Cisco wins prestigious TSIA STAR Award for Services Innovation

During the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA) – the world’s leading organization dedicated to advancing the business of technology and services conference on 25 October 2017, Cisco was awarded the Star award for Innovation in Expand Selling Programs.

To win a STAR Award, nominees undergo a rigorous evaluation process, with the winners selected by TSIA’s service discipline advisory board members. Since its inception in 1990, the STAR Awards have become one of the highest honors in the technology services industry, acknowledging the contribution of companies of all sizes to the continual improvement of technology services delivery industry-wide.

This award clearly highlights the ability that Cisco has in helping enterprises identify and adopt the right technology solutions to get the business outcomes that they seek. With this mind, we have taken it one step further by providing new levels of support and guidance to help customers adopt digital network solutions.

Customers need a strong, optimized and efficient network foundation to evolve to and benefit from a digital network and with Cisco’s Digital Network Architecture (DNA) customers have the perfect foundation to build their digital business.

That’s not all, customers have struggled to evolve to digital networks and adopt the right solutions for their business outcomes, at Cisco we have aligned our product management and marketing to help make these choices easier for customers. Our services delivery teams have aligned to drive adoption, as well as overall business outcomes. To that end, we have empowered their service delivery teams to take ownership of the customer problem beyond just the simple fix, and utilized gamification techniques to drive home the change in culture

So what is Cisco DNA and how can customers and partners benefit from it?

Cisco DNA is an open, software-driven, services-centric network architecture, while Cisco ONE software is the key interface to manage the network hardware. Together customers have access to analytics-based insights that enable better digital adoption and allow them to fine-tune business models using technology.

In addition, both customers and partners see an increase in devices, applications, users and cyber threats, built in automation supports information technology teams to simplify the network management.

Some of the immediate benefits of this software-driven approach, is that it speeds up innovation through insights and experiences, reduces costs and complexity through automation and lowers risk through security and compliance.

There were additional benefits, as customers needed to understand the value of the digital network that is managed through software applications – and train them to use the software. Training was required which made them pick up new skills that made them relevant to the business.

Customers and partners also began to see the value in a single touch point for technical support versus a multi-vendor model for priorities like security and mobility require a different support teams.

Also, this means that instead of having engineers just fixing immediate problems, our engineers identified solutions and recommended services to drive network improvements for customers. This has resulted in customers appreciating the support and proactive approach demonstrated by engineers.

Why? Simply because customers state that our recommendations to improve their networks are helping them to optimize cost, comply with industry regulatory requirements and more importantly grow revenue.

By focusing on goals that revolve around the evolution of support models and go beyond break-fix, we’ve managed to identify customer challenges and offer tailored solutions that helps both the customer and Cisco to meet their digital goals.

As Cisco continues its transition towards Software and Services, the TSIA Star award is a good reminder that we’re on the right track as a company and together with our expanded partner ecosystem we’re helping our customers reach theirs digital goals through a mix or software, hardware and services, making us a truly integrated technology solutions provider.

For more information about the TSIA awards, please click here.