A Conversation With Cisco's John Chambers

Photo by Noah Berger
With so much more emphasis now on applications, do you feel like you have the right set of channel partners to make that push?

Chambers: There will be certain channel partners who primarily stay within a product area or a solution type area, there will be others who architecturally play across the whole gamut ... As we move into software-as-a-service and other related areas -- bandwidth-as-a-service, storage-as-a-service, processing power-as-a-service -- how do we sell differently and how do we evolve as an organization? So if we do our job with our channel partners, we outline here's where we think the industry is going, here are the multiple areas we can work on together, and then each of our partners have to say here's where my expertise is and here's where I think I can have sustainable differentiation and then here's where I need to go.

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