Partners all smiles after 'fundamental' Cisco restructure

Reduced tensions

Cisco's Adams said the vendor had needed to improve its channel strategy.

"We were very hard and complex to deal with. We probably always should have looked at the partner as a customer and made sure it's successful," she said.

Adams said the changes would reduce tensions between account managers and resellers, and would have more opportunity to set the scope with the customer.

"That's how most channels work. As a reseller you always see it as a threat that the vendors are dealing with the client because they have the power to take it to someone else," Steve Surleff, principal of Western Australian reseller Stellar Systems, said. 

Surleff said he thought all channel partners in any vendor-reseller arrangement would prefer that account managers support resellers directly rather than deal with customers. He said other vendors continued to contact customers directly, sometimes with the stated intention of checking on the reseller's service delivery but that this was often a cover for hard selling.

Under the old channel model, Cisco was the same, Surleff said. "It's all about selling. [Cisco] want to sell, that's all they want to do. They don't want to provide a solution."

Surleff said he thought the move to partner-facing channel managers would make a difference to Cisco's behaviour.

"That's always what we wanted to see, that [Cisco] would butt out of it and let us deal with the client," Surleff said.