Cisco announced earlier in the year in Las Vegas a challenging set of targets for all business areas, especially SMBs and announced they would be recruiting additional resellers as well as targeting existing channels for further growth to hit those targets.
The new Industry Solutions Partner Network will engage, enable and reward a global community of channel partners, application providers and device manufacturers to collaborate and deliver industry-specific solutions that address the business needs of mutual customers. Partners that qualify for this new program will also be the first to have access to Cisco Partner Space, an innovative virtual environment that facilitates the partner-to-partner collaboration required to deliver complete industry solutions.
“We are entering the second phase of the Internet and this is creating unprecedented growth opportunities over the next decade for our channel partners and customers,” said Keith Goodwin, senior vice president of Worldwide Channels at Cisco. “Companies and governments are looking to deploy industry solutions to increase collaboration and productivity; while partners are looking to deploy industry solutions to increase transaction size and gross margins.”
Cisco say that partner-to-partner collaboration is critical to delivering more valuable solutions to customers. Digitel Corporation, a Cisco channel partner, and Cistera Networks Inc., a Cisco Unified Communications enterprise application services provider, were able to provide a complete event alerting and notification solution for the city of Opelika, Ala. Using this solution, Opelika city services and emergency personnel can now communicate with each other seamlessly over the Cisco Unified Communications system, while digitally recording and archiving each transmission. Emergency response is faster and more efficient, while post-event analysis is now possible due to the recording and archiving features.
"Opelika is a community that's proud of our rich heritage, but ready to embrace the possibilities of technology innovation, especially to enhance mission-critical services such as public safety," said John Findley, information technology director with the city of Opelika. "In order to maintain the most effective and up-to-date departments to serve and protect our citizens, we turned to trusted Cisco partners Digitel and Cistera to design and implement a Cisco Unified Communications network for emergency management and public safety applications."
The Cisco Industry Solutions Partner Network will support partners by providing industry training, expertise, industry specific communications, and innovative collaboration tools based on Web 2.0 technology, such as Cisco Partner Space.
Cisco will promote the capabilities of the partners in the network in various ways, and will provide collaborative business planning, proposal-based joint marketing funds and turn-key demand generation programs. This will allow partners to quickly engage each other, expand their geographic reach, and better address the business challenges of customers.
The collaborative delivery of these industry-specific solutions will be rewarded with product discounts offered through the Cisco Solution Incentive Program, provided that the Cisco product and services component accounts for no more than 70 percent of the total solution.
Cisco partners must meet additional requirements, such as having industry references, an industry-focused business plan and dedicated resources to participate in the program.
Specific program requirements can be found at the Cisco web site.