In these unprecedented times, your customers have realized that they need help to stay ahead of the unexpected – always. Business Critical Services (BCS) provides continuous engagements with Cisco experts, powered by analytics, insights, and automation, who provide cross-architecture guidance throughout the customer lifecycle journey. As a valued Cisco Partner and trusted advisor to your customers, you will want to start a conversation about how you can deliver business continuity today and enable continuous transformation by creating a more resilient, highly adaptive, and transformative IT organization with Business Critical Services.
In response to your feedback, we are announcing new enhancements to BCS 3.0 designed to help you sell more of your services faster, grow your business, and differentiate your services from the competition. BCS is the gateway to one of Cisco’s most exciting businesses, and we are working hard for you, our partners, to make sure it is an exciting business opportunity for you, as well. Here’s a few key updates for partners:
Own the Full Customer Transaction
Beginning in late June, you can accelerate the selling motion and own the full customer transaction with direct ordering through the Cisco Commerce Workspace (CCW) tool. From registering, to quoting, to ordering, Tier 1 partners can manage transactions directly through CCW. Tier 2 partners will have direct orderability access later this year.
Offer Flexible Multi-architecture, Single Package Options
We heard from you that the requirement to purchase multiple packages by architecture was a barrier for many of your commercial customers, so we have created a new multi-architecture option for the Essentials and Advantage tiers, which focus on medium-size enterprises, governments and cloud providers. You now have the flexibility to:
- Select a single package and utilize across multiple architectures
- Or select an individual package for each architecture and get the entire number of available packaged capabilities for those selected architectures
- Or select a mix of both
Receive Deliverables on Behalf of the Customer
For the first time, partners have the option to receive analytics and insights from Cisco experts so that you can present to your customers. The Cisco expert will work with the partner directly or with the partner and customer together, providing more ways for the partner to drive customer satisfaction and increase profitability.
Grow Your Profitability
To help you grow the profitability of your services practice, we have made several improvements to the incentive structure, targeted to begin at the end of June 2020. This can provide a significant discount to partners. In addition to the new incentive framework, you can also take advantage of BCS early adopter pricing, which is available globally for both the BCS Essentials and Advantage tiers.
Sell More of Your Own Services
Cisco’s partner strategy model is architected to help you differentiate your services portfolio of offerings and increase profitability. BCS can help you create new pull-though opportunities for your services and further differentiate your expertise by building your own unique services offerings with Cisco capabilities.
What’s Next
BCS Essentials and BCS Advantage tiers were launched earlier this year to support medium-size enterprises, governments and cloud providers. We are excited to introduce a third tier, BCS Premier, and new Add-Ons.
- BCS Premier empowers large enterprises and service providers with the right amount of intelligence and guidance, when, where, and how they need it.
- BCS Add-Ons give organizations of every size the flexibility to quickly respond to changing priorities by enabling them to create an adaptive workforce and fill any talent gaps on their team by tapping into labor pools from Cisco and Cisco Specialized Partners.
Premier and Add-ons can be offered with any BCS tier and are currently in limited availability in the US and Canada. General availability is targeted for later this year. Cisco will be sharing service descriptions, best practices, and delivery templates to enable partners to sell their own brand of Add-Ons. Cisco is also planning a partner-delivered option through a new specialization in 2021, so stay tuned for more information.
With this release of BCS, you get new rewards and enablement to set you up for greater success. You can access Cisco customer analytics and insights to power services that will help you differentiate and grow your business. You can tap into new market segments, addressing the needs of functional IT roles. And, you can now accelerate the sales process with direct orderability.
Learn more about BCS on the SalesConnect Partner Hub.
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