“This is something I think we will see more of”
Rob Quickenden, CTO, Cisilion
How big a disruption is this to the way the channel usually operates?
This is something I think we will see more of.
This is both an opportunity and risk for partners. If partners have trust with their customers, they can get them to secure orders sooner (costs are likely to go up before they come down) and this means they recognise the deal and margin (and EBIT) sooner.
It may cause customers to look towards other vendors but in my opinion all the big vendors will do the same. Cisco have a huge capital and cash in the bank which will help them in the immediate term. I think we may see more cloud migrations (for those hybrid) if they can’t get their preferred compute rather than shift or mix suppliers.
We will certainly be as open as we can and typically work closely with Cisco account team on deals anyway.
It’s early to tell what customers will do but we will be speaking to ours.
SHI VP of Europe Ian Foddering weighs in on final page…
