Enabling Our Partners’ Success in a Digital Age

At Cisco Live in Melbourne – an event in its 25th year – more than 7,000 customers and partners came together to learn more about the new technology innovation at Cisco.

Amongst the 7,000 plus attendees were close to 1,000 partners from across Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) who congregated in Melbourne to learn more about how our technology can benefit our mutual customers. This inaugural event is evolving into our flagship partner event for the region. It’s called the PartnerXperience at Cisco Live.

With so many Partners in attendance, we were fortunate enough to have our Global Channel Chief, Wendy Bahr and members of the Global Partner Organization in Melbourne to provide a global view of common Partner challenges and answer questions that our APJ Partners have, to help them grow their Cisco practice. We even had a cameo by Cisco’s newly appointed President of Asia Pacific and Japan, Miyuki Suzuki.

We kicked off the PartnerXperience with a keynote which included an all-star lineup of speakers such as Wendy Bahr (Senior Vice President, Global Partner Organization) Nirav Sheth (Vice President Sales and Systems Engineering, Global Partner Organization),Vish Iyer (Vice President of Architectures APJ), DD Dasgupta (‎Vice President of Marketing) and myself. We were also fortunate to have two strategic sponsors, Intel and Google Cloud, who also shared their vision of digital market transitions.

Wendy touched on the opportunity that is present in the market with digitization and how the new revenue streams, when banded together with new services, new consulting, and new applications will result in ultimately greater profitability and growth.

I then followed Wendy by sharing how Partners can evolve their business with Cisco and identify opportunities on how to build your Cisco Business as well as explore ecosystem opportunities.

Vish Iyer, who leads Cisco Architectures for the region spoke about modernizing our customers’ infrastructures in a digital world and Dhritiman Dasgupta (DD) then continued the technology theme with Intent Based Data Centers in a multicloud world.

Nirav Sheth then brought us home by reiterating Cisco’s commitment to the Partner Ecosystem and how we will continue to support our partners going forward.

The partners from the different regions split up into separate Theatre specific breakout groups where they could get localized aspects of the keynote – e.g. what it means for Partners in each specific country.

The next day onwards, Partners attended architecture sessions from Cisco’s four key architectures, but also sessions such as Marketing and Ecosystems, to help them understand new buying motions that we are beginning to see in the enterprises. In between all this, Partners also had the chance to explore the World of Solutions to see real world solutions in action and better understand how to leverage those solutions for their customers. This included over a hundred ecosystem Partners from across the globe.

At the end of the week, we got great feedback from Partners including how valuable this event was – in fact many of them are already booking in for next year’s PartnerXperience at Cisco Live.

It has been an exceptionally valuable event. Together with our Partners we are enabling the next industrial revolution which requires new selling motions around secure, intelligent platform for digital business. On behalf of the APJ Partner Organization, I would like to take this opportunity to give a heartfelt thank you to everyone who has working diligently behind the scenes to make PartnerXperience at Cisco Live 2018 in Melbourne a resounding success.