Cisco promotes Adams to A/NZ managing director of partner business group

Cisco has promoted today Sara Adams to the role of managing director of the partner business group for Cisco A/NZ.

The Partner Business Group is the team responsible for designing and implementing the channel partner strategy in the region. In a statement, Cisco said Adams’ promotion followed her successful evolution of the partner business group to support a partner-led model.

Cisco recently revealed its plans to invest $US15 million in the Asia-Pacific region alone to provide partners with pre-sales support, marketing, incentives and rewards to help fuel partner sales to mid-market and SMB customers. “The one priority that’s different for partners is business architecture transformation. Our first point of focus is to train the channel using our recently piloted business architecture technology program,” Adams said.

She further elaborated on the new channel strategies that the Cisco A/NZ partner business group has devised. Cisco A/NZ is also piloting a partner plus program, a pre-sales helpline and will launch a teaming incentive program in December. In the event that partners get approved for the program, they get a price differential guarantee in the deal.

Another program it will soon launch is its Cloud Incentive Program (CIP), where if a partner certifies its Cloud services with Cisco and meets the criteria, the sales team will get compensated on the partners’ service.

It will also soon launch an Avant Garde pay-for-performance program and its ‘Big Bets’ program that will address A/NZ market opportunities.

“What we’re trying to do now is find where the addressable market is and tie in the gaps with our partners. One of the areas we are investing in right now is the Cloud and we have moved the service creation department to within the partner business group as a key priority,” Adams said.

Cisco is currently marking out details for a partner services program, which will be announced in 2012.

Cisco also recently recognised channel partners who had shown excellence in marketing as part of Cisco's ongoing strategy of creating partner success, at the Quarterly Cisco A/NZ Marketing Forum. The prizes were awarded in two categories; the ‘partner’ category, for traditional Cisco channel partners; and ‘distributor’, for Cisco distributors and resellers.

The winner in the distributor category was Gabrielle Kingston of Westcon Group and in the highly commended category, was Rochelle Carlyle from Ingram Micro New Zealand.

In the partner category, Alphawest’s Suzanne Maybury was named the winner and David Lovell at Dimension Data was highly commended in the partner category.

As part of its partner-led strategy, Cisco ANZ invested in tools and resources to support the development of services with new financial and delivery constructs that will drive differentiation and profitability for partners.

From a marketing perspective, Cisco encouraged partners to take advantage of its internal telemarketing resources demand centre, campaign portal, Cisco subject matter experts and quarterly marketing forums. Winners in each category have the choice of receiving a trip to either Cisco’s Velocity Partner Conference in Las Vegas or the company’s Global Partner Summit in San Diego.

The company recognised the efforts of Westcon Group for Asia-Pacific and Xiaotong Networking Technology for Greater China as part of the Cisco Smart Services Channel Partner Award and IBM Global Technology Services for Asia-Pacific, Flextronics International for Japan and TNT Express Worldwide for China as part of the Cisco Smart Services Vendor Award at its Cisco Partner-Led Network Conference in Singapore.

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