Cisco Malaysia managing director Anne Abraham said that the six-month integrated campaign--'One Voice'--is its first ever SMB campaign would transform the way that Cisco communicates with SMBs.
"'One Voice' will focus on business capabilities and the benefits of complete solutions rather than on products and technologies," said Abraham. "Small businesses are the lifeblood of today's economy and in today's challenging economic environment, it's critical that small-business owners have a technology partner that they can trust to help them find and deploy the right solutions to grow their businesses.
She said that Cisco valued the total global market for small-business networking and communications products and services at US$16 billion in 2009 with US$10 billion of this coming from companies with less than 100 employees.
SMB Malaysia
Abraham stressed that the Malaysian SMB sector is an important part Cisco's Malaysian business. "SMBs contributed 35 per cent to the nation's GDP in 2006 and are expected to make an increased contribution of 37 per cent to the national GDP by the year 2010."
Cisco Malaysia director of commercial SMB, Stanley Lim, said: "The number one priority for small-business owners is growing their companies, not being technology experts. Small businesses learn about, and implement technology in very different ways from large enterprises. Cisco brings the technology conversation to a level small business owners can understand via campaigns which address business challenges, rather than technology."
Investing in small businesses
Abraham said that the 'One Voice' campaign leveraged Web 2.0 functionalities and included an SMB seminar, 15 January, as well as:
- SMB Summit Site (www.cisco.com/web/MY/solutions/smb/index.html) for SMB customers and Cisco channel partners.
- Ongoing promotions and product bundles with selected partners and resellers for Cisco's Unified Communications, switches, routers and wireless products.
In addition, Abraham said that the rollout of this campaign comes on the back of Cisco's recent announcement of a US$100 million investment in its global small-business initiative. "Cisco has created the Cisco Small Business Technology Group (SBTG), which would develop technologies focused on six areas which small-businesses highlighted as top priorities for enabling business growth: connectivity, security, remote access, productivity, customer interaction and customer support."