Cross Channel: Apple iPhone Sales Dive And Cisco Cuts 5,500 Jobs

Welcome to Cross Channel, a weekly round up of the most pertinent stories from our sister site ChannelBiz, where you can find out all the latest developments, views and strategies from the world of the channel.

Apple smartphone sales to end users dive globally

Apple saw an 8 percent decline in smartphone sales to end users in the second quarter, according to analyst Gartner, as it lost further ground to Samsung.

Global sales of smartphones to end users totalled 344 million units in the second quarter of 2016, a 4.3 percent increase over the same period in 2015, according to the analyst house.

“Demand for premium smartphones slowed in the second quarter of 2016 as consumers wait for new hardware launches in the second half of the year,” said Anshul Gupta, an analyst at Gartner.

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Juniper Networks updates Partner Advantage Programme

To account for “changing business models and customer demands” Juniper has created new categories within its Elite partner tier.

With the inclusion of new sub-categories including Next Gen and Rising Star, partners will be placed at the “optimal part of the programme best suited to their specific business needs and individual circumstances”, said Juniper.

In addition, Juniper has also announced the introduction of a flexible points-based rewards programme, supporting partners who continue to invest and grow within the channel community.

Launching 1 September, the new programme will help partners manage, track and close on deals more quickly, the network vendor says.

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Cisco axes another 5,500 on the back of good profits

Cisco is making another 5,500 staff redundant on the back of stagnant full year sales results of $49.2 billion, and a 2 percent dip in sales for the fourth quarter. Despite the lower sales, net income for the year jumped 20 percent to $10.7 billion.

The staff cull represents around 7 percent of the company’s global workforce, and follows similar cuts in 2012, 2013 and 2014, although major reductions were not made last year.

With revenues from networking hardware on their way down, Cisco is now expected to focus on services and software- and cloud-based security and networking offerings, including software-defined networking (SDN) solutions

There were reports that surfaced this week that the jobs cull this time round could actually reach 14,000, which would have represented about 20 percent of the global workforce.

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Price still wins out on multi-cloud purchasing decisions

Despite organisations pursuing multi-cloud strategies to ensure business continuity, resilience and performance, research shows that cloud purchasing decisions are still almost entirely focused on pricing.

In a survey of 1,821 IT decision makers, the most important business drivers for the adoption of multi-cloud deployments were:

To ensure business continuity across multiple sites (77 percent of respondents)
To increase resilience (74 percent)
To reduce operational expenditure (70 percent)
To reduce capital expenditure (69 percent)

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