Forward as One: Embracing the Future of Partnering with Cisco

In today’s fast-paced and highly competitive market, our customers face new challenges. They’re not just looking for products—they want outcomes, experiences, and solutions that are fast, flexible, and simple. As they seek to modernize their infrastructure, leverage AI and data, and improve cybersecurity, all while keeping their digital footprint resilient, we must adapt to meet their evolving needs.

To stay ahead, it’s critical that we align with these market shifts. This means evolving our approach to better serve both our partners and customers—moving beyond transactional relationships to embrace a more holistic strategy. As we strive to become the #1 vendor in the markets we serve, we are strengthening our partner ecosystem, ensuring that our innovations help partners deliver value across the customer lifecycle.

Cisco is revolutionizing how infrastructure and data connect and protect organizations in the AI era. We are working to transform data centers to power AI workloads; modernize everywhere people work and serve customers to deliver better employee and customer experiences, while improving productivity and sustainability; and empower IT, engineering, and security teams to prevent, detect and respond to events that could disrupt the delivery of digital experiences and harm business outcomes. We also acquired Splunk, our most significant acquisition ever, which brings complementary capabilities in security, observability, and a highly scalable data platform.

Our innovations will enable partners to deliver value to our customers across the lifecycle. We are simplifying how we work together. And we are recognizing partners’ contributions in delivering customer outcomes as we evolve and move forward, as one. This is the power of the ecosystem.

With the market evolving faster than ever, it’s clear that no single company can do it alone—success lies in collaboration and integration. That’s where our partners come in, elevating Cisco’s quality and innovation to create tailored solutions and unique experiences. They build on our technology and create their own services to wrap around Cisco’s, simplifying the customer experience and allowing customers to purchase and consume technology on their terms.

As a partner-first company, partners remain essential to our success and integral to our go-to-market strategy.

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Cisco Partner Summit 2024 is right around the corner

I’m excited about the opportunity to connect with our incredible partner ecosystem. This event is a highlight every year, offering us a chance to strengthen our collaborations and drive innovation together.

This year’s theme is Forward as One and it fits perfectly with our current landscape. It underscores the necessity of moving forward together—Cisco and our partners—as a unified force. To evolve and succeed in this ever-changing market, we must be aligned, collaborative, and committed to advancing together.

As we continue to align our partner program to a fast evolving market and customer needs, our focus is clear:

Drive customer outcomes to maximize impact and profitability for our partners.
Expand our partners’ reach by differentiating with their unique strengths.
Accelerate our value exchange and deepen our partners’ technical expertise.

We know it’s crucial to simplify and streamline how you do business with Cisco. To truly drive partner preference, we need to ensure that our programs are aligned with our shared goals of customer and business success.

And we’ve listened to your feedback and have been evolving our CX partner strategy. In close collaboration with CX, we have aligned incentives to create a more simplified, profitable, and predictable experience for our partner community. Our goal is to reduce operational complexities, improve sales alignment, and provide more predictable revenue potential.

That’s why we continue to evolve to more performance-based incentives for our partners, focused on driving growth, adoption, and renewals. We’re committed to providing you with the tools and resources needed to align with our teams so that together, we can achieve profitable growth.

Curious to learn more?

Register now for Partner Summit 2024 and join us on this exciting journey as we move Forward as One. This is your chance to explore the future of our next-generation Cisco Partner Program and uncover new opportunities to redefine what’s possible together.

If you can’t be there in person, join us for the live digital broadcast on October 28 (1:30-3:30 PM PDT) and October 29 (8:30-11:00 AM PDT). Get ready for inspiring insights, exciting company updates, and innovative approaches to delivering value.

I look forward to seeing you there!