Today, Ricardo Moreno--Senior Director, Strategy, Planning & Programs, Worldwide Partner Organization--blogged about evolving our channel partner program and specific architecture specializations: Borderless Networks, Collaboration, and Data Center.
As Cisco evolves its products and services to map to architectures, partners and customers must develop new skills to be successful. Engineers will need to be able to devise network-centric architectures, and salespeople will require the ability to identify business issues and map technology solutions to the issue.
Building competencies in key areas including business consulting, architecture practice and business and solution modeling will position channel partners with the skills they need to thrive in this new architectural framework.
As the Global Director of the Worldwide Learning Partner Channel, my team works directly with our network of more than 450 strategic partners located in over 130 countries globally.
Learning Partners are authorized by Cisco to deliver technical, certification, product, and solutions training. They are key to supporting the company-wide transition to architectural strategy by delivering architectural proficiencies and related certification courses.
You have undoubtedly joined the more than 300,000 worldwide Cisco customers and channel partners who annually receive authorized training and enablement through Authorized Cisco Learning Partners.
To help Cisco partners and customers make the shift to architectures, we’re working closely with Learning Partners to create specialized training and skills development. In fact, Cisco is evolving its entire global Learning Partner Channel program to deliver architecture-based skills and training.
To speed customer adoption of the new architectural approach and help partners embrace architectural capabilities, Cisco is transforming its Worldwide Learning Partner Channel program into two tracks for FY12: Read More »
At Partner Summit 2011, Edison Peres, SVP WW Channels, described architectures as being the house, with individual solutions being the rooms in that house.
Today we are evolving our channel partner program with architecture specializations: Borderless Networks Architecture Specialization, Collaboration Architecture Specialization, and Data Center Architecture Specialization.
Architectures present massive opportunities for Cisco and its channel partners – borderless networks alone have a $49 billion total addressable market opportunity in FY11, collaboration $35 billion in CY11, and data center/virtualization is $42 billion in FY11.
To capture market opportunities that lie ahead, we must evolve towards architectures together. And here’s how we’ll do it.
Today I want to bring up DCI use case that I’ve been thinking about: capacity expansion. As you know, the purpose of DCI is to connect two or more Data Centers together so that they share resources and deliver services. The capacity expansion use case is when you have temporary traffic bursts, cloud bursts, either planned or unplanned, maintenance windows, migrations or really any temporary service event that requires additional service capacity.
To start addressing the challenge of meeting these planned and unplanned cloud burst and capacity expansion requirements, check out the new ACE + OTV feature called Dynamic Workload Scaling announced recently.
Server cabinets typically get no respect when folks try to improve the energy efficiency of their Data Centers. Why would they? Cabinets don’t consume power. They don’t even have moving parts. They’re the second-string of Data Center physical infrastructure, used only so hardware, power strips and patch fields don’t have to sit in a heap on the hosting area floor.
If you’re treating the cabinets in your Data Center like nothing more than shelving units, though, you’re overlooking a useful tool. Choosing the right server cabinet and being strategic about how components are installed within them can optimize airflow, reduce hot spots and even reduce power consumption as the Data Center’s cooling system doesn’t have to work as hard.
Consider their role in dissipating heat produced by high-performance hardware.
On April 15th Cisco will be opening a second data center in Allen, Texas. This is not just any data center ladies and gents, this state-of-the-art data center demonstrates Cisco’s architectural vision and strategy by incorporation their latest innovations; Unified Computing System (UCS), Nexus switch portfolios, and the latest green technologies.
What degree of green are we talking about? LED lighting – naturally, solar power -- absolutely, water-efficient landscaping – by all means, use of recycled building materials – affirmative. But to take it up a notch, Cisco used LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) when building the data center. LEED is an internationally recognized green building certification system that provides third-party verification that a building was designed and built using strategies intended to improve performance metrics such as energy saving, water efficiency, CO2 emissions reductions, etc.
You can listen to a live broadcast on April 15that 3:30pm, ET with CIO Rebecca Jacoby and VP of IT John Manville. They will discuss in more detail about how it was built to be “ultra green” and how this data center fits into Cisco’s overall data center and cloud strategy: www.ustream.tv/ciscotv.
It is exciting to see what was first a vision of a data center strategy, that developed into products to grow with that strategy. Makes me ponder what will the 3rddata center be comprised of? Walk that walk Cisco (with a carbon-free footprint of course).
