Moulton had a broad remit to bring on resellers for Cisco products outside of their core switching portfolio. That means security, voice, video and Wi-Fi. It is understood that in his short time at Cisco Moulton had recruited several of his former Siemens resellers as well as some from the Avaya channel.
However, with Cisco UK missing their numbers for the last two quarters and analysts questioning UK management strategy, pressure is mounting at the company for immediate results.
Talking to Comms Business Magazine in December at the time of his appointment Moulton commented, “With regards to voice, Cisco has recognised that they need to talk a common language with voice resellers and as a result the company has put a lot of weight behind voice by recruiting people like Clive Sawkins and myself. If you look at where Cisco has progressed in voice we are very string in the enterprise space but we need to provide some focus and get all of our guns aligned in the SME and mid markets.”
John Donovan, Cisco’s Managing Director for UK & Ireland channels, confirmed this week that Moulton had left the company and reaffirmed SME channel plans.
“Voice resellers have an advantage in that they already have the customers however the sale is now taking place at a different level within the user. Cisco’s most successful partners have been data centric and operating in the enterprise space. We now need to take this to the SME across a range of products and need to build an in depth relationship with the voice channel.”
Donovan sees the voice channel as being very product orientated and needing to focus on how we can change their business.
“Voice vendors are promoting products and not applications and business solutions. We can help resellers re-shape their business. There is a big opportunity for resellers to sell packaged solutions to SMEs, say broadband, security, wireless and voice all on a monthly managed service basis.”
“Sub 50-users the Cisco offer is not strong although we will have a play to make there soon. The mid market for Cisco (250-1500 user) is doing very well but our focus right now is the 50-250 user SEB market.”
Donovan was keen to remind the channel that his finance division is offering zero percent leasing on deals to the SME market right now.