Cisco’s ThousandEyes Goes All-In On The Channel

ThousandEyes, now part of Cisco, is taking a page out of fellow Cisco business AppDynamics and will be doing 100 percent of its business through channel partners, executives tell CRN.

Network monitoring company ThousandEyes, now owned by Cisco Systems, will be doing all of its business through the channel, executives told CRN ahead of the inaugural ThousandEyes Partner Connection Event on Wednesday.

Cisco is doing more than 90 percent of its business through the channel in the Americas right now. The company’s AppDynamics business, which was acquired in 2017, in 2021 announced it would be doing business exclusively through the channel. Aligning ThousandEyes’ approach to the market with Cisco’s channel-first focus is an important milestone, said John Moses, vice president of Partner Sales, Americas Partner Organisation for Cisco.

“Our success has and always will be centered around our partners, so this is a natural progression as we work with ThousandEyes to meet our customers where they are,” Moses said.

Cisco in 2020 acquired network monitoring company ThousandEyes for a reported price tag of nearly $1 billion.

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ThousandEyes has experienced “astounding” growth for its cloud and internet monitoring technologies since it was picked up by Cisco nearly two years ago. The company was doing most of its business direct to customers prior to joining Cisco, so now is the time for the company to go “all-in,” Michael Reid, chief revenue officer for Cisco ThousandEyes, told CRN.

“We’ve seen a number of other acquisitions make that pivot to all-channel, particularly software acquisitions that offer pure SaaS and a recurring revenue business, so, it’s a really great opportunity for us,” said Reid (pictured above).

ThousandEyes is Cisco’s hottest and fastest growing acquisition inside the business, he added.

The San Francisco-based company offers visibility into the networks that business don’t own, including cloud and public internet-based connections. Cisco has integrated ThousandEyes’ platform into all its architectures, such as SD-WAN and collaboration, the company said.

“We’ve got this incredible opportunity to go with channel partners, at scale, solving our customers most complex digital problems. That’s why at this moment we’re going all-in on channel. This is a big pivot for us,” Reid said.

Cisco partner NTT, which also partnered with ThousandEyes for five years before the company was acquired by Cisco, is supporting its clients that are demanding hybrid work solutions and migrating to the cloud, while also requiring high services levels and operational excellence from their IT teams and partners. ThousandEyes gives NTT added visibility across all environments, which is welcome to clients of all sizes right now, said Joe Maissel, practice director of observability and AI operations for NTT.

“The demand is exploding for this and [the scale] that Cisco brings to the table is driving awareness that these visibility problems are now solvable,” he said.

Since ThousandEyes joined Cisco, NTT has seen ongoing investment and a commitment from Cisco to put the structures in place to support ThousandEyes partners effectively, Maissel said.

“ThousandEyes has always been a fabulous partner, but we are only seeing increased acknowledgment of the need to go through the channel,” he said.