Cisco thinks its supply chain constraints are easing and should get better over the next few months.
The industry has been plagued with component shortages for 18 months and the channel has been managing inventories and customer expectations.
At the time Cisco thought that the situation would improve by the second half of the year. Cisco’s announcement of Q4 and fiscal year numbers, for the period ending 30 July confirmed the trend.
Cisco has warned that supply chain challenges and material shortages were creating a rise in grey-market activity and counterfeit IT products.
Cisco legal director Al Palladin said some customers — and even channel partners — were looking outside of Cisco’s authorised channels to get their hands on new products faster, resulting in a spike of counterfeit activity,
Products sourced outside of Cisco’s authorised channels won’t come with a valid warranty or license from Cisco. This gear also runs the risk of being tampered with in a way to makes it more vulnerable to security breaches. Not only could this cause damage to Cisco’s brand, it also could leave businesses open to attack or early failure of the product, Palladin warned.
Cisco Systems’ Global Partner Organization has assumed responsibility for the company’s small-business customer segment.
Cisco’s vice president of global distribution sales Andrew Sage said the reorganisation combines the small-business customer responsibility with Cisco’s largest route to market, the Global Partner Organisation.
Cisco’s small-business customer segment is a 100 percent partner business, especially as these customers gravitate toward managed services and Everything as a Service, Sage said.
Economic sanctions against Tsar Putin will have a significant impact on the IT channel, according to analysts at Context.
According to a report cross-border payments are extremely challenging if not impossible for channel players and their customers now that major banks are locked out of the SWIFT system. The EU and US have banned the supply of hi-tech goods including semiconductors, computers, telecoms and information security equipment. Russian aircraft are banned from European airspace, and Boeing/Airbus have stopped servicing the Russian aviation industry, which will further restrict transport flows.
Proofpoint CEO Gary Steele is leaving security outfit to take over as Splunk’s new CEO.
Steele was the founding CEO of Proofpoint and has overseen the company’s growth from a startup to a publicly-traded security-as-a-service provider.
He will take over as permanent CEO on 11 April following Doug Merritt’s decision to step down in November last year, just five months after Splunk received a billion dollars of private equity funding from Silver Lake Investment.
“Splunk has built one of the most respected brands in tech and is at the forefront of security and observability. I’m honoured to join the company at such an important moment – for both Splunk and the industry. I’ve dedicated my career to helping companies around the world safeguard their data, systems and infrastructure, and know first-hand how critical Splunk’s products and solutions have become to customers as they navigate hybrid, multi-cloud environments with increasingly complex attacks and threat actors.”
Cisco is converting its ThousandEyes arm into a channel proposition.
Cisco channel leader Oliver Tuszik said it had got to a point where the company wanted to put the network visualisation tools into the hands of its partners so they could react to growing demand from customers for greater visibility and improved security.
He said: “We are helping our partners further deliver on their commitment to customers by announcing that Cisco ThousandEyes is moving to a full channel sales model.”
“I am thrilled about this and the work our teams are doing to support partners’ needs in adding this capability to their Cisco portfolio. Delivered as a SaaS [software-as-a-service] solution, ThousandEyes is another important Cisco component in driving more subscription-based annual recurring revenues – an important shift we know is just good business for our partners’ bottom line.”
Networking giant Cisco is trying to buy the data analytics software company Splunk.
Cisco has made an offer worth more than $20 billion for the outfit recently although neither side is in active talks over a deal.
If it goes through the deal would mark Cisco’s biggest ever acquisition – smashing the $6.9 billion acquisition of Scientific Atlanta in 2005.
Splunk, which is currently searching for a new chief executive after Doug Merritt stepped down from the role in November, sells a platform that monitors and searches and visualises machine data.
The two companies already have a partnership, and Cisco has continued to put its efforts into moving towards software in recent years, with CEO Chuck Robbins praising partners in November for helping the company’s shift toward software and services.
