Thoughts from Partner Summit Digital 2020 – Cisco Blogs

Another Partner Summit is complete, and our first all-digital event has been received well by all participants. Thank you to all who participated and contributed to make this a huge success. We highlighted many new solutions, tools and enablement such as IoT Essentials now on Black Belt and many other IoT updates; click here to discover more. Meraki Cloud has a timely offer to buy a three-year cloud management license and receive an additional year free (through January 23, 2021).

I invite you to gain all the benefits of Partner Summit Digital by watching or downloading the sessions’ videos and presentations. Go here to access all the Partner Summit Digital 2020 content.

We are in an important time of the year, and as we look toward calendar year 2021, I would like to offer some top-of-mind considerations:

Agil-IT-y

The practice of agility was a rallying point at Partner Summit Digital. Todd Nightingale extended this point to say, “IT agility represents your IT superpower.” We all need to be “Future Ready” to transform overnight based on the next potential global disruption. Your customers are tasked to change, evolve, and adapt faster than ever before and this places additional awareness on IT Agility as the game-changer. IT Agility ensures channel partners’ stay relevant to customers who are contending with ongoing disruptive market forces.

Cisco supports IT agility through the Agile Platform Strategy

The Agile Platform Strategy is your control panel to the underlying Cisco technology stack. All the Cisco solutions sit beneath these enterprise platforms, providing a way to simplify the Cisco solutions’ alignment to your customer’s business strategy. As we move from strategy to engagement, Cisco understands how you need to connect your customer’s environment, secure everything end-to-end, and scale these needs through automation.

Many Cisco partners are already building on our agile platform approach with real-world examples. For example, Lane Irvine, Network Business Solutions Director, at Long View, provided this perspective, “I’m excited to see Cisco moving towards this new Agile Platform Strategy, which will connect the Cisco management platforms. Long View is building our end-to-end software-defined networking strategy called NextNet, which will provide a single interface that allows us to integrate and manage our customers’ businesses. With the new Cisco Agile Platform, Long View NextNet will be able to provide new unique solutions that bring automation and innovation to help drive our customer’s business needs to new levels previously too difficult and complex to achieve.”

Profit Pools

As you may have heard me mention at Partner Summit Digital, profit pools are a way to look at a comprehensive value chain to discover profit opportunities. Similarly, the Cisco Agile Platform Strategy allows partners to uncover new areas of profitability either deep in a single domain, or driving connectivity, security and automation across the domains. Furthermore, new profit opportunities such as Enterprise Agreements or even multi-year managed service offers become apparent when looking across domains.

I am excited to close out the 2020 calendar year strong and sprint into 2021! We will align to IT agility, dive into new profit pools and meet the speed at which the markets and your customers adapt to the new normal.

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