Cambium Networks plans a growth story together with its partners

Cambium Networks takes pride in its channel and considers it as one of its growth vehicle, responsible for taking its products and solutions successfully to the market. Ron Ryan, Vice President Global Channels - Cambium Networks shares his insights with VARINDIA of what he feels about the India market -   

Cambium views the Indian market as probably the fastest growing and the largest single opportunity with a broad network of partner community. In a short time, it has emerged as the second largest market globally for Cambium. 

“We have over 200 people in our design centre in Bangalore and have just started our repair center out of the same Bangalore facility. We have tremendous focus on the market and are committed to India in a big way,” says Ron Ryan, VP Global Channels - Cambium Networks.

Cambium that was crafted out of Motorola, historically started as a channel company. It has stayed and grown as a channel company since then and the majority of its business, (which is close to 98%) is done through channel partners even today. 

“The channel will remain the go to market for us in future. We believe that the channel gives us the leverage and the reason that Cambium offers a broad portfolio of products and services, we could not have reached to the kind of market that we are trying to get by just having Cambium employees alone. So we recognised that if we really want to be successful, it was going to be through the partners. We think that we have the right kind of partners in the right kind of places in the right kind of segments,” Ron states.  

Cambium had initially focused its business on the ISP market; so service providers was the backbone for the Cambium product portfolio which was largely in the WISP market (wireless internet service providers). But the WISP market itself is extremely broadwith thousands of ISPs across different markets globally. 

“To add to the fact, we have brought in the Wi-Fi product portfolio to cater to the home and the ISP segment. We have also created an entirely new customer basewhere we are now recruiting partners specifically for enterprise and Wi-Fi products. We also have added IIoT to our product portfolio which are again industrial opportunities and that requires a separate kind of partner base. So primarily, we have verticals in 3 major categories that requires a broad partner network to cover it. This explains why we are so much dependent on our channel,” explains Ron.

One of the challenges of selling products across multiple verticals is to have a single channel program. Historically, the Motorola channel was more of industrial focused, whereas now with the Wi-Fi product line, Cambium is more enterprise focused. Though there are a lot of similar programs that cater to both these customer segments, one cannot have the same discounts across these different portfolio. This creates some complexity. 

“At Cambium, we have conceptualised a 2 step program in which we have a 2 tier channel; it sells primarily to distributors who sell further to value added resellers and resellers across the world. So it is a single program that basically flows across a 2 tier partner model across multiple tier industries and verticals,” says Ron.

Ron however feels that there are a lot of commonality between partners across the world.“I get three basic questions from every partner irrespective of the industry, which county they are from, or who they are. They want to know three specific things - 

•    If I do work for you and design your products into somebody’s network, how would you protect me? 
•    If I do all this work, how much can I make?
•    How do you create the market demand, or how would you help me to create that demand? 

Most of these resellers by and large are very small companies; they do not have a large marketing budget and so what becomes important for them is what and how a principal vendor will provide them opportunities or allow them to find those opportunities. So, based on my experience in India, US and South America, these three questions are the primary things that partners are concerned. At Cambium we try to address these 3 things by trying to build a simple program and listening to our partners carefully so that we can come out with ways of how they can make money. At any partner conference, our CEO would always say that Cambium wants its partners to make money, as long as they are focussed on doing business.”

For the past 14 quarters, Cambium has been experiencing 20% growth quarter on quarter. For the next few quarters, given the kind of business that it has been doing, the company expects a 30 - 40% growth.