IT hardware giant Cisco is betting big on India’s Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs) sector for growth. Company is looking to increase its customer base from 30,000 to 90,000 over the next three years. “We have about 30,000 SMEs customer in India and over the next three years we aim to triple this to over 90,000,” said Nal Gollagunta, Managing Director, commercial sales, Cisco India and SAARC.
Company said that there are 50 million SMEs in India. Out of which, only 2% are currently digital. So, there is tremendous interest of IT firms in SMEs modernisation in the country. “The opportunity is huge and we are committed towards digitisation of Indian SMEs,” said Gollagunta.
The networking major whose 20-30% business in India comes from SMEs sector said that surge in the penetration of 4G network in India led by telcos like Reliance Jio is opening up new opportunities across different verticals and success of e-commerce portal are encouraging SMEs to go digital. “Going forward our goal would be take increase the share from 20-30% to 50%,” said Gollagunta.
For SMEs, Cisco is pushing wireless connectivity, security software and collaboration video solutions. “SME sector requirements and approach to IT is different from startups and big enterprises. Over the past five years, we have focused on SME sector and have launched customised solutions primarily aimed at them,” said Gollagunta. Cisco has segregated Indian SMEs in 19 clusters and offer customised solutions both on perpetual license and pay-per-use subscription model basis. But in recent past, there has been more demand for pay-per-use subscription from SMEs, said an executive.
Source: Financial Express
