Cisco Launchpad: A platform for startups to build digital businesses

Today, in its sprawling Bengaluru campus, Cisco announced its new initiative - LaunchPad - a platform for developers and the startup community. The company says that the platform is designed to help startups, its authorised channel partners and developers scale their solutions, address newer markets and build digital businesses. Besides, Cisco will also provide them with space at its Bengaluru campus along with access to a suite of Cisco technologies and free grants to those chosen to work at its campus.

Amit Phadnis, President, Engineering and India site leader tells Tech2, “This is a unique program wherein we are bringing together startup communities, partner communities and Cisco from a technology perspective. We have a clear purpose of creating technology solutions for the 3 billion people using 50 billion devices that will get connected to the Internet. There is a tremendous amount of change happening around us and some of these problems cannot be solved by one company, and the reason why we are taking a ecosystem approach. Its different from usual accelerators as not only plan to help startups succeed, get funding and mentorship from talent from Cisco India and globally, but also co-create solutions that can be taken to the market, which is unique about Launchpad.”

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Cisco LaunchPad will involve a rigorous selection process which will be based on viability of applicants’ business plans, strength of their teams and their alignment with the company’s digitisation vision. “It doesn’t matter if its an early stage or late stage startup, we are looking at intersting and innovative ideas that can be used to solve problems of people, societies and the government. Also, in what way Cisco can complement the purpose with our existing technologies and what our partners can help with. In a nutshell, a startup with innovative technology and vision to solve a larger problem, along with the willingness to work with a larger ecosystem,” Phadnis said.

Through LaunchPad, the startups will work on solving business relevant problems by catering to cases identified and validated by Cisco go-to-market teams. Phadnis explains that solving a problem requires more than one technology. “If we talk about IoT, healthcare, agriculture or smart cities. There are multiple solutions for these. To solve any of these you need multiple technologies. For instance, for educational sector - you’ll require analytics, video and data analytics, cloud-based technologies, collaboration tech, content management and, distribution, and so on. There is a tech basket and solution basket, and many technologies can help solve one problem.”

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Cisco has teamed up with Tech Mahindra to co-develop digital solutions for Indian electric utilities. Both will work with select startups and developers to accelerate digitisation. L Ravichandran, President and COO at Tech Mahindra, who was also present at the event said that the company is working closely with Cisco to bring the power of digitisation to millions of people.

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Also, present at the event, and discussing the startup ecosystem were KS Viswanathan, VP, Nasscom and Ravi Gururaj, Product Council and member, Nasscom. Cisco already runs Cisco Digitisation Acceleration and Cisco Investment programs in India.