Cisco partners with ITS Sector to drive next phase of growth in India

Demonstrating its close association with India’s growth industries, Cisco today shared a strategic roadmap to working with the IT Services (ITS) sector, a traditionally significant adopter of leading edge networking, communications and computing technology. Following a 360o engagement model, Cisco will work with companies in the sector, not just as consumers of technology, but also as partners with whom to jointly develop solutions and go-to-market strategies.

The Indian IT sector, which was pegged at over $70bn in FY10, is looking at growth of 4.2 percent in 2011, according NASSCOM’s Strategic Review 2010 on the IT-BPO sector in India. Organisations are not only realizing the value of IT in reducing information costs, but the shift towards SaaS and cloud computing, shared services and more selective outsourcing is the near-term priority for IT organizations.

As part of the briefing, Jagdish Mahapatra, Vice – President, ITS Sales, Cisco India & SAARC highlighted Cisco’s technology offerings, which help IT Services organizations streamline processes and increase efficiency. “The IT sector has evolved over the last couple of years, especially as the recession forced companies to trim costs and improve efficiencies to remain competitive. While IT companies earlier followed a linear growth model to scale, the trend now is a non-linear model, wherein headcount and revenues are not in tandem,” said Jagdish. “Cisco’s network – centric approach places us at the heart of any solution designed not just to save costs, but also help organisations scale seamlessly, streamline internal processes and increase organisational productivity,” he added.

Over the last few months, Cisco has announced a host of new technologies specifically targeted to meet the changing needs of the sector from the technology adoption and services delivery perspectives. Its virtual technologies, such as the recently launched Virtualization Experience Infrastructure (Cisco VXI), enable organizations to free employees to work remotely, cutting real estate and energy costs alike. Cisco also has extensive unified communications offerings that include advanced telephony calling and management; unified messaging (UM) etc.

In addition, the IT industry can benefit from collaboration technologies such as Enterprise Social Software, Web, audio, and videoconferencing, business video, and TelePresence. Cisco’s consolidated and centralized infrastructure offerings can also result in maintenance and management savings for IT Services organisations. Its managed services and data center and cloud technologies can ensure better utilization of staff for IT companies.