Cisco Giving Channel 'Everything' in Partner Lifecycle Services Expansion
Denzil Samuels shared how Cisco prioritized getting partner executives involved in PLS and how that paid dividends.
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Denzil Samuels, global channel and partner leader for Cisco Services, pointed to three key “legs” of PLS.
The first is digitization, in which Cisco is building tools for partners and customers that reflect an automated and easily accessable world.
“We’re moving away from a world of reactive hardware support. The customers are demanding something else. As consumers, we’ve gotten used to a whole different experience from a customer perspective. We almost take that for granted with the apps we use, whether it’s an Uber or an Airbnb or apps to change the thermostat in your house from thousands of miles away and get analytics on it,” Samuels said.
Cisco has built CX Cloud as a digital platform to house more than 20 years worth of customer data. Moreover, it has built PX Cloud as an interface within CX Cloud that gives eligible partners access to relevant customer data.
“We’ve created PXP to digitize the experience that you, the new partner, has with us, in terms of incentives, in terms of rebates, in terms of partner maturity model. We have to digitize and automate things that should be digitized and automated, such as machine learning, automation, resolution of problem tickets,” he said.
The second leg of PLS is changing the customer experience for the better.
Samuels said programs and tools need to reflect the movement of the economy away from products and into subscriptions.
“We’ve actually moved to a consumption economy, and now we are in the customer experience economy, and it’s not a fad. It’s real,” he told Channel Futures. “And in that customer experience economy, the experience is, ‘Sell me an outcome. Don’t sell me hardware or software. Don’t even say you’re going to going to sell me a solution; sell me an outcome.'”
For example, partners need to demonstrate how the Cisco offering they sell can give a customer return on investment.
“That return on investment has to be reflected in the form of reducing my operational complexity, or reducing my cost, or minimizing my security risk, or giving me a platform for growth, or helping me become more agile,” Samuels said.
To that end, Samuel said Cisco has been developing “blueprints” in the form of APIs that can help partners tackle different customer use cases.
“If you look at an API library, you can you should be able to, at a glance, say, ‘Ah, if I pick API 23 over there, I know that’s going to reduce operational complexity. That’s the one I go for,'” he said.
Cisco’s Executive Engagement Series Workshops mark the third leg of the PLS vision.
Participating PLS partners must complete five two-hour workshops, preferably within a 30-day period.
The series of workshops begins with an alignment session in which the partner and Cisco share their strategic priorities and their points of focus for the next six to 12 months.
Based on the results of the first workshop, the next four workshops cover all the certifications, the specializations and audits the partner needs to obtain in order to reposition itself and sell accordingly. One of those workshops helps partners measure the maturity and profitability of their services.
Samuels said Cisco changed the workshops to mandate that the CEO of the partner or members of its leadership team attend the first workshop session.
He said that initially Cisco wasn’t engaging with people at a high enough level in the partner organizations to ensure the partner was buying into the PLS vision. In some cases, top management at those partner firms didn’t yet know about the initiative.
“I was asking for commitments from the people in that workshop, and they didn’t have the authority to make the decision,” Samuels said.
So Samuels and company set out to drive more buy-in at the executive level, with the hope that the participation would trickle down.
For example, he approached the president of a partner that generated $3 billion a year for Cisco. The partner was partipating in PLS, but the president had not yet acquainted himself with CX members.
“I told the organization we were going to shut down everything to do with CX unless he attended that first workshop. And we were prepared to,” Samuels said.
Samuels said the president attended the alignment session and is now meeting with Samuels every 30 days to ensure his team is where it needs to be. And his participation is paying dividends, Samuels said.
“The growth that they’ve experienced from a CX perspective and the growth we’ve experience has been substantial. Messages like that got around really quickly. All of a sudden, I actually had the C-suite of the partners asking for those meetings, because they started to see that competitors were making traction,” he said.
Samuels said the current group of “smart-bonded” partners amounts to approximately 200. These partners have digitally unified their customer support systems in order to jointly serve customers.
Samuels said customers historically would call their partner if they experienced a technology problem. The partner would then initiate a ticket, and if it couldn’t solve the issue, it would call Cisco’s Technical Assistance Center (TAC). Then Cisco and the partner would hash out the problem via phone or email.
And for Samuels, this manual, segmented approach didn’t mesh well with a software-driven world. For that reason, Cisco required its PLS partners to digitally bond their support systems with that of Cisco.
“If you open up a problem ticket in your system, the nanosecond it gets opened up, we see it in that TAC center,” he said. “Every update that happens, we see. Every update you do, we see. There’s no need for phone calls. There’s no need for emails. It’s dynamic information that we see straightaway.”
PX Cloud, which will become generally available to partners in March, will function as a partner’s portal into Cisco’s CX Cloud platform.
