In less than a week, partners from around the globe will join Cisco executives and marketing thought leaders in Las Vegas for Cisco Partner Velocity 2012. This exclusive three-day event is all about you—helping partners “amp up” their marketing efforts. Don’t worry if you can’t attend in person: there will be lots of coverage from the event and replays so you won’t miss a thing.
Next week, we’ll host the very best and brightest marketing experts and they will share their insights on a range of topics such as:
How to scale your business through integrated campaigns
Creating distinction using social media
Understanding and leveraging marketing techniques
Marketing best practices to accelerate your business
And much more!
Some of Partner Velocity’s guest speakers include:
Dr. Martha Rogers, recognized for her one-to-one marketing
Daniel Pink, bestselling author and journalist
Chris Brogan, bestselling co-author and columnist
What else can partners expect to learn? Read More »
Overnight sensations, right? If only it were that easy. The truth is these international pop stars spent their early years perfecting their craft before hitting it big. The same can be said about World Wide Technology (WWT), Cisco’s largest reseller to the United States Federal Government.
Founded in 1990, WWT has grown from a mere startup to a $4 billion+ organization with more than 1,700 employees. Their success secret? A relentless focus on their people, processes, and partnerships—including their close partnership with Cisco. Also of note is their ability to look ahead, anticipating profitable market shifts.
One of those is occurring now in the energy sector. Utilities around the world are eager to modernize energy grids with intelligent infrastructure. While Cisco is ready to help partners meet those needs with its recently introduced Connected Grid portfolio, WWT is also fully on board to generate new sources of revenue.
John Rohde, WWT’s energy and utility practice manager, recently shared his thoughts on what’s required for partners to thrive in the energy sector. Read More »
Over the next several years, worldwide consumer Internet traffic is expected to increase fivefold, reaching a compound annual growth rate of 36 percent.
I’m no mathematician, but I’m guessing that amounts to a whole lot of traffic. It also means that your service provider customers will need to keep pace to ensure they have enough network capacity to support the accelerated demand.
Leverage this new specialization to help your service provider customers create, enable, and integrate a variety of high-quality video, mobility, and cloud solutions for businesses and consumers alike—all on a single IP-based network.
Want to find out how you can benefit from this architecture specialization, and how it can help you differentiate? Read More »
Think cloud isn’t the next big thing in the evolution of IT? By 2015, experts predict cloud traffic will grow 12 times to reach 1.6 zettabytes—yes, zettabytes. That’s more than four days of business-class video for every single person on the planet.
So listen up, partners. Cisco is backing cloud 100 percent, and they’re ready to work with you to help enable the world of many clouds. Whether it’s planning, building, or running clouds, the opportunities are enormous. There’s also a great deal of complexity.
But not to worry. Cisco has you covered.
As part of its Cloud Partner Program, Cisco is offering Collaborative Professional Services (CPS) for Cloud. This Cisco Services offering shares intellectual capital, smart service innovation, demand generation, and a global delivery infrastructure with partners—all to help you develop profitable cloud solutions that will put a smile on every customer’s face.
Believe me. Your enterprise, service provider, small business, and government customers want a trusted cloud advisor. By transitioning to cloud, they’re likely to reduce costs, increase efficiency, and gain strategic advantage. Wonder who they’ll thank for the help? Read More »
Imagine running a call center where all of your phones rang for a single call and your operators had to roshambo to decide who would answer. Pure chaos, right? Well, that describes the situation Wayfair (formerly CSN Stores) was in before INX (recently acquired by Presidio) stepped in to upgrade and enhance their networking capabilities. (Okay, maybe without the roshambo part, but still chaotic nonetheless.)
Wayfair is the largest online retailer in the home goods space. As they grew from a two-person company to one with 800 employees, they looked to INX to provide various network solutions—from expanding their older VoIP-based telephony solution to designing and implementing a scalable Cisco Unified Communications/Collaboration Solution.
Wayfair Co-founder and Chairman Steve Conine says, “We really needed to upgrade to a system that had much more sophisticated routing and better tie-in with our call order system. Having the ability to take advantage of some of the Cisco wireless phone technology for the operators on the floor and the warehouse has been pretty neat.”
Steve also gives glowing reviews of INX. “Over the years, working with INX, they’ve really become a trusted advisor to our IT operations group.”
But INX didn’t become Wayfair’s trusted advisor overnight. Watch as Steve shares why INX continues to be a group he relies on when it comes to providing network solutions.
