Infinite possibilities with Cisco

Global partners of Cisco Systems descended onto the crisp white shores of Oahu earlier this month to hear the latest plans and promises from the networking giant. The Cisco Partner Summit was last held in Hawaii back in 2004 when the small town proved it could cope with the sheer size of the conference with 3000 plus people in attendence. Representing 17 different companies, there were 30 Australian partners at the event along with nearly 75 international journalists that were all waiting to hear about Cisco’s next take on collaboration. Naturally, partners were expecting a few surprises, but one of the biggest seemed to be the vendor’s push for collaboration within its reseller community.

Cisco brought in the heavy hitters for the main keynote address with John Chambers, chairman and CEO, Keith Goodwin, senior vice-president of worldwide channels and Don Proctor, senior vice-president, Software Group, addressing the audience and providing live product demonstrations.

Starting with a simple thankyou to partners, Chambers announced that the company needs to generate US$20 billion in new channel business over the next few years.

The Next Phase

It is well known that John Chambers has been actively pushing Web 2.0 and collaboration through Cisco messaging but it seems that the next phase is already beginning. In an address to partners Chambers said that this is about a whole new generation, Web 3.0.

“It is about where we can go together that has not been done before. It is about catching more market transitions than have ever occurred in the industry that are occurring at a faster and faster pace. The transitions can be on products, where it’s not going to be about routers and switches and data centers and security and wireless and the home strategy versus service providers. It’s going to be about any device to any content over any combination of networks in whatever ways we want with communities pulling together toward a common goal”.

Don Proctor, senior vice-president Software Group, Cisco, explained there are big opportunities for reseller partners. “What we are really doing is positioning a new kind of software stack that Cisco has uniquely developed to help our reseller partners take advantage of this overall shift to Web 2.0 models”, said Proctor.
Collaborative channel

Practising what he loves to preach, Chambers has embraced the collaborative way of thinking for his own team and has introduced a collaborative environment for his own executives. Those who couldn’t adjust to a more open working environment left the organisation while executives who embraced the new way of thinking are leading partners by example. Chambers said that the only way to achieve his target of 22 different key focus areas for Cisco, not to mention the US$20 billion in new business, is collaboration.

Says Goodwin, “John Chambers has set expectations for us to grow 12 to 17 per cent as a company over the next three to five years. When I run the numbers on that, it means that over the next three years, I need to build US$15 to US$20 billion of new partner capacity. There are two ways we could do that. We could recruit thousands of new partners, but that’s not our strategy. Our strategy is to build it through each and every one of you in this room by continuing to invest in you”.

Highlighting the company’s belief in social networking and Web 2.0, the Cisco Partner Exchange was unveiled to partners. This virtual environment provides an area for the vendor’s partners to showcase their talents, in virtual booths. The main aim of the program is for partners to share information about their skill sets, and then find solution providers with complementary skill sets to partner with. “This is like speed dating for channel partners”, said Andrew Sage, senior director for worldwide marketing at Cisco.

Exchange on the local front

Due to the size of Australia, the Exchange initiative is thought to be particularly relevant to the local partner community in terms of helping resellers service national clients. According to Sage it was the SMB community of partners that were brought on first. “It’s more typical that a small partner will find a customer that needs a branch to be deployed in a location where they don’t have a presence. We really hope that we did a decent job of designing it so it is useful for smaller partners”.

Mike Allen, director of channel operations, Asia Pacific, said it was pretty exciting because it is about helping partners extend beyond where they are. “It’s a portal based on the Cisco Partner Space that is all Web 2.0 and allows partner to find other partners to work with and more importantly be found by other partners.

“Cisco commissioned a study that found that the average Cisco partner works with 8 other partners and the average Cisco partner sees about 30 per cent of their revenue through collaboration. If you break the Asia Pacific numbers out they are actually right in line, almost identical, with the worldwide average. We see that partnering going on today. There is a partner of Cisco’s in Australia who comes to Cisco events, and one of his main reasons to be there is to learn about what’s going on with Cisco but the real key for him is to support his customers outside of Sydney. It’s actually a small partner”.

One of the hurdles with the new initiative is encouraging resellers to open up about their business skills to the wider partner community. According to Allen what Cisco sees is the partners who collaborated are the ones who are growing, the ones who are becoming more profitable.

“In this study 75 per cent of the partners said the reason they collaborated was because their field size is bigger, the breadth of technology excellence is bigger and their revenue is bigger. All great reasons to collaborate and what is also interesting is that the customers are demanding this now. They don’t want to go to multiple partners.”

Areas of opportunity

There were key take-home messages for the partner community covering a broad range of topics. One that addresses a particular need for Australian reseller partners centred on the chronic skills shortage facing the IT industry. The Partner Talent Network has been formed to help resellers recruit and keep new staff. Around 20,000 resumes are submitted through Cisco’s company website each month with over 25 per cent coming from the Asia Pacific region. These will now be made available to Cisco partners, accessible through the Partner Exchange Network. The Talent Network will use Web 2.0 collaboration capabilities such as interactive video, targeted candidate matching, interactive talent maps and personal branding capabilities. This will replace the existing Partner Talent Portal.