Cisco made its case that this is the year of the partner in security, laying out what they have been doing, and where they are going, with the emphasis squarely on additional simplification.

This week, Cisco held their fourth session of In the Know, an online panel format presentation hosted by Oliver Tuszik, SVP of Partner Sales and GM Routes to Market at Cisco. The topic was the evolution of Cisco’s security strategy to meet changing customer needs, and the opportunities that this provides for their partner ecosystem.

Tuszik kicked off the session by citing data that even in a world where customers recognize less complexity is better, most customers still have overly complex security setups – regardless of their size.

“It is still to me a shocking surprise that most of our customers have a huge amount of different security tools,” he said. “Small businesses use 3-6 tools to manage their security, while a large corporate enterprise will use 50-100 tools from 20 different vendors, and that’s one of the key security complexity drivers.”

With a gap of 3.4 million security professionals, which is getting bigger every single day, Tuszik said most organizations’ security is well below optimum,

“Only 15% of organizations globally are at a mature level of preparedness, which means 85% are not prepared for what is happening in the market,” Tuszik said. “47% have taken some steps to protect themselves, but are not classified as ready.

“This is why our partner system is so important,” Tuszik stressed. “Customers want an end-to-end coverage model. In this age of the partner, it’s less about delivering technology innovation. It’s about delivering the innovation in a way that delivers value, while reducing complexity.”

“Probably the number one thing we are seeing right now is a request for technology rationalization, as the macroeconomic pressures are definitely causing customers to scrutinize their investments a little more closely,” said Stephanie Hagopian, VP of Physical and Cybersecurity Solutions at Cisco partner CDW which has made a deep investment in security. “They are taking a little longer to evaluate solutions as the result of really asking us to help them from a technology rationalization perspective. It’s creating a great opportunity for the platform play, which is a clear advantage for Cisco. But we are seeing our clients lean more towards the familiar vendors., the solutions where they already have a footprint and where they can just organically expand on those footprints.

“We engage quite a bit with Cisco on wrapping our consulting services and our managed services around the pre-existing portfolio,” Hagopian continued. But we’ve seen demand up quite a bit, especially on the managed side, because of the workforce shortage. They don’t have enough folks in house.”

“Cisco is in a unique position to be a top partner in enterprise agreements, the way that you can acquire technology and bundle it into a platform play,” said Ryan Sheehan, SVP of Advanced Solutions at SHI International, another large Cisco partner with a deep security practice. “We recently had our Sales Smackdown with about 3000 people in Austin TX. We gave them a real world scenario, a health care scenario, and we leverage a platform platy or an alliance or ecosystem, and salespeople pick the winner based on overall presenting skills and Cisco came out the winner of that. When the story is told in the right way, and you have the right technical experience, it creates a win-win.”

“Top multi-billion dollar companies pick companies just founded in the garage,” Tuszik commented. “That was the behavior in the past.”

Emma Carpenter, VP Global Security Sales Organization at Cisco, then reviewed the core growth areas of the Cisco security business and how they are evolving.

“When I joined about eight months ago, I talked about three areas of the business,” she said. “The first was securing and growing the base with the Cisco Secure Firewall. She noted how this was enhanced by Cisco’s recent Valtyx acquisition, which works on all the different cloud service providers out there and in a private data centre.

“We will be reskinning it and launching it at Cisco Live in the Americas around how we bring to market a truly end-to-end approach,” she said. “This takes a suite of solutions to the next level that we are going to wrap around a single management plane to support all those capabilities. That’s huge.”

Carpenter than went over securing the platform with Network Security, SASE and Zero Trust. She pointed out that SASE growth was likely even higher than forecast, and will become a really key component as they broaden that out from a security point of view.

Third is how they secure the SOC.

“A lot of partners use our Talos, a solution for an open vendor environment,” she said. “We are multi-vendor so partners can manage their customers’ estates.”

Carpenter said that there is now a fourth area, securing the application in the cloud.

“It’s about how we manage the application when our customers have put some if not all their workloads into the cloud,” she stated. “We’ve got great technology, but haven’t been great at advertising features and functionality. This is not about explaining a widget. It’s about the use case they can help the customers to execute. We have the opportunity to use this capability today, build it into our SSE stack, put it in the cloud and let customers managed by partners secure their networks wherever they are.”

Carpenter acknowledged that Cisco had also been making their security too complex for their partners.

“We realize that with partners in security, we kind of got it wrong a little,” she said. “We are doing an awful lot now to simplify and to make it more profitable and improve training. We want to make sure the rest of our organization is selling security and making sure for partners, security as well as the network is front and centre. We want to be known as a security giant as we move forward.”

Simplification is front and centre here.

“We went from 12 to 4 sales teams – this has already been announced,” Carpenter said. She also noted they are greatly reducing number of security solutions they offer into three suites, something that will be announced over next few weeks and months as they simplify their Go-to-Market approach

“We are simplifying the message,” Carpenter stated. “We don’t want to be talking about individual point solutions any more.”

Shawn Yuskaitis, Director, Partner Go-to-Market Acceleration, Security at Cisco, then reviewed Cisco’s Partnering Strategy and Joint Marketing Strategy.

“Since Partner Summit, we have made a lot of progress,” he said. He noted that they had made key commitments to partners around increased partner profitability at the front end, back end and with lifecycle incentives.

“We are also reducing complexity, continuing to make sure partners meet customers where they want to buy, with partner-led offers and simplified pricing,” he said. “We are dramatically simplifying how security is consumed. We also made major investments to simplify the experience, with white glove support and improved tools, and have invested in training and in very simple messaging.”

More programs are on the way.

Around Secure the Base, we’ve got programs for our partners around really driving that firewall refresh,” Yuskaitis said. “Around Secure the Platform, there is an opportunity to drive growth with scale, and there’s some really exciting announcements that are coming. Our security trial console launches this week, and makes it easier to do demonstrations around cloud and delivered security. Some big announcements are also coming around XDR.”

Yuskaitis also noted that Cisco is accelerating managed services capabilities – moving full speed ahead into public cloud marketplaces. They have also invested $100 million in partners in the second half of FY 2023.

“We are changing every aspect of our partner program,” he said. “We will support partners and their customers through the entire lifecycle. We want to make sure that our solutions are not just sold, but used and adopted as well.”

“Were we ready to do this a year ago,” Tuszik asked rhetorically in concluding. “The clear answer is no. We had good solutions, but now we are bringing it together to make it more integrated, and easier to utilize. It’s a perfect time for the age of the partner, especially in security.”