Summer’s coming to a close and Cisco partners have been doing much more than just hanging by the pool. They’ve been busy working on some very cool projects!
In this episode of Partner Update, we find out why Cisco partner Force 3 has been spending time with competitive eating champion Joey Chestnut and learn about a new blog series from Logicalis called Hype or Ripe.
But there’s a lot more in this action-packed newscast, so watch this week’s Partner Update to get a math lesson from Cisco Channels Chief Edison Peres, find out how architecture-based solutions can maximize ROI for customers and help ensure partner profitability, learn how Westcon Group is removing obstacles to global distribution, get the latest details from Forrester Consulting on ways that customers can benefit from Borderless Networks solutions, out with HP and in with Xerox print solutions, our VMworld update, and much more that you don’t want to miss.
Watch it all right here:
Keep reading for a list of links and a written transcript of our newscast. Read More »
We’ve just formally kicked off our new fiscal year and, last week, we completed our annual global sales meeting where John Chambers, Rob Lloyd, and the Cisco leadership team charged up our sales organization around the Next Cisco.
So what does the Next Cisco mean to our partners?
One message that I want you to hear loud and clear is that partners are, and will continue to be, an integral part of our strategy.
Here in the United States, many kids are beginning a new school year, so I thought I a quick math lesson would help me illustrate the value partners bring and what’s happening here at Cisco.
Watch this short video for my math lesson to help you better understand what’s changing, what’s not, and how Cisco, along with our partners, adds up to success.
Keep reading for more details on my math lesson. Read More »
It’s no secret that Cisco has been on a journey to simplify and make it easier to work with us.
In May, we took a leap forward in this process and announced a series of changes across our global engineering, sales, and services teams to streamline our organizational structure and speed decision making.
Today I’d like to outline the next step in this process and how it affects partners. I also want you to know that many of the changes you’re seeing at Cisco are a result of what we’ve heard from you, so I encourage you to keep the feedback coming (via Twitter, by talking to your account manager, or by leaving a comment here on this blog).
Let’s take a closer look at the changes to the Worldwide Partner Organization, which fall into three main areas: Partner Led, Partner Marketing, and geographic alignment.
1) Partner Led
Our Partner organization will assume responsibility for building the global capabilities to support Partner-Led – one of two global go-to-market selling models. The Partner Led global sales model will increase Cisco’s reliance on partners to address the needs of customers across all market segments where Cisco will not have a high-touch sales presence.
Andrew Sage will take on the role of Vice President, Partner Led. A 12-year Cisco veteran, Andrew most recently spear-headed our Small Business Sales efforts and was instrumental in shaping our key strategies for the Partner-Led model.
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.
In this week’s episode, we offer a quick recap of Partner Summit 2011 with some event highlights, important links, plus our handy, downloadable summary document with all of the important links you need – from Cloud partner programs to Architecture specializations and those great deals that were announced, like a big WebEx discount for partners. And, if you missed Partner Summit keynotes, executive chats, or theater breakout sessions, head over to the Virtual Partner Summit site for replays.
I also caught up with Virtual Computing Environment CEO Michael Capellas who talked about the importance of VCE, its value to Cisco partners, and some info about VBlock. We’ll be sharing more of his insights and the full interview with him here on the Channels blog on Monday, so be sure to check back.
Watch our Partner Update newscast for the top partner headlines.
