Cisco, on Thursday, 17th October 2019, held an event with partners in channel at Shoregate Hotel, Ikeja, Lagos. There, they discussed how their cloud-based solutions could foster small businesses.

Lela Omo-Ikirodah, the Commercial Sales Account Manager at Cisco for West Africa, was on ground to drive home these innovations into their hearts.

The small and medium market is growing, and it’s growing fast. Projections reveal that 75% of customers will be connected to the internet via wireless come 2020 and 43% of cyber attacks target small business. She also went on to add that 60% of these businesses will shut their doors within six months of these attacks.

Nevertheless, she assured the partners of Cisco’s willingness to ensure these businesses are sustained in their business priorities. These priorities include growing revenue, improving the experience of customers, improving products and services and, most importantly, the ability to reduce cost.

Cisco intends to merge these priorities with their IT projections which is increasing innovations and delivering it to the small and medium businesses more quickly. But why Cisco, one might ask, knowing they are a considerable lot providing IT solutions too. Cisco can deliver secure, smart, reliable and affordable IT solutions.

Commercial and SMB customers are looking for modernised IT solutions for digital transformation designed with simplicity needed for lead IT teams. Cisco offers the most flexible portfolio with products and solutions sized for any business. Major business-centric products discussed at the event include Cisco Meraki – a solution for cloud-controlled WiFi, routing, and security, and Cisco Refresh – certified and affordable re-manufactured products from Cisco.

Cisco products are:

• Simply Secure products that efficiently deliver security everywhere, embedded right into the network to protect users from growing threats.
• Simply Smart products with ports that can configure based on connected devices. The wireless enables seamless onboarding and roaming, and applications optimised based on network path availability.
• Simply Reliable products that deliver the industry’s highest standard on network uptime with powerful failover so business cannot miss a beat.
• Simply Affordable products that can support budgets at every price point without compromising quality.

The event didn’t end without Cisco tackling the problem of availability of products to these partners and their customers.

It is safe to say Cisco made it worthwhile as the partners were all smiles and showed their zeal to go back into the market with renewed ammo in their arsenal for customer satisfaction.