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A common phenomenon in the tech industry is the conversion of internal tools that was originally developed to solve internal pain points into external products or services. Companies use various approaches to achieve this, like productizing and monetizing the tools, extending to the ecosystem, or creating a open-source developer community network.

In this blog, I will share how the analytics and automation tools that were developed by Cisco CX (Customer Experience) team over more than a decade is being shared with eco-system partners to solve common customer pain points. Furthermore how partners can create upstream innovation, package, productize and sell them to their customers. Finally i will explain how Cisco Partner Success team drives this upstream innovation with partners to create value based solutions for customers.

An Impetus for bottoms-up Innovation

Over the last decade or so, the proliferation of open-source tools for data analytics, automation and AI gave power to the engineers who were on the front lines of solving customer problems and needs. This created a culture of experimentation for new ideas to close the gaps using novel ways.   Their creative minds focused on automating tasks and solving customer problems have given rise to hundreds of tools, scripts and applications that can automate implementation tasks, case resolutions, technical support workflows, derive predictive network insights and so on.  These CX (Customer Experience) assets has been catalogued and aligned with the product lifecycle stages (design, implementation, operations, optimization, etc.,). Few of these assets or solutions that are enabled by insights and automation capabilities have made it into channel partners hands and many are in the pipeline

Few notable innovations from CX include ‘RadKit’ that offers novel method for remote network troubleshooting and allows partners to create new services on top of this toolkit, ‘Sherlock’  that opens a proactive support case for the network issue that the customer network will be encountering and servicing the case till the resolution using workflow automation, ‘Service-as-Code’ (SaC) that automates the network provisioning and change management, ‘Auto RMA’ that turns on a low touch RMA experience using AI/Machine learning, and so on.

Partner Branded, Partner Delivered Services

Below framework shows few of these CX home-grown innovations around insights and automation tools that are now available to channel partners. What’s unique now is that partners can package these services with value added services and sell and deliver them under their own brand name.

The value-add services involve the partner innovating upstream leveraging APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) and SDKs (Software Development Kit) offered by these tools and platforms. Partners can create new services and integration solutions based on the customer requirements.  

For example, leveraging RadKit SDK’s partners can create network health monitoring application or speed up problem resolution. Using diagnostics insights APIs from PX Cloud, partner can add multi vendor insights and create customer dashboards. Another example where partner can build ITSM connectors and add DevOps coaching for SaC customers. 

Partner Incubation

All the above listed innovations on insights and automation are available to partners who can value-add, productize, sell, deliver and monetize with their customers. To undertake these activities, partners can ask enablement services from a globally staffed Cisco Partner Success team. Whether incubating a new practice, consultation on APIs, ideas for partner value-added services or goto market enablement, the Cisco Partner Success team has expertise on all these areas that partners can tap into.

Below is a sample engagement plan that Cisco Partner Success team adopts to incubate Service as Code delivery practice with its partners.

One aspect I did not discuss in this blog is the impact of Generative AI on the tools’ development. I will keep this for my next blog, but just to share some insights, GenAI is being infused into most of the above toolset and also the new ones that will be coming soon.

Further Resources

Link to various tools: RadKit , Service as Code , PX ( Partner Experience) Cloud