Major Enhancements Coming to Cisco Partner Experience Platform

A year after launching its Partner Experience Platform (PXP), Cisco is readying significant enhancements, including the new PX Cloud. Cisco now has revealed new PXP capabilities which the company plans to launch this fall.

The upgraded PXP features will debut at the Cisco Partner Summit, a virtual event in November. Cisco is adding AI and machine learning capabilities to PXP that will provide “actionable insights and recommendations,” the company said. PXP will also gain enhanced partner planning tools, simplified renewal management and partner-to-partner collaboration capabilities. PX Cloud will bring PXP to a cloud-native architecture designed to integrate legacy systems tied to different products and services.

PXP’s Focus

PXP is the outgrowth of a major effort by Cisco to simplify customer and partner engagement with a unified interface. The core focus of PXP is to reduce complexity and improve partner productivity, therefore making them more profitable. Now that partners must support multiple routes to market, Cisco channel chief Oliver Tuszik emphasized that simplicity is key to profitability.

Cisco’s Oliver Tuszik

“Where in the past we had to manage one route to market, we now need to manage four or five different routes, which means also for our partners, life is getting much more complex, and complexity is the one thing that is destroying their profitability,” Tuszik said.

Other than customer satisfaction, Tuszik said that partner profitability remains his organization’s primary priority.

“When we look at profitability, this is a thing that we can actively influence,” he said. “We’re not talking about the front-end sales profitability; we are talking mainly about how to transact, how to find out where the business is going, and how to drive activities within the partner side, to drive your back-end profitability.”

Cisco’s José Van Dijk

Tuszik emphasized this priority isn’t new — he prefaced his announcement at the last live Cisco Partner Summit two years ago. It was at that event in 2019 that Tuszik signaled the development of PXP.

During a briefing with media and analysts, José van Dijk, vice president, partner performance and Global Partner Organization (GPO) operations, outlined the four new features coming to PXP. Tony Colon, SVP of customer and partner experience engineering demonstrated the new PX Cloud.

Cisco’s Tony Colon

A breakdown of key new capabilities to PXP and features of PX Cloud is in the slideshow above.