New collaboration products set |to drive Cisco sales in Asia-Pacific
Cisco Systems is aiming for double-digit growth in the Asia-Pacific region next year, led by a new portfolio that includes some new products that were launched at the "Cisco Collaboration Summit" in Los Angeles this week.
The company says it sees Thailand as a hub for its collaboration products in the Asean region because of the country’s advantageous geographical location.
In the last three quarters, Cisco has seen significant growth for its video portfolio in South Korea, India, Indonesia and Thailand, where 2,500 units of its Business Edition 6000 have been sold in the past 18 months and more than 500 units of the old CTS3000 TelePresence product. Most units of these two products were sold in the Asean region.
BE6000 is a single-server collaboration platform designed for companies with 25-1,000 employees; 20 per cent of those sold in the past 18 months incorporated video technology. CTS3000 uses three-screen videoconferencing technology.
The company has now launched IX5000 TelePresence to serve large corporate clients and Business Edition 6000S for the mid-market. A new team-collaboration application called Project Squared is meant to capture both markets’ attention, since it is available for free and it works well with all of Cisco’s platforms.
"The aim is [providing] no-compromise collaboration to everyone in any meeting room and on any desktop, and that is a very big step forward to enable and empower everyone within an organisation with access to a technology like video ... and that is what we are delivering with the enhanced portfolio," said Peter Bocquet, Cisco’s director of collaboration-solution sales in Asia-Pacific and Japan.
Andre Smit, managing director of collaboration-solution sales in Asia Pacific and Japan, said Cisco was always looking to increase its investment in the Asean region. It has already invested a lot of resources such as personnel and research.
He said the biggest growth Cisco had seen in the Asean region was in the commercial segment. This was a market it was not able to serve that well in the past, but now it has the biggest market share in the region for video and voice platforms along with its Contact Centre Enterprise (contact routing, call treatment, network-to-desktop computer telephony integration), which has been growing "massively".
Smit said Cisco had also grown very strongly in the financial-services industry in Thailand. The Contact Centre Enterprise is the main growth driver. Video growth has not been as aggressive in Thailand because of bandwidth constraints, but since the IX5000 has reduced the bandwidth requirement by half, the firm now expects higher growth in its video and cloud businesses as well.
"Cisco realised the significance of Thailand in the region to an extent that I actually live there for three months of the year," he said. The cost of bandwidth is low and its availability as good as or even better than in markets such as Singapore, while "Thailand is evolving so quickly in terms of infrastructure".
The country’s chronic political instability has had no effect on Cisco’s collaboration businesses and it is "no issue for Cisco", he added.
