Cisco Makes PX Cloud Analytics Platform Generally Available to Partners

All Cisco Systems partners who manage customer life cycles can now access the vendor’s Partner Experience (PX) cloud data and analytics platform.

Cisco on Thursday announced the general availability of PX Cloud to partners that resell its Success Tracks. Success Tracks are a packaged set of services that take customers through the full technology life cycle. PX Cloud functions as the partner version of CX Cloud, a customer-facing platform that houses client data.

Cisco has been expanding gradually over the last two years in terms of which partners can access it. The company last November made its APIs for PX Cloud generally available. Before November, only a select number of larger partners could access those APIs. Cisco had promised that the platform would be generally available this month. And the vendor is making good on those promises today. That’s according to Denzil Samuels, global channel and partner leader for Cisco Services (CX).

Cisco’s Denzil Samuels

“Now, partners get 360-degree visibility of their Success Tracks customers’ data and tap into a suite of APIs for predictive telemetry insights and much more, all in one place,” Samuels wrote in a blog.

The data in CX Cloud includes a customers’ full base of installed assets. Customers must provide digital approval for the customer to interface with the data.

Samuels told Channel Futures last year that PX Cloud fits into Cisco’s goal of digitizing and automating the partner experience.

“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,” Samuels said.

Partner Perspective

Large solution provider and Cisco partner Computacenter has been using PX Cloud. The company has specifically leveraged PX Cloud for a customer experience practice it created called Assure.

Computacenter’s Julie Greene

Julie Greene, Computacenter’s Cisco business development director, said the practice would more closely closely align its sales, account managers and customer support people in the sales motion. Greene said the partner therefore needed to give those teams access to “timely and accurate account intelligence data.”

“Once we mapped this data, finding out how to deliver and make it simple for our internal teams to consume and utilize was a big challenge,” Greene wrote in the blog. “To become agile, we had to cut down on the administrative burden of capturing and analyzing the data from multiple sources and tools.”

She said her team learned about PX Cloud at Cisco Partner Summit in 2020. That pane of glass would ultimately allow Computacenter to consolidate six Cisco platforms into its own intelligence portal. Now Computacenter’s intelligence portal includes more than 35 APIs from Cisco, including for Meraki, Greene said.

“Not only did it streamline the consumption of the data, but it also accelerated the decision-making of our team to engage the customers with the right offer at the right time,” Greene said.

Computacenter has also built branded offers and published them in its customers’ CX Cloud platforms.

“We have developed technical workshops, assessments and services that showcase our Partner Lifecycle Accelerators in multiple architectures. These unique solutions are positioned in the different stages of the life cycle, from adoption to renewal,” she said. “As customers look to upskill and learn new insights and best practices, featuring our expert services on CX Cloud has been a huge game-changer.”

Cisco Updates

Meantime, Cisco on Wednesday announced its intent to buy cloud security software provider Lightspin Technologies. That’s its second cybersecurity acquisition announcement in about a month, taking into account the purchase of Valtix.

Channel Futures also recently wrote about the company’s growing African American Cisco Partner Community.