Which Cisco partners are the most profitable?

A Cisco executive has revealed at its annual channel conference that its most successful partners have one speciality in common.

“Our most profitable partners sell security,” said Cisco security general manager David Goeckeler during his keynote address in front of more than 2,000 global partners. “Why? There are three reasons.”

Security drives the entire relationship between a solutions provider and a customer, according to Goeckeler. “You need to have a modern network to have a very sophisticated security posture. So security is the conversation that’s driving the network refresh.”

He told the packed crowd at San Diego on Thursday morning Australian time that the network acts as a sensor and an enforcer. “These are incredible powerful architectures that are at the forefront of security today.”

The second reason, Goeckeler said, is that security leads to software subscriptions - meaning recurring revenue for the reseller.

“And thirdly, and maybe the most important [reason]: security is a service-rich market. A $100 billion market and 60 percent of it is services - and services are growing faster than products.”

Cisco worldwide sales executive vice president Chris Dedicoat also emphasised the synergy between security and networking.

"We see 80 billion DNS addresses a day. 80 billion," he told partners Friday morning Australian time. "No other company on the planet sees this many. It's an incredible amount of knowledge of what's occuring in the threat landscape and where the threat actors are."

Earlier in the summit, Goeckeler co-starred on a panel with Australian Dimension Data global security solutions general manager Matt Gyde, who boasted that the solutions provider had boosted its security services by more than 80 percent in the “last couple of years”.

“[Customer board members] are very very aware now that they’ll end up in jail if something goes wrong. So there’s a commitment there to spend,” the Singapore-based executive said on Tuesday Australian time.

The journalist travelled to San Diego courtesy of Cisco.