MIAMI – At its Partner Conference Week, Cisco Systems, Inc. unveiled three new partner specific incents starting with the expansion of its Cisco Capital Easy Pay program across all architectures and products. Expansions to the company’s Account Breakaway program, and a new two per cent VIP incent on all enterprise networks and Nexus registered deals were also announced.
Nirav Sheth, vice president of Cisco’s global partner organization solutions, architecture, and engineering, believes that Cisco partners have a tremendous opportunity in today’s technology-filled world. He points to companies like Pizza Hut and Dominos as examples, specifically comments made by Pizza Hunt’s CEO saying that moving forward the company will be building around technology.
The idea behind the example is simple, if pizza companies are starting to call themselves technology companies, then we are truly in an age where every company is a technology company to a certain extent. “That means tech is continuing to elevate into the C-suite out of any customer we work with irrespective of where they are and what vertical they are in. As a result, it gives all of us an unprecedented opportunity,” said Sheth in an interview with CDN.
Nirav Sheth, Cisco VP, Global Partner Solutions Organization, Architecture, Engineering
And with these announcements, Sheth believes Cisco partners can take advantage of these new opportunities.
The expansion to Cisco Capital Easy Pay, which was introduced in 2016 as a zero per cent leasing option for Cisco Digital Network Architecture (DNA) hardware, starts with the popularity of the program among Cisco partners. With the success of the program with Cisco DNA, partners began wondering why DNA was the only platform with this capability. That is no longer the case with Capital Easy Pay being available across all architectures, including the bulk of its business in enterprise networking, collaboration, data centre, and security.
However, Capital Easy Pay won’t be coming to Canada for the time being. For now it is only being rolled out in the U.S., with a gradual release throughout the globe planned.
“Because legalities vary around the world, we chose to focus first on the U.S. to drive that forward, and then work through the other geographies shortly after,” said Sheth.
With the Account Breakaway program, Cisco is adding a “simple promotion structure” for its entire networking portfolio of 60 per cent off. And, if a partner registers a deal as Account Breakaway, they will have deal protection on that deal.
“Essentially if a partner identifies an opportunity, they can bring it to us and request an account breakaway registration. This is no questions asked, and an upfront 60 per cent discount, which is deeper than their traditional buy discount as a partner. It’s a reward for identifying an opportunity and hunting,” said Sheth.
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The incentive behind the two per cent VIP incent for all enterprise networks and Nexus registered deals is simple – Cisco wants to reward its partners for doing the heavy lifting.
“We know our partners are often doing a lot of pre-sale work to identify and lock down an opportunity. We want to bring more rewards to them when they are doing that heavy lifting upfront. We already had this in place for compute, so now for all of enterprise networking and data centre, both switching as well as compute, there will be an across the board VIP two per cent bonus,” said Sheth.
And to top it off, Cisco announced 12 incentive trips for partners. Three for enterprise network partners, three for data centre, three for security, and three for software buying models. Further details on what exactly this trip promotion will entail will come out in the coming days after the conference.
“People make a company, and we know it is a time commitment to be here, so we want to reward that,” said Sheth.