Cisco outlines five future partner program improvements

Cisco has teased new and more efficient services and facilities for partners.

José Van Dijk, vice-president for Partner Performance and Operations (PPO) in Cisco’s Global Partner Organisation, took to the company blog to explain the networking giant is “Rethinking how we work to cut down on the back-and-forth means you can focus on what matters most–driving new business and creating more predictable, measurable outcomes.”

Van Dijk says Cisco is working on five fronts.

One is digitising services for partners.

“We’re hard at work automating many processes between Cisco and our partners,” she said, naming the company’s Black Belt Partner Academy training portal and Partner Experience Platform as examples of the what Cisco hopes to achieve. She promised “a lot more to come on this front” if partners stay tuned.

She also says “A lot of hard work is going into simplifying how we do things” and offered the example of consolidation of Cisco partner tools as an example.

“Our big portfolio of digital partner tools had no concrete organizing strategy before the creation of PPO,” Can Dijk wrote. “We got to work making the portfolio simpler by consolidating existing digital tools and capabilities, both by retiring older tools and by integrating tools that made sense together. In turn we reduced over 150 tools by 30 percent. This work is ongoing!”

An optimisation effort continues, aimed at “Making our partners’ interactions with Cisco as efficient as possible… because we know that the easier it is for a partner to get what they want, the more likely they are to continue relying on for the services they need."

Personalisation is also on Cisco’s agenda, so that partners see “only with information directly related to them.”

Lastly, Van Dijk flagged more automation.

“When partners automate their processes, they’re more likely to renew,” she wrote. “The strong connection between the partners that embrace automation and their rates of renewal send a clear signal–people want to get things done faster and easier and will stick with a partner who helps that happen.” Cisco’s global renewals policy, she said, is an example of the company’s automation efforts.