Staying a Cisco Channel Partner is a tough choice.

Over the last six months I have been wondering what I should do as a company with our Cisco partnership. To be honest, Cisco is not the easiest company to work with as a partner and that bothers me. I have sent a few emails to people at Cisco and two executives with no reply back other than an SMB Account Manager.

If I was running Cisco and a partner sent me an email saying he was thinking of leaving due to certain reasons, I would be sure to follow up and see if it could be fixed. It could be that you have many other partners who are having the same issue and it really needs to be fixed. In my opinion, as a common courtesy you should return the email even if you pass it on to someone else.

I have not seen any real movement as a company to fix the partner program compared to other vendors. It seems to be that Cisco is a commodity when it comes to networking gear and is no longer a solution. When you have so many (and from my point of view, really too many partners), it will always be like that. This is what I am hearing from customers as they purchase appliances from large Cisco Gold Partners but call us to architect the network, do the installs and troubleshoot as necessary down the road. So I've been thinking -- this has been working well for my company and I do not have to be a Cisco Partner to do this.

I went back and read this article by Brad Reese again, Why HP ProCurve is dismantling Cisco's market share on a deal-by-deal basis [1] and this made me think once again -- why be a partner? I would like Cisco to tell me why I should continue to stay a partner, and to return my emails. With no word back, I'm left to wonder if the partner program is in worse shape than I first thought.