Cisco Partner Selling Options Expanded For Business Critical Services Portfolio

‘Going from a resale-only model now to being partner-led and in some cases, partner-delivered, it‘s a strategy that basically leverages the partner community selling CX,’ one Cisco partner tells CRN.

Cisco is opening up its Business Critical Services (BCS) portfolio to more partners via a wider variety of delivery models, making good on its promise during last years’ Partner Summit.

Cisco partners can now go beyond reselling the updated BCS portfolio, the flagship portfolio within Cisco‘s Customer Experience (CX) organization. Solution providers today are able to create, augment, and deliver these services for the first time, giving partners more flexibility and choice, said Thimaya Subaiya, senior vice president of Customer Experience Solutions and Acceleration for Cisco.

The BCS portfolio has been historically geared toward the higher end of the enterprise space, but the changes Cisco is making to selling motions around the portfolio will help bring it down market and pick up “velocity” with more partners, said Jonathan Groves, CEO for Logicalis, a Cisco Gold partner.

“Going from a resale-only model now to being partner-led and in some cases, partner-delivered, it‘s a strategy that basically leverages the partner community selling CX,” Groves said.

Logicalis is bundling its own design and deployment services along with Cisco‘s BCS solutions, including Cisco’s Managed Detection and Response (MDR) offering, Grove said. “We see the BCS to be an enabler for us to move up the stack and not invest alone -- we can go hand-in-hand with Cisco as we do it,” he added.

[Related: Cisco Partner Experience Platform Will Cut 100-Plus Separate Tools]​

The BCS platform, which employs analytics and automation to guide customers as they transform their IT environments with insights and data, now lets partners “add on” their own services and solutions for the first time. “We are letting partners create their own services around the BCS construct, which is huge, and we‘re letting them deliver with us,” Subaiya said. ”A lot of partners are in disbelief that we are letting them do this. We’re letting them truly into the fold and co-deliver.”

For partners that don‘t have expertise in a specific area, these solution providers have been happy that Cisco has been offering the “full-fledged” package that can be resold. But other partners that have their own services capabilities have been asking to be able to do things on their own, Cisco Channel Chief Oliver Tuszik told CRN about the new BCS selling options.

“With the new BCS, which is more flexible, partners can build their own offerings on top and make it a Cisco-powered, but unique offering,” he said. “This will allow them to differentiate and also make better margin and create more long-term stickiness with their customers.”

Nearly every Cisco partner has been moving toward offering flexible delivery models for their end customers, Subaiya said. The new delivery options gives the partner community a boost because solution providers entering new markets can come to the table with Cisco, he said.

The expanded BCS portfolio will not only help drive growth and profitability for Cisco partners, but it will also help businesses transform and build agile IT environments, Subaiya said. The new model for BCS has been popular with certain subsets of customers around the globe, such as healthcare customers, he added.

San Jose, Calif.-based Cisco is also introducing a new Premier tier to the Essentials and Advantage tier within BCS. The new Premier tier will help partners adapt and provide the right solutions for any-sized customer, including large enterprises and public sector customers, the company said.