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\u2019d brought us, with deals in 18 countries and 6 continents landing on our desk almost overnight.<\/p>\n
A month down the line and I\u2019m still amazed at the speed and efficiency at which Cisco\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Right from the start our focus when engaging with Cisco was to get on the pricelist.\u00a0 We had a previous company which had been quite successful but we\u2019d always struggled to scale because we\u2019d taken a direct to market route, so getting access to Cisco\u2019s 62,000+\u00a0global resellers was a key part of Davra\u2019s growth strategy.\u00a0 The additional marketing collaboration, the technical validation and other \u2018infrastructural\u2019 supports were always secondary and to be entirely honest I didn\u2019t pay much attention to them as we progressed through our negotiations.<\/p>\n
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\u2019d been able to utilize Cisco\u00a0InterCloud<\/strong>\u00a0technology to effectively redesign and completely streamline our entire go-to market infrastructure in less than 24 hours.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n To me \u2018Automated Orchestration\u2019, \u2018Secure Extenders\u2019 & \u2018Fabric Managers\u2019 were just marketing terms which sounded more like obscure 80\u2019s 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.\u00a0 Amazon was\u00a0cheap, Rackspace was\u00a0local so why would I bother moving to Cisco, sure they probably all use the same datacenters anyway.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 All the while the underlying Network, Datacentre, Compute & Storage layers remain the same.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n So the underlying platform is great but the real value goes way beyond that.<\/p>\n Because by far the\u00a0most\u00a0exciting\u00a0feature of the Cisco Intercloud will be\u00a0the Cisco Intercloud\u00a0Marketplace,\u00a0<\/strong>\u00a0a global storefront to Intercloud which will become available later this year. \u00a0By far the biggest benefit will be that Cisco’s partner alliances including some\u00a0of the biggest System Integrators and support partners in the world will will then\u00a0have immediate access to a full \u2018white label\u2019 version of our platform from which to build and deliver their own IOT Managed services. \u00a0Davratm<\/sup>\u00a0is 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,\u00a0 support will be delivered locally\u00a0 and most importantly customers can run and manage their implementation locally and on their own hybrid cloud services.<\/p>\n From a business perspective,<\/ins>\u00a0this 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\u00a0to the Intercloud\u00a0team.\u00a0 We don\u2019t need to make any investment in infrastructure, have no need for localized support services,\u00a0even the customer facing sales piece is handled by the channel.\u00a0 This allows us to scale and support a global audience without taking on potentially crippling overheads while we do it.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Earlier this year Gartner projected that 60% of the companies that will operate in the IOT\u00a0space by 2020 are unknown to us today.\u00a0 They\u2019re the startups or early stage companies like Davra that we see in incubators and innovation centres\u00a0across the globe, the college spinouts and the young entrepreneurs with great ideas and endless enthusiasm.<\/p>\n As CEO of a small focused IOT\u00a0company like that,<\/ins>\u00a0my role is to grow our business, deliver unrivaled services to our customers (along with profits to my shareholders) and Cisco Intercloud\u00a0enables 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. \u00a0Cisco Intercloud allows me to be exactly what my customer wants me to be, the guy who fixes his problems\u00a0\u2026\u2026..<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[62,608,596,611,153,617,245,656,660,640,651,644,599,590,620,222,636,156,632,625],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davra.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davra.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davra.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davra.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davra.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=253"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davra.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davra.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davra.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davra.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=253"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davra.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The Cloud King<\/h2>\n
This little piggy went to the market \u2026\u2026\u2026..<\/h2>\n
The Bottom Line<\/h2>\n