Cisco Expands Managed Services Portfolio to Help Partners Meet Increased Demand

With an increased demand for managed services, Cisco this week announced three additions to its managed services portfolio with the goal of helping partners get a slice of an estimated $232 billion market. 

The new managed services are: Managed Detection and Response (MDR), Secure SD-WAN and Unified Communications Manager Cloud (UCM Cloud).

Cisco’s Ruba Borno

“We know that managed services are at the heart of delivering an outcome to a customer,” Ruba Borno, senior vice president and general manager, Cisco Managed Services told attendees at Cisco Partner Summit held this week in Las Vegas. “For those of you who have already established robust managed services practices, you’re already reaping the rewards. We’re seeing that your customers are spending 2.3X on your services than others. This is an attractive market.”

Managed services are estimated to be a $282 billion market that’s growing by 9% year over year, she said. Cisco wants to help partners capitalize on the managed services market and enable key technology transitions for customers. The managed services were designed for partners as Cisco’s primary route to market. 

They were also designed with four key principals in mind: profitability, simplicity, predictability and differentiation, or giving partners room to customize offers for their customers.  

Taking a closer look: 

Managed Detection and Response (MDR) is a fast-growing sector growing at 14%, a $32.2 billion resell opportunity. The managed service provides customers with protection across the cloud, endpoint and the network. 

Secure SD-WAN is expected to be a fast- growing segment of the network infrastructure market, according to IDC, reaching $5.25 billion by 2023. Two-thirds of the businesses predicted to make a decision about SD-WAN over the next two years, expect to buy it as a managed service offer, said Borno. “This gives you an offer to take to your customers today,” she said. 

Unified Communications Manager Cloud (UCM Cloud) offers a way for partners to help customers refresh aging infrastructure with a managed service option. “UCM Cloud gives you an evergreen environment for voice, video, messaging, and web conferencing with a consumption-based pricing model,” she said. 

All three of the new managed service offers are available in November 2019 in the U.S. and all regions by January 2020 for UCM, March 2020 for MDR and June 2020 for SD-WAN. 

Borno said that the benefits of selling the new managed services for partners with robust managed services practices and those newer to the game are access to new revenue streams, reduced investment and risk, fast time to market, marketing support, lead generation and Cisco brand value. 

“Many of our managed services partners tell us that it takes them six, twelve, even eighteen months to build a managed services practice around Cisco products. What we want to do here is give you a fast time to market so you can resell these and if you choose to build your own, that’s fine too, but it doesn’t let you skip a beat in your time to market,” she said. 

Cisco managed services also addresses talent shortages giving partners and their customers the ability to leverage Cisco experts.