>> Announcer: From Barcelona, Spain, it's The Cube covering Cisco live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veem and The Cube's ecosystem partner. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. This is The Cube live in Barcelona, Spain for Cisco live 2018 in Europe. I'm John Furrier, co-host of The Cube with my co-host this week, Stu Miniman, the coupon analyst. Our next guest is Denny Trivette, who's the Vice President of Ecosystem Sales Acceleration Global Partner Organization at Cisco. Denny welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you very much glad to be here. >> So you have a good job. You have to on the business side look at commercializing all this great technology everyone's learning. It's important because there's big numbers, billions of dollars involved in the businesses. Depending on who you talk to, this vendor does a billion dollars with Cisco. This vendor does a billion dollars with supplies at Cisco so a lot of happy customers, but an evolving ecosystem. What's the business outlook from your stand point? Obviously there's change happening, positive change at Cisco. What's going on in the business side? Is it bumpy, is it smooth? Give us the weather report. >> Yeah I think first point though you said I have a good job for Cisco? I have a great for Cisco. I love what we do cause our job is all about how do we leverage the full power of the Cisco partner ecosystem to really build new connections that will drive and accelerate our solutions to all kinds of customers. When you say bumpy areas, absolutely. >> Yeah >> There's always going to be trends and different moves in the market or what have you. For us, what we're able to do is expand the opportunity that Cisco is focused on. We're not just selling products, technologies, and architectures into an IT buying center. Now we're opening up buying centers for our good friends at App D or getting into the line of business and engaging in new conversations that unlock real value. >> You guys have always been a company that has a heritage of enabling technologies. You enable other people to create value and speeds and fees and great tech. The question for you is you mentioned in your title sales acceleration, you can't be in a more pressing time now where words like time to value are faster. Customers want more value up front faster than ever before. So that kind of puts the pressure on the business front. How do you get that done? Is there a certain business model that you guys evolved to? Is it tried and true? Can you explain the business model of how you get to that value faster with partners? >> I think it's a very important point because back in the day we used to celebrate successes, and a success was hey we just launched a new joint integration. That was a success, and we'd celebrate that. In the end nobody monetized that, so in the end that doesn't matter. Now what we're trying to figure out is how do we truly unlock the power of these relationships? There's two transformations we've driven. One is how we engage multiple partners in new sales motions. We've never done that effectively as an industry quite frankly and we've launched things like ACES and it stands for accelerating Cisco ecosystem sales. Which is a fully built framework for better engaging multiple partners so that we can actually do all of the things that we all know we need to do as a business to drive and accelerate success, but we do it highly effectively. There's multiple steps to it. >> John: And multiple stake holders too. >> A lot of stake holders yeah. And by the way a big part of it is make sure you actually have agreement from the executive decision makers from the different partners that we're going to go down these paths in the first point. So very very important. >> Soon you can automate that away, it's like deb ops culture, right? >> Actually no that's so real. We work with this one partner who built out the whole ACES framework. Then they built out ACES two dot oh, sorry ACES at scale. Now they just said hey Denny we're building out ACES at hyper scale where we're going to automate this whole process so that we can drive path the revenue plans with close loop selling etcetera. So it's a game changer for us. >> So this is a real, this is actually happening. >> This is actually happening, and when we engage like this with our partners two things happen we accelerate the whole time to revenue. We actually get the sales teams better aligned. We get executive commitment. We engage customers sooner and then we can sell more effectively. For our customers, they love it because now we're bringing the power of the ecosystem in an organized fashion. They see hey these guys really understand my business issues and they're committed to solving those problems with us. >> And they probably make more money too because when you have that efficiency that drops right to the bottom line. >> Yeah that's important for us and them. And by the way part of the business model transformation that we're driving that's important is I also realized we can no longer live in a siloed world. We use to silo all of our resources. We had big teams on this partner, that partner, this technology, this architecture and what we did is we moved our sales acceleration team into a shared tool model. So now we can dynamically allocate talent to whatever the next big thing is. So a hyper flex, the latest launch, or whatever, great. We can dynamically move the right talent to engage the right partners in the right sales motions. >> That's very elastic, very cool. >> Denny, you know we've been watching Cisco's transformation for years. Obviously, networking is still at the core but