Cisco launches 'new era' of specialisations at annual partner conference in Las Vegas
The vendor's VP partner strategy for its Global Partner Sales organisation, Marc Surplus, talks to CRN about what's new for the channel
Three specialisations were also revealed quite recently in September.
These were:
- Full-Stack Observability (FSO) - To highlight expertise in centralising and correlating application performance analytics across the full IT stack, which includes technologies such as AppDynamics, ThousandEyes and Intersight.
- Hybrid Work from Office specialisation - To recognise skills and experience helping customers evolve traditional on-site and off-site work models.
- And Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) - Which highlights partners helping customers to secure and power remote users, devices and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications.
These specialisations are in addition to three existing categories of Cisco partner specialisations: the Architecture specialisations, Cisco Powered Service specialisations and Business specialisations.
Progressing to Cisco Gold
Partners can use the new solution specialisations toward their progress to Gold, a level that formerly required partners to have three Architecture specialisations plus the Cisco Customer Experience specialisation to achieve Gold, Surplus said.
The cross-architectural approach is what makes the Solution specialisations "lighter weight," Surplus claimed, because they allow partners to leverage the multi-year investments they've already made in architectures.
"For partners that have made those investments, this allows them to get further differentiation [and] showcase their ability to deliver the solutions customers are looking for, with the full weight of Cisco branding behind it," he added.
Cisco specialisations have historically included heavy training and testing.
"We're now looking for knowledge [and] we're looking for experience.
"So, there is a training component, but it's not as extensive as with the Architecture [specialisations]. More importantly, we're focused on the partners' ability to actually deliver the solution. That's what customers are looking for.
"And because they're multi-architectural in nature, you can leverage a lot of the expertise that you already have invested in and have in-house," he said.
The new specialisations will give partners the recognition they need to land new business without taking people out of the game to study and test, Surplus said.
"Partners have a big backlog of business. A lot of projects they've got to deliver because of supply chain shortages [and] coming out of COVID and they don't want their people in non-billable situations.
"That's what we're trying to do here."
Cisco is integrating its partners much earlier in the sales process for things like hybrid work and SASE because no vendor can deliver customer experience and complexity reduction on their own, said Cisco Channel Chief Oliver Tuszik.
"We see that the ecosystem we have already needs to be engaged earlier…And when partners create offers based on our technology and add capabilities and services—even add products—they make more money and are winning bigger deals," Tuszik said.
Cisco claims it already has 300 newly specialised partners.
In 2020, Cisco made sweeping changes to its partner program to drop the number of disparate programs and center the revamped Cisco Partner Program around four roles that partners are playing for customers: Integrator, Provider, Developer and Advisor.
A Focus On Life Cycle
Another "needle-mover" that Cisco's partner team unveiled this year at Partner Summit is an update to its Life-Cycle Incentives (LCI) programme.
The programme, which rewards partners for activities leading to better software and subscription adoption, has existed for six years, but the experience was "good, not great," Surplus said.
To remedy that, Cisco is launching LCI 2.0. It will involve the standardisation of all of the company's software on one consistent life-cycle process for partners.
"In the past, incentives were more back-end-loaded towards delivering the business outcome, [so] we will be shifting the incentives [to make them] more balanced across the full life cycle, so more incentives upstream, because we know when you drive that usage and engagement with the software that leads to greater consumption, that correlates to larger renewals, which is what everybody wants," Surplus said.
The upgrade will involve an entirely new platform, Surplus added.
The platform will give partners visibility into each transaction and deal, including where they are with each deal on the customer life cycle, what incentives they have available to earn, potential use cases, and how Cisco is paying them against the earnings.
"They'll be able to track everything—we've not had that visibility in the past. That's going to be a game-changer for our partners as we think about life-cycle incentives," he said.
Cisco partners already have access to some of the features, like enhanced visibility and reporting.
The tech giant plans to launch the platform in the second half of Cisco's 2023 fiscal year.
