Power(ful) Partnerships in the Digital Age

This blog is co-authored by Michelle Chiantera, Senior Director of Global Partner Marketing.

Today, Cisco Partner Summit 2016 kicked off in sunny San Diego. We’re energized and ready for the great week we have planned for our 2,200 partners joining us onsite from around the world.

Moments ago, during the general session keynote, Chuck Robbins, Kelly Kramer and Wendy Bahr shared how Cisco is accelerating opportunities in the digital world for our partner ecosystem. They also illustrated how the Power of Partnerships is key to our mutual success.

And, as anticipated, we made a number of news announcements that will charge up partners, particularly in the hot data center space and how to effectively market to today’s digital business.

Today, we’re pleased to unveil our expansion into the hyperconverged market and announce additions to our switching portfolio. What’s more, to help partners truly succeed in digital marketing today, we’re also introducing a new suite of marketing services.

With these new technology innovations, Cisco is accelerating hybrid cloud deployments.

Expanding our Hyperconverged Presence

Cisco is expanding its data center portfolio into the red-hot hyperconverged market. Built on Cisco’s industry-leading UCS compute platform, Cisco HyperFlex™ Systems provides architectural approach to hyperconverged infrastructure. Aligned with Cisco’s build, buy, partner strategy that’s at the core of our innovation strategy, the HyperFlex portfolio will be available from our partners to deliver customers unprecedented agility and flexibility in the hyper-converged infrastructure space.

Switches

To further expand our Data Center portfolio, we’ve announced new data center switches and software that will pave the way for customers to excel in their transition to digitization. The new Cisco Nexus 9200 and Nexus 9300EX Series switches are the industry’s first native 25Gbps-capable switches, delivering 25/50/100Gbps speeds at the cost of 10/40Gbps.

Digital Marketing – Time to Engage

In the digital world, information is everywhere and it’s changing the way people – our customers— receive and rationalize information.  Customers are more educated, more social, and more aware than ever before.  This means you – our partners – need to get ahead of the curve, create new messages and stay relevant – all differently than you’ve done before.

Everything is going digital, requiring partners to integrate digital into their current marketing practices. How partners engage with customers is changing as new ways to drive customer demand and adoption gain popularity. Partners seeking new marketing approaches will learn how to put digital first, make it personalized and attuned to the ways customers are buying in this new digital era.

To help partners navigate this digital marketing transformation, we’ve also introduced Cisco Engage. Engage is a suite of new digital marketing services designed to help partners engage customers and drive revenue. Through new tools, services and resources, partners can enhance their marketing expertise to reach new customers and accelerate sales. This all comes together through education and training, powerful customized campaigns, and enabling partners to leverage marketing-driven revenue.

Engage provides the following services:

Enhance Your Expertise with Marketing Velocity programs

We’ve revamped Cisco Marketing Velocity to give partners access to the best marketing practices and thought leadership – real-time – in the industry.  This is designed to help partners accelerate sales, sharpen skills and keep up with the new marketing trends. What’s new:

• Get industry-wide best practices for free with the always-on Marketing Velocity Hub.
• Expand your marketing mastery through Marketing eLearning Partners can enhance their marketing skills specific to Cisco technology marketing, social media, revenue marketing and digital demand generation.
• Learn from industry leaders through On-the-Air Each month, marketing experts share new innovative ideas, best practices, and trends.

Create Conversations through an enhanced Partner Marketing Central platform

The revamped Partner Marketing Central now offers a more integrated and personalized digital marketing experience for partners. Partners can create personalized content, have access to a digital marketing library and utilize customizable digital demand generation services designed to better engage customers and drive revenue. What’s new:

• Partners can create customized marketing and demand generation campaigns through an intuitive and personalized platform.
• A new interface allows partners to manage marketing campaign funds simply and precisely.
• The enhanced marketing library offers digital marketing thought leadership resources and services.
• Digital marketing experts will help partners create custom marketing plans. Through an ongoing curriculum, digital marketing experts will help partners develop high-impact, marketing results.

In this fast-paced digital world, sales and marketing will now need to work together more closely; aligning strategies to drive growth. Through Engage, Cisco continues to invest in partners’ marketing talent and expertise, giving them the resources to support a high-impact digital marketing model.

All of these new announcements equate to new opportunities for partners. The digital transformation waits for no one, and we are not slowing down. Follow Cisco throughout the week to hear about the continued innovation we are delivering to partners.