Partners: Cisco is Abandoning the SMB Market

Several of Cisco Systems’ (CSCO) partners feel they are getting the cold shoulder in the SMB space from the once-enthusiastic vendor.

The perceived lack of attention stems from the company’s plans to discontinue two of its most popular SMB products, the Unified Communications 500 and Business Edition 3000 offerings. The products were officially taken off Cisco’s list of available products as of January, according to CRN. But even though Cisco deemed the products to be obsolete, many of the company’s channel partners say their businesses are dependent on these two popular products.

Several anonymous Cisco partners voiced their concern in the article that Cisco had abandoned them for a newer line of enterprise-focused products. Now that the company has stopped supporting its widely used UC500 and BE3000 switches, many of these partners have been left with no way of supporting their SMB customers, they said.

"They have discontinued both of those boxes, which we had sold a significant amount of, and now I feel like [Cisco] is just bailing on our customers in that space," one Cisco SMB partner told CRN. “They don’t have the emphasis they did two years ago around SMB.”

In place of the defunct UC500 and BE3000 systems, Cisco is marketing its new Business Edition 6000 (BE6000) platform as a replacement to the former devices. But SMB partners say that since the BE6000 system is designed for larger enterprise users, scaling it down and implementation is more costly for the partners. While some of the partners are able to continue selling the BE6000, CRN says that others are beginning to look at competing platforms to stem their losses.

"I think [Cisco] made a very huge, strategic mistake getting rid of the BE3000," said one CEO of a Silver-level Cisco partner. "We just picked up another partnership with another phone vendor for those smaller-end deals. I love Cisco's products, and have a lot invested in them. But at the end of the day, I have to make money to pay my people."

While partners say they have been hurt by the loss of the UC500 and BE3000 systems, Cisco said it made the change to give its SMB customers access to more powerful feature sets. The company also said it has no intentions of giving up on its SMB business dealings in the future. The company even said that the number of partners holding Cisco SMB Specialization had increased 24 percent since February of last year, according to the CRN article.

"Cisco made the decision to end-of-life the small-business UC and voice platforms because our partners and customers were asking for simplicity, features and scalability, and not multiple product lines," said Richard McLeod, senior director of Worldwide Collaboration Channel Sales at Cisco.