How are channel partners included in the emerging technology group?
The whole channel question is a key aspect of our due diligence of entering a market space and looking at possible acquisitions. We look at what complementary assets Cisco already has to get us into a space, then we focus on the outside. The outside is customers and partners. We look at the market to see how we will sell, and this is where our channel partners come in. We have a channel organization that is, of course, adept at selling our products. Quite often they have a lot of skills that in the past we havent tapped in to. It turns out that many of our partners who sell our routers, switches and telephony also have a business in physical security. When we decided to go into the physical security market, we had conversations with our channel partners to ask if they could teach us something. We asked them to validate some of the product ideas we were considering. We also asked for some competitive analysis to see how our product would be perceived against the established players. For
