The holiday season is upon us, which means its a time to show thankfulness, reflect on our faith and spend time with family.  It also means for many, its time to shop!  For us at Cisco, this time of year also means we get to expand upon our work within the Retail Industry, to bring new ideas, new passions, new & improved partners and new opportunities to market and show the industry how Cisco is leading in the area of digital transformation in Retail.  In my role at Cisco, I spend most of my time trying to teach partners about industries and giving them tools to make them even more successful!

Here are the two opportunities I am always trying to teach our partners when it comes to Retail:

1. First, as a Cisco partner, I want to ensure you are leveraging the power of Cisco's Retail Partner Ecosystem,do you know how to do that?
   • Are you establishing a strategy to take our core offers to market with multi-partner relationships with folks like Local Measure, Tulip Retail, Purple, and Cloud4wi just to name a few?
   • Have you leveraged our Ecosystem Partner Locator and looked for non-competitive partners to help you attack Line of Business budgets?   You see multi-partner engagements with our partners unlocks new buying centers or line of business buyers that can extend the total addressable market a traditional partner would have.
2. Secondly, do you as a partner understand what Cisco is positioning in the Retail Industry?  In retail we have focused our attention around the actualDigital Storeand created a handful of easy to explainOffer Categories. Let me review them with you in case you aren't familiar with them:
   • Store Fabric: The fabric or network is the foundation and offer the platform for broad-based innovation.   Perfectly applicable for new stores, refreshes, bandwidth and network optimization and providing new "in-store" business capabilities, Store Fabric fits those needs. Made up of various architectures including our Cisco ISR, Catalyst, Meraki, and Viptela solutions, positioning Store Fabric is a key and foundational and will unlock a ton of opportunities around operational efficiency.
   • Store Mobility:Mobility has become another utility in the world we live in. At Cisco we have created the Store Mobility offer to help with new digital store mandates, IoT projects, mobile marketing, mobile analytics and social and associate engagements. Comprised of our Aironet, Meraki, and Cisco DNA Spaces & CMX architectures and AP's, positioning our Store Mobility offer can unlock new found opportunities around customer experience and associate productivity.
   • Secure Store:We hear about security breaches by physical and cyber security each and every week. Cisco's Secure Store offering allows us to reach into our deep portfolio and leverage architectures like Umbrella, Cloud Lock, AMP as well as a bevy of IP Cameras to provide a best in class option for our customers. Our partners that are positioning Secure Store are unlocking a huge opportunity that offers a tremendous amount of service offerings as well.

To find out more on these offers and how I am "teaching" our partners to position these offers in the market, check out these Cisco Retail case studies and use cases go to http://www.cisco.com/go/retail. Feel free to investigate the Industries Partner Guide also.  You may want to embrace the partner ecosystem that Cisco has created in Retail, with tools such as the Ecosystem Partner locater or you may want to see how we incorporate all of these offers in our own Cisco Store!

In the meantime, happy selling to all our partners during this Holiday season!

-Bryan