New Cisco Americas Channel Chief: ‘This Is Not Your Mother’s Go-To-Market Partnership’

What’s your message to Cisco Americas partners?

My message — and I think what partners want to hear is — we understand your business, we want to make sure that you understand how important you are to our business and our clients, and we want to leverage your strengths where they fit into the Cisco strategy. We’re going to really lean into these partners because they care about these areas. We’re going to lean into these other partners because they have strength in other areas. So, it really is about leveraging the strength of the partners. If you’re a managed service provider, how do we lean into differently? How do we make sure that we are driving our managed security offers, as an example. If security is not in your portfolio, we want to make sure that we’re enabling, but what are we going to drive with you? How do we leverage your strengths to make sure that we are maximizing our time and energies with you.

For us to transform, we can’t continue to do what we’ve done. One of the things that I believe Cisco has done well over the many years I’ve been here is to be ahead of that curve. It’s not just keeping up. But how do we see into the future and how do we get in front of that demand to really drive it? We have partners that we can work with together to look into the future.