Know it, use it, sell it. That’s going to be my new motto this year. The idea behind this credo is that before you sell a product, you have to know the product inside out and use it day-to-day--only then can you truly understand what your customers need and want.
In this episode of Partner Update, we learn how one Cisco partner fully embraces this motto in its hosted UCS practice and how this is impacting their sales.
We also cover Cisco switching innovations, a new ad campaign to reach customers, a pop quiz, partner tools for success in 2012, powering up connected grids, building a bulletproof networks for gamers, how to rock the Cius, and more.
Tune in and get all of your Cisco partner news, in less than five short minutes.
For a full transcript of what we covered, including links and time stamps so you can easily find information, keep reading. Read More »
Let’s face it: Providing quantifiable value and cost savings while convincing customers of their return on investment, can often make or break a deal. However, the advent of architecture-based solutions and the increasing need for consultative services are helping drive partners’ success and growth. But in the negotiation phase, how can partners think creatively to help provide analysis and assessments to customers?
As you look for new revenue opportunities, what helps propel you ahead of the pack and helps differentiate you from the competition?
Cisco Gold partner Presidio completed an RFP for Tyler Independent School District in Texas and was competing for the business with another solutions provider. What helped to win Tyler’s trust was the ROI analysis they shared with the district’s superintendent.
Tyler Independent School District has 18,000 students, but only had a 4:1 student to desktop ratio. Additionally, thousands of the district’s PCs were seven, eight, or nine years old – completely incapable of running Windows 7 or new applications. IT was struggling to keep up with management and maintenance issues, as well as security challenges. Additionally, the district wanted to enable a BYOPC (bring your own PC) policy but lacked the equipment, tools, and bandwidth to do so.
So how did Presidio solve the district’s IT problems and save the schools money, too? Read More »
Do your customers talk about optimizing team performance? Do they struggle with new ways to increase their competitive edge? Are they looking for ways to scale their most precious resources? Then it’s time for you to step up as your customers’ collaboration expert.
Collaboration will be the business opportunity of the decade, and partners who can help move their customers through this transition will see their revenue grow. But you have to be able to speak the language of collaboration and understand its true meaning in a connected world.
But how do you learn and embrace this new language?
A new book provides the lowdown you need to share how improved collaboration represents the best opportunity for business leaders to tap the full range of talents of their people, move with greater speed and flexibility, and compete to win over the next decade.
In today’s economic climate, a value-conscious shopper may look to wholesalers such as Costco to stock up on household goods. I frequently find myself at Costco versus specialty stores, because I know I can get the same high-quality olive oil at a fraction of the price.
And when you switch out the olive oil for network solutions, the concept remains the same.
Earlier this week, I shared a blog post about Nexus IS’ experience with wholesaler Neutral Tandem’sCisco Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS) proof-of-concept trial. We got to hear the VAR’s side of the story, but I knew you’d want to know more. So I checked in with Ian Neale, Neutral Tandem’s VP of Product Marketing, and asked him to give me an insider’s look at his company’s wholesale model.
What I really wanted to find out was what our partners could expect when working with them, and, more important, how they can help partners increase their revenue opportunities. Want to know what I learned? Read More »
a) Every second, one hour of video is being uploaded to YouTube.
b) Four years from now, there will be 7.1 billion mobile connected devices.
c) By 2015, Internet traffic volume will be the equivalent of downloading every movie ever made.
d) All of the above.
I’ll give you a moment to ponder…give up? The answer is d: all of the above.
Are your customers ready for this influx of data, video, and devices? Not to worry. Cisco has you—and your customers’ networks—covered.
Today, Cisco is again leading in switching innovation by supporting 100, 40, and 10 Gigabit over Ethernet (GE) for Cisco Nexus and Catalyst switches. These advancements are fully scalable, intelligent, and cloud-ready—and apply to the campus and data center.
For partners, this provides a very profitable opportunity to help customers improve and upgrade their networks as they embrace cloud computing and mobility, continue to load up the network with video, and struggle to get their arms around the data deluge.
So how do you begin the conversation with customers? Read More »
Would you buy a car from a dealership where none of the salesmen knew how to drive? Or order prime rib at a restaurant where the chef was a strict vegetarian? What about when it comes to your customer’s network? Are you willing to risk installing products that you don’t have firsthand experience with? I’m guessing the answer is “no.”
