Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 01 | Page 45

INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Cabling Sven Jirgal, Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, Cisco Systems Capital Corp. We are basically there to help Cisco customers and partners adopt Cisco technology and provide the financial wrapper inventory that needs to be managed. Products are separated into those that have a secondary value and those that do not. Any product that has left the manufacturer and been shipped and has not been sold for any of the above reasons needs to be re-inspected. This needs to be done before it can be returned into the regular sales channels. Those products that have been used and returned as part of a lease financing arrangement also need to be refurbished. They are refreshed and upgraded as best as possible and on what makes sense. Finally those assets that have no secondary value are disposed in an ecologically friendly way. “Like any other company we have a reverse logistics function too where we take products back.” Cisco products that have been remanufactured and refurbished in this manner are made available for repurchase through the regular sales channels. A channel partner would see the inventory of these products with technical specifications similar to the inventory of other prime products. The only difference in the listing being the price and a suffix indicating the source www.intelligentcio.com originating through reverse logistics. For all purposes re-manufactured products follow the same ordering and shipping procedures, channel partners would earn the same rebates, and end customers would get the same service support, similar to any Cisco prime product. Contrary to first impressions, such remanufactured products have significant demand in certain applications areas and are not canabalising prime new products. “Where we see the most uptake for re-marketed products is actually in managed service applications. The customer does not care what product is actually used to deliver the managed service. And the service provider is looking for a cost effective way to deliver that service,” elaborates Jirgal. Traditionally, Cisco managed services has seen the most uptake in US, Western Europe, Japan. But Jirgal says the business has grown fourfold in the Gulf over the last 18 months, and includes the who is who of the industry. Managed services using re-manufactured Cisco equipment are a win-win situation for end users, channel partner and vendors. They use products that give the INTELLIGENTCIO 45