Cisco African American Partner Community Eyes Hiring, HBCU Opportunities
Cisco is working with 14 Black-owned partner firms in a "high-touch" manner to invest in their growth.
![Cisco African American Partner Community Eyes Hiring, HBCU Opportunities Cisco African American Partner Community Eyes Hiring, HBCU Opportunities](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt10e444bce2d36aa8/blt7bdcab83a48984fd/6524022cc6e5097af0a5eed0/2-Talent.jpg?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
The African American Cisco Partner Community (AACPC) emerged in 2020 as one of 12 actions the vendor pledged to make to promote social justice.
Specifically, Cisco was making the dozen actions as a commitment to the Black community. As mass protests against anti-Black police violence swept across the country, Cisco and other technology vendors grappled with inequities in their own ranks. For example, shareholders pointed out that Black people comprised less than 2% of Cisco’s employees with the title of vice president or higher.
Cisco released 12 social justice actions, half of them internally-facing, and half external. The vendor made a $300 million pledge over the next five years. The 12 points included increasing board diversity, expanding fair pay, increasing supplier diversity, and action No. 10: increasing partner diversity.
The formation of AACPC started as part of social justice action No. 10 for Cisco: diversifying its partner ecosystem.
Andrico Spates, senior manager, sales business development for global partner routes to market and sales, noted that the initiative is different from diversifying the supplier ecosystem. The latter is its own point on Cisco’s 12 actions; Cisco reports having increased its spend with diverse suppliers by 28% since 2020.
“A lot of people aren’t necessarily familiar with the idea of diversifying the partner ecosystem,” Spates said. “Their minds automatically go to diversifying the suppliers.”
Spates said he explains that diversivifying the partner community and enabling diverse partners actually creates diverse suppliers.
“These partners are suppliers to our customers,” he said. “And when I define it like that, the light bulb goes on.”
AACPC represented a $50 million investment in promoting partner diversity. The program charter stated three goals: increasing the number of African American/Black-owned Cisco partners, giving those partners more opportunities to accelerate financial growth, and expanding hiring of African American/Black employees into the partner community.
Spates noted that the Cisco partner ecosystem already included many Black-owned partners. One of the foremost is St. Louis-based systems integrator and solution provider World Wide Technology, which David Steward founded in 1990.
“They do a lot of great things for Cisco and our customers, and also for their community,” Spates told Channel Futures. “One of the goals of this initiative is to bring more attention to partners that can reliver results and impact like that.”
AACPC has identified a subset of 14 partner members that it will work with in a “high-touch format.”
Those partner organizations, like New York City-based Molaprise, have gone through lengthy discussions with Cisco leadership.
“We look at not just the size of their business, but the customer segments they serve, their mix of business and their specializations and technical expertise,” Spates said. “But it’s not just about looking at that on paper. We have some candid dialogue and discussion with them to understand more about their company and to understand the challenges that they’ve seen, not just with Cisco, but in general.”
Cisco in 2021 pledged $150 million to historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in conjunction with the Student Freedom Initiative. Fifty million will go to endowment for STEM students.
While Cisco is connecting AACPC partners to hiring opportunities at HBCUs, the collaboration extends beyond recruitment.
Part of Cisco’s initiative included helping HBCUs transform their IT environments to meet National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) compliance standards. And Cisco has been training AACPC partners to perform NIST assessments at these campuses.
“We have AACPC partners that are actually executing that work within the HBCUs,” Spates said.
And partners’ efforts with HBCUs have equipped them for opportunities with other customers, Spates said.
“Our partners have been doing a fantastic job doing [NIST assessments] in the HBCUs. And now they have the ability to do it across the board through the offers that they’ve created across the marketplace,” he said.
(Pictured above is Tougaloo College, a private HBCU in Jackson, Mississippi, among the first nine schools receiving an endowment pledge from Cisco.)
Accelerate member Molaprise provides consulting, design and implementation for cloud and cybersecurity solutions.
The partner has aligned heavily with Cisco for the cybersecurity aspect. Founder and managing director Emmanuel Ola-Dake (pictured) said the firm is using Cisco security as a foundation for all of its security solutions.
“We want to align with Cisco, which is dominant in network infrastructure and now turning the corner to be a security-first company. We want to align with the Cisco security strategy in the long run to build a security practice that’s sustainable, and then layer on top emerging solutions to secure the enterprise and transform infrastructure,” he said.
Ola-Dake moved to the U.S. almost 20 years with an eye for a career in finance. After getting his MBA, he studied private equity and venture capital at Harvard. He intended to launch his own fund some day down the road.
