This week in San Diego Cisco,  partners from all over the world are converging to learn about the latest trends in IT organization, and latest solutions from Cisco at the  Partner Summit 2012 ( follow on Twitter the hashtag #ciscops12)
If you are a Cisco partner, we hope that you plan to attend either physically or virtually. Check  my previous blog for details on the data center program.

Let’s be real! Our great success in the Data Center relies  mainly on this incredible ecosystem of talented professionals who believe in Cisco vision and products. These companies are  bringing  an unique value add, in building solutions designed specifically for more and more demanding IT customers -- Customers under a lot of pressure to deploy solutions which are cost effective and extremely agile to meet the business requirements.

We recently met in London, one of our key partners , Dimension Data.   A perfect “Mise en Bouche ” just before the Cisco Partner Summit!

Dimension Data entered the data center networking market about 3 years ago and it has been the fastest growing area of our networking business over the  past years . It is now a significant contributor to our business and because of that we will double our investment in this particular space.  It allows us to grab business across the 50 countries that we operate in, and it also allows us to get far more strategic with our clients and build  up the network platform inside the data center that enables our clients to achieve the savings and benefits  and more exciting opportunities in the market. So we certainly will be investing far more in the space together with Cisco to execute better in the market.  Watch Gary Middleton , Dimension Data Business Development Manager, share his satisfaction to work with Cisco in the data Center space.

To illustrate Gary’s statement, here is a perfect and recent example of the momentum  created by Cisco and partners, when working together  :

With a large project backlog, the  development and test infrastructure at  ING DIRECT Australia could not meet the bank’s appetite for innovation. The bank’s  in-house team of 49 developers and 18 testers needed a faster way to create new copies of the bank so they could  accelerate time to market for new products  and services

Developed collaboratively with ING  DIRECT and vendors Cisco, NetApp and  Microsoft, the Dimension Data solution  features data centre infrastructure built  on Cisco Unified Computing System  (UCS), Cisco Nexus switching and NetApp
storage with Windows Server 2008 R2  Hyper-V virtualization technology.

“Cisco’s server infrastructure helps us break  down data centre silos and establish a  single compute platform that’s completely  integrated with those of other vendors,”  says  Ben  Issa, Head of IT Strategy, ING DIRECT  Australia. “NetApp technologies help us offload the storage seamlessly behind  the scenes without overloading our  infrastructure, saving a huge amount of network bandwidth, storage space and processing power. For one environment that’s a saving – when you’re deploying many concurrently, it’s critical.“The Microsoft technologies work together, making it very easy and efficient for our developers to interact with the other solution components,” Issa adds. “This means a huge boost to our productivity.”

You can find the complete  story, including the benefits achieved,  on the DimensionData  website here
if you want to follow on Twitter Dimension Data , why not start with @DimensionDataAM and @jackiefunk

Submit your Success Story

As we want to thank our data center partners for their loyalty and professionalism, we invite our resellers to submit a request during the Cisco Partner Summit for a customer success story video in North America.
We will select the more interesting project and work with you (the partner)  to create a success story , which will include soundbites from your company , as well as from your customer. This video will be created by our professional video crew free of charge for the selected partner.
We will invite the selected partner  to post this  video on a website, and we will use our social media properties to promote it. If possible the video will be also promoted at Cisco Live San Diego in June.

Rules are very easy:

We ask  a representative of your company to  attend the Data Center session on April 18th in San Diego or through the Virtual Summit on April 19th
Then we need you to  send us an email (cgtaylor@cisco.com) not later than April 20th Midnight PST with the following information:

-Name of your company (the partner)

-Name, email and tel number  of the partner contact

-Who from your company attended the data center session at the Partner Summit ( physically or Virtually)

-Name of  your customer company

-City, State  ( North America)

-Industry ? [] Finance [] Retail [] Government [] Healthcare [] Manufacturing [] Education [] Other _______

- Cisco Data Center solution deployed

[] UCS    [] VBlock [] Flexpod [] DC Switching [] Nexus  [] Risk Migration [] desktop virtualization [] Cloud  [] Other ___________

- When it has been deployed?

- Size of configuration

-Can your customer cite quantitative economic benefits? {Y/N]

-Is your customer ready for a video success story?   [] Yes  [] To Be confirmed

- Job title of  your customer point of contact ?

Can’t be easier, don’t you think ?

Last word : Attending physically or virtually the Partner Summit, make sure that you go through this checklist (Know before you go )  to be ready for this great opportunity.

I hope to hear from you (the partners) very soon !

Tags: Cisco, cloud, data center, nexus, partner summit, UCS