Cisco Partner Summit

I recently arrived in my old hometown of Boston to attend Cisco's Partner Summit.  Today is a day of 1:1 meetings and the main sessions begin tomorrow.  The first session of Partner Summit is a global general session including John Chambers.  Interested to hear what's new with Cisco in general and learn more about where Cisco is going as we at Varrow continue to expand and deepen our relationship with the networking behemoth.  Here is the abstract of the general session:

Abstract:		Hear from our leaders about the unprecedented opportunities we see ahead for Cisco and our partners. We are once again at the center of a significant market transition: the Internet of Everything. It’s a massive opportunity, the biggest in the next decade with a $14.4 trillion value-at-stake. With our partners, we have the ability to build, manage, and secure end-to-end IP-based platforms to connect people, process, data, and things to capture our share of this phenomenal market transition. With an unwavering commitment to our partners’ success, we are driving channel innovation around the most important priorities to you. We will continue to be the most partner-centric organization in the IT industry, focused on building and enabling a robust partner ecosystem. We will share how we will help you accelerate profitable growth, and make it easier for you to do business with Cisco. Specifically, you will hear about new areas of investment and about our firm commitment to help you transform your business to meet the changing demands of customers to capture the enormous market opportunities in front of us.
Speaker:		Bruce Klein Senior Vice President, Worldwide Partner Organization Cisco Edison Peres Senior Vice President, Worldwide Channels Cisco John Chambers Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Cisco

10 Reasons NOT to attend Varrow Madness

Brandon Watson at Varrow was scratching his head wondering why an IT person wouldn't come to Varrow Madness and he came up with 10 good reasons not to attend.  Got any more?

Varrow Madness agenda: http://madness.varrow.com/#

10 Reasons NOT to Attend Varrow Madness:

1) Technology and fun should not be mixed.

2) This Cloud thing won’t catch on.

3) What could I possibly learn from 8 VCPs, 5 vExperts, a VCDX, storage and network specialists, 3 Industry CEOs, and 500 of my peers?

4) Mainframes Rule!

5) Why do I need labs when I can just try new things in my production environment?

6) Free education is overrated.

7) I am worried that my IBM rep will find out.

8) My arm is caught in the server rack (Please Help!)

9) I’ll just look for the highlights on YouTube.

10) I heard the Varrow CEO raps.

Not all EMC Signature Partners are Created Equal

One of my Acct Managers was at a customer site this week and an interesting discussion came up that is pertinent to all of our customers and prospective customers.  The customer reached out to him because they are evaluating all their vendor relationships and they are making sure they have the right partners aligned to the right solutions.  Very healthy exercise.  We saw this as a great opportunity to demonstrate how we can help in other areas where we are not working with them today.

When we went through how his discussion went, he mentioned that he told the IT Director that we were the only EMC Signature Partner based in the Carolinas - "Signature" is the highest tier of partner in the EMC partner ecosystem.  I had to tell him that we may still be the only one, but that will likely change very quickly if it hasn't already.

You might think Varrow is no longer the only Signature Partner because other partners have made the necessary exhaustive investments in engineering talent needed to gain this status or have sold a lot of EMC solutions and have earned it. 

The reality is that EMC has lowered the bar for partners to achieve Signature status; they have done so by eliminating the need to invest in services engineers and pass multiple difficult design and implementation tests in order to become Signature.  This was always the barrier to entry for many partners - they could get the sales and presales certs, but the services certs required a level of commitment and investment that most were unwilling to make. 

Now, any EMC partner can become Signature by passing a few sales and presales tests.

So, if you are determining who will be your trusted adviser on EMC and someone tells you they are an EMC Signature Partner, be sure to ask if they are capable of delivering the solution they are proposing.