Cisco Redefines Customer Experience with New Partner Opportunities, Value to Customers

LAS VEGAS, Nov. 5, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Cisco Partner Summit -- With IT driving business transformation, leaders feel boardroom pressure to deliver results while coping with skills gaps and struggling with increased complexity. To address this, today at Cisco Partner Summit, Cisco CX announced new developments to a lifecycle selling approach that accelerate customer success while supporting growth for its partners.

"Selling across the lifecycle is the largest opportunity for our partners to position customers for a successful digital transformation. Partners are integral to delivering on the Cisco Customer Experience vision, which is why we have designed our entire CX portfolio with partners in mind," said Maria Martinez, Executive Vice President and Chief Customer Experience Officer. "Cisco's unique CX approach, insights, and digital capabilities can help partners modernize and monetize their services to drive business transformation."

Cisco's annual Partner Summit attendees will get an update from one year ago when Martinez first unveiled the Cisco Customer Experience strategy. Since then, Cisco focused on investing and developing partners' lifecycle services. The biggest developments include hiring new CX roles that help drive more business to partners, delivering specialization criteria and certification curriculum, and a refreshed SuccessHub for partners with lifecycle content and role-based training.

While growing partners' lifecycle services to accelerate customer success, Cisco is also announcing services to grow partners' profitability. Cisco's new offers were all designed with partners in mind and enable partners to book bigger deals, expand their offerings, and scale digitally – all to deliver a superior customer experience.

Key new offers Cisco is announcing today include:

• Business Critical Services (BCS) 3.0: Packaged expertise, analytics, and insights guiding customers to perform and transform. The services' actionable insights, recommendations and automation are powered by AI & ML with access to Cisco and partner experts.

BCS 3.0 was built to address key needs for the Architecture, Engineering, NetOps, SecOps, and DevOps functions. New BCS 3.0 packaging (Essentials and Advantage) allow partners and customers to choose how best to integrate BCS 3.0 into their environments.

• Solution Support: Solution-level coverage and coordination for all Cisco technology portfolios that resolves complex issues on average 44% faster than device-level support. Customers and partners get access to a primary point of contact with product and solution expertise across 30+ Cisco solutions, 250+ Cisco products, and 100+ technology providers. Cisco is now extending this offer to cover software subscriptions. Support for Collaboration is now available, followed by Cisco Digital Network Architecture (DNA) and Security in early 2020 with others to follow.
• Operate Offers: An updated portfolio of managed services that help partners simplify IT operations and ensure availability of their customers' networks. Packaged for partner resell, allowing partners to rapidly deliver managed services capabilities from Cisco while adding to or creating new managed service practices. These offers draw upon industry-leading orchestration and automation capabilities to proactively identify and resolve issues before they occur. 

The three new offers are Managed Detection and Response, Managed Secure SD-WAN, and Unified Communications Manager Cloud.

• New Partner Program Incentives Focused on the Lifecycle: The new Lifecycle Incentives program rewards partners that successfully drive software activation and adoption with customers, and for expanding existing deals into new opportunities. We're also introducing an additional reward for activating more Cisco DNA Center use cases – the new Use Accelerator bonus (available now through end of Q3). Cisco is making new additions to the industry leading programs and incentives that now covers the full lifecycle and increases partners' profitability.

We're taking a lifecycle-first approach with our Partner Lifecycle Model. We've expanded the incentives and created the first business specialization focused on customer experience. The overall model to help partners monetize, operate, and organize for lifecycle selling, and guidance on how partners can modernize their services practices.

Analyst and Partner Quotes

"We've been extremely excited about this new offer they (Cisco) are bringing to market around Managed Detection and Response via Cisco Managed Services and our ability to tap into that capability without necessarily having to build it on our own allows us to get to market way faster and help our customers get the most out of their investment."  Brian Ortbals, VP – Global Engineering Team WWT

"We are, today, embracing the shift to software, subscription and lifecycle services, so that tomorrow we can engage with our customers at an even deeper level, and together with Cisco, we can unlock new possibilities for all of us."   Mark Rogers, CEO Logicalis

"Working together, Cisco and NTT focus on unlocking value for clients in new ways, integrating a lifecycle approach and leveraging connected data to drive unique insights, ensuring optimal outcomes, and driving our clients' businesses forward." Bill Padfield, Senior Executive Vice President, Transformation & Platform Services, NTT Ltd.

"Cisco and GDT have a strong partnership.  Our commitment to enhancing our customers experience and accelerating their digital transformation is also about partnership.  We all succeed together.  We provide value to our customers together."  Roshni Dasgupta, CFO, GDT-General Datatech

"With an insights-driven engine like BCS 3.0, Cisco is giving partners the opportunity to generate their own high value services and support customers throughout their lifecycle. This demonstrates Cisco's commitment to supporting its partners' services business." Alastair Edwards, Chief Analyst, Canalys

About Partner Summit 

An invitation-only event, Cisco's Partner Summit will take place at the Aria Resort and Casino in Las Vegas and runs from November 4 through 6. It is the annual opportunity for Cisco to bring its partners together in one place to network and learn about new technologies and services. This year will bring together 1,152 partner companies from 91 countries around the world.

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SOURCE Cisco