Cisco Encourages Partners to Sell Solutions

Line-of-business solutions conversations can be influenced by IT sales, according to Cisco, and thusly, channel partners may be afforded less time to concentrate on the speeds-and-feeds deliberation and more time to resolve problems within business such as reassembling products and services in such a way that CEOs, CMOs and CFOs would find as attractive as CIOs and IT administrators.

Cisco has been attempting to push partners in the direction of its Smart Solutions branding initiative, whereby advanced training and channel support will be provided for partners allowing them to design, sell and implement customer solutions via Cisco and third-party ecosystem products and services.

Partners will be rewarded by this idea and can go on to sell with an architectural mindset, going forward from the dated resell break/fix models to compete with workplace challenges like BYOD and virtual desktop infrastructure using solutions-based Cisco.

Speaking at UBM Channel's Best of Breed (BoB) Conference in Tampa on Tuesday, Chris Ozor of Cisco said, “Our mutual customers are investing in things that address their most important business imperatives.”

At the Smart Solutions initiative at Cisco Partner Summit in April of this year and over the summer, Cisco mentioned that Smart Solution frameworks had been identified in the VDI, BYOD and remote management areas.

Multiple areas of practice relating to Cisco's guidelines are combined by each solution; for example, mobility and collaboration are drawn by BYOD. Furthermore, solution providers certified with both Cisco and ecosystem partners like EMC, Citrix or MobileIron are also engaged. Solution Partner Accelerators are the first set of Cisco incentives, and launched earlier in June. VDI, and specifically the combination of Cisco Virtualization Experience Infrastructure with Citrix XenDesktop, were covered by the Cisco incentive.

Ozor added, “We're more at the beginning of this.” He continued on to say that Cisco will be key in offering support to a partner at every step from sales and engineering to marketing and reward programs such as Cisco's Solution Incentive Program (SIP).

The business development leaders for advanced solutions at IPLogic of Latham, N.Y. Based Cisco Gold partner, Jessiva Mayo-Pike, said Cisco had successfully customized its enablement programs in order to aide partners and understand bigger-picture solutions for customers.

Mayo-Pike told CRN, “I do think Cisco's been instrumental in helping us transform reps into having business-level discussions with a CTO, or CMO or CSO instead of just talking switches and routers with the IT guys... they've divided up a lot of their marketing materials into things that speak to use-case scenarios relevant to a CMO or a CTO, as opposed to just the things the IT guys care about.” (CY) Link

1 Responses to "Cisco Encourages Partners to Sell Solutions" - Add Yours

Art Rosenberg 10/23/2012 9:42:58 AM

Cisco is moving in the right direction with its "Smart Solutions" initiative that addresses all end user needs in a business process. That means both communications and automated (online) self-service applications.

Using the label "Smart" ties into the principal mobile device that all end users will exploit, i.e., "smartphones." I actually thought about doing something like that to replace the confusion of "unified communications" (UC), but found that a telco in the Phillppines was already calling itself "Smart Communications."

Now, all we have to do is define what "smart" really means functionally, e.g., "contextual" and "multi-modal."