Channels Your Voice Within the Cisco Channel Partner Community

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

Don’t Gamble with Your Network

“Network problems…it’s nothing serious. Considering the money we saved on this equipment, it’s worth the risk.”

In these tough economic times, it may seem harmless for customers to take advantage of that too-good-to-be-true deal from an uncertified reseller. However, buying uncertified equipment may cost more in the long run in terms of lost time, repairs, and legal problems. This is according to an IDC Executive Brief “Creating Corporate Policies to Protect IT Infrastructure.” (PDF)

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Posted by Alexandra Krasne at 02:29PM PST

Permission Marketing to Your Customers

If you’ve read any of Seth Godin’s numerous best-selling books or visited his blog, you already know he’s outspoken and opinionated on the topic of marketing. (He was also a speaker at the last Partner Velocity event in February.) Some of his insights may seem counterintuitive to what you may have first learned about marketing, but as marketing evolves and social media becomes more prominent, Godin’s work is more relevant than ever.

One of Godin’s best-known concepts is Permission Marketing: “the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal, and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them.” In short, this means contacting people who want to be contacted, delivering what and when you say you will deliver.

In a recent blog post, Godin remarks that he had a less-than-stellar experience while trying to get a price quote. “I visited eight sites. Six of them hide their email address. They use forms of one sort of another. One firm refused to accept more than 500 characters in the ‘how can we help you’ box, while three of them wanted to know what state I was in, etc.”

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Posted by Alexandra Krasne at 09:01PM PST

Cisco and Tandberg’s Commitment to Partners

Cisco’s intent to acquire Norway-based video conferencing company Tandberg (announced today) will help expand collaboration solutions to reach a broader set of customers, extending TelePresence from the board room to the desktop.

It’s no secret that channel partners are critical to both Tandberg and Cisco’s success in bringing these solutions to the masses. In the video below, John Chambers—Cisco’s Chaiman and CEO—and Tandberg CEO Fredrik Halvorsen discuss the importance of partnering as the two companies join forces.

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Posted by Alexandra Krasne at 11:59PM PST

What is Cisco White Label?

Here’s a trivia question for you: What is White Label? No, it isn’t the latest hip hop album from Jay Z. Guess again? Nope, not a new brand of pasta sauce. No fair Googling it! Give up?

If you didn’t guess, White Label is a new partner model within Cisco’s Managed Services channel program that allows two partners to collaborate to provide a managed service to an end customer.

Here’s how it works: a producing partner (who owns the NOC) takes on the operational and technical requirements to support the service. Then, a selling partner represents the service as if it were their own, taking on the customer relationship management, service agreements, and contractual obligations with the end customer.

As you’ll see in the video, partner-to-partner collaboration provides three unique benefits—which will look and sound great to your customers and prove profitable for your business, too.

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Posted by Alexandra Krasne at 04:38PM PST

N2A Helps Cisco Partner 2e2 Optimize Business Practices

Streamlining business processes can mean the difference between a healthy profit and a big loss. Cisco partner 2e2’s recent engagement and involvement in the Navigate to Accelerate initiative has helped the company optimize business practices and bring about substantial improvements in services business performance and profitability.

During the engagement, a Cisco consultant worked with 2e2 to map out their business processes end to end and, together, they worked to create practical and lasting changes. The entire experience provided the partner with an external look at their business and helped optimize and align with Cisco’s own processes. Ultimately, these changes will help 2e2 become more profitable.

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Posted by Alexandra Krasne at 10:19PM PST