Cisco says the latest version of its Business Critical Services (BCS) is truly advisory and brings partners into the services opportunity. The company rolled out BCS 3.0 at Cisco Partner Summit Digital last week.

This first advisory offering targets customers in three scenarios. It helps with optimization, transformation, or any new projects in an existing install or an expansion. Cisco’s customer experience (CX) strategy is about helping customers realize the value of their technology investments.

Cisco’s Thimaya Subaiya

“This is a true advisory offering based on expertise and insights. And, for our customers and their IT organizations, it’s truly resilient, adaptive and transformative,” said Thimaya Subaiya, senior vice president, CX solutions and acceleration at Cisco.

The Cisco CX Success portfolio scales with partners.

BCS

BCS has been around for about four years. Version 3.0 offers greater flexibility, higher value and is available globally. Orders begin on Nov. 8.

The CX announcements target Cisco partners and new growth opportunities for their businesses.

The expanded BCS portfolio includes broader package options and more training. Cisco expects increased delivery flexibility will drive growth and profitability for partners.

The BCS packaged tiers (premier, advantage and essentials) goes across all industry segments and business market segments. Prepackaged offers include operational insight reviews on a regular basis and change window support. Customer life cycle success is also built in and includes one-on-one workshops with customers — and case management, for example.

The prepackaged BCS also cuts across architecture — core networking, data center, security and collaboration.

The premier tier is new to BCS with this latest release. It empowers large enterprises, service providers and public-sector customers with the right amount of intelligence and guidance when and where they need it. The premier tier adds to the existing essentials and advantage tiers.

BCS Specialized Expertise

At the same time, Cisco adds new BCS Specialized Expertise with flexible delivery options.

“Last year during Partner Summit we told partners that we would bring them into the fold. Up until then, most of our partners on the advisory side were mostly focused on resell. We then floated this idea of co-delivery – or flexible delivery – with our partners,” said Subaiya.

Flexible delivery is twofold – with you, where partners can take on additional projects – and delivery through partners. In the latter scenario, partners create and augment business critical services.

“Some partners already have practices with established capabilities. So we’re giving them an umbrella or template to bake [services] into the overall business construct to have products work together,” said Subaiya.

More for Partners

The new BCS Specialized Expertise includes both partners and Cisco. There are two types of specialized expertise: scrum services and expert-as-a-service. Scrum services address top initiatives throughout the life cycle with flexible IT engagements. Scrum services are capability driven; so, for example, design, migration, validation and implementation services.

Partners can opt to augment their services with Cisco expertise, sell and deliver Cisco specialized expertise, or resell specialized expertise.

Expert-as-a-service allows partners to fill in technology gaps by adding the precise expertise as needed.

“So partners can buy a consulting engineer, a solutions architect, a project manager or an asset manager, and so on,” said Subaiya.

Other News

In other news, Cisco announced the following: