Partners are growth drivers for CISCO

A lot of announcements happened at Cisco Partner Summit 2016, where Chuck Robbins, CEO and Wendy Bahr, Senior Vice President of the Global Partner Organization assured on how partners are the growth drivers of CISCO and eighty percent of Cisco revenue is driven by partners and through distribution. Various presentations revolving around the theme of this year's conference: Powered by Partnerships were also presented.

The company made product announcements which include new Nexus 9000 data center switches, Nexus 3000 data center switches, and the Cisco HyperFlex systems for hyper-converged Infrastructure. The company also announced the acquisition of CliQr that will help to achieve true application lifecycle management and unified orchestration to heterogeneous data center infrastructure, running across bare-metal, containers and virtualized environments.

Speaking about its Partner strategy, Bahr spoke about the three pillars: simplicity, alignment and value exchange. What this means to partners is that they should expect to see a series of evolutionary changes that will reshape how Cisco and partners work together, with an objective on how to speed up innovation. To do that he outlined five pillars of innovation: build, buy, partner, invest and co-develop. Chuck also spoke on how the company is going to achieve its goals with its partner ecosystem.

Cisco also highlighted the Digital Network Architecture (DNA) for Partners. This Architecture will enable business innovation, generate insights and create customer experiences. It will reduce cost and complexity with new orchestration and automation capabilities, while helping protect the business with an architecture designed for security. With an objective to simplify the holistic program that represents products, services and software which is easy for partners to understand, use and exchange value in better ways, as a complete technology solution company.

Rob Soderbery, SVP for Enterprise Products and Solutions, CISCO spoke on how digital network is the platform for digital business. Cisco DNA brings together virtualization, automation, analytics, cloud and programmability to build that platform in support of the DNA architecture.

Speaking on the Software defining everything (Network/ Software/Hyper convergence) and digital marketing services, the aim is to reach more customers, drive more demand generation, and offer analytics and campaign reporting