What do partners need to do to be involved with PLS?

What we’ve done [this time] that we hadn’t done before was we said: “There’s absolutely no point making an announcement and having nothing right away, in terms of enablement, content, use cases and playbooks, so why don’t we build all that first and it available so that when they decide that they want to move into this space and they register, they can go to Partner SuccessHub and see all this training information and content.”

We do need [partners] to be at the minimum, a CX Specialized partner. Many of them are actually Advanced Specialized partners. So, many of them do have the training, certifications, and already have access to smart hub. We [require a CX Specialization] because a big part of this is the ability to dynamically transfer information between our companies. For example, if a partner has a customer issue, they want to be able to open a trouble ticket. The instant that that trouble ticket is open, we see it. If we populate it or update it, or if they do, we see that ticket in both environments. We know that there’s no simple Cisco-only solution and some of our solutions involve a whole bunch of other vendors, so we built into this a multi-vendor aspect, and all of that we refer to as smart bond. We really need partners to be smart bonded to be on this PLS journey with us.