Cisco focuses on SME location

Networking giant Cisco has claimed that shifting its SME and commercial business to a geography-based sales model will make life easier for its channel partners, says ChannelWeb.

David Critchley took on the role of UK and Ireland director of commercial and SME six months ago, addressing customers with between 100 and 1 500 staff. Sub-100-seat firms are now covered by a separate small business wing.

He revealed SME and commercial end-users and the channel partners that serve them are now managed by Cisco according to geography. “It is about having the right partners with the right coverage model,” he said. “That is governed by what end-users are looking for, which could be managed services, resale relationships - it is a complex arena.”

NetApp has highlighted its close relationships with IT vendors and enterprise value-added resellers to provide enterprise customers with the technology and solutions needed to build their cloud infrastructures, reports Computerworld.

This includes global service providers and system integrators that are leveraging NetApp technology to create cloud service offerings for their own enterprise customers.

“NetApp believes that because there are several elements that must come together to create a cloud infrastructure, no single vendor is able to adequately address each and every layer,” said Peter O'Connor, VP and MD of NetApp Australia and New Zealand.

An emerging new information risk management company has introduced a channel partner programme it hopes will help MSSPs, security systems integrators, and other services-oriented security channel players augment and solidify their content-oriented protection solutions, says Channel Insider.

Houston-based Exobox bills itself as what it calls a data leak detection vendor. Its SaaS solution, ExoDetect, is designed to find and identify sensitive corporate information that's already been leaked out into the wild.

That means finding instances of data such as customer information, drafts of earnings statements before release and secret product schemas out on public Web sites, chat boards, social networking sites and the like.