When making purchases, big or small, customers want to have confidence that the company they partner with has in-depth knowledge and can stand behind the products they sell. Consider Amy Smith, Director of Collaboration at Nexus IS and a Cisco Gold Certified Partner. She’s committed to live by her company’s marketing motto: “Know it, use it, sell it.”
This was the case when Nexus IS decided to add Cisco’s Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS) — an offering that allows partners to provide a wide range of Cisco collaboration applications to their customers as a subscriber-based service—to its portfolio. Their first step was to go the wholesale route and participate in Neutral Tandem’s proof-of-concept trial. This was an easy decision, since Nexus IS always tests new products on its own network before installing them on a customer’s network. It’s all about fully understanding, embracing, and discovering best practices of a product before offering it for sale.
Think HCS would be a great addition to your list of offerings?
Learn about Nexus IS’ trial experience and why the timing is right for the HCS market. Read More »
Before we could write, film videos, watch TV, or tweet, stories served as the way to share information and convey data.
But even in the digital age with information coming at us from every angle every second, it’s the power of stories that compel us to buy, that make our customers trust us, and it’s how the best marketers convey information.
Cisco’s new Built for the Network campaign is helping us to reach out to customers through videos and success stories that we’re currently rolling out via television, print, digital, mobile and social media. These stories showcase the power of Cisco and its partners and we want to ensure that you have the tools to spread the word, through this and your own campaigns. I would also like you to participate and will show you how.
First, watch the most recently launched commercial.
Keep reading for details on how to participate in the campaign and reach more customers. (It could be your business featured in an upcoming commercial or video.)
Have you heard the news? 3D versions of the Star Warsmovies will begin rolling out in 2012. I know some sci-fi geeks…ah, friends…who can hardly wait.
Me, I prefer Force 3. I like to think of them as the living, breathing version of Star Wars. No Darth Vaders, no jittery C-3POs, but plenty of Luke Skywalkers—regular “heroes” intent on designing technology solutions with a relentless focus on meeting their customers’ business needs.
But what really grabs my attention in their video below is that Force 3 gets it, they truly do. As a thriving Cisco Master Partner, pushing products isn’t on their intergalactic radar— it’s not even within low-earth orbit.
So if it’s not selling gear, what’s Force 3’s strategy for success? Read More »
If I were cooking lobster risotto for the first time, I probably wouldn’t just leave it to trial and error, hoping for the best. I would go to my favorite website for recipes that had already been tested by fellow home chefs. It’d either be that or order pizza again.
So, when it comes to networks, wouldn’t it be great if there was a similar resource—a place you could tap into to find successful “recipes” for building your customer’s network without having to start from scratch?
Well, there actually is a resource available to Cisco partners and it’s free! Cisco SMART Designs is a portfolio of validated and replicable network solutions, optimized to meet the needs of Cisco partners serving small business customers with up to 250 users. By removing the guesswork from building the right network for your customers, you can make your operation more profitable and help protect your customers’ investments.
If that isn’t enough to convince you to tap into this free resource, how about this fun fact?
Select partners worldwide using Cisco SMART Designs have 52 percent higher average quarterly bookings than those who don’t.
Ready to get started? Read on to learn more about the benefits of using Cisco SMART Designs and how to access this free resource today. Read More »
Are your customers asking for a network with poor performance, inadequate security, lack of application visibility, and complex management? Probably not. More likely they ask for a network that’s efficient, easy to set up, and doesn’t take up too much space in the closet.
Just consider this hypothetical customer situation…
Your customer’s branch office has 150 employees, 45-Mbps WAN bandwidth, an IP voice system, and WAN acceleration to optimize the connection to the head office. The office also has custom applications it runs on a small server. Here’s your riddle: what vendor’s solution can you deploy that would support your customer’s needs and offer:
50% fewer devices
43% fewer capital expenditures
57% fewer OpEx over 5 years
49% less overall cost over 5 years
Find out the answer and read our white paper with all the details. Read More »
In less than a week, partners from around the globe will join Cisco executives and marketing thought leaders in Las Vegas for Cisco Partner Velocity 2012. This exclusive three-day event is all about you—helping partners “amp up” their marketing efforts. Don’t worry if you can’t attend in person: there will be lots of coverage from the event and replays so you won’t miss a thing.
In today’s economic climate, a value-conscious shopper may look to wholesalers such as 
If I were cooking lobster risotto for the first time, I probably wouldn’t just leave it to trial and error, hoping for the best. I would go to 
