Cisco Americas Partner Lead: 'Our Path to Success Is Pretty Clear'

There’ll be a new face on stage at this year’s Cisco Partner Summit, just one month away. That would be John Moses, vice president, Americas Partner Organization.

Just three months in, since taking over for the recently retired Rick Snyder, Moses, a 14-year Cisco veteran, steps into his newest job at Cisco at a transformative time in the company’s history. And, at a critical time for partners who at last year’s Partner Summit were given one year to get in lockstep with the company. 

Cisco’s John Moses

Channel Futures sat down with Moses, former U.S. vice president of sales with Cisco’s Partner Organization for almost two years, to get some insight on the new Americas channel lead. As the largest of Cisco’s three regions, the Americas drives 65% of Cisco revenue. And, out of the approximately $33 billion in revenue that comes from the Americas, 92% flows through partners. 

Channel Futures: The Americas region and channel play a significant role in Cisco’s overall business.  

John Moses: Yes, and what’s really cool is that as we make the shift to software, subscriptions and recurring revenue, 98% of that revenue flows through partners. So basically, our biggest growth engine comes through and with our partners. 

CF: What would you like partners to know about you as the Americas channel chief? 

JM: It’s been an amazing 90 days since I’ve been in the role. I feel honored and humbled to get this role. I want people to know that I’m very passionate about partners, committed to their success and know that we have a legacy of greatness and that I’m looking forward to being the shepherd to take that forward to greater heights. 

CF: You’re a company veteran, yet you’re stepping into your new role at a pivotal time in Cisco’s history. What’s that like? 

JM: The evolution that we are going through is pretty incredible and I truly believe that we’ll be looking at a Harvard study about what Cisco and its partners are doing together sometime down the road. What’s incredible is that our work and commitment to partners starts at the top. [CEO] Chuck Robbins was part of the partner organization, he came up through the sales organization and he continues to share with our key stakeholders and shareholders the importance of our partners.  

Gerri [Elliott], who runs worldwide sales for us, she made a $300 million investment to upgrade tools and processes to make it easier for our partners to do business with us, and Oliver [Tuszik, SVP, Global Partner Organization] continues to talk about the power of “with.” What he means by that is that there’s a 16X multiplier that we have with our partners and our sales organization together. Jeff Sherritts, who leads the Americas sales, started out as a partner account manager and was with the partner organization for six years, and his message is always, let’s take care of our partners.

We have a bright future ahead. It’s pretty exciting. As we move forward, partners have a choice and our job every day is to make Cisco a destination for them, a company they want to do business with. 

CF: Cisco partners are coming to the end of that 12-month time period to get in lockstep with Cisco. What are you observing and what’s resonating with partners? 

JM: There are big transitions going on — managed services, application development, or IP, and customer success. It’s not without a few bumps in the road at times but I think we made some great progress and our path to success is pretty clear. 

The biggest and newest thing that’s resonating is …

… life-cycle customer success. While many of our partners have practices in place, it’s something we’re learning together. We have over 155 Lifecycle advisers, which are now life-cycle specialization partners in the Americas. So partners are definitely leaning in with us. 

Also, our software capabilities with our partners are on an exponential growth pattern and that’s a business with a predictable revenue stream; it also serves our customer in giving them what they need in terms of outcomes. It’s a nice win-win-win. 

CF: Name three things that partners should be doing to be in lockstep with Cisco. 

JM: These are things we do together with our partners. 

Partners need to understand our portfolio and know how to position Cisco’s multidomain approach – aka Cisco’s intent-based networking architecture covering all domains of the network – to deliver business outcomes to our customers. We’re doing things to help them on that such as our Blackbelt program, an enablement program to allow their [partner] engineers and sellers to be competent and confident with our multidomain approach. 

Customer success would be the second thing. Customer success means different things to different partners – some have gone all in with us where they’ve become life-cycle specialized and that’s certainly where we want all of our partners to go because the life cycle is a new selling motion that includes software capabilities, allowing customers to choose, but we also want to get them using and loving. 

The third piece is more of the transformative type of thing. What I mean by that is us continuing to build out managed offerings, continuing to build our hybrid cloud solutions … these are things our customers need. So, it’s about perform for today and also about transform and bringing on new capabilities they may not have had in the past. 

CF: Talk a bit more about Cisco’s new selling motion which is critical for partners. 

JM: It’s important to find out that the age of software is absolutely here. There’s a statistic I heard the other day that 70% of applications are going to be built rather than bought. So that’s where our partners getting these new capabilities around software, building intellectual property of top of our platform, is going to be critical, creating stickiness and relevance for the customers — but it’s also going to help them with their profitability. 

CF: How about a sneak peek to Cisco Partner Summit 2019 coming up next month? 

JM: The theme is Own Your Edge. It’s about unique differentiation. We’re incredibly excited about Partner Summit. I think it’s going to be one of our best yet. What I can say is that there’s going to be some great messaging, great stories — it’s going to be a full experience. We’re in the process of building something legendary.