Cisco Gives TSDs, Advisors Webex Contact Center Solution to Sell

CISCO PARTNER SUMMIT — Cisco Systems made good on its promise to open up more of its portfolio to agent partners by making its contact center offering available.

Partners of tech services distributors Telarus and Intelisys can now sell Cisco Webex Contact Center. Agents can earn a commission from recommending the contact center solution to their customers.

Cisco’s Kristyn Hogan

“We are super excited to add contact center to our agency offer, which is what the partners have been begging for,” Kristyn Hogan said

Hogan, who leads Cisco’s global collaboration partner sales, said the move reflects a larger expansion of Cisco’s go-to-market efforts around contact center. In addition, any collaboration-certified partner can now sell contact center from Cisco.

Cisco is hosting partners at their annual summit Las Vegas this week.

Agent Offer

Cisco in the summer of 2021 officially kicked off its efforts in the agent/TSD channel by partnering with ScanSource-owned Intelisys.

ScanSource resellers were already delivering Cisco hardware; the Intelisys partnership let agents sell Webex in their natural model. In that model the vendor, rather than the partner, bills the customer and provides the managed services.

Intelisys/ScanSource’s John DeLozier

“We have a longstanding relationship with Cisco, which began in the hardware business. We are thrilled Cisco opened up the agency route to market last year and, together, we are providing great new opportunities for our partners,” said John DeLozier, president of Intelisys, a ScanSource company.

Cisco expanded its TSD channel in early 2022 by partnering with Telarus. That partnership included a regional channel manager team and internal engineering resources. However, partners could only sell the unified communications side of Webex.

But that’s changing now.

Telarus’ Samantha Nelson

“Companies are leveraging customer experience (CX) as a competitive advantage by meeting customers where they are,” said Samantha Nelson, vice president of contact center for Telarus. “As a result, our partners and customers are having more conversations about incorporating a digital-first approach. Cisco’s contact center offering will allow businesses to leverage experience as a basis of differentiation, for internal employees and external customers.”

Massive Opportunity

Hogan said contact center has contributed immensely to the recent growth of its TSD partners. UCaaS propelled agents through COVID-19 as the pandemic forced businesses into the cloud. But now CCaaS has allowed agents to demonstrate the business value they can provide to customers.

“For the past six quarters, contact center has been leading the charge, growing off the chart, so they’ve been begging for it,” she said.

DeLozier said partners are looking at a total addressable market of $25 billion for unified communications as a service (UCaaS) and contact center as a service (CCaaS). That stems in major part from the widespread move to hybrid work.

“While the need for these technologies was accelerated by the pandemic, end users now need to create longer-term business strategies. Ensuring partners can deliver the next generation of cloud solutions – be it CCaaS, UCaaS, security – to their end users is essential to their continued growth,” DeLozier told Channel Futures. “We are committed to helping our partners meet their end users where they are. Expanding our Cisco portfolio to include their cloud solutions will be a key strategy in enabling us to do that.”

Overall Expansion

Moreover, Cisco will allow any certified collaboration partner to …