Sri Lanka, a very promising market for Cisco: MD
Cisco, a leader in digitisation and innovation front, sees Sri Lanka as a promising market in the eyes of Cisco India and SAARC Managing Director Sudhir Nayar.
Cisco sees a year-on-year (YOY) growth of 20 percent in Sri Lanka solely on Ciscobranded products and services, along with the company’s envisioned ever-increasing market share in the region.
Sudhir Nayar said that four key sectors they specialise in exclusively for the local (Sri Lankan) market are banking and finance, hospitality and retail, government and public sector (digital shift into egovernance) and manufacturing.
Despite mainstream competition on similar sectors, Cisco claims that it’s interest lies in assisting and pushing forward innovation and digitisation within Sri Lanka, pointing out the fast-paced infrastructure developments, increase in tourism rates, export-centric trading initiatives and most prominently, the local SME sector.
“Competition is good. It keeps us on our toes to innovate. We are the only ones that can walk into a SME or mid-market or large customer or government and offer the entire infrastructure which starts from the network, goes onto collaboration, makes it secure, and provides data centre technologies. There are very few players who can actually come closer to that,” Nayar said, referring to Cisco’s stance in Sri Lanka. “We are focusing on how we can get optimised architecture to our customers, and a balanced architecture which is secure. That’s reallywhat our innovation is focusing on rather than worrying about our competition.”
He further went on to say: “Our fight is against time to help our customers to go more digital in a shorter period of time. We’ve added over 100 customers in the SME sector in Sri Lanka within the past 12 months, and Colombo is 60-70 percent of that market. This shows that there is a need for digitisation. The need for digitisation comes from one simple thing; they all have to compete, not with another company in Sri Lanka, but with other companies around the world.”
Cisco has also partnered a selection of educational institutions in Sri Lanka, where it supplies the entire curriculum and study materials to the institutions under its ‘Net Academy’ programme, an initiative which aims to produce technically and theoretically advanced students for the IT industry, to prepare and take on the digital shift with Cisco. To date, this initiative has over 15,000 students passed out and highly qualified under it.