Who is Mastersystem?

With over 27 years of operations, Mastersystem has become one of the leaders in Indonesia's system integration industry, providing end-to-end information and communication technology (ICT), infrastructure technologies, and advanced solutions to renowned corporations. A top Cisco Gold and CX Specialized Partner in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Mastersystem employs more than 600 technology professionals and has partnered with more than 30 globally renowned principals.

With a mission to be Indonesia's leader in ICT, Mastersystem is relentlessly focused on bringing value to all of its customers' stakeholders. The company empowers businesses with a broad range of innovative technologies, solutions, and services, including Digital Business Management, Enterprise Collaboration, Data Center and Cloud Infrastructure, Adaptive Security Architectures, and more. 

Headquartered in Jakarta, the organization supports customers throughout Indonesia, including Java, Sumatra, Kalimantan, and Papua. 

Market challenges inspire a change in mindset 

Like all successful technology leaders, Mastersystem listens closely to its customers and adjusts continually to keep its organization in sync with their current needs. Cybersecurity has become a key business imperative for its customers as the threat landscape has become more sophisticated. This renewed focus on minimizing risk created an opportunity for Mastersystem to realign its sales and support organization to serve customers better.  

"Attacks are becoming more prevalent, and cybersecurity is becoming increasingly important for our customers," explained Lintar Wardana, Director of Solution Engineering at Mastersystem. "However, our presales team was not effectively positioning Cisco solutions in security opportunities and faced challenges in articulating their value. In addition, post sales and operations teams found difficulty causing longer implementation time." 

With more than 20 years' experience in product and business development, professional services, and service delivery in the industry, Lintar turned to the Cisco Partner Organization and Cisco Customer Experience (CX) for assistance. With the partnership, Mastersystem began charting a fresh course for the organization, based on an outcome-driven approach to customers.  

A lifecycle approach to customer engagement 

The first step in evolving Mastersystem's strategy was to strengthen security sales capabilities. The organization initially requested a best practices and adoption hands-on workshop. The effort focused on business alignment and enabling closer collaboration between Mastersystem and Cisco. This helped Mastersystem identify knowledge gaps and acquire knowledge on adoption of Cisco best practices and use cases. 

More than 17 people at Mastersystem from its pre-sales, post sales, and support organization joined the Accelerator Adoption workshop to learn more about Cisco Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) best practices and Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs). 

"Our confidence in Cisco Secure solutions such as Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) and IPS was low before, but after the adoption workshop, our confidence has improved significantly," said Lintar. "We gained more knowledge about deployment best practices, how to create firewall policies, and also how to create reports, determine what is important to business outcomes, and share that information with customers. There had been many instances where our post-sales team used to discourage us in positioning Cisco firewalls, in favor of other solutions. I'm happy to share that they are more comfortable now."  

Looking beyond adoption toward the lifecycle 

Cisco also worked with Mastersystem's post-sales team to provide guidance beyond the adoption phase, sharing best practices to optimize and fine-tune the configurations. By focusing on the full lifecycle of the solution, Cisco and Mastersystem forged a strategy for sustaining long-term customer relationships.  

Mastersystem also engaged with several cross-functional Cisco teams that worked together to develop a custom lifecycle strategy plan for Mastersystem, including translation with help from local teams. 

Unlocking a financial services win

Mastersystem's early engagement on a lifecycle practice helped it gain a distinct competitive edge in closing a deal with a major financial services customer. One of the largest privately owned banks in Indonesia, the organization needed to strengthen its cybersecurity by expanding its firewall capabilities. 

Mastersystem collaborated closely with Cisco to move its selling approach beyond speeds and feeds and apply its outcome-focused approach to the engagement to achieve the win. 

"The initiative was an expansion of the bank's Cisco Firepower next-generation firewall deployment," said Lintar. "The customer had started with a deployment on its campus LAN, and wanted to expand to its server farm and other perimeter locations. Together with Cisco, we created a comprehensive report showing how Firepower could protect its campus LAN perimeter, and the types of attacks that the solution could prevent." 

The CX knowledge that Mastersystem gained also helped the organization reduce the time required for implementation and operations efforts, for an improved partner experience. 

Strengthening customer relationships over the long term

Although its initial CX transformation focused primarily on the adoption phase of the customer lifecycle, that step was just the beginning. Mastersystem is a mature Cisco partner that is continually expanding opportunities for frictionless on-time-renewals (OTR) and incremental annual recurring revenue (iARR). 

Cisco and Mastersystem enjoy a true partnership that is built around dialogue and an open exchange of ideas. Mastersystem is comfortable challenging Cisco with candid feedback about its solutions, and Cisco listens and responds to suggestions about ways it can improve its offerings to better meet its partner's needs.

A bright future together 

Mastersystem is looking forward to taking full advantage of the wealth of knowledge in the Cisco CX Success Portfolio that can provide better insights into customer needs. It is exploring CX Cloud, which provides a single pane of glass for customers to manage their IT operations through the Success Tracks suite of service capabilities: expert resources, trusted support, insights and analytics, and contextual learning. CX Cloud and Success Tracks can help guide Mastersystem customers to realize the most value from their Cisco technology investments. The team is also willing to explore and develop Cisco Partner Lifecycle Services for more potentials on services business. 

Cisco understands that when its partners succeed, Cisco succeeds. Building on their close relationship, the two innovative partners are forging a foundation for a new era of outcome-driven engagements with our customers.