The New Network

In addition, partners need to prepare for the sales model changes that will come as Cisco moves toward SaaS and other related areas, including bandwidth-as-a-service, storage-as-a-service and processing power-as-a-service, Chambers said.

A major step in Cisco’s SaaS push came with its $3.2 billion acquisition of WebEx Communications last May. It’s a purchase that stands to have long-term impact on Cisco and its channel, Chambers said.

“While we’ve done over 130 acquisitions, WebEx has a very realistic possibility of being in the top five, maybe even in the top two, in terms of the long-term contribution to Cisco,” Chambers said. “WebEx has the capabilities to expand well beyond just enabling collaboration, [to] providing many things as a service to the environment, embedding them deep into our products and [being] a key differentiator for many of our customers and partners as well.”

Solution providers like George Pashardis, vice-president of sales at ePlus Technology, a Cisco Gold partner in New York, see huge potential for building WebEx into their businesses.

“Now everyone is using some sort of WebEx-type service, whether it’s Citrix GoToMeeting or ReadyTalk or something else, so we do see a huge opportunity”, Pashardis said.

Cisco is piloting a number of channel programs built for partners working in these new service models. In addition to a managed services program launched in the fall and a pilot channel program around WebEx, Cisco is now also piloting a program for outsourcing partners. The outsourcing program is part of a strategy Goodwin unveiled in 2006 to create “offer-based” programs.

“We’re working with a small set of partners today who have a lot of experience historically in the outsourcing marketplace, and we’re using their knowledge and expertise to help us build the program”, Goodwin said. “The idea here isn’t to say that partners need to move into managed services or outsourcing ... but there are significant trends there, so we want partners that are moving in that direction to support that”.

As Cisco pushes out channel building blocks to help partners evolve, it’s also launching new products. In March, the company unveiled its Aggregation Services Router (ASR) family, a new line of midrange routers that aims to bring high-performance services to the network edge. The line incorporates IOS XE, a virtualised version of Cisco’s Internetwork Operating System, and provides unparalleled levels of resiliency and application delivery, the company said.

In addition, collaboration, unified communications and data center technology were all under the spotlight at the Partner Summit, including the launch of new application capabilities for Cisco’s Integrated Services Router family.

While many Cisco partners share Chambers’ vision of what the network can do, some customers are still hesitant to pull the trigger on full-blown collaboration solutions. Chambers counselled channel partners not to let their business strategies get derailed by clouds on the economic horizon. His advice? Get ready to pounce on the next market transition. That, after all, is what he’s doing.

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