The Vegas strip is alight with slot machines, neon lights, and…Cisco partners attending Partner Velocity, Cisco’s annual partner marketing conference.

The event kicks off tonight at The Palazzo in Las Vegas, where partners from around the globe will spend the next few days making marketing innovation happen.

Attendees will learn from an all-star lineup of speakers—from best-selling authors Daniel Pink and Sally Hogshead to social media superstar Chris Brogan—who will share insights around cloud marketing, motivation, fascinating customers, crafting, and standing out. (Full Velocity event agenda here.)

And speaking of cloud marketing, whether you’re in Las Vegas or not, the Cisco Cloud Marketing Kit is now available to help you position and market your cloud-based solutions to customers and prospects. It’s completely free and is packed full of resources: collateral, presentations, sales tools, campaign/program links, and more.

Are you ready to make marketing innovation happen?

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Tags: amanda jobbins, chris brogan, Cisco, cloud, cloudverse, daniel pink, las vegas, marketing kit, partner, partnervelocity, sally hogshead, velocitylv

This morning NetApp and Cisco announced how the companies are helping channel partners sell and deploy their FlexPod design architecture with Microsoft Windows Server Hyper-V. This is a major expansion of our partnership with Microsoft, so I picked up the phone and called Rick Snyder, vice president of Global Strategic Partner Organization here at Cisco to ask him a few questions.

Q: What’s the deal with this FlexPod solution with Microsoft? And what do our channel partners need to know about it?
A: So, Alex, today Cisco release a new Cisco Validated Design for the FlexPod shared infrastructure with Microsoft Private Cloud solutions to help ease deployments of the Microsoft Private Cloud solutions built on our shared infrastructure with NetApp. Also, FlexPods can be purchased pre-integrated for our US and Canada Channel partners through our work with Avnet. As part of its FlexPod Services, Avnet offers many different applications preloaded on the FlexPod.

Q: Shared infrastructure? Is that like a timeshare?
A: (laughs) Well in a way yes, but rather than a room in a Caribbean, we are the data center hardware in the data center. We’ve furnished the data center with the necessary hardware to house many different applications from VMware, Citrix, and now for our Microsoft Private Cloud customers. We feed these applications with data center resources like computing, industry leading memory, network bandwidth, and storage capacity to offer end users an enjoyable experience.

Q: So how popular are these FlexPods? Read More »

Tags: Cisco, FlexPod, Microsoft, netapp, partner

In less than a week, partners from around the globe will join Cisco executives and marketing thought leaders in Las Vegas for Cisco Partner Velocity 2012. This exclusive three-day event is all about you—helping partners “amp up” their marketing efforts. Don’t worry if you can’t attend in person: there will be lots of coverage from the event and replays so you won’t miss a thing.

Next week, we’ll host the very best and brightest marketing experts and they will share their insights on a range of topics such as:

• How to scale your business through integrated campaigns
• Creating distinction using social media
• Understanding and leveraging marketing techniques
• Marketing best practices to accelerate your business
• And much more!

Some of Partner Velocity’s guest speakers include:

• Dr. Martha Rogers, recognized for her one-to-one marketing
• Daniel Pink, bestselling author and journalist
• Chris Brogan, bestselling co-author and columnist

What else can partners expect to learn? Read More »

Tags: Cisco, event, marketing, partner, velocity

Over the next several years, worldwide consumer Internet traffic is expected to increase fivefold, reaching a compound annual growth rate of 36 percent.

I’m no mathematician, but I’m guessing that amounts to a whole lot of traffic. It also means that your service provider customers will need to keep pace to ensure they have enough network capacity to support the accelerated demand.

You can help by taking advantage of the Advanced IP Next-Generation Network (IP NGN) Architecture Specialization. It’s available now to qualified partners.

Leverage this new specialization to help your service provider customers create, enable, and integrate a variety of high-quality video, mobility, and cloud solutions for businesses and consumers alike—all on a single IP-based network.

Want to find out how you can benefit from this architecture specialization, and how it can help you differentiate? Read More »

Tags: Cisco, IP NGN, partner, Service Provider

This week is a busy one for the Intelligent Automation cloud team, with both VMware Partner Exchange in Las Vegas and Cloud Connect in Santa Clara.

Cloud Connect is (as you might expect) all about cloud.  At VMware Partner Exchange, you’ll learn about virtual desktops, virtual workspaces, and VXI with Cisco and VMware View.  But you can also learn about more about Cisco and VMware’s complementary cloud management solutions – to help our customers accelerate their journey to cloud computing.

You may have heard about the Cisco IT internal private cloud (CITEIS – Cisco IT Elastic Infrastructure Services) by now.  At VMworld last fall, our IT team gave a presentation on how they deployed Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud together with VMware vSphere and vCloud Director for this successful initiative:

If you’re at VMware Partner Exchange this year, you’ll have an opportunity to learn how we did it, how it works, why it delivered great results, and how you can deploy a similar solution.  Just make sure you visit Cisco in booth 308 to see a demo of cloud management with Intelligent Automation – and attend our sessions below.

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Tags: Cisco Intelligent Automaton for Cloud, cloud, Cloud Management, events, intelligent automation, partner, unified management, VMware, VMware vCloud Director