Cisco services on the way

By Kimberly Guest for Cisco
Johannesburg, 17 Mar 2008

Cisco Technology Services (CTS) will officially launch at the beginning of next month.

CTS is the international vendor's third local subsidiary, joining Cisco SA - the company's sales arm - and Cisco Capital, which offers financing to Cisco's customer base. CTS is led by Mark Baptiste, while Cisco SA and Cisco Capital are led by Steve Midgley.

Says Baptiste: "The company has been operational, but we were waiting for all the papers to come through from the Companies and Intellectual Property Registration Office. Once we have these in place, we can step up the work we will be doing specifically with tier one telecoms operators."

CTS will work directly with customers, as well as through its partner channel. However, Baptiste says the company has not received negative feedback from its channel partners.

"On the tier one operator side - like Telkom, Vodacom, MTN and Neotel - we have been encouraging our channel partners to skill up to service these players for a while. For most of our partners though, that process has been too expensive with little short-term return."

He adds: "On the second tier, we want to work with our partners where they don't have the skills or are in need of additional skills. We intend to be a catalyst rather than a competitor."

Additionally, having Cisco on board as a co-service provider gives the customer more confidence as it means the vendor has "skin in the game".

Typically, CTS will not provide tier two customers "the full service", says Baptiste.

"We look at implementations as a six-phase operation incorporating plan, prepare, deploy, implement, operate and optimise. CTS will mostly be called in to help on the plan and prepare aspects and perhaps implementation. Even in the enterprise space, we believe we will mostly be called in to help with particularly complex deployments," he explains.