2 New Ways To Make Money Around Cisco Software

Cisco is trying to enable its channel partners to make more money off software by launching two new roles this month – the life-cycle adviser and software integrator.

In an interview with CRN, Jason Gallo, Cisco's global director of enterprise networking and software partner go-to-market strategy, explained how channel partners can begin to form a practice around these two new roles.

The new life-cycle adviser role is about building capabilities and practices to do adoption and expansion of software and renewals. By offering life-cycle adviser professional services, partners stay tightly connected with their customers and become trusted advisers.

Gallo suggests that partners get ready for this by hiring customer success managers, investing in software asset management tools and defining adoption use-case catalogs.

The other new way to make software revenue is adopting a software integrator role. This role is critical for digitization to help organizations bridge the gap between applications and the network infrastructure. Cisco is incenting partners to become these software integrators by offering additional performance and referral incentives.

Gallo said partners can build this practice by hiring software integrators or by partnering with other Cisco partners who specialize in software development.