Cisco system to help SMB with affordable IT solutions

Indunil HEWAGE

Cisco Systems, a well known vendor system catering to the IT requirements of a wide range of industry segments throughout the world, is ready to help the Sri Lankan Small and Medium Businesses (SMB), by introducing affordable IT solutions to address the growing needs of the SMB segment.

In an interview with the Daily News Business, Cisco Systems (India) Private Limited Vice President India and SAARC, Amit Malik pointed out that SMB was one of the fastest growing businesses of Cisco in Sri Lanka and many other countries, approximately 20% percent of company business in Sri Lanka, was coming from SMB and SMB class products.

According to Malik, the SMB market grows three times faster than the enterprise market and the aspirations of the SMB were quite similar to the enterprise market. Cisco's total annual spending on research and development has been valued at $ 6 billion, of which $ 5 billion have been spent to develop SMB class products last year.

As a company, SMB is a very strong market for us despite the global economy going through a difficult period. As far as Sri Lanka was concerned, there were some lull moments in the economy. Overall, Sri Lanka was still one of the fastest growing markets, especially in the SAARC countries.

However, lack of proper IT infrastructure, IT personnel requirement and budgetary constraints have hindered the growth potential of the industry to a great extent. Commenting on the Sri Lankan IT industry, Malik said leveraging of IT in the private sector in Sri Lanka can be bench marked as the best in the SAARC countries, fuelled by growing high IT literacy of people and high degree of technology adoption. Whether it be a bank or private sector company, technology adaptation in Sri Lanka is much higher than in some other similar countries..

"Sri Lankan IT industry will grow at a rate of 30% in another 4-8 years and will see more and more virtualized environments as a result of more and more organizations moving towards virtualized desktop environments. "IT leverage of public sector is probably going to be faster than what we see in the enterprise sector. Telecom, banking, SMB , public sector in Sri Lanka would be the four strongest sectors for Cisco's future growth ," Malik said.