Cisco Partner Weekly Rewind – December 20, 2013

Each week, we’ll highlight the most important Cisco partner news and stories, as well as point you to important, Cisco-related partner content you may have missed along the way.
Here’s what you might have missed this week:

Well here we are. We have reached the last Cisco Partner Weekly Rewind of the year. I won’t be back in this Weekly Rewind space until January 10, 2014.

I hope you are all spending time with friends and family during this holiday season, and that you are closing out 2013 in style.

As you can see here, Bruce Klein and Edison Peres wish you the best as we all head into the holiday season. Also, Cisco as a whole wants to thank you for your hard work and commitment.

Without our partners, we would not have seen the successes of 2013, including:

• Expanding the decade long partnership with NetApp in January
• Working with partners to highlight the opportunity created by the Internet of Everything (IoE)
• Building momentum in UCS with a number of awards in March
• Welcoming Sherri Liebo as the new leader for Global Partner Marketing
• Holding another fantastic Marketing Velocity event in April
• Kicking off a great, ongoing series with Dimension Data on UC&C
• Wrapping up yet another great Partner Summit in June
• Announcing Andrew Sage as the new Vice President, Americas Distribution
• Announcing John Donovan as the new leader for Partner Led and Global Virtual Sales
• Celebrating our partners powering us to multiple ARC awards in August
• Launching a new SMB specialization in September
• Closing out the acquisition of Sourcefire in October
• Continuing the conversation on how Cisco marketing is shifting into revenue generation
• Working to complete the most successful collaboration summit to date

Those are just a few of the highlights we noted on our blog in 2013, and the evidence speaks for itself. Without the support of our partners, we don’t have much to talk about! Suffice to say, we all understand just how much of Cisco’s success is only possible with the dedication of our partners. Bruce and Edison often reiterate this sentiment, not only to you, but to all of us here at Cisco.

They know how world class you are. We all know how hard you work and we just want to say thank you. Enjoy a happy and restful holiday. And just as importantly, we want to wish you success in 2014 as we all come back together in January to continue our continued success together.

Personally, I just want to say thanks for making my entry into the Channels Blog quite painless. I’ve met several of you this year and I look forward to working with all of you in the future. Now on to closing out 2013…

Off the Top

Sherri Liebo continued her blogs on revenue-generation marketing this week, focusing on the needed alignment between marketing and the sales force. In her latest entry, she gives a little insight on the work done at Cisco so far and where we would like to go in the future when aligning the sales team to marketing. Be sure to check out her latest insight and give your feedback on Cisco’s journey to revenue-generation marketing.

Collaborate.com Acquisition

Hilton Romanski published his thoughts on the acquisition of Collaborate.com. Just as he said, the mobility and cloud markets continue to transform the technology landscape, and mobile workers are always looking to extend the boundaries of the office. Check out Hilton’s thoughts on how those workers connect and communicate, and how the acquisition of Collaborate.com will help Cisco provide what those users need for collaboration.

Enter New Markets with Cisco Powered Services

Our latest offerings introduce Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), allowing you to confidently manage multitenant cloud-based recovery environments. There is also a new deployment model, Micro Node, for Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS) and Citrix now supports our Desktop as a Service (DaaS) cloud architecture. Be sure to check out the latest information on Cisco Powered Partner Central or contact your Partner Account Manager (PAM) for more information.

Good Reads

• Bill Shields wrapped up TCO for UCS for 2013
• John Stewart looked ahead to 2014 for security
• Vishakha Radia showed how to save money and help patients with collaboration
• Pankaj Patel thought about what 2014 will look like for networking
• Sheila Jordan talked about transforming child safety through mobility
• Chet Namboodri predicted the safe bet for 2014 is the Internet of Everything
• Frank Palumbo discussed the progress of our application centric infrastructure

Keep An Eye Out

• Swing by the Cisco Partner Event calendar for the latest information on Cisco partner gatherings.
• Be sure to check in with me again on January 10, 2014 for more upcoming events!