Cisco Cloud Partner Program Unveiled at Cisco Partner Summit
Cisco Channel Chief Edison Peres (pictured), as expected, launched the Cisco Cloud Partner Program today at Cisco Partner Summit in New Orleans. The Cisco Cloud Partner Program has three tracks — for cloud builders, cloud providers and cloud services resellers.
“It is not Cisco’s intent to become a broad-based cloud services provider,” said Peres. “It’s our intent to enable you and not compete with you.”
To get started, partners should focus on earning a Cloud Ready Infrastructure Competency, which focuses on secure networking, servers, storage and virtualization. Next, cloud partners should focus on at least one of three areas:
1. Cloud Builder: Here, partners will leverage their management and services competencies, for cloud management applications and cloud profesisonal service practices. “Most of opportunity cloud opportunity is in the cloud builder space,” said Peres.
2. Cloud Provider: In order to become a Cisco-oriented cloud provider,partners will need to meet certain audit requirements. Partners will earn the right to deliver Cisco Powered Cloud Services. It’s very similar to Cisco’s managed services partner program.
3. Cloud Services Reseller: Here, channel partners will be able to OEM and resell cloud services from peer Cisco partners. Again, this is very similar to the Cisco managed services partner program.
Peres is still on stage delivering his keynote. But I hope to catch up with him for more details about the Cisco Cloud Partner Program within the next few hours. Also of note: Cisco CEO John Chambers assured partners that Cisco will not compete with partners in the cloud. And on a somewhat related note, Peres said Cisco’s managed services business is growing twice as fast as on-premise related sales.
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