Gaining a Competitive Edge with Innovative Services

It’s been a few months since I took on the role of Chief Technology and Strategy Officer for Cisco Services. In that time, I’ve been inspired by the senior technical talent on our team and by the amazing ways we are helping customers.

Every day, our 30 excellent Distinguished Services Engineers (DSEs), Principal Engineers, and Principal Architects are embedded on the ground, on the road, supporting our account teams and building lasting customer relationships. Our Services Senior Technical Community does it all, from delivering integral pre-sales support to serving as virtual Chief Technology Officers.

It’s clear that technology is changing our world as everyone and everything becomes more digitized. And when it comes to our technologists, they are the “final frontier” for serious issues, instrumental to our success—and that’s just their “day jobs”!

Beyond the day to day, our senior technologists participate in community-sponsored programs that deliver high value in and out of Cisco. For example, Cisco Services has a Distinguished Discussions program, where our technologists present internally to our engineering community. While this program has been around for some time, it is now being leveraged externally as part of the Technical Knowledge Library’s biweekly educational seminar series offered to customers to further their success.

We do additional outreach via a roadshows program, where senior technologists engage with our global engineering communities to discuss technical challenges and industry trends with customers and employees alike. Additionally, we host Innovation Forums, solving big problems on demand via insight from our DSEs or Principals. A recent example of this involved a major telecommunications customer when Innovation Forum members came up with dozens of ideas, especially in the area of co-development with the customer.

We also launched a new innovation program called CHILL, which stands for Cisco Hyper-Innovation Living Labs. CHILL is a capability designed to drive transformational, industry-scale innovation with our customers. The Living Lab Experience brings together four to six non-competing customers, who diversely represent whole industries, to solve a bold challenge in areas where IoT is ripe for disruption. These solutions provide opportunities to drive growth for Cisco and our customers through joint ventures, venture seeding new businesses, joint projects, and partnered go to market.

It is through these innovative programs and technical talent that we are helping you, our customers, become more digitized, and helping with some of your biggest obstacles. So what’s top of your list to fix in 2016? We want to hear from you–add a comment below.