Image Gallery: Cisco Partner Summit 2019 — Own Your Edge
Did you miss it? Cisco Partner Summit 2019 had new product announcements and partner strategy for the next 12 months.
November 12, 2019
![Cisco Partner Summit 2019 Own Your Edge Cisco Partner Summit 2019 Own Your Edge](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt10e444bce2d36aa8/blte8637bca25e72158/652459e911d30c2c457fa07f/Cisco-PS19-Own-Your-Edge.jpg?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
Oliver Tuszik, senior vice president, Cisco Global Partner Organization, reminds partners about Cisco’s four key messages: 1. Customer success is the #1 priority. Adoption is not only an option, but Cisco and partners must focus on customer success like never before. 2. Partners are Cisco’s default go-to-market for the entire life cycle. 3. Perform and Transform continues and evolves to align Cisco and partner teams. 4. Cisco wants unique, specialized partners and will support partners to own their edge.
Marc Surplus, vice president, partner strategy, planning and programs, Cisco Global Partner Organization (left), and panelists Mike Dornan, COO, Natilik; Jonathan Barouch, CEO and founder of Local Measure; and Sean Rollman, CTO, Internetwork Engineering, talk about partner program news and how incentives will help them improve profitability and differentiation.
What’s the impact of DevNet on the partner business?
“I have a problem that’s a good one to have. My small development staff is completely unavailable to me because they’re helping our customers all the time. We’re seeing opportunities and will grow that,” said Rollman. “We’re going to continue to invest there. We’re a little slower because we didn’t start off as a software company but we’re definitely seeing this as a way to differentiate going forward.”
It was earnings reporting time that kept Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins from attending Cisco Partner Summit 2018. This year, Robbins celebrated his birthday with song at this year’s event, his 21st Partner Summit.
“We have to continue to adapt to change based on what’s happening in the world, what’s happening with our customers. That is what we’ve attempted to do over the last few years. We embarked on this business model change – and it isn’t like we got to do this on our own, it impacted everybody in this room. And we’re still in process with our transition,” he said.
“If you can solve a business problem with software, do it,” he added. “It creates more predictability and for all of us it creates more new opportunities.”
Last year was a record year for Cisco, reporting almost $52 billion in revenue.
It’s on again. With a goal to help inspire and empower a generation of global problem solvers, Cisco is on a mission to positively impact 1 billion people by 2025.
The challenge is a worldwide search for early-state technology-enabled solutions and services that can enable economic development and/or benefit society and/or the environment.
Executive meetings are always buzzing. A big reason partner executives attend conferences is for the upfront and personal time they get to spend with their vendor partners.
“We come to this [conference] every year because it’s about 64% of our overall revenue as an organization, and we find that Cisco, their acquisitions and innovation is always helping us evolve as an organization, pushing us into new things. We find it meaningful … the changes that we’re seeing in subscriptions, as-a-service plays, multicloud … it’s helping us change the way we do business,” Shawn Heiden, vice president of sales at Compunet, a heavy engineering organization that works with customers to find business strategies and tie them to IT outcomes, told Channel Futures. Compunet was founded in 1998.
“Aside from whatever Cisco announces here, it’s important for us to be in meetings with Cisco leadership talking about what’s going on.”
Book recommendations by Cisco executives Chuck Robbins, Gerri Eliott and Oliver Tuszik are on display for partners to check out. The titles – “Just Mercy,” by Bryan Stevenson; “How Democracies Die,” by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt; The Hundred Year Marathon, by Michael Pillsbury; Range, by David Epstein; and Evicted, by Matthew Desmond.
Cisco Webex Desk Pro is one of two new devices in Cisco’s collaboration portfolio; the other is Webex Room Panorama. Webex Desk Pro can be used for one-on-one or team collaboration and is AI-enabled right out of the box.
Cisco last week announced five major innovations to its collaboration portfolio.
Cisco Black Belt Academy is part of the Cisco Partner Experience. The Black Belt Academy is a virtual and self-paced learning experience for partner sales and engineers to learn about how the vendor’s solutions compete in the market.
Cisco Black Belt Academy is part of the Cisco Partner Experience. The Black Belt Academy is a virtual and self-paced learning experience for partner sales and engineers to learn about how the vendor’s solutions compete in the market.
Cisco Partner Summit 2019 might be in the rearview mirror, but for partners the next steps in their Cisco business transformation journey is in front of them.
By all accounts, the vendor’s partner conference was a success, with 3,000 attendees in Las Vegas and another 12,000 attending virtually. Oliver Tuszik, senior vice president, Cisco Global Partner Organization, opened the conference by talking about partner success, noting that they account for 75% of all of Cisco bookings — that’s in more than 80 countries, accounting for 145,000 customers.
The conference theme – “Own Your Edge” – was heard throughout the event.
“It’s about what you are doing, how you create value to our customers, how you’re being unique no matter the size of the company, no matter what country, no matter what segment of technology. It’s you that creates the unique value on top of our offerings. It’s you that delivers business outcomes and value,” Tuszik said.
Click through our slideshow above for highlights of the event and insights into how you can “own your edge.”
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