Welcome to my first blog as leader of the new Partner Managed and as-a-Service team! I have had the pleasure of working with many of you in our partner community over the years. My team is focused on improving the end-to-end engagement model for how provider partners build, sell and scale their managed services based on Cisco’s industry-leading technology, and on accelerating Cisco’s delivery of as-a-service experiences. Today, I am eager to share where we are on this journey.
First, I don’t need to convince any of you how important managed services are to our customers. We estimate this to be a $200B business for our applicable products and your services globally, spanning single technology managed offers, like managed cloud calling or managed Wi-Fi 6, all the way through tailored, multi-architecture managed solutions for our largest enterprises and specialized vertical customers. At the heart of it, your managed services deliver clear outcomes with SLAs that are built and operated by you, our trusted partners, who are integrating different products and services that map to customer and segment needs. Additionally, your lifecycle and support services enhance customer time to value and outcome success.
The results of our provider partners’ managed services practices speak for themselves: there are already 2,300+ services globally that have been made available by our provider partners generating billions of dollars in related bookings. With the rise of cloud consumption, the fast pace of competitive disruption and the constantly evolving macro economy, our mutual customers are telling us they want to increase their consumption of managed IT through our trusted partners. To help us all meet this demand, my team is working to accelerate Cisco’s “operating model” for partner managed services along several dimensions, from driving sales execution, building and supporting managed-ready products, to optimizing sales operations and partnering frameworks such as the roll-out of the Provider role in Cisco’s holistic Partner Program.
“The Factory”
The Partner Managed Services engagement framework we’re working on is something we call ‘The Factory’, which is an integrated execution approach to partner managed services development, go-to-market readiness, and selling. This framework helps Cisco align with engineering, sales, operations, marketing and others. It also enables us to more easily co-create with partners who are leveraging Cisco technologies to help customers solve their IT and digitization challenges, ultimately helping their end customers consume exceptional outcomes.
Here’s how the engagement model works: within my global team, we have a provider managed services expert group that oversees offer development to ensure an optimal partner experience. The expert group works with the service creation specialists located within the specific geographies who in turn spends time with providers to envision, build and launch integrated solutions and services using relevant Cisco-based offers. Once these services are part of the provider’s catalog, a third group of experts engages and supports the sales acceleration of these new offers – with the Cisco end-customer sales teams where appropriate – so we can mutually grow our businesses. The goal is to empower partners to sell a broader part of Cisco’s product portfolio and effectively create high value, differentiated experiences that can be consumed in just the way your customers want, with your procurement from Cisco well aligned.
This Factory framework is foundational and critical to future success as it drives improved consistency, accountability, focus, and time-to-market for how we grow across the partner value chain.
Growing Your Managed Services Practice
Whether you’re an established global telco or a regionally focused managed services provider, there are pressing customer needs that you can address today with Cisco offerings. Below is a snapshot of the industry-leading Cisco offers which you, our trusted partners, can leverage to build best-in-class customer outcomes with the go-to-market motion, segment relevance and operations at scale across networking, security, application experiences and collaboration. Over time, our vision is to create our own catalog of partner-built managed offerings to amplify what you build with Cisco’s sellers, customers, and partner ecosystem.
If you haven’t done so already, set up time with your partner account manager or distribution account manager for a discussion about these offers and how to get started or scale what you’ve built. They can also guide you through the various go-to-market programs to launch or accelerate your practice.
What’s Next?
My team will be introducing themselves to you over the coming months to share what we’re doing, hear your stories of success and transformation, and learn about your needs. In the meantime, join us at the upcoming Cisco Live event kicking off on March 30 in the Americas and concluding on April 1 in EMEAR. There will be a portal just for partners called the “Cisco Live 2021 Early Access Partner Experience”. Customers are not permitted to attend the Early Access Partner Experience. Details for logging on will be available beginning March 22nd.
Stay tuned for more updates.
I’m excited about the endless possibilities of increasing your ability to deliver exceptional customer outcomes and profitability!
If you have questions or comments, feel free to engage with me on Twitter at @alexza.
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