By Mike Johnson, Director of Communication & Collaboration – Solutions@LogicalisMikeJ
Thousands of delegates from Cisco’s Global partners converged on Montreal this week, and more than 6,000 joined in virtually to hear Cisco tell them how being BOLD will lead to satisfied mutual customers. To be bold, partners such as our team at Logicalis are to encourage and enable disruptive change that digitizes every aspect of customer businesses.
That sounds good, but what does it really mean, and how can we work together to accomplish such a macro goal? Allow me to give you a micro perspective…
I agree we must advise customers to disrupt the markets they serve or they risk being disrupted by them. Cisco tells us we are entering a decade of Hyper Connectivity—where 21B devices will connect to us and our networks this year and grow to 50B by 2020.
The data these devices and their associated applications generate and create will stress IT, the business and solution providers—if we don’t adopt a few new ideas and architectures in a framework to relieve that stress. If we get too comfortable selling/buying point products, we become commodity sellers and buyers. But Cisco and its partners (like Logicalis) have a three-step approach to deal with this, as you’ll see below.
- First, you must understand the business; how it grows, how it profits, and how it can become more efficient.
- Second, you need to examine the marketplace of services and the portfolio of products; then form them into an architecture that can be agile, orchestrated and automated, and most importantly, brokered and consumed easily by IT and the line of business. This allows IT to show its value to the business in the most relevant ways.
- Third, you should apply the proper product, solution and service architectures to the business need; and you need do it securely and with velocity.
It sounds too simple, right? Well it takes a lot of in-house talent to advise and deliver on this methodology. It just seems simple because Cisco has the right portfolio and the right partners, like Logicalis, to execute.
As you may or may not have noticed, I haven’t yet mentioned a single point product or specific technology. Cisco is a hardware and software company, and partners like Logicalis sell a lot of hardware and software.
But I’m here to tell you, together, we really sell business outcomes. We have the strongest products, architectures, frameworks and methodologies in the industry or we wouldn’t be able to say we can truly deliver outcomes. So whether you attended the Cisco Partner Summit or not, the message was clear to me. The solution portfolios and point products took a back stage.
This includes cool products such as the new cloud collaboration product called Spark; the robust next-generation security product suite—ASA and Sourcefire; the super-fast spine and leaf data center backbone that is Nexus 9K; the game-changing APIC ACI/SDN controller or the cloud of clouds: Intercloud; or even the mind boggling Internet of Everything and its total addressable market of devices to connect.
All of these take a backseat to disruptive, business-impact conceptual ideas and methodologies that are…well…quite BOLD!
Visit our website to learn more about the many Cisco solutions that Logicalis designs, deploys and supports. While you’re there, check out this short video to see how Logicalis and Cisco are creating Tomorrow’s Workplace.