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Cisco's top global sales executive Thursday said the opportunities for Cisco partners are by now so deep and wide that partners have a story to tell every potential prospect, from healthcare CIOs to financial services managers. And Cisco, fresh from a belt-tightening restructuring effort, is now in a much better position to serve the channel, he said.
"Find me a customer where we can't sell something today," said Rob Lloyd, Cisco executive vice president, worldwide operations, at Cisco Partner Summit in San Diego.
Along with a few widely expected competitive barbs thrown at HP, Huawei and Microsoft, Lloyd used his closing session speech to confirm a number of incremental partner incentives tied to several Catalyst and Nexus switch lines, and also a major investment by Cisco in services to help partners push Cisco's Jabber platform into more customer opportunities.
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Specifically, Cisco will offer incremental incentives of 5 percent on Catalyst 6500 switches, 4 percent on Catalyst 4200 switches, 5 percent on Nexus 7000 switches and 3 percent on Nexus 5000 and 2000 switches under its Teaming Incentive Program (TIP) and Opportunity Incentive Program (OIP) offers.
Specific to the Catalyst promotions, Lloyd said that there's more than $40 billion in currently deployed Cisco Catalyst 6000 and 4000 switching infrastructure that's in need of an upgrade to support video and other next-generation network demands.
Cisco is also investing $1 million to help partners with the services needed to deploy Jabber, Cisco's platform for embedding access to Cisco's various UC functions, from voice to presence to messaging, into various client devices and operating systems.
Earlier in the Partner Summit, Cisco confirmed that Jabber will be made available at no additional license cost for customers already using Cisco Unified Communications Manager -- a move widely applauded by partners during the show and also seen as competitive jockeying by Cisco against Microsoft, which is making headway in the UC space with its Lync platform.
Lloyd's core message was that Cisco's portfolio leadership-- how it's innovating around market priorities such as video, cloud and mobility -- creates an opportunity for solution providers to solve business challenges everywhere from the data center to the desktop, and through what Cisco's been plugging as an "intelligent network," create efficient cloud computing models whether they're private, hybrid or public.
"I'd rather be the leader than a participant in any of the markets we participate in today," he said.
