Mumbai: Cisco seems to have intensified its war against rivals, including HPE in the server space. The company has announced a slew of incentive programs for its channel partners to give them a competitive edge over competitors to win UCS deals. The networking company announced new HPE Competitive Promo program at its Partner Summit 2016 in San Francisco last week. The new promo is a global deal registration program to help Cisco partners win competitive UCS deals against HPE servers.
The new HPE Competitive Promo program provides partners Cisco partners competitive UCS pricing, deal protection and higher partner gross margins. According to the company. The deal must be registered with Cisco’s Opportunity Incentive Program (OIP) – Hunting or the Teaming Incentive Program (TIP). The company has also announced enhancements in its Value Incentive Program rebates to help make UCS deals more profitable, and encouraged channel partners to seek pricing help from the company.
“We know that this is a tough market right now to sell into, and we want increase growth and profitability, so we simplified VIP around UCS and we added a two percent bonus for eligible partners on new account breakaway, but also migration. Or if it’s a super-competitive offer, I don’t know, say against somebody like HPE – you’ve got to contact us about the upfront discounts you can use instead to ensure we win that business together”, Cisco global channel chief Wendy Bahr told CRN in an interview. (Read the full story here).
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Cisco’s partners say that the company is taking a hard-edge approach to help accelerate partner sales around specific technology in order to surge ahead of other prominent vendors in the server space such as HPE and Dell.
Through promotions like Cisco’s SmartPlay bundles – which are limited time, special-priced promotional offers – Cisco is striving to pull partners deals across the goal line against the competition. Bahr said partners can still use Cisco’s popular Value Incentive Program (VIP) along with the special pricing offers.
The goal of the promotion is to drive UCS growth in the channel as Cisco launches its new storage-optimized S-Series server. On Nov. 1, Cisco revealed its new UCS S-Series designed to address the needs of data-intensive workloads, touting that it can lower total cost of ownership by more than 50 percent compared to storing active data in the AWS public cloud.
The UCS S3260 is second-generation technology based on Cisco’s C3160 rack server, which was released in 2014. The UCS S3260 has up to 600 TB of storage capacity, 90 TB of solid state drive flash, cache-acceleration capabilities and provides scaling with Cisco’s UCS Manager software and unified input/output (I/O) connectivity for any storage type. The company said that it would expand the S-Series portfolio in 2017.