The New Network

"There is a game-changing event going on in networking right now ... We're asking our networks to do increasingly complex things moving forward," said Gary Berzack, CTO and COO of eTribeca LLC, a solution provider in New York, pointing to technologies such as perimeter intrusion detection and prevention, internal wireless controllers, storage and video, all of which are now embedded into networking infrastructure.

Keith Goodwin, senior vice president of worldwide channels at Cisco, said solution providers will have to adapt to take advantage of the collaboration opportunity, even in the way they work with Cisco.

"It's not just a market opportunity. It is significant and, ramping up, is going to drive growth for us together over the next three to five years, but part of it will be to utilize these technologies ourselves," Goodwin said, referencing programs such as Cisco's Industry Solutions Partner Network, which so far has brought more than 200 channel partners in contact with solutions from Cisco ISV partners. In addition, more than 800 users are interacting in ISPN Partner Space, an online partner community Cisco launched in the fall.

Chambers has been laying the groundwork for this push for some time. Anyone who has heard him deliver a keynote address over the last three years has likely heard him preach on the elevated role of the network as a platform for grander things: application delivery, service delivery and all things related to communications and IT. Now it's catching hold, he said.

"It's actually accelerated now, because a lot of the basic concepts in collaboration are now taking off," Chambers said. "The network will probably enable the next major wave of IT spending as well as communication spending. So the role of the network has changed: It's changed from being infrastructure, primarily a box mentality, to an architecture approach that provides business solutions, and as such, we at Cisco have to change and so do our channel partners."

In fact, Cisco channel partners need to do more than change. They need to evolve, he said.

"I think that we and our channel partners will have to evolve based upon, [for] each one of us, our dreams and aspirations and be realistic [about] our capability and our ability to move within markets," Chambers said, adding that while some partners will stick to a product or solution area, others will chase a broader architectural play with solutions expertise.

If Cisco's mantra for its partners to pick a specialization or find a means of differentiation seems familiar, it's because the vendor has been evangelizing it for several years ("If my message to my partners is changing every 12 months, I don't have a strategy or a vision," Chambers noted). The key take-away now is the ramification of such specialization and differentiation.

"What it means is that partners have to partner with complementary partners because you cannot be an expert in everything," Berzack said, noting that eTribeca works with about seven other Cisco partners on a weekly basis and roughly another 30 on a monthly basis.

In addition, partners need to prepare for the sales model changes that will come as Cisco moves toward SaaS and other related areas, including bandwidth-as-a-service, storage-as-a-service and processing power-as-a-service, Chambers said.

Next: SaaS Push