Cisco Preparing Major Managed Services Event
According to Cisco's teaser information, the virtual summit will allow attendees to:
Cisco Systems Inc. on November 18 and 19 plans to host a virtual summit for established and aspiring managed service providers. I learned about the summit while navigating a few Facebook links last night. Here are some preliminary details about the event.
According to Cisco’s teaser information, the virtual summit will allow attendees to:
“Connect with Cisco executives, top industry experts, and analysts and chat with service provider peers from around the world… It is the only forum dedicated exclusively to learning how to create, expand, and launch managed services faster, helping you increase customer loyalty and identify new revenue opportunities.”
The registration page for the event highlights the following confirmed speakers:
- Curtis Price, program VP, IDC
- Richard Duggan, Cisco Powered Program
- Al Safarikas, senior director, managed services marketing, Cisco
- Will Scott, director, service provider marketing, managed services, Cisco
- Joel Conover, marketing manager, network systems, Cisco
In a potentially related move, Cisco on November 11 plans to announce a “revolutionary telecommunications product for service providers.”
Cisco’s Balancing Act
Cisco has been working overtime to polish its messaging to managed service providers.
Safarikas in April 2008 told me Cisco had no plans to become a service provider. Instead, the technology giant wants to help MSPs develop long-term relationships (rather than one-off engagements) with customers.
It sounds like we’ll learn more about that strategy on Nov. 18 and 19.
MSPmentor is updated multiple times daily. Don’t miss a single post. Subscribe to our Enewsletter, RSS and Twitter feeds.
One can hope that this will be more fruitful than the Cisco Monitor Director push that was all the rave from certain Cisco Business Units around 6 months ago (which I hear has been discontinued).
John: I didn’t follow the Cisco Monitor Director push closely, and I know some Cisco folks read this site. In your view, where did Cisco go wrong and how can the company improve this time around?
It’s my assumption that often the way Cisco develops products are in towers of business units that don’t necessarily talk to each other internally. In this case I felt they released competing products to the partners, had a big push in it (as well as get VAR/MSP’s to push it, such as Intelligent Enterprise in the Cisco Monitor Director case) and then see who wins the product race. In the Cisco Monitor Director suite I was told there was slow adoption to the product so they would be focusing their efforts elsewhere and no longer developing CMD. Quite a disappointment for MSP’s like ours and IEnterprise that latched onto a great product with so much potential. Now we’re just waiting on the “new” MSP product which I was told would be ready for marke around February about 5 weeks ago. I’m not sure if this November product is the same one, but I guess we’ll find out.
I think it’s pretty self explanatory what they could do better this time around.
John Kilgore
Computer Service Partners, Inc.
John: Thanks for your perspective. I’m going to hop on the Cisco event Nov. 18 to see what it’s all about. I think the Nov. 11 product launch may be a completely separate effort more for telecom service providers. But we’ll see. The answers will surface Nov. 11 and Nov. 18.
All the best
-jp