Cisco Answers MSP Cloud Questions

When Cisco announced that it was adding cloud service designations to its expanding Managed Services Channel Program (MSCP), MSPs had questions about where they fit in and how best to take advantage. In a new blog post, Cisco Director of the MSCP Todd Roth gives some answers. Here are the highlights.

The full Q&A is right here, and has every detail. The new cloud services designations in the MSCP are: private cloud, also known as IaaS; hosted collaborative solution, less commonly known as Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS).

By attaining these designations, cloud service providers who are also Cisco partners can “align and brand their cloud-based offerings with Cisco” by providing Cisco-validated architecture – and really ambitious partners can go white-label with their solutions.

But here’s the quote that stood out to MSPmentor:

We think about Cloud not so much as a new market, but more as changes in end-user consumption. With cloud, customers are increasingly asking our partners to provide technology as a service rather than asking partners to install the solution on their own premises. Partners will begin to provide Cisco technology such as unified communications and data center as a service. The opportunity for partners is about evolving their business models and expanding their “IT as a service” business offerings for the same or similar customers.

The overarching theme of Roth’s answers is that he sees tremendous potential for partners to grow with the cloud, as long as they invest in meeting customer needs by managing and monitoring IT solutions from a data center or NOC while also offering third-party applications like CRM or ERP on top of core infrastructure.

In short, Roth says that customers want more IT services with less initial investment — and they’re willing to pay on a rolling basis for it. MSPmentor can’t fault his logic, and Cisco seems to have a good handle on why demand for cloud services is growing.

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