fivelayers.net

After an 18-month long ‘Life’ break, I am happy to share that I am starting a new role this week at Cisco as a partner success executive. Having spent most of my career at cisco, this is like a homecoming for me. What surprised me during my new-hire onboarding process is that Cisco has retained every bit of my information within their systems from my photographs to every project I delivered to cisco clients over the past 15 years. Its a feeling like someone knowing you will be back, for sure an emotional moment for me !

Nevertheless, I cannot be more excited to join this global team of 50+ experts who are laser-focused on transforming cisco partner’s professional services business. In other words, cisco is helping thousands of its partners globally to digitize their service business through a new digital platform called Partner Experience (PX) cloud. Cisco itself went through this transformation five years back through the development of the Customer Experience (CX) cloud and now its partner’s turn to consume these elements, features, and capabilities through the PX cloud.

PX and CX clouds are the front and center of how cisco and its partners will deliver their services to their customers in the future. If Cisco customers are looking to engage a trusted advisor, view telemetry data for their infrastructure, or engage Cisco resources for training their staff, this digital platform becomes a gateway to all their needs.

But this is a hard feat for cisco and easier said than done, but the journey has begun with a crystal clear strategy. Cisco has built a robust framework called Partner Lifecycle Service (PLS) as a way to digitize its partner’s professional services business. PLS demands a separate blog but in a nutshell, cisco partners would be able to tap into cisco’s decades worth of intellectual property and combine them with their own to create a differentiated offering to their customers that is enabled by software and automation. In order to do this API’s become very critical and cisco is investing heavily to expose its intellectual property through API’s for the partners to consume and build on top.

As I dive into the intricacies of PLS in the next few weeks in my new role, I will have more to talk about. If you work for a Cisco partner in APJC, please drop me a note or send me a LinkedIn invite!

Cheers !!!