data centre.
“This will be the forerunner of “green networking”, where power efficiencies, other efficient utility utilisation, and emission footprint reduction will be critical.”

Bloch added “Web 2.0 generation” has driven the use of video, both on the public and private Internet.

“When collaborating, people want to “see” and if that’s not possible, they want a rich user experience. Video provides this and is one of the key drivers behind recent phenomena such as YouTube and TelePresence. We will start to see the prevalence of IP-based video delivery in the areas of entertainment, security, surveillance and retail applications,” added Bloch.

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