Today, I’d like to thank an old friend and welcome back a familiar face.

Jim Sherriff, the leader of the Americas Partner Organization and previously the US and Canada Partner Organization for the past two years, has accepted a new role working with Rob Lloyd on the Worldwide Sales Operations team.

Among other responsibilities, Jim will lead our global efforts to bring greater capabilities and efficiency to our sales process by assuming sales leadership for ACT (Accelerated Cisco Transformation). ACT is Cisco’s multi-year program to fuel growth by enhancing our operating model, ensuring world-class execution, efficiency, and ease of doing business. Jim will report directly to Rob Lloyd.

The Americas Partner Organization has made great strides in driving partner profitability under Jim’s direction through three key areas of focus: enabling partners to capture new markets faster, increasing customer segment impact, and driving improved operational efficiency.

Jim and his team initiated and led the “the 1% solution,” a series of initiatives to improve operational efficiency with early successes including the Audit Certification team that helps partners reduce the cost of re-certification, and introduction of The SELL (Sales Enablement Learning Lifecycle), a valuable resource for our partners to help them on-board and develop their sales professionals.

I’d like to thank him for his exceptional leadership and many contributions. He will be a great advocate for The Americas sales organization in his new role.

With Jim’s move to Worldwide Operations, I’m pleased to announce Wendy Bahr as our new SVP, Americas Partner Organization.

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Tags: americas, chuck robbins, Cisco, jim sherriff, partners, strategic partners, Wendy Bahr

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?

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Tags: award, channel, chuck robbins, Cisco, crn, edison peres, john chambers, keith goodwin, partner, rob lloyd, top 100

This post was written by Chuck Robbins, Cisco’s Senior Vice President, The Americas.

Today Cisco will be replacing its current HP print services with Xerox Managed Print Services (MPS), a more cost-effective way to produce and manage documents across all 460 of our offices.

Cisco is embracing the future of MPS, using managed print and cloud ITO services, to work within our company’s existing infrastructure, supporting multiple locations and mobile technologies.

By working and partnering with Xerox, we can further enable an anytime, anywhere, any device mobility strategy for our employees, as they won’t have any barriers to printing when they’re on the road. We’re making sure they don’t have to spend unnecessary time on print-related tasks when they’re in the office, too.

What does this mean for Cisco partners? Read More »

Tags: chuck robbins, Cisco, cloud, HP, mps, partners, printing, secure, xerox