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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
