Cisco's Rodney Clark Dishes on Splunk, Partners, Channel Evolution
Clark, who officially started his job at Cisco three months ago, sat down for an interview with Channel Futures.
![Cisco's Rodney Clark talks everything channel, Splunk Cisco's Rodney Clark talks everything channel, Splunk](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt10e444bce2d36aa8/bltbefc08bff7d18fe2/6619981b507b520698e5f016/Rodney_Clark_Cisco_feature_2024.jpg?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
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Clark summed his role of aligning partner capability with customer needs. Cisco is boosting those partner capabilities – whether they be in traditional or emerging technologies – through specializations.
Clark said these specializations are making an already loyal partner base more committed.
"We get 10 of their technicians or technical sellers trained on secure networking. Then they go out and sell and deploy secure networking [from Cisco]," Clark said. "For us, the more we can invest in that, the more loyal our partners are, because they see that as us contributing to their capability, both for the individuals that are focused on it, and in this case, their company capability. Because the more of those specialized/certified technical sellers they have, the more services that they can build."
That loyalty also can deepen as Cisco widens its portfolio into areas like cybersecurity that it wouldn't have touched in previous decades.
Splunk is a textbook example of Cisco's ambition of moving all the way across the IT tech stack. The company at its last Cisco Live event proclaimed its ambitions to be known by partners and customers as a "platform" company.
Now Cisco can add the SIEM/SOAR capabilities of Splunk into its platform, pairing it with AppDynamics observability, Clark said.
"Previously a customer may have had to stitch these two things together or buy a piece of Cisco Meraki hardware and then use one of many or multiple other vendors to come in and support," he said. "Increasingly, the way that we're building our portfolio is to stitch these things together so that it's no longer point solutions. It creates an opportunity for us to secure a customer from that edge hardware experience all the way through to SIM/SOAR, XDR all the way through to observability. "
Clark said the channel integration process involves three different layers.
The first? the partners. Many of them have been selling both Splunk and Cisco, but others may have only sold one vendor.
"We want to continue to support those that are unique, especially those focused Splunk partners that have built amazing practices. But we also are in this position to capitalize on helping our partners who sell both Cisco products traditionally and Splunk continues to grow," he said.
The second layer? the ecosystems and programs that will merge together.
The third, Clark said, are the actual customers connected to Cisco and Splunk partners.
"The key here is understanding at least the current customers that these partners are mapped to. We don't want to disrupt business ... As we transition and evolve and integrate, we will ensure that we are overindexing on those Splunk partners, especially those have been uniquely a part of Splunk ecosystem," Clark said.
Clark said Cisco wants to be intentional about how it helps partners adopt Splunk offerings. The company will "double down" on training for partners delivering SIEM, SOAR and log-management offerings to the end user.
"I say we are going to 'overindex' on that, not because it doesn't exist today, but because we want to make sure that we signal to customers that when they have a partner that [is] Splunk-capable or capable of selling security observability, secure AI or secure networking – that the customer knows exactly what they're getting," he said. "So we'll spend a lot of time on that messaging on that."
Asked how Splunk and Cisco differ, Clark said he sees "very little competitive overlap."
There are some established differences, however, on the financial side.
"Splunk very publicly is much more focused on product discount. Cisco very publicly in our program is much more focused on rebate and incentive. So those are two financial mechanisms that we have to pull together to make sure that shared value becomes something that our partners understand without compromising the value that we deliver to customers," he said.
Clark added that Splunk heavily rewarded partners over the last couple of years to help the company transition to annual recurring revenue.
"As we merge these two things, what elements of that we do we keep and which elements of [Cisco's] way of incenting our partners do we keep? That's the simple question," he said.
Cisco operates its channel with four different partner personas: integrator, provider, developer and advisor. This is not to be confused with "routes to market," which includes sales routes like marketplaces and managed services.
But similar to routes to market, Clark said his team is reviewing how end customers think about the term "partner persona." Namely, do they think about partner personas?
For now, Clark said partners have responded well to the partner personas.
