Collaboration still the name of the game

Opening the first keynote with glow sticks and high-energy dancers, Cisco succeeded in setting a very upbeat tone for the 14th Annual Networkers Conference.

Les Williamson, vice president of Cisco Australia and New Zealand, opened the first day of Cisco Networkers by thanking the 1100 delegates attending the event.

This is the second time Williamson has opened Networkers as the Australian leader.

Last year he had only been in the job a mere four weeks when he hosted the event with Howard Charney, senior vice president for Cisco.

Williamson was at home on the stage and, in a similar tone to the Worldwide Partner Conference held in Hawaii earlier this year, he said that collaboration was the way forward for Cisco and its partners.

Distinguished company

The major speaker for this year’s opening day was Michael Boland, distinguished systems engineer for Cisco A/NZ.

He explained where Cisco is heading over the next 12 months and touched on many product areas including the data centre and the Nexus 5000.

Cisco’s Quantum Flow Processor was cited as one of the three main areas of concern over the coming months.

“We are breaking all of the moulds as to how they are built.

The world is moving from packet processing to extreme processing,” said Boland.

“The Quantum Flow Processor was a huge change we led in the industry here by many definitions.”

Telepresence units featured prominently at the solutions partner exhibition and Boland touted the technology as “the end to lost time and productivity”.

Cisco has now commissioned 269 Telepresence units globally and they have an average usage rate of 45 percent.

Between well-travelled flight paths, such as Sydney to Melbourne, the Telepresence units have a usage rate of 95 percent.

Boland also discussed WebEx Connect as an option for the SMB market and an opportunity for channel partners.

He provided a demonstration that showed the interoperability of WebEx Connect with the much-loved Apple iPhone.

Users are able to move a video call from their desktop to the iPhone and then transfer the call to another iPhone as well. Boland also mentioned that Cisco partners with Apple to provide security on the iPhone using their VPN technology.

Closing the keynote, he left his partners with this: “When I becomes we, we think globally, we can do wonders.”

Product focus

Coinciding with VMworld, Cisco released information around its VMWare collaboration project, the VN-Link virtual machine aware network and storage service.

Cisco has created the Nexus 1000V distributed virtual software switch to simplify the operations of both physical and virtual networking infrastructures.

The aim is to help server, virtualisation and networking administration managers accelerate data centre virtualisation.

In addition to the VMware announcement, there were other product highlights for partners including the TelePresence System 500 that was on show at the World of Solutions expo.

The personal Cisco TelePresence unit provides an opportunity for solution providers to sell the technology to the local enterprise and mid-market space.

Cisco claims that the smaller-sized unit, featuring a 37-inch display, still maintains the same qualities as the original life-size, face-to-face version

New partner programs

Speaking exclusively with CRN, Williamson announced plans of two new partner programs for the local region.

Touted for this fiscal year, the programs address two areas of focus for the networking giant.

The first program will complement WebEx Connect and Williamson is already using the technology to communicate with partners.

“We are going to get our partners linked in to our WebEx Connect capabilities so we will have a special Partner Connect Program,” he said.

“It’s really about account managers from Cisco working with engineers and channel people and their teams, working in collaborative online spaces for mutual planning, mutual strategies and mutual proposals.

“We are really going to enhance the way that we work with our partners and that’s an immediate rollout.

Not all partners are going to embrace that from the get go. We will take that step by step and pick a couple of trial partners or beta partners first up.”

The focus over the coming months for Cisco will be working with partners using the WebEx technology.

Williamson said he is excited about this change of focus that will ultimately ensure more intimate planning and engagement with partners.

He emphasised that it will provide the ability for Cisco to be more open
and ultimately transparent about its business with partners.

Cisco receives requests from customers who want to have one solution provider cover their multi-national needs and the new Multi-national Partner Program will assist partners with strategies as well as back-end tools.

“We’ve got a multi-national program starting which is in recognition that more and more Australian companies are expanding offshore,” said Williamson.

“Predominantly into APAC, but into Europe and into the US.

Our customers want a partner that can handle that from a central point, wherever that may be, to multiple locations around the world.

“The program has back-end tools but it also has the geographic reach that channel partners can handle as a single point of contact, a single business dialogue.

Our partners have been asking us for that for some time.”

Williamson was keeping his cards close to his chest regarding the new channel leader.

“I had hoped to announce something now, but it will probably be in
a couple of weeks,” he said.

“We are very comfortable with that and excited to get some new external blood into the leadership team.”

The exact timeframe for the programs will be announced in the coming months following the appointment of the new leader.

“I will let them take the time plan for that, but it is sooner rather than later because we are seeing good growth,” he said.

Helen Frost