4 Ways Cisco Partners Are Navigating Brutal Supply Chain Delays
Shipment delays of 300 days are not uncommon for partners and their customers.
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Berger said the recent integration of Cisco product lines reflect its move to create a simplified experience predicated on customer needs.
“They’re starting to build solutions looking at the business outcome or the technology challenge. So they’re not trying to sell them how Cisco is organized; they’re selling them what the customer’s challenge is,” he said.
In other words, rather than approaching a Cisco partner for a security product, the customer might come to them asking them to enable a connected workforce.
“Those are three or four different areas of Cisco expertise. So now they’re building cross-domain solutions to solve for that. I think it’s the right approach,” he said.
Ogden said MNJ’s Cisco business is growing. However, that does not include the managed portion of its business.
MNJ, which also partners with vendors like Silver Peak/Aruba, Versa, Juniper, Fortinet and Arista, often leans toward those vendors when delivering managed services to its mid-market customers.
“Most of our customers are mid-market, so they’re not going to want a Viptela product or Meraki product that’s not fully baked yet. So we lean towards the Silver Peak/Versa/Fortinet versus going towards Cisco,” Ogden told Channel Futures.
That being said, he noted that Cisco remains MNJ’s biggest partner by a large margin.
The MNJ team agreed that the Cisco Meraki platform is moving in the right direction. And for them, the ultimate trajectory is being known as an enterprise-grade offering.
“It’s the right platform to transition and pivot from,” said Bruce Friedman, MNJ’s network and infrastructure architect. “The question is, will it scale to the size that is needed for a lot of the organizations that are going to be interested in adopting it?”
Cisco has been quite public about the fact that it is feeling the weight of supply chain issues. The company’s latest quarterly earnings showed that the company is enjoying massive demand for its products. However, global events like COVID-19 and the invasion of Ukraine have made the process to supply that demand a slower one.
And partners are feeling pressure as they try to help their customers.
Ogden said Cisco’s wait-times are almost double that of other MNJ vendors.
“If you look at Arista, you’re talking about anywhere between 120 to 160 days for the majority of their gear. If you get into the high end stuff, it extends a little bit. If you look at Cisco just to buy a normal access point, you’re talking almost 300 days,” Ogden told Channel Futures.
It’s not just that a 300-day delay slows down a customer getting their hardware. It impacts whether or not they get it at all.
For example, some companies’s budgets require that they receive the product by the end of the fiscal year. An expected 300-day delay means customers need to make their purchases early in the first quarter.
“You’re forcing companies to expedite their purchasing,” Ogden said.
Ogden said as-a-service leasing models from Cisco are helping customers navigate the changes. And Berger agreed that there have improvements.
“Cisco has gotten better. The lead times on certain product lines have gotten a bit better,” he said.
Berger said WWT has made a point of communicating extra with its suppliers and customers.
“We tell our customers to order early and get in line,” he said.
But in some cases, customers are “just living on the gear.”
“Instead of spending that capital expenditure, they’re going to live on to year seven or eight or nine, because they can’t get the gear,” Ogden said.
Cisco has publicly touted its efforts to become a software and services company.
“When I took over [in 2015], basically we sold technology products, and customers bought them and integrated them. And now we have a $17-18 billion dollar run rate software business,” CEO Chuck Robbins said at Cisco Live. “We have a solutions that have cloud management with a piece of hardware on-prem, on-prem license software and pure SaaS solutions. We’re trying to provide our customers exceptional choice, however they’re going to consume it.”
Berger said this pivot fits with both the larger industry as well as the supply chain problems.
“The market’s been moving that way for a few years. I think with the supply chain constraints, Cisco has to kind of focus on software and managed services right now. That’s what actually can ship today,” he said.
In many cases, the fix for supply chain issues is to order more advanced offerings.
Take, for example, the Catalyst 9300 switches, which many customers are choosing instead the 9200.
“The 9200 switch is less expensive, less feature rich and less available. 9300’s more expensive, more feature-rich and more available. It’s like a 100-day difference between the two,” Friedman said.
But in some cases, customers are picking a different vendor rather than a different product.
“We have a lot of customers asking us, ‘I have to go do a big deployment in six months. Which vendor has inventory that I can go deploy?'” Berger told Channel Futures.
As a result the supply chain is factoring into vendor selection more than it ever has, Berger said.
Cisco recently unveiled its Cisco+ Secure Now Connect SASE platform.
Berger said the offering will make a big difference for WWT’s digital workspace unit as it crafts hybrid work solutions.
“You’ve got to allow the connectivity between the user and their applications. Whether that’s cloud, SaaS or data center, you’ve got to enable it to be a lot easier, versus backhauling directly through your typical on-prem network or your corporate network. The problem with that has always been, ‘How do you secure it now?’ And that’s where SASE kind of comes into play.”
Ogden said he is looking for the offering to become more “fully-baked,” which he sees in rival SASE providers like Silver Peak/Aruba and Palo Alto.
“It’s not a bad offering. The problem I see with it is that it’s not fully integrated. It’s three different products that they’re trying to cobble together to match what the other vendors in the market are doing,” Ogden said.
Cisco recently announced a new digital learning center featuring online and in-person classes and assessments.
Ogden said Cisco U is a welcome resource for MNJ engineers.
“That is intriguing for us, because we do a lot in the space with our engineers, so any additional training we can get them is beneficial,” he said.
Cisco recently announced a new digital learning center featuring online and in-person classes and assessments.
Ogden said Cisco U is a welcome resource for MNJ engineers.
“That is intriguing for us, because we do a lot in the space with our engineers, so any additional training we can get them is beneficial,” he said.
Supply chain issues are the elephant in the room that IT departments and the partners that service them can’t afford to ignore.
Last week’s Cisco Live conference in Las Vegas brought together customers and partners of the networking giant. The company unveiled multiple integrations to its portfolio, including cloud management of its Catalyst switches on the Meraki cloud portal. The company’s executives also spoke about their vision for hybrid work and their goal of delivering their products in whatever form their customers want.
Yet the topic of supply chain issues loomed large for attendees, and it was particularly felt in conversations with partners.
Matt Ogden is the chief technology officer for Illinois-based MNJ Technologies, a partner that has evolved from a pure-VAR to adding managed services. The company generates about $50 million dollars with Cisco annually, and Ogden said the partnership is growing.
Joe Berger is the senior director of World Wide Technology’s (WWT) digital workspace practice. WWT drives between $5 billion and $6 billion annually with Cisco, making it one of the vendor’s largest partners.
Berger and Ogden spoke to Channel Futures about how their experience partnering with Cisco has evolved, especially over the last year. They touched on the evolution of Cisco’s portfolio, particularly around its Meraki and SASE offerings.
Scroll through the slideshow above to see 10 observations from partners about supply chain issues as well as the evolution of the Cisco portfolio.
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