Former Cisco UK&I channel boss Angela Whitty has left the networking giant to head Crawley-based IT solutions provider Ampito Group.
Whitty said taking the CEO role at Ampito was a “compelling opportunity” after 29 years at Cisco, the last seven of which were spent as MD of UK&I partner sales.
She said that it intrigued her to see how the other half lived after being part of the vendor space for so long.
Cloud and digital transformation services provider Kerv has snapped up SD-WAN specialist Gyrocom.
The move makes Kerv a £50 million revenue business. The company was created through a three-way merger between DoubleEdge Professional Services, Foehn and Metaphor IT. It acquired Microsoft Dynamics and Power Platform specialist cloudThing in May.
Cisco is planning a sustainability specialisation programme is for partners in 2022.
The vendor told the gathered throngs at its partner event this week the programme will initially be focused largely on recycling and rewarding partners for becoming part of the “circular” economy.
Cisco vice-president, global distribution Andrew Sage said that the vendor had already been offering a take-back and recycle service that partners could offer customers.
Cisco’s AppDynamics is shifting to a 100 percent channel model, alongside major updates and improvements to its global partner programme.
The firm said the changes will help partners “fully exploit the potential of stack observability with business context”.
AppDynamics has been using a “direct and indirect” sales model for some time, but the outfit feels that a total channel will provide closer alignment to Cisco’s sales motion and give partners the confidence and opportunity to build out full-stack observability practices with AppDynamics and Cisco.
AppDynamics’ vice president of Worldwide Channels and Strategic Alliances Mark Maslach said the company has added a new ‘Elite’ level to its Global Partner Program, creating a three-tier structure alongside the existing ‘Alliance’ and ‘Titan’ levels.
Tech Data is increasing investment in its Software Store self-service renewals platform introducing a monthly data pack option for partners that have a large number of upcoming renewals and providing dedicated business development support.
The company said it is seeing steady growth in usage of the nine portals via which software and service renewals can be tracked, quoted for, and ordered, and is on track to achieve half of all software licensing renewals through them by the end of the year.
Michael Holden, Tech Data, UK and Ireland, business development manager eCommerce, said that the new data pack option will provide larger reseller partners with all pertinent information on their up-and-coming renewals for automatic input into their own internal systems.
“Larger partners may have thousands of renewals they want to track and might need to give access to many different users while ensuring they conform to security and data policies. We’ve developed the data pack option to provide partners with an uncomplicated way to get all the information they need to automate their renewals business, whilst ensuring they are compliant.”
Cisco has ended its fiscal 2021 with its highest product order growth rates in more than a decade, after having a really mixed year.
Revenues for the three months ending 31 July reached 13.1 billion, an increase of eight per ent year on year. GAAP operating income meanwhile swelled by 10 percent to $3.6 billion. Cisco’s sales for its full fiscal 2021 increased by one percent to $49.8 billion.
Cisco’s EMEA business grew revenues by six percent to $3.3 billion for the quarter. Sales in the Land of the Fee grew by eight percent to $7.73 billion
Product revenues grew by 10 percent in Fourth Quater to $9.71 billion, while services enjoyed 2.6 percent growth to $3.4 billion.
Networking giant Cisco has acquired application monitoring firm Epsagon with a view to putting its tech under the bonnet of Cisco’s products and services.
Epsagon will be integrated into Cisco’s Strategy, Incubation and Applications division and will expand Cisco’s advanced full-stack observability strategy.
Big distieTech Data has announced that Cisco easylease payment plans can now be provided through its Tech-as-a-Service offering, making it easier for partners to quote end-user customers for a subscription payment option using the online portal.
The cunning plan is to make it simpler and faster for resellers to quote for finance options on smaller orders, giving the customer more choice and helping them to fund new infrastructure purchases.
Any Cisco partner can log-on and explore subscription payments options for their customers on the purchase of Cisco equipment, allowing them to spread the cost over a period of up to three years, instead of funding the full investment in new equipment up-front.
