By Diane Krakora, CEO
Wendy Bahr, SVP of Global Partner Organization at Cisco, was fantastic in her first time as master of ceremonies for the partner summit. She not only provided a warm and friendly welcome to the thousands of partners in San Diego, she was also very clear and detailed describing the next evolution of Cisco’s partnering strategy: simplicity, alignment and evolving the value exchange.
Topics: News and Programs
By Diane Krakora, CEO
Chuck Robbins, Cisco’s CEO, opened this week's partner summit with a fantastic statement. He began with, “the winners in the next two decades will be powered by partnerships.” Considering this a partner conference, and Chuck has spent 17 years at Cisco, which was driven to partner centricity by his predecessor, John Chambers, and having spent many of those years in channel roles, I expected nothing less.
Topics: News and Programs
This week, hosts Charlene O'Hanlon, channel industry editor & writer, and Diane Krakora, CEO of PartnerPath, chat about some of the key points from the 2016 Cisco Partner Summit. Cisco Channel Chief Wendy Bahr spoke about the evolution of partner strategy and it's components. She also talked about priorities including security, software and line of business selling. Hear about some of her other comments and how Diane and Charlene think these strategies will affect Cisco partners and the partner channel as a whole. Do you agree? Let us know what you think.
Topics: News and Programs, videocast, Industry Perspective
By Diane Krakora, CEO
Topics: Partnering Tips, Industry Perspective
This week, hosts Charlene O'Hanlon, channel industry editor & writer, and Diane Krakora, CEO of PartnerPath, chat about some key takeaways from last week's webinar on Power to the Partners. How are partners evaluating vendors and deciding who to engage with? What role does profitability play in this evaluation? What else is involved in this trend? Listen to their discussion and let us know what you think.
Topics: Partnering Tips, videocast, Channel Best Practices, Industry Perspective
This week, hosts Charlene O'Hanlon, channel industry editor & writer, and Diane Krakora, CEO of PartnerPath, discuss the big news from Thursday: Ingram Micro is being acquired by Tianjin Tianhai for $6 billion. Charlene and Diane reflect on the top questions the channel should be asking in the months to come along with possible answers. Only time will tell how this acquisition may affect other distributors, channel partners and vendors, but it's certainly interesting to speculate and see how the channel adapts. Listen to the discussion and tell us what you think!
Topics: News and Programs, videocast, Industry Perspective
02.17.16
The partners you engage and enable for cloud might not be the same partners in your current program. As IT consumption moves to on-demand and subscription models, the types of partners addressing customers’ needs will shift, as will the services these solution providers offer. Channel partners of the future will manage the entire customer lifecycle – from evaluation, through purchase, adoption and usage. The channel partner who recommends a combination of policies, products and support to address a customer’s needs will truly be their trusted advisor. Not only are they the face of the solution for the customer, since they marketed and sold it, but they are also the brains. The solution provider knows how all the products and pieces work together and specifically, how they work for a particular customer. They own that customer relationship. The power is shifting to partners.
Topics: Partnering Tips, Industry Perspective
This week, hosts Charlene O'Hanlon, channel industry editor & writer, and Diane Krakora, CEO of PartnerPath, discuss Diane's frustration at the absence of any channel discussion at a recent SaaS Conference, SaaStr Annual 2016 in San Francisco. Over 5,000 SaaS founders, executives and investors were in attendance and several sessions specifically targeted growth, acceleration beyond startup and how to scale sales. So where was the discussion on how channel partners and solution providers can help build solutions around SaaS technologies? Diane and Charlene try to make sense of it.
Topics: News and Programs, videocast, Industry Perspective
This week, hosts Charlene O'Hanlon, channel industry editor & writer, and Diane Krakora, CEO of PartnerPath, discuss Charlene's recent brush with an IoT conference. What exactly is IoT, and what is it not? How do companies need to come together to create IoT solutions and who in the vendor community is focused on this space? Listen as Charlene breaks down some of the myth around IoT and let us know how and if you plan to explore this technology.
Topics: videocast, Channel Best Practices, Industry Perspective
