Cisco Partner Experience Platform's Growth and Profitability Feature Adds It To The "Next Level"

 Cisco Partner Experience Platform's Growth and Profitability Feature Adds It To The "Next Level"

According to José Van Dijk of Cisco, the Partner Experience Platform is more than simply a location to compile partner products, as CRN reports. With the addition of tools like predictive modeling, it now offers partners even more potential for recurring income growth and increased productivity.

A few new capabilities have been added to the Partner Experience Platform (PXP), which allows partners to manage their connection with Cisco Systems and find new possibilities as well as areas they may have overlooked. This will help partners build their company.

In 2019, José Van Dijk joined the global partner performance team as vice president of partner performance as well as observations for Cisco's Global Partner Organization. Her goal upon arrival was to help partners navigate a complicated environment that included several dissimilar tools that they might access from various locations.

In 2020, she and her group unveiled PXP, a centralized platform that assists partners in deal planning and renewal, accessing certification details and incentives, and even working together with other Cisco partners. With the intention of retiring and combining half of the more than 180 different tools into PXP, the platform was created to reduce their number. As of right now, Van Dijk and her group have exceeded that target by removing, combining, or redesigning 60% of the tools in PXP.

Since the required technologies are now included into PXP, Van Dijk and her team's new objective is to guarantee that partners may access the APIs and incorporate the PXP platform into their processes regardless of whether they are using PXP or not. The second objective is to assist partners expand their businesses by using Cisco's thirty years of data to improve predictive modeling.

She said that PXP's new features, which are geared at partner development, profitability, and productivity, would accomplish this.

One of the new tools included into PXP, dubbed Growth Finder, was unveiled at Partner Summit 2023. According to Van Dijk, this tool will help partners increase their recurring income by providing them with fresh insights about whitespace, cross-sell, and upsell possibilities via automated procedures.

"Basically, we do partner-specific artificial intelligence modeling in Growth Finder and automate additional prescription insight from all of these best practices that we have." Greenfield possibilities and recurrent revenue attrition may then be found, sized, and prioritized, the speaker stated. We may inform [partners], for instance, "Hey, you have so much a la carte with your consumers out there." Converting them to enterprise agreements (EAs) not only increases business volume but also clearly illustrates the advantages that the partner would get right now.

According to Van Dijk, PXP will now assist partners in maximizing profitability by pointing out areas where rebates were overlooked and demonstrating to them how to increase client software uptake.

"Clearly, there is a huge opportunity there that they have already missed by not converting these a la cartes into EAs, as we have made clear," the spokesperson said. "You purchased Identity Services Engine (ISE) for this client, but they haven't purchased any further security components that suit that profile,' we may also demonstrate to them. Thus, now is your chance to pitch this to that client as well.

In a similar spirit, Funds Manager will allow PXP to display partners' assets in a single location, as stated by the IT behemoth headquartered in San Jose, California.

There are many innovative ways that the PXP platform is assisting partners with productivity. The first modification is to Disti Partner View (DPV), a tool that encourages two-tier partners to work with their assigned distributor to boost their company success. Custom sales and customer hierarchies may also be uploaded by partners. According to the business, a new feature called Cisco Partner Journeys will support agility, acceleration, and enablement of successful Cisco partner practices from incubation to revenue creation. Furthermore, PXP will provide what Cisco refers to as a more comprehensive perspective on money management straight from Cisco, eliminating the need for assistance from internal or external administrative resources.

Approximately 35,000 partners are now utilizing PXP, and Cisco is witnessing productivity gains of between 15 and 20 percent overall for these partners, according to Van Dijk.

"We share many of the same principles in how we view our [own] client along with experience, so directionally, it seems to be quite good," said Brian Ortbals, vice president of international engineering at World Wide Technology (WWT), a Cisco Gold partner located in Maryland Heights, Missouri. "What I've seen is really captivating with where they're going."

According to Ortbals, WWT is attempting to unify its products into a single platform, much as Cisco is. "A lot more of a coherent experience; it's undoubtedly beneficial for us, in my opinion. We refer to it as a knob wall. You don't need all that, even if you can do a lot and turn a lot of knobs. "I require simplicity and ease of use," he said.

Additionally, Cisco said at Partner Summit that partners with particular knowledge in sustainability would be able to use the Sustainability Estimator tool on November 20 via the PXP platform. In order to assist partners reach their objectives, the tool enables them to estimate carbon savings and communicate sustainability information with their end consumers.

According to the firm, Cisco has roughly 800 partners with expertise in sustainability.

Although Van Dijk and her team started working on the PXP platform almost four years ago, simplifying it and cutting down on the amount of tools, they are now at a crossroads, according to Van Dijk.

We're moving on to the next phase, she said. The current state of Growth Finder, upselling and cross-selling prospects, incentive modeling, and other related features are all much more focused on maximizing profitability and monetization while also using Cisco to its fullest potential.