Last week in Dallas I had the opportunity to attend “XChange 2012” an event that brings together a number of industry experts and solutions providers for a dialog around the changes happening in the industry and a great opportunity to network.
Each year at this event UBM Channel presents the ARC Awards, short for Annual Report Card, which gives partners the opportunity to rate their vendors in a number of categories.
I’m proud to say that Cisco took home 16 ARC Awards capped off by five overall awards including Enterprise Networking Infrastructure, Network Security Appliance and SMB Networking Hardware. We won the overall in Unified Communications for the ninth consecutive year and finally, took home the top prize for Midrange Servers, beating IBM and HP in our first year competing in this category.
Not only is this the first time in Cisco’s history we’ve won all of the categories we entered, Cisco is the only vendor to have won this many categories at the event. These awards are thanks to you, our partners, and I had a chance to talk to some of the partners who attended the event. Here’s what they had to say.
Did you catch the news today? As Cisco and VMware continue to collaborate in transforming virtual desktops into virtual workspaces, we reached an important milestone – an agreement to sell VMware View 5 software as part of an integrated VXI offer to our customers. Read More »
Making Cisco easier to do business with. That is one of the committments the company outlined this year as part of its refinements and evolution. The results in doing so continues, we hope you see it and feel it. That promise shows up in many places across the company including our Services business. Services is one area of any business that is multifaceted, no doubt. At Cisco it’s a differentiated strategy that we bring to the market because of our partner-centric approach. Services provides a huge opporutnity for our partners,we recognize that and it now represents 40-50% of Cisco channel partners business, up from 20 percent just five years ago.
Partners participate in the Services opportunity at every level, from the largest global customers to the local small business. Our partners are the extension our Services arm. And that’s not just “lip Service” --to back it up Cisco is taking the next step forward to further clarify our sales engagement model and drive consistency in the field to continue momentum with absolute clarity. We just published our Services Rules of Engagement to provide our partners with a definitive road map for how to engage with Cisco Services and maximize their Cisco Services investment. Specifically the document does the following:
Defines the partners role in the selling and delivery of Cisco services
Helps partners build a collaborative and predictable field sales and delivery model
Gives partners easy steps to driving accelerated customer adoption of smart services capabilities
Delivers a clear field escalation process should a mishap occur
Describe the sales compensation neutrality strategy
You be the judge as to how this really works, your outside voice and views are a great reality test. Let us know what you hear and how we are doing, we think we are off to a solid start, so let’s engage.
To learn more, click here and check out a blog by Raja Sundaran VP WW Services Partner Organization on the Rules of Engagement that talks more about Cisco’s approach and “tasty” opportunity for our partners.
Hit the video below from Keith Goodwin, SVP WW Partner Organization, and Bob Singleton, SVP WW Services Partner Organization on our Services Go-to-Market model and ways partners will benefit.
The movie industry has the Oscars, the music industry the Grammys, but what about the IT industry? How do we recognize the top performers, the stars, and those behind the scenes making the magic happen? One could argue that CRN’s Top 100 is about as close to a channel award shows as you can get, minus the red carpet designer gowns and tearful acceptance speeches.
This year’s CRN awards are out and we’re happy to report that several Cisco executives were recognized on the Top 100 list:
Rob Lloyd in the category of “Channel Advocates”
Edison Peres in the category of “Channel Sales Leaders”
Keith Goodwin in the category of “Channel Services Leaders”
Chuck Robbins in the category of “Channel Strategists”
John Chambers in the category of “Influential”
The awards were based on nominations from solution providers who rank executives based on a number of criteria: channel influence, effectiveness and visibility, as well as business and sales impact. CRN also factored in channel sales volume, channel investment and resources, channel advocacy and visibility, and performance in UBM Channel research projects with a panel of UBM Channel editors making the final ruling.
Thank you for voting for Cisco in these awards. We’re proud to see that a number of partners made it to the list as well and congratulate the winners.
Of course, what would an award be without an acceptance speech?
You can’t turn around without seeing new stats on the growth of cloud adoption. (One of our favorites stats states that by the year 2015, 50% of all CIOs expect to operate the majority of their applications and infrastructures via the cloud.)
While growth is imminent, many customers are still wary and concerned about risk. To both help partners better prepare for growth and help address customer concerns, we launched the Cloud Partner Program with three tracks: Cloud Builder, Cloud Provider, and Cloud Services Reseller.
On the heels of that news, Gartner released a report titled “Cloud Adoption at Risk without Big Channel Investment.” We’ve summarized a few of the key findings and recommendations for partners:
Through 2015, cloud service brokerage will represent the single largest revenue growth opportunity in cloud computing.
The channel has an opportunity to play a significant role in aggregation and brokerage services. The challenges facing enterprises building private cloud services or leveraging public clouds are significantly more complicated than just technology.
