Network Ninja

Last night in Johannesburg (13th August 2008) Cisco announced the winner of the Extreme Business Makeover Competition.

This competition might just be the thing a growing SMB needs to get more competitive, agile and ready for business in the fast paced economy of today so that the SMB can communicate at the speed of business unlike Extreme Makeover: Home Edition that’s the show where the people go and demolish the families house, build a totally new house and pimp it out with stuff the family couldn’t afford in the first place in a month of Sundays.

Where this prize from Cisco will be different from the Extreme Makeover: Home Edition is that

• Cisco products are reliable in that they generally don’t just break down,
• Cisco products and solutions are well integrated and
• If one compares apples with apples Cisco products are cost effective (I’m not going to go get technical here but comparing other SMB products and what you get between vendors I feel Cisco is very well priced with lots of Enterprise Class Technology).

For SMB companies that are struggling with managing vast amounts of data in a secure, reliable and cost effective manner there really is only one technology partner that offers you complete peace of mind in one neat package. All this while offering employees, customers, partners, and vendors access information anywhere and any time without breaking the bank.

On the topic of breaking the bank generally SMB business have cash-flow issues because operational activities take precedence over large capital expenditure projects and Cisco knows this and run amazing leasing deals and rentals offers (recently prime less 4%) for those of us not lucky enough to get this kit for free.

But now back to the competition; The competition was launched in March 2008 and invited local businesses to compete for the first price of a total network transformation featuring all the pimped out Cisco products and solution worth R 300,000 ( $ 37,500 USD). In Cisco products and solutions that should do some heavy pimping!

The winner of the first prize was a company by the name of redpeg a SETA accredited education and training services provider that offers training programs and workplace interventions. The company broadly operates within the workplace HIV/Aids arena and consults to businesses of all sizes to enable them to build capacity to implement manageable and sustainable HIV/Aids workplace programmes.