Cisco strategy to positively impact Asia-Pacific and Japan
Cisco recently announced a handful of changes to its operations.
At its ongoing Cisco Partner Summit 2016, the company announced its intent to acquire CliQr, said it will be increasing its investments into the channel with a new partner strategy and launched Cisco HyperFlex Systems, a solution built on its UCS compute platform, and an extensible and software driven architecture for digital business solution, Digital Network Architecture (DNA).
The company’s Asia-Pacific executives all agreed that the moves are strategic and will be beneficial to the region.
Cisco A/NZ vice-president, Ken Boal, said with regards to Cisco HyperFlex Systems, the company was confident in going into the compute business and has a strong innovation approach to market with the convergence of compute and network.
“We’ve got form and our partners have been at us to do something in this space. The hyperconverged market is in its early days; there’s been a lot of noise but not much implementation on the ground.
“We’re arriving at a good time and this will complement the rest of the partners’ investment in the Cisco datacentre stack. It rounds up our portfolio nicely,” he said.
Cisco Asia-Pacific and Japan
president, Irving Tan, added that any partnerships Cisco has with existing hyperconverged businesses, such as SimpliVity, will continue and that Cisco will continue working with them.
Cisco Asia-Pacifc and Japan partner organisation vice-president, Ruma Balasubramanian, spoke about the rollout of DNA in Asia-Pacific, along with the availability of EasyPay.
“What we have launched is very unique in the partner space. It’s still in the early days to provide a specific timeframe of when this will be available in Asia-Pacific and Japan but we’re looking to bring EasyPay into the region with Cisco Capital around the same time as DNA.”
Tan spoke about the integration of CliQr into its portfolio, saying that it brings orchestration across both the private and public Clouds.
“Our partners are putting their minds to retraining and attracting new talent with these software skills. It is a journey that is going to happen over the next two to three years, and different markets will move faster than others depending on the readiness of the market. A/NZ will lead on the pointy end of the sphere.”
In terms of simplifying the partner programs, Balasubramanian said partners have been asking for fewer programs that are more impactful.
“It’s a much more simpler way for partners to think about the programs and it saves on operational costs,” she mentioned.
Boal added that the contents of the partner programs reflect the company’s new corporate strategy.
“We’ll put additional incentives on software and security, for example. Our partners automatically updated with these programs and that drives the industry shift and the capability build in A/NZ in those key areas.
“There will be an 80-20 split in terms of programs at a global versus local level but there will also be specific programs with individual partners customised to their focus and strategy,” he concluded.
