Cisco Plus: How the brand comes to life through partners

I’m so excited about today’s Cisco Plus announcement because of how much it promises to accelerate our customers’ business outcomes.  Cisco Plus brings the best of Cisco’s broad portfolio of market leading technology together to solve the most challenging problems that enterprises face today.  My team is fully dedicated to partner managed and as-a-service sales and we are thrilled to support you, our partners, as we embark on this new journey.

Partners like you have been asking for more outcome-based products and services from Cisco so they can meet customers right where they are on their digitization journey.  As I mentioned in my previous blog, customers are asking partners to not only integrate Cisco solutions, but to also deliver and operate them with managed services. So, it’s no surprise that partners want further alignment with Cisco to meet the need for as-a-service IT.

Cisco Plus provides an additional and simple way to use and gain value from Cisco technology in an integrated, cloud-enabled, easy-to-consume experience.  For partners, this makes what you’re doing today better, easier and accelerates your future business opportunities.

Let me start by addressing common questions we’ve been getting. Does the addition of as-a-service offerings change the partner role?  How does Cisco Plus affect your current Cisco practice and investments?  What is the impact for partners that are not selling as-a-service solutions today?

First, we believe partners have never been more essential in guiding customers through their business challenges in order to deliver secure and reliable IT solutions.  We believe Cisco Plus makes partners even more successful in achieving customers’ goals no matter how big or small the Cisco-based opportunity may be.

More importantly, as Cisco Plus comes to life, we’re taking a flexible approach to development, which will benefit partners no matter where you are in your adoption of as-a-service IT.  Let’s take a closer look at how the “hooks” for partners across the Cisco Plus stack can help you strengthen your practice today as well as help you drive new and improved outcomes to customers in the future.

Cisco Plus Innovation: Expanded choice and agility for partners

Cisco Plus builds on our existing technology platforms and APIs.  These APIs are how our partners deliver customer solutions and managed services today and we see the partner experience only strengthening through platform innovation fueled by Cisco Plus development.  Improved API standardization and resources will help partners more efficiently operationalize their unique services from our platforms, as well as create new ways to deliver and monetize customer integrations and vertical offerings.  My team is building support for the partner managed route-to-market and we are excited to work with you to grow your business.

Offer Innovations

Next, Cisco Plus will deliver offer innovation to accelerate your time to market by integrating our platforms into outcome-based offerings along with usage and consumption-based pricing, as relevant.

• Cisco Plus Hybrid Cloud: As the first Cisco Plus branded offer, Cisco Plus Hybrid Cloud is a consumption-based offer that comes to market later this year.  This will deliver improved outcomes for businesses working across public and private clouds from application performance, cost optimization and on-demand resource availability.  Partners will play a critical role beyond just plan and deploy, by using consumption insights to seamlessly help customers navigate unexpected business shifts and changes in application usage.  These capabilities certainly help customers get better and faster outcomes and gives partners rich and expanded monetization opportunities.
• Secure access service edge (SASE): In the networking and security space, SASE is a very hot topic with IT professionals.  You are helping us lead in this space by building and selling Cisco Secure SD-WAN solutions.  With our new SASE offer, we’re making it easier to go-to-market with competitive pricing by combining Umbrella, SD-WAN, Duo and Thousand Eyes with an easy-to-remember, easy-to-purchase offering structure.  In future iterations, subscription-based offerings will streamline how partners sell SASE as-a-service.

Why Cisco Plus for Partners?

Every single day we are humbled to have the best partner ecosystem in the industry. We are excited to work closely with each of you to build the next generation experience.  That’s why we are building Cisco Plus with our partners, using the unique value and roles you bring today as scaling points for the future. Here are a few highlights of what you can expect from Cisco Plus:

• Cisco Plus is significantly more than just a metered consumption offer. We are taking our broad Cisco portfolio across network, security and observability and accelerating it in an outcome-centric model that is subscription-based, consumption-driven and cloud-enabled.
• Partners will benefit greatly from cross-architecture offerings that align to where customers are moving with predictability in outcomes, pricing and security — all with rich insights and intelligence that can be significantly augmented with partner services.
• Selling outcomes means providing definable results for customers. Because customers in every segment have complex challenges that change on a dime, partners must juggle an ecosystem of vendor offerings behind the scenes.  We not only will simplify how we work together to ensure you can more easily position Cisco to meet your customer needs, but also enhance our open and standardized API approach to help you deliver a complete outcome-centric service across the IT landscape.
• If you already have an as-a-service or managed services practice, then the journey we’re taking to build Cisco Plus accelerates your opportunity. We are cataloging, promoting and co-selling the managed services and as-a-service value propositions many of you have built.  And we are extremely excited to see continued velocity here as we make it easier for you to do business and innovate with our platforms.  If you’re in the early stage of this journey, we will have many new things for you to get going with quickly as our experience innovation will deliver pre-integrated offers that are turnkey to sell and support.  No matter your role, we want Cisco Plus to be scaling point for your future with us.

And don’t just take it from me!  Here are some insightful comments from our partner community:

Axians

Conscia

Insight

Presidio

What’s Next?

We are sharing a wealth of information during the Cisco Live Digital Experience.  Take full advantage of the real-time keynotes and recorded technical sessions and trainings. Here are a few key sessions to have on your radar:

• Tune into Oliver Tuszik’s executive talk featuring the Wipro/Olympus success story and their partner managed secure SD-Wan solution Oliver’s Executive Talk.
• Partner Managed Services recorded session “Don’t Miss It! Know Why for Cisco Managed Services”

Join us on May 5, 2021 for an exclusive webinar:

Experts discuss as-a-service IT and the partner opportunity

Register and learn more at the Partner Success page.

For more resources, visit Cisco Plus partner resources page on Sales Connect.

We’ve also created a collection of assets to help you continue developing your business. Follow this blog page for the most up to date information from me and my team; and, of course, connect with your PAM.

Here’s to an amazing Cisco Live experience!

 

 

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