Demystifying Data Center Services for Partners

With Cisco’s Partner Summit 2019 wrapped up, and the evolution of Cisco Customer Experience in full swing, Cisco partners are listening closely as they decide what and how to invest as they grow their Cisco practice. Specifically, on the data center and cloud front, partners are dealing with massive changes in the market as customers have become fully entrenched in a multicloud, hybrid data center world.

In fact, Gartner indicates that over 80% of customers are using multiple public clouds.

The data center has always been the place in IT where many solutions from multiple vendors must not only coexist but work together to create an overall better solution for the customer. When partners sell a data center solution — whether from one vendor or multiple — the immediate question is “how will this be supported?” In the data center, this is an important and loaded question.

Solution Support

While Cisco has its own best-in-class Solution Support service that partners can resell, partners also are able to build their own practice around this level of support. While there’s a natural tension between the two, Cisco continues to encourage capable partners to build and provide Solution Support. In fact, not only does Cisco encourage it, but we also provide tools and enablement in order to equip partners.

Multicloud Support

Supporting a customer’s on-premise data center is one thing… what about when a customer is also using public clouds? Cisco enables our partners to support this ecosystem with products and services such as ACI Anywhere, CloudCenter, Cisco Container Platform, and NSO Service Packs.

Conclusion

Partners face unique challenges when selling and supporting data center solutions for their customers. They must sell the support story from the very beginning, even before the first product is sold. How will we, the partner, ensure the success of the deployment when there are so many pieces to the solution and from multiple vendors? How will we continue to be the trusted advisor for our customers? With Cisco Solution Support, as well as a partner’s own capabilities, they will be able to confidently sell, deploy, and support Cisco’s next generation Data Center solutions.

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