Cisco Partner Summit: What lies ahead for channel partners?

Acting as a networking opportunity for global partners, Cisco promises that the 2008 summit will be packed with informative news and technology demonstrations. More than 2000 partners from around the world are expected to attend this year. ‘Infinite Possibilities’ is the theme of the event with partners invited to reflect upon the opportunities with Cisco.

John Chambers, chairman and CEO of Cisco will be speaking at the 2008 Summit alongside Keith Goodwin, senior vice president Worldwide Channels and Donald Proctor senior vice president Software Group. In his welcome letter to attendees, Goodwin confirmed that collaboration will again be a key focus and wrote: “Collaboration has implications for the industry, for customers and for partners, and is creating new opportunities for all of us in the marketplace.”

George Atrash, general manager Connectivity, Dimension Data, finds partner conferences to be a beneficial learning experience.

“We generally come back with a lot of knowledge of where market trends will be across the next year. Last year a lot of the programs stayed on track and it was recognised where some were modified and had achieved growth,” he said.

The conference is an opportunity for local reseller, Dimension Data, to see initiatives coming out of new areas and understand the strategic focus and direction Cisco is taking with its solutions. There is also the chance to find out Cisco’s plans, if any, to modify its partner programs and how this will impact Dimension Data as one of the vendor’s resellers.

“Dimension Data has six lines of business with the Cisco business covering four of these. There is network integration which is a major focus as well as converged connectivity, security and data centre solutions. We definitely see a lot of announcements coming off the back of those areas from the product section as well as managed services.” said Atrash.