I had the opportunity to attend Cisco's annual Partner Summit last month and I am excited about the news announced at the summit as well as the valuable conversations I had with our partners. The reoccurring topics I heard included cloud, innovation, speed, scale and, most importantly, differentiation.

The partners I spoke with viewed exceptional service as a key enabler of future growth. As solutions get ever more complex, partners increasingly look to services as their key competitive differentiator.

Partners have a unique opportunity to leverage recent Cisco investments in software enabled services to enable differentiation. In discussions at Partner Summit, one question came up time and again:

"Customers are demanding more complex solutions, but they want a simpler support experience -how do we balance these seemingly competing objectives?"

Multi-vendor solutions are by their nature complex. Integrating support across these disparate components enables partners to create a simplified support experience -speeding resolution times and increasing transparency across the support process. Customers also look for integrated SLA's, no matter how many parties might be involved in delivering support.

By connecting all service partners in the cloud, partners can deliver a unified support experience, opening new opportunities for partners to provide differentiated services. Better still, this "ecosystem" of connections in the cloud enables automation of IT service management and better exchange of support information between providers and customers for faster mean time to resolution for IT issues.

One partner at the forefront of this new paradigm is BORN Green Technologies of Switzerland. I caught up with Patrick Spreng from BORN at Partner Summit. He told me about BORN customers who had visibility into multi-vendor support processes they've never had before, using Cisco ServiceGrid. What had previously seemed an unmanageable mess created from a highly fragmented environment was brought together into a single support experience -with one overall SLA. On a daily basis, Patrick reported, it just made support easier.

Services will continue to grow as a major competitive differentiator for partners. Partners that embrace new models and innovate in this space will win new customers. Nowhere is this more important than in managing the growing complexity customers are facing every day.

Watch our interview with ATP Partner BORN Green Technologies to learn more about how it is leveraging the power of Cisco ServiceGrid:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgG3o6wuf0E&list=UUzx3f4L9O21pfbpMyJ9Fs5w