Undoubtedly, weare all excitedandoptimisticto usherin thenew year witha focusonhealthand prosperity.Many ofusare hopeful that thepace of digital disruption forced upon us in 2021 will bear fruits blossoming into new revenue streams throughoutthe yearand beyond.  

Ciscoisworking with our partners globallyto take stock and reviewhow market trends map to customer needs and solutions.We realize that this is an ongoing process thoughdoing this sooner rather than later will determine the winnersin the race to provide digital transformation services and solutionsto customers who are struggling to keep up with the pace of change whilekeeping costs in checkfollowing one of the most tumultuous years in history. 

Review 

Let's touch on three key trendsthat areinevitablytop of mindforall of our partners.  

First,is the trend towards SD-WANaway fromthe inflexible and thereforecostly operations inherent in hardwarecentricnetworking.Theindustry widedecoupling of hardware and softwarein productionis already well underway, however it's important to note thatSD-WAN market penetrationis expectedto increase from30% today to 60% in 2024.Many,many customers have yet to make the leap towards this unavoidable trend.Cisco isthrilledabouthaving the largest number of SD-WAN customerswith more than 30,000, while the closest competitorhas only 9,000.Our SD-WAN solutionswereevaluated with strong recognition by Gartner, IDC and Dell 'Oro.In 2019, wewon the SD-WAN product of the yearfrom CRNand in 2020we were awarded thetech innovator award for Cisco SASEunder networking SD-WAN fromCRN.  

Second is the COVID accelerated trend towards all thingsmulti-cloud including SaaS, IaaS and PaaS.In the first half of 2020, cloud infrastructure services grew 34% from 2019 (Synergy Research). As Applications, workloads, and services?have become?more distributed across the edge-cloud continuum,our customers needa SD-WAN fabric that supports these more diverse and complex access requirements while being equally agile and automated.?Cisco SD-WANwas designed to provide greater visibility,full stack edge security and automationfrom branch to cloud and co-locations.Cisco provides a cloud nativeway for customers to seamlessly onboard Cisco SD-WAN to AWS, Azure,and Google Cloud. Nowbecause of ourtechnologyinvestments,our customers can migrate to the cloud faster, have consistentsecurity and networkpolicieswhether workloads are in corporate data centers or in the cloud, anduse one dashboardthat sees IaaS the same as a corporate datacenter.  

Third, the need for network as a servicecombined withsecurity as a service or better known as SASEhas never been greater.Gartner's recent report indicated that "By 2024, more than 60% of SD-WAN customers will have implemented a secure access service edge (SASE) architecture."Thisopens the doors to new buying centers for partners, namely the SecOps teams,thereby improving the stickiness of the sale. Cisco helps simplify the transition to SASE by offering SD-WAN with security in the cloud and on-prem. In addition, the solution is wrapped with licensing that includes security and SD-WAN bundled together. We also knowthat most customers prefer to buy security and SDWAN from the same vendor. This improves partner profits since security should now be part of every SDWAN deal.   

Retool 

While there are many partner specific solutions and tools to leverage, I would like to shine the spotlight on two that are new.  

First isour Cisco Ready for Partnersmodernizationplatformand the second is our SD-WAN Conversion tool.In June of 2020 the Global Partner Organization launched the Cisco Ready for PartnersModernize Intent Based Networking campaign.This campaign with accompanyingwizard like UIhas capabilities to address wireless, switching andnow SD-WAN. Partner sellersare guided to promotions and messaging most likely to be consumed by specific customers. That data is used tobuild targeted campaigns based ona specificcustomer'sinstall base. The tool provides a framework toensure sales teams are taking advantage of thesameuse cases, messaging, and promotionsused by Cisco internal sellers. 

• Cisco Ready for Partners is accessiblehere 
• Partners can learn morehere  

Second,we have made what was once only available to internal architectsavailable to partners in order to simplify migrationto the latest SD-WAN softwareand increase adoption. The SD-WAN Conversion Tool is a cloud-hosted web-based platform that allows its users to translate and convert Cisco IOS XE configuration to a compatible SD-WAN configuration that can be pushed as a device template for Cisco's SD-WAN product. The UI provides users with a simplified, interactive wizard workflow to upload theirIOS XE config, map it to the SD-WAN config, and then download the converted config or upload it directly to their desired vManage node as a device template.  Given that Cisco has the lion's share of the traditional router market, this is a boon forour partner community to differentiate themselves and dramaticallyimprovetheir delivery efficiency. As a result, this willimprove theircustomer'stime to market. Availabilityis expectedby end of January 2021. 

Renew 

In October 2020 and withmuch fanfare, we announced the launch ofthe new Catalyst 8000 Edge Platformsfamily.This is a wide scale refresh ofSD-WAN routing with benefitsthat have been aggressively rolled in based on market demandkeeping our customers, partners and Cisco ahead of the curve. These platforms deliver?secure connectivity to hybrid and?multi-cloud?applications across cloud, data center and edge locations.?Furthermore, the platformsare best in class for SDWAN,multi-layered security with SASE, edge computing and 5G-ready connectivity.The platformsare suitable for cloud, branch and head end with up to 4x better SD-WANperformance.  

The Catalyst 8000 family was given the "Catalyst" name because it is important that there is product, branding and messaging alignment across Access (LAN) and WAN. The benefit to customersis that Cisco offers consistency acrosstheentire Intent Based Networking (IBN)portfolio as a set of products that unify their enterprise networks and provide software-defined capabilities via a common IOS-XE operating system.  

No other vendor can provide the multi-domain capabilitiesacross wireless, switching and edge routingaligned withmarket leadingSD-WAN software. The Catalyst 8000 Edge Platformsfamily brings it all together and provides a multi-billion dollaropportunity for our partners as they work with customers to renew. 

On behalf of our Global Partner Organization, I want to thank our customers and our partners for their loyalty and trust. I also want to wish you a happy, healthy and prosperous 2021?as you review, retool and renew.