Today, more than 170 Cisco Authorized Distributors around the world help more than 40,000 of our Cisco Authorized Resellers grow their business.
Distributors all over the world are helping partners increase revenue and accelerate knowledge of Cisco products and services through a wide range of tools, resources, and information. As a result, these partners can execute more efficiently, and extend their service offerings and market coverage.
Each distributor offers an abundance of services and expertise such as technical support, architectural expertise, certification training, marketing guidance, and experience developing a services practice. Many also have solution demonstration centers, financing options, and extensive training on Cisco products and services.
This video shares some of the details on how Cisco Authorized Distributors can help you create more demand, close deals faster and gain a competitive edge.
Listening to our partners is one of the most important aspects of my role at Cisco. The feedback we get from our partners helps to shape our strategy and our programs.
Every year we bring together a select group of partners as part of a series of Cisco Partner Executive Exchange (CPEE) events around the world. In the last 2 months, we’ve met with Latin America partners, APJC partners, and US and Canada partners. Last week we met with our Americas service provider partners, and next month we’ll meet with our partners in EMEAR.
During these events, partners gave us feedback on our go-to-market strategies; our programs, tools and incentives; and how to optimize our sales teaming with them. While each region is unique and partners have their own unique challenges, as we talk to partners around the world, it’s clear there are some common themes. Read More »
You’ve often heard me say that Cisco partners need to continue to evolve their businesses to stay competitive and be successful. As the trend for delivering technology as a service continues, now more than ever partners must evolve their business to support the demand for new consumption models, like cloud and managed services. And in order to support our partner’s evolution, Cisco is evolving our Partner Program with the availability of the new Master Cloud Builder Specialization.
As I announced at Partner Summit back in April, this new specialization brings together the data center architecture specialization, Cloud Builder designation and adds competencies to deliver solutions like Vblock, Flexpod, and VXI. Think of the new Master Cloud Builder specialization as the customer’s “one-stop shop” for the highest level of competencies for data center and cloud.
No matter which analyst report you read, the market opportunity for both private and public cloud infrastructure will be billions of dollars over the next several years. The Master Cloud Builder Specialization allows partners to differentiate even further to help capture a greater share of the rapidly growing cloud market.
Partners have a choice in the role they want to play in cloud (Builder, Provider, Reseller) and the level of investment they want to make. Cisco is committed to continuing to invest in the success of our partners, to help you optimize your business value and see the greatest return on your investment in Cisco.
Along with the availability of the new master specialization, Cisco is launching the Cisco Cloud Partner Marketplace. Created based on your feedback, this tool gives partners a place to market and promote their Cisco cloud-based solutions and services.
I encourage you to learn more about the new Master Cloud Builder Specialization and the Cisco Cloud Partner Marketplace and I look forward to our continued journey together in this ever-changing marketplace.
Find out what some of our partners had to say about the Master Cloud Builder Specialization.
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.
The success of distribution at Cisco is no longer a secret, thanks to Scott Brown’s recent interview with CRN. Of course, it was no secret to me--our distributors have been an important part of our channel strategy from the beginning. But I’m extremely proud of Scott and his team for driving the more recent growth and deepening our relationship with our distributors.
Those who know me, know I’m all about relationships. And I believe that the success and growth comes, not just from Cisco’s relationship with our distributors, but also from the relationship our distributors have developed with our channel partners. Together, we deliver greater value for our partners.
As customers begin to demand new consumption models, I believe distribution will play a significant role in helping partners evolve their business models more quickly to profitably deliver cloud and managed services solutions. Our commitment to a partner-centric sales and services go-to-market model doesn’t just apply to our traditional channel partners. As more solutions move to the cloud, we plan to work with our major distributors and leverage their capacity and their relationships in order to scale.
