Cisco Cultivating Elite Class Of Cloud Partners

Grazed from CRN. Author: Chad Berndston.

Now that Cisco Systems (NSDQ:CSCO) has significant traction with its Cloud Partner Program, it’s looking to elevate partners who have made the deepest investments in its cloud vision to a new Master specialization, one that will bring added benefits and a level of preferred status among top Cisco partners focused on the cloud.

As of this week, Cisco partners can begin applying to become Master Cloud Builders, a specialization that builds upon the Cloud Builder designation but requires significantly more involvement on the part of partners — for significantly more benefits. Cisco unveiled the Cloud Channel Program at its 2011 Partner Summit in New Orleans as a way to organize Cisco partners around their potential cloud computing opportunity with the vendor. According to Cisco figures culled from various research reports, the market opportunity for building cloud infrastructure is on a roughly 24 percent CAGR over the next four years and could hit about $112 billion by 2015. Cloud services, meanwhile, are on a roughly 35 percent CAGR, expected to reach $113.6 billion by then…

"The market is equally large in both infrastructure and everything-as-a-service," said Susheel Chitre, director, cloud go-to-market for Cisco’s Worldwide Partner Organization, in a recent interview with CRN. "Our guidance to partners is that they need to have a holistic strategy as they approach customers in the cloud discussion. They have to be able to address customer needs both for on-premise and multitenant environments. It’s not enough to focus on one or the other. Customers will have a mix of requirements."…

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