Cisco has introduced a new cloud partner program to help partners choose their role in the cloud and evolve their business models to capitalize on the multi-billion cloud market opportunity. To help partners enhance their professional services capabilities and accelerate their evolution to selling end-to-end communications and IT solutions or 'architectures,' Cisco also unveiled its latest smart services innovation, Cisco Collaborative Professional Services.
The Cisco Cloud Partner Program (CPP) has three tracks that provide partners with the flexibility to choose the role they want to play in the market: Cloud Builder, Cloud Provider and Cloud Services Reseller.
Cloud Builder is for partners who design and implement cloud-ready infrastructures or fully provisioned private or public clouds. The designation validates partners' competency in three aspects of building clouds: Infrastructure, Management Applications and Cloud Professional Services.
Cloud Provider is designed for partners offering public cloud services to the market. The Cloud Provider track empowers and supports our cloud service provider partners to sell their own brand of Cisco-powered cloud services.
Cloud Services Reseller is complementary to the Cloud Provider track as it offers an additional route to market for the cloud provider. Cloud Services Resellers are partners who "white-label" or resell a Cloud Provider's "Cisco Powered Service."
The Cloud Builder and Cloud Provider tracks include branding, as well as reference architecture support, financing, market development funding and access to channel partners as a route to market. These benefits are in addition to those the partners already receive from Cisco.
To reduce incremental costs to partners, CPP builds upon partners' existing certifications in Cisco and its ecosystem partners.
Collaborative Professional Services
Collaborative Professional Services (CPS) is a portfolio of services that combines Cisco intellectual capital, engineering expertise and service automation to help partners profitably expand or build new professional services practices.
CPS delivers several types of services to Cisco partners:
Assessment Services: Software tools help partners analyze and collect data through assessments and automate service capabilities.
Guidance and Development Services: Cisco engineering resources review or create technology design and implementation plans to enable partners.
Practice Accelerators: Cisco Services best practices around new technologies or architectures are shared to help partners design or expand a professional service practice.
With 30 business services in the portfolio, CPS spans all major technologies in Cisco borderless networks, collaboration and data center/virtualization architectures and will expand to offer cloud services later this year.
CPS helps qualified Cisco partners expand into new technology markets faster and increase the operational efficiency of their services practices by using Cisco engineering resources, intellectual property, proven methodologies and service automation.
Cisco routinely captures knowledge through millions of customer interactions and applies that expertise to deliver smart service capabilities. These smart services enable partners to deliver proactive, automated services and profitably grow their service practices.
As Cisco's latest smart service innovation, CPS helps Cisco partners increase customer satisfaction by providing proactive guidance as well as actionable customer recommendations based on real-time network intelligence to their customers.
Edison Peres, senior vice president, Worldwide Channels, Cisco: "The network platform is essential to the delivery of cloud applications and services, creating a rich opportunity for Cisco channel partners. The Cisco Cloud Partner Program will further empower our channel partners to evolve their business model to monetize the cloud opportunity."
Karl Meulema, senior vice president, Cisco Services: "Services are the key differentiator and profitability engine for our partners. As our latest smart service innovation, Collaborative Professional Services will help our channel partners grow their professional service capabilities and accelerate the transition to architectures."
Adrian Foxall, networking business line director, Computacenter, a UK-based Cisco Gold Certified Partner: "As channel resellers look to seize the cloud computing market opportunity, Cisco's Cloud Partner Program provides a solid blueprint for helping migrate toward new cloud business models. The program is inclusive, offering different roles resellers can engage, while recognizing resellers' existing multi-vendor technology investments and capabilities. The Program gives channel resellers multiple opportunities to capture the growth in the cloud computing market with the deep enablement and programmatic support from Cisco."