Cisco Partner Summit is one of my favorite times each year. It’s kind of like the World Cup for our team, where we go all-out to help our partners accelerate their business opportunities. We come together, get creative, make big investments, and strengthen relationships built around our strategic pillars of Simplicity, Alignment, and, Value Exchange.
Since we are all about teaming with you – our partners – today we are announcing several important new ways to help you gain more profit, in less time, with better results. And I don’t know about you, but getting better results in less time is one of my favorite things.
Here are a few of our new programs you should know about:
VIP for UCS
Interested in expanding your UCS business? We’re building on existing incentives to offer VIP for UCS products. We simplified and improved this VIP with significantly higher rebates and increased back-end partner profitability. Not only have we increased pay outs for UCS on VIP, included for the first time ever, SmartPlay bundles into VIP, but, today, we’re announcing a 2% VIP accelerator for Account Breakaway registered deals retroactive to day 1 of Cisco Q2.
As your work with our joint customers to help them map their hybrid cloud strategy, bet on UCS as the compute platform of choice – across blade, rack, converged infrastructure, hyper converged infrastructure, and, now storage optimized – UCS is what the Global 500 is investing in. Let’s not forget our new HPE Competitive Promo – if you are working with a customer who has an existing HPE footprint, or bidding against HPE, use this promo to enjoy rich up front discounting opportunities and ensure your customers go with the best compute platform in the industry.
Cisco Ready
Align your installed base to current Cisco Campaigns with Cisco Ready. In the next few weeks, we’re adding vertical relevant insights, playbooks, and care-abouts to Cisco Ready so you can get more tips and tools to customize your selling based on what accounts in that customer’s vertical is focused on investing in – let’s change the conversation and become much more business relevant and outcome focused than ever before.
Collaboration SaaS VIP
Growing your recurring revenue and minimizing customer churn are critical to maintaining a healthy SaaS practice – and the new Collaboration SaaS VIP track rewards you for just that. But we’re not stopping there. As other SaaS capabilities come to GPL – such as OpenDNS – we’ll bring the same benefits to the table.
Customer Success Portal
Our new Customer Success Portal is a portfolio of assets made available by our Global Customer Success (GCS) organization – our learnings in managing the customer lifecycle, our trainings, and key assets we leverage internally are now partner facing for the first time ever. We’re all shifting our motions from ‘landing’, to ‘adopt and expanding’ as more and more of our portfolio is software led – we’re on this journey together and I’m excited that our GCS team is so committed to investing in helping our partners build their capabilities in lock step with us.
Security Account Breakaway
With our new Security Account Breakaway Offer we’re helping you improve deal margin. When you lead with the Account Breakaway you can double upfront deal margins coupled with rich back end rebates.
Digital Network Architecture Offers
Cisco Digital Network Architecture (DNA) is a monumental shift in networking that drives security, analytics, and automation deep into the infrastructure. It also provides a sound platform to not only enable the flexibility required for digital business, but also increase your profitable growth through greater extensibility and services attach. Our new DNA offers help you lead with our strength in security, deliver greater software value at no additional costs, and provide compelling customer incentives to migrate now. With these promotions Cisco accelerates successful DNA deployments by offloading deployment costs, hardware costs, and financing.
Together we can accomplish even more.
In my 16+ years at Cisco, if I have learned two things, it’s that we are the best in the industry in terms of innovation, and, we have been successful because of our unwavering commitment to our partners. I can’t tell you how excited I am about the continued investments we’re making into our partners, and, how passionate you are about leading with Cisco. We will continue to accomplish great things together as our customers go ‘digital’.
While I did not have a chance to go to the last Football World Cup, I would much rather be at our Partner World Cup spending time with some of the top leaders in IT – whether your attending remotely via Virtual Partner Summit or joining us live, I know that this Partner Summit is going to be the best one yet!
Thanks for summarizing it so well for us Nirav. UCS VIP on smart plays is a big one and glad to see it happen.