Meet the channel manager: Cisco

Jason Brouwers has been at Cisco since 2000. Over those 14 years, his roles have spanned direct sales, management and, since late 2013, heading up the vendor’s ecosystem as director of the partner business group, Australia & New Zealand. He says that Cisco is seeing significant change in the types of companies it calls partners. Trends such as the Internet of Things has seen it add partners such as industrial automation giant Rockwell System, a recent Cisco award winner. On the flip side, Brouwers says growth in the cloud has opened up opportunities for much smaller partners, such as ISVs.

Traditional partners

“We obviously have our gold, silver and premier partners. We also have our select partners and registered partners that may have a limited relationship. We have a long history of working with our gold partners and, traditionally, they’ve been very large, and worked on big infrastructure and integration deals.”

New partners

“Going forward, we need to look at how we treat our new ISVs, the development partners and the consulting partners. Our consulting partners are not necessarily partners that will book, say, a million dollars of Cisco products, but they might heavily influence a deal. Where in the past we couldn’t really accurately measure how we work with those partners and their effectiveness, now we’re really looking at how we can develop those relationships. That’s the same for some of the ISVs: they’re not necessarily looking for business with Cisco, but they’re building their applications and adding more to the Cisco toolkit.”

Programs

“We’ve also got to look at how we integrate our ISVs and developer partners to bring them in the mix. How do we match our certifications and programs to then work in that new world? Because they don’t necessarily work based on the traditional way we’ve done things in the past. We’ve got to look for a way to create an incentive for some of these partners to work with Cisco. Cloud reseller programs are one way; we want to provide an incentive for our partners to use a Cisco-powered cloud.”

Entering the channel

“In the early days, especially when I was working on larger accounts, I used to have a fairly one-eyed view of what a partner looked like and the way we work with a partner. In the past four to five years, and especially in this last year in the role, I’ve got to appreciate that even some of the most embryonic small partnership relationships we have are extremely exciting, because that could represent an opportunity for one of our large, important partners. I’m actually looking at transforming the way to make our current partners and our future partners more profitable.”

Lessons learned

“You’re not always going to have everything for everyone. You’ve got to place some bets. There’s probably a lot of the smaller partners out there that, just based on scale, we can’t necessarily always do everything with. It’s just a natural thing: a scale thing. If we’re setting up those relationships, we’re very up-front about our ability to be there to help them grow. The good thing is that some of those smaller partners can now work with Cisco.”