Cisco Partner WWT Adapts to Changing IT Environment
Posted by Channel Futures on June 13, 2019:
CISCO LIVE 2019 — Amid all the talk about how tech vendors like Cisco Systems and their enterprise customers are adapting to a rapidly changing IT landscape of clouds, data and everything as a service, it's easy to overlook the challenges channel partners face as they not only help their end users with their transformation but also evolving their own business models.
Cisco for the past few years has spoken about the its move from being primarily a hardware vendor focused on selling products to a company that also deals in software, solutions and services, and is increasingly reliant on recurring revenue rather than one-time sales.
Many of Cisco's 60,000-plus channel partners are evolving along with Cisco and their other OEM partners, and while they aren't giving up selling hardware assets, they understand that if they're to survive over the next five or so years, they have to adapt to an environment where their customers are moving more of their workloads to the cloud, where they are less likely to want to manage large IT infrastructures and where mobility is playing an increasingly large role.
Transforming a business is a daunting undertaking for channel companies and customers alike, but the changes in the IT space also open up an array of opportunities, according to Brian Ortbals, vice president of advanced technologies for World Wide Technology, a 25-year Cisco partner. The company, with 6,000 employees and almost 1,000 customers, did about $18 million in business with Cisco when Ortbals joined WWT 20 years ago, and is projecting $5 billion in Cisco business this year, Ortbals said.
"The world's changing," Ortbals told Channel Futures during an interview at the Cisco Live 2019 event in San Diego. "With so much going to clouds and as-a-service, as a networking company, Cisco – and [WWT], being their largest partner by default worldwide – is having to adapt. I think cloud at the outset was a very scary proposition, that so much was going to change and move. But the reality is for us as an integrator, the potential upside of helping our customers navigate how to rearchitect their infrastructure is pretty significant."