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One of the key value proposition of Cisco PX (Partner Experience) cloud for Partners is the ability to offer and monetise high-margin services across their customer Lifecycle. Most often these high margin services have higher complexity in terms of the expertise and tools needed to deliver these services. Following chart depicts examples of various Lifecycle Service Accelerators in relation to their complexity and profit margin. For example, the workflow orchestration service accelerator on the upper right quadrant has the highest complexity resulting in higher profit margin.

Cisco partners developing service accelerators also has to also keep in mind the value delivered to their customers and strive for differentiation in the marketplace. But how can the partners ensure that their service accelerators satisfy all the three criteria on high-margin, high value and differentiation. Thats where Cisco Partner Success team comes into help who works with Cisco CX (Customer Experience) specialised partners to develop service accelerators through lifecycle Service Creation workshop engagement.

Lifecycle Service Creation

Cisco Partner Success team engages with CX specialised partners to ideate, build, publish and monetise lifecycle service accelerators leveraging user centered approach. Partner customer success, delivery and pre-sales teams are engaged in this process with Cisco partner success team. The engagement methodology as depicted below follows a structured 8-step process that starts from the kickoff, discovery interviews, portfolio mapping , ideation, branding and publishing the service accelerators. The final step or the success criteria is driven by customer consumption of the partner service accelerators which is really dependant on the value and differentiation created.

User Centred Service Ideation

Service creation workshop stage-2, from the above methodology, is all about user-centered ideation exercise, which forms the core activity of the engagement . The ideation activity is centred around various users (netops, devops, secops, architects, and operations teams) and capabilities (business process, vertically-oriented, etc.). Helping partner teams think through these user needs and capabilities leveraging proven frameworks help ensure ideate on new accelerators . There are three distinct steps in this ideation activity, as depicted in the picture below. The end goal of this workshop is to develop user centred service accelerator data sheets for the selected success tracks (campus network, data centre compute, data centre network, security, etc.).

CX specialised partners interested developing lifecycle services and would like to engage Cisco partner success teams and adopt the above methodology, please email partnerservicecreation@cisco.com