Two years after eliminating role sharing, Cisco Systems announced Monday it was turning back the clock and will now allow limited role sharing to give partners more flexibility around specializations.
The change around the sharing of roles is based on extensive feedback from the partner community said Rick Graham, vice-president, distribution and channel operations with Cisco Canada. Premier partners in particular, he said, were asking for more flexibility in how they utilize their human resources to meet Cisco’s specialization requirements, particularly around the SMB opportunity, in a more profitable way.
Especially in the SMB space, said Graham, it makes more sense for a partner to be able to send one person with a breadth of knowledge on a call, rather than sending three or four to make sure all the specializations are covered.
Graham added when role sharing wasn’t permitted smaller partners were forced to focus their resources around a smaller number of specializations to be eligible for programs like Cisco’s Value Incentive Program (VIP).
“This change allows them to take those same resources and spread them over more specializations, allowing them to benefit more greatly from this and other programs,” said Graham. “There’s a big financial impact in terms of access to VIP.”
Rebecca Leach, manager, partner programs with Cisco Canada, said the total number of roles required for the partner programs aren’t changing. Each specialization will still have three roles, typically an account manager (AM), a sales manager (SE) and a field engineer (FE). Each of them needs to be certified in the specialty. The Premier level will still require three certifications, the Silver level six and the Gold level 12.
In the past each of those roles had to have individuals dedicated to just one specialization. What’s new, said Leach, is that now one SE or FE will be able to fill two different specialization roles, and each AM will be able to fill four. In other words, rather than being limited to security, one SE can specialize in security and wireless, and fill both roles.
“It significantly reduces the number of people required to fill the specialization roles,” said Leach. “It enables a partner to utilize the same person across multiple specializations if they choose to.”
It may seem like a minor tweak but it will make a difference for ESI Information Technologies, a Montreal-based solutions provider with 200 staff and offices in Toronto and Quebec City. A Cisco Silver partner, ESI plays in the security, storage and high availability spaces, and also has units dedicated to software development and cabling.
Patrick Naoum, ESI’s vice-president, said he understands why Cisco initially disallowed role sharing. For smaller partners a lot of specializations would reside on one or two people’s shoulders, putting the partner at risk if one of those people left.
However, he said the end of role sharing put ESI in a difficult situation, since it meant more individuals were needed to maintain the same specializations. As a Silver partner, ESI is also required to maintain two Cisco Certified Internetwork Experts (CCIE), and Naoum said CCIEs are typically worried about maintaining that certification and aren’t keen on attaining specializations, reducing the pool of people within the company available to earn specializations.
“For us, we lost our wireless specialization and we decided to keep unified communications and security,” said Naoum. “I had to divert resources to keep security and unified communications, which at the time were more important for us.”
ESI sits on a number of Cisco partner committees where the role sharing issue has been raised, and Naoum said he is glad the vendor has responded. While he agrees that role sharing should not be unlimited, he said that a good compromise has been struck and ESI plans to add a wireless specialization once again in short order.
Not only does that mean increased recognition for the company and for its specialists, Naoum said it also means access to VIP dollars for wireless specialization, which will be a boost for ESI’s bottom line.
“Wireless is key to security and unified communications, and to add wireless to them is a no-brainer,” said Naoum. “Ultimately our guys have the expertise and were certified, but it wasn’t recognized by Cisco because they couldn’t have role-sharing.”
Despite the increased flexibility around role sharing in the partner program, Cisco’s Graham said the vendor is still a strong believer in the idea of role dedication.
“We think for larger partners specifically it does give them more bench strength and lets them build more robust practices, and it provides them with some risk management (in case people leave),” said Graham.
