Cisco announced enhancements to its product portfolio at its annual Partners Summit, including new security features and Kubernetes support. The company also announced plans to simplify its partner programme over the next 12-18 months.
The company plans to consolidate nearly a dozen of the separate partner programmes into one single programme. The New Cisco Partner Program will offer partners more opportunity to differentiate across the various aspects of their business, moving from resell to managed services to developer and advisor practices with Cisco, the company said.
They will be able to focus on up to four key roles the company sees for partners: Integrator, Provider, Developer and Advisor. Cisco’s Gold brand remains the cornerstone of the new programme while also enhancing the Premier and Select tiers to help partners differentiate with their customers. Current Cisco partners will not be asked to start over with this new programme, as it was designed to recognize their existing competences.
The new Partner Experience Platform (PXP) will be the gateway to Cisco services and support. Partners will be able to collaborate across a connected ecosystem, co-innovate and co-sell together with Cisco on one digital platform. PXP will be available to all partners globally from 30 November, and the other changes to the partner programme will roll out over the coming fiscal year.
Cloud, security product updates
In new product news, the hybrid cloud platform Cisco Intersight is getting the new Intersight Kubernetes Service. With this, infrastructure teams can automate the lifecycle management of Kubernetes and containerized applications across any environment, Cisco said. The Intersight Workload Optimizer tool further simplifies application resources management, and Intersight integration with AppDynamics provides IT teams with visibility to improve management across infrastructure and applications.
Cisco also introduced the Nexus Dashboard, a single insights and automation platform to operate multicloud data centre networks spanning on-premise, virtual edge and cloud sites. The dashboard brings together Cisco's orchestration, insights and assurance services together with critical third-party services.
Cisco Security announced a number of platform innovations across the portfolio, including enhanced capabilities in Extended Detection and Response (XDR), zero trust, and Secure Access Services Edge (SASE).
These include updates to Cisco SecureX, the security platform available since end of June and already used by more than 4,000 organizations. Cisco said customers have seen a 95 percent reduction in time to detect threats and 85 percent reduction in time to remediate, while more than half of customers for SecureX reported saving up to six hours per week on incident response.
