Cisco: Partners need services for success

Cisco (CSCO) has unveiled a handful of new initiatives to partners at the opening session of its Partner Summit 2010 in San Francisco.
These include a partner incentive programme to encourage early engagement with Cisco, a partner-to-partner scheme aimed at enabling its partners to work together to serve multinational, as well as new services specialisations.

Evolving to architectures
Cisco is continuing to push its partners towards solution selling with the news it is changing its partner specialisations from technologies to architectures to help partners develop service-based practices around borderless networks, collaboration, and datacentre virtualisation.
Cisco began to move its partners towards architectures a year ago, when it announced its flagship profitability programme, VIP, would shift from rewarding partners’ investments in technologies to selling architectural solutions.

Early engagement
Elsewhere, senior VP of Cisco’s Worldwide Partner Organisation, Keith Goodwin said the vendor's new Teaming Incentive Programme (TIP) aims to encourage early sales engagement with partners and reward them for their investment in consulting and professional services capabilities.
Historically Cisco has rewarded new opportunities through its Opportunity Incentive Programme (OIP). Now the vendor says it will determine which partner is entitled to benefit under the TIP based on a set of criteria that includes customer relationship, pre-sales investments, joint account planning, certifications, specialisations and investments in professional and technical services capabilities. That partner will then receive differential discounts in recognition of their investment in the deal.
The firm has been running a pilot for the last 18 months in Latin America, and says it will form the fourth pillar in Cisco’s channel partner incentive programme, joining the OIP, the Value Incentive Programme (VIP) and Solutions Incentive Programme (SIP). Implementation expected to begin in July 2010 and be completed by the end of 2010.

Global collaboration
Cisco also unveiled the Global Partner Network, a programme that enables its partners to collaborate to serve multinational customers.
Businesses expanding internationally have traditionally engaged in separate transactions with local Cisco resellers in each country of their operations. The new programme, says Cisco, allows another partner to act as a ‘host’ partner in the headquarters location of the customer.
The host partner can also establish an ‘agency’ relationship with other qualified Cisco partners and distributors in remote locations. The host owns the customer relationship, designs the solution architecture in the headquarters location and has responsibility for the overall transaction from pre- to post-sales.
An online portal, the Cisco Commerce Workspace, will allow the host partner to manage the global deal, secure Cisco approvals, and manage agents by remote country.