Cisco PX Cloud Now Globally Available To Partners Prioritizing CX

The partner version of Cisco’s popular customer experience (CX) cloud portal, PX Cloud, can help partners refine their own CX practices. The portal is now available to Cisco partners around the world.

Cisco’s highly anticipated Partner Experience (PX) Cloud, the partner version of Cisco’s popular CX Cloud platform, is now generally available worldwide, the tech giant said Thursday.

Revealed for the first time at Cisco’s Partner Summit in 2020, PX Cloud is a portal that connects partners with Cisco and their customers. The platform includes analytics, offers, training and more and allows partners to identify opportunities to extend their service offerings by accessing a customer’s CX Cloud information. PX Cloud also gives partners a set of APIs that can be used to bake the tech giant’s insight into their own customer success practices, according to San Jose, Calif.-based Cisco.

The company has been working on the platform for years in conjunction with a select group of partners.

Solution providers that resell Success Tracks, Cisco’s packaged services that connect businesses with the right expertise, insight, learning and support, will now get automatic access to the PX Cloud platform and Cisco CX to manage their customers’ life cycles, according to Denzil Samuels, Cisco’s vice president of Global CX Partner Success.

[Related: Cisco Provides Partners A Path To Drive CX With New Success Insights Platform]

”The partner’s edition of the customers’ CX Cloud, PX Cloud, is partners’ digital gateway to real-time data and analytics, service creation, monetization opportunities and insight for best-in-class proactive support. Now, partners get 360-degree visibility of their Success Tracks customers’ data and tap into a suite of APIs for predictive telemetry insight and much more, all in one place,” Samuels said in a blog post on the announcement of PX Cloud’s global availability.

Longtime Cisco partner Computacenter was excited about the potential of PX Cloud after learning about it three years ago. The portal would help the company go from reactive to proactive and predictive with its customers, said Julie Greene, Cisco business development director for Computacenter.

“[We were excited about] getting away from spreadsheets and thinking that was the be-all, end-all, and getting away from the model of pushing hardware and boxes out the door without having a total relationship with our customers about the solutions they’re investing in,” Greene said.

The company quickly become involved in the PX pilot to help co-create the platform alongside Cisco. PX Cloud has helped transform Computacenter’s business and processes internally, Greene said. “There’s no longer presales and post-sales, it’s just one life-cycle solution that many people are engaged in because we have all the data in front of us now,” she said.

A CX Cloud view is available from inside PX Cloud based on access policies created and approved by the end customer. If access is granted, partners can view their customer’s CX Cloud data, including assets and coverage, advisories, subscriptions, insight and all Success Tracks from within CX Cloud in real time. The connection lets partners help with mitigating risks and identifying new opportunities, Greene said.

“We’re seeing tactical insights, telemetry and analytics [and] we also have created our own asset intelligence portal called the Smart Hub, where we are utilizing Cisco’s PX cloud APIs that are feeding into our own portal as another source of identifying truth or activity on all levels, and to see what’s happening with the customer now and in the future,” she said.

PX Cloud with hooks into CX Cloud is making the jobs of Computacenter’s sales teams much easier, Greene said. “It’s a tangible way to keep the relationship moving with the customer,” she said.

It was common practice for partners in the past to sell a multiyear deal and return at the end for a renewal, Greene recalled.

“Three years later, we’d say: ‘Hi, remember us? We can do a renewal with you.’ That was normal back then. Now, we can’t go three weeks without staying engaged and having touchpoints with the customer on a solution,” she said. “It’s a huge change.”

Cisco said that it had more than 50 early adopter partners involved in the pilot of PX Cloud.