Cisco has chalked out its vision and strategies for a trusted, secure, and connected future. The networking player has redesigned its channel engagements which are all the more focused around building ‘trust’ in this hyperconnected ecosystem. Speaking on the sidelines of the Cisco India Summit 2023 held in Jaipur, Panish PK, Managing Director, Partner Business Group, Cisco India and SAARC informed about new specialization areas which are on the offing for its 1500 partners in India. Cisco is reaching out to partners just starting down the road with these new set of solutions specialization with incentives.
In line with the way the market trends are moving. Earlier, Cisco has been enabling partners on the specific technology architectures then it started a trend where in the lines between the different technology architecture started delivering across multi-architecture.These customers are embracing to the cloud things they couldn’t do before. It’s really driving growth for Cisco to support these customers. “With the current trends, we are migrating our channel from architecture based approach to solutions specialisation. We have identified six solutions based specialisation for our partners. Out of six, we have already rolled a few of them to our partners and the rest will do soon. These solutions are around Zero trust, Hybrid working, SASE, Multi-cloud. We want to cover most of our partners to become familiar with the solution specializations,” PK said.
With many looking to switch to hybrid work models long-term, the demand for cloud-delivered collaboration tools and security technologies to keep increasingly distributed workforces safe, secure, and productive has sky-rocketed. The reason Cisco is talking about security now more than ever is because after the pandemic this whole concept of hybrid work along with adoption of cloud technologies and meeting devices are connected to a network across the globe. Security becomes a very important one to connect all the employees to all the digital assets. That is where Cisco is already a leader in connecting but connecting securely is even more important today considering this distributed nature of employees and assets.
“We feel that we are best positioned to also manage the security aspects of that connection. So that is where it said if it is connected, it should be protected. Cisco is a networking company but we are already a very large cybersecurity company. Network and security can’t be treated as two separate topics within any organization. It has to be treated as one,” he informed.
Cisco is seen as one of the most lucrative companies for partners in terms of incentive programs, different rewards and mechanisms. The cybersecurity market is by far the biggest opportunity to grow or even double its market share. “We’re very strong, thanks to our partners, in the enterprise space with our networking and software and even in the services business, but when we go down into the security space, a mighty segment is not only growing but outperforming right now. Thus, this is an area where we will go deep with our partners. We want our partners to be doing profitable business with us on security as well because of market opportunities as they do with networking, collaboration and data,” PK highlighted.
Another area Cisco partners are focusing is co-selling by enabling partners to start co-selling with hyperscalers to make them more efficient and agile.
