It’s a well known fact in the IT industry that there is a spending push at the end of the calendar year as companies look to close out their budget. This year-end spending trend represents a great sales opportunity for both Cisco and our partners.

Helping our partners boost profits and provide value to our mutual customers are two core principles of our partner strategy. With that in mind, we recently launched a global sales initiative called “Year-end Sprint” (YES), which will allow us, together with our partners, to capture coveted year-end IT spending.

YES is a collection of several high-value, global architecture product and service offerings for customers that include additional incentives for partners. These offers span our four key architectures: Borderless Networks, Collaboration, Data Center, and Service Provider, including IP NGN and SP Cloud.

The countdown to the New Year has already begun, so  I encourage you to quickly learn more about YES, by visiting the YES Sales Initiative page on Partner Central (CCO login required).

To give you a flavor for YES, let me take a moment to highlight three of our YES architecture offers.

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Tags: architecture, Borderless Networks, Cisco, collaboration, customer, data center, IT, partners, Service Provider

Did you know that lung disease is the third leading cause of death in America? And globally, lung cancer is the number one cause of cancer death, yet is the most underfunded.

To help raise awareness about lung disease, Cisco sponsored the American Lung Association of Washington’s annual “Fight for Air Climb” fundraiser on October 23.  The climb, which was held in Bellevue, Washington, is the largest stair climb in the U.S. (3,242 stairs up and down the Bellevue Towers, to be exact!).

But it wasn’t just Cisco who was involved: We invited Microsoft to join in a little healthy fundraising competition. Together, we helped to raise over $95,000 for the cause. Read More »

Tags: American Lung Association, Cisco, fundraising, Microsoft, partners

Want to find out what’s in store for Cisco’s transformational partnerships?

We’ll be hosting a live video chat on our Ustream channel with Wendy Bahr on November 5, 2010 at 10:30 a.m. PST. During the broadcast, we’ll get the latest news and info about Cisco’s global and transformational partnering strategy.

So what will Wendy talk about during the chat? Read More »

Tags: broadcast, channel partners, Cisco, global partnering strategy, partners, ustream, worldwide partner organization

Our next Virtual Partner Velocity event is happening soon—next week, in fact. So what’s on tap for our broadcast?

This time around, we’ll hear about lead nurturing. During the session Creating High Quality Leads Through Improved Content Creation and Data Management, which will take place on October 28 at 7:30 a.m. PST, Luanne Tierney, VP of WW Partner Marketing, will chat with Dave Green, Director of Best Practices and Applied Research with MECLABS.  Dave will talk about lead nurturing, and the content and data implications of lead nurturing and scoring.

So what is lead nuturing?

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Tags: channels, Cisco, lead generation, Luanne Tierney, marketing, partners, partnervelocity

We’ve had a lot going on lately: The launch of our new Facebook page, our new Partner Update broadcasts, and our ongoing contest to win an iTouch for using My Cisco. All of these vehicles are part of our ongoing efforts to communicate with you, our partners, in an effective and meaningful way.

In that spirit, we are launching a new, updated corporate brand campaign, with the theme “Together we are the human network.” So how will this new campaign impact you? Here are the details:

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Tags: brand, Cisco, facebook, My Cisco, network, partner update, partners, together