On his blog Goodwin announced, “It’s no secret that Cisco has been on a journey to simplify and make it easier to work with us.
In May, we took a leap forward in this process and announced a series of changes across our global engineering, sales, and services teams to streamline our organizational structure and speed decision making.
Today I’d like to outline the next step in this process and how it affects partners. I also want you know that many of the changes you’re seeing at Cisco are a result of what we’ve heard from you, so I encourage you to keep the feedback coming (via Twitter, by talking to your account manager, or by leaving a comment here on this blog).
Let’s take a closer look at the changes to the Worldwide Partner Organization, which fall into three main areas: Partner Led, Partner Marketing, and geographic leadership.
1) Partner Led
Our Partner organization will assume responsibility for building the global capabilities to support Partner-Led – one of two global go-to-market selling models. The Partner Led global sales model will increase Cisco’s reliance on partners to address the needs of customers across all market segments where Cisco will not have a high-touch sales presence.
Andrew Sage will take on the role of Vice President, Partner Led. A 12-year Cisco veteran, Andrew most recently spear-headed our Small Business Sales efforts and was instrumental in shaping our key strategies for the Partner-Led model.
2) Geographic Alignment
Rather than seven global theaters with seven leaders, we have simplified and created three geographic regions, each with one new partner leader.
Stanimira Koleva will head up the newly created APJC (Asia Pacific, Japan and Greater China) geography
Milo Schacher will lead EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa)
Jim Sherriff will be in charge of the Americas geography
3) Partner Marketing
Last and certainly not least, we’ve heard from partners that marketing is integral to your success and we want to ensure that you have the programs, tools and education you need to market to customers.
Rest assured that we will continue offering programs like Partner Velocity, marketing toolkits and new innovative resources to help you increase your profitability. In fact, we are evolving partner marketing to better scale and support our Partner-Led model while growing our marketing investments in you, our partners.
To continue innovating in our partner marketing efforts, Amanda Jobbins will lead Partner Marketing as Vice President. The new Partner Marketing organization led by Amanda will now be under the Cisco Global Marketing organization, and Amanda will report directly to Blair Christie, our Chief Marketing Officer.
Amanda will also be an active member of my senior leadership team. I strongly believe this structure will allow us to simplify how you work with us, and most importantly, will ensure additional marketing investments in you, our Partners.
While we’re making some changes to our organizational structure, Edison Peres will continue to lead Worldwide Channels and Wendy Bahr will continue to lead our Global and Transformational Partner Organization.
The bottom line is that Cisco’s unwavering commitment to our partners remains unchanged. In fact, we are doubling down on our partners by creating a partner-led model, streamlining our leadership team, and investing in partner marketing.”