As one of the largest enterprise technology companies, Cisco’s impact on the way we are doing business in a COVID-19 world is huge. As such, Cisco is adapting its offerings for its partners in a way that not only supports them professionally during this unprecedented time, but enables them to thrive.
With this goal in mind, Cisco announced its new Business Resiliency Program, an initiative that will help partners provide additional support to customers. This program aims to alleviate customer financial challenges and includes $2.5 billion in financing to provide organizations with continued access to keystone Cisco solutions in their business.
Up front, the program offers a 90-day payment holiday that allows a customer to defer 95 percent of the cost of a new product or solution until 2021. The Business Resiliency Program will also accelerate partner sales cycles, reduce financial risk, and enable partners to offer their customers payment solutions to better manage their cash flow. All Cisco solutions are eligible for this program, including hardware, software, and services, and up to five percent of partner-provided services.
“Last year’s Cisco Partner Summit theme couldn’t be more applicable for today’s environment: Own Your Edge,” stated Oliver Tuszik, Senior Vice President of Cisco’s Global Partner Organization, in a recent post about the Business Resiliency Program. “Together with [our partners], we can make a real impact supporting our customers and communities as they adjust to these challenging circumstances. Our strategy remains unchanged. We have an opportunity to not only own our edge, but to expand it by performing to meet today’s current demands while transforming to prepare for the new normal.”
To support the increasing remote workforce, Cisco collaboration solutions are seeing remarkable upticks in engagement, with Webex hosting 14 billion meeting minutes in March. The platform handled 4.2 million meetings in one day, more than twice the average on a peak day prior to the pandemic. As demand increases, platform reliability and security measures for partners and customers must scale accordingly in order to ensure the data privacy caliber that Cisco defines as fundamental to its community.
“What is transpiring today will not only change the way people communicate, it will also impact and enable business continuity in the future,” said Chuck Robbins, Chairman and CEO of Cisco, in a recent blog post. “This is an environment that every company is learning to navigate, and I believe there is no company – or team – in the world more committed than Cisco to making sure that organizations around the world have the technology and support they need to stay connected.”
