Time to gamble on emerging technology?

Bloch said about four years ago Cisco announced significant milestones and recognised it had to push even further into the emerging technology.

“We recognise the risk associated with emerging technology and Cisco has moved to mitigate the risk through marketing and broadening the market reach of the brand and the distribution channel,” he said.

“For instance we incubate start ups within the group but as soon as the technology reaches a certain point that we can go to market – we have a process within Cisco to breed and cultivate new technologies and likewise a process in market distribution.

“In the Australian and New Zealand channel we have a team subset that takes emerging technologies and mitigates risk as we look to our partners with competence in adjacent markets,” he said.

“But we are always looking for new blood in emerging technology and this might include companies involved in, for instance, security.

“For instance, they might have operations in a physical environment but have no IT or IP expertise. What we would do then is look to get a techie and align them with the security player.

“We also have an Advance Technology Partner Certification Training Course which trains the partners and certifies them before they go and sell the product, thus mitigating risk for us as well as the partner.

“We take an architectural approach,” Bloch said. “And everything we are doing is from a basic idea all the way to partner sales. This is a built-in process rather than sporadic approach.”

Network security vendor Fortinet offers security networking technology and according to regional director Charles Cote the success or otherwise of emerging technology is down to the relationship between vendor and reseller.

He said the risk to resellers of emerging technologies need not be a gamble.

It all comes down to the level of relationship the reseller has with the vendor,” Cote said. “If there is a strong partnership, and the vendor has local on the ground support – both pre and post sales – then you are going to be in a much better situation.

“It also obviously helps when the vendor creates demand with marketing programs to generate end-user demand, and has well-structured training and channel sales programs.”

Cote said Fortinet has a highly structured channel program that has proven very successful around the world.

“Fortinet connects our resellers with the resources needed to develop expertise, grow their business, increase customer satisfaction, while maximising profitability,” he said.

The FortiPartner program offers the opportunity for successful resellers to provide a vendor with emerging technology.

“We can assist our partners in providing strong local pre- and post-sales support, good training programs, and a channel sales model that allows them to make a good margin on both product sales and ongoing services,” Cote added.

“The goal of the FortiPartner Program is to enable our partners to successfully achieve unprecedented growth and profit potential by delivering superior, next generation multi-threat security solutions to your customers.”

“Our program offers the right level of participation, performance and commitment to provide the best opportunity and flexibility for individual needs.”

Fortinet offers three reseller levels, with the silver level partners offering only entry-level product with Fortinet’s low-to-mid range multi-threat security solutions squarely targeting small to medium businesses.

The Gold level program is for resellers who work to deliver the full spectrum of Fortinet’s solution set and they are certified to assist with any variety of implementation needs including a small branch solution or up to a core headquarter deployment.

Platinum partners have full access to Fortinet’s solution set and have certified staff to suit any complex deployment requirements and deliver exceptional levels of support and service.

“Partners have access to a wide range of marketing material and programs, and can carry out jointly funded campaigns tailored to their situation,” he said.

emerging gamble on strategy technology time to