Cisco to old-school resellers: go software or else

Cisco Australia head Ken Boal has reiterated his company’s line that conventional network resellers “have no choice” about transitioning to a software-based world.

The vendor’s partner conference this week in San Diego has persistently emphasised the importance of turning to software and services in the new world, for both Cisco itself and its channel.

“For our traditional networking partners, they have no choice,” Boal told journalists Thursday morning Australian time.

“They, like [Cisco], have no choice. We’ve moved to a software-driven architecture, DNA - so the whole industry has to go through this re-skilling process over the next 12 to 24 months.”

The vice president said that partners facing this reform have many personnel-related questions to answer.

“How do I take my existing network engineer workforce and up-skill them? And/or how do I attract new talent with more software skills? What’s the right mix of skills to really lead this significant market transition?”

Cisco worldwide sales executive vice president Chris Dedicoat said that "software is now pervase in a network environment" and pleaded with partners to get on-board.

"The average customer has 69 different revisions of Cisco OS," he told partners Friday morning Australian time. "We need to do a better job."

Cisco global partner organisation senior vice president Wendy Bahr said there will always be a need for partners that wire up the networks, but in the current climate of customer business units increasingly making technology decisions in lieu of IT departments, old-school resellers cannot sit idle.

“If you’re a traditional reseller and you’re not going to develop those capabilities yourself, you need to team up with an ecosystem partner that represents the interests that customers face, so that you can tap into that [non-IT] budget.” she told international media.