New Orleans, LA. – Cisco’s (Nasdaq: CSCO)Partner Summit heads to the crescent city of New Orleans. Cisco may have the most progressive channel program and strategy in high tech, but channel partners will be looking for more as they battle constant margin pressure than ever before.
The cloud is also posing unique challenges for channel partners as well as the rise in IT complexity, which is dramatically increasing up front solution development costs for partners.
Cisco will try to address these concerns this week at the Partner Summit, which officially starts today. One area Cisco will be steering partners is towards high margin services.
Cisco already has Smart Services in play. Smart Services can be embedded as part of managed services offering. According to Jim McDonnell, senior director of Cisco Services, this strategy will enable channel partners to drive more profitability and differentiate themselves in the market place.
Beyond managed services, Smart Services can also enable partners to take on more complex projects including Unified Computing System (UCS).
The current iteration of Smart Services is based on more than 50 million installed devices and six million secure customer interactions. McDonnell added that all this intelligences will be passed on to the channel for them to improve their value added services offerings and potential profitability.
In this first video blog series from the Cisco Partner Summit find out how the cloud will impact Smart Services.
