Tag: Cisco

Networking giant Cisco has admitted it really did not have a clue about the channel before and has now changed its mind about its importance.

Chuck Robbins’ told the assorted throngs at his opening keynote at the 2017 Cisco partner summit that things had changed a lot since 1999 when everyone was still interested in direct models.

Cisco management wanted him to work in a group called ‘channels’ and I said, ‘why’? And he replied that ‘we believe that organisation is our future’.

“We are more committed today than we were then. We really didn’t know how committed [to the channel] we should be back then, but today we know for sure. We are committed to our success together [with the channel] as we go forward.”

In the current IT landscape, with millions of businesses moving towards the cloud, the network will end up being fundamentally different than it is today.

“We have to reinvent networking. We have to make it simpler, we have to make it programmable, make it scalable, and we have to make it much more agile for our customers”,  he said.

“This new era in networking is about the ability to take business intent and apply that to the network. Security also has to be embedded deeply into the network because we are adding billions of devices, so have to be applying security in the network too”, added Robbins.

Cisco has been simplifying its partner programme to support its channel’s transition to software-focused sales and services.

It is simplifying its specialisation programme portfolio and adding a Master networking specialisation which will include new software and services skill development. It is improving its industry expertise recognition in areas like retail, healthcare and manufacturing.

There are a battery of new incentives and simplifying deal registration. There is a new Migration Incentive Programme (MIP) to provide partners with an offering to migrate customers with legacy or competitive products to new Cisco technologies. It is simplifying registration by consolidating 15 hunting and teaming programme tracks into two and by streamlining the approval process.

Lastly Cisco has increased its partners in its lifecycle advisor programme and expanding the portfolio of offers available to those partners to more areas of Cisco’s business.

Two new incentives in the Value Incentive Programme (VIP) allow partners to simplify their software-based networking practices while upping their services.

City of London Police have seized over 1,000 fake Cisco products in a raid.

Inspector Knacker of the City of London Police’s Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) executed a search warrant on a property in Herne Bay, Kent, seizing counterfeit Cisco hardware worth “hundreds of thousands of pounds” (Some of which is pictured above).

The raid resulted in two individuals being interviewed under caution, the force confirmed.

Neil Sheridan, director of brand protection at Cisco, said: “We greatly value our working relationship with PIPCU and our joint efforts to ensure counterfeit products do not reach end-user installations, where they have the potential to seriously impact both the security and operational integrity of business-critical networks.

“This latest action has taken a significant volume of counterfeit products out of circulation and provides a vast amount of evidence and insight into others who are trading illegally. We are delighted with our co-operation with PIPCU and look forward to continuing our work together.”

Just last month the City of London Police partnered with Microsoft to arrest four people accused of committing software service fraud.

The force said that the investigation into the counterfeit Cisco hardware is ongoing. Detective sergeant Kevin Ives said that the success of this operation has stopped organisations and companies from potential harm, should they have bought and used the counterfeit items.

“It also highlights the excellent working relationship between the PIPCU and the technology industry to tackle the sale of counterfeit goods.”

As part of its cunning plan to be more software centric, maker of networking boxes Cisco is launching a new enterprise-wide software licensing agreement.

A spokesCisco said the new Enterprise Agreement (EA) is either a three or five-year licensing contract and partners will have the potential to bring in more revenue, with a lower upfront investment on software, hardware, and services with the new EAs.

The deal aims to give customers more opportunity to take part in traditional enterprise licensing agreements.

Before Cisco customers had to invest several millions of dollars to get access to a catalogue or portfolio of software. But now the price point has come down significantly to as low as $250,000.

“This opens up opportunities for our customers and for us to expand the presence of Cisco software and enterprise agreements to a broader range and broader audience.”

Cisco has also lowered its minimum purchase requirement for an enterprise licence agreement, enabling partners to potentially sell the new EA in the midmarket space.

This opens up some new white space customer opportunity for partners to have discussions with a broader set of customers around a single agreement that can meet their overall goals.

Cisco is planning to release a new network operating system that will allow users to run its most sophisticated networking features on older and lower-cost Cisco routers and switches.

What is interesting about the tech is that it could disrupt Cisco’s networking hardware business as it will only run on Cisco switches.

Dubbed Lindt, it will enable Cisco customers to move away from switches based on proprietary high-performance Cisco chips to Cisco hardware that works with lower-cost chips.

The move is seen as part of Cisco becoming less hardware focused and some of its partners think it is rather a good time to do that.

Cisco partners have always had the problem of linking software to the hardware so that they always had to renew the software with the product.

Having the flexibility of owning the software and having more flexibility of changing the platform underneath that makes a more likely sale.

Solution providers said Cisco selling stand-alone software could make Cisco a more valuable company in the long run.

Cisco has been putting networking functions on more platforms, including virtual switches for VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V virtualized and private cloud environments.

It has been also setting up more software-defined networking technology which removes the management layer and switching technology from physical switches to move the networking functionality into the network itself.