By Khali Henderson

Cisco is targeting growth in the midmarket with the rollout of a new global channel program called Partner Plus, which was announced Tuesday at the 2012 Cisco Partner Summit in San Diego.

Partner Plus is part of the Partner-Led strategy the gearmaker rolled out in summer 2011 to drive business in the small and medium business segment. It is part of the $75 million investment that Cisco announced in 2011 for enablement, systems and support capabilities.

Andrew Sage, vice president of Partner Led worldwide, said Partner Plus will offer partners  preference, investment and support.

Specifically, Partner Plus offers qualified partners five primary perks, including incentives and rebates to fund marketing and sales training, virtual access to Cisco’s engineers for pre-sales tech support, customer intelligence for better targeting and reduced cost of sales, access to Partner Sales Excellence Training and co-marketing support.

“We are going to underpin this with automation, which allows to better do opportunity tracking,” said Sage. The Cisco Sales Collaboration platform, as it’s called, is based on Salesforce.com.

Partner Plus will be rolled out in waves, beginning with the United States and Canada in May 2012 and the rest of the world in August 2012. Aspire Technology Partners is the first Partner Plus partner in the United States.

Participants must be certified and have a minimum revenue (set by country)  in the Partner-Led segment. Partner Led has an addressable market Cisco projects to be $61 billion. Currently Partner Led accounts for 23-25 percent of Cisco’s revenue; the majority (about 60 percent) is from the midmarket.