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Last week I wrote about 8 new year’s resolutions Cisco is making to partners. And if you’ve ever set a resolution and successfully achieved it, you know that having a trusted friend there to help track your progress or call when you need support is key to keeping those resolutions.
Consider Cisco your trusted friend to help make and keep those resolutions with two programs to ensure you achieve success in 2012: Steps to Success and Partner Practice Builder. Both are free resources that are available to all Cisco Registered partners. Oh, did I say they’re free?
These two programs help you optimize, support, plan, and develop strategies for success and profitability in 2012. Here’s how these tools work: Read More »
It seems like you can’t open an IT magazine these days without being bombarded by cloud, cloud, cloud. Going to tradeshows you see traditional vendors that have taken their existing solution packages and rebranded them as cloud. For Cisco partners and customers this can be confusing; especially since cloud comes in so many types/flavors: IaaS, SaaS, PaaS, and however people are positioning themselves. When I think of cloud I think it fundamentally boils down to an industrialization/simplification of IT. You focus and clearly define what you as a solution provider are providing, and by doing so, drive out the cost. Look at MS office for email etc. has literally thousands of options or ways to use it, but has a high cost/user/month. Gmail limits those options and by offering it free to everyone, it costs Google an ever decreasing fraction of a dollar/month. The economics are compelling. Customers like economics in their favor and partners get excited when customers want to make a transition.
On Dec 6th Cisco announced CloudVerse – an integrated set of capabilities combining Unified Data Center with Cloud Intelligent Network to deliver Cloud Applications and Services. The beauty of this position is that we aren’t telling our partners, “Thanks, we’ll take it from here!” We’re looking to them to offer this integrated Cisco vision to their customers.
“We’re putting our partners in the position to offer CloudVerse as a portfolio and new cloud capabilities.” As Ralph Nimmergood, VP of WW Channels at Cisco, stated in a CRN article published last week.
Partners are key to our cloud strategy and we’re excited to be on this journey with them.
If someone invited you to a dinner party, but then only allowed you to eat the bread at the table verses the entire meal, chances are, you’d leave feeling pretty hungry.
Applying that analogy--let’s look at how a vendors services model impacts the overall partner-vendor relationship. We all know that services are “meat and potatoes” for solution providers. As a matter of fact, services now represent 40-50% of Cisco channel partners business, up from 20 percent five years ago.
But the reality is that traditional services models don’t allow channel partners to fully participate in the services opportunity. HP is a case in point. HP has a traditional services model, with an army of approximately 200,000 services employees and a “hard deck” where they sell direct to 1,800-2,000 of their largest customers.
Cisco, on the other hand, has approximately 11,000 Services employees and allows partners to participate in the Services opportunity at every level, from the largest global customers to the local small business. Our partners are the extension our Services arm.
Through programs such as Collaborative Professional Services (CPS) and Steps-to-Success, Cisco also has a range of initiatives designed to transfer knowledge gained by Cisco Services to accelerate partner success.
To go back to our original analogy, Cisco allows partners to enjoy the entire meal…and the $49 billion services TAM around Cisco technologies and architectures in FY12 definitely offers some enticing menu options!
To take advantage of this tremendous opportunity, Cisco Services aims to work with partners to deliver new services experiences to customers through its unique sales engagement model, smart services portfolio and partner-centric programs. Now, Cisco is taking the next step forward to further clarify our sales engagement model and drive consistency in the field.
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Imagine being alerted of a customer’s network issue at your son’s baseball game. Now imagine being able to fix that issue between innings, before the customer even becomes aware of it.
That’s the power of OnPlus, a new managed service Cisco is announcing today to help VARs easily and affordably provide network assessment, management, and advisory services to their small business customers. This new service provides VARs with a cost-effective, scalable business model for those beginning to establish their managed services practice.
So what does this really mean for our channel partners?
If you ask Liberty Technology President and Cisco certified partner Ben Johnson, he’d say that, “Liberty Technology focuses on making technology easy for both consumers and businesses. With Cisco OnPlus, you’re able to get a more complete, 360 degree picture of your customer’s network. We’ve used OnPlus in a number of scenarios, from doing network surveys to quickly troubleshooting and identifying problems with customer’s networks, which has greatly saved us time and of course money.”
What else can you gain from using Cisco OnPlus service? Read on for all of the advantages. Read More »
Cisco Senior Manager of Collaboration Worldwide Channels, Gary Wolfson, shares the partner reception and momentum Cisco is seeing for Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS) and the customer demand driving it. Gary also shares opportunities and different Cisco programs for partners now and in future, and how customers can find a suitable partner.
Before and after our Cisco Hosted Collaboration (HCS) announcement, we Read More »
Last week I wrote about 8 new year’s resolutions Cisco is making to partners. And if you’ve ever set a resolution and successfully achieved it, you know that having a trusted friend there to help track your progress or call when you need support is key to keeping those resolutions.
