Avatar

As a Cisco Collaboration partner, you are always looking for new ways to reach more buying centers and dazzle your customers with an engaging collaboration experience. Today, Cisco announced new innovative solutions to help you do just that. This is our most significant video launch in many years, and we are changing the game with great experiences for any screen, from the browser to the boardroom. Rowan Trollope’s blog describes our unique approach to developing collaboration solutions that customers will want to use each day. But, of course, collaboration is about more than just video. We have big enhancements to packaged solutions and cloud capabilities, as well. Together, our new advancements will not only help accelerate your sales, but help you deliver greater business outcomes and drive value for your customers.

Make Collaboration Simple and More Affordable

In order for more people to use collaboration as an essential part of their workday, it must be simple to use. Our new innovations such as the Cisco TelePresence SX10, Cisco TelePresence MX200 and MX300  products break down barriers to video adoption and make it affordable to turn every conference room into a videoconference room. For example, the SX10 is a simple, easy to deploy new system that turns any standard flat panel monitor into a videoconferencing system, letting you demonstrate how video can boost the productivity of any meeting. This can enable access to new budgets and new conversations across customer organizations.

Increase Sales and Profitability

In order for you to accelerate sales, collaboration must be simple to price, order and deploy. Many of our partners have already experienced great success selling the Cisco Business Edition 6000 packaged collaboration solution to midmarket customers. We are now extending the Business Edition family with a new, turnkey, integrated collaboration platform for the enterprise market: the Cisco Business Edition 7000. It’s ideal for fast-growing enterprises from 1,000 users, and scalable to thousands. Together, these packaged solutions make it easier for you to sell, quote, install, and scale collaboration for your customers.

Open New Opportunities

With today’s announcement Cisco is offering tools and capabilities to drive new sales opportunities. We continue to make it even easier for you to deliver the same rich collaboration experience whether your customers prefer an on-premise deployment, a cloud-based model or a combination of both. Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS) is now accessible over the public Internet – no VPN required. This helps your customers with mobile workers and teleworkers because VPN is often a cost barrier. HCS also has improvements for a simplified video experience, as well as voicemail and contact center options that make adoption more cost-effective for midsize customers. For your video business, the new Cisco TelePresence SX80 is a powerful platform that lets you deliver additional integration services and meet the needs of customers who want a custom deployment.  Project Workplace is an online tool for partners that enables you to shorten the video sales cycle by providing blueprints and best practices for a wide variety of video deployment options.

As I’ve said many times, we are on a transformation journey together, bringing new innovation to not only collaboration technology, but to your practice in order to win in today’s market. This transformation is all about developing new ways to sell, manage relationships and embed collaboration into the bedrock of your customers’ business. All of this will result in you delivering substantially greater value.

Learn how to rapidly incorporate the new Cisco products into your practice at cisco.com/go/collabpartnermarch2014. You can watch a demonstration of our new products during Rowan Trollope’s Enterprise Connect keynote presentation on March 18. And I hope to see you at Cisco Partner Summit later this month or online at Virtual Partner Summit. Tell us how you will use the new Cisco collaboration innovations to transform your business and deliver amazing experiences for your customers.



Authors

Richard McLeod

No Longer with Cisco