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The Return of the 500lb Gorilla:

A couple of weeks ago I spoke about how our inclusion in the Cisco pricelist had...

A couple of weeks ago I spoke about how our inclusion in the Cisco pricelist had done more for our sales opportunities in an 8 week time period than we had managed to do since we started the company. At that stage I was still marveling at the sheer speed at which we had racked up over $9M in quoted business when it had taken us a significant chunk of the previous 4 years to get that number past the $1M mark and also the sheer breadth of cover they’d brought us, with deals in 18 countries and 6 continents landing on our desk almost overnight.

A month down the line and I’m still amazed at the speed and efficiency at which Cisco’s global sales teams are engaging with us and that pipeline of business opportunities has been growing every day but the real value of the relationship is actually starting to show in some very unusual places.

‘Soft’ Supports and Surprising Values

Right from the start our focus when engaging with Cisco was to get on the pricelist. We had a previous company which had been quite successful but we’d always struggled to scale because we’d taken a direct to market route, so getting access to Cisco’s 62,000+ global resellers was a key part of Davra’s growth strategy. The additional marketing collaboration, the technical validation and other ‘infrastructural’ supports were always secondary and to be entirely honest I didn’t pay much attention to them as we progressed through our negotiations.

That all changed however a couple of weeks ago when as part of our bi-monthly tech update my development team showed me how they’d been able to utilize Cisco InterCloud technology to effectively redesign and completely streamline our entire go-to market infrastructure in less than 24 hours.

The Cloud King

To me ‘Automated Orchestration’, ‘Secure Extenders’ & ‘Fabric Managers’ were just marketing terms which sounded more like obscure 80’s bands than any form of usable technology, surely cloud hosting was just a way of freeing up some real estate in the office and reducing our support headcount I thought. Amazon was cheap, Rackspace was local so why would I bother moving to Cisco, sure they probably all use the same datacenters anyway. It wasn’t long however before I realized just how little I knew and how my technological ignorance had caused me to overlook one of the most unique market differentiators we had as a business.

Interclouds unique Cloud Services Stack allows us to easily and inexpensively spin up new servers for customer trials, proof of concepts and early stage implementations which in itself is great but uniquely it also provides the security, flexibility and reliability that means our customers are willing to use it in live implementations so we can seamlessly pass from one phase to another. A low specification server for the initial technology trial run by Davra can be upgraded and ownership passed to Cisco Services for the Field trial and then passed on again to our VAR or implementation partner for the final rollout. All the while the underlying Network, Datacentre, Compute & Storage layers remain the same. Cisco also handles the security element of the build allowing us to simply and easily add extra secure layers for Government, Finance or other security conscious customers on demand.

So the underlying platform is great but the real value goes way beyond that.

This little piggy went to the market ………..

Because by far the most exciting feature of the Cisco Intercloud will be the Cisco Intercloud Marketplace, a global storefront to Intercloud which will become available later this year. By far the biggest benefit will be that Cisco’s partner alliances including some of the biggest System Integrators and support partners in the world will will then have immediate access to a full ‘white label’ version of our platform from which to build and deliver their own IOT Managed services. Davra^tm is onboarded once and then scaled globally so no matter who the customer is, or which partner is delivering the service, data will be stored locally, support will be delivered locally and most importantly customers can run and manage their implementation locally and on their own hybrid cloud services.

From a business perspective, this is the Holy Grail for a company like Davra, we can focus on developing the best possible product while effectively leaving all of the non-critical elements of our go-to-market to the Intercloud team. We don’t need to make any investment in infrastructure, have no need for localized support services, even the customer facing sales piece is handled by the channel. This allows us to scale and support a global audience without taking on potentially crippling overheads while we do it.

The Bottom Line

Earlier this year Gartner projected that 60% of the companies that will operate in the IOT space by 2020 are unknown to us today. They’re the startups or early stage companies like Davra that we see in incubators and innovation centres across the globe, the college spinouts and the young entrepreneurs with great ideas and endless enthusiasm.

As CEO of a small focused IOT company like that, my role is to grow our business, deliver unrivaled services to our customers (along with profits to my shareholders) and Cisco Intercloud enables me to do this. It enables me not to be a server guy, or a network guy, or a support guy or even a sales guy. Cisco Intercloud allows me to be exactly what my customer wants me to be, the guy who fixes his problems ……..