Unleashing Constant Partner Platform Innovations

As Cisco starts its new fiscal year, I have to say how proud I am to be at Cisco at this time, with so many dynamic opportunities in the global partner channels. Do we have challenges, absolutely! But the channel has always risen to the occasion and given your customers huge value.

Cisco has a long history with our partner-led strategy. We continue investing in global partner channels to provide outcomes consistent with customer needs to become entirely digitized in the future.

And I promise to all in the global partner community to simplify your business with Cisco, identify and qualify new opportunities, and give you a platform with analytics, benchmarking, and metrics to see your position in the market and achieve growth. We are doing this with good data, providing actionable insights, and using Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to recommend great business choices.

Many partners at a forum threw down the gauntlet regarding Cisco’s complexity a couple of years ago. It was the feedback we needed to hear; we listened, collaborated, and co-created, and with the global partner community’s assistance, the Partner Experience Platform, PXP, was created. I know you have heard me talk about PXP many times, but this is due to the strength of what you and Cisco have done together. And we have never stopped listening to your guidance.

You told us your experience with Cisco was too siloed and complex—it wasted cycles, had out-of-synch data, inefficient manual processes, major productivity drain! Many of you had to hire additional people to manage all that data. Well, this will stop with the enhancement you will see from PXP.

PXP brings together the most important information you need daily, like Business insights, incentives and funds, and sales opportunities.

This year for Partner Incentives, we brought TPV functionality into PXP. Not just a lift and shift! Business critical insights from TPV are available to you in PXP with fewer clicks. But you also now have Sales Opportunity views across selling motions, enablement insights, business performance and key insights like wallet share loss by Customer.

We have expanded the peer benchmarking of Cisco Services Partner Program (CSPP) service metrics and bookings to include additional metrics and benchmarking for VIP so you can understand and grow your recurring and renewal business performance. These insights help you to make more effective and faster decisions, and all of this ultimately helps to improve both the top and bottom line.

Our innovative and flexible Access Controls allow you to customize access to PXP data usage per your unique organizational need—not how we would dictate it. With these rich features, we have already seen a 6x increase in usage, which keeps climbing. [This should be particularly important for EMEA partners with strict data privacy rules.]

Practice Maturity is coming to PXP in November! You will gain visibility to over 60 key metrics, personalized insights, and peer benchmarking—distilled into a practice maturity score (related to software, services, profitability, automation, and lifecycle) and aligned to targeted actions for improvement. No more guesswork and manual consolidation!

And there is more! We are also bringing funds management into PXP to provide a holistic view. That is called PXP Funds Manager—where we create a better experience for proof of performance incentives with one tool and simplified processes.

Many of you have told us you have had to deploy additional resources or third-party solutions to identify eligible opportunities or consolidate multiple manual data sources to understand performance in the different funds. We have automated all those steps and added real-time, integrated reporting. Now you can focus on value creation rather than administrative overhead.

This is an important transition, and we are working carefully with you as we transition the funds in phases. We have already launched:

• Co-Sell MDF (for Developer/Advisor)—this new visibility and enhanced reporting within the Funds Manager can guide teams on where to invest time and resources for the greatest impact. This is exciting for our ecosystem partner community
• Lifecycle Incentives – with extensive integration and automation. Today in Funds Manager, deals are preloaded and ready to be linked to the lifecycle activities for incentive payment submission.
• Disti Invest is the most recent fund to transition

We will be transitioning additional funds in the near term such as Provider MDF, Marketing Velocity, and our MOU-based funds.

Next, we are also investing in a New Rebate Engine for our incentive portfolio. We are doing this because this investment will result in a better experience with accelerated rebate calculations and better rebate insights, including down to the deal level. Together they will provide richer data sources for PXP rebate reporting. As you can imagine transitioning to a new rebate engine is a major lift and will occur over multiple quarters.

We made a promise to keep a focus on our simplification mission and we are doing just that. As I mentioned, we intend PXP to be your one-stop to manage growth, reduce costs, and mitigate risks wherever possible. When we started this journey, there were far too many disconnected tools. We evaluated each tool and process and needed to understand how we can improve, combine, or eliminate everything that required interaction from our partners.

To date, we have reduced 50% of tools of 166 tools and processes that were partner-facing. Within the next few quarters, we have a pipeline of tools targeted for reduction that will bring us to 60%.  But it is not just about tool reduction but also about breaking down siloes.

We have a bold, aspirational goal to deliver a Partner Experience that far exceeds what we have delivered to date—and we are aggressively building on top of this foundation to accelerate transformation.

We are heavily investing in automation and simplification and stretching our capabilities in predictive modeling with a more profound use of AI/ML to guide your experience. You will see this in defining strategy, closing execution gaps, identifying the most profitable opportunities, and partnering with Cisco and other companies to jointly win and deliver customer outcomes.

We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with #CiscoPartners on social!

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