CX Cloud contains years of data about Cisco’s customers, with API and automation capabilities. In cases when a partner has received permission to view the data, PX Cloud will allow them to see their client’s technology posture.
“When they get the digital approval to look at a certain customer’s data, we then extend that access to the data,” Samuels said. “So the PX Cloud is their lens into the customer data upon approval.”
General Data Tech (GDT) is one such partner to take advantage of PX Cloud data. The partner received authorization to view data from its customer, Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.
Viewing the CX Cloud data let them view the tribe’s full IT and network environment.
“As a result of that, there were certain areas where they knew they could now use automation to provide services, versus in the past that had been manual,” Samuels said.
Cisco gave its recent Partner Summit the tagline, “Let’s Own It,” speaking to the goal of its partners getting more involved in the customer life cycle. That includes both deployment, managed services and other aspects of helping customers procure technology.
Alexandra Zagury, Cisco’s vice president of partner managed and as-a-service global partner sales, told analysts last week that managed services will account for 45% of Cisco’s TAM by 2025. And partners will deliver those managed services, Cisco executives have reiterated.
In the meantime, the partners who are investing most heavily in Partner Lifecycle Services say their expansion is coming with Cisco’s help.
Kenneth Farber works as president of ePlus Systems, which recently earned the title of Cisco’s first qualified PLS Support program partner in North America. Farber said ePlus wouldn’t have made the investment in the program without knowing first that Cisco would help share the load.
“We were very adamant that in order for us to do this, it had to be co-delivered, so the customer knew that we [ePlus and Cisco] were both in it together and had skin in the game together. And we would share our success and then we share our failures,” Farber said.
Cisco gave its recent Partner Summit the tagline, “Let’s Own It,” speaking to the goal of its partners getting more involved in the customer life cycle. That includes both deployment, managed services and other aspects of helping customers procure technology.
Alexandra Zagury, Cisco’s vice president of partner managed and as-a-service global partner sales, told analysts last week that managed services will account for 45% of Cisco’s TAM by 2025. And partners will deliver those managed services, Cisco executives have reiterated.
In the meantime, the partners who are investing most heavily in Partner Lifecycle Services say their expansion is coming with Cisco’s help.
Kenneth Farber works as president of ePlus Systems, which recently earned the title of Cisco’s first qualified PLS Support program partner in North America. Farber said ePlus wouldn’t have made the investment in the program without knowing first that Cisco would help share the load.
“We were very adamant that in order for us to do this, it had to be co-delivered, so the customer knew that we [ePlus and Cisco] were both in it together and had skin in the game together. And we would share our success and then we share our failures,” Farber said.
Cisco Systems is giving partners the keys to the kingdom with the expansion of its Partner Lifecycle Services initiative.
Cisco as of earlier this year was already following the road map for its Partner Lifecycle Services, which offer resources and train partners to provide deeper and more profitable solutions for their customers. The IT giant back in May made its Partner Lifecycle Services Support (PLSS) available, and continues to track on schedule with its planned updates. That’s according to Denzil Samuels, global channel and partner leader for Cisco Services (CX).
Cisco’s Denzil Samuels
Next March, Cisco will make PX Cloud, a window for partners into Cisco’s CX Cloud portal (based on digital approval to view certain customers’ data), generally available to eligible partners. At the same time, Cisco will give partners Success Tracks ‘Enhanced Access,’ giving them co-sell abilities, access to additional accelerators, and multiple net new APIs beyond what the company announced at its recent Partner Summit. Then in July, Cisco will give partners PLS Success Tracks that they can co-deliver to end customers. Samuels said that means Cisco is making its entire CX portfolio that it has been selling directly customers, available in a customized manner for channel partners.
“That means anything the partners want to do with our portfolio is available for them,” Samuels told Channel Futures. “… We’re giving them everything.”
Partner Experience
Moreover, Cisco at Partner Summit made its PX (partner experience) Cloud APIs generally available for partners. Samuels said Cisco has offered API’s on PX Cloud in limited availability – mainly to a select number of its larger partners – but that access is about to expand.
“What we’re basically saying is, ‘If you want to sign up for that API access by PX Cloud, now you can. Because we’ve tested it. We know it works. We know the data’s sound,” Samuels said.
Samuels said that when Cisco launched PLS, his teamed had hoped to convince 500 to register their interest in learning about eligibility criteria, smart bonding and PLS workshops. Moreover, he had hoped that at least 25 partners would indicate their interest in smart bonding. However, the initial partner response exceeded his expectations, with nearly 470 partners coming on board in the first three months.
Samuels shared details about the CX Cloud and PX Cloud platforms, how smart-bonded partners are supporting customers differently and why Cisco revamped its PLS workshops to foster C-suite engagement.
See the eight slides above to learn more about Cisco Partner Lifecycle Services.
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