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Chambers, for his part, said Cisco expects its partner services revenue to grow five times to ten times faster than the services revenue that Cisco itself generates. That is no small matter given that technology professional services are growing at twice the rate of information technology products and make up in many cases as much as 80 percent of a solution provider's profits.
To hammer home its business architecture focus, Cisco is urging solution provider sales reps to get trained as business architect specialists with training from Cisco affiliated third party vendors. Cisco is also requiring its Gold partners attain three business architecture specializations choosing from areas like switching & routing, wireless, security, and unified communications.
Besides that, Cisco has reorganized its own internal sales and marketing effort around business technology architectures.
The Cisco drive to increase partners' business architecture solutions selling prowess comes with Cisco competitors waging a war on Cisco's highly profitable network routing/switching business. Chambers, for his part, rallied partners to make sure they continue to lead in core network routing/switching.
HP, weighing in at $126 billion, has waged the most public war on Cisco's core networking products singling out what it has called Cisco's 80 percent networking product margins as out of line. HP is even claiming a 40 percent price advantage over Cisco on core routing/switching products.
When asked if solution providers that partner with HP are putting their business at risk, Chambers replied: "I never put any comments (out there) about specific competitors. What I do believe in is (Cisco's) ability to transform technology into business process change and to do that in a way that allows them (partners) to evolve with very best in class products in each category."
Chambers stressed that Cisco has consistently proven that it sees big market transitions "way ahead of competitors" and has been able to move partners into highly profitable new emerging technology markets like data center and video. "Our customers know that we go to market with our partners in a win-win," he said. "We have done it for 15 years better than anyone else."
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