Why Does Telcion Focus on Cisco?
We are often asked why Telcion is so focused on Cisco as our primary market partner. This is a great question, and there are many reasons that have led us to this conclusion.
Main Reasons
Cross-Platform Integration of Products
All of Cisco’s products are designed to integrate with each other. One problem with IT is that there can be a lot of finger-pointing between vendors. It’s expected that all vendor products will interoperate, but the reality is that they don’t. Or products will rely on each other in some form, but they don’t play nice in all situations. Cisco doesn’t look at each product individually, but how each product fits into the whole platform and suite of products. Because of this, they are able to provide more features and usability.
Cisco’s Size
You don’t have to worry about Cisco going anywhere. They aren’t going to be acquired. Instead, they are the buyer of smaller companies.
Ability to Specialize
Our team can be an expert in Cisco products because that’s all we focus on day in and day out. Our engineers don’t have to be jacks of all trades, trying to know every vendor product available in every segment. Our focus on Cisco allows them to specialize and become experts with specific products.
Telcion Differentiator
You get the confidence of dealing with an expert because all we focus on is Cisco. Whereas our competitors’ engineering staffs will have less expertise with any given product because they are spread thinner. It’s impossible to stay current on every product available, even within a given technology silo.
Support
As a partner, it’s easier for us to provide support to our clients who use one product suite. And it’s easier to keep our engineers trained on those products. More volume provides more opportunity within the Cisco ecosystem, and more support from Cisco overall for our company. More visibility within Cisco translates to better support for our clients.
Philosophy
We believe in the philosophy that one vendor integrating across multiple technology platforms is more useful, creates better solutions, and is easier to manage than multiple vendors.
Occasionally Cisco will get behind in a particular product segment, but over time they have a consistent track record of correcting and getting back ahead of the product innovation cycle. Cisco has an internal desire to be #1 or #2 in every product category. They relentlessly move towards this goal, investing more in R&D every year (more than 6 billion dollars in 2019) than most of their competitors make in revenue.
Ultimately, choosing a primary vendor is a philosophy for our clients. There aren’t necessarily right or wrong choices, just different choices. Not unlike those who are Mac vs. PC, or Android vs. iOS. We believe that fewer vendors is better and creates overall better solutions.
Other Vendors & Services
All of that said, there are certain areas of technology that Cisco doesn’t play in (storage, for example), and for those we must work with other vendors. In the security silo, there are many facets to a total solution which may require additional vendors. Hypervisors is another. So, where holes exist in the Cisco product line, we can fill in the gaps in order to solve our clients' needs.
Within IT, we concentrate on HPE Nimble for storage and SAN related solutions. We have deep expertise in VMware with multiple VMware certified professionals on staff. Microsoft server products are a given for our data center engineers. O365 migrations are typical. And there are numerous 3rd party products that we use for specialty voice applications for the phone and call center solutions we provide, especially around emergency notifications, paging, call recording, and call reporting. We also have our own custom developed monitoring platform that we sell as a service so that our clients do not have to manage an ever-changing platform.
Outside of IT, we have our own structured cabling business to provide copper and fiber solutions.
In the end, Telcion is in the business of providing custom IT solutions. While most of these solutions will revolve around Cisco technology, sometimes non-Cisco products are required to create these custom solutions.