Opportunities, Challenges Facing Cisco Partners
Cisco Live was this week's event headliner. Reps from Computacenter, Molaprise, NTT and WWT weigh in on their experiences.
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Emmanuel Ola-Dake (pictured) is the founder and managing director of Molaprise, a cloud and security-focused consultancy and MSP.
Ola-Dake said Cisco is taking seriously the feedback of customers and partners about developing more of a platform-based portfolio.
“It’s good to see one of the biggest technology companies in the world beginning to unify all the enterprise in a way that becomes very simple,” Ola-Dake told Channel Futures.
And “simple” has been the name of the game at 2023 Cisco Live. CEO Chuck Robbins emphasized in his Tuesday keynote that Cisco historically has made a point of rolling out copious amounts of technology features. The time has come, however, to bring them together.
“But if you can’t deploy them, they’re no good,” Robbins said. “So the No. 1 feature that our teams need to continue to focus on is simplicity. Simplicity and your experience using our technology.”
Ola-Dake said increased simplicity, particularly on the security side, will improve life for the partner firm on the ground level.
“It looks like it will help with going to market, execution and conversion, as well as making our clients happy and providing a better customer experience.”
Jeff Jennings directs Computacenter‘s U.S. networking portfolio. He said the complexity of IT is inhibiting what businesses want to accomplished. Jennings said he’s happy to see Cisco taking strides toward simplicity. However, he said Cisco faces three-pronged challenge in both meeting customers where they are and helping those customers evolve.
“There’s where their customers are and how to maintain and release features, enhancements and capabilities. There’s also where Cisco wants to take them to. And there’s, in my mind, a large step to get from where they are to where Cisco wants to take them, [with] all of the pieces that customers have to move around to get to it,” Jennings told Channel Futures.
Neil Anderson, who serves as area vice president of cloud and infrastructure solutions for World Wide Technology (WWT), added an observation that analysts and Cisco executives have been saying all week: Customers want to consolidate the sprawling number of security tools they currently own.
“Our customers are looking for security platforms. There are just so many different security tools and vendors out there that customers are kind of drowning in. And they’re looking for consolidation. How do I adopt a platform where instead of managing 12 different things? I can manage one. That’s the direction Cisco is headed with its security portfolio,” Anderson said.
Oliver Tuszik, Cisco’s senior vice president of global partner sales and general manager of routes to market, agreed that Cisco is moving in that direction of unification.
“We’re coming out of a world where we had a lot of great products, a lot of great acquisitions. And we now finally stopped selling them in silos and bringing them more together to integrate solutions. And that’s especially important as our customers realize that they have a zoo of security solutions that no longer really work together,” Tuszik told Channel Futures.
He added that the average enterprise uses between 50 and 70 different security solutions. And that overwhelmingly large number stemmed from how CEOs and CFOs engaged with CIOs around security over the years. The former would read the news about the latest cyberattack and ask the CIO if the company had the right solution to stop such an assault. At the same time, new companies were popping up with the answer to that specific problem.
“So you bought the software. You installed it, build up the skills, and it’s running. Then the next threat came up. We had something new every quarter over the last 20 years … and now we’re getting to the point that this complexity is no longer manageable,” Tuszik said.
In the meantime, SMBs face the same threats. But with thinner staffing, they’re looking for managed services in addition to platform consolidation.
The same excitement about increased simplicity goes for channel partners delivering network solutions.
WWT’s Neil Anderson (pictured) said he’s excited about the integration that’s occurring within the Cisco networking portfolio. For example, Cisco rolled out for a way for Meraki management console users to acess several other network management platforms through a single sign-on.
“[Cisco networking leader] Jonathan Davidson talked a lot about how they’re bringing together the Meraki and the Catalyst portfolio under cloud management. And they’re just laser-focused on simplifying,” Anderson told Channel Futures.
