Cisco: Next generation of services delivered collaboratively 1 April, 2008 By Chris Talbot

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With networks becoming more complex and end-customers requiring more proactive services from Cisco and its partners (instead of the reactive services they have been delivering), the network is becoming more of a mission-critical asset than it has been in the past, said Sherri Liebo, vice president of marketing for services at Cisco Systems.

"Now, it always has been, but even moreso, it's becoming mission-critical," she added.

According to Liebo, Cisco and its partners play critical role in service delivery, and customers are asking for them to take a stronger role in servicing the network, Liebo said. Cisco's smart services need to evolve, and the best way to do that is to deliver services collaboratively with partners, she said.

The two main service delivery areas for Cisco are Smart Care and E-Consulting, both of which were launched in 2007 and will continue to be expanded. Cisco plans to increase the availability of Smart Care beyond the U.S., Canada and Europe this year, thereby exiting the pilot stage. The networking vendor will also expand E-Consulting at Partner Summit to include more than 4,000 partners, including two-tier partners.

There are ample opportunities for partners to collaborate on services with through Smart Care, Liebo said. In the year since the program launched, partners have been seeing it as a general service platform they can wrap their own services around to create a differentiated services offering, she said. She added that it increases partners' efficiency and makes customers more comfortable so the partner can drive future business to them.

Additionally, there has been an expanded service opportunity for partners emerging in the last several months, Liebo explained. Fifty per cent of Smart Care customers are new customers to the partners, so partners are finding opportunities in customers that didn't purchase from them before.

When going in to start servicing clients with Smart Care services, partners have also found that 60 per cent of devices being covered by Smart Care were previously uncovered by any service contract, which Liebo said offers partners an expanded revenue opportunity within their installed base.

New sales opportunities outside of services are also being discovered, with 15 per cent of Cisco devices found through Smart Care service assessment being equipment no longer sold by Cisco, Liebo said. This provides partners with an opportunity to talk with their customers about upgrading their older equipment, she said.

"It's providing an expanded service opportunity for our partners," Liebo said.

The opportunity revolves around partners leveraging the Smart Care services platform, said Raja Sundaram, director of business development for channel operations at Cisco Systems.

With E-Consulting, which was originally launched to support less than 1,000 certified or specialized partners, Cisco partners have found a nearly 10 per cent improvement in attach rate and a 12 per cent improvement on services delivery, "which kind of amounts to about $157,000 on average" in increased services revenue, Sundaram said.