Cisco Partner Summit will be on twice this year

Cisco’s global channel manager has announced that its annual partner summit, currently running in San Diego, would repeat this year in November.

The vendor’s global partner organisation senior vice president Wendy Bahr said that Cisco’s internal sales conference Global Sales Experience is always held in August or September every year.

“We fire up the troops, talk about our strategy and we do a lot of training. And then we wait - six, seven, eight, nine... sometimes ten months to have this event with you. That’s not very aligned. I think we can do a better job.”

Bahr then told the crowd of more 2,200 attendees at the Cisco Partner Summit that the conference would now switch to the northern autumn, to be close to GSX.

“To drive alignment and share the exact same information - so that we’re in lock-step. Because when we’re in lock-step, we win.”

The announcement means that 2016 will have two Cisco Partner Summits - the second will be held in San Francisco from 1 to 3 November.

“With the speed at which things are changing, I’m not concerned at all that we won’t have enough to talk about in November,” Bahr told the media afterwards. “Almost 90 percent of the content from GSX in August will be re-purposed with a ‘partner lens’ around it.”