Cisco Partner Summit 2022 Day One Highlights

Today, Cisco hosted the first day of Partner Summit 2022 as a hybrid event, drawing thousands of global partners both in-person in Las Vegas and across our Partner Summit Digital platform. Participants have heard some of the key go-to-market architectural areas that Cisco is continuing to accelerate. These focus areas highlight Cisco’s new launches and announcements of the past few months.

It’s no surprise that Security is no longer a single place with a health check at the network edge, rather true ‘Security Resilience’ must also happen anywhere, any time, and on any device.

And Security Resilience to Cisco is a specific approach to designing products from the perspective of our customers’ needs. For Security Resilience to happen, our products must allow customers to:

• See More (Telemetry)
• Anticipate What’s Next (Actionable Insights)
• Prioritize Actions (Risk based & Continuous Trust Assessments)
• Close the Gaps (API/Integrations)
• Simplify the SecOps experience through Optimization & Automation tools

Today, we announced innovations in the three key Security categories where we’ve applied this approach:

• Zero Trust
• Network Security
• Secure Connectivity

All of this demonstrates progress towards our Security Cloud vision and brings customers closer to true Security Resilience. For all the details see the Security Press Release.

To support our partners’ efforts, we’ve also created new unique tools like a workshop template that Partners can use for consulting engagements with customers, or incentives like “One Year on Us.”

And all of these areas of support are available to Partners, based on the route-to-market motion and the role they wish to offer. For example, the curated content in our Blackbelt program has multiple learning tracks which are customized for Resellers, Managed Service Providers, Distributors, and others.

Speaking of Partner Programmatic enhancements, let’s look at today’s next announcements. Cisco is known to be one of THE best partner programs in the industry. Our program levels have been built on Cisco architectures and focus on our partner’s world-class capabilities.

But as the market changes, we are evolving our Specializations strategy. These new Solution Specializations:

• Showcase partners’ unique capabilities at a Solution level, not just the broader Architecture
• These Solution Specializations reflect how Partners bring multiple broad architectures together, to meet specific customer needs
• They consider successful delivery of the Solutions, not just completing exams and taking a few training courses
• And they provide partners greater flexibility as they can now assign their resources to various roles which make sense to their unique partner practice

Overall, these new Solution specializations are designed to be lightweight, applicable to all routes-to-market, and be customer-relevant. This customer relevance was designed in from the beginning, as we’ve linked these Specializations to the four customer priorities in Cisco’s strategy:

• Reimagine Applications
• Power Hybrid Work
• Secure the Enterprise
• Transform Infrastructure

These six new Solution Specializations cut across more of the portfolio and represent Cisco’s emerging multi-architectural solution offers:

• Full Stack Observability
• Hybrid Work from Office
• SASE
• Hybrid Cloud Networking
• Hybrid Cloud Computing
• Hybrid Cloud Software

The beauty is, partners are already delivering many of these solutions, so it’s great to now have a mechanism which showcases that expertise. Partners can use these Specializations towards their Gold, Premier or Select certification levels; and we are aligning the Cisco incentives to these Specializations beginning in the second half of our fiscal year.

Beyond the news-specific payloads, Partners also heard:

• How we’re delivering on our commitments to move to a hybrid world at every layer of the stack
• How simplification is opening up new opportunities in areas they may have believed were historically inaccessible
• The mainstreaming of IoT into familiar use cases
• Significant price reductions on our optics portfolio

Lastly, but certainly not the least, Chuck also briefly touched upon our new Partnering for Purpose initiative, which Partners will learn more about from Fran Katsoudas during tomorrow’s keynote session. For more than 25 years, Cisco and our partners have proven that by working together we can solve some of the world’s biggest challenges. Cisco has initiatives, alongside our partners, in four key areas that highlight how we live our purpose every day. Our technology can change lives. When we connect people we can educate them, deliver health care, bring them into the global economy and give them opportunities they didn’t have before.

Doing good is good for business.

Partner Summit day one audiences heard how together, Cisco & our partners, make it all work together:

Whether that is with new CX – Partner Lifecycle Services, or Strategic Solutions such as Cisco’s Hybrid Work bundles; having a hybrid experience available to our attendees provides a hybrid event experience through the Cisco Partner Launch Experience for Partner Summit 2022.

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