What’s the biggest areas in which these partners struggle, and how will you help?

I think there are multiple areas. What I think what we do very well is help partners understand their profitability, and our team’s understanding [of] theirs. Partners are not simply in the business of reselling for the sake of reselling. They’re trying to drive a profitable business with Cisco. I think Cisco is very good at working with partners around their profitability. I think we’re very good at pushing — the partners are pushing us, and we are pushing them to drive innovation and think literally outside of the box — and how do we build joint offers together to drive differentiation in the marketplace? I think the work we’re currently doing now around managed services in partnership with our global organization; that’s an example of how we are driving that innovation.

We have a cadence with the [global partner organization], so we are constantly sharing with Global the initiatives that we are driving [and] we are leveraging what they are developing at a global level and sort of tweaking as needed to make it fit to our markets across the Americas. There’s a natural synergy that, by the way, was there before I got here, but I think it becomes stronger because I’m coming from the Global Partner Organization.