security, we go to so many shows. We see Cisco in the container space, lots of open stores. Software acquisitions, how's that transformation of Cisco changing and proliferating the various ecosystem models that you have to build? >> This is one of those things that we struggle with in certain days cause if Cisco moves into a new space where we acquire a new company, not only does the sales motion sometimes change and who we sell to change. It's maybe a new buying center an applications dev ops cloud development, but also the ecosystem changes. So we have to get smart about who we bring in. So for instance back in the day Cisco and a reseller we could go sell to the networking buying center, the data center buying center, but now all of a sudden if we want to have a conversation around dev ops and then bring in the line of business, IT and these other dev ops, Cisco and our resellers we can't really sit at the table and bring as much value there. So there's different vendors, like consultancies out there. Companies like Zentars that can actually come to the table and help build the bridge between IT and the line of business, facilitate and drive that conversation. So to your question, we're engaging new partners like that. They don't resell anything but they're a key influence there to connect the multiple different buying centers. There helping Cisco and our resellers generate opportunities we wouldn't have gotten before. >> To follow up on the channel I remember back when converge infrastructure started. There were Cisco channel partners that built whole data center practices. All new lines of business when they were building it. How do you help build that kind of multiply effect for some of your partners to help really accelerate them, drive new businesses? Think about there are so many new areas that Cisco is tapping into. How do you help move that change? People are resistant to change. They're worried about cloud. They're worried about oh you're taking away some of my existing lines of business. Will I make money? >> Actually when you think about digital transformation there's the cloud, there's analytics, there's security. There's so many technologies that come into play. Our resellers have to think about how do I build a practice that includes all of those different foundations. Working with one of my peers in Rob's organization he's got this person Andre Sintez. We're partnered up with them to build out this new model where we can actually help assess our partners to see where they are against all these critical foundational pieces, and then build the training around it. It's not just training because a reseller has an option. If they're going to move into whatever this dev ops cloud space, whatever it happens to be, they have an option to build, buy, or partner. They can build the capability. Train there people, hire new people, etc. Buy a company that does that already, or partner with one of those consultancies or boutique systems integrator. That's where we're spending our time, is building those new connections. >> I'm wondering if you can comment on service providers too. Obviously it's been a big customer for Cisco before, also there's many times we've said the service provider can be the new channel for both Cisco and the partners. Do you look at that very differently than you do the enterprise? >> Service provider as a channel is a big motion without a doubt because they are in those accounts. They're selling in many cases what our customers want to consume in the consumption model that they want. It is critical that we play with them and that we play with them effectively. What's interesting is sometimes based on the verticals or the industries or the segments it's a different set of solutions. So sometimes it's not the motion that my team does by engaging the right ecosystem partners with them. The motion doesn't change as much, what changes is which customer or segment you're going after. Which partners really make sense and can they be delivered in the consumption model that you're looking at? So we might have to pick the right partners and the right solutions to drive. But once we do, we can still leverage a lot of the same practices. So ACES, sales blitzes, overdrives, vertical value plays, all these cool things that we do today could fit with a service provider or any other client. >> Do you guys just flex those resources and go wherever you need to go? Very elastic kind of like a cloud model. >> Absolutely. >> I got to ask you on the organizational front, do you guys have like a big pow wow with your partners? Is it like an annual summit that you do at Cisco live? How do you get your partners together? Is there like a >> Yes, yes, and yes to all of it >> How do you guys handle the partner relationships? >> Each event is a little bit different. Cisco live and here at Cisco live Barcelona, the incredible thing about this event is we have all the people in the world of solutions. The sponsors, the hardware vendors, software vendors, those vendors are here. Our resellers are here. Our sales teams are here. So this type of event we actually have a separate track. Here at Cisco live called the partner experience. Wendy Mars kicked it off this morning. In the room we had resellers, software vendors, hardware vendors, a bunch of different partner types in the room. Then we break out into different tracks. I just left the solution partner forum where it was no resellers, it was software vendors and all these folks. We had an intimate conversation with them about how we're going to accelerate our business together with them as ecosystem partners. >> So you do the big tent events during the lives. You do your own little events with them as well probably with your own teams like a sales kick off? >> Yup and then probably the most popular events is when we regionalized it and do things like partner connections. So like show Shark Tank, we can bring in four or five of these ecosystem partners and any one particular vertical or architecture and have them pitch to a roomful >> Can we film it? >> Yeah we should. I would love to. >> That would be great Cube action. >> That would be awesome. >> You're really on the front lines, super innovation. I love this notion of codifying and putting frameworks around the systems cause that essentially makes it more efficient and you can then flex for these unique situations cause not every deploy is different. A partner might have different vertical requirements. So you can't boiler plate this. It's really one of those things where complexity you have to address at the field level. >> You do exactly. To your point if we can have certain frameworks, so say like a sales blitz. Real actionable item. A sales blitz is where we do a lunch and learn, a cold calling blitz, then we have basically day two support where we can follow up on leads that come from it. We built a sales blitz originally with a partner like a live action, that plays with us in SD Win. Then we said hey this works in data protection. Lets leverage it for a calm vault or veeam. Hey this also works in a healthcare application. So as we build out these best practices we build them in a way so that they can be scaled across any architecture or any partner or any solution type. We also build it so it can be high touched where I use resources of my own to manage it, low touched we just coach em on how to do it, or no touch here it is it's in a box you take it and you go build it yourself. All the best practices are there. >> So this must have a real impact on personnel. Have you seen higher attainments and retention with sales people? It sounds motivating. >> What's so funny and this is a fact, I just heard last week, one of my teams came up and they said hey Denny I talked to one of our new hires, they came into Cisco early in career first and they were on one of these flex teams and they've already done three different projects in three different areas. In the past they would've been hired in the hyper flex team or whatever. Now they've done whatever, hyper flex, the network intuitive launch, and then they did something around the Apple launch. How cool is that from an experience... >> So the old waterfall model of group to group to group now they can essentially go wherever the agile needs are. >> Exactly. >> Denny I know it's tough to choose favorites, but what's buzzing in your partner ecosystem? What's the area where they're seeing big opportunity, customers are getting excited about? >> A lot of the stories that tell the best are these customer experience stories. If I think of a partner called Local Measure for instance, they're a software vendor. They play in retail and other areas. These stories get exciting. Let me tell you real quick. First of all when we partner with these folks we take a customer in approach. We don't go in there and pitch product like, Local Measure by the way works with Marakey and Spark. We don't go into that line of business fire and pitch Marakey and Spark. It probably doesn't come up until later in the conversation. We really start about hey, what's your true business issue, and typically in a retailer they might want to do two things. They might want to accelerate or increase the engagement of the customers so they get better loyalty and repeat buyers. They want people to come back to their amusement park or their retailer or whatever it happens to be, and ultimately the way Local Measure can do that, they can say hey we can change the engagement in the store. For instance if you go into a shoe store and you send out a tweet that says hey the service stinks at this shoe store, they intercept that through Twitter, or Facebook, or Instagram and then they can correlate that information with location from a Marakey network and then send it to the store and say hey store associate via Spark message. There's a person, they're in your New York City store. They're standing right in this spot right now. They just sent out this tweet. Here's their profile. Go talk to them, they want help. That engagement is very different than other types of engagements, but when we tell those stories people see the importance of connecting technologies together, cause it's multiple technologies, but also bridging the conversation between the line of business, that retails store person, and IT. You can't do it either or, you got to bring em together and deliver that type of outcome. >> Well, we're always looking for some good stories on The Cube so if you've got any great stories to tell with customers we'd love to see these cases that can really point to the future. >> For things like this, events like this we collected 23 different win stories here and Europe from a small set of ecosystems and partners. So we can bring some of these guys on and have them tell their stories directly to you. >> We love those tech athletes. They're out making it happen every day. Denny great to see you and (unintelligible) the Cube and taking the time. I know you have big partner kick off meetings over there. >> Yes >> We appreciate your time coming on The Cube. >> Yeah thank you. >> Live coverage here with The Cube in Barcelona Spain. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman, more coverage after this short break. Day one of two days of wall to wall coverage. You're watching The Cube, we'll be right back. (lively music)