"We got really really rich feedback when we went to a role-based approach to driving engagement, as opposed to just tiering. What we're being tested on right now is whether or not that translates to a customer perceiving that value," Clark said.
A simple way to study that question is to review RFPs and see if customers are mentioning those keywords. Focus groups and analyst reports are also contributing to the research, Clark said.
"Everything that we do from an ecosystem perspective has to translate back to some customer sitting there and [saying], 'I need a Cisco partner to help me with X.' The question I'm asking is if they say, 'I need a gold integrator to help me with X.'"
Cisco operates its channel with four different partner personas: integrator, provider, developer and advisor. This is not to be confused with "routes to market," which includes sales routes like marketplaces and managed services.
But similar to routes to market, Clark said his team is reviewing how end customers think about the term "partner persona." Namely, do they think about partner personas?
For now, Clark said partners have responded well to the partner personas.
"We got really really rich feedback when we went to a role-based approach to driving engagement, as opposed to just tiering. What we're being tested on right now is whether or not that translates to a customer perceiving that value," Clark said.
A simple way to study that question is to review RFPs and see if customers are mentioning those keywords. Focus groups and analyst reports are also contributing to the research, Clark said.
"Everything that we do from an ecosystem perspective has to translate back to some customer sitting there and [saying], 'I need a Cisco partner to help me with X.' The question I'm asking is if they say, 'I need a gold integrator to help me with X.'"
Recently appointed Cisco channel leader Rodney Clark said his team is conducting more research into how end customers are perceiving Cisco's channel partners.
Cisco announced last fall that Clark would join the company as senior vice president of partnerships and small and medium business. Now officially three months into his job, Clark is immersing himself in a variety of conversations and initiatives at the IT vendor.
The initiative getting the headlines is Cisco's recently completed $28 billion acquisition of Splunk. Clark said Cisco is seeking to accomplish "three or four milestones" for integrating its partner program with Splunk's by November. In the meantime, he said the vendors are "operating on their own paper" when partners sell them.
"Our goal is to ensure that every Splunk partner that's a part of the Splunk partner program today is enabled to engage and do business the very same way that they do today between now and the time where we fully integrate Splunk into our back-end systems and things like pricing lists," Clark told Channel Futures in an interview at the company's office in Bellevue, Washington, this week.
Cisco's Rodney Clark Talks End Users
Clark's job title looks different from that of his predecessor, Oliver Tuszik. Whereas Tuszik was senior vice president of global partner sales and general manager of global routes to market, Clark is SVP of partnerships and SMB.
The change doesn't seem to be as much in function as it is in what it communicates to the external world. Clark said when he told non-Cisco people that he was going to own routes to market with the provider, they didn't understand the term.
"Those of us who are close to this all day, every day, know what that means. But to the average person externally – to a midsize customer in Alabama – what does route to market mean? All of this [change] was in terms saying in my title what we do: We drive partnerships, and we drive SMB."
Clark said he thinks about the SMB in his job title as "more than just a customer segment."
"For me, it's a proxy on how we leverage the scale of partners to address a set of customers," he told Channel Futures. "... How am I building a set of resources that can address the scale of our ecosystem, do it in a way that is low-touch and high-volume, and do it in a way that's that's low-cost and high-value."
Cisco brought Clark on in part because of his ability to challenge traditional thinking at the vendor. Clark worked for 20 years at Microsoft, often operating in overlapping circles with Cisco but bringing with him an external perspective.
"To succeed in this role, you have to understand our legacy, but you can’t be beholden to it," Cisco chief partner officer Jeff Sharritts said last year.
Clark said key feedback about Cisco's channel strategy will come from from the people its channel partners serve: end customers.
"I talk very openly about evolving our channel. We've come from this transactional hardware company to this age of AI, cloud and marketplace," he said. "In my first three months, we're really challenging each other to ensure that we're delivering on what the end customer really wants through our partner."
In the slideshow above, Channel Futures shares six highlights from its interview with Clark, including multiple angles of the Cisco-Splunk partner program integration.
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