Partner

“It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.” That was the quote I used by W. Edwards Deming, a 20th century engineer and physicist, to open up my collaboration breakout session at Partner Summit back in March. Obviously, it’s tongue-in-cheek, but the point is clear. We’ve spent the la…

Last week, I discussed the NetAcademy and Talent Bridge program from the student’s perspective. But really, that is only half of the story. I believe it’s essential to understand the NetAcademy program from an educator’s perspective, too. Why, you ask? Because who knows students better than their ow…

Over the last year, more than 4,000 people from our partner community attended a Customer Success Talk webinar and joined us on a journey to create customers for life. In addition to sharing practice-building tips and tools, the series has also served as a way to gauge where we all are on the path t…

The development of the digital landscape is accelerating at an unprecedented rate for Cisco, our ecosystem of partners, and our mutual customers. We’re seeing unprecedented opportunity as our customers – across all vertical markets – are going full speed to quickly becoming digital organ…

Even if you didn’t realize that managing cybersecurity threat risk is a major concern for our customers, the market potential should tell you something:  according to Gartner, worldwide spending on information security products and services will reach $81.6 billion in 2016.  Clearly, organizations a…

  At Cisco Partner Summit in November, a hot topic when talking with many of you was talent. How do you make sure you have the right people with the right skills for the digital economy? As I mentioned in my blog last week, Cisco Networking Academy is all about developing the best IT students f…

I’ve been putting my Amazon Echo through its paces lately. Its voice recognition service, Alexa, and I have established a pretty close relationship: “Alexa, call Uber”, “Alexa, buy How Far Can You Go? by John Maclean”, “Alexa, it’s a little chilly, raise the temperature to 70 degrees.” You get the i…

Wendy Bahr said it best at Partner Summit: “to move with speed, we have to simplify”. But how can you cut through the clutter and not only reach your target audience, but reach them with something that spurs action and pushes results? Our distribution partners at Comstor did just that. Through a las…

Partners of all types across the globe have one very important thing in common. Yes, they all want to become more profitable; but, they also want to help facilitate this by aligning their sales and marketing teams more closely. While some still see marketing as a “support” role, it really is critica…