Cisco India Sharpens Focus On SME Outreach

The ICT major is looking at growing its SME outreach to a million enterprises by 2020

- Nandita Singh

Business transformation in India is picking up steam. With impetus from the programs announced by Narendra Modi-led government, ranging from ‘Make in India’, 100 Smart Cities, Skill India, to StartUp India along with taxation reforms such as Goods and Services Tax ushering in a unified tax regime, India’s SME sector is becoming a hotbed of hyper-activity.

In India’s growth story, Small and Medium Businesses (SMEs) will drive employment generation, and will be a key contributor to India’s goal of becoming a $5 trillion economy by 2025.

In that backdrop, almost every ICT major is after a slice of India’s business transformation market. But how do you engage and sell business transformation to Small & Medium Enterprises (SMEs), who hardly have a concept of how IT can impact and enable their business?

Barring exceptions of digital businesses, in most cases, SMEs have neither a designated IT budget for the purpose nor a personnel, specifically assigned to drive value from information technology.

“SMEs are a nebulous mass of enterprises spread across the length and breadth of the country. Defining outreach and making inroads in SME segment requires a very customized approach,” says Nal (Nalinikanth) Gollagunta, MD & Country Head of Commercial Sales at Cisco India & SAARC.

Nal Gollagunta along with Daisy Chittilapilly, MD of Partner Organization at Cisco India & SAARC is leading the SME outreach program at Cisco. The company is currently engaging with 30,000 such enterprises and Gollagunta aims to double this outreach number year-on-year. “Right now, I am primarily focused on technology evangelization,” says Gollagunta explaining the Cisco approach to the market.