There is a fundamental shift taking place with how businesses purchase products essential to their operations. Line-of-business managers are becoming the people who purchase for IT, and that changes the relationship between independent software and hardware vendors and the businesses to which they sell.
Cisco (News - Alert) is specifically taking on this fundamental change by creating its Solution Partner Program that is geared to build relationships between solutions providers and other business entities such as app developers and independent software vendors. Steve Benvenuto, senior director of Business Development for Strategy, Planning and Partner Programs at Cisco, says the program helps to ensure that solution providers are able to sell businesses products that will help them operate more effectively and not just provide them with technical specifications that do not mean anything in the context of overall financial outcomes.
In recent interview with CRN, Benvenuto explained the basic change of relationships that is occurring throughout various markets.
"If you are a partner and you understand the Cisco architecture and have deep expertise in that, the CIO trusts you and you have a long-term relationship," Benvenuto said. "Now, to say that, all of sudden, the line of business is controlling the budget, [partners] need to have some sort of financial application that is actually integrated with the Cisco infrastructure to be able to go in and say, 'Here's what this means to finance.'"
Obviously, with whom the partner interacts changes the entire scenario. This is where the Solution Partner Program enters the picture. Instead of allowing such a long-term relationship to fade away as a result of relationship changes, Cisco sets up connections between independent vendors and partners.
Cisco is also working to develop its Solutions Marketplace where solutions providers can search for independent vendors with whom they want to work, and applications that can enhance their own products. Cisco vets all the vendors and applications before allowing them into the Marketplace, so solutions providers know they will only be searching for providers and products that can operate smoothly with Cisco environments. This lowers the amount of testing solutions providers have to perform, and it allows smoother connections between companies that may have had a hard time finding each other outside the marketplace ecosystem.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson