Cisco Investing More in Security Partners' Success with Less Complexity

Cisco is investing in its partners’ success with security with new tools, incentives and enablement, with less complexity and a simplified experience.

That was among information shared Tuesday during the latest Cisco security roundtable featuring company leaders and partners. Cisco also disclosed it will be making a major announcement about its extended detection and response (XDR) later this month at RSA Conference USA.

Oliver Tuszik, Cisco‘s senior vice president of partner sales and general manager of routes to market, said his company is very focused on its partners, “which is not a surprise because they are 90% of our route to market.”

Cisco’s Oliver Tuszik

“So we do everything more or less with our partners,” he said. “So when you look at the top three partner feedbacks that we got over the last two years, I would say it’s first of all, simplify the portfolio … create an end-to-end solution instead of point solution. Second, not a surprise, make it easier to transact, reduce complexity. That’s what we’re doing, not only on the sales side, but also systems tools. And then also not a surprise, something partners always ask us for is make it more profitable. So we’re not only adding more profitable to the back end, we’re also adding more profitable into the deals. So our entire structure is shaped on customer and partner feedback.”

Cisco, Partners Can Help with Organizations’ Security Maturity

When it comes to cybersecurity, only 15% of organizations globally are at a mature level of preparedness, Tuszik said. That leaves 85% of all organizations unprepared.

In addition, less than one-half have started to take steps to ramp up their security capabilities, he said.

“And this comes in a situation where executives say that their biggest priority is to protect their company from all these kinds of threats that they’re seeing,” Tuszik said. “They are afraid of these attacks like they never had been before. So to sum it up, it is a difficult situation right now for all of our customers. Our customers are experiencing one of the biggest challenges when it comes to security.”

That is why Cisco‘s partner ecosystem, together with Cisco, is in such an important role right now, he said. What customers are looking for is less about the best security solutions. It’s about bringing an end-to-end coverage model that helps them to manage the complexity.

“In this age of the partner, it’s less about only delivering a technology innovation,” Tuszik said. “It’s about delivering the innovation in a way that it delivers a value while reducing complexity.”

See our slideshow above for more highlights from Cisco’s security roundtable.