Leading together, digitizing Asia

In March, we held PartnerXperience at CiscoLive! Melbourne, where we hosted more than 1,000 delegates from 18 countries across the region. These companies all had one thing in common; they’re Cisco partners. These partners, who make up our diverse partner ecosystem, wanted to learn about the innovation and strategy coming out of Cisco and how to best take advantage of that work. This was also discussed in more than 200 Executive Meetings that took place.

Perform and Transform

Joined by Oliver Tuszik, Senior Vice President, Global Partner Organization, and key members of his leadership team, PartnerXperience 2019 kicked off with Kerri Lampard, APJC Partner Architecture and Services GTM Director, who has been instrumental in evolving PartnerXperience in to the integrated innovation showcase that we have today. You can see Kerri presenting in the image to the right. Miyuki Suzuki, President, APJC, then delivered the promise of leading together for regional growth with our Partners.

Oliver introduced the importance of performing for today while transforming for tomorrow. This will help our Partners maintain customer engagements and relationships while increasing relevance and competitive differentiation, which will then fuel growth and help customers grow and transform. Be sure to watch the replay of all the keynotes!

Innovation will always take center stage.

Nirav Sheth, VP, Architectures & Engineering, Global Partner Organization, was also on stage to give an overarching view on the innovation coming out of Cisco and how we can go to market together to create incredible outcomes for our customers. This was detailed deeper in the Architecture sessions held that week. Our elite sponsor, Intel, had Santhosh Viswanathan, Managing Director, Asia Pacific and Japan, give an eye-opening presentation on how something so small, like a bee, can impact our lives in a big way.

Unlocking opportunities

The keynote closed with a chat between Irving Tan, Chief Operations Officer, and I on how business is evolving to allow us to arm our partners with the right tools to be successful. I then closed out the keynote with an exciting video highlighting how we created a digital reality for the more than 150-year-old Sydney Cricket Ground.

If one of Australia’s oldest cricket grounds is utilizing Cisco technology to create a complete new customer experience, then you know digitization is real.

This partner session kicked off an eventful week with specific partner focused sessions on the different element of our business ranging from Distribution, Ecosystem Partners, Partner Marketing, Theater Specific Insights, CTO sessions and plenty of networking events that our partner ecosystem were able to leverage. As always, a major highlight was the World of Solutions – a place to see our technology and solutions in action.

In addition to the sessions, which can now be viewed online, the APJC Partner Organization team also prepared the Partner Playbooks – a holistic sales resource that you can leverage to go to market for specific solutions across all Architectures.

It was a great event in Melbourne this year and I was excited to see so many partner faces at the event. Let me know your thoughts in the comments section. I look forward to hearing your feedback.