His career started in the financial tech (fintech) world with companies like Fiserve, where he learned about the backend technology capital markets use.
Ola-Dake later moved from a full-time job to a consulting, helping Wall Street companies like Bank of America Merill Lynch and Citigroup implement applications for their fund management and accounting systems. He said he hoped those consulting gigs would lead to a full-time position at one of those clients. However, that opportunity wasn’t emerging. Moreover, he was trying to support a family while constantly looking for the next consulting opportunity.
So he embraced the opportunity to start his own technology consultancy.
“If such opportunity would not be available for me, then I needed to create one and chart my own path,” he said.
Molaprise emerged as a born-in-the-cloud partner that focused public sector space as well as commercial financial services.
Molaprise in 2022 launched a program called NextGen, aimed at developing young people and communities of color with resources for a career in technology. The program gives members of underserved opportunies to gain key technology certifications with companies like Cisco, Microsoft and AWS.
NextGen graduated its first cohort in West Ghana and has since partnered with the The City University of New York (CUNY).
Participants have earned internships as a result of NextGen. Others have gone on to work full-time with Molaprise.
“We wake up every day knowing that someone may be in the line waiting for an opportunity,” Ola-Dake told Channel Futures. “And if that person doesn’t have the chance, and we do, we would like to extend that opportunity.”
He added that such a program would have benefited his younger self immensely. How would his career have changed if, for example, he had gotten training in artificial intelligence?
“If I had gotten that opportunity earlier in my life or in my career or as a young graduate, that would have rapidly accelerated my path in technology. I would have had so much information, resources and the first-mover advantage for certain ideas,” he said.
Spates said it’s essential to equip the next generation of talent with the skills and knowledge they need to address a changing technology landscape.
“It’s important for not just the partners to understand what the talent is, but for the talent to understand where the opportunities are,” Spates told Channel Futures. “So we see things more around understanding software, understanding services and understanding the business functions of IT. Because, as you know, technology is becoming simplified. Now it’s really about those outcomes.”
Cisco on April 25-26 in Atlanta will host a Black-Owned Partner & Supplier Conference. Attendees will included Black-owned channel partners, Black-owned suppliers, and anyone considering becoming one of those.
“We don’t just talk about opportunities to work at Cisco,” Spates said. “We talk about opportunities to work at Cisco and within the channel, because it’s one giant ecosystem.”
Spates said Cisco has seen a widespread embrace of AACPC.
“Our main distributors, for example, all have programs that they’ve put into place specifically to be able to complement what we’re doing on our side from a support perspective, from an enablement perspective and from a marketing perspective, to help these partners accomplish those goals,” he said.
“So it’s not just Cisco. It’s our entire channel that’s fully leaned in to be able to be able to help with that.”
Spates encouraged Black-owned partner organizations to enter into dialogue with Cisco.
“One of the things that that we see in the industry is that a lot of the partners don’t make themselves known,” he said. “The more we get engaged, the more that the conversation continues to happen, the more we can all work together to make sure we’re accomplishing.”
Spates encouraged Black-owned partner organizations to enter into dialogue with Cisco.
“One of the things that that we see in the industry is that a lot of the partners don’t make themselves known,” he said. “The more we get engaged, the more that the conversation continues to happen, the more we can all work together to make sure we’re accomplishing.”
For Cisco leaders and partners working with the company’s African American Partner Community, efforts to diversify the vendor’s partner ecosystem are impacting the larger Black community for good.
The African American Cisco Partner Community launched in 2020 to provide support and investment to some 54 partners. Recently the company has added a special “Acceleration” tier to the program for partners that will get special focus from the enterprise technology giant. It’s part of a $50 million Cisco has pledged to invest by 2025 to diversify its partner ecosystem.
Cisco’s Andrico Spates
Andrico Spates, senior manager, sales business development for global partner routes to market and sales, told Channel Futures in an interview that Cisco’s efforts to support Black-owned partner firms through the African American Partner Community are playing into other commitments Cisco has made toward racial justice and equity. For example, Spates said AACPC has played a key role in promoting hiring from historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). For example, Accelerate partner Molaprise and others joined Cisco in a recent virtual event focusing on students from Clark Atlanta University and Howard University.
“That’s been one of the great things about this,” Spates said. “What you can do to service your customers are the same things you can do to make an impact on your community.”
Spates and Molaprise founder Emmanuel Ola-Dake spoke about the African American Cisco Partner Community with Channel Futures. They also described opportunities they see to bring diverse talent into the channel. Read highlights of the conversation in the 12 images above.
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