To all our Cisco partner’s in MEAR that have registered for our annual Partner Summit on 3–6 June 2013 in Boston, Massachusetts; I’d like to welcome you ahead of the event next week.
This year we’re expecting an incredibly high turnout – nearly 3,000 partners from 150 countries who will be networking and discussing our Go To Market, the latest technologies, new markets, business transformation and leadership, and lots more.
Alongside the Summit in Boston, an estimated 10,000 people from our partner organisations will be taking part in the Virtual Partner Summit. This offers real-time access to the same content, speakers and resources – it’s the next best thing to being there in person and I’d encourage as many partners as possible to get involved.
The fast pace of business means it easy to forget how much ground we’ve covered in the last 12 months. Among all the networking, meeting new people and sharing news, the Summit is our chance to look back and celebrate our mutual successes, recognising our partners’ achievements and rewarding excellence.
Hot topics for 2013
The Internet of Everything will no doubt be a hot topic. During the three day session, I’m expecting lots of debate about the impact of connecting people, process, data and things – and the new revenue streams it’s creating.
Our partners in MEAR always have news, views and insights to share about expanding into new markets. For me, that’s what makes the Summit so crucial to building relationships across the globe. It’s the arena for extending your professional network with many of our top executives at Cisco including the MEAR leadership team and your fellow channel partners. It is our opportunity to listen to you and everyone’s chance to have some fun together.
If we don’t get to meet in Boston, watch the Virtual Partner Summit as it happens, and follow the event on Twitter #CiscoPS13 and #MEARps13 . You can also catch-up with the sessions you missed via our on-demand service, which will be available from the end of the Summit until 8 July.
In today’s tough selling climate, are your customers anxious for data? For “proof” that selecting your practice—and Cisco—as their trusted business advisor is the best choice? If so, today is a great day!
Everything Channel, a UBM company, named its 27th Annual Report Card (ARC) winners at the XChange Americas conference, in Dallas, Texas this week. And guess who won big? Yep, Cisco. And so did you!
This means you have the extra ammunition you need when going up against competitors to close deals. It also means we owe you a huge “thank you.”
The annual ARC awards recognize technology vendors that received the highest grades from their top partners in three categories: Product Innovation, Support, and Partnership, with the combined scores leading to an Overall winner.
Thousands of partners voted and Cisco is the Overall winner in five of the 23 categories. Also, this was the first year we participated in the Midrange Servers category and we swept the award against the traditional powerhouses, winning Overall and in every sub-category. We also snagged a ninth consecutive win in the Unified Communications category.
Check out our other wins in this handy infographic and please be sure to share it across your social networks.
Today, we ‘re featuring a guest post from Brian Blatnik, a senior manager within Cisco’s Collaboration Technology Group:
In the month since our CloudVerse announcement the notion of a world of many clouds – public, private, and hybrid – has resonated with our customers, partners, and industry analysts. I’d like to share some perspective on how those types of clouds address different customers in the collaboration cloud services market. Since last month’s announcement highlighted our private cloud model in that market, Hosted Collaboration Solution for Large Enterprises, I’ll focus on that model. As a reminder, the Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution gives partners, including service providers and integrators, the ability to deploy multiple collaboration applications on one server in a virtualized environment and then host those applications for multiple client organizations. The solution is designed to be run from partner data centers.
I’m often asked, “Haven’t enterprise voice and other UC services always been delivered from what we now call a private cloud?” It’s true that IP PBXs and other UC servers, like their PBX predecessors, provide services to users from a remote room or facility via a network. But there are two ways in which today’s cloud service delivery differs. First, there is the efficiency of pooling computing, network, and storage resources across multiple locations and services. Second, the services can be delivered in an on-demand fashion with elastic scaling.
The financial and strategic benefits deriving from these two factors are leading many businesses to consider consuming collaboration services in a utility model from Cisco’s partners in the Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS). But the same drivers can result in substantial benefits to businesses that aren’t looking for services from a third party’s public cloud. Read More »
You Cisco partners are a creative lot—when we asked you to send us your thoughts on how Cisco products improve the network, we discovered that so many of you are true writers at heart.
We also found that Cisco products have impacted your customers’ bottom line and improved productivity. Whether you deployed Cisco Nexus switches, a collaboration portfolio, Catalyst switches, or WAN optimizations solutions, your customers are getting the high-quality products and fantastic total cost of ownership that they deserve.
We think all of our partners are winners, but there can only be two contest winners. This contest was about success stories and how Cisco products have improved the network. We reviewed all the entries, discussed the merits and two entries rose above the rest to be crowned: Our Winners!
So the other day my wife told me the water in the shower didn’t seem as hot as it normally does. “Maybe something wrong with the water heater?” she said. I did all the normal checks: no water on the basement floor, pilot is lit, check, check. All seems ok.
We happened to go to Home Depot to buy some other stuff, but we ran into the water heater guy. His diagnosis: water heater going bad. (Full admission, it is 11 years old)
I kind of buy his story, it makes sense. Here is an appliance that is 11 years old that I never maintained. Expected life is 10 years, so I am already plus one, right? And maybe a new one would be more efficient, right?
But isn’t that the sort of internal argument manufacturers go through every day? Sunk cost (what they already paid for) vs. Maintenance vs. Replacement? How efficient are the machines you bought 10 or 15 years ago? How do you know? How much does it cost you for a shutdown for two to three days while you secure a replacement machine and install it? Wouldn’t that information be valuable to you if it was visible? How do you know?
Energy management/awareness is certainly a big part of this sustainability issue. Check out this video from Chet:
