Edison Peres

During the past year, the pieces of our Intercloud strategy have been falling into place. We’ve built out the technology, created services and orchestrated a robust partner ecosystem.

IT today is filled with disparate islands of clouds. Cisco’s strategy to connect those islands into an interconnected global network of clouds—the Intercloud—is unique in the market.

If you had a chance to check out the Cisco Global Cloud Index, it’s no real surprise that data center traffic will nearly triple over the next five years and cloud traffic will nearly quadruple.

Today’s Cisco announcements illustrate the momentum we’ve seen thus far for Cisco’s approach to cloud. Partners across the globe are very eager to engage and understand what roles they can play to help them meet their customer’s needs for choice, flexibility, security, and compliance.

As we celebrate the 25th anniversary of Cisco Live in San Francisco this week, it’s an exciting time for Cisco and our partners. Customers are embracing the opportunities around the Internet of Everything and looking for us to help them realize the benefits and manage the transition.

Nick Earle announced the newly formed Cisco Cloud and Managed Service Organization (CMSO) and his new leadership team to our internal stakeholders. I am excited to be part of that leadership team and will be transitioning to my new role, to lead this new Cloud and Managed Services Partner Organization, over the next few weeks.

The Cisco Channel Partner Program has always focused on value versus volume, rewarding partners who create value, no matter their size or sales volume. The program has evolved over time to identify market transitions, enable our partners through these transitions and recognize partners for their practices.

Yesterday in Los Angeles, CA I attended XChange Solution Provider, where Cisco was honored with multiple Channel Champions awards. This conference brings together 225 solution provider decision makers from across the United States and Canada and provides a great chance to network.

For a while now, I’ve been promoting that partners need to adopt a Hybrid IT business model to be successful and stay competitive in a world with more market transitions, more technologies, and more customer choices than ever before.