Cisco CEO Robbins: 'Resellers have an opportunity to become app developers'

Cisco boss says moving into app development will be one of the biggest opportunities for partners over the next two years

Resellers should look into becoming app developers over the next two years, according to Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins.

Answering a question by CRN during a Q&A session at this year's Cisco Live event, Robbins said that his advice to resellers is to start building their own in-house app development teams in order to capitalise on opportunities over the next two years.

The advice comes after a slew of new announcements from Cisco, including a new unified secure access service edge offering, the integration between ThousandEyes and App Dynamics and the launch of its new as-a-service offering Cisco Plus.

Robbins said that the announcements from Cisco show how important apps will become to the channel over the next two years.

"We've got some partners that have gone out and acquired development companies. They've brought out those capabilities and started to tie that together with their infrastructure experience.

"I think that is one of the biggest opportunities our partners have and I think it will create a very long -term sustainable business and differentiated business model for them."

"What will be more relevant over the next 24 month is partners either moving up the stack to become more of an application player, or building great expertise around the value of the application and infrastructure coming together from a visibility perspective at a minimum," Robbins added.

Cisco's chief strategy officer and GM of applications, Liz Centoni, added that there will be almost 600 million new applications created over the next three years alone.

"It is the one space our partners should look at," she said.

"When I talk with our customers, there's a desire to build more modern applications. Because truly it is the application that is the business.

"There's an opportunity for partners in helping customers with that balance of traditional applications working pretty well and moving to more cloud native and modern applications. A number of those applications are traditional and some of them will stay that way. We have customers that want to run applications on mainframes and have no plans to change that. But some are looking at migrating some applications - maybe just on the front end and keeping the back end on prem. So they're looking for migration help and cloud native help in those areas£

"There's that opportunity in helping customers with that balance of traditional applications and moving to more cloud native and modern applications."