Thanks to all of our Cisco Partners who joined us last week in Las Vegas and digitally from around the world for Cisco Partner Summit 2022! What an amazing few days! From the keynotes to the leader insight sessions, deep dives, and 1:1 meetings, your feedback has been very positive. Please continue to share! I'm energized by the many interactions and conversations with all of you and excited about the opportunity ahead of us.

As I said during my keynote, I believe we are entering a new age.

Evolving Customer Needs

It's pretty clear the experience customers expect today is very different. Over the past few years, we were all forced to react to a rapidly changing environment, which created a lot of risk and complexity. Now, customers are reassessing their priorities as they prepare for this next phase. As a result, customer needs have further evolved. They're looking for business outcomes, fast, flexible, simple solutions, and more automation and self-serve capabilities. Even more impactful is the fact that buying motions are changing as a consequence -with more non-IT buyers influencing spend, more managed and as-a-Service offerings needed, and more demand for automation -all in an environment that remains unpredictable. No customer, vendor, partner can deliver this on their own. 

That is why I believe we have arrived at the Age of the Partner.

The Age of the Partner

Partners have always played a central role combining the different elements of a solution and adding your own capabilities to deliver a unique customer experience. You have always delivered flexibility and choice and addressed the specific needs of the business.

Success in the Age of the Partner requires Cisco and our partners to take a new look at how we bring our strengths together. We need to partner early, with new types of partners, and even with companies we viewed as competitors. It also requires us to sell together differently, based on the customer, their desired outcomes, routes-to-market, and preferred consumption motion. And we will need to come up with new delivery models across the lifecycle.

Let's Own the Opportunity

Cisco chose a channel-led business model 26 years ago -and we've built our strategy based on a partner-driven go-to-market model. We've continued to adapt and evolve, and we always will.

I couldn't be more excited for the opportunity that lies ahead of us. Let's own it!

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