With this last Partner Summit in New Orleans, Cisco celebrates its 15th partner summit.
Keith Goodwin, Cisco SVP Partner Organization, purposefully chose to kick off this 15th summit by acknowledging an attendee from Ingram Micro France who has attended all 15 summits. While the 2011 summit had more than 10,000 attendees (counting the 7000 virtual attendees, too), that Ingram Micro executive was part of a first Cisco Partner Summit with a mere 175 attendees.
You can measure Cisco’s impact on the channel in the last 15 years by counting that growth in attendees. And Goodwin went on to introduce IMPACT as the theme for this 2011 Summit: impact to make a difference (first day), impact innovation (second day) and impact leadership (final day).
Cisco is putting extra effort into targeting the small and medium business (SMB) market because, according to Goodwin, Cisco “isn’t getting its fair share” of this very large, growing market.
When Goodwin handed over the stage in Big Easy to the Cisco CEO and President, John Chambers highlighted the partner’s $170B opportunity which Cisco addresses with five priorities:
- Core routing/switching business
- Collaboration
- Data Centre, virtualization and the Cloud
- Business (and technology) architectures
- Video
Chambers underlined Cisco’s ability to read the market, stating, “We see market transitions way ahead of our competition.” Read more...