We have an exciting summary of announcements for our partners this year at Cisco Partner Summit 2023. The exciting aspect of these announcements is the broad portfolio they represent with products, programs, platforms, and tools to assist with partner productivity and profitability. These are aligned to Customer Priorities and incorporated throughout Partner Summit Keynotes, Breakout Sessions, Press Releases and more. The Partner Launch Experience will be a great resource for you to explore.
AI-Ready Infrastructure: New Validated Designs
Without the right IT infrastructure there will be no AI projects. And through recent Cisco research (Cisco AI Readiness Index Survey – launching soon) we know that 70% of the IT infrastructure is not available. Cisco, through its partners, is providing simplified solutions to help customers get their infrastructure AI-ready faster. We are introducing converged and hyperconverged infrastructure solutions to help customers simplify and accelerate new Validated Designs (CVD) for AI, and partners can deploy accelerated compute and high-performance storage on proven solutions for their customers.
New partner modules on FSO Platform
Partners will have the ability to extend observability use cases with Cisco’s Full-Stack Observability Platform. Developers of these modules are built from day one on the Open Telemetry Framework and anchored on metrics to drive an open and scalable single source of insight across the technology stack and provide business impact. Partners will unlock developing applications and modules to tackle additional important use cases. Modules being announced will provide Fintech in claims and eCommerce, SAP Observability, Campus Analytics, Service Level Objective, MLOps, and Cloud Carbon Insight capabilities.
New Security Suites and product innovation
We are excited that security suites and Cisco’s Security Cloud – our AI-driven, open, integrated, API-based platform – is now a reality. The new Security Suites are designed around key customer outcomes delivering better efficacy, better experiences, and better economics. These security suites address customer needs in three areas: User, Cloud, and Breach Protection. Cisco is also enhancing partner profitability by offering up to 30% in blended margin.
Evolving from architectures to solutions with Solution Specializations
There is strong momentum by providing new Solution Specializations. These specializations are better positioned for our partners and aligned to Cisco strategy and innovations. These specializations count towards Integrator levels and are key to maximizing incentives. This will be a gradual shift from Architecture Specializations to Solution Specializations. In the announcement, we are launching SMB and in the second half of fiscal year 2024 we will also provide Secure Networking, IoT (Industrial and Non-Industrial), Network Security, and Zero Trust.
Cisco Partner Incentives
Also, as part of our partner program we will combine the best elements of Cisco’s most valued partner incentives into a single, integrated incentive. The new incentive model will reward partners for selling Cisco’s hardware, software, and as-a-service solutions across the entire customer lifecycle and routes-to-market. Phased implementation begins early in second half fiscal year 2024.
Partner Managed Services Advancements
Cisco is taking bold steps to advancing outcome-driven solutions for Managed Service Partners. With this support comes first-ever support features, including new partner managed-ready offers. Expanding security will include Managed XDR, Managed Firewall and Secure Networking MSP Campaign. There’s also a new MSP Express for SMB offer to capture a growing SMB market opportunity. Drive preference in buying programs with expanded offer coverage for MSEA and MSLA, including the availability of FSO (AppDynamics and ThousandEyes) on MSLA.
Partner Experience Platform (PXP)
The Partner Experience Platform is adding functionality that will assure partners that Cisco is investing for and with them – everything we do or innovate is to help them differentiate and succeed. We are doing this along three critical areas for partners with Growth, Profitability, and Productivity
In the growth area we are adding Growth Finder which automatically delivers prescriptive insights from best practices and partner-specific AI modeling to identify, size and prioritize recurring revenue attrition and greenfield opportunities (and identify competitive threats). We will also drive recurring business with Lifecycle incentives down to the customer level by identifying a la carte opportunities that can be combined with an Enterprise Agreement.
We believe the new Environmental Sustainability Estimator in PXP (available exclusively to Cisco Environmental Sustainability Specialization (ESS) specialized partners) will calculate savings related to energy consumption and carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) emissions that may be realized by migrating from specific Cisco hardware.
With profitability, see what you’re leaving on the table for services practice and CSPP rebates, and optimize VIP rebates with dynamic product mix modeling. Also, manage 100% of Cisco incentives and funds with lower administrative burden and third-party spend and greater Lifecycle Incentives 2.0 telemetry.
For productivity we are adding Auto-Renew simplification to enable the majority of Cisco Software in a “Netflix” model, but you control the low-touch to high-applied to the customer. Scale down-market with DISTI BDMs, augmenting Cisco’s coverage with Disti Partner View (DPV). Understand APIs and XML resources to help accelerate your business model with the Cisco Automation and Digitization hub.
Cisco Journeys is a huge addition to enable partners to a step-by-step guide for achieving business outcomes, faster, in top priority areas such as managed services, Meraki, security, and 16 other journeys.
Rounding out the announcements this week are the following areas:
The Cat 9300-M Series, which takes all of the power our customers love in the Catalyst Switches, but allows it to be natively managed via the Meraki Dashboard. The first 9300-M PIDs became available on October 17th, and there are more on the way including ones that support UPOE+.
Also, ThousandEyes will now be a native capability in the Meraki Dashboard. Think about that—more than one million MX routers now have the ability to be instant ThousandEyes vantage points.
For Powering Hybrid Work, there are fantastic innovations which were announced at the WebEx ONE event – but in the context of Partner Summit, we’ll combine these innovations together with other key parts of the Cisco portfolio, to drive the Hybrid Work Solution and in the Reimagine Workspaces Growth Sprint.
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to Learn About These Announcements and More
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