The networking giant, Cisco India has recently concluded its fifth edition of ‘India Summit’ in Goa, where the leadership team of Cisco India, set the tone for next five years. The company is bullish about the digital disruption wave in India and helping Indian companies towards the mega ‘Digital Rush’ which is going to be $80 trillion worth of the global economy. India is going to be $ 6 trillion economy by 2027 and close to trillion dollars will be digitally enabled economy and internet economy will be $125 billion in 2021.
This massive digital change and newer technologies like intent based networking and growing popularity of Webex business have changed the way Cisco used to operate. The company strongly believes in digitization is not the domain of big companies anymore so to capture the untapped opportunities. The company is reinventing its Network and in some of the pockets, the Cisco India’s business is growing bigger than the global business.
Speaking at the fifth India Summit, Sameer Garde, President-India and SAARC, who took over the reins in 2017 said, “We created and reinvented the network. We talked more about the network in last one year than in last five years. The network is fueling digital transformation in India. The future of monetization of technology be it for customers and technology companies is about simplicity over complexity. In this digital era, we have added new customers like Wipro, Infosys, NSE, TCS, Viraj, Fiserv, Tech Mahindra, Ashok Leyland and more.”
Interestingly, Cisco’s first deployment of Intent based networking anywhere in the world, was in India- Wipro was the first customer and TCS was the largest customer of DNA SDA deployment. Today Cisco claims to have 125 customers being added on to its new network. Traditionally, Cisco has been a hardware driven company, but now the company is breaking this perception and moving towards more services and software business. “We are very proud of our hardware legacy, we are not in the least apologetic about our hardware legacy. But we are transforming as an organization from hardware to service and software. Globally, this mix is 33%, but in India, this mix is 40%, we are 7 points ahead of the global. Moreover, the software selling motion is changing significantly for Cisco. Earlier 50-52% of our software sales was perpetual software licensing and now it is moved to subscription-based licenses,” he informed.
Overall, for Cisco, 92% growth is coming from its Webex meeting business in this year wherein the video endpoint solution is growing @ 40%. As per the company five top, IT/ITes companies in India are using upwards of 2 billion Webex minute a year. This is unprecedented.
Moving forward, the company is looking to enter into new segments like manufacturing, education and from product and service it will be focusing more on Digital India 2.0, managed security services. The company is also changing its business model towards Service as a network, wi-fi and Webex as a platform. “As of now Webex using it as a collaborative tool. There are close to half a million developers, who are developing solutions top of over Webex across the world and over DNA platform. We are looking at figuring out how we make Webex as platform and analytics as a business proportion.”
For Cisco, SMBs vertical is one of the biggest contributors followed by BFSI, IT/ITes. The company is looking to triple the SMBs customers based from 30,000 to 90,000 in next three years.
(The author was in Goa on the invitation of Cisco India)
