Cisco Sales Leader: Service Providers Will Be A 'Very Key Component' In Go-To-Market Strategy

Cisco Systems global sales leader Chris Dedicoat says service providers are going to be a "tremendous platform" for the networking giant in the future as well as a key component in Cisco's go-to-market strategy.

"We're seeing great traction with a number of the service providers globally and we expect them to be a very, very significant channel," said Dedicoat during a Q&A session with the media and analysts at Cisco Partner Summit 2016. "Expect to see them as a very, very key component of our go-to-market strategy around all of our technologies."

Telecoms are in a great market position to take advantage of the increasing need for network bandwidth as more mobile devices become online and the Internet of Things market begins to take off, according to Dedicoat.

"We need to enable them with the technologies to do that and that's why many of them have embraced, particularly, our collaboration portfolio," said Dedicoat. "We don’t want to take away things from them. We don’t want to take away call control from them. We want them to sustain in the call control, but we want to be able to provide the value in terms of the application."

The San Jose, Calif.-based networking leader took a deeper dive into collaboration at the Partner Summit by launching several new offerings aimed at driving sales including a new premise-based, cloud-managed telephony platform targeting the SMB market and a new software subscription license plan for Cisco's flagship collaboration offering:Cisco Spark.