Cisco Still On Top Of The Heap
Cisco earned an overall score of 71, solidly beating the category average score of 65 and improving on its scores from last year as it swept each subcategory, winning a 76 in product innovation, a 70 in support and a 68 in partnership.
Alex Thurber, senior director of technology go-to-market strategy for worldwide channels at Cisco, attributes the company's improvement to a mainstay in any good partnership: listening to partners' needs.
And partners agree that Cisco seems to be doing a better job of heeding their calls.
"I don't know if it's Cisco as a machine or if we just have good people handling us inside of Cisco, but they are responsive, they come to the table with solutions that help us be innovative and they seem willing to listen to our challenges and do what they can to address them," said Dan Shundoff, CEO at IntelliCom, a solution provider in Kearney, Neb.
Partners surveyed touted Cisco's support as one of its greatest strengths, and Cisco outpaced its competitors in this area on the ARC survey with a score of 70.
HP's ProCurve business held the second highest score in this area with a 65, while D-Link and NetGear lagged behind with sub-60 scores.
"We have good access to Cisco technical resources, field resources and business unit resources, and when we have periodically run into configuration issues they have stepped in and assisted us when we asked them," said David Hope, senior account executive at Greensboro, N.C.-based NWN.
Among the new initiatives it launched for wireless partners in the past year, Cisco increased the number of channel account managers and launched new partner programs.
"For example, we implemented our value incentive program for wireless, which is a margin support program that started out in voice and security," Thurber said. "We go out to our partner community and say, 'We want you to invest in wireless technologies, and in turn we want to help support your business model in making those investments.' "
But where Cisco scored its highest marks was in the area of technical innovation, and partners say they best reap the benefits of that technical innovation when it's coupled with strong partner support.
Cisco also introduced several new products in the past year, including its first set of products based on the 802.11n standard for high-speed wireless, which is still pending approval by the IEEE. After the standard is approved, 802.11n implementations should open up more professional services opportunities for partners, Thurber said.
But despite its higher scores this year, there's always room for improvement. Partners expressed interest in more resources from the vendor to help them pair up with other solution providers in areas where they may not be as skilled.
"Matchmaking is the holy grail in partnering," Thurber said. "We have a new tool that will be released in the next few weeks to start to make that possible at the beginning level, and we are investing a lot of research and development into how we do something like that. We haven't solved it yet, but we're working on it."