Anderson said WWT is coming away encouraged about Cisco’s security portfolio growth. Previously the partner might have needed to turn to a different vendor that covered a gap in Cisco’s portfolio. He pointed to Cisco’s new SSE offering as something that will come in handy for WWT and its customers.
“They weren’t always the most competitive in some of the market with firewall and SSE capabilities. There was a huge shift to that during the pandemic. We’re very excited about Cisco catching up those capabilities to be much more competitive the market,” he told Channel Futures.
WWT recently won Cisco’s enterprise partner and service provider of the year awards.
Ola-Dake said that partners may need to tweak their sales motion as the Cisco portfolio includes more and more integration.
“The slight challenge is how we retrain and retool to making sure that instead of selling siloed SKUs and things, now you are selling in stock – in package form – and making sure that you’re delivering that customer experience that way as well,” he told Channel Futures.
Tuszik said the game has changed from selling a product, or even a suite, to selling an outcome.
“Customers don’t want to do it themselves any longer. They said, ‘Don’t give me six products and I need to build it. Give me an outcome,’ which we are supporting with these suites,” Tuszik told Channel Futures.
Tuszik pointed to managed services as a very outcome-focused motion that many Cisco partners have already adopted. Others are still catching up on managed services, and others are facing challenges, he said.
For many partners, there’s a certain inertia from the pandemic around selling SKUs that partners need to move past.
“There was a hype on just getting the infrastructure. You could make a lot of money by just shipping routers and switches. But now as all the gear is out there, customers are looking for somebody to help them to generate the value or fix the underlying problem,” he said. “So we see clearly a shift, and we’re building more and more bundles or suites like a hybrid work, secure connect and full stack observability. “
When asked what vendors like Cisco can do to make life easier for partners, Anderson pointed to license simplification.
“Making it easy for us and our customers to understand, what do they need? What do I order? What license do I need? Just making that easy and simple. That’s really important for us. It’s always been pretty complicated for parts of Cisco,” Anderson said. “Bringing that more unified experience to partners and customers is something that we really need. And they’re headed in that direction.”
Ola-Dake that he sees opportunity in Cisco’s developing collaboration with cloud marketplaces. Cisco channel leaders have spoken publicly about their goal of partnering with hyperscalers like AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud to use their marketplaces as an area to build and deploy cloud-native solutions.
“What does that mean for our customers? A quick, seamless procurement and deployment process. That’s a huge opportunity,” Ola-Dake told Channel Futures.
Jennings said generative AI and large language models loomed large over the conference.
Cisco announced plans to integrate generative AI into both its Webex collaboration portfolio and security portfolio.
“I don’t think anybody has totally figured it out, but it is nice to see that Cisco has paths and plans to integrate that into solutions and products. We’re trying to do the same for our customers and help figure out how they could use it, and even how we can use it ourselves. It seemed like every conversation — everything they talked about, came back to embedding AI into it in some capacity,” Jennings told Channel Futures.
While Cisco’s security and collaboration portfolios got much of the attention for the generative AI capabilites they’ll soon include, Jennings said he’s interested to see how AI impacts the full-stack observability suite.
“They’re going to take in telemetry and analytics, apply AI to the situation based on what it knows, and transform the network on the fly without a human,” he said. “I think that’s absolutely where the future of the network is. It’s going to take a little time and effort to get there, but I think they’re on the path, and they have the pieces to put that together.
Joe Maissel is vice president of digital advisory and services for NTT, which Cisco recently recognized as its managed services partner of the year. He spoke to Channel Futures this week about Cisco’s full-stack observability (FSO) portfolio, which NTT uses for its managed services.
Maissel noted that the portfolio is evolving to layer on diffent layers of visibility, including application, network and data center.
“As we get into situations with our clients where we have to resolve issues more effectively, and we discover that there are telemetry and data that need to come from a source that we weren’t considering before, we’ll now have the option to bring that data in order to correlate it and identify problems faster. And that’s a form of innovation – that the platform allows you to bring in sources of data that you wouldn’t have been able to in the past. It opens up the possibility of providing an even more effective managed service and better outcomes for our clients,” he said.
