Cisco and Ingram Micro jointly announced this week that Cisco partners would be able to originate orders, changes and track Cisco products and services via an Ingram Micro online portal.
Announced at the Ingram Micro ONE 2018 conference, Ingram Micro also revealed this week that it plans to offer similar capabilities to partners of other technology vendors in 2019 via a Partner Now initiative the distributor has launched.
Jeff Sharritts, senior vice president for the Americas sales organization at Cisco, told conference attendees that the approach most channel partners have relied on to gain and retain customers needs to fundamentally change. For example, instead of waiting for customers to upgrade a switch every three years, new functionality is being delivered to that switch multiple times a year via a software subscription.
That shift requires partners to transform everything from the way they transact to how they bring products and services to market, says Sharritts.
“It allows for a more profitable sticky relationship with our customers,” says Sharritts.
Much of that change is being driven by customers, adds Sharritts. Line of business executives are much more involved in IT purchase. But rather than being interested in the core product, much of their focus is on the business outcome enabled by the IT product or service, says Sharritts. Citing industry analyst projections, Sharritts notes that spending on digital business projects globally now exceeds $1 trillion, with $436 billion of that occurring in the U.S. alone.
In the case of Cisco technology initiatives, Sharritts says the focus is now clearly on multi-cloud computing, networking, data management, security and providing a superior customer experience. In terms of the cloud, Sharritts says the channel plays a critical role in activating software-as-a-service (SaaS) licensing and then making sure more of those licenses are consumed over time. The challenge IT vendors and their partners alike face is that 90 percent of the profits from cloud applications is generated after the sale.
Because of that issue, Sharritts notes it’s important for channel partners to extend their reach into the realm of managed services to stay relevant. Sharritts notes that managed services are expected to continue to grow at a double-digit rate through 2021.
The alliance with Ingram to provide a portal for Cisco partners represents an effort to get closer to a partner that still account for 90 percent of Cisco’s revenue. The challenge now is to make sure Cisco partners are staying close enough to their end customers to make logging into that portal worth the time and effort.
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