I recently purchased a vehicle for my wife. We searched online, we test drove, and we anticipated the "nice car smell." During that process it made me think of multi-partner ecosystem we have built and are building in Industries. You see when I went to the car lot, I expected to see a car, not just the transmission. At Cisco we have to start thinking that way too! Our customers expect us to provide them a fully functional "car" with the best transmission (or "systems") in the industry.

Recently I hosted a series of webinars for the Consumer and Content Industries at Cisco (Sports, Retail and Media) to dive deep into the primary trends and use cases that are driving the retail industry (again, insert car/transmission analogy here). In each of these sessions we focused on how our channel partner community could partner with ecosystem partners to have a "line of business" conversation with our shared customers and provide to our shared customers the business value they are looking for.   Let me share a few items of feedback and a few of the highlights:

Retail

We conducted 10 of these sessions highlighting the interlock between our ecosystem partners and how they and their primary use cases align perfectly to our scale offers including; Store Fabric, Store Mobility and Secure Store. We covered things like our Apple partnership, mobile marketing and analytics partners, application partners, and solutions for scan and go shopping. Given Retail is an industry that is going through rapid digital transformation, these sessions provided "real-time" use cases and wins all focused around line of business selling. You can find  all of the Retail Ecosystem recordings here.

Sports

In these sessions, we discussed the changing demands for Connected Venues. The rise of mobile devices, in-home entertainment and overall competing outside interests make this space an important battle ground that our customers are trying to hold firm on. At Cisco we have built our solution portfolio and our partners to help address this. During this series we tackled use cases around; social sentiment, mobile engagement, blue-dot wayfinding, VoD and mobile video, application creation, suite control systems integration with Cisco's Cisco Vision digital signage offering, and AI/ML use cases around smart cueing. Clearly our partnerships in Sports add a lot of value, and our customers and partners are taking notice.  You can find all of the Sports Ecosystem recordings here.

Media

Talk about an industry going through change! Media is certainly that and partnerships in this space are critical for us to help drive the industry forward. Our media ecosystem sessions focused around the ISV partners that are integrating with Cisco around Object Storage and Asset Management, IP Fabric for Media integration with vendors integrating with our Data Center Network Manager system and many others that touch on OTT and Virtualized workflows. You can find all of the Media Ecosystem recordings here.

You see it's clear that our customers and channel partners want access to folks that can help them unlock the line of business buyers. The links above are proof, first-hand, of just how we have done so. Now what's exciting is to see this partner community forge their own partner ecosystems to help distinguish themselves from their competition. Regardless the approach, the multi-partner engagement is here and allows each of us to sell "cars" to people wanting "cars." Pretty cool.

Happy selling, partners!