Coming off another jam-packed Cisco Live, the company’s Channel Chief Oliver Tuszik is more convinced than ever that the age of the partner is alive and very well.

 That’s because the long list of announcements, launches, and innovations unveiled at the show have one thing in common: They require channel partners’ expertise for successful deployment and management.

At the event this week, Cisco Networking Cloud was introduced, a platform strategy to help customers consolidate their networking environments and in time manage their networking environments from one place. Like Cisco Security Cloud, the platform approach to networking opens many doors for partners.

The tech giant also launched a vendor-agnostic full stack observability (FSO) platform to bring together contextual and predictive insights so that businesses can solve problems faster and optimize end-user experiences -- another huge area of opportunity for partners whose customers are looking at all avenues of improving customer experience. And it goes without saying that security is a primary area of interest for customers, making it crucial to partners. To that end, Cisco unveiled a new security service edge offering, a multi-cloud security feature and a firewall series aimed at applications and multi-cloud environments.

Customers are facing indisputable challenges, from talent shortage issues to trying to do more with less. Those are challenges that Cisco is speaking to with its technology and, in turn, relying on its partner ecosystem to heed the call with their valued-added services. Tuszik sat down with CRN to talk about Cisco’s platform approach to networking and security, the opportunity around full stack observability, and the changes that the tech giant’s Global Partner Organization has made to help partners grow their businesses.

Here’s what Tuszik had to say: