Cisco had contingency plans in case around a third of its channel looked like failing in the recent recession. Now that this looks less likely, it has revealed some of the views it held at the time.

Edison Peres, Senior Vice President, Worldwide Channels Go-to-Market, says it had "real fears over the loss to the industry - we had thought that up to a third of the partners were going to disappear - merge or fail or be bought. The channel took a long time to build and we were worried how many might go."

Cisco set up a "storm-tracker" system whereby partners could indicate how likely they were to sell up or be in the market to acquire. "We didn't publicise it at the time, but we did some match-making. this was all about preserving the skills in the business . We've been doing this now for eighteen months, We found that the number of partners putting themselves up for sale was less than expected - which means that they are managing themselves through the downturn. Some of our incentives helped this, but also they found they were in the market with an aspiration of a price, that was higher than others would pay, but they managed to stay in anyway."

"What we actually saw was the number of failures in the marketplace was less than previous recessions."

And the irony is that, because channels cut back on costs severely, Cisco tracking of their profitability shows them as making more money than they did the previous year when they were investing in growth.

"We do this survey every year and 90% of partners participate and want to know what is happening. We give them the aggregate position overall. This coming year -we don't necessarily expect profits to fall back - what happened before was that they were investing a lot in the growth market. It will be interesting to see," he adds.