Insight on Partner News from Partner Summit 2021 – Cisco Blogs

During the past couple years, I’ve been turning up the intensity on partner listening. From the engineering perspective, this is how my team gets trusted insight into the successes and challenges you — our amazing partners — are facing. Our goal is to help you define new experiences, drive more engagement, and deliver greater value for customers.

Business transformation? Hybrid work? Together, we make Everything Possible

Partners make a huge difference in our business – from providing data-informed and experience-informed insights to outcome-driven observations. We rely on partners in many areas of the business, throughout a customer project lifecycle. That’s why “Everything Possible” is more than a theme – it’s a rallying cry! These two words together reflect the innovation, hard work, and transformation that we are creating for customers.

These announcements from Partner Summit represent significant investment and progress to helping you – our partners – successfully position, sell, and deploy Cisco technology with the highest possible level of profitability.

Partner Summit News

Cisco made a number of announcements this week. With so many great main-stage presentations, informative sessions and discussions it can be an undertaking to absorb all the news and announcements. So here are three key highlights to hopefully make it easier to sort through all the great content available.

1. New Cisco Enterprise Agreement
   First, to make it easier for customers and partners to buy, consume, and manage Cisco software and services, we announced our new Enterprise Agreement. The single contract increases access to Cisco’s portfolio and solutions, offering predictable costs, efficiency, more choices, and greater flexibility for organizations looking to accelerate their digital transformation. Read the press release
2. Hybrid Work Innovations
   Next, innovations for the enterprise and how we work continue to create a lot of excitement and discussion, especially as we focus on fueling productivity and ensuring employees have secure access to the applications they need. As part of that effort, we announced the ThousandEyes Internet Insights: App Outages expansion, which provides actionable visibility into digital experiences for cloud, internet, and SaaS. What does Cisco’s Hybrid Work Innovation do? First, Cisco addresses the need for greater visibility across the public internet, cloud applications and the WAN with new innovations. In addition, ThousandEyes is unveiling a publicly accessible internet health map that helps customers identify application outages in near real-time, allowing them to proactively address an outage. With Webex for collaboration and ThousandEyes for network infrastructure integration, we are focused on building the best hybrid work experience. Read the press release. For an even deeper dive into all the latest Webex news and announcements, be sure to check out this Webex One recap.
3. Partner Program Updates
   It’s very exciting to share enhancements to our Partner Program! A year ago, we introduced the new Cisco Partner Program designed to create a more consistent and compelling program that recognizes and rewards you based on the ways you deliver value to customers. This year we announced the addition of two more roles, developer and advisor, which will launch in Q2 FY22. As part of this update, we also shared details on specializations going forward, which will include solution specializations, Cisco-powered specializations and business specializations. We are especially excited about our new environmental sustainability specialization, which falls under the business specialization category. We understand that great partner programs often make the difference in successful partner relationships. For more details on our Partner Program updates, be sure to check out Marc Surplus’ blog here.

Additional Insights

In addition to the key themes above, I also wanted to highlight some additional content on new offers, services, products, sales campaigns and competitive programs. Below is a round-up with links to various blogs and sessions that can provide additional insight. More in-depth information is coming in the following weeks with full information available via SalesConnect and Cisco Partner blogs.

• How Cisco is providing customers with end-to-end visibility across applications and infrastructure with Full-Stack Observability (ThousandEyes, AppD and Intersight)
• Partner Lifecycle Services: new offers and capabilities for our partners with CX Specialization, giving ultimate flexibility and more ways to differentiate a partner’s CX practice and grow profitability
• Cisco+, our new brand for cross-portfolio solutions as-a-service
• Several new IBN/Cloud offerings and/or updates, including Full Stack Observability, Access, Nexus Dashboard, and more

Our goal is to help partners think about what’s possible to provide greater value for our customers. With our new Enterprise Agreement, Hybrid Work innovations and partner programs, I know you will see how Cisco is focused on a partner experience that helps make Everything Possible!

So, if you haven’t had a chance to check out all the great information from this year’s event, be sure you take some time to sit back, relax, and connect. Check out the wide variety of blogs posted from leaders across our partner organization and visit Partner Summit 2021 on the SalesConnect hub where you will find all the announcements and news releases.

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

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