Chuck Robbins: 'Cisco didn't know how channel committed to be'

CEO uses partner summit keynote to admit that the importance of the channel was not clear at first

Cisco was unsure in the past of how channel committed it should be, its CEO said as he highlighted the current importance of resellers at its partner summit in Dallas on Wednesday.

Chuck Robbins' opening keynote at the 2017 Cisco partner summit detailed his journey from direct sales at Cisco to working with the channel and eventually taking over the networking giant's hotseat.

"This [partner summit] is my favourite event. I think back to 1999 when a vice president [at Cisco] approached me and asked me to work in a different part of the organisation," said Robbins.

"Back in 1999, working in the 'direct sales force' was the thing to do. They wanted me to work in a group called 'channels' and I said, 'why'? And he replied 'we believe that organisation is our future'.

"We are more committed today than we were then. We really didn't know how committed [to the channel] we should be back then, but today we know for sure. We are committed to our success together [with the channel] as we go forward."

Robbins went on to tell partners that in the current IT landscape, with millions of businesses moving towards cloud, the network will end up being fundamentally different than it is today.

"We have to reinvent networking. We have to make it simpler, we have to make it programmable, make it scalable, and we have to make it much more agile for our customers," he said.

"This new era in networking is about the ability to take business intent and apply that to the network. Security also has to be embedded deeply into the network because we are adding billions of devices, so we have to be applying security in the network too."