Cisco SMB SA
Over the past dozen years, Cisco Systems has established their dominance over the global market for major corporate networking application hardware. Then, just a few years ago, the Company bought into the lower-end market with its acquisition of Linksys, a major supplier of wireless networking hardware for the home market. However, Cisco’s major share in these two market segments left a large, under-served gap in between.

Since 2005, Cisco has been developing networking hardware solutions with which to attack the market for small- and medium-sized businesses. As a part of this effort, Cisco developed a new level of service targeted at this segment of the commercial market, Small Medium Business Support Assistant (SMB SA). This service level offers end-users affordable software and call-in support.

Close by their side, TimelyText writers have provided documentation development resources to support this new market segment. The unique challenges represented by the SMB SA market include:

• Small- and medium-sized businesses need greater networking capability than home networks, but do not have dedicated staffing structures to install and maintain complex equipment.
• Small- and medium-sized businesses need significant levels of support, but cannot afford to pay for the same large-scale support licenses that large businesses enjoy.

To date, TimelyText has consistently provided value-added documentation support to Cisco’s SMB SA products for more than a year, including over 80 percent of the SMB SA content for the Cisco website. During that time, Cisco’s commitment to their new market segment has continued to gain momentum, even in the face of the market’s formidable challenges for balancing product simplicity and support costs against affordable pricing.