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At the end of the restructuring effort -- and I realize a lot of these decisions are still being made -- will the Worldwide Partner Organization (WWPO) see more or fewer resources than it does now? How will the resource pool change? How will the restructuring benefit the WWPO as an organization inside Cisco -- inside the areas you oversee -- and benefit partners?
Our overall priority is resource allocation. One of our top priorities is to invest and accelerate the capabilities we bring to our selling model we call partner-led. Partner-led is when we embrace, through systems, through marketing programs, through differentiated offers based on value and investment that our partners make with us. As we embrace that around the world, my expectation is that we'll invest more of our resources in the partner-led model that puts our partner sales force, engineering team and services as the primary vehicle with which we engage with customers. That's a foundational program around the world.
My expectation is that more of those resources will be in the field teams that face our partners every day and engage in our partners, but I'll be very candid that we will put more into marketing programs over the next year. More into systemic investment to support the relationships with partners, their sales teams and their engineering teams and more into helping them build their practices.
We are, as a company and an organization, focusing on more resources facing our customers and partners and less resources talking internally to each other.
So just to put a bow on that, partners who fear that as a result of this restructuring, fewer resources will be available to the WWPO and thus fewer resources available to them…those fears are unfounded? You can tell them that now?
All of our teams are going to be looking at ways to be more efficient and that's across the company. Everyone can look at ways in which we can be more efficient and as a result, simpler. Everyone will be focused on simplification, however the outcome of this is very clearly have our resources much more clearly aligned at the front of our business, facing customers and partners every day. That's the end goal. I've look the plans Keith and the teams around the world have rolled out, and I expect you'll see more resourcing, more program dollars, more engagement capabilities and more investments in systems that face our partners, and they'll feel a greater degree of alignment going forward.
The basic answer is that across the company, we're all looking at making our business run more efficiently. We think the net result of what we'll achieve is a simpler interface and faster engagement with our partners. Time will tell if that's the way they feel, and I can assure you I'll be asking them in the sessions we hold and the meetings I have almost every week either here or in the field. We'll ask them if they feel a simpler Cisco, and a Cisco embracing more the construct of their profitability and their value propositions.
The feedback CRN has gotten and the feedback that's out there is that Cisco partners look at this charge toward 30 to 50 adjacencies coming out of the downturn, and they wanted to find ways to realign their businesses to focus on the things that were going to be more important. Given that you have oversight over the WWPO and the sales function for Cisco, if you're advising partners on how to focus for profitability and focus on the technology that's going to define them for tomorrow, what are you telling them?
Obviously our partners fall into different segments and categories and serve customers whose needs vary significantly. Our partners cover the vast range of infrastructure solutions. [They] drive the capabilities to help our customers capture network technologies and achieve their business outcomes faster. Typically, we equate those capabilities with service offerings. Increasingly, we're seeing some of those capabilities as integrated technology that helps customers get faster the outcomes they're looking at. Whether it's a small VAR serving small customers or serving public sector customers, the faster they can help the customer get to the outcome for which they're investing in that technology, the more value they bring.
All of us believe that our partners' investment in practices, and our partners embracing architectures will allow them to get the stuff in place faster. I think big projects with multi-year turnarounds and multi-year ROI are not cutting the grade anymore, not passing the investment test. Projects that don't see a return for three years aren't happening anymore because the needs of clients may change before those are ever completed. The partners' value proposition through services expertise, through integrating technology that gets the customer in place with lower risk and faster time to market in a much quicker world is going to be the winning formula.
We need to be faster in getting there, we need to be simpler in how we present our offers and conduct our marketing and programs, and a lot of those things are long-term evolutions, but that's the long-term direction we're heading. Simpler, faster, integrated architectures that add value to the customer and our partners getting that in place to hit the customers' return on investment.
That's why we're convinced that once we spend some time on this switching debate, we see it's not about the cheapest switch in the closet, it's more about the skill sets required to deploy that, the [need] to upgrade and protect that investment over time. That's just an example of where a lot of the conversation will turn to: return on investment in customers. It's not a box play anymore.
NEXT: The Cisco Difference In Switching
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