Channels Your Voice Within the Cisco Channel Partner Community

Align Your Marketing to the Way Businesses Buy

In this latest video from last week’s Partner Velocity event, I talk to speaker Hugh Macfarlane, author of “The Leaky Funnel.” He shares insights about the way businesses buy and important steps for moving customers through the sales cycle more quickly.

As he points out, we have a fixed view of the way we’d like to sell—a set of steps we take—and it’s all about what we want. What about the buyer? What’s their process? And, more importantly, how can we help them move through it more quickly? Watch this interview to find out.

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Posted by Alexandra Krasne at 04:58PM PST

Idea Guy Marc Lewis Shares Formula for Creativity

Continuing our Partner Velocity video interview series, I talk to Marc Lewis—Dean of the School of Communication Arts, successful entrepreneur, and all-around Idea Guy. Lewis led an engaging session “The Creative Formula” at Partner Velocity in Paris that helped attendees harness creativity and think in new ways.

Lewis uses unconventional, but very effective, ways to brainstorm; he taught attendees how to do the same. By generating many ideas at the beginning of a project, rather than hitting the delete key or listening to your inner critic, he says you’ll get one or two golden ideas that you can then develop further. There are many other enemies of creative thinking, which Lewis highlights in this video interview that was captured at the event.

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Posted by Alexandra Krasne at 10:06PM PST

B2B Marketing is Boring, but Doesn’t Have to Be

This week in Paris, more than 150 Cisco partners from around the world convened at Partner Velocity where they learned marketing tips, tricks, and proven techniques. At the event, a list of renowned speakers and experts talked on topics ranging from B2B marketing, generating new ideas, the eight commandments of social media, to personal branding, the sales funnel, and video.

Many of the talks and break out sessions will be posted on the Velocity web site in the coming weeks, so be sure to check back. I’ll also be posting interviews with the speakers here on the blog so you’ll get the key takeaways from these sessions.

In the first interview, I talk to Martin Lindstrom, author of the book “Buyology.” He’s known for his work and research around buying habits and what drives B2B spending. In this interview, he talks about B2B marketing and the fact that so many companies turn it into “boring-to-boring” marketing. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

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Posted by Alexandra Krasne at 12:02AM PST

What Partners Are Saying About the New Collaboration Solutions

Cisco’s new collaboration solutions announced yesterday hold the promise of collaborating and communicating in new ways. Given the broad scope of the tools—from WebEx Mail, a hosted email solution, to the InterCompany Media Engine, a a solution that offers business-to-business wide band audio, voice and other collaboration capabilities—the possibilities (and differentiation) are endless.

To find out what partners are saying about the new solutions, we grabbed our trusty Flip camera and talked to a couple of partners, Derek Downs of VocalMash, and Kevin DeMers of CDW, in the halls at the Collaboration Partner Summit in San Francisco.

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Posted by Alexandra Krasne at 02:39PM PST

New Collaboration Tools Mean New Ways to Work

A multitude of new collaboration tools announced today, simply put, will help improve communications and bring us closer to an easy one-button approach. TelePresence, Unified Communications, and WebEx solutions have all been updated with new capabilities—for instance, a new feature called TelePresence WebEx Engage is a one-button solution that integrates video between TelePresence and WebEx conferencing.

A new enterprise social software program lets groups of participants create and manage video communities—videos can be shared, tagged, and delivered through RSS feeds. That tool might prove especially useful when communicating with those in disparate locations. Those are just a few of the new solutions.

Richard McLeod, Senior Director of Collaboration Solutions at Cisco, walks us through some of the other new solutions, new ways to differentiate as partners, and new ways to work.

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Posted by Alexandra Krasne at 02:38PM PST

Global Economic Recovery on the Horizon?

While there are some signs pointing to a global economic recovery, some news articles and pundits are “cautiously optomistic” while others are doom and gloom saying that the global economy is not yet bouncing back.

Rather than postulate on what could be, I decided to talk with some of Cisco’s Europe and Emerging Market partners at the recent Partner Operations Advisory Board Meeting in Madrid to get their take on the economy in their regions. From France to Lebanon, partners had different insights to share about the current climate and whether an upturn is imminent.

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Posted by Alexandra Krasne at 11:19AM PST

Transforming IT with the Virtual Computing Environment

At Cisco, we are our partners. Which is why today’s Virtual Computing Environment Coalition announcement is about you and how we can forge ahead together in a new collaborative world.

Cloud computing and virtualization have transformed the way we do IT. Worldwide spending on data center technology infrastructure and services exceeds $350 billion annually, according to McKinsey and Company estimates. It is also estimated that approximately $85 billion, or 20% of this total market, can be addressed with data center virtualization and private cloud technology by 2015.

Today Cisco and EMC, together with VMware, are transforming the way we help accelerate migration. The VBlock Infrastructure Package, which you’ll learn more about in this video, will create a market disruption and a tremendous opportunity for our partners.

What are the key elements of today’s announcement?

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Posted by Alexandra Krasne at 07:24AM PST

Revolutionizing the Data Center with UCS C-Series

At the recent Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco, I caught up with Glenn Keels (Cisco’s Director of Unified Computing System Product Marketing) where we discussed the zippy new  UCS C-Series servers which promise to bring speed, efficiency, and agility to data centers everywhere.

In this video, we take a peek inside the top-of-the-line C-250 and ooh and ahh over its Intel Xeon 5500 series processor, 10-Gbps Ethernet, industry standard FCoE, and 384GB of main memory. Glenn also shares info about availability, partner revenue and differentiation, as well as the overall benefits the products bring to customers. Tune in to find out more.

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Posted by Alexandra Krasne at 05:55PM PST

Turn Small Business into Big Sales with Cisco Small Business Advantage

To help you build and sustain a profitable small business practice, Cisco today introduced the Cisco Small Business Advantage site on Partner Central.

We’ve built these small business programs around three main areas: Products, Support, and Profitability.

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Posted by Alexandra Krasne at 04:39PM PST

Pump Up Your Marketing

With topics ranging from branding, B2B, and social media to creating consumer-centric websites, engaging virtual events, and measuring success of your campaigns…not to mention producing and marketing videos, Partner Velocity is a packed two-day event in Paris offering innovative ways to pump up your marketing. If you’re a certified Cisco channel partner, this event offers innovative ways to bring your marketing to a new level.

In the video below, Luanne Tierney talks about the Velocity event, what’s new this year, and what to expect in Paris. Virtual Velocity will be running simultaneously, allowing partners to glean information from the talks in Paris, upload videos, and participate virtually.

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Posted by Alexandra Krasne at 04:46PM PST

Keep It Simple

I’m at POAB (Partner Operations Advisory Board) in Madrid this week, interviewing partners from Europe/Emerging Markets about ways to make it easier to do business with Cisco and streamline the partner experience. These meetings give partners a forum in which to provide feedback to Cisco and the sessions are designed for partners to do most of the talking.

One of the themes I’m hearing in my interviews is: Simplify! Partners from Spain, Lebanon, France, Germany, Belgium, Qatar, Finland, Costa Rica, Mexico, Switzerland, and many other locales are also sharing their assessments of the current economic climate, challenges, and programs/initiatives that have been helpful (and not so helpful).

In the coming weeks, I’ll post video interviews from the event highlighting the feedback we received from partners. We’ll also hear from Cisco attendees about key themes they heard at POAB and plans for next steps.

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Posted by Alexandra Krasne at 08:45AM PST

A $10 Billion Market Opportunity for Partners

Today we’re rolling out the first borderless network solution: the Integrated Services Router Generation 2 or ISR G2 which brings us closer to the reality of delivering connectivity to anyone, anything, anywhere, anytime—securely, reliably, and seamlessly.

Automating business processes, driving down costs and energy usage, optimizing video, ISR G2 does everything short of your laundry. And, not only is the launch great news for customers—up to five times the performance of the current generation ISRs at similar price points—but also for partners with a $10+ billion migration opportunity, VIP increases, and a higher rebate.

In this TelePresence video interview (another example of ways that we can be connected to anyone, anywhere), I spoke with Wenceslao Lada, Vice President of WW Channels Borderless Networks Architecture, about this announcement and what’s in it for partners.

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Posted by Alexandra Krasne at 02:55PM PST

Accelerate Your Marketing at Cisco Partner Velocity

What do a Ferrari, a Harley Davidson, and indoor skydiving have in common? (Aside from being cool things that I want to drive or try someday.) They’re all featured in this video highlighting the speed at which your marketing will take off at the upcoming Cisco Partner Velocity event in Paris on November 10-12.

Open to registered Cisco partners, Velocity will host some of the best and brightest minds of the marketing realm: personal branding guru William Aruda, B2B branding pro Martin Lindstrom, social media marketer Will McInnes, and many more.

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Posted by Alexandra Krasne at 06:15PM PST

How Does Cisco’s Partner-to-Partner Collaboration Work?

If your customers are asking for managed services, but you don’t have an infrastructure in place just yet, partner-to-partner collaboration may be that missing puzzle piece you need.

Essentially, traditional partners can out-task their NOCs to partners like Heit who already have an infrastructure in place. Heit manages the services remotely—whether they include unified communications, routing, switching, or servers—and traditional VARs benefit from infrastructures that are already built. But the best part is that you still manage the front-end relationship with the client. Win win, right?

In the video below, Todd Roth, Cisco’s Director of WW Channels Strategy, and Heit CEO Dan Holt break it down and walk us through the process.

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Posted by Alexandra Krasne at 06:51PM PST

The Next YouTube Star: You

You can rub your eyes and double check the figures, but the latest reports say that YouTube has surpassed 10 billion views in a single month in the United States. Globally, figures show that YouTube serves up 1 billion videos a day, roughly 30 billion in a month.

It’s no wonder. Video provides that extra “oomph,” adds personality—pushing the imagination far beyond the black-and-white text on a page. Using a consumer-level camera (like a Flip), YouTube, and some simple editing software, you can easily create a customer testimonial or a marketing video and broadcast it for free, even embed it on your website.

Sure, you may be feeling a bit apprehensive about your first foray into video. If it makes you feel any better, I’ve made just about all of the mistakes you can make during the course of my own video blogging career: too little light, bad sound, too much ambient noise, audio levels too low, you name it. I’d like to offer a hand so you don’t have to go through, say, the agony of editing video footage from a conference where all of the subjects are in shadows. (Let’s just say the footage would be perfect had it been a spy video.)

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Posted by Alexandra Krasne at 10:56AM PST