Cisco has seen rapid expansion of both its SMB efforts and the amount of managed services its partners are driving. And often those two trends – SMB and MSPs – are close bedfellows. According to Cisco executives and analysts, more and more SMBs are looking to procure their solutions in a digital way and lean on a partner to manage those solutions. Cisco’s recent partnership expansion with AT&T to reach SMBs demonstrates that trend.
However, the experience may be different with enterprise-focused partners like WWT. While WWT does offer managed services, its customers differ very significantly in terms of their in-house IT staff.
“These are large organizations. They may do managed in spots, but we’re not seeing huge demands for managed services,” Anderson said.
Anderson said WWT’s capabilities, resources and relationships in traditional infrastructure will lend themselves to helping customers in the cloud.
“While there are cloud boutiques out there that just focus on cloud and do that very well, they often don’t understand the traditional infrastructure that customers have. How do you … chain the two together in the right architecture? We’re really excited that we feel like we’ve got that capability, and the cloud providers are also super excited about that. Cisco is super excited about that because we can bridge those worlds for them,” he said.
Anderson said WWT’s capabilities, resources and relationships in traditional infrastructure will lend themselves to helping customers in the cloud.
“While there are cloud boutiques out there that just focus on cloud and do that very well, they often don’t understand the traditional infrastructure that customers have. How do you … chain the two together in the right architecture? We’re really excited that we feel like we’ve got that capability, and the cloud providers are also super excited about that. Cisco is super excited about that because we can bridge those worlds for them,” he said.
CISCO LIVE — Companies ranging across the diverse ecosystem of Cisco partners are embracing the vendor’s movement toward simplicity and platform consolidation.
Cisco hosted its annual conference in Las Vegas this week, drawing in upward of 20,000 partners and customers. The vendor unveiled numerous portfolio updates, many of which include unifying its respective networking and security platforms. Those updates include road map timelines to bring generative AI into Cisco Security Cloud and Webex.
Oliver Tuszik, Cisco’s senior vice president of global partner sales and general manager of routes to market, said businesses of all sizes need technology more than ever to enable business outcomes.
Cisco’s Oliver Tuszik
“There were times where all digitization was mainly happening at the bigger accounts. It’s now also the midmarket and also the SMB that drive digital transformation. No matter what size of business you have, you need to have a digital business model,” Tuszik told Channel Futures in an interview.
Executives in keynotes and conversations with analysts said they’re out to establish Cisco’s identity as a platform company. And partners who spoke to Channel Futures said they see Cisco taking serious strides in that direction.
“IT has become way too complex. It’s an inhibitor to where businesses are trying to go. I am glad to see Cisco focused on simplicity,” said Jeff Jennings, director of Computacenter‘s USA networking portfolio.
Cisco Partners Key to Platform Updates
Computacenter’s Jeff Jennings
Tuszik added that the company leaned heavily on Cisco partners and end customers for the updates it made around platform consolidation and consolidation. Approximately 90% of Cisco’s business runs through indirect channels. Cisco in recent months has publicized what it calls “Age of the Partner.”
“This position really differentiates them as it demonstrates that they do not think of the channel as a necessary evil for scale as some others in the space do, but rather as the true driving force behind all progress in business and technology,” said Janet Schijns, CEO of the channel consultancy JS Group. “You see that in the investments they are making in technology that surrounds their legacy products as well as the position they have taken in managed services in the market, especially in the SMB space.”
JS Group’s Janet Schijns
Channel Futures interviewed people from four different partner firms to see what they think about Cisco’s latest initiatives. Partners shared how platform consolidation will impact them and their customers, their feelings on Cisco’s partnership with cloud marketplaces and the conversations they’re having about generative AI. The companies vary significantly in size, from New York-based consultancy Molaprise to behemoth international service provider NTT.
Scroll through the 11 slides above to see comments from Cisco partners at this week’s Cisco Live.
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