Empowering our Partners to be Future Ready: Digital Partner Summit

With the onset of late Autumn, we feel the familiar chill in the air and experience the lessening of daylight. Many of us at Cisco also feel the customary anticipation of Partner Summit, where our network of partners gather annually in Vegas.

This year, consistent with Cisco Live US, our IMPACT sales gathering initiatives, and so many other physical events that have been adapted for a virtual platform, we executed and scaled an action-packed virtual lineup for our partners and sellers.

To me, these were the key takeaways for our partners, customers, and sellers:

1.   The “Big Goals” 

Oliver Tuszik, Senior Vice President, WW Partner Organization, spoke passionately about his “big goals” that we have simplified for our partners: Agility, Relevance and Profitability, and shared real-life examples of how Cisco is living these core values with and for our partners.

Leveraging a real-time use case of agility, Oliver referred to the way Cisco rallied to help our businesses, our communities, and our partners in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ways we helped our stakeholders make massive adjustments in their workplaces and workforces.

Highlighting relevance, he shared that companies need to be not just what we deliver but HOW we deliver – with new routes to market – in distribution and public marketplaces. No matter what route to market companies focus on, customers are the ones who determine your relevance.

And in keeping with our commitment to ensure that our partners are profitable, we need to uphold and continue to innovate an amazing customer experience, in creating demand for our AAS offerings, being future ready, expanding our roles, and enabling more ways to reach customers and meet their needs – where they are.

2.   Enabling technology for the Future of Work

We also heard an impassioned speech from our CEO, Chuck Robbins, who highlighted the essential services industries that have changed forever, and our need to support them more than ever. He cited examples in healthcare, where many of our customers moved to Telehealth out of necessity in a rapid pace, and Education, where almost billion and a half students needed to learn virtually – almost overnight.

As we envision the Future of Work, we need to be ready for how the market will change and how we move into hybrid world. Our opportunities are expanding, and customers need to accelerate what this mean for them. We will light up our software business and leverage technology as a service as we thrive in a cloud-first world.

And most importantly, we need to step back and look at what our customers care about.

Every customer wants choice: public cloud, private cloud, on premises, and they want to consume as a service. We will give them a choice of all of those services.

And all the while, we will empower our teams to be more productive, and to drive a much more robust customer experience to enable technology. And what we do together - is power an inclusive future for all.

3.   Agility – the IT Superpower

Todd Nightingale, our Senior Vice President of Enterprise Networking & Cloud, spoke from a technical lens, but his words aligned consistently with Oliver’s theme of agility. Todd referenced that our customers are realizing – agility is the IT superpower. They are securing their solutions leveraging SecureX, and empowering teams with Webex.

The platforms need to the foundation upon which all of our partner teams can bring innovation. We are opening up APIs and building extensible technology. We have the potential for enormous profitable high growth, and ability to make teams more scalable.

We are also seeing vertically specific applications being written for customers in market, which is consistent with our strategy of infusing industries into everything we do.

“We serve our customers better when we have a strong partner network – that is where our power comes.”

4.   Investing in our Partners’ Success

Of course, one of the highlights of the Summit was to hear our always energetic Gerri Elliott, Executive Vice President, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer speak enthusiastically about the ways that our partners are critical to our success, and provide the framework for winning in this marketplace.

Gerri spoke specifically to one key area that is critical to partner success, and that is – where we will invest. We are focusing on five areas, the first two being partner-led.

1.   Investing to win in a hybrid multi cloud app first world

2.   Investing to bring more offerings to the cloud, expanding managed services

3.   Make it easier to do business with us

4.   Focus on recurring revenue 

5.   Develop systems that support partners

While we move to these hybrid models, we need to ensure customers are upgrading to the latest versions of software and need to have best experience with our products.

We can create value with adoption; our strategy and success depend on it.

Our commitment in this market is to help our customers prepare for the new normal, whatever that may be.

5.   Powering the Future Together

Back in the summer at IMPACT, Jeff Sharritts, Senior Vice President of Americas Sales, spoke about our collective need to do the next right thing – for our customers, our partners, our communities, and ourselves. He revisited these sentiments during Partner Summit, but also reinforced our simple core objectives:

We have a role in powering the future of our customers – together - through focusing on virtual work and hybrid cloud. And for our partners, we need to focus on simplifying – and innovating around new business models.

“Your commitment is stronger than ever; your profitability is our number one priority.”

Feedback from our partners post-Partner Summit has been positive and productive. By documenting the thoughts and perspectives from our Leadership team, I want to reinforce the values that we are committed to simplicity, agility, relevance, and of course, profitability for our partners. Gerri mentioned in her keynote that our objective was for our partners to sign off the virtual event knowing that Cisco is invested in your success as a partner-led company.

Our collective recovery is going to see some uphill challenges. But technology can help our customers reimagine their future. With visionary leadership, the right offers, and optimistic innovation, we are fully committed to empowering our partners to be – Future Ready.