Services, Collaboration: Key Themes of This Year’s Cisco Summit

As Cisco Systems kicks off its 12th annual Partner Summit, services and collaboration have emerged as the key watchwords.

Approximately 2,000 partners from more than 90 countries are expected to attend this year’s event in Honolulu. And more than half of those attendees are C-level executives, according to Cisco.

Expect to hear a lot of details around services collaboration, as the new Smart Care program enters general availability in most geographic theaters. The program, which was initially announced at last year’s summit in Las Vegas, is designed to help small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and mid-market customers simplify network maintenance through regular, proactive network assessments, remote software repairs and technical support.

Smart Care is based on a software client or a hardware-based network appliance that collects network performance data that is then forwarded to the contracted channel partner. That partner can then proactively address potential issues before they become emergencies, or recommend network upgrades. Partners are also encouraged to wrap their own services solutions into the equation.

The program has spent the last nine months in pilot phase with approximately 200 participating channel partners. “We’ve identified three key benefits,” said Sherri Liebo, vice president of commercial services marketing at Cisco. “The partners are in fact wrapping their services around it and customers are willing to buy those services. Secondly they're finding a great deal more efficiency through the program. What used to require the work of engineers is now much more automated and efficient. They're also finding sales efficiency because they can do all this with one contract. They leave behind a set of challenges associated with selling services and maintenance together, and all of this is leading to greater customer loyalty. You start to see that stickiness with the end customer and this brings about increased customer loyalty.”

Liebo added that 50% of the customers signed up are new customers from a Cisco services point-of-view. And 60% of the devices signed up for the service have never had services attached to them before. In 67% of the time, issues were discovered that required attention from the partner.

Prices are based on the number of Cisco devices being monitored and the types of technologies being carried by the network. The partner is then urged to add their own value proposition and adjust the end customer price accordingly.

In other news, Cisco’s e-Consulting program is now being extended worldwide to channel partners who source product through distributors, after the earlier phase of the program was limited to direct VARs as part of proof-of-concept and testing.

The e-Consulting program enables partners to compare the performance of their businesses against that of generalized competitors in their region, and also receive recommendations for improvement.

In the past seven months, we’ve seen an average increase of 10% in the partners’ services attach rate based on the recommendations that they're getting from this program,” explained Raja Sundaram, director of service channels at Cisco. “We’ve also seen a 12% improvement on their service delivery and metrics based on such things as the RMA rate and closed cases.”

Cisco is expecting to see 3,000 partners participating in the program in the not-too-distant future.