Cisco Systems sees the small-to-midsized market as a $30 billion dollar market opportunity. A great deal of that opportunity is around customers moving to the cloud and SaaS models for their IT needs. About 20 percent of SMB business is being generated by new customers coming to Cisco for the first time.

Needless to say, there’s a lot of reasons for Cisco and for partners to be pretty “jazzed” about the SMB opportunity, according to Cisco executives.

The SMB market, according to Cisco executives, presents a “hot” area for partners to drive growth and profitability through managed services and cloud offerings. Cisco, a historically enterprise-focused vendor, is making it its mission to be the best partner to solution providers and MSPs targeting SMBs. To do that, the company has unveiled its Scale go-to-market strategy aimed at enabling partners as they support their existing customers, identify new ones, and grow their businesses.

In a recent Cisco SMB webinar, Luxy Thuraisingam, Cisco’s vice president of global SMB and head of global partner marketing and Andrew Sage, vice president of global distribution and SMB sales, shared the steps Cisco is taking to support partners going after SMB business through new marketing initiatives, managed services, headcount, and a focus on business outcomes.

Here’s what Cisco’s SMB leaders had to share with partners.