With Cisco taking up a more software-centric business approach, the company is also directing its channel partners the way they table the products and solutions in the market. The emphasis is more on knowing the customers’ business imperatives and move towards a software capable business.
Cisco underlined a couple of ways in March at its Partner Connection Week 2017 event. The ways include Reselling product and solutions, Partner pooling, Provider, designed-in and significance of platform. These ways support partners to engage well with customers to go ahead with initiatives such as digital transformation.
At the event, Cisco executives clearly indicated to the partners that given digital is a huge opportunity, especially because is very significant to the customers, partners like Cisco itself must wear a new demeanor to accelerate growth.
The ways outlined by the company for Bring in the Digital Wave
Reselling product and solutions: The traditional Cisco partners are taking the company’s products and solutions to the market and adding their services to it and reselling the end product to the customers.
Partner pooling: here lies an opportunity for traditional resale partner with other technology solutions or product provider such as a hardware provider or an independent software vendor etc. to diversify the kind of solutions to take to the customers. This will offer more options to customers and will fast-track Cisco’s products.
Provider: Cisco has partnership with several System Integrators and consulting companies. These firms does application development and networking transformation deals with Cisco. In the provider segment, strategic partners collaborate with Cisco and validate their architecture based on solution stacks of Cisco.
Designed-in: this is seen by Cisco as a two-fold path. From IoT angle, partnerships with vendors including Siemens, Rockwell and Honeywell builds opportunity for Cisco such as Cisco IOx for IoT environments to be designed into solutions stacks.
Another is partnership with firms such as Apple where both the parties are jointly involved in designing, developing and enhancing technology.
Emphasis on Platform: Cisco has continued its focus on a software-centric portfolio of products some of them being Cisco Spark, Cisco Umbrella and CloudLock. The company is pursuing products that support cloud computing capabilities.
The company is looking for partners who have not considered Cisco for collaboration earlier, might now change their views.