Cisco talks ‘bold’ moves with partners

“Write the rules. Own the game.” These were the words spoken by senior VP of Cisco’s Worldwide Partner Organisation, Keith Goodwin yesterday to kick off the company’s Partner Summit 2010 in San Francisco (CSCO).
Goodwin himself came up with the slogan to sum up the theme of this year’s event, specifically referring to four market “transitions” that the firm wants its channel partners to grow their businesses around: collaboration, virtualisation of the datacentre, video and cloud-based services.
“The network is at the heart of each of these transitions,” Goodwin told the 3000 assembled partners, speaking about Cisco’s Borderless Network architecture.
Referring to the summit’s theme, he said: “I don’t believe it’s arrogant, I believe it’s bold... Leadership is about breaking the rules together and owning the game.”
 
Collaboration & video

Goodwin referred to Cisco’s WebEx and Cisco Unified Workspace products and told partners: “As as a result of your investment [in collaboration] today we have over 100,000 customers of our collaboration solutions; we’ve got $8m worth of business together and in November at our Collaboration Summit alone, we introduced 65 new products.”
He went on to say that customers will expect their collaboration in the future to be video-based, labelling video at the killer app. He said today 60 percent of traffic on Cisco’s network is video and consumer research shows that in three years this figure will rise to 90 percent.
“This is a $33m opportunity for us,” he said. “Video is a tremendous opportunity for everyone is this room because video makes the deal bigger. It is a huge network upgrade opportunity for every partner.”
Last week Cisco announced the completion of its acquisition of videoconferencing firm, Tandberg.
 
Datacentre
Goodwin also compared those who were sceptical about its entry into the voice arena in the late 90s to anyone cynical about its entry into the datacentre: “This is not about the datacentre, or just selling servers. This is about re-writing the rules for the next generation datacentre,” he maintained. “We know a lot about the datacentre through our partners.”
He told partners: “You have a history of selling into the datacentre, you know the market, and you know the customers.”
Referring to what he describes as an $85m opportunity, including services, Good win said: “Like in the voice world, together we have an opportunity to own the game when it comes to the next generation datacentre.”
Goodwin went on to say that the virtualised datacentre is an enabler for cloud-based services.
 
Cloud services
He said that over the long term, cloud computing will offer significant disruption to the way IT services and resources are delivered, and therefore offers a huge opportunity for partners, asking them if they were cloud-ready.
There was, however, no reference at all to one-time collaborator HP (NYSE:HPQ) during yesterday’s keynote speeches, although executive VP of worldwide operations, Rob Lloyd, did say: “We’re never going to be the only big player in the market. We’re not focused on the competition, but on the market transitions.”
In addition, the Goodwin used his keynote speech to reveal a handful of new initiatives at the opening session. In addition, the Goodwin used his keynote speech to reveal a handful of new initiatives at the opening session. Read about them here.