Navigating the Summer Beat: Insights from Cisco Live and our Partners

The start of summer is always filled with excitement, fun, and for most, a change in schedule. My children have all grown, but I carry the memories of these exciting months with vacations, lots of time in the water, and picnics.

Cisco Live 2024

Similarly at Cisco for the past few years, the first few weeks of summer often bring exciting new announcements delivered at Cisco Live. This year has been no different with the multiple investments made to integrate AI into our solutions, partnerships with Microsoft and Google, and simplification across the architectures.

You can read all about these changes across the many thought-leaders at Cisco, but one has caught my attention. Jeetu Patel, EVP and General Manager, Security & Collaboration, shared his thoughts on Innovating at Scale. I am encouraged by Jeetu’s guidance on how we can accelerate the latest Cisco innovation to help our partners scale to meet the protection and digital resilience demands of our customers. With added partnerships with Microsoft and Google, I am expecting to see this collaboration drive greater platform interoperability and simplify security on browsers through the cloud.

If you were not able to attend in person or the live recordings, I highly encourage you to watch those and catch up on all the incredible things that were announced via the many blogs available.

Q4 Quarterly Partner Insights

Just before Cisco Live, Americas Distribution held our Quarterly Insights event for VAR Partners. It was another great event, and we explored these interesting topics:

• Unlocking new Enterprise Agreement (EA) growth opportunities by utilizing EA Data Packs and the enhanced functionalities within PXP to accelerate EA sales by converting ALC subscriptions to EAs, securing EA renewals, and pursuing EA expansion.
• Understanding how specializations and certifications can help you drive more business, profitability, and differentiation and show you how to accelerate transformation to drive greater alignment to customer’s changing consumption behaviors.
• Learning how to uncover new growth opportunities, optimize practices, maximize incentives, and drive simplicity through your organization utilizing Cisco Partner Experience Platform (PXP) – the co-designed, AI and ML driven analytics platform.

We hope our partners can use these insights to pursue EA opportunities with greater confidence, see how specializations and certifications can make a difference in profitability, and utilize PXP to increase visibility into available opportunities.

You can find the recording and presentation on SalesConnect. As I mentioned during the event, we want our Distributors and Partners to meet on how to best utilize these resources to fuel mutual success.

Hybrid Cloud Specialization

Mentioned in the Partner Insights event in Q4, specializations can raise profitability, drive more business, and increase differentiation. These specializations are required for partners to access EA sales and Lifecycle incentives. To continue receiving these rebates in the Hybrid Cloud space, partners must complete one or all three of the modules before July 27, 2024. Although these modules do move you quickly through the content, your team will need to dedicate enough time to complete it successfully before this date.

You can learn more about the Hybrid Cloud Specialization on this at-a-glance here.

I am looking forward to seeing how these insights will help you fuel success. Hope you all have a great summer!

presentation and recording!

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