'These are our biggest partner programme changes in a decade' - Cisco

Vendor giant to re-categorise all partners in an effort to increase its ‘relevance in the market by elevating roles beyond the traditional resale motion’

Cisco is to streamline its partner programme, including re-categorising all partners, in an overhaul it's claiming is the biggest in over a decade.

At Cisco's virtual Partner Summit Digital 2020, it unveiled Cisco PXP, its new Partner Experience Platform, a single gateway for partner tools and resources.

The programme update

PXP will be available to all global partners from 30 November 2020.

Cisco SVP global partner organisation, Oliver Tuszik, said that a chief concern for the networking vendor giant is to try and keep working with Cisco as simple as possible, despite a plethora of solutions.

To that end, his team will consolidate almost a dozen partner programmes over the next 12 - 18 months, to be accessed via Cisco's new PXP.

"The simplified partner programme will serve partners in a more flexible and agile way than ever before," he said.

"These changes will deliver simplicity and allow Cisco and our partners to be more agile, relevant, and profitable."

Key to the new Cisco partner programme will be the categorisation of partners into four roles: integrator, provider, developer, and advisor.

Partners can approach Cisco to be in as many as they believe apply to them.

In a blog post, Cisco VP of strategy of planning and programmes Marc Surplus shared what attributes will be expected of each category.

• Integrators:

These partners will build end-to-end solutions for Cisco customers, primarily as resellers.

Business specialisations will continue to count toward integrator certifications.

• Providers:

Providers will focus on managed services and SaaS solutions. Cisco says it sees them as "an evolution of the cloud and managed services programme".

"We will add a new Gold Provider status in the second half of FY2021."

• Developers:

These partners will be expected to provide complete customer solutions by delivering complimentary products, software and services.

"Developers often leverage our APIs to drive more automation in the network or even build custom applications that work on Cisco platforms to solve unique customer business challenges."

"For Developers, co-marketing and co-selling opportunities are key to our value exchange," Surplus said.

• Advisors:

And advisors will be seen as those partners who "add value by consulting on customers' most pressing business challenges and understand how a Cisco offer or solution may solve that challenge."

"Typically involved during a pre-sales conversation, this role often kickstarts the customer lifecycle engagement. Going forward, Cisco will formally recognise the value Advisors bring," Surplus added.

Advisor partners will be given new benefits, such as early access to Cisco strategy and roadmaps.

Cisco says existing partner investments in Cisco will be preserved, however, the vendor's tiers of Gold, Premier and Select will be merged with the categories over FY2021.

Yet global partner boss Tuszik reassured current Cisco partners that they will not be asked to "start over" with this new programme.

He said the re-categorisation of partners is a reflection of the wider market trend towards services.

"The new Cisco partner programme increases relevance in the market by elevating roles beyond the traditional resale motion and allows more ways to showcase their managed services, developer and advisor areas of expertise."

The products update

When lifting the lid on the latest portfolio updates, the vendor had to fend off analyst queries over the relevancy of a legacy networking player in a cloud-world where more and more applications are being migrated to the hyperscalers.

VP Gordon Thomson responded by insisting Cisco "will still be relevant" because customers will never be able to move every application to the cloud.

"Some are too costly or too difficult. We think the world will always be hybrid," he said.

"Whether that's using private datacentres or SaaS providers, Cisco will be relevant because Cisco will be able to stand up those virtual machines in any cloud, moving workloads from one cloud to another and deploy that from one tool."

Thomson cited new updates to the vendor's solution Cisco Intersight and the Cisco Nexus Dashboard, which provide real-time automation to help customers gain more insights from cloud and on-premise investments.

And across all clouds, Cisco says its strategy is to be seen as a leader in zero-trust security approaches in the networking market.

It first launched Cisco SecureX, a cloud-native security platform, in June of this year.

Since then, Thompson says the vendor has seen an uptake by more than 4,000 customers using the platform.

He also claimed that more than half of customers reported saving up to six hours per week on incident response - totalling more than two full weeks saved per year on operations-focused responsibilities.

Within the platform, Cisco has announced a number of updates across the breath of the Cisco Security portfolio, including enhanced capabilities in extended detection and response (XDR); sero trust; and secure access services edge (SASE).

"Cisco Duo, a foundational pillar of Cisco's zero trust solution, now automatically detects suspicious logins with machine learning and alerts security operations via API integrations with platforms such as SecureX," said SVP of Cisco security business group, Gee Rittenhouse.

"As we move to the next normal, we see an acceleration in new ways of working that require organisations to evolve their cybersecurity approach so people can securely connect from anywhere, anytime, and on any device."

Cisco says it will share more details on its 2021 strategy throughout the remainder of this year, including benchmarking capabilities, faster onboarding and enrollment information for partners.