ThousandEyes Announced Big News Going All In For Partners

Co-authored by Craig Vario
Head of Channel, ThousandEyes

As our global partner leader Oliver Tuszik shared earlier today, Cisco ThousandEyes is announcing its full commitment to the channel. I recommend all partners attend the inaugural ThousandEyes Partner Connection event happening February 23-24, 2022, to learn more about what this major move means for you.

ThousandEyes’ SaaS-powered internet and network visibility technology provides a solution to some of today’s most complex digital experience challenges, allowing you to extend your networking business to include a robust visibility platform, and adding significant recurring software revenue opportunities. The choice is yours to understand how you integrate these opportunities to your customers’ specific needs.

Hybrid work, the move to the cloud and the rapid adoption of SaaS apps have created a borderless IT perimeter where cloud and internet networks have become an extension of the enterprise network. But your customers don’t own and therefore don’t control these networks. This is where ThousandEyes’ solution provides a unique advantage for partners to let customers see cloud and internet networks like they own them to troubleshoot issues faster, accelerate digital transformation projects, and ensure always-on digital experiences. To go a little deeper, I’ve invited Craig Vario, Director, Partner Sales at ThousandEyes, to discuss what Cisco can do for you, our global partners.

Craig and I have worked hard since August of 2020 to rapidly integrate ThousandEyes and bring the best capabilities to our global ecosystem of partners. We were very pleased to see how quickly ThousandEyes products were offered on the Cisco GPL in April 2021. Craig, this could not have happened without a great partnership and excellent solutions for end-to-end visibility. Can you describe how partners will build and grow with ThousandEyes?

Craig:

We believe going all in for our partners will pay off in many ways. The first way is all about partner growth. And to do this, we have focused on three main areas:

- Accelerate customer digitization and superior user experience
- Recurring revenues
- New revenue practice

Let me take you through a recent example and an experience with our partner Presidio. Presidio’s team of transformation agents runs soft tests on a prospect’s application or website, effectively showing user experiences from different places around the world. This is the type of information and insight that customers don’t have access to without the visibility provided by ThousandEyes.

ThousandEyes creates a single source of truth to view all the disparate internal and external components and delivery paths that can impact end-user experience. This visibility makes it easy to immediately pinpoint where service issues exist and fix them before affecting productivity, reputation, or revenues.

Jason:

Tell me about how we assist partners in deployment.

Craig:

We know that our partners are moving 100 miles per hour to help customers grab hold of the growth opportunities made possible by today’s digital transformation projects. That’s why we’ve built the onramp tools partners need to quickly deploy end-to-end visibility based on the most common ‘blind spots’ that businesses run into with SaaS apps and other cloud-first services. We have grouped these into three categories with five specific use cases:

- - Workforce Digital Experience
    - Webex
    - MS Office 365
    - MS Teams
  - Customer Digital Experience
    - Website, user experience
  - Enterprise Digital Experience
    - Modern hybrid and SD-WAN network performance

Together, we have created a tool called the Automator, which provides simplified onboarding to enable immediate customer value. It closes the ‘visibility gap’ and empowers partners to quickly scope, price, sell, and Install common use cases. Understanding all the use case configurations, the Automator, instantiates all component pieces in minutes rather than several hours.

Jason:

One of the first things I invested in during the acquisition integration was how to ensure the Automator tool really accelerated partners’ time to delivering value. It’s great to see the usability of this tool and the traction it gained with the SE / TSA teams.

We have discussed that there are many starting places for partners building a Full Stack Observability (FSO) practice. We have used the idea of different base camps on a mountain as the concept of being able to start a customer journey at various levels, potentially initiating an engagement with ThousandEyes, to win the observability solutions decision.

Craig:

There is ThousandEyes profitability for all types of partners. The combination of Cisco’s expertise in network and application performance and ThousandEyes’ visibility into the Internet. Specifically, this provides partners with the opportunity to offer their customers a critical end-to-end view into the digital delivery of applications and services, allowing them to pinpoint deficiencies, and improve network and application performance across enterprise and cloud networks.

ThousandEyes is integral to core Cisco offerings, including Full-Stack Observability, SD-WAN, SASE, and Hybrid Work. Partners are critical to developing and delivering unique business performance and IT optimization solutions for our customers.

Jason:

To assist partners with rapidly expanding to the visibility opportunities ThousandEyes represents, Cisco is investing in tools, as we mentioned with the Automator, but is also providing incentives and enablement. What is being offered?

Craig:

There are three additional offerings that I’ll call out:

- - In addition to the Automator, we have other tools such as a pricing calculator, the Lifecycle toolkit, and a business value assessment
  - Incentives include the Value Incentive Program and Lifecycle incentives,
  - For enablement there is Black Belt Academy, Demos, Mentored Installs (MINT) and a new FSO Specialization coming soon

And, Jason the excitement does not stop here, at the inaugural ThousandEyes Partner Connection event, partners will learn how to take advantage of these opportunities.

Jason:

There is a lot of excitement regarding the ThousandEyes Partner Connection event to give our partners the information and tools they need to harness the market opportunity and better serve their customer needs.

On behalf of Craig and myself, we look forward to the impact of aligning our go-to-market strategy to create optimized selling situations for our global partners.

Good selling!