Networking giant Cisco Systems plans to double its investments in partner-led resources to $150 million in the financial year 2014.
The San Jose-headquartered company defines mid-market as companies with 100-1,000 employees and estimates to spend $25 billion on technology and $30 billion on services by 2016.
“That’s a great opportunity. There are a lot of mid-sized customers who would not have big budgets to acquire legacy applications. Someone has to help them,” said Andrew Sage, Vice-President (Worldwide Partner Led) at Cisco.
The new offerings for the company would include cloud managed networking portfolio and managed services dashboard.
The networking services and solutions provider would look at mobility, collaboration, public and private cloud, and emerging paradigms such as bring your own device.
Cisco has also committed to generate $1 billion in sales-qualified leads (activities to generate demand) through marketing for its partners in the fiscal. The company would also continue to enhance marketing under its mid-market strategy.
New managed service
The company also announced a new managed service — Cisco Meraki Managed Services Dashboard — offering built on Meraki platform, a company it had acquired last year.
In November 2012, Cisco had acquired privately-held cloud infrastructure provider Meraki for $1.2 billion in cash and revenue-based initiatives.
Meraki, a San Francisco-based start-up, provides Wi-Fi with cloud-based management software to remotely control and manage hardware, security, wired and wireless infrastructure.
“Small and medium companies would have to move over to cloud very, very fast to be competitive,” Sage said on the importance of cloud computing.