SADA helps sell Cisco Unified Communications for Pennies a day

Great article in Channel Insider:

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Selling Unified Communications for Pennies a Day

Cisco moves closer to hardware-as-a-service with a per-user, per-day pricing plan that charges about as much as for a daily newspaper and includes upfront costs.

Do your customers like the idea of unified communications but balk at the upfront price tag? A new financing option from Cisco attempts to jump that sales roadblock by breaking down UC costs to a per-user, per-day price for the end user.

The program, announced Feb. 25, uses financing from Cisco Capital to create an HAAS (hardware as a service) model for selling unified communications to small and midsize businesses. VARs set the end-user price, and can use a calculator on the partner portal to determine what that price should be.

"If we break the price into monthly chunks, that's a much easier conversation than 'Could you write me a check for $30,000?'" said Brad Kowerchuk, president of Bralin Technology Solutions, a Cisco partner in Saskatchewan, Canada.

"I think hardware as a service is where we ultimately can go with this," Kowerchuk said. "Photocopier guys have known this for decades. You pay them a maintenance fee, cut them a small check every month. With hardware as a service we are really just going in those footsteps." 

Typically the per-day, per-user prices will be around the cost of a daily newspaper, according to Maryann Von Seggern, director of worldwide channels at Cisco Capital. Cisco showed some prepared examples of how the program could be implemented. For 22 users on a 36-month term, the price offered could be as low as 82 cents per user per day. On a 60-month term, pricing would drop to 62 cents per user per day. For 73 users a company would pay $1.15 per user per day for a 46-month term, or 86 cents per user per day for a 60-month term.