Ricoh Australia has joined a select group of Cisco partners, garnering gold status, as the IT services provider continues to expand its Cisco business.

Matt Dixon, Ricoh Australia general manager of IT services, says Cisco has been an integral partner for the technology company's growth, helping the company become ‘a major player' in the Australian IT services market.

“Ricoh became a silver partner three years ago and since this time our Cisco business has grown significantly,” Dixon says.

“We have developed our own Cisco backed maintenance service branded as NetSupport, which has rapidly grown to 40 clients, and doubled our Cisco engineering staff to develop our national service capability,” he adds.

The Gold Certification provides Ricoh with access to additional sales, technical and lifecycle services training and support from Cisco.

In order to attain the certification, partners are required to meet rigorous standards across networking competency, service, support and customer satisfaction.

Ricoh achieved Cisco advanced specialisations in enterprise networks architecture, security architecture, collaboration architecture and data center architecture, as part of the Gold requirements for attaining the broadest range of expertise across multiple technologies.

The company says it has also integrated Cisco Hybrid IT, the resale of cloud and managed services, into its offerings to ensure high customer satisfaction in collaboration with Cisco.