On Sustainability

Channel partners are changing their business models to include new priorities, like social impact and sustainability. Robbins talked about how Cisco is helping partners meet these new requirements and why it’s important to the tech giant.  

“I have one-on-ones with certain partners periodically during the year and a couple of partners in Europe are building practices around sustainability. I was in France meeting with [Emmanuel] Macron’s right-hand person and he pointed out to me: “This whole shift, and the climate crisis and actually solving this problem and sustainability is going to be really good for you guys.” I hadn’t thought about it quite that way. When you really think about the amount of technology that is going to be involved in actually solving this and as customers begin to build more … when you when you go into you‘re competing for a deal on cloud infrastructure, assuming our technology is good — which is proven to be so given how much business we’ve taken in the last three years — that power consumption becomes the determining factor of who they choose. And increasingly, we see partners in our customers that are including aspects of all of this as part of the purchasing criteria. And we’re building practices and specializations around for some parameters.”