Cisco partners will see summits shift to fall

While Cisco partners are poised to register for the vendor’s Global Partner Summit 2016 taking place February 29 to March 3 in San Diego, Wendy Bahr, who took over as Cisco’s channel chief back in July, recently shook things up a bit by announcing that future Partner Summits will be scheduled in the fall.

Bahr, senior vice president of Cisco’s Global Partner Organization, made the change to better align the company’s internal sales organization with the partner channel, according to a recently published blog post. What Cisco partners need to know is that the new plan kicks off in November 2016 with a Global Partner Summit in San Francisco.

“Many of the conversations I’ve had with our partners over the past few months have been about the challenges around the breadth of Cisco’s portfolio, our sometimes complex processes, and the transformation of our business to a more software-centric, ‘as-a-service model,'” she said.

“It’s clear that we need greater simplicity across our entire portfolio and better alignment between our partners and our field sales organization,” she stated in the blog post.

In order to bring together the company’s internal and external sales channel around strategy and priorities, the vendor will schedule future Global Partner Summits “on the heels” of the annual Cisco Global Sales Event (GSX). Cisco GSX 2015 was held in August in Las Vegas and drew about 20,000 attendees.

Citrix was one of the first big vendors to bring together its internal sales teams and channel partners to focus on joint success. The Citrix Summit 2014 kicked off the New Year and the company’s new strategy of bringing together internal sales with channel partners at a single event. Prior to the change, the partner conference took place four or more months after the internal sales team learned about the company’s strategic plans for the year.

Now in its third year, the strategy continues: Citrix Summit 2016 is around the corner, being held January 11 to 13 in Las Vegas.