Cisco Partner Summit: New SaaS push for resellers

Cisco Systems has initiated a further push into the software arena with a managed services solution for reseller partners. By "taking the Web 2.0 phenomenon and moving it into collaboration" the networking vendor is providing partners with another offering for customers.

“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 Don Proctor, senior vice president Software Group, Cisco.

According to Proctor, these next generation Web applications will be delivered as a single service. The move is seen as powerful because of the capability to change the way in which IT is used and involves Cisco’s unified communications offerings including VoIP, unified messaging, customer contacts, fixed mobile integration, presence and Web 2.0.

“This is a little bit unique, it’s something new for us,” said Proctor. “The idea here is for us to really optimise up and down our product capabilities that we bring to the table in the software area. Most customers don’t think of Cisco as a software company but we see software as the key for us going forward to help connect the infrastructure we build to our customer’s business processes.

“A remarkable transformation has taken place with resellers providing more strategic solutions that help customers do their job better, not just infrastructure and technology but strategic assets.”

Software as a service [SaaS] was brought into the Cisco model when the vendor acquired WebEx last year. The WebEx offering will also be adapted in the future to be a partner service.

“If you look at the way we’ve done IT for the past thirty years we’ve had a fairly rigid paradigm. The Web 2.0 world is starting to really change that model. More and more IT is about participation, it’s about distributing creation, it’s about the network, about connections, in many cases about a broad range of devices and interfaces,” explained Proctor.