Cisco Capital has announced a $2.5 billion (U.S.) program designed to offer many customers the option to buy the company’s technology now and pay later.

Under the Business Resiliency Program, the networking giant’s financing arm is offering customers the option to defer most of the payments until 2021 for the technology they may need or want today. Under the program, customers will be offered first a 90-day payment holiday to start any purchase, then pay the equivalent of one percent of the deal value for the balance of 2020, with regular payments beginning in 2021, based on terms of between three and five years.

The program will be available for customers purchasing any Cisco hardware, software, or services, and payments can include partner services such as installation or managed services up to five percent of the total deal value.

Mark Collins, vice president of the partner organization for Cisco Canada, said the program supports customers through what Cisco sees as the four phases businesses are likely to go through as the result of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic — respond, reflect, rethink, and recover.

Most customers today are in the respond phase right now, which includes a surge in demand as partners source technology to support businesses forced to implement work-from-home in a hurry. And the program will support that. But Collins stressed that it will also be there to support customers as they “set the stage for what they think recovery will look like.”

“It wil let them reprioritize the technology they need to accelerate their recovery,” Collins said. “It’s about enabling [customers’] innovation strategies and helping them get back to productivity as best they can.”

It’s also a program that can help solution providers’ own cash flow. As with all Cisco Capital offerings through partners, partners get paid up-front based on the full value of the deal.

“I’m so pleased to see we’re acknowledging the criticality of our partners’ services to our customers’ success” by including partner services in eligibility for the programs, Collins said. “Cisco Capital has been a key differentiator for us and for our partners for decades.”

In recent years, the Capital business has been popular due to the drive towards more cloud-like and OPEX-based IT spending. And it Collins said it will continue to be a key part of what the vendor and its partners offer to the market as customers try to reconcile short-term and potentially long-term cash flow challenges with the need to bring on new technology to support recovery from those same challenges.

Initially, the focus will likely be on that response phase, which has seen technology support for work-from-home go from what Collins described as mostly “a possibility or a curiosity” to “absolute table stakes to function.” 

But there’s no cap on the duration of the program, Collins said, and the same supports will also be valuable to both customers and partners as customers emerge from that initial rush and start to take a longer-term view for what their businesses will need and want to survive and flourish post-COVID-19.

The same financing terms are available both on new Cisco equipment and on refurbished gear offered through its Cisco Refresh program.

The Business Resiliency Program is part of the second wave of Cisco’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which started last year with the announcement of $225 million (U.S.) in cash and product donations, as well as 90-day free trials for new customers to its Webex meeting and collaboration products and many of its cloud-based security offerings.

It’s also part of a broader trend towards offering flexible financing to keep IT spending going. In recent weeks, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise has offered a similar program, and distributors including Ingram Micro Canada and D&H Canada have touted additional financing dollars and flexibility to support their channel partner customers.