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I am a big fan of Simon Sinek, world renown leadership coach and author of award-winning books like “Start with Why”. One of his mantras is ‘If you want to lead, focus on your own areas of leadership!’
Building on this concept, how can you find adjacent opportunities building upon your core business? Arguably a great and efficient way to increase growth!

With Cisco’s leading industrial networking portfolio, you can tap into existing IT relationships within your customers and provide a bridge to new OT buying centres. For our customers, you can deliver powerful IoT solutions across both extended enterprise use cases and industry solutions.

The industrial IoT networking portfolio is ruggedized and purpose built and functions within Cisco’s DNA (Digital Network Architecture). It accelerates digitization by providing end-to-end security, simplified management and assurance of operations. It runs the same operating system but is hardened and has the protocols required to run in the industrial space.

Discovery starts with a simple question: “Mr. customer, how are you providing connectivity today in areas outside your campus network, in non-carpeted areas?”
Position the message of the extended enterprise, with a wealth of documented use cases for outdoor, warehouse, distribution centre, roadways & transportation, airport and port logistics, emergency services etc.

How should you approach this? Here are the CxO qualification questions to help you discover existing locked budget and new TAM opportunity:

  • “Where is your organization in the convergence of IT and OT skills and capabilities to drive new revenues and efficiencies?”
  • “How can we help you drive out costs by increasing visibility on downtime of connected environments?”
  • “Security and compliance: do you know your endpoints are actually safe and not exposed to Cybersecurity attacks?”

Here is the perspective of Mark Johnson, Head of IoT at ANS, one of UK’s leading Gold partners:

“Where I can leverage our experience is the opportunity to drive networking architecture principles in the non-carpeted areas. It is about being able to look at the extended enterprise: how that should now integrate and interact with the enterprise network, both the traditional network or the newer Cisco DNA and highlighting that, in the age of IoT, the network has never been so critical! Providing high availability to all ‘Things’ that now have a strategic importance to the business, its efficiency and data it collects.

His key takeaways:

  • Networking architectural principles have never been so important, so performance, availability, scalability and agility are key principles, that requirement particular attention
  • Security should be inherent, end to end and built into the IoT fabric from the start.
  • Understand the data that is being collected by sensors, actuators, MEMS, People and ensure you understand the end to end IoT architecture”

Leadership

Back to the theme of playing to your strength: Partners can leverage their IT campus buyer relationship, Enterprise Networking investments in skills and capabilities and customer base to access net new TAM in non-carpeted spaces. Start where you have a leadership position in your customer base.

What’s next? If you are attending Hannover Messe in April, joins us and meet our experts

Industrial IoT Networking use cases in the extended enterprise, click here

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Authors

Jeroen Sourbron

Sr. Manager, Business Development

Collaboration Worldwide Channels