Cisco announces shift to architectural plays

At Tuesday’s Cisco Partner Summit keynote, one of the company’s major announcements for its partners was that it will align all of Cisco’s sales force under three multibillion dollar architectural plays. Keith Goodwin, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Channels, said that in moving from a focus on advanced technologies to a focus on architectural plays, Cisco enables partners to move from having a technology conversation to having a business conversation with their customers.

The three major architectural plays will be:

1. Collaboration: Cisco will broaden its emphasis on collaboration tools, make video pervasive, and integrate these tools into networks.

2. Virtualization and Data Center: With its unified computing platform and new server products, Cisco deepens its entry to virtualization and data center markets, posing a threat to the vendors who’ve traditionally held greater market share.

3. Borderless Network: Cisco’s core area of routing and switching is evolving into “next-generation routing and switching,” including Cisco WAAS WAN optimization.

In this video, Associate Editor Elaine Hom summarizes the three architectural plays.

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