This is Your Network on Digital Transformation

Mobility. IoT. Cloud. Analytics.

Major technology shifts have forced businesses to think differently about their technology investments. As organizations retool to go digital – whether their goals are to grow, drive productivity, differentiate, protect themselves, improve customer experience, or drive profitability – the opportunity for Cisco and our partners is unprecedented. Our customers need a world class digital infrastructure to achieve their goals.

Having started my Cisco career as part of the Catalyst 6000 team – one the most highly-awarded switch platforms ever – I can look back with pride on how Cisco and our partners have helped customers through the first few waves of transformation. Heck, as I scan eBay for classic cars, one day I may even look back to the 6-slot Cat6K and compare it to a classic Ferrari. But, just like Ferraris are dramatically different today than several years ago, it’s time that we look at networks much differently than ever before.

We’re moving away from the legacy network architecture that met yesterday’s needs to one that enables real-time insights, personalized experiences, automation, assurance, security, and compliance. With an open and extensible, software-driven architecture, we can now accelerate and simplify your customers’ enterprise network operations at the same time. This is what the Cisco Digital Network Architecture—or DNA—is all about.

Cisco transformed the network to be the foundation for digital transformation, helping enable business and IT to innovate faster, reduce costs, and decrease risk with services that are easy to consume. But why change our approach? We’re rapidly changing the network so it best suits both you and your end customers.

We don’t just deliver an integrated portfolio – including network, data center, cloud, security, collaboration, IoT, analytics, and software. We also leverage you— the industry’s best partner ecosystem—to bring together today’s innovative technologies with added value and expertise. Together, we are adding value in every step of the lifecycle from wherever the service/application resides to wherever it may be consumed.

To bring security and the network together, we’ve launched a new set of DNA offers that our partners can bring to the market, marrying the best of the network and the best of our security portfolio.  Digital business requires applications, and, applications require datacenter and cloud capabilities.  You’ll be hearing about how our portfolio is expanding and how only Cisco can help you unlock profitable opportunities no matter how applications get deployed.

Talking about how to optimize applications enables us to shift the conversation towards business executives – which is critical as 70% of technology spend is now influenced by business executives. Our opportunity is not only to make IT more relevant within their own organizations, but to shift the conversation from world-class technology to how that technology unlocks new opportunities for our customers.

Together we can capture these new opportunities as our customers look to transform and go digital. Together we can make a real difference for our customers. And together we are changing the industry.

You can bet you’ll hear more about these topics during Cisco Partner Summit, November 1-3. No matter where you are in the world, you can hear directly from our leaders streaming online on most any device. I hope you’ll register for Virtual Partner Summit to learn more about our vision, strategy, and expanding opportunities that we can achieve together.

I want to thank you personally for all you do for us as Cisco partners. I feel humbled and privileged to have an opportunity to work with you every day as part